MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by NoLinkToMe | 2026-01-14 06:17:55+00:00
Great writeup!

Tldr; their full costs of the system are returned in 11 years.

Whether that's good depends on your perspective and assumptions, you can take a look at opportunity costs.

Imagine you have 100k for say 30 years, and you have three choices:
1. put it in a UK government bond at 4.4% -> 100 * 1.044^30 = 363k
2. put it in the S&P500 (dividend reinvested) at nominal 10% rate -> 1.7 million
3. buy a system that can't be made liquid after 30 years, but returns 11k flat per year = 330k.

1 is very safe and virtually guaranteed. 2 is considered less safe, but over 30 years broad based stock indexes are far less risky than short-term stock investing.

3 is perhaps the most difficult to make assumptions, as its house-tied and operational. Switch houses for any personal reasons, and you'll not be able to fully make your investment liquid and recuperate it. Blow an inverter, see panels degrade and replacement costs must be factored in. This pushes down the final cash position of 330k.

We could be generous and say that the 11k flat savings will increase, as electricity prices rise. Prices grew by 5% yearly in the UK, under that rate so the 11k savings today would grow to 47k annual savings in year 30, and total savings over 30 years would be 870k, pushing up the final cash position, but still not getting close to a long-term stock index investment.

But even that's somewhat generous for two reasons: one is that the 5% inflation was unnaturally high due to the EU's energy crisis from the Russian invasion, and not necessarily indicative of the next 30 years. Various countries in the EU are also curtailing renewable production because there's too much of it (precisely during the moments solar systems were making their biggest profits < 2020, you since see curtailment growing), and with more storage coming online rapidly the profits from their battery system are expected to decline, not increase. -- generally speaking, solar energy producers were more profitable a few years ago, and are becoming less and less profitable over time as competition from cheap panels undercuts them. Many countries have begun to cut the reward from exporting back to the grid from the retail prices of €0.30 to the puny wholesale prices of €0.05 and all countries are expected to go down this road eventually.

On the other hand, AI seems likely to push electricity prices higher for a long time... but it's the newest and biggest question mark compared to the other assumptions we've made above.
by yardstick | 2026-01-14 06:18:23+00:00
> Or better still, this torrent file, where the bots would briefly end up improving the shareability of the data.

Depends on if they wrote their own BitTorrent client or not. It’s possible to write a client that doesn’t share, and even reports false/inflated sharing stats back to the tracker.

A decade or more ago I modified my client to inflate my share stats so I wouldn’t get kicked out of a private tracker whose high share ratios conflicted with my crappy data plan.
by legostormtroopr | 2026-01-14 06:19:25+00:00
Unless I am wildly misreading this, this is actually worse that both GUIs and LLMs combined.

LLMs offer a level of flexibility and non-determinism that allow them to adapt to different situations.

GUIs offer precision and predictability - they are the same every time. Which means people can learn them and navigate them quickly. If you've ever seen a bank teller or rental car agent navigate a GUI or TUI they tab through and type so quickly because they have expert familliarity.

But this - with a non-determinstic user interface generated by AI, every time a user engages with a UI its different. So they a more rigid UI but also a non-deterministic set of options every time. Which means instead of memorising what is in every drop down and tabbing through quickly, they need to re-learn the interface every time.
by jimbo808 | 2026-01-14 06:20:11+00:00
I've only experienced de-motivation from managers, personally. At least for me, motivation comes from ownership, impact, autonomy, respect. You can cause me to lose motivation in a lot of ways, but you can't really cause me to gain motivation unless you've already de-motivated me somehow.

You can de-motivate me in a lot of ways, some examples:

- throwing me or a coworker under the bus for your mistakes

- crediting yourself for the work of someone else

- attempting to "motivate" me when I'm already motivated

- manufacturing a sense of urgency, this is especially bad if you try to sustain this state all indefinitely

- using AI or market conditions as a fear tactic to motivate the team

- visibly engaging in any kind of nepotism

Honestly this list could go on and on, but those are some that come to mind.
by teiferer | 2026-01-14 06:21:29+00:00
"Why stop there" is often a reason why nothing gets done. Why do small if you can go big right away? Because going big right away is costly (in social cost, in convincing, in how much people need to change behavior, ...) and that prevents people from doing it in the first place because the threshold is high. Apathy is the result. Better to take a small step first, then get used to the measure / the cost, then have a next phase where you do more.

