MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vdupras | 2026-01-25 15:43:37+00:00
I don't know about the rest of the world, but here in Quebec, Canada, we had a very dry summer in 2025 and some farmers had to bring literal truckloads of water to their farm for their animals to stay alive. I remember that they were saying to the press that the cost it incurred made them lose a lot of money, making these animals net negative for them, budget wise.

This year was an exception, I'm guessing it's going to become the norm. So, much higher food prices.
by alex1138 | 2026-01-25 15:43:42+00:00
I want people to be REAL careful about "Israel obviously committed a genocide"

All those people brutally murdered on October 7 don't just disappear. Whatever you think about Israel's response it's kind of amazing the main focus is on the "big bad" of Israel

There were pro-Pally protests on October 8! If not October 7. Before the bodies were cool, so to speak

If you were pro-Palestine it is absolutely your moral duty to not just be silent. There is absolutely no ambiguity here. The Islamic Republic is slaughtering Iranians

Edit: And I don't give a damn if this is "construed as hostile", if you downvote me for this (Already one in the last minute) you do not deserve the 500 karma you have to be able to downvote me. I, in fact, suggest that you delete your account
by collingreen | 2026-01-25 15:44:04+00:00
Remember you don't have to feed the trolls.

It's frustrating when people fake argue with you on the internet and seem like they just aren't quite engaging with what you're saying. Unfortunately, sometimes that's the point since it inherently devalues the conversation as a whole.

Not telling you what to do; just passing by and reminding that you're under no obligation to engage with a convo that isn't good faith because sometimes I forget that myself in the moment.
by api | 2026-01-25 15:44:45+00:00
Are you sure? That’s insane if true.

It genuinely puzzles me why they wouldn’t buy some solar panels to run desalination. The oil they’d then be able to sell instead of burning would pay for it easily.

Of course there is not always a good reason. The reason may be that the country is run by aristocrats who are rich and comfortable and don’t care and the present thing works so why fix it. If the system does stop working it’ll only really impact the poor.
by parados | 2026-01-25 15:45:09+00:00
I think that you are confusing ACARS messages (those transmitted from the aircraft via airband radio or satellite) with ECAM messages (those that are displayed to the pilots).
The former are mainly for operational reasons, for example so that ground engineers get forewarning of a failing component. ECAM messages are flight safety critical messages requiring pilot action and they are organised by priority.

ECAM messages are recorded by the DFDR/CVR but are not normally transmitted via ACARS. Pilots were not normally aware of ACARS messages (see MH370).

Your point is a fair one though. In the case of AF447 the crew, against their training, made no attempt at all to work their way through the multiple ECAM messages with the appropriate checklist so they died. The final report on QF32 shows what a high workload this can be.

Since AF447 was lost for nearly two years the ACARS messages were all that the investigators had to go on until they found the wreckage and the DFDR and CVR. Incidentally, one problem with those ACARS messages was that they are only timestamped to the minute and may arrive out of order which makes the interpretation of them more difficult.
by nh2 | 2026-01-25 15:45:33+00:00
There is some confusion here.

ZIP retains timestamps. This makes sense because timestamps are a global concept. Consider them a attribute dependent on only the file in ZIP, similar to the file's name.

Owners and permissions are dependent also on the computer the files are stored on. User "john" might have a different user ID on another computer, or not exist there at all, or be a different John. So there isn't one obvious way to handle this, while there is with timestamps. Archiving tools will have to pick a particular way of handling it, so you need to pick the tool that implements the specific way you want.
by sunshine-o | 2026-01-25 15:46:26+00:00
Let's not forget Big tech is also fulled by the rest of world and Europe.

If you walk into a bank in Europe and have some money to invest they will sell you mostly debt and the "Magnificent Seven" or a funds with those stocks inside.

The EU is ridiculous when it says it want to built an alternative because it's entire financial/banking system end up fueling the saving of its citizen into those companies.

This is also why we end up in that absurd situation where the Mag 7 make up 1/3 of the S&P 500 market cap.

