MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bitwize | 2026-01-22 16:37:29+00:00
To close the loop, I had a chemistry professor who linked concepts together in lecture with the phrase "Meaning what?" E.g., "In the alkyne molecule, the carbon atoms share a triple bond. Meaning what? Meaning that the bond is much stronger than in alkanes or alkenes..." It was less a technique for getting attention and more for holding it through a chain of reasoning. But it worked.
by gcr | 2026-01-22 16:37:30+00:00
I think it's a hard problem. The semanticscholar folks are doing the sort of work that would allow them to track this; I wonder if they've thought about it.

A somewhat-related parable: I once worked in a larger lab with several subteams submitting to the same conference. Sometimes the work we did was related, so we both cited each other's paper which was also under review at the same venue. (These were flavor citations in the "related work" section for completeness, not material to our arguments.) In the review copy, the reference lists the other paper as written by "anonymous (also under review at XXXX2025)," also emphasized by a footnote to explain the situation to reviewers. When it came time to submit the camera-ready copy, we either removed the anonymization or replaced it with an arxiv link if the other team's paper got rejected. :-) I doubt this practice improved either paper's chances of getting accepted.

Are these the sorts of citation rings you're talking about? If authors misrepresented the work as if it were accepted, or pretended it was published last year or something, I'd agree with you, but it's not too uncommon in my area for well-connected authors to cite manuscripts in process. I don't think it's a problem as long as they don't lean on them.
by AnotherGoodName | 2026-01-22 16:37:39+00:00
>Australia has so much electricity during the day they’re talking about making I free for everyone in the middle of the day.

Not just talking about it, if you get a smart meter and sign up for a plan that matches the grid rates you can actually be paid to take electricity during the day right now.

If you're wondering "couldn't you just make bank with a battery" yes you can. In fact Australia dominates the world in grid connected storage (per capita) and this chart itself is actually out of date (it's growing even faster than shown).

https://elements.visualcapitalist.com/top-20-countries-by-ba...

I'll also point out that gas and oil generation has declined rapidly.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/the-rise-of-battery-storage-and-...

For anyone that thinks renewables can't phase out peaker plants it happens very naturally and rapidly once there's enough solar to set rates negative in the day.
by epsteingpt | 2026-01-22 16:37:43+00:00
Not here to have a religious debate - though given HN, it may turn into one!

Imprecise language is a common human feature of a lack of understanding - something we all suffer from. We call LLM's "AI" without fully understanding what's artificial and what's intelligence.

The story of faith is, in some ways, the story about how little we know about the universe. That doesn't mean there's no progress. If anything, it shows there is an end goal.

The ancient narratives of Babel and Genesis reduce the incomprehensible (Creation, the Divine) into elements we as humans at that time could understand.

How else could our ancestors have possibly related to the divine?
by robkop | 2026-01-22 16:37:45+00:00
It's a fair question - I think the fact that they hold abilities (read 200k tokens instantly, can clone themselves, ...) that we don't would suggest they will have quirks and differecnes.

What downstream implication that will have on a AX sense is certainly arguable, but I would put forward that we're already seeing it with effective harnesses such as Claude Code. The experience the agent has there is quite different to how you'd build an IDE for a human.
by rawgabbit | 2026-01-22 16:37:54+00:00
The article you cited said it was done during wartime. It was a way to keep the scientists and technicians who were drafted into military service... so they can keep working in the laboratories they are already working in.

As a solution, the Manhattan Engineer District (MED) in May secured authorization to establish the Special Engineering Detachment (SED) to which technical and scientific personnel could be assigned upon being drafted
by kalkin | 2026-01-22 16:37:56+00:00
If a human is ultimately made up of nothing more than particles obeying the laws of physics, it would be in principle possible to simulate one on paper. Completely impractical, but the same is true of simulating Claude by hand (presuming Anthropic doesn't have some kind of insane secret efficiency breakthrough which allows many orders of magnitude fewer flops to run Claude than other models, which they're cleverly disguising by buying billions of dollars of compute they don't need).
by gnosis67 | 2026-01-22 16:38:08+00:00
I got the same reaction from that “how intelligence agencies think” YouTube video. Come now, “situational awareness”? Who needs a conspiracy to pay attention to their environment? And other mental tricks that people who must be told what to do may not come up with for themselves.

