MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cogman10 | 2026-01-05 11:01:17+00:00
Complexity is a big part of it along with a lot of required materials.

It takes either a lot of heavy weight or a very long decent regardless the storage system in order to store a significant amount of energy. Further, you need some very beefy generators/motors to work with that weight along with some complex equipment to ultimately convert the AC output into what the grid expects.

Look at the proposed (not built system)

https://aresnorthamerica.com/las-vegas-business-press-deal-w...

It requires 20 acres, a mining pit, 30 employees. And how much energy does it store? 12.5 MWh (15 minutes of runtime, 50MW of output). And do notice the date, 2020. From what I can find, this thing hasn't even started operating yet.

That's a VERY expensive battery which hasn't even been built yet.

All of these very special requirements for such a low storage amount is why these things are grifts.

The comparison is my electric company, which is going to install 200MWh of batteries on 10 acres of available land (it's right next to one of their big substations). It'll take them 6 months to do and the main hurdle they had was getting city approval to start work.

The reason pumped hydro is about the only appealing form of a gravity battery is because you can store just massive amounts of water conveniently which gives those systems pretty nice storage levels. Further, the equipment is near the same of any hydro dam. But even those suffer from very specific geography needs before they can get off the ground and massive amounts of hurdles with local regulations in order to even start work. There is, no joke, a proposed pumped hydro system that I know about which has been in the planning stage for the last 20 years as they've been going back and forth with the local county and community.

That's why it's a grift. The competition is chemical battery storage which has stupidly high energy density and almost instant deployment. Any gravity system that is going to be competitive needs both those things before it'd actually be a contender. I've yet to see any of these systems actually get built beyond just tiny prototypes.
by kathir05 | 2026-01-05 11:01:23+00:00
Apologies for poor formatting

Links

https://huntyourtribe.com/

https://blog.huntyourtribe.com/our-journey-so-far/

https://x.com/ramitkoul/status/2003060909862953084

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbUe8PoEDB4
by nialse | 2026-01-05 11:02:54+00:00
Note: At the point of writing this, the comments are largely skeptical.

Reading this as an avid Codex CLI user, some things make sense and reflect lessons learned along the way. However, the patterns also get stale fast as agents improve and may be counterproductive. One such pattern is context anxiety, which probably reflects a particular model more than a general problem, and is likely an issue that will go away over time.

There are certainly patterns that need to be learned, and relearned over time. Learning the patterns is sort of an anti-pattern, since it is the model that should be trained to alleviate its shortcomings rather than the human. Then again, a successful mindset over the last three years has been to treat models as another form of intelligence, not as human intelligence, by getting to know them and being mindful of their strengths and weaknesses. This is quite a demanding task in terms of communication, reflection, and perspective-taking, and it is understandable that this knowledge is being documented.

But models change over time. The strengths and weaknesses of yesterday’s models are not the same as today’s, and reasoning models have actually removed some capabilities. A simple example is giving a reasoning model with tools the task of inspecting logs. It will most likely grep and parse out smaller sections, and may also refuse an instruction to load the file into context to inspect it. The model then relies on its reasoning (system 2) rather than its intuitive (system 1) thinking.

This means that many of these patterns are temporary, and optimizing for them risks locking human behavior to quirks that may disappear or even reverse as models evolve. YMMV.
by sylware | 2026-01-05 11:03:13+00:00
What to keep an eye on is noscript/basic (x)html interoperability, namely a web site, not a web app.

With a web site and not a web app, you are not dependent on the whatng cartel web engines, in other words, the door is kept opened for small and alternative _real life_ noscript/basic (x)html web engines/browsers (with CSS renderer or not).

Ofc, you can have a web app and a web site side by side, usually the web app is built upon the web site.

