MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alephnerd | 2026-01-22 14:27:26+00:00
That's not true. Even the article points out that the renewables expansion is going hand-in-hand with the expansion of coal (similar to what China saw when it hit similar green electrifications rates 5-6 years ago).

Additonally, countries will continue to invest in traditional fossil fuel technology in order to maintain strategic autonomy - why switch from the OPEC Cartel to China weaponizing REE [0] and Green Tech IP exports [1].

This is why you end up seeing ExAmerica and ExChina IP supply chains being built using Japanese [2], Korean [3], Taiwanese [4], European [5], and Israeli [6] IP.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/india-taking-steps-mitig...

[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-12/reliance-...

[2] - https://asia.nikkei.com/business/energy/japan-s-sumitomo-to-...

[3] - https://www.reuters.com/world/china/indian-miner-irel-seeks-...

[4] - https://www.pv-magazine-india.com/2025/05/19/premier-energie...

[5] - https://www.siemens-energy-india.com/

[6] - https://innovationisrael.org.il/en/calls_for_proposal/intern...
by throwaway422432 | 2026-01-22 14:27:27+00:00
Both sides are as bad as each other. Sure there may be a few individuals who truly stand for something and would sacrifice everything to make some change, but the majority don't and in many cases will never have the power or opportunity to bring about change.

Why?

They're individuals who above all look to secure the steady job that will provide the standard of living they aspire to. Unless someone can self-fund and run as an independent, they are beholden to those who provide the funds required to run for office and also have to pander to whichever party put then on the ticket.
by throwaway132448 | 2026-01-22 14:27:42+00:00
I don’t know anything about Charlie Brown, but I’m not sure constant bad luck and disappointment capture the spirit of the British humour being discussed, as that can just as easily be used to describe slapstick humour. Perhaps it’s the existential futility/resignation that’s missing? Charlie Brown is a child, so they perhaps have optimistic naïveté instead (such that their failure be viewed with pity instead of kinship, which is really the distinction here).
by technothrasher | 2026-01-22 14:28:08+00:00
As a fellow older American who loves Monty Python, the more modern British shows I've enjoyed the most were Green Wing, League of Gentlemen, Peep Show, and Doc Martin. Of those, League of Gentlemen and Green Wing have the most Python-like absurdity, while Doc Martin has the most subtle humor. Peep Show is hilarious, but the most crass humor of those listed, although League of Gentlemen doesn't shy away from crassness either.
by adrian_b | 2026-01-22 14:28:22+00:00
"Recently" is 6 years ago, so not so recent.

The real Intel mistake was that they have segregated by ISA the desktop/laptop CPUs and the server CPUs, by removing AVX-512 from the former, soon after providing decent AVX-512 implementations. This doomed AVX-512 until AMD provided it again in Zen 4, which has forced Intel to eventually reintroduce it in Nova Lake, which is expected by the end of this year.

Even the problems of Skylake Server and of its derivatives were not really caused by their AVX-512 implementation, which still had a much better energy efficiency than their AVX2 implementation, but by their obsolete implementation for varying the supply voltage and clock frequency of the CPU, which was far too slow, so it had to use an inappropriate algorithm in order to guarantee that the CPUs are not damaged.

The bad algorithm for frequency/voltage control was what caused the performance problems of AVX-512 (i.e. just a few AVX-512 instructions could lower preventively the clock frequency for times comparable with a second, because the CPU feared that if more AVX-512 instructions would come in the future it would be impossible to lower the voltage and frequency fast enough to prevent overheating).

The contemporaneous Zen 1 had a much more agile mechanism for varying supply voltage and clock frequency, which was matched by Intel only recently, many years later.
by jchw | 2026-01-22 14:28:43+00:00
Me as a kid thought this would be a great idea, and started implementing a PE binfmt. I actually did make a rudimentary PE binfmt, though it started to occur to me how different Windows and Linux really were as I progressed.