Design however is a highly praiseworthy contemplation. There are those who do it well, and those who best learn to rip off what works as faithfully as means allow.
by ACS_Solver | 2026-01-22 16:38:17+00:00
> I do think there's some opportunity for ReactOS, but I feel it would have to at LEAST get to pretty complete Windows 7 compatibility

That's not going to happen in any way that matters. If ReactOS ever reaches Win7 compatibility, that would be at a time when Win7 is long forgotten.

The project has had a target of Windows 2000 compatibility, later changed to XP (which is a relatively minor upgrade kernel wise). Now as of 2026, ReactOS has limited USB 2.0 support and wholly lacks critical XP-level support like Wifi, NTFS or multicore CPUs. Development on the project has never been fast but somewhere around 2018 it dropped even more, just looking at the commit history there's now half the activity of a decade ago. So at current rates, it's another 5+ years away from beta level support of NT 5.0.

ReactOS actually reaching decent Win2K/XP compatibility is a long shot but still possible. Upgrading to Win7 compatibility before Win7 itself is three plus decades old, no.
by genewitch | 2026-01-22 16:38:26+00:00
after you do all of that, see if you can find pictures of the stations, the little structure the old ones were in are called "CRS" which stands for Cotton Region Shelter. these were the old liquid-in-glass style thermometers. The new ones have multi-plate radiation shields to house the thermistor and protect it from direct sunlight while allowing airflow. i guess some people say they look like a beehive, but they're a cylinder.

so the CRS ones could be put anywhere. the new MMTS sensors had a pre-cut length of cable for installation, as the base unit was to be situated indoors.

So CRS could be out in the middle of a field, where the MMTS are generally within 30' of a building.

Maybe we should throw out all the MMTS data?

Now, though, someone finally realized, and they're installing wireless MMTS - minimum-maximum temperature sensor, tells the min and max over the last 24 hours, and you record those numbers once per day, at a specific Time-of-Observation. Changing the time-of-observation requires de-biasing the data, too!
by modo_mario | 2026-01-22 16:38:34+00:00
>Yes, you're right that (almost famously) farm work is done by a disproportionate amount of illegals, but conflating those with immigrants as a default does injustice to the hardworking people that followed the rules.

I think that shifts a bit when there's potentially more of the former than the later (or even just anything vaguely close to that).
Especially when that's the aspect that's been drawing so much focus in this context.
by 65 | 2026-01-22 16:38:35+00:00
I read the Design of Everyday Things and most of it was painfully obvious examples and was overly philosophical.

Design is solving problems so they're intuitive for the user. Obviously a door with a handle shouldn't be a push door, I don't really think you need to write a book about it. And the types of people creating bad design are generally constrained by cost, time, or practicality, not necessarily by education.
by doublerabbit | 2026-01-22 16:38:36+00:00
If either one of the two alternative government parties of the UK get in they will scrap all. Reform UK sets out plans to tax renewable energy, conservatives are all for the oil.

2030 is four years away & the next election is in 2029. The Labour party is unlikely to get in again, and if they do it'll be a miracle. Far-Right or Fascist Right.

Reform UK won't get enough seats to sit in parliament this election but if in the future, it's a dystopian vision I don't want to think about. Trump-XL, tax the EU, climate change doesn't exist, kick out asylum seekers, higher taxation to further screw Scotland and Wales. Heavily back pocketed by the US oil and tobacco industry, Nigel is foul, A MAGA of the UK.

Conservatives, sponsored by oil and pharmaceutical. Exxon, Esso, BP et cetera. They got their wish with Brexit, they made a bucket load of cash from that and they're the ones who scrapped the renewable industry in the first place. Their main aim is to scrap the NHS and make it privatized.
by pranavj | 2026-01-22 16:38:36+00:00
The most underreported part of this story is the battery piece at the end. Batteries are beginning to displace natural gas in evening peak hours - that's the exact window where solar critics have long argued renewables fall short. If this trend accelerates (and battery prices are dropping faster than most models predicted), the "intermittency problem" starts looking more like a solvable engineering challenge than a fundamental barrier.