In the end, if we are all honnest with ourself, 99% of the time spent on an online service is keeping it available and safe, 1% will be its actual development.
by ChiNutri20 | 2026-01-05 11:04:06+00:00
What makes Morten Høi Jensen’s study so timely is how it highlights Mann’s own transformation. The Magic Mountain isn't just a 'modernist summit'; it’s a record of a man watching his world slide into the abyss of authoritarianism. Seeing the clash between Settembrini’s humanism and Naphta’s radicalism feels less like 1924 and more like a mirror to our current 2026 political climate. It reminds us that intellectual debates aren't just academic they are the symptoms of a society's terminal irrationality
by barnabee | 2026-01-05 11:05:08+00:00
I fairly often go out with just my Garmin watch and an ereader (Boox 6”, which is just about pocketable).

I can sync music to it and use it for contactless payments, which is just about enough.

It’s possible to do a bit more but it’s more basic than an Apple Watch as a smartphone alternative (but much better for everything I want it for), and as I mostly use it for sports tracking and being phoneless, I haven’t set any other apps up.
by jillesvangurp | 2026-01-05 11:05:19+00:00
If you travel solo, going to cafe's, bars, and especially restaurants can be a bit awkward. But also enjoyable. Mostly, it's just a mental block that people need to get over.

Some venues are really just not designed for solo travelers. You have all these couples and social groups having fun with each other and then the tables they give to social travelers don't tend to be the nicest.

This is annoying if you are hungry and not looking to get another fast food meal. But fast food restaurants are of course perfect for solo travelers otherwise. And there are lots of restaurant types that serve decent food in a bit informal setting where eating by yourself is not that weird. Other good options include hotel restaurants. Because hotels tend to have lots of solo travelers. The bigger the city, the easier it is to find nice places to eat by yourself generally.

Cafes are easier. Lots of people go there to have a coffee by themselves, work, read, or whatever. It's normal. The venue might not like the sub optimal use of tables though. But if it's not too busy and you tip well, they typically don't mind people staying for a few hours and perhaps reading or working on a laptop. I do this a lot.

I don't drink alcohol anymore and getting drunk by yourself in a bar can be a bit weird. Though depending on the bar, it's perfectly normal to have a drink by yourself of course. These days I tend to like to sit down after a day of sight seeing to have a few cold alcohol free beers. Lots of places where this is perfectly normal.

I've been traveling solo for a few decades. I can be quite social but I'm also fine not talking to people for days/weeks when traveling. It's not for everyone. I tend to prefer booking apartments and self catering these days. Going to restaurants for dinner is expensive and not really worth it to me by myself. But I'll have coffees, light lunches, and other beverages.
by fuzzy2 | 2026-01-05 11:05:25+00:00
Doing it like this (or preferably with a custom exception) translates the technical problem into a domain problem. Without doing this, callers can't properly handle it. FormatException or OverflowException could be thrown at multiple locations, not just in parsing the user ID. This here is an InvalidUserIdException. It could be derived from ArgumentException, but IMHO InvalidOperationException is not appropriate.
by Yizahi | 2026-01-05 11:05:45+00:00
We have LLM memory, it's a training data from which the model was initially programmed. To allow adding or changing LLM memory, we would need to retrain model completely or partially. And that is not realistic any time soon. All other attempts at LLM memory would be just an obscure hack of splitting context window into parts and feeding input from different files. Literally nothing would change if you input half of the query from one file, half from another called "memory.txt" or if you just input whole query from a single file twice as big.
by einpoklum | 2026-01-05 11:05:58+00:00
If - to take a convenient example - I use a library sorting function instead of writing my own sorting code, it's true that I haven't removed the complexity of the work my program is doing: It sorts. But I have arguably reduced the complexity of my code.

Similarly, if I factor out some well-named function instead of repeating the same sequence actions in multiple places - the work to be done is just as complex, and I haven't even removed the complexity from my code, but - I have traded the complexity of N different pieces of code for 1 such piece plus N function calls. Granted, that tradeoff isn't always the right thing to do, but one could still claim that, often, that _does_ reduce the complexity of the code.
by rswail | 2026-01-05 11:06:07+00:00
Everyone with excess disposable income can be a shareholder in a publicly traded company.

