MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-01-17 15:29:44+00:00
Right, there is potential for energy everywhere, some location specific (hydro, geothermal, solar, wind), and some less so (nuclear, coal, gas). The quickest (shortest lead time) solution is to do what xAI did and use on-site natural gas generators.

It's interesting that at some point datacenters in space also become viable, which sounds absurd, but since the need for FLOPS and power is immediate, space and Greenland have to be far down the list of places to choose to build. Right now you build where the lead time for power capacity of some sort is shortest.
by fra07 | 2026-01-17 15:30:11+00:00
Hi HN, I'm the author.

I built this because I wanted a lightweight, native alternative to heavy Electron workspace switchers. I was tired of opening the same 10 apps and folders manually every morning for different contexts (Work, Freelance, Study).

It's a native macOS app (SwiftUI, ~15MB) that lets you define workspaces and launch them in one click.

Technical details:
- Written 100% in SwiftUI.
- Uses a helper executable for some system automations to stay sandboxing-compliant where possible.
- Officially Notarized by Apple (v2.0 release).
- Supports TouchID to lock specific workspaces.

It follows a freemium model (core features are free forever), but the repo is public. I'd love to hear your feedback on the SwiftUI implementation and performance!
by qcnguy | 2026-01-17 15:30:27+00:00
Nice try. The German constitution is a poor document and doesn't protect political opinion, so your "constitutionally protected" political opinion caveat just makes it useless. You'd just defend every example with "our constitution allows that" rather than recognizing that it just means the constitution itself is wrong.

Example: the American author CJ Hopkins has been repeatedly prosecuted in Berlin despite being acquitted the first time, because in Germany there's apparently no constitutional prohibition against double jeopardy. His "crime" was criticizing COVID authoritarianism. You're now going to tell me why the German constitution allows this, and incorrectly use that as a moral justification.
by mikkupikku | 2026-01-17 15:31:01+00:00
It's stupid, but it works. There are innumerable examples of it, The People's Democratic Republic of Korea, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, National Socialism, Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Good guys, or at least people who are good in the context of your or my value systems, also do it. I've got zero beef with my local Humane Society, they're great, but clearly the name of the organization has been chosen for its strong emotional potency.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-17 15:31:32+00:00
There is a push to switch from fossil fuel to electricity across the board, and that’s a good thing.

Cars are the big one. However even heating is going electric (heat pumps, not resistive). Induction stovetops outperform residential gas cooktops. Some cities are even experimenting with phasing out natural gas hookups for new construction.

It all adds up, and it a good thing. It doesn’t explain 100% of the growth but it’s a lot of it.

> Amercian industrial base is being restored, that more and better services are being provided (better healthcare, inexpensive and healthy food, comfortable, efficient and inexpensive transportation).

Trying to put concepts like “better healthcare” on to the growth of electricity demand is unrealistic but generally speaking we’re putting electricity to good use. It’s not being wasted.
by dboreham | 2026-01-17 15:32:41+00:00
> who prompts the AI

LLMs are a box where the input has to be generated by someone/something, but also the output has to be verified somehow (because, like humans, it isn't always correct). So you either need a human at "both ends", or some very clever AI filling those roles.

But I think the human doing those things probably needs slightly different skills and experience than the average legacy developer.
by gnosis67 | 2026-01-17 15:33:02+00:00
I don’t want to spook you, though I’m the guy going around telling everyone “the voices in our heads are real and we are not alone in our own minds.”

I was press ganged into a hooligan army of Power over a decade ago. White terror American Thought Control (who drives public shootings and other evils indistinguishable from crackpot crazy conspiracy talk) tried to recruit me on account of certain charming aspects of my character.

Think of the CIA Stargate programs from the 70s, only those are curated cargo cult games played upon a very real intelligence community who “channel” Bin Ladens location and the like. These actually extort the US government from within and are as parasites among conventional powers.