If the EU is serious about offering an alternative (which I doubt) it needs to offer a sustainable path for its people to invest in it. Not do another fake program where insiders will grab some public money and get nowhere (it has been tried for 25 years).
by rapatel0 | 2026-01-25 15:46:27+00:00
New datacenter projects are usually closed loop now.

From your first citation:

> Closed-loop cooling systems enable the reuse of both recycled wastewater and freshwater, allowing water supplies to be used multiple times. A cooling tower can use external air to cool the heated water, allowing it to return to its original temperature. These systems can reduce freshwater use by up to 70%.
by ungreased0675 | 2026-01-25 15:47:30+00:00
The paper publishing industry has a tragedy of the commons problem. Individual authors benefit from fake or misrepresented research. Over time more and more people roll their eyes when they hear “a study found…” Over a long period it depreciates science and elevates superstition.

For example, look at how people interact with LLMs. Lots of superstition (take a deep breath) not much reading about the underlying architecture.
by sdoering | 2026-01-25 15:47:34+00:00
The reality is usually less dramatic than "water completely gone" but more chronically exhausting.

For a sub-Saharan family, "severe water scarcity" often means:

Daily life shifts

Wells and water points yield less or run dry. Wait times at functioning sources grow from minutes to hours. Walking distances to water double or triple. Water quality drops as everyone crowds the remaining sources.

Who carries the burden
Mostly women and girls. During dry season, water collection can expand from one hour daily to four to six hours. Girls miss school, women lose time for farming or income generation.

Practical consequences

Washing, cooking, hygiene get rationed. Livestock often gets priority because it's the livelihood. Latrine hygiene suffers, raising disease risk. Conflicts at water points increase.

What "one month per year" obscures

The statistic sounds manageable, but that month typically falls during dry season when harvests also fail and food gets scarce. The effects compound.

Water rarely just "cuts off" - it's more of a grinding struggle over a shrinking resource, where the poorest have to walk furthest.

Edit: Formatting
by 1718627440 | 2026-01-25 15:47:57+00:00
I'm not repaying for the same fuel, I am paying for new fuel. I'm not rebuying for the same insurance, I pay for the potential accidents in a time frame. With registration I am paying for the wear I am inflicting on the public roads for a time frame. I expect to own the car and it is staying the same. Paying for it again is called renting.
by cherry_tree | 2026-01-25 15:48:26+00:00
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/17/grokipedi...

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/elon-musk/elon-musk-grokipedia-...

https://english.elpais.com/technology/2025-12-06/jimmy-wales...
by nunobrito | 2026-01-25 15:48:33+00:00
The water is reutilized, a big reason is the difficuty to filter new incoming water because of impurities and uncertainty about quality (e.g. winter times make the river water very muddy and difficult to filter).

Second because is because adding water is a cost, whereas reuse existing water is simpler and saves money. There are always losses of water, however these are neglectible.

Not mentioned here but for more extreme cases of devices cooling is done with distilled water (zero minerals) and the whole device works submerged under this water, the hot water isn't thrown away because it distilled water takes a lot of effort to remove the minerals and effort to keep them out, so the closed loop is very efficient.
by i_cannot_hack | 2026-01-25 15:48:49+00:00
What are your credentials on this topic? You speak with a lot of certainty, but fail to acknowledge any nuance that would complicate you world view, such that a lot of water shortages happen also in developed and peaceful regions (as it mentioned in the article). The people without much water are not only in very poor places and warzones, unless you are specifically referring to the people dying due to lack of water.

How would your proposed solution of "the oceans are full of water, just desalinate" affect affordability in agriculture and industry? I assume it would require vast investments in infrastructure that has not been built and is not even planned to be built, what would be required for such an infrastructure to be put in place and what challenges need to be overcome? Are there ecological concerns with the required scale of the operation (such as massive brine runoff at the coast)?

In short, you say "I can assure you there is plenty of water", but is that assurance coming from actual knowledge in the area at hand, or is it misplaced confidence due to dodging any inherent complexity before reaching your conclusion?
by cogman10 | 2026-01-25 15:48:51+00:00
The problem is that while there is a lot of water available, more than our needs, we do not use water efficiently. In particular, food production is horribly wasteful with water. Even small farms will dump 100s of gallons of water per minute (yes minute) onto the ground to ultimately be washed away or evaporated.