Everybody makes fun of paper straws. Or they made fun of wind power when it was barely 0.1% of energy production. Why not immediately demand 20 years ago that all single use plastic is banned? Or that only wind and solar are allowed? Because the step is too big, it would not be accepted. You need to take one step at a time.

That's even a viable strategy against procrastination. There is this big daunting task. So much to do! Oh my, better scroll a little tiktok first. No, just take a small first step of the task. Very small, no big commitment. Then maybe do some tiktok, but the little first step won't be too much. Result is, you have an immediate sense of accomplishment and actually made progress, maybe even stay hooked with more steps of the ultimately big task.
by maxbond | 2026-01-14 06:21:35+00:00
You will have an error rate of less than or equal to 1%. You can't average two measurements and get a result with a higher error rate than the worst of the original measurements had.

You wouldn't be well served by averaging a measurement with a 1% error and a measurement with a 90% error, but you will have still have less than or equal to 90% error in the result.

If the errors are correlated, you could end up with a 1% error still. The degenerate case of this is averaging a measurement with itself. This is something clocks are especially prone to; if you do not inertially isolate them, they will sync up [1]. But that still doesn't result in a greater error.

You could introduce more error if you encountered precision issues. Eg, you used `(A+B)/2` instead of `A/2 + B/2`; because floating point has less precision for higher numbers, the former will introduce more rounding errors. But that's not a function of the clocks, that's a numerics bug. (And this is normally encountered when averaging many measurements rather than two.)

There are different ways to define error but this is true whether you consider it to be MSE or variance.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T58lGKREubo
by wolvoleo | 2026-01-14 06:21:44+00:00
I have a hybrid model here. For many many tasks a local 12b or similar works totally fine. For the rest I use cloud, those things tend to be less privacy sensitive anyway.

Like when someone sends me a message, I made something that categorises it for urgency. If I'd use cloud it means they get a copy of all those messages. But locally there's no issue and complexity wise it's pretty low for an LLM.

Things like research jobs I do do in cloud, but they don't really contain any personal content, they just research using sources they already have access to anyway. Same with programming, there's nothing really sensitive in there.
by CableNinja | 2026-01-14 06:22:06+00:00
Ive dabbled in a bit of all of this, and let me say, good luck! Sounds interesting.

Unfortunately, USB is hot garbage imo. The USB-IF, really screwed up USB, especially with all the power negotiation bullshit that has to happen now. Thanks to their ever changing USB3.x super premium plus ultra megaspeed crap that they keep doing, i ended up giving up on a multi-year usb project. Because of their changes, i would have had to change my entire build, and have to mitm usb devices, which i explicitly built my device to avoid. And then theres the USB-C cable, and the stupid process of negotiation and the power cable active crap, just... uhg, i hate usb after going down that rabbit hole.
by sllabres | 2026-01-14 06:22:13+00:00
From the man page: Linux 5.14.

Before Linux 6.5, memfd_secret() was disabled by default and only available if the system administrator turned it on using "secretmem.enable=y" kernel parameter.
[...]

"To prevent potential data leaks of memory regions backed by memfd_secret() from a hybernation image, hybernation is prevented when there are active memfd_secret() users."
by burnt-resistor | 2026-01-14 06:22:59+00:00
Vintage hw is even harder to find drivers, BIOSs, SDKs, schematics, manuals, and such for because there's no assurance of proper archival. This is almost always seen whenever downloads were hidden behind Flash, CGI, JS, or other dynamic / link-rotten URI or were on an ftp server which IA failed to mirror.

