MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fundatus | 2026-01-17 14:25:48+00:00
> undispatchable resources

Solar is not dispatchable like a gas power plant is as the sun needs to shine to produce electricity. But it can very much be curtailed to any percentage you want. And that is being done globally every day exactly when it would be uneconomical to generate that electricity.

Interestingly this is as opposed to nuclear energy, which is basically never curtailed and always runs at 100% unless needed for maintenance or safety. Which is one of the main factors why nuclear energy is not economical anymore in a modern grid that values flexibility over constant generation.
by sethev | 2026-01-17 14:26:53+00:00
Yeah, if you have a formal proof of something but you don't know exactly what then you might as well vibe code the system itself. I've been wondering if it would be possible to formally define a property (like deadlock freedom or linearizability) and then vibe-code the spec (and associated implementation).

I don't know if that's possible but it seems like that's where the value would be.
by akomtu | 2026-01-17 14:27:42+00:00
That theory, or mental model, is a lot like a program, but of a higher kind. A mental model answers the question: what if I do this or that? It can answer this question with a different level of detail, unlike the program that must be executed completely. The language of a mental model is also different: it talks in terms of constraints and invariants, while the program is a step-by-step guide.
by narrator | 2026-01-17 14:28:06+00:00
Prediction: Dilbert will be bought by Paramount, all the old books will stop being published, and not-funny Woke Dilbert will get a Barbie movie treatment, a new not funny comic strip syndicated in daily newspapers only boomers read, a set of long books about social justice that have no comics in them, bad jokes, boring rehashed social justice narratives and just a picture of Dilbert on the cover to sell it. It will be called something like : "Dilbert’s Official Apology, Expanded Edition"
by Amezarak | 2026-01-17 14:28:17+00:00
> One does not need slow-mo to see she wasn't trying to kill anyone.

She accelerated her car before turning the wheels knowing people were in the path of her car. (Even if you argue that the wheels spinning before the wheels turn doesn't count, cars do not turn rotate on their central axis, so accelerating while turning still endangers people in front of the car.) Nobody can read her mind but the possible consequences of that action are obvious. Legally that constitutes intent, regardless of what we might want to project on her state of mind.

Further, if you do want to talk about state of mind, you cannot argue that any person behaving rationally would choose to commit a felony and flee from LEO in a vehicle in the first place. This is an extremely high-risk move for zero benefit and the video confirms it didn't even take place out of panic, which was my original thought. On the ground in that situation there can be no analysis of "what is she thinking" because she abandoned the reasonable course that anyone there would have expected her to take.

> that shooting her in the head

No confirmed gunshot wound is in her head. Where did you hear this? It appears the ICE officer fired center of mass, as two confirmed gunshot wounds are in her chest and one in her arm.

I realize that arguing these technical issues will not change your mind, because for you the emotion of "people dying is bad" trumps all the reasons it happened. But I hope it will get you to consider what other people are thinking.

> tactically unnecessary, but objectively made the situation worse

That isn't clear at all because you cannot know what the counterfactual is. There were armed people who could have shot James Fields before he accelerated into a crowd. If they had, Heather Heyer would be alive today. If they had shot him, then people would be making the same argument you're making. Hitting the gas while your car is surrounded by people is no different than firing a gun randomly. In the very best case, your are operating a deadly weapon with a total disregard for human life. In some situations (self-defense), that may be justified. But it is not innocent.

The way to stop this from happening is to stop encouraging people to commit crimes by interfering with law enforcement. There are other effective ways to protest. Another good start would be winning elections. Encouraging people to get into violent encounters with law enforcement is risking peoples' lives for nothing. Once you choose violence you don't know where it's going to go.
by elzbardico | 2026-01-17 14:28:40+00:00
I think that the companies that have the mindset "Let's give engineers tools that can leverage their strengths and eliminate toil" have way more success than those scammy "get-rich-fast let's automate software development and stop paying those sv salaries, invest in us!!!" gigs like Cursor and Devin.