What that means is that the piping to get enough water everywhere is enormous. The global usage was 2 quadrillion gallons of water. [1]

There are ways to use water much much more efficiently, but they are expensive to implement. Hydroponics can grow a lot of food, but it requires a lot of power and infrastructure to get setup.

[1] https://www.htt.io/learning-center/water-usage-in-the-agricu...
by maccard | 2026-01-25 15:50:02+00:00
My car will beep every 15 minutes when the washer fluid is low. “Low” being some arbitrary value, and not even remotely close to empty. Last time it happened. I had just started on a long motorway drive on a clear day and it just pinged and pinged and pinged. The beep is actually louder and harsher than the emergency anti collision break alert.

I’ve also never used as much windscreen wash in any other car as I have in this one
by londons_explore | 2026-01-25 15:50:04+00:00
Some older and less efficient desalination plants directly burn oil/coal/gas to desalinate water, so no electricity is involved.

That is perhaps the source of the discrepancy.

With cheap oil, there is little financial incentive to upgrade these plants.

Remember the government need not 'pay' market price for this oil - they can prop the market up by restricting oil exports whilst simultaneously using oil internally at production cost.
by hnlmorg | 2026-01-25 15:50:05+00:00
Depends on what you class as “old”. Remember that a great many British homes are 50+ years old. You certainly wouldn’t have considered having multiple phones in a house when they were built. So the extra socket was added after it was built.

Adding extension sockets was a very easy job. So easy that many homeowners did it themselves.

So it’s very likely your parents and grandparents bedroom phone wasn’t part of the original wiring.
by st_goliath | 2026-01-25 15:50:05+00:00
You might be thinking of ar, the classic Unix ARchive that is used for static libraries?

The format used by `ar` is a quite simple, somewhat like tar, with files glued together and a short header in between and no index.

Early Unix eventually introduced a program called `ranlib` that generates and appends one (also containing extracted symbols) to speed up linking. The index is simply embedded as a file with a special name.

The GNU version of `ar` as well as some later Unix descendants support doing that directly instead.
by malfist | 2026-01-25 15:50:53+00:00
If your high voltage line is conducting enough to the ground that it's sparking, your vehicle isn't going to work. Electricity follows the path of least resistance and a path to ground is a lot lower resistance than a motor coil.

EVs eliminate a lot of polluting failure states of ICE vehicles. There just simply aren't that many things to burn or leak and still have a functioning vehicle.
by orwin | 2026-01-25 15:53:22+00:00
China in Tibet manifestation were mostly thanks to the Dalai Lama. Without a spiritual chief in exile, no one would have cared.

The Uighur is easy: Nike and a lots of western brand used Chinese work camps. In my neighborhood that's what people protested, not really Chinese treatment of their minority, but the fact our brands used slave labor. Nike and all no promised they wouldn't use slave again, the Uighur are still discriminated and forcefully sterilized, no one care anymore in the West.

Russia war against Ukraine is very different, it's the first war in Europe since the 90s, and the first "real" war in europe since 45 (I guarantee you if Ukraine folded in 3 days, no one would have said much). Also, Europe is financing the Russian war economy, which is easy to protest.
by nickpsecurity | 2026-01-25 15:53:25+00:00
I think what these papers prove is my newer theory that organized science isn't scientific at all. It's mostly unverified claims by people rewarded for throwing papers out that look scientific, have novelty, and achieve policy goals of specific groups. There's also little review with dissent banned in many places. We've been calling it scientism since it's like a self-reinforcing religion.

We need to throw all of this out by default. From public policy to courtrooms, we need to treat it like any other eyewitness claim. We shouldn't beleive anything unless it has strong arguments or data backing it. For science, we need the scientific method applied with skeptical review and/or replication. Our tools, like statistical methods and programs, must be vetted.