The oligarchy of the CxOs and boards and cross-pollination has led to concentration of the rewards of companies into the their hands, compared to 40 years ago.

All the productivity gains have not gone to labor, its predominately gone to equity and then extracted via options and buy backs to avoid tax which means public service and investment has gone down.

The craziness of the USG borrowing to fund tax cuts is the ultimate example.
by MathMonkeyMan | 2026-01-05 11:08:02+00:00
MacOS and Windows, as far as I understand, do the equivalent of "build for the target OS/arch and include DLLs for all transitive dependencies except the system ones." MacOS puts all that in a disk image while Windows I don't know puts it in one or several directories.

I like the "one consistent system with one dependency tree" policy of Debian et al, but with flatpack, appimage, snap, etc. the "application" part of software might prefer the Windows/MacOS model.
by rswail | 2026-01-05 11:10:59+00:00
Everyone in the team should have that.

Obviously at different levels of focus and completeness, but the Product Manager is supposed to be communicating in both directions and they rarely do, they just take the feature list and tick them off.

Telling the customer that they can't have something or it needs to be different and having their trust that you aren't doing it just to cut corners is what good Product Managers do.
by Tharre | 2026-01-05 11:11:18+00:00
The TPM itself can actually be discrete, as long as you have a root-of-trust inside the CPU with a unique secret. Derive a secret from the unique secret and the hash of the initial bootcode the CPU is running like HMAC(UDS, hash(program)) and derive a public/private key pair from that. Now you can just do normal Diffie-Hellman to negotiate encryption keys with the TPM and you're safe from any future interposers.

This matters because for some functionality you really want tamper-resistant persistent storage, for example "delete the disk encryption keys if I enter the wrong password 10 times". Fairly easy to do on a TPM that can be made on a process node that supports flash vs a general CPU where that just isn't an option.
by aebtebeten | 2026-01-05 11:11:50+00:00
<anger>

Maybe it looks to you as if those who voted for Trump believed they were acting _against_ authoritarians, but I've lived among them.

I was still living in their midst when they tarred and feathered the Dixie Chicks (as they were then) for having the audacity to say GWB's Iraq Adventure might not be the most wonderful thing since sliced mayonnaise. (could we say they "cancelled" the Chicks?)

Then they claimed to be voting for DJT (a public figure whose bully bona fides go back at least 4 decades, eg https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6131533-trumpdeathpe... ) on an "isolationist" platform.

But now they're cheering Operation Southern Spear as if it were a homecoming game, as they did for GHB's Iraq. My local paper even had https://x.com/KatieMiller/status/2007541679293944266 (sorry for the X link) in it this morning.

They may say they're voting on a mind-your-own-business-principle, but whenever you look at what they do, they've consistently been voting on a leader-principle.

</anger>

Q. How do you describe a principled authoritarian follower?

A. "The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind"

Inner Party Pigs
Outer Party Dogs
Proles the Equal animals
by al_borland | 2026-01-05 11:12:14+00:00
If Microsoft won’t eat their own dogfood, why should they expect anyone else to?

This is why no one jumps onboard with new stuff Microsoft wants to push. They don’t stick to anything. A dev can constantly chase after Microsoft’s latest pet projects, or they can simply ignore all of it, knowing it will eventually fall out of fashion and save themselves (and their users) a lot of trouble.
by ofTimothy | 2026-01-05 11:12:31+00:00
You don't need multiple SIM cards; you can just create new Google accounts. I have my main google account set as the child of a different account and it works great. But the set up was somewhat annoying, took me a couple hours.