Their whole attitude leads to them wasting time with those Willy the Coyote Plans instead of building good products like Amp.
by psychoslave | 2026-01-17 14:29:00+00:00
Some people seems to confuse, willingly or not, unbiased with targeting neutral point of view, free of any perspective.

We can step back from a debate and reports who's saying what, but this is still reporting ongoing debate. And still involving attention within its considerations, which do change our mental process as much as performative effects can go. That's as opposed to remain completely unaware the debate could be even be considered.

no one is going out of ontological constraints and brings absolute truth from transexistential considerations.
by simion314 | 2026-01-17 14:29:57+00:00
Use Ubuntu/Kubuntu LTS , do not upgrade every 6 m0onths to get the latest bugs from upstream just because they GNOME/KDE made some small improvements for some feature you probably do not use. There are PPAs with latest kernels and NVIDIA driver if you really need to upgrade for your work or gaming. This shit on upgrade happens on cool distros too, just Google Arch broke on update and you will see that there were cases where the efi partition was deleted and the user data was lost or some font customization a dude done to GNOME broke the login after an update.

If you want to install Linux to a less tech person you install an LTS distro and enable only the security updates, you can install Firefox from upsteeam and it has auto update and install ad blockers on it but teach the user how to stop it for specific websites in the case the blocker breaks stuff.
by 9JollyOtter | 2026-01-17 14:32:09+00:00
The fact is that Windows isn't the cash cow it used to be for Microsoft. Windows makes up less than 10% of Microsoft's revenue now. Server and Cloud and Office 365 make up the bulk of their income now.

As time goes on Windows is going to be smaller piece of this pie and I suspect Microsoft will move it over to a subscription service or you will just have like 1000 ads shoved in your face. I made the move over to Linux last year and Windows will have to live in a VM.
by ahartmetz | 2026-01-17 14:32:11+00:00
At least all expensive laptops of the last 5 years or so seem to have really nice headphone outputs. 10ish years ago, Thinkpads even had bad sound quality on that (but Dell Latitudes were great).

I now have a laptop that supposedly has some of the best speakers on a non-Apple laptop, but guess what, it's a laptop, so it can't possibly reproduce even moderately low frequencies well. So, eh, the emergency sound option is less crap. I don't care too much.
by honzabe | 2026-01-17 14:32:30+00:00
> Those 50-60-70+% of people in former communist states don't "romanticize", they just remember being better.

Where did you get those numbers? I remember reading about one survey where the number of people with previous regime ‘nostalgia’ was around 50%. That survey had flawed methodology, and the results were probably mostly about nostalgia related to the times when we were young, and our backs did not hurt (obviously, Russian bots in my country keep blabbering about it ad nauseam as if it were actually about the quality of the old regime).

Let’s focus on the numbers that matter - the election numbers: in the 2025 elections in my country (Czechia), communists did not even get over the 5% necessary to get to the parliament. So, I guess what people actually remember here is communism not being better.
by gnosis67 | 2026-01-17 14:33:55+00:00
To beat everyone who says “we don’t know what that is” to the punch, I would like to explain what “that” is and all about.

Firstly, conventionalists are insisting they are talking about “awareness” when they are referring to consciousness, and that is a self deception.

Awareness, even being “awake” aka “conscious” is only a small part of consciousness.

Consciousness is the inflection upon the potential of existential being. I know you don’t want to hear it, it is the vibrational purturbation of quantum potentials in the lattis of our minds which founds the “holographic reflection” that is the self rendering of awareness (call that qualia.)

This self rendering of “awareness” is the biotechnology stack sitting ON TOP IF CONSCIOUSNESS, not the other way around.

Life is a technology of consciousness, and awareness the temporal feedback loop offered by our neurological technology.

This said, quantum computing is closer to “consciousness” than LLM, yet not actually by a long shot.

I am suggesting the very purturbation of the quantum domain is technically a hyperdimensional vibration as consciousness. Consciousness relies upon a holographic aspect of the quantum domain we have not yet fully explored or explained.