For example, with ELF/UNIX, the basic ELF binfmt is barely any more complex than what you'd probably expect the a.out binfmt to be: it maps sections into memory and then executes. Dynamic linking isn't implemented; instead, similar to the interpreter of a shell script, an ELF binary can have an interpreter (PT_INTERP) which is loaded in lieu of the actual binary. This way, the PT_INTERP can be set to the well-known path of the dynamic linker of your libc, which itself is a static ELF binary. It is executed with the appropriate arguments loaded onto the stack and the dynamic linker starts loading the actual binary and its dependencies.

Windows is totally different here. I mean, as far as I know, the dynamic linker is still in userland, known as the Windows Loader. However, the barrier between the userland and kernel land is not stable for Windows NT. Syscall numbers can change during major updates. And, sometimes, implementation details are split between the kernel and userland. Now, in order to be able to contribute to Wine and other projects, I've had to be very careful how I discover how Windows internals works, often by reading other's writings and doing careful black box analysis (for some of this I have work I can show to show how I figured it out.) But for example, the PEB/TIB structures that store information about processes/threads seems to be something that both the userland and kernel components both read and modify. For dynamic linking in particular, there are some linked lists in the PEB that store the modules loaded into the process, and I believe these are used by both the Windows loader and the kernel in some cases.

The Windows NT kernel also just takes on a lot more responsibilities. For example, input. I can literally identify some of the syscalls that go into input handling and observe how they change behavior depending on the last result of PeekMessage. The kernel also appears to be the part of the system that handles event coalescing and priority. It's nothing absurd (the Wine project has already figured out how a lot of this works) but it is a Huge difference from Linux where there's no concept of "messages" and probably shouldn't be.

So the equivalent of the Windows NT kernel services would often be more appropriate to put in userland on Linux anyways, and Wine already does that.

It would still be interesting to attempt to get a Windows XP userland to boot directly on a Linux kernel, but I don't think you'd ever end up with anything that could ever be upstreamed :)

Maybe we should do the PE binfmt though. I am no longer a fan of ELF with it's symbol conflicts and whatnot. Let's make Linux PE-based so we can finally get icons for binaries without needing to append a filesystem to the end of it :)
by lproven | 2026-01-22 14:28:51+00:00
> Much of a modern Linux desktop e.g. runs inside one of multiple not very well optimized JS engines

A couple of years ago I saw a talk by Sophie Wilson, the designer of the ARM chip. She had been amused by someone saying there was an ARM inside every iPhone: she pointed out that there was 6-8 assymetric ARM cores in the CPU section of the SOC, some big and fast, some small and power-frugal, an ARM chip in the Bluetooth controller, another in the Wifi controller, several in the GSM/mobile controller, at least one in the memory controller, several in the flash memory controller...

It wasn't "an ARM chip". It was half a dozen ARMs in early iPhones, and then maybe dozens in modern ones. More in anything with an SD card slot, as SD card typically contain an Arm or a few of them to manage the blocks of storage, and other ARMs in the interface are talking to those ARMs.

Wheels within wheels: multiple very similar cores, running different OSes and RTOSes and chunks of embedded firmware, all cooperatively running user-facing OSes with a load of duplication, like a shell in one Javascript launching Firefox which contains a copy of a different version of the same Javascript engine, plus another in Thunderbird, plus another embedded in Slack and another copy embedded in VSCode.

Insanity. Make a resource cheap and it is human nature to squander it.
by dillydogg | 2026-01-22 14:28:53+00:00
I think one of the most interesting techniques for burn victims is using placentas. I haven't seen it too much in my current hoapital system, but have seen it talked about at medical association conferences and think it's pretty exciting.

Here is a gift link for an article about them in the New York Times from about a year ago.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/08/well/placenta-donations-b...
by abecedarius | 2026-01-22 14:28:53+00:00
I'm on your side in this argument (approximately; asking what ethics even is and where it comes from can be productive but shouldn't conclude "and therefore AI agents working with humans don't need to integrate a human moral sense" -- at least that'd be a really bad conclusion to humanity as AI scales up).