Thought Control is the real deal, they can manipulate minds in the tens of thousands. Schizophrenic city will play Power games upon you one and all.

Many of you know what I am talking about, yet these insights are not available to ordinary persons.
by polotics | 2026-01-17 15:33:04+00:00
Well, I agree but think it is even worse than this. Anyone who hasn't got wind of the opposition between rationalism and empiricism is squarely placing themselves in a very ancient thought-space, more Plato than Kant, no Popper, no modernity.

They are basically outing themselves as either having little curiosity, or as having had very limited opportunity to learn... Still if they expound on it, the curiosity deficit is the most likely explanation.
by saimiam | 2026-01-17 15:33:07+00:00
Is it true that people are working harder because they consume more?

For me, the chain of events was like this.

I had disposable income > i had no social network or things to do > so i went out and joined a running group and made friends like that.

Others probably choose gaming or something else they can do alone in the third stage.

I doubt there are many people who spent on gaming without first going through the “I don’t have things to do” stage.
by greggoB | 2026-01-17 15:33:28+00:00
> The first link was just referring to him starting his own.

He's pushing a platform that uses AI to generate content that's riddled with far-right misinformation. The context for him doing this is because he didn't like that Wikipedia now chronicles the very real fact that he made a Nazi salute. This doesn't constitute just starting an alternative, this is actively pushing an agenda of misinformation, while demonizing platforms that he doesn't like. He can't buy Wikipedia like he did with Twitter, so he's pushing to undermine & harm it, via defunding or other means (see government threats to "investigate" while Musk was running DOGE).

> "Charitable" is irrelevant to my reference because "competitor" is a term completely devoid of any indication of the quality of the product.

I was being nice; your characterizing of Musk's platform as a genuine "competitor" is BS. Every indication is that he's doing this because he wants to choose what constitutes fact and what doesn't.
by walterbell | 2026-01-17 15:33:53+00:00
> Understanding this doesn’t mean rejecting new tools. It means using them with clear expectations about what they can provide and what will always require human judgment.

Speaking of tools, that style of writing rings a bell.. Ben Affleck made a similar point about the evolving use of computers and AI in filmmaking, wielded with creativity by humans with lived experiences, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-2OsvVJC0s. Faster visual effects production enables more creative options.
by frumplestlatz | 2026-01-17 15:33:57+00:00
Validating the correctness of AI output seems like one of the biggest problems we are going to face. AI can generate code far faster than humans can adequately review it.

My work is in formal verification, and we’re looking at how to apply what we do to putting guard rails on AI output.

It’s a promising space, but there’s a long way to go, and in the meantime, I think we’re about to enter a new era of exploitable bugs becoming extremely common due to vibe coding.

I vibe coded an entire LSP server — in a day — for an oddball verification language I’m stuck working in. It’s fantastic to have it, and an enormous productivity boost, but it would’ve literally taken months of work to write the same thing myself.

Moreover, because it ties deeply into unstable upstream compiler implementation details, I would struggle to actually maintain it.

The AI took care of all of that — but I have almost no idea what’s in there. It would be foolish to assume the code is correct or safe.
by shadowgovt | 2026-01-17 15:33:57+00:00
For those who haven't read it, Scott Alexander's "Unsong" (https://unsongbook.com/) is a very fun piece of historical fiction / religious fantasy. Basic premise is that the world is incredibly shocked when the Apollo 10 mission crashes into the Dome of the Sky and (a) proves that the Biblical cosmology was the true cosmology this whole time and (b) damages reality. It includes the idea that there is a whole cottage industry of people trying to apply technology to deciphering the True Name of God by essentially Mechanical Turking it ("If we divide up all possible syllable combinations into tranches and pay folks minimum wage to sit around reciting every syllable combination possible, we're bound to hit it sometime!").
by paxys | 2026-01-17 15:34:00+00:00
The risk is the same as it was a decade ago, and the decade before that.