I've been postponing writing a guide on how to set this up for a while, but I think I'm motivated to do it now, I'll try to have something up by the 8th here https://tim2othy.github.io/ws/screen-time/, maybe useful for you.
by utf_8x | 2026-01-05 11:14:13+00:00
Considering the relatively limited context window even on the latest models, the output would likely be incoherent mess. Sure, you could make the LLM go through the code in easily digestible chunks (file by file) but to get any groundbreaking optimization, it would need to have the context of the entire project to properly understand the architecture. (IMO that is, I'm not an expert)
by lerno | 2026-01-05 11:15:19+00:00
They have different wins. I think labelled break/continue help because they are clearer in locally expressing what the point is. If you see `goto NEXT;` you can kind of guess the intention, but `continue OUTER;` doesn't require you to read the code at the label and check what's happening there. `defer catch` and `defer try` helps avoiding some booleans otherwise needed with just a basic defer. `defer` on its own otherwise sometimes needs booleans to track what should be closed. With goto those naturally go to different cleanup sections.

I keep revisiting goto though. I like it a lot for its simplicity.
by beAbU | 2026-01-05 11:15:36+00:00
Many years ago I subscribed to his blog/newsletter thinking it was going to be full of great gems, like the comic strip. I was very surprised to learn that not to be the case, as every other article was some sort of unhinged ramble about race, class, culture or religion.

I enjoy his cartoon, I still do in fact. But I don't think I'll enjoy the company of the creator himself.

Having said that, an untimely death is deserved by nobody and I hope he can remain comfortable and pain free till the end.
by kaelwd | 2026-01-05 11:15:43+00:00
From discord:

> There has been a ton of interest expressed this week about potential community maintenance of Gel moving forward. To help organize and channel these hopes, I'm putting out a call for volunteers to join a Gel Community Fork Working Group (...GCFWG??). We are looking for 3-5 enthusiastic, trustworthy, and competent engineers to form a working group to create a "blessed" community-maintained fork of Gel. I would be available as an advisor to the WG, on a limited basis, in the beginning.

> The goal would be to produce a fork with its own build and distribution infrastructure and a credible commitment to maintainership. If successful, we will link to the project from the old Gel repos before archiving them, and potentially make the final CLI release support upgrading to the community fork.

> Applications accepted here: https://forms.gle/GcooC6ZDTjNRen939

> I'll be reaching out to people about applications in January.
by pfdietz | 2026-01-05 11:16:08+00:00
Deer can eat grass, but it's not their preferred food, and they can't thrive on it. They eat forbs, shoots, browse (twigs, buds, etc.) and mast like acorns (they are set up to deal with the large amounts of tannin in acorns).

https://www.msudeer.msstate.edu/deer-diet.php

"Although low quality forages such as mature grasses provide adequate nutrition to animals such as elk and cattle, the quicker digestive process of whitetails requires more readily digestible forages to fulfill their energy and protein requirements. On severely overpopulated and depleted ranges, white-tailed deer have starved to death with their stomachs full of low quality forages."
by iso1631 | 2026-01-05 11:16:16+00:00
VPNs as a technology, gre/ipsec and wireguard. I assume others.

VPNs as a youtube sold service. Mullvad/mozillavpn for one

I get an IP of fc00:bbbb:bbbb:bb01::1 and it uses NAT66 to place me in New York despite being in the UK

1.|-- fc00:bbbb:bbbb:bb01::1 0.0% 10 78.6 80.2 78.6 82.0 1.2
2.|-- 2607:9000:a000:34::1 0.0% 10 80.1 80.3 79.3 81.2 0.7
3.|-- ??? 100.0 10 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
4.|-- 2607:f740:70:101::1 0.0% 10 82.2 83.9 79.8 104.3 7.2
5.|-- 2001:550:2:d::4a:1 90.0% 10 80.1 80.1 80.1 80.1 0.0
6.|-- be3448.agr22.jfk02.atlas.cogentco.com (2001:550:0:1000::9a36:1a9) 60.0% 10 80.4 81.0 79.2 82.9 1.5

and on
by reactordev | 2026-01-05 11:16:41+00:00
Everything you just said was irrelevant and followed by a personal attack.