There must be international legal minimum standards of post-sales support and EOL archival caretaking to really reduce e-waste and allow things people paid for to endure rather than forced planned obsolescence like cloud-side or update-based bricking. The corrosive consumer mindset of "new, new, new"; fragile, undocumented, closed-source, short-life tech; and throwing away expensive things is absurd.
by 0x1ceb00da | 2026-01-14 06:23:30+00:00
> The buffer is the UI, rendered by Emacs's extremely optimised text display machinery

Doesn't emacs lag like crazy in files with large lines. Why is this still a problem? Every modern editor handles this gracefully. I remember reading something about using regexes for syntax highlighting. This looks like a problem in the rendering layer which shouldn't be too hard to fix without touching the core engine. Are there any other problems that make it difficult to fix without disabling any useful features?
by nebula8804 | 2026-01-14 06:23:42+00:00
Well on a positive note, it may eventually lead to a union or works council for technologists. Will coders be a part of that or will that skill set go the way of carpenter? Remains to be seen. But there is still other roles in tech that could take the place of coders (infrastructure, security etc.).

Also remains to be seen how long this process will take. Could take a decade or two but hopefully it will happen. Its just so nice to see little wins like a Democratic Socialist like Mamdani getting elected in the finance capital of America. It shows that people are slowly chipping away at the capital class and sooner or later they will have to throw us some breadcrumbs.
by robot-wrangler | 2026-01-14 06:23:47+00:00
This is a meta-game. I got curious about related topics in game theory once and found out about [1,2]. There are also a few papers directly trying to study calvinball and so-called minimal-nomic. It's pretty crazy how little we know theoretically about this stuff, considering how relevant games with dynamic rules actually are for daily life.

Of course, there's probably no clean solutions in this space short of lots of sims. Regardless of whether new agentic stuff works for everything else in AI.. agent-based modeling seems likely to benefit from some kind of renaissance and that should be really interesting.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_economics
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design
by ahf8Aithaex7Nai | 2026-01-14 06:24:09+00:00
> Again, they are not part of the capital class.

I vaguely remember reading something recently, probably by Branko Milanović, about how there is a class of workers in the tech sector who earn so much money that they are gradually starting to become capitalists. When you have so much money left over that you can start putting your capital to work for you, you cross that very line. I don't mean a home savings plan or ETFs or anything like that, but if you have seven figures and can skim off returns that you could live well on, then you're definitely no longer working class.
by array_key_first | 2026-01-14 06:24:50+00:00
I'm not a troll, we just disagree. Sports and games are mindless entertainment.

Yes, competition is important - but it doesn't produce anything. If I win a game, I haven't won anything other than the ability to say I've won the game. I didn't produce a good, I didn't cook food or blow glass.

Now, entertainment does create value around it. Taking attention can be used for advertising and admission. But the exact same thing is true of porn, and to the same if not greater extent.

I also don't buy the whole "discipline" angle. Yes, sports are hard and take practice. But you're making a morality argument. Just because something takes blood, sweat and tears doesn't mean it's good. Eating a couch takes discipline, too, just ask that one guy on My Strange Addiction.

The only reason, and I do mean only reason, we view porn as less valuable is because we think it's icky. That's it. But I don't particularly think that's a strong argument for anything.
by xracy | 2026-01-14 06:25:16+00:00
Bruh, what? Why in the world is Obama relevant? Why aren't you also condemning Harry S. Truman, while you're at it?

That's a wild non sequitur in the the middle of your false equivalency. If you can't see the problems right in front of your eyes, and are still complaining about Obama, then you're lost.
by NoLinkToMe | 2026-01-14 06:25:48+00:00
Is it priceless? I literally wouldn't pay more than $200 to have electricity for a day while the whole neighborhood doesn't. Anything more and I'd prefer to just keep the money in my pocket to be honest.

In my country I've never had to deal with more than 15 minutes, twice in my life. In other countries its sometimes been a day but really I just go on with my life.
Show HN: Cyber+ – A cybersecurity-focused programming language
by CzaxTanmay | 2026-01-14 06:26:19+00:00
Hi HN I’m the creator of Cyber+.