The startup will take over your life. You will pour every bit of time and money you have into it. You will lose your sanity. And it’s pretty much a guarantee that you will fail.

Unless you already have a comfortable financial cushion and/or industry connections that will guarantee funding and partnerships, you have to be truly crazy to try that life. But, ultimately it’s the crazy ones that end up winning.
by lesuorac | 2026-01-17 15:34:29+00:00
> You are breaking the principle of keep all other conditions constant.

We've added a change; of course the world will change! But yeah sure if we introduce UBI and hold the rest of the world the same then UBI will have an unobservable effect.

> If it's possible to optimize, why didn't they do it before?

I mean people aren't actually rational so there's a million angles there. However, the cost of a janitor is going to go up with UBI as the opportunity cost has increased.

> then doing low-paying job part time should also cover these basic needs. Something in your logic is not adding up.

No, I just don't think you understand the world around you. Have you never heard of remote nomads? Plenty of people work full-time for parts of the year or part-time all of the year.

> Geologists not needing to hide information, because they don't need that money to survive is opportunity cost how?

Giving the information away for free costs you the money that you could've gotten for charging for it. When you need that money to survive then you have to restrict access. When you don't then you're able to volunteer it.
by akst | 2026-01-17 15:34:34+00:00
My point was mostly, people just aren’t as aware of issues with it compared to other forms of media. Issues in other forms of media don’t change that or make it less of an issue.

At the end of the day you’re gonna to consume information from somewhere, it’ll have shortcomings but you’re still better off knowing that going in.

On bias’ of authors: I actually think people fixate a bit too much on bias of an author to the point it’s a solely used as a speculative reason to dismiss something asuntrue. If the claims made by the author are consistent with other information and others trusted sources it’s just irrelevant. I feel people online to readily get hung up motivations and it’s sometimes a crotch for a readers inability to engage with ideas they find uncomfortable.

Like if a private company sponsors a study with a finding that aligns with their business interests, that actually doesn’t mean it’s false. It’s false if no one can reproduce their results. I mean you’d definitely want to verify other sources knowing this, but also researches have their own reputation to preserve as well. In reality the truth ends up being more boring than people anticipate.

But obviously it matters when claims can’t be verified or tested but I find online there’s an overemphasis of this online.
by neogodless | 2026-01-17 15:34:34+00:00
I think many who dislike Trump (myself included) don't really want to think of him as having skills of any sort.

But I think it's more so that he does absolutely have certain skills such as persuasion or, some argue, charisma. He just doesn't have any of that pesky morality or sense of responsibility to the greater good, the entire citizenship, etc. that often gets in the way of such ambitions.

So we're left with a master manipulator who will hurt a great number of people, maybe benefit a few if necessary, but ultimately a subset of people think he's genius and a net positive. And I can't help but think that the only ones who think he's a "net positive" are either personally benefiting, or have been persuaded to believe it, despite reality painting a different picture.
by bruckie | 2026-01-17 15:34:43+00:00
The people you're replying to aren't talking about converting from AC to DC or stepping voltage up or down. Rather, they're talking about grid stability. You can have mechanisms to convert from AC to DC and to step voltage up or down, but still have a unstable grid. We had a notable example of that last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou....

One way to think about this problem is that our electrical grids are giant machines—in many ways, the largest machines that humanity has every constructed. The enormous machine of the grid is comprised of many smaller connected machines, and many of those have spinning loads with enormous mechanical inertia. Some of those spinning machines are generators (prime movers), and some are loads (like large electric motors at industrial facilities). All of those real, physical machines—in addition to other non-inertia generators and loads—are coupled together through the grid.

In the giant machine of the grid, electricity supply and demand have to be almost perfectly in sync, microsecond to microsecond. If they're not, the frequency of the grid changes. Abrupt changes in frequency translate into not only electrical/electronic problems for devices that assume 60 Hz (or 50, depending on where you are), but into physical problems for the machines connected to the grid. If the grid frequency suddenly drops (due to a sudden drop in generation capacity or sudden drop in load), the spinning masses connected to the grid will suddenly be under enormous mechanical stress that can destroy them.

