MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by russss | 2026-01-08 14:36:06+00:00
Pretty much all electricity markets worldwide set the unit price based on the the cost of the "marginal" (most expensive) generator running during each time period. It's a weirdly common misconception that the UK is unique in doing this.

If you paid generators what they bid, then they're incentivised to manipulate their bids to try and make the most money, distorting the market.

Almost all the wind farms and many solar farms in the UK operate under the "contract for difference" system, where they're guaranteed a fixed price per unit and have to pay back any income above that. So a lot of the money paid is clawed back through that method.

The reason the UK's electricity has been expensive over the last few years comes down to:

- Shutdown of several nuclear plants without any replacement
- Shutdown of coal plants and replacement with gas
- The Ukraine war affecting gas prices
- Clean energy surcharges on bills (which hit electricity bills a lot harder than gas bills, regardless of how clean the electricity is...)

There will be a bunch more renewables coming online soon which will hopefully start crowding out gas and driving the price down more regularly, so hopefully prices will start dropping faster soon.
by burnt-resistor | 2026-01-08 14:36:15+00:00
People who have been stalked or are uncomfortable having their details published for the world to find need privacy.

Privacy mechanisms aren't just what applies to your or my perspectives, there are millions of other situations. For example, most counties in Texas identify the full legal name(s), phone number(s), and mailing address(es) of every single property owner and their tax payment amount and status. That'd get really weird, real quick for celebrities if there weren't any concealment mechanism.

Privacy isn't a binary or continuous thing, but is possible to varying degrees and requires navigating government and business processes carefully.
by DanexCodr | 2026-01-08 14:36:22+00:00
The Problem: Traditional arrays can't handle 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 elements. The memory doesn't exist.

The Solution: Coderive creates mathematical formulas instead of allocating arrays.

The Benchmark:

```java
arr := [0 to 1Qi] // 1 quintillion elements
start := timer()
for i in [0 to 1Qi] {
arr[i] = i % 2 == 0 ? "even" : "odd"
}
time := timer() - start // 0.898769 ms
```

How it works:

· No actual array allocation
· Creates formula: f(i) = (i % 2 == 0) ? "even" : "odd"
· Evaluates on demand: arr[24000] → "even" instantly

Random access works:

```java
arr[2] // "even"
arr[3] // "odd"
arr[24000] // "even"
```

More patterns:

· 2-statement optimization: 0.185ms
· Variable substitution: 0.087ms
· Range slicing: data[10 to 20], data[by 2 in 10 to 30]

Why it matters:

· Scientific computing with massive parameter spaces
· Exhaustive algorithm testing
· Pattern-based optimization beats traditional lazy evaluation

Not magic: Pattern detection + symbolic computation + lazy evaluation.

Repo: github.com/DanexCodr/Coderive

The insight: The most efficient way to handle infinite data is to not store it—just describe it mathematically.
by mhb | 2026-01-08 14:36:23+00:00
"Some years ago, Dourado and Russell pointed out a stunning fact about airport noise complaints: A very large number come from a single individual or household.

'In 2015, for example, 6,852 of the 8,760 complaints submitted to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport originated from one residence in the affluent Foxhall neighborhood of northwest Washington, DC. The residents of that particular house called Reagan National to express irritation about aircraft noise an average of almost 19 times per day during 2015.'

Since then, total complaint volumes have exploded—but they are still coming from a tiny number of now apparently more “productive” individuals. In 2024, for example, one individual alone submitted 20,089 complaints, accounting for 25% of all complaints! Indeed, the total number of complainants was only 188 but they complained 79,918 times (an average of 425 per individual or more than one per day.)"
by eszed | 2026-01-08 14:36:45+00:00
You can defer the decision without waffling on the communication. Saying "we'll decide this later" (ideally with some reasons / parameters), is decisive - and sometimes gets pushback. Going silent in order to avoid dissent is bad form.

Not to say this "technique" isn't useful, but imo it should be super limited. I'll put off a reply when a) it's a non-urgent issue, where b) resources (documentation, or other local users' experience) exist, c) this user will be motivated to find them (by the nature of the issue, or because I know they are the sort of person who does that), and d) independent problem-solving will fulfill a teaching function. Even then, I will hit "Snooze" on the email and follow up a day or two later: if they haven't solved it I'll point them to a resource; if they have I'll praise them for figuring it out for themselves. People like both outcomes.