Cyber+ is an open-source programming language designed specifically for cybersecurity tasks like scanning, reconnaissance, and security automation. I built it because general-purpose languages felt too heavy and verbose for quick security workflows.

The project is still experimental, but it’s runnable and includes a basic interpreter and examples. I’d really appreciate feedback on:
- The language design and syntax
- Whether a security-focused DSL is useful in practice
- What features would matter most to you

Repo: https://github.com/TanmayCzax/Cyber-Programming-language-Alp...
by zerocrates | 2026-01-14 06:27:18+00:00
Yeah the flood of these Chrome UAs with every version number under the sun, and a really large portion being *.0.0.0 version numbers, that's what I've tended to experience lately. Also just kind of every browser user agent ever:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.2.12) Gecko/20101026 Firefox/3.6.12 (.NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.5.21022)

There were waves of big and sometimes intrusive traffic admitting to being from Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Meta, etc., but those are easy to block or throttle and aren't that big a deal in the scheme of things.
by rob74 | 2026-01-14 06:27:50+00:00
For my part, I hate anything explicitly labeled "disposable". As the author writes, you're supposed to recycle it, but how many people will do that if it has "disposable" written on it? Even worse, if it was truly disposable they could use a non-rechargeable battery, but because they have to keep up the pretense of it being reusable, they have to include a rechargeable battery with more dodgy chemistry that probably shouldn't end up in a landfill...
by lostlogin | 2026-01-14 06:27:58+00:00
> It stands to reason that microbes will eventually evolve the means to digest it and make use of this abundant, under-used energy source. In fact, some already have [1], but it's still early days.

That’s a hell of a way to kick the can down the road.

I don’t have sea views, but if I wait, sea views are coming.
by array_key_first | 2026-01-14 06:29:34+00:00
It's certainly a very profitable industry, I don't see why they wouldn't want it. Outside of "eww icky" type reasoning, which as I've said, I don't think is important or worth humoring.

Everyone thinks rome will fall because of promiscuity. I just don't buy that weak morals, whatever that may mean, has a negative effect on society. Ultimately, these people do not hurt anyone and they push a lot of money into the economy.

It's just mindless entertainment. And, on the topic of skills: skills mean nothing. Being skilled is not enough, you have to be skilled at the right things.

Think of it this way: the skill of putting a ball through a hoop is one that is, objectively, worthless. There's no situation in modern life, or frankly even prehistoric life, where that skill would help you or create value.

It has value because we say so. We say "people want to watch this". If you take away the people watching, then the skill is beyond worthless. Worth less than even talking. Now, parallel this to porn, and you will see it's the same situation.
by k310 | 2026-01-14 06:29:41+00:00
> The classic Pixelmator app offers more basic image editing tools, whereas Pixelmator Pro for iPad will be a fully-featured, professional image editing app.

> Pixelmator Pro for iPad features a new touch-optimized workspace, full Apple Pencil support for pressure-sensitive brushing, the ability to work between iPad and Mac, and all of the powerful editing tools from the Mac version of the app.

Apple now owns both Pixelmator and Photomator. I got version 3.0.3 of Photomator for mac before it went subscription model, and obviously don't "update" it.

As for "Creator Studio" the "free three" Pages, Numbers and Keynote, will remain free to use, with AI "assist" optional at extra charge. I am fine with image editors GIMP, RawTherapee, DarkTable and Diffraction (get it while it's still free) and the Nikon Studio, reverted version that doesn't require a damn login.

FWIW, my Nikons, old and new produce such excellent jpegs that I rarely go beyond the Preview app to get great photos. GIMP does a great job (most of the time) with cleanup. My neighbor doesn't know that I removed his TV antenna (virtually) for a fine scenic. RAW not needed so far!
by davorak | 2026-01-14 06:30:29+00:00
> https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v...

> https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/191/8/1420/6556183

> https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8627252/

or [x], [y], [z] for ease.

I read the abstract and conclusion of all three, none of them talk about natural immunity with no vaccination being the "winning path" like Scott Adams did. None of them talk about getting covid before getting vaccinated(maybe only optionally) as a better or safer path, not in the abstract or conclusions at least.
by ColinEberhardt | 2026-01-14 06:30:42+00:00
An important point here is that it isnt doing a 1-shot implementation, it is iteratively solving a problem over multiple iterations, with a closed feedback loop.