>”Because it doesn’t sound like you had?” was unnecessary and you have no idea who I am.

I was merely stating that most distros have those headers, most distros care about being up to date with stable releases. Yes KDE releases software on Mac and windows, that has nothing to do with vcpkg. If anything, it’s more work.

I’m sick of the “mansplaining” in these comments like I was born yesterday. I wasn’t, and I know how to write C.
by imtringued | 2026-01-05 11:16:49+00:00
I know this is a master thesis but I'm kind of disappointed by this. The AMD AI Engine is a GEMM and Flash Attention workhorse. Those are the primary workloads and the non-sparse versions of those workloads map 1:1 to the AI Engine. We don't see that in this master thesis.

Like, I'm sitting here on the sidelines and thinking that someone is going to do implement this stuff before I even get a chance, which is why I never mention the blatantly obvious communication pattern that is breathing down your neck that the AI Engines are begging you to implement. Doing Flash Attention is slightly more difficult, but not meaningfully so.

If you are using broadcasting to spread your A and B matrices, you're doing it wrong. You can do the thing that others do inside their processor "outside". Once you understand that, you will start to realize that this is actually the best possible architecture for dense GEMM and dense FlashAttention.
by LordGrey | 2026-01-05 11:17:07+00:00
You can see this in action today, if you make the effort to manually remove yourself from data brokers.

Some of the brokers do offer an easy removal process and will handle your request right away, but then your record will reappear after some amount of time, obviously purchased from another broker.

I would not be surprised to discover that these individual brokers are, in fact, owned by the same entity and they merely exchange records periodically.

This is the reason that I choose to use Optery. They have the bandwidth and tools to chase my records on my behalf, for as long as I pay them.
by loxs | 2026-01-05 11:17:44+00:00
As I said, my app is write heavy. So there are several separate processes that constantly write to the database, but of course, often, before writing, they need to read in order to decide what/where to write. Currently they need to have their own read cache in order to not clog the database.

The "web service" is only the user facing part which bears the least load. Read caching is useful there too as users look at statistics, so calculating them once every 5-10 minutes and caching them is needed, as that requires scanning the whole database.

A CDN is something I don't even have. It's not needed for the amount of users I have.

If I was using Postgres, these writer processes + the web service would share the same read cache for free (coming from Posgres itself). The difference wouldn't be huge if I would migrate right now, but now I already have the custom caching.
by Mashimo | 2026-01-05 11:17:56+00:00
> Seriously who needs a Store App on a desktop OS?

I like the idea. A single place to search for common apps, that also keep them updated. I don't want to download the .exe again and again with ever update. Just do that in the background please.

Though I mostly use WinGet, but it's sadly not as user friendly as apt.
Ask HN: How are you developing and testing agents without burning tokens?
by zlatkov | 2026-01-05 11:18:16+00:00
Every agent run (and especially when running tests in CI/CD) adds token cost, nondeterminism, and slows iteration.

I’m not talking about LLM evals here. I mean integration-style testing.

There are some workarounds like VCR-style record/replay (e.g., Python's VCR “cassettes”) and similar ideas for capturing LLM calls. They can work for certain frameworks when your test/runtime is the one making the HTTP requests.

Using local LLMs to save costs adds significant delay for each execution (+ doesn't solve nondeterminism).

However, it becomes significantly more challenging for MCP-style flows, where the interaction can be IDE-driven (stdio/JSON-RPC) and the HTTP calls may not even originate from your code.

I'm curious what people are using.
by thaumasiotes | 2026-01-05 11:18:36+00:00
This NYT article opens with a video showing the web and some explanatory text.

The archive.today copy doesn't play the video. The thumbnail image is present. The <video> tag is present on the archived page, but its src attribute has been renamed to "old-src". Re-renaming the old-src attribute back to "src" will cause the video to play, but at that point you're playing the original non-archived video directly from nyt.com. This will presumably break if NYT takes the video down.

Does archive.today not archive videos?