Like with logic, we shouldn't allow them to go beyond what's proven in this way. So, only the vetted claims are allowed as building blocks (premises) in newly-vetted work. The premises must be used how they were used before. If not, they are re-checked for the new circumstances. Then, the conclusions are stated with their preconditions and limitations to only he applied that way.

I imagine many non-scientists and taxpayers assumed what I described is how all these "scientific facts" and "consensus" vlaims were done. The opposite was true in most cases. So, we need to not onoy redo it but apply scientific method to the institutions themselves assessing their reliability. If they don't get reliable, they loose their funding and quickly.

(Note: There are groups in many fields doing real research and experimental science. We should highlight them as exemplars. Maybe let them take the lead in consulting for how to fix these problems.)
by caisley | 2026-01-25 15:53:28+00:00
I work in custom CMOS image sensor design, targeting scientific imaging applications like electron microscopes, X-ray microscopy, and detectors for high-energy physics. Our designs aren't that cost sensitive from a unit cost perspective, because we are at most probably making several thousand of the chips. So the cost per chip can effectively range from 10-100$ at this scale, after yield losses. But the fixed costs of engineering and 'mask creation' for process nodes can range from 300k$ for nodes around 180 nm, to over 500k$ for 65nm, and above 1m$ for 28nm and below.

We can save money during initial prototyping, by creating a small test structure as small as 1mmm^2, which reduces the cost of a prototype run to 5k$ - 10k$. Some services that provide this are MOSIS [0] in the US, and Europractice [1] in the EU. But when we go to a full production run, there's no way to get around creating a 'full reticle' design, as image sensors have a physical dimension determined by focal plan size requirement of imaging application. For example, in digital camera, if a sensor is 'full frame' then it obviously has to be 36mm x 24mm, regardless of if the process node would have let you shrink it. And if you make a serious mistake, then you need to do another production run, which means you pay the 300k$ - 1m$ once again.

In terms of the circuit functionality, image sensors require a mixture of analog and digital design, but in this area, even many of the digital circuits are custom designed, rather than relying on foundry-provided 'standard cells' and an automatic place-and-route flow.

[0] https://www.mosis.org/
[1] https://europractice-ic.com/
by pydry | 2026-01-25 15:53:30+00:00
MediaZona is one example of an organization that uses a large diversity of sources to assemble what looks like a very accurate Russian soldier casualty count. Their process is excellent.

TIME magazine didnt do anything like that. They most likely got a call from the state department in between their Iran invasion planning meetings to say "hey, we've got a totally legit guy on the inside of rhe iranian ministry of health with an EXPLOSIVE story you wanna talk to him?"

That guy will be getting paid to risk his life talking to the enemy and he will know that his job is not to disappoint.
by trungld | 2026-01-25 15:53:41+00:00
Hi HN

We've been working on Notebook.link( https://notebook.link), a Medium-style blogging platform that lets posts include live, interactive code.

The demo linked here is a Box2D physics simulation running entirely in the browser. Everything executes via WebAssembly, so there’s no installation or backend required.

Posts are authored in Jupyter notebooks, which means authors can seamlessly mix narrative text, plots, widgets, and executable code. Authors can write in Python, C++, R, and Octave, and manage packages and dependencies directly in the browser for each post.

It’s designed to be free to write and share your content, while letting technical articles retain the “live” aspect that usually gets lost in screenshots or static code snippets.

The source code of this blog: https://notebook.link/@DerThorsten/jupyter-games

I’d love feedback on usability, security concerns, and ways to make the experience smoother for readers and authors alike.
by funkyfiddler69 | 2026-01-25 15:54:14+00:00
imagine a camping trip or a long hike and you didn't bring even remotely enough water; your shoes are extremely uncomfortable and your clothes are all soaked and dirty and you are constantly itching; heat, stress, kids, sickness, waiting lines, the crowds, noise, air pollution ...

but these people are not on a hike, and they didn't get their full set of nutrients, "ever" and they don't have the safety of "just a couple more hours".

you are constantly on edge. you are tired. there's work to be done. distances to be walked. through the dust and dirt and smog. children to be fed and old people that depend on your care. and you do get horny, and you fuck and you have to wash before and after ... with ... well, not really clean water ...

and did I mention the smell?

now that doesn't apply to all the four billion, of course but you should get the picture.