It's obviously not possible to instantaneously increase or decrease explicit generation in response to spikes or drops in load (or alternatively, instantaneously increase or decrease load in response to spikes or drops in generation). But we don't need to: all of the spinning mass connected to the grid acts as a metaphorical (and literal) flywheel that serves as a buffer to smooth out spikes.

As the generation mix on the grid moves away from things with physical inertia (huge spinning turbines) and toward non-inertial sources (like solar), we need to use other mechanisms to ensure that the grid can smoothly absorb spikes. One way to do that is via spinning reserves (e.g. https://www.sysotechnologies.com/spinning-reserves/). Another way to do it is via sophisticated power electronics that mimic inertia (such as grid-forming inverters, which contrast with the much more common grid-following inverters).

To learn more about this topic, look up ancillary services (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_services). This Shift Key podcast episode is also a great introduction: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/spains-blackout-and-th...
by benoau | 2026-01-17 15:35:12+00:00
Some people just see it as a cost, one "tech" startup I worked at I got this lengthy pitch from a sales exec that they shouldn't have a software team at all, that we'd never be able to build anything useful without spending millions and that money would be better-spent on the sales team, although they'd have nothing to sell lmfao. And the real laugh was the dev team was heavily subsidized by R&D grants anyway.
by dahart | 2026-01-17 15:35:51+00:00
This seems like a very jaded comment, and if it’s because you got burned in a startup, then you have my sympathy and I’m sorry for debating. Just know that not everyone is running on nothing but greed. You might be confusing VCs with startup founders a bit. VCs are definitely profit motivated, by design. It’s going too far, and incorrect IMO, to suggest even VCs, or anyone involved, doesn’t care about building solutions or care about customers. All founders I’ve ever met care about what they make, and most VCs care about it somewhat but also care that the founders care strongly; they don’t often fund founders who don’t care.

So can you source any of your claims of “most”? I just looked it up, and the majority of software startups are self-funded or angel/seed-funded, not VC funded. Founders that don’t care about product or customers enough tend to fail. Founders that only care about the payoff don’t tend to self-fund their startup.

That said, everyone and all companies have financial incentives. There’s nothing unique or new about software startup founders there. The entire economy runs on profit motive. And I’ve seen a lot more people who don’t care about customers or product working in large companies making a nice easy salary working 9 to 5 (or less)!

My personal sampling of founders vs company workers is that founders are, by far, the ones who care more deeply about building something new and delighting customers and growing a sustainable business, care enough to start working nights and weekends, go years with crappy pay or no pay, to do every job in the company from engineering to design to marketing to support to filing taxes. Some people certainly are at least partially motivated to accept these sacrifices for the chance at a payoff, but lots of founders would prefer a lifestyle company where they get to keep building and don’t have the insane pressures and politics of a unicorn company.

Pivots are a thing because good product ideas often are not good business ideas. Startups that fail to pivot are the ones that die, and if your startup dies you don’t get to care about what you’re building or about customers at all. If you want companies to care about product and customers and not profit, then you should embrace sustainable economics, and that means making things people will pay for, and when they’re not paying, making something else.
by paravaib | 2026-01-17 15:35:57+00:00
That makes sense.

I’ve noticed a similar thing — business contexts already revolve around spreadsheets and dashboards, so the desire isn’t really “a website” as much as a stable, public view that stays in sync.

In those cases it feels less like publishing and more like exposing an existing source of truth in a readable way.

Curious whether you’ve seen this solved cleanly in Microsoft-centric setups, or if people mostly accept heavier tooling there.
by londons_explore | 2026-01-17 15:36:00+00:00
In reality most people will buy "smart" appliances which turn on and off based on price - eg. a water heater which picks the cheapest hour to reheat the tank for the day, or a fridge/freezer which cools everything more in cheap hours, an EV charger which starts selling rather than buying power at the highest priced hours, etc. It's all fairly simple software as soon as energy companies do live pricing, so pretty much every wifi gadget will do it.