Create the right agentic feedback loop and a reasoning model can perform far better through iteration than its first 1-shot attempt.

This is very human. How much code can you reliable write without any feedback? Very little. We iterate, guided by feedback (compiler, linter, executing and exploring)
by teiferer | 2026-01-14 06:31:03+00:00
> You need to 2x+ the transportation cost of all products

As with all economics, it's not a one-way street. A change in conditions causes a change in behavior. Increased costs will cause a change in how products are designed, manufactured, used. If one-time use cost goes through the roof, suddenly all vapes will be multi-use. Plastic bottles will disappear in favor of dispensers and multi-use bottles. Not all of them, but most of.

It's about incentives in a dynamic system, not spot bans in an otherwise static world.
by __rito__ | 2026-01-14 06:31:31+00:00
I went through the comments, and one nice resource that's not on the list:

Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Computation by Umesh Vazirani (UC Berkeley course) - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL74Rel4IAsETUwZS_Se_P-fSE...

It's old, but really good.

Another nice one is:

Introduction to Classical and Quantum Computation by Wong - https://www.thomaswong.net/introduction-to-classical-and-qua... [PDF]

These are really nice.

My favorite QM book is the one by Eisberg, Resnick. I recommend it to other people.

There are some nice recommendations in this thread:

- Nielsen, Chuang

- quantum.country by Nielsen

- The IBM Qiskit ecosystem, community, platform, etc. are active and welcoming

Manning Publication has some books on the theme. It's worth it to search through them.
by deng | 2026-01-14 06:32:40+00:00
> Even if its just creative prompting, or perhaps custom trained models, someday someone will come along and make a genuine artistic viable piece of work using ai.

We've now had this technology for 2 years. Show me one, just ONE track that is purely(!) made by AI you find honestly exciting. Not "commercially successful", mind you, something you, a musician, personally think is actually great. You are referencing Aphex Twin there, and I'm old enough to remember when I first heard "Digeridoo", so, you know, something where you just go "Wow, that's a banger". If you're DJing: something you would actually put on in a club and the crowd would go wild.

Let's cut the crap: there is none. All GenAI is good for is generating stupid memes, shitposting, ads, and generic background music. There is ZERO creative value in purely generative AI. Yes, there are tools leveraging AI models which can help musicians create tracks - entirely different thing. This is also not what Bandcamp is banning here. Most people will freely admit that AI tooling can be used creatively, like what De Staat did with the "Running backwards into the future" music video - that's all fine, really nobody is disputing that fact, although that "look" is now well established and people are mostly bored and annoyed by it, but that's just how it goes.
by duxup | 2026-01-14 06:33:23+00:00
A while back here on HN and reddit I started noticing accounts in US / China threads with some amusingly similar or identical stories.

They would mention how at least while in China they could walk around without wearing their backpack backwards to protect themselves from thieves. It was almost like a musical refrain that would pop up in comments.

It's interesting how when we hear something about another country we assume it is incredibly pervasive / everywhere and how people of that country must be terribly preoccupied with with that problem at all times.
by geokon | 2026-01-14 06:33:41+00:00
I only have a limited experience with GUI Widgets - by using JavaFX through `cljfx`

- vui.el seems like the right idea - You have a widget library, and then you add state management, you add layout management etc. It's sort of a blessing widget is simple enough to be reused this way

- ECS and inheritance. I have personally never really hit on this limitation. It's there in the abstract.. but don't GUIs generally fit the OO paradigm pretty well? Looking at the class tree for JavaFX, I don't see any really awkward widgets that are ambiguously placed.

- State Management. This can be bolted on - like with vui.el. But to me this feels like something that should be independent of GUIs. Something like Pathom looks more appealing to me here

- "Not a full reactive framework - Emacs doesn't need that complexity" .. why not? Maybe the library internals are complex, but it makes user code much simpler, no?