Can't recommend letting an LLM write for you directly, though. I found myself skipping your third paragraph in the reply above.
by Wowfunhappy | 2026-01-22 14:29:49+00:00
Interesting. The other book this makes me think of is Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. I think Gaiman lives in America now, but he’d only recently moved as of when Neverwhere was published, and it’s a very British novel.

I love the world and plot of Neverwhere, but the protagonist, Richard Mayhew, always pissed me off because he’s such a loser. I never understood why Gaiman chose him to be in charge of the story.

Now I’m wondering if that’s my American sensibility.
by Spooky23 | 2026-01-22 14:29:54+00:00
Culture and what companies want there. I was running a operational team with a couple of incredibly talented guys who had been escalation engineers for large software companies in India.

They were trained really hard to "restore" things in a way that hit some minimal level of the SLA, but not really. It created alot of issues initially in the organization as the "don't question anything" had really been ingrained into them. My observation there is that it made many of the useless support engagements I've experienced make sense, and that a place with that level of discipline and process must be pretty awful.
by croon | 2026-01-22 14:30:00+00:00
The most statistically likely output given your diligently described symtoms could still be useful. The prohibitive cost in healthcare in general is likely your time with your doctor. If you could "consult" with a dumb LLM beforehand and give the doctor a couple of different venues to look at that they can then shoot down or further explore could likely save time rather than them having to prod you for exhaustive binary tree exploring.

This from a huge LLM skeptic in general. It doesn't have to be right all the time if it in aggregate saves time doctors can spend diagnosing you.
by perching_aix | 2026-01-22 14:30:02+00:00
How does Reddit come up in this?

The only official community spaces they maintain are:

- their GitHub projects (Issues, Pull Requests, Discussions)

- their mailing lists

- their HackerOne page

If you were harassed on Reddit that is still shitty of course, but it's not gonna be on the project's dev team:

> Some dev teams do not mess around.

Unless some of the devs have verifiable, pseudo-official presence there at least.
by tonio67 | 2026-01-22 14:30:23+00:00
Hi HN, I’m building WebCad, a CAD tool that runs entirely in the browser. You can generate/edit parts with AI and export a clean STEP (.stp) for SolidWorks/Fusion/Inventor, etc.

Why it’s useful:

Works on any laptop / school computer (no installs, no licenses)

Fast iteration: prompt → geometry → tweak → export

Great for engineering students + rapid prototyping

Free to try up to 10 AI generated prompts

https://app.webcad.ca/
by afavour | 2026-01-22 14:30:24+00:00
This reminds me of the differences between the US version of The Office and the UK one. I’m actually fond of both but the boss character (as played by Ricky Gervais) in the UK version is absolutely reprehensible. And he’s the main focus of the show. The US version started that way but it just didn’t work at all. By the second season Steve Carrell’s character was a lovable doofus and the show was much better for it.

(I also think some line of thinking like this applies to politicians. British people almost always hate their politicians, even the ones they vote for. By comparison, in my experience, Americans really want to root for their candidate. Be that Obama or Trump, there’s a passion there you rarely see in the UK)
by creata | 2026-01-22 14:30:51+00:00
Functions are just a different kind of value. Needing to know the type of the values you're using when you use them isn't "nonlocal reasoning".

And it's not like curried function application involves type-driven parsing or anything. (f x y) is just parsed and compiled as two function calls ((f x) y), regardless of the type of anything involved, just as (x * y * z) is parsed as ((x * y) * z) in mainstream languages. (Except for C, because C actually does have type-driven parsing for the asterisk.)

Another way to look at it: languages like Haskell only have functions with one argument, and function application is just written "f x" instead of "f(x)". Everything follows from there. Not a huge difference.
by treyd | 2026-01-22 14:31:10+00:00
FreeBSD is not "compatible with Linux", it provides a way to run Linux applications under a Linux-like syscall environment. What you're suggesting is as if you could load Linux kernel modules into the FreeBSD kernel.