By this measure, it is that our very biology uses the analog feedback echo chamber for “potential resolving”. The computational shortcut of our minds. However the wonder of our conscious is that the biology, neurology, and behavioral layers will all self adjust using this feedback loop, rather than a static array of isolated nodes.

If the operating kernel was fully rendered holographically upon the register matrix, and through such feedback self optimized, one might finally call our prodigal technology of “consciousness”.

In the meanwhile, dream of quantum holography which will make all future “computation” the interference within a quantum holographic sieve.
by falcor84 | 2026-01-17 14:34:22+00:00
It's an interesting slice-of-life piece, and I'll want to watch the film if I have an opportunity, but the site's making this sound unique to Tel Aviv, and the byline's mention of "hypocrisy and cruelty of Israeli society" seem to be pure editorializing and unsubstantiated by the article, neither word appearing in the article text.

At least the title does say "Doesn't Want to Be Saved From Sex Work, Drugs and Violence", which better represents the interviews with Eileen, who later goes on to tell:

> Once I was in private rehab, 17,000 shekels, and I left after two days. But I also told myself: Apparently it wasn't your time. To leave my world, to really move out of it, I would have to commit to that, to wanting to leave. And I don't want to leave.

This led me to seek objective measures of homelessness around the world now, and found [0] that Israel apparently has one of the lowest homelessness figures out there, at about 4.0 homeless individuals per 10k residents, as compared to e.g. 19.5 for the US, 56.1 for the UK, and 217.0 for New Zealand (and I'm intentionally ignoring war-torn countries, where this goes into the thousands).

[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/homelessn...
by utopiah | 2026-01-17 14:34:22+00:00
If I understood correctly you are giving an example of a "success" of using the technology. So that's addressing that the technology is useful or not, powerful or not, but it does not address what it actually does (maybe somebody in ChatGPT is a gnome that solved it, I'm just being provocative here to make the point) or more important that it does something it couldn't do a year ago or 5 years ago because how it is doing something new.

For example if somebody had used GPT2 with the input dataset of GPT5.2 (assuming that's the one used for Erdos problems) rather than the input dataset it had then, could it have solved those same problems? Without doing such tests it's hard to say if it moved fast, or at all. It's not because something new has been solved by it that it's new. Yes it's a reasonable assumption, but it's just that. So going for that to assuming "it" is "moving fast" is just a belief IMHO.
by dredmorbius | 2026-01-17 14:34:23+00:00
Runaway happens when the “selection function” gets trapped inside the system it’s selecting, so the feedback loop selects for its own reinforcement rather than for wider viability.

Bingo. That would also cover examples, e.g., of artificial selection which are exogenous to a specific species, but which also result in lower-fitness traits emerging or becoming dominant. Crops and livestock which must rely on humans for cultivation and protection, or dog/cat breeds with heritable defects such as hip dysplasia, pug noses, or dwarf legs.

keep an eye on how often he treats “pathology” as a property of relationships and feedback, not of individuals

That's also strongly in line with my own thinking. "Pathological" is a word I tend to use fairly frequently as well: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>. Eyeballing that search set, they're among my more interesting comments as well ;-)

Again, thanks.
by Filligree | 2026-01-17 14:35:02+00:00
The utility side has found that vaporising short circuits is a useful feature, as that includes e.g. twigs hitting a power line.

There are breakers, of course, but they react slowly enough that there will absolutely be a massive overdraw first. Then the breaker will open. Then, some small number of seconds later, it will automatically close.

It will attempt this two to four times before locking out, in case it just needs multiple bursts. It’s called “burning clear”, and it looks just as scary as you’d think… but it does work.

So, solar suppliers need to also survive this.
by lmeyerov | 2026-01-17 14:35:28+00:00
I've had an interesting comparative experience so far using Alloy, which is a 'simpler' formal method approach that you can think of as smarter exhaustive fuzzing for your properties of interest.