The next milestone to watch: when battery-backed solar becomes cheaper than gas peakers for evening demand across most of Europe. We might be closer than people think.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-22 16:38:36+00:00
> I'm curious what would stop you from opening it in restricted mode? Is it because it says browse and not edit under the button?

Have you tried it? It breaks a lot of things that I would not have expected from the dialog. It’s basically regressing to a slightly more advanced notepad.exe with better grepping facilities in some combinations of syntax and plugins.
by pranavj | 2026-01-22 16:39:45+00:00
Good catch. Electricity is maybe 20-25% of final energy consumption in most EU countries. The real test is whether cheap renewable electricity can pull heating (heat pumps) and transport (EVs) onto the grid fast enough. The encouraging sign is that both are happening - heat pump sales have surged in several EU countries, and EV adoption is well ahead of most forecasts from 5 years ago. But you're right that "overtaking fossil fuels" in total energy is still years away.
by sersi | 2026-01-22 16:39:53+00:00
> Who opens an physical encyclopedia nowadays?
I know plenty of people who binge wikipedia and learn new things through that. While Wikipedia is not always perfect, it's not like older printed encyclopaedia like Britannica were perfect either.

You have a point with trusting AI, but I'm starting to see people around me realising that LLMs tend to be overconfident even when wrong and verifying the source instead of just trusting. That's the way I use something like perplexity, I use it as an improved search engines and then tend to visit the sources it lists.
by burkaman | 2026-01-22 16:39:57+00:00
If you click on the article you can see a full list of the hallucinations they found. They did put in the effort to look for plausible partial matches, but most of them are some variation of "No author or title match. Doesn't exist in publication."

Here's a random one I picked as an example.

Paper: https://openreview.net/pdf?id=IiEtQPGVyV

Reference: Asma Issa, George Mohler, and John Johnson. Paraphrase identification using deep contextual-
ized representations. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural
Language Processing (EMNLP), pp. 517–526, 2018.

Asma Issa and John Johnson don't appear to exist. George Mohler does, but it doesn't look like he works in this area (https://www.georgemohler.com/). No paper with that title exists. There are some with sort of similar titles (https://arxiv.org/html/2212.06933v2 for example), but none that really make sense as a citation in this context. EMNLP 2018 exists (https://aclanthology.org/D18-1.pdf), but that page range is not a single paper. There are papers in there that contain the phrases "paraphrase identification" and "deep contextualized representations", so you can see how an LLM might have come up with this title.
by mcv | 2026-01-22 16:40:18+00:00
I'd briefly come across Elk, but couldn't tell how it was better than what I was using. The examples I could find all showed far simpler graphs than what we had, and nothing that seemed to address the problems we had, but maybe I should give it another look, because I've kinda lost faith that dagre is going to do what we need.

If I can explain briefly what our issue is: we've got a really complex graph, and need to show it in a way that makes it easy to understand. That by itself might be a lost cause already, but we need it fixed. The problem is that our graph has cycles, and dagre is designed for DAGs; directed acyclic graphs. Fortunately it has a step that removes cycles, but it does that fairly randomly, and that can sometimes dramatically change the shape of the graph by creating unintentional start or end nodes.

I had a way to fix that, but even with that, it's still really hard to understand the graph. We need to cut it up into parts, group nodes together based on shared properties, and that's not something dagre does at all. I'm currently looking into cola with its constraints. But I'll take another look at elk.
by sedawkgrep | 2026-01-22 16:40:18+00:00
> Surely the variety of NAT that significantly improves the IPv4 address starvation problem (IP Masq by its various names) requires a connection oriented approach to be effective?

Actually it doesn't. Well, not really.

With NAT you're generally talking about either 1:1 or 1:many (Masquerading).

In all cases the device doing the NAT maintains a table which is referenced for every matching packet that arrives or leaves.