The issue with NT is the driver ecosystem. You'd have to reimplement a lot of under-documented NT behavior for NT drivers to behave themselves, and making that work within the Linux kernel would require major architectural changes. The userland is also where a lot of magic happens for application compatibility.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-22 14:31:38+00:00
Strongly disagree based on Pakistan’s uptake. China is already destroying 1M barrels a day of global fossil fuel demand for every 24 months of EV production. 25% of vehicles sold globally last year were battery electric (growing at a rate of 3M-5M units/year), over 50% in China.

Oil is terminal, and already has a 2M barrel a day global production surplus currently, headed to 4M barrels a day. Coal equally so; even if generators get built, utilization will be low as it gets crowded out by renewables as is happening in China.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2026/01/20/pakistans-installed-p...

> Pakistan has imported over 50 GW of solar modules from China, including 18 GW during the country’s last fiscal year. In the absence of official installation figures, Islamabad-based thinktank Renewables First says up to 33 GW of solar capacity could have been deployed in Pakistan to date.

For comparison, Pakistan only has 8.5GW of coal generation and 17.4GW of gas generation. Solar uptake will continue, battery storage will follow, and India will do the same as solar and battery cost declines continue (imho).

https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-export-data/
by WarmWash | 2026-01-22 14:31:42+00:00
Maybe you are confused, but GPT4.5 had all the same "morality guards" as OAI's other models, and was clearly RL'd with the same "user first" goals.

True, it was a massive model, but my comment isn't really about scale so much as it is about bending will.

Also the model size you reference refers to the memory footprint of the parameters, not the actual number of parameters. The author postulates a lower bound of 800B parameters for Opus 4.5.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2026-01-22 14:31:47+00:00
Interesting statement coming from Nadella - almost that AI is a solution looking for a problem, or at least looking for a problem that justifies the cost in terms of the resources (energy, memory chips, fab capacity) it is sucking up, not to mention looming societal disruption.

There obviously are some compelling use cases for "AI", but it's certainly questionable if any of those are really making people's lives any better, especially if you take "AI" to mean LLMs and fake videos, not more bespoke uses like AlphaFold which is not only beneficial, but also not a resource hog.
by wwfn | 2026-01-22 14:31:55+00:00
Hopefully not too offtopic: why so much boilerplate?

I see most would-be-boilerplate code refactored so the redundant bit becomes a small utility or library. But most of what I write is for research/analysis pipelines, so I'm likely missing an important insight. Like more verbose configuration over terse convention?

For code structure, snippets tempting[1] ("iff[tab]" => "if(...){...}") handles the bare conditional/loop completes in a more predictable way and offline/without a LLM eating into RAM.

[1] https://github.com/joaotavora/yasnippet; https://github.com/SirVer/ultisnips; https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/editing/userdefinedsnippe...
by ajross | 2026-01-22 14:32:16+00:00
> How is this any different than say, Democratic voters who want medicare for all (or whatever) and not getting that for decades?

Because democrats largely support M4A and socialized health care in general. A handful are squishy on the issue, and the structure of the senate requires significant bipartisanship to pass[1]. But if you want it to pass you want to vote for democrats, duh. If you do happen to vote for a democrat who actually opposes that and complain to them that they didn't vote for it, then yeah: you're dumb.

[1] The exception that proves the rule being the ACA itself, which passed on an EXTREMELY rare party-line 60 vote majority. And didn't include a government-offered insurance option because of the objections of Just One Guy (Joe Lieberman, representing the insurance hotbed of Connecticut) whose vote was needed.
by epolanski | 2026-01-22 14:32:25+00:00
> Good Indian devs out of college make atleast 30k USD. Good senior devs make atleast 50k.

1. How can you be a good dev if you've never developed professionally in your life?

2. I know Indian numbers and this is complete bs. Like complete.

Maybe there are extremely rare exceptions to it, but this is like claiming that good US devs out of college make 350k. That's beyond rare, may happen, but it's beyond rare.
by Forgeties79 | 2026-01-22 14:32:35+00:00
And once again with one sentence Adams is able to all but completely articulate an incredibly nuanced cultural topic:

> Terrible things happen to him, he complains about it a bit quite articulately, so we can really feel it along with him - then calms down and has a cup of tea. My kind of guy!