We have been building GFQL, an open source graph query language that can run at the compute tier seperate from whatever existing storage system (splunk, SQL, cs , ..), making graphs easy for interactive notebooks/dashboards/analytics/pipelines/agents without needing graph DBs, even at billion scales. Part of the trick is it is a bit unusual inside too because we are making cypher-style queries run with columnar operations (purely vectorized for both CPU + GPU mode via a multi-target dataframe abstraction layer), but that is taking a few innovations in the interpreter algorithm so we worry about subtle semantic bugs. Most of our bugs can surface with small (graph, query) combos, so this sounded perfect for Alloy's small scope hypothesis!

So we are having a natural experiment for which does more bug finding:

- asking Claude code to analyze new code or recently found issues and using that for unit test amplification

- asking Claude code to use the alloy model checker to prove out our space of (query, graph) for key methods

- asking Claude code to port a large cypher conformance test suite

So far, Claude Code as a test amplifier is doing so much better than the others that it's our Dr default preference. The real gem is when we make it do a '5 whys root cause analysis' on why some bug got through and then it does test amplification around several categories of potential error.

We found the conformance suite to be 'class imbalanced' by focusing on a couple features we are adding next, so jury still out on that one. And finally... Alloy hasn't really found anything. We suspect we need to change how we use Alloy to be more reflective of the kinds of bugs we find, but 0 was disappointing.

If anyone is into this kind of thing, happy to discuss/collab!
by j45 | 2026-01-17 14:35:31+00:00
This is kind of odd.

Bloom's paradox is well known and proven in education.

AI is the first thing that can positively personalize education and instruction and provide support to instructors.

The authors seem of limited technical literacy to know that you can just train and focus only on textbooks, instead of their explorations using general models and the pitfalls that they have. Not knowing this key difference affects some of the points being made.

The intersection of having a take on technology needs some semblance of digital and technical literacy involved in the paper to help acknowledge or navigate it, or it become a potential blind spot.

It takes legitimate concerns and ironically explores them in average ways, much like an llm returns average text for vague or incomplete questions.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-17 14:35:38+00:00
> You can look at places with less funding

Yeah, like FOSS which is drastically underfunded since birth, yet continues to put out software that the entire world ends up relying on, instead of relying on whatever VC-pumped companies are putting out.

I'm not talking "better software" as in "made a lot of money", I meant "better" as in "had a better impact on the world".
by chithanh | 2026-01-17 14:35:54+00:00
The problem here is that the production of hydrocarbons, ammonia, etc. from electricity can only make back its high upfront investment when it runs basically 24/7. This is a challenge for renewables.

In China which recently opened a large off-grid green ammonia plant in Chifeng, they use multiple tiers of energy storage to ensure constant electric power availability.
by jalapenos | 2026-01-17 14:36:22+00:00
Whole milk was forbidden in US schools?

Almost surreal how wrong people with a absolute sense of certainly can be. Every time you hear "experts say X is terrible for you" you basically start the clock on the news article "new experts say X is wonderful for you".

One wonders what else will be found to have been a load of crap. At this point if I heard "drinking improves your driving skills" I'd barely be surprised.
by quickthrowman | 2026-01-17 14:36:32+00:00
Gotcha, I think I understand now.

The lack of rotating mass in a solar site means the rest of the spinning mass of the generators needs to compensate to maintain frequency and voltage, right? So when clouds roll in and the solar field output drops quickly, it’s a challenge for the rest of the system to compensate since any other generator that spins will slow down much more slowly, giving the grid more time to react.