I know poverty, and some of the itchiness that comes with it but I don't know "severe water scarcity" ... even in townships in SA they'll tell you it's enough and they'll "hit you" if you waste any.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-25 15:54:59+00:00
I think they're both good points. An unwillingness to call out bullshit itself leads to a systemic dysfunction but on the flip side a culture where everyone just rages at everything simply isn't productive. Pragmatically, it's important to optimize for the desired end result. I think that's generally going to be fixing the system first and foremost.

It's also important to recognize that there are a lot of situations where calling someone out isn't going to have any (useful) effect. In such cases any impulsive behavior that disrupts the environment becomes a net negative.
by venkada | 2026-01-25 15:55:17+00:00
Hi HN,

I built this because I wanted the AI summary features mainly to summarize the action items discussed in a meeting, one on one convo or talking to yourself. The main logic here is that everything works offline.

Fission runs entirely on-device:

Transcription: Uses Vosk for offline STT.

Summarization: Runs a quantized Llama model locally to summarize the transcript. Uses Qwen 0.6b llm model.

Stack: React Native / Expo.

It’s open source (GPLv3). I’d love feedback on how the inference performs on older devices. I'm currently working on better options for transcribing.
by natmaka | 2026-01-25 15:56:10+00:00
Arsenic: this only plays during mining (recycling is OK), and efficient measures are already in place (where and when was it a problem, and at which extent?)

> capacity factor

So what? Capacity factor (or another similar quantity such as physical efficiency, operating life, etc.) is a salient criterion in the case of equipment consuming materials or fuel without recycling them, or producing waste in quantity or in the long term that is dangerous... therefore does not concern nuclear power but hardly concerns renewables.

A low yield makes deployment more expensive but, considered alone, is not prohibitive: a mix of renewables producing adequately (quantity, permanence, impacts, total cost including recycling, etc.) is a good solution whatever its yield.

> most of the deaths are caused by extreme evacuation measures that werent needed

This is disputed and the real amplitude of the threat was not known during the nuclear accident. The tiny evacuation ordered was minimally cautious as experts predicted, during the accident, that the worst cast would imply evacuating up to 50 millions persons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naoto_Kan#In_media
by HEmanZ | 2026-01-25 15:56:19+00:00
Yup, the whole chain of command needs to be bought in. All of this is not “in my head” but “well established with m1, m2, pm”

In my experience this is a really hard conversation and you have to build a lot of relationship/trust (aka politics) within the company to be direct about it. But it saves you and your team from burnout, because it eliminates the expectation of “if you fall behind you’ll work 80hrs/wk until the timeline is caught up” which is what I’ve seen happen too many times.
by dredmorbius | 2026-01-25 15:56:45+00:00
"iPhone" was an Infogear, later Cisco, trademark, for the InfoGear iPhone (1997--2000 / InfoGear, Cisco/Linksys 2006--2007), which was licenced to Apple.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(internet_appliance)>

<https://www.cultofmac.com/apple-history/cisco-infogear-iphon...>
by trinix912 | 2026-01-25 15:56:48+00:00
That's none of the business of my ISP to care about. If a botnet abuses my connection to send excessive traffic, that's going to be limited by the bandwidth limit I'm paying for.

Restricting ports also doesn't mitigate it, as a port scanner can easily find out I'm running this or that vulnerable server software on a non-standard port.

It's none of the ISP's business to restrict the ports I should be using.
by jacquesm | 2026-01-25 15:57:05+00:00
That principle goes far further than developing for space, but for space the pay-off is the largest. It also applies to maritime, medical, aviation and mining and probably other domains where whatever you make it going to have to function even when you can not reach it at all.

But it is great to point it out and to show how essential this kind of thinking is, and how it can help to focus on what is really important and what can be fixed.

What is interesting is to theorize about the relative impact of losing any of those three and how you managed to fix the second because you still had power and were able to communicate with the device. I think within those the order of relative importance would be communications, power and then attitude but I could well be mistaken.