People will choose it based on claims in the shop like "Smart timing cuts energy bills by 25% on average!".

It only takes a smallish percentage of demand to be reactive like that and really big price swings won't really happen.

Somewhere they'll still be grandad manually putting the dishwasher on at a cheap hour or turning the hot tub off whenever he sees the price is high, but I expect most to be automatic.
by rednafi | 2026-01-17 15:36:19+00:00
Everyone claims they are x% more productive with LLMs, but once a greenfield project turns into a brownfield one, the second law of thermodynamics kicks in and these disposable components start becoming a liability.

On top of that, Hyrum’s law doesn’t go away just because your software has explicit contracts. In my experience, as more people start losing their agency over the code they generate, the system accumulates implicit cruft over time and other code starts depending on it.

Also, reliability is a reasoning problem. So operational excellence becomes scrappy with this way of working. It works for some software, but I don’t know whether this push to YOLO it is actually a good thing. C-levels are putting immense pressure in many big companies for everyone to adopt these tools and magically increase productivity while decreasing headcount to please investors. Not going too well so far.

A good interface doesn’t magically make vibe-coded implementations with little oversight usable. Rewriting it over and over again in the same manner and expecting improvement is not the kind of engineering I want to do.
by ffsm8 | 2026-01-17 15:36:53+00:00
You'll be surprised to know that there are still some mice that don't support that. Admittedly, I've only had that happen once in the last 15 yrs in a budget "gamer" mouse I instantly returned and replaced with a Logitech g903 at the time (though I've switched mice twice since, and both supported it)
by throwawayqqq11 | 2026-01-17 15:39:16+00:00
I asked you spefically, amd reminded you twice now, to morally justify deportations (without due process) simply by crossing the border illegaly. And then i predicted your silence. Dont try to now, you will prob fail on it.

I also ticked all the boxes of fascism (adimttedly, i left out an ignored judicative), to which you didnt respond too.

I dont get how your reading can be that selective. Well, i would strugle too if i had to defend trumps admin.
by binary132 | 2026-01-17 15:39:27+00:00
Very.

I think that we are currently undergoing a sort of Cambrian explosion of awful slop that will inevitably starve itself of resources and die off.

After that process completes, a small core of human-only, anti-“social”, resilient software will remain efficient and usable.

This software will serve as the foundation for a future that prioritizes efficiency (both of hardware and financial resources), maintainability, extensibility, etc.

Much of what we imagine as futuristic software features today will be tomorrow’s corny yesteryear. Tomorrow’s software will be much more utilitarian.

Unfortunately, most users will still probably be trapped in dark-patterned software like Facebook, but the ever-increasing abusiveness of such platforms for the sake of extracting profit growth from a stable or shrinking userbase will drive more and more people to the new world.
by shadowgovt | 2026-01-17 15:39:48+00:00
Great question. The best team I can name had these things going for them:

- Constrained scope (they were the UI team on an internal product; by the time they got their marching orders the whole thing was a very well understood problem domain)

- Excellent manager (he has infinite calm, deep empathy for the fact that real people are messy and complicated, and an incredible nose for time estimates). There was basically no amount of pressure up-chain could put on him that would shake his cool; he seems to be completely confident internally that the worst-case scenario is he goes and lands on his feet somewhere else.

As a result, his team was basically always happy and high-performing and he consistently missed up-chain expectations set by project managers above him who had to consistently report that UI wasn't going to be delivered on the timeline they set because they had taken his estimates and shaved three weeks off of them, only to discover that the estimates were dead-on and they were the liars. He was insulated from this by (a) keeping consistently good notes on his initial estimates, everything that bumped them, and the final deliverable dates and (b) having skip-level meetings where he could present all of this to his boss's boss clearly.