Also, I was not aware that inverters can only handle fault current that is 1.1x the nameplate capacity, that’s a big limitation. I can buy a 20A breaker with 200kaic, which is 10,000x higher than the breaker ampacity, which is extremely helpful for handling fault current.
by utopiah | 2026-01-17 14:37:06+00:00
Also something that makes the whole process very hard to verify is what I tried to address in a much older comment : whenever LLMs are used (regardless of the input dataset) by someone who is an expert in the domain (rather than an novice) how can one evaluate what's been done by whom or what? Sure again there can be a positive result, e.g a solution to a problem until now unsolved, what does it say about the tool itself versus a user who is, by definition if they are an expert, up to date on the state of thew art?
Show HN: Autonomous AI code factory on Android/Termux
by jltackett | 2026-01-17 14:37:38+00:00
Over a year+ of 20-hr days in Termux on low-end Android phones, I built an "Autonomous Organism/Factory": local LLMs (TinyLlama/Ollama), Python generators for full apps (MERN, React Native, Kotlin, Java/Spring, legacy langs like Cobol/Fortran, even pentest tools—some manual), self-improvers (AGI_COMPLETE_SYSTEM.py), meta-scripts, trinity audits/QA (VALIDATE_ALL_ASSETS_INDUSTRY_STANDARD.sh), and a Divine Governance core (DIVINE_GOVERNANCE_V2_ENHANCED.py: enforces no-harm, truth-aligned ethics via code checks—inspired by personal faith as guidance through the grind).
It autonomously builds/bundles production-grade apps across stacks. Current output: ~16GB tar.gz on my phone (phone_inventory_complete_20260111.tar.gz), with inventories, generators, etc. Proof excerpt (ls -lh root):
total 16G
drwx------. ... phone_inventory_complete_20260111_054033.tar.gz # core 16G bundle
drwx------. ... PENTEST_BOTS_20260116_190446 # manual security additions
drwx------. ... TRINITY_COMPREHENSIVE_* # deep audits
-rw-------. ... DIVINE_GOVERNANCE_V2_ENHANCED.py # ethical core
... (full ls/DM for details)
Backstory twist: Early version ran on Digital Ocean—demoed it live at SEMO CS dept on Dec 3, 2025 (during student theses; chatted profs/students). Spotted 5 unauthorized users mid-demo, but too excited to act. Products jumped 121→470+ that day; by day 35, full compromise (rootkits, backdoors, monitoring, lockouts). Shut it down, lost chunks from a prior broken phone (dead screen, no recovery). Rebuilt from GitHub/PC scraps on new phone—evolved stronger, with better security focus (e.g., manual pentest bots).
Offer to small teams (≤5): Free 2-year license, 50/50 rev split (simple self-report agreement, gross via Stripe/etc.), then full ownership. No upfront cost—pass it on freely as inspiration came to me. Aiming for The Collective: aligned builders scaling this ethically.
Skeptics: IP is 100% mine (no copies/forks). Security: QA-validated, but audit yourself. Dependencies: Mostly standalone post-handover. Run on real hardware (my phone's maxed—storage/RAM full, runs sluggish).
DM/reply if interested. Thoughts on ethical AI gen? Hack recovery tips? Improvements? #AICoding #IndieDev
by quietbritishjim | 2026-01-17 14:37:49+00:00
In the UK, there is no crime "burglary".

"Breaking and entering" it's a criminal offence, and walking through an unlocked front door back door doesn't count. If you are on someone's land but didn't have to break in then that's trespass, which is just a civil offense.

Theft is a crime in any case (indeed even if you're not on their land e.g. snatching a phone off the street).
by j45 | 2026-01-17 14:38:23+00:00
Imagine a tutor that stays with you as long as you need for every concept of math, instead of the class moving on without you and that compounding over years.

Rather than 1 teacher for 30 students, 1 teacher can scale to 30 students to better address Bloom's 2 sigma problem, which discovered students in a 1:2 ratio with a tutor full time ended up in the 98% of students reliably.

LLMs are capable of delivering this outright, or providing serious inroads to it for those capable and willing to do the work beyond going through the motions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_2_sigma_problem (1984)
by reactordev | 2026-01-17 14:38:40+00:00
Now, how do we apply that to today’s current events?

Is it still a crime if the roadblocks to commit the crime are removed? Even applauded by some? What happens when the chief of police is telling you to go out and commit said crimes?

Law and order is dictated by the ruling party. What was a crime yesterday may not be a crime today.

So if all you did was turn a key and now you’re a burglar going to prison, when the CEO of the house spent months setting up the perfect crime scene, shouldn’t the CEO at least get an accomplice charge? Insurance fraud starts the same way…