In 1:1 NAT, the IP in the packet header (Layer-3) is simply rewritten from one address to the other whenever a packet matching both addresses in the NAT table leaves or arrives.

In 1:many NAT, the source port is often randomized because you can run into collisions when multiple clients are connecting to the same server:port. So in that case the NAT table contains IP addresses as well as ports. When a return packet arrives, it checks the NAT table and rewrites both the L3 and L4 (port) info before passing it along.

Often times firewalls will randomize the source port when doing 1:1 NAT as a security measure, but after all these years I don't really remember why that's helpful. :-\

But that's really the extent of tracking connections with NAT.

Now when you're talking about firewalling, there's a lot more to track, such as connection start/stop/timeouts/lifetimes, total throughput, TCP state (handshakes, sequence numbers, etc.), closing open sessions when seeing things like TCP RSTs or FINs or ICMP unreachables. The amount of data and CPU is dramatically higher, and tailored to the software doing the firewalling. I believe in many cases simple L3/L4 rewrites can happen in hardware.

I haven't talked about any of this in several years so I hope I'm making sense.
by pixl97 | 2026-01-22 16:40:21+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

Should be a highlight of the 2020's decade.

It's not just open projects, it's anything that accepts unvetted information at all. Bug lists full of shit. Forums full of shit. News feeds full of fake shit. Ads full of fake shit. Cultural zeitgeist full of fake shit.

Culture and society has not figured out how to inoculate themselves yet.
by kalkin | 2026-01-22 16:40:45+00:00
It would be pretty arrogant, I think, though possibly classic tech-bro behavior, for Anthropic to say, "you know what, smart people who've spent their whole lives thinking and debating about this don't have any agreement on what's required for consciousness, but we're good at engineering so we can just say that some of those people are idiots and we can give their conclusions zero credence."
by class3shock | 2026-01-22 16:40:49+00:00
I forget where, but someone was talking about a similar difference in American vs British comedy looking at The Office (the American one) and Parks and Rec. In both, the format tends to be pre-conflict -> conflict -> resolution, with the episodes almost always ending on an upbeat tone. In contrast, in a British show, it tends to be pre-conflict -> conflict -> kick them while they are down. Things can get worse, the characters can be unredeemed, and the fun is they are inept, unlucky, arseholes that don't get out of the situation with a happy ever after.

Americans like that humor as well (see Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Archer, etc.) but it definitely is less prevalent.
by pranavj | 2026-01-22 16:40:52+00:00
This is an important observation. For years these headlines came with asterisks - one sunny/windy day, excludes gas, new capacity only, etc. This being actual annual generation for wind+solar combined vs all fossil fuels is genuinely significant. The compounding nature of it is key too - solar capacity is now large enough that even modest percentage growth adds enormous absolute capacity each year.
by DetectDefect | 2026-01-22 16:40:53+00:00
> In fact we did and we have an electric car, replaced our gas cooking top by induction, and our gas-based heating by a heat pump. Last time I boarded an airplane was in 2019 I think.

Fantastic virtue signaling. Of course totally devoid of any mention about the individuals picking raw materials for those electric car components though, since they're not "our" children.
by overfeed | 2026-01-22 16:41:03+00:00
> Indeed, also a great example of a failing bumbling lovable loser who is frequently considered a hero to many Americans is Homer Simpson.

Homer maybe the best attempt at a protagonist American "loser", but he still has far too much agency compared to a British loser. "Lisa needs braces" and "Do it for her" are very hero-coded, and would never happen in a universe where the Simpsons are a British family.

Another barometer is American remakes of British shows, where the loser character is given redeeming qualities or circumstances rather than just letting them be the losers they are, such as David Brent vs. Michael Scott in their respective "The Office" roles. I suspect soaked-in-the-wool loser characters don't poll well in American focus groups hired by studios.
by jamesmunns | 2026-01-22 16:41:19+00:00
Speaking as someone familiar with C and Rust (not so much Go!), although there's a parallel here to Rust's Traits, this actually is much closer to dyn Trait in Rust, which uses vtables and runtime polymorphism, rather than "regular" Traits in Rust, which are monomorphized versions of similar interface constraints, much closer to C++'s templates (or concepts, I'm hand waving here).