Some people can communicate on a truly different level.
by smusamashah | 2026-01-22 14:33:03+00:00
It tells lots of things but you can takeaway a few things.

One of the key takeaway example for me was that if you make an approachable flat surface, people will put things on it. This is a small example but tells a lot about design of common things.

Another was that I shouldn't be blaming myself for failing to use an everyday thing, I should be blaming its design.

After reading the book I now keep seeing so many design flaws in so many things around. It also made me appreciate good design similarly. I probably think a bit more about users of code etc now, doesn't mean I write better, but it has changed perspective quite a bit.
by jqpabc123 | 2026-01-22 14:33:03+00:00
Summary: It's obvious that bitcoin was never designed for use as a normal, practical currency.

Consequently, many crypto fans have taken to apologetically describing bitcoin as "digital gold".

But real gold has been fully "digitized". You can now buy and sell real gold bullion without every taking delivery, without transaction fees and without depending on unregulated market makers/manipulators.

"Real gold" is up about 60% over the past year. "Digital gold" is down about 30%.
by xnorswap | 2026-01-22 14:33:23+00:00
What do you mean by "this type"?

The sketch show format has been pretty much entirely killed off by TikTok & Instagram.

It's very hard to do a sketch that hasn't already been done on TikTok with a tiny fraction of the budget.

Absurdist humour still exists everywhere, it's less popular than either Python in the 70's / 80's, or the flash era in the 2000s, but it's still everywhere, but I'd also wager it is not to your taste.

At the risk of offending just about everyone, I would suggest that something like "Skibidi Toilet" is just this generation's badger-badger-mushroom, which in turn was that generations' "Bring me a shrubbery!".

Sketch shows in particular don't work well for TV in this era. Mitchell and Webb tried hard to return with one this year and it just fell flat, the jokes feel telegraphed from a mile-away, taking a minute to get to a punchline in a era when the same jokes are told in a 10 second short.

The downside of the tiktok/insta model, is that the more successful people on Insta end up just re-telling their one good joke over and over. ( Or indeed, re-recording someone else's one good joke. ).

Not that sketch shows didn't also repeat jokes sometimes, but they could at least play around with a punchline in unexpected ways, or have callbacks and nods to earlier sketches in a series. That kind of non-continuity doesn't work when you don't know which tiktoks will go viral, or which order your audience will see them in, as the algorithm dictates all.
by Tyriar | 2026-01-22 14:33:29+00:00
VS Code team member here :wave:

As called out elsewhere, workspace trust is literally the protection here which is being circumvented. You're warned when you open a folder whether you trust the origin/authors with pretty strong wording. Sure you may find this annoying, but it's literally a security warning in a giant modal that forces you to chose.

Even if automatic tasks were disabled by default, you'd still be vulnerable if you trust the workspace. VS Code is an IDE and the core and extensions can execute code based on files within the folder in order to provide rich features like autocomplete, compilation, run tests, agentic coding, etc.

Before workspace trust existed, we started noticing many extensions and core features having their own version of workspace trust warnings popping up. Workspace trust unified this into a single in your face experience. It's perfectly fine to not trust the folder, you'll just enter restricted mode that will protect you and certain things will be degraded like language servers may not run, you don't be able to debug (executes code in vscode/launch.json), etc.

Ultimately we're shipping developer tool that can do powerful things like automating project compilation or dependency install when you open a folder. This attack vector capitalizes on neglectful developers that ignore a scary looking security warning. It certainly happens in practice, but workspace trust is pretty critical to the trust model of VS Code and is also an important part to improve the UX around it as we annoy you a _single_ time when you open the folder, not several times from various components using a JIT notification approach. I recall many discussions happening around the exact wording of the warning, it's a difficult to communicate concept in the small amount of words that it needs to use.

My recommendation is to use the check box to trust the parent or configure trusted folders. I personally have all my safe git clones in a dev/ folder which I configured to trust, but I also have a playground/ folder where I put random projects that I don't know much about and decide at the time I open something.