This isn't necessarily a negative, sometimes you actually prefer vtables and runtime polymorphism for various reasons like flexibility, or code size reasons. Just wanted to add some flavor for folks that aren't as familiar with Rust, that this isn't exactly how things usually work, as "regular" Trait usage is much more common than dyn Trait usage, which you have to explicitly opt-in to.
by hydrogen7800 | 2026-01-22 16:41:28+00:00
I visited London several years ago, and in the house we were staying was a relatively short book describing, for lack of a better term, "British exceptionalism", and it resonated with me as an American. I don't recall that much, but I do remember the idea, for example, that the European Union was seen to be a good thing in the eyes of the archetypal Brit "for the continent", and not for the British isles. Always exempting themselves from international cooperation/norms/laws, etc. I think America inherited a lot from the British (certainly not an original idea of mine).
by runtimepanic | 2026-01-22 16:41:51+00:00
Interesting idea. One thing I’m curious about is where we draw the line between improving clarity and actively trying to disguise authorship. Tools like this make sense for reducing awkward phrasing, but they also raise questions about transparency, especially in academic or professional contexts.

It feels like we’re moving from “AI-assisted writing” toward “AI-assisted obfuscation,” which is technically impressive but socially a bit tricky. Would be interesting to hear what use cases you had in mind when building it.
by dataviz1000 | 2026-01-22 16:42:00+00:00
> Solar prices in the US are criminal, protecting oil and gas who bought all the politicians.

It would be worth including control of the people who vote for the politicians by direct investment such as when the oil producing Saudis bought the second largest stake in NewCorps which controls FoxNews controlling the content that influences voters. And, less than ethical control using bots on social media by Russia.

A lot of what influences "solar prices in the US" is controlled by foreign oil producing countries like Saudi Arabia and Russia controlling content and media consumed by American voters.
by pranavj | 2026-01-22 16:42:14+00:00
The baseload framing is increasingly outdated. What grids need isn't constant supply - it's flexible supply that matches variable demand. Solar + batteries handle daytime and evening peaks well. Wind fills different gaps. The remaining "firmness" problem (extended low-wind, low-sun periods) is real but smaller than baseload thinking suggests. Most studies show you can get to 80-90% renewables before you hit hard storage limits. The last 10-20% is the expensive part, but that's a different problem than needing baseload for everything.
by JeremyNT | 2026-01-22 16:42:15+00:00
> Sounds like you've already bought into the meme that AI is actually magical, and can do everything the hype train says. I'm unconvinced. Just because there's smoke coming from the bottle doesn't mean it's a genie. What's more likely, magic is real? Or someone's lying to sell something?

There are a lot of lies and BS out there in this moment, but it doesn't have to do everything the hype train says to have enough value that it will be adopted.

After my (getting to be long) career, there's a constant about software development: higher level abstractions will be used, because they enable people to either work faster, or they enable people who can't "grok" lower level abstractions to do things they couldn't before.

The output I can get from these tools today exceeds what I could've ever gotten from a junior developer before their existence, and it will never be worse than it is right now.
by CollinEMac | 2026-01-22 16:42:41+00:00
I don't think Adams is talking about how reluctant the hero is but about failure and misfortune.

Frodo definitely doesn't want to be there but he is far from being a failure. He saves Middle-earth, goes home to the Shire and saves that too, and is regarded as such an incredible mortal that he's invited to live in Valinor with the elves (this is a very big deal and I believe has only ever happened for Frodo and his buddies).

The same goes for Harry Potter. He's a loser at the beginning but after going to Hogwarts he's very much a hero that saves the day by being good at everything and exceptionally brave.

Also, I'd say there are plenty of reluctant heroes in American literature and film. Luke Skywalker hesitates to go save Leia in the first film, Spider-man straight up quits being Spider-man multiple times, John McClane just happened to be there when terrorists attack.