I notice that many of the historical examples are a result of latency in communication, like people asking for things that had already been done. We don't often face that constraint.
by jrjeksjd8d | 2026-01-08 14:37:00+00:00
AI coding has massive factors that should make it the easiest to drive adoption and monetize.

The biggest is FOMO. So many orgs have a principle-agent problem where execs are buying AI for their whole org, regardless of value. This is easier revenue than nickle-and-diming individuals.

The second factor is the circular tech economy. Everyone knows everyone, everyone is buying from everyone, it's the same dollar changing hands back and forth.

Finally, AI coding should be able to produce concrete value. If an AI makes code that compiles and solves a problem it should have some value. By comparison, if your product is _writing_, AI writing is kind of bullshit.
by second_reef | 2026-01-08 14:37:14+00:00
I learned this the hard way..

What stuck out to me once I reflected on my failed startup, after I gave up emailing ppl who didn't care about what I built, is that it's actually hard to imagine that I put months into validating instead of building.

It just doesn't really come naturally to my mind. Yet, the fact is, clear as day, that I would have been perhaps better off actually putting 8 (or 10) hrs a day investigating demand.
by rvz | 2026-01-08 14:37:58+00:00
The warnings were right there, and it is really unsurprising. [0]

AI can never work without a dataset to train on and it will always need to read your email to make a decision.

This is why Google products have a massive privacy prompt before you start using Gemini.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45968411
by toyg | 2026-01-08 14:37:59+00:00
I'm a big believer in this. I called it "let them marinate". It works particularly well in the modern world of IMs, where a lot of people see a problem and go "oh, X will know why this is happening, let's ask him!" without even trying to get their brain-gears moving. After a while, you learn who you should ignore and for how long, and it reduces the incentive for the worst time-wasters to come to you. I used to worry that they'd find me less useful and hence stop liking me, but that doesn't really happen.
Ask HN: Why has "using" gone out of fashion?
by bf9d413906 | 2026-01-08 14:38:08+00:00
I encounter the words "utilise"/"utilising"/"utilize"/"utilizing" so often these days, that I wonder how come it has become so much more popular than simply saying "use"/"using". And I cannot recall it being so common 10 years ago.

As a non-native speaker, I am a bit baffled by this. What explains this evolution ?
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-08 14:38:21+00:00
> imply that normal API token publishing is somehow not authenticated

Fair enough, although the same reasoning would imply that API token publishing isn't trusted ... well after the recent npm attacks I suppose it might not be at that.

> With what key?

> And there is a signature involved,

So there's already a key involved. I realize its lifetime might not be suitable but presumably the pipeline itself either already possesses or could generate a long lived key to be registered with the central service.

> but it only verifies the identity of the pipeline,

I thought verifying the identity of the pipeline was the entire point? The pipeline singing a fingerprint of the package would enable anyone to verify the provenance of the complete contents (either they'd need a way to look up the key or you could do TOFU but I digress). There's value in being able to verify the integrity of the artifacts in your local cache.

Also, the more independent layers of authentication there are the fewer options an attacker will have. A hypothetical artifact that carried signatures from the developer, the pipeline, and the registry would have a very clear chain of custody.

> it being hard to directly sign arbitrary inputs with just OIDC in a meaningful way

At the end of the day you just need to somehow end up in a situation where the pipeline holds a key that has been authenticated by the package registry. From that point on I'd think that the particular signature scheme would become a trivial implementation detail; you stuff the output into some json or something similar and get on with life.

Has some key complexity gone over my head here?

BTW please don't take this the wrong way. It's not my intent to imply that I know better. As long as the process works it isn't my intent to critique it. I was just honestly surprised to learn that the package content itself isn't signed by the pipeline to prove provenance for downstream consumers and from there I'm just responding to the reasoning you gave. But if the current process does what it set out to do then I've no grounds to object.
by randlet | 2026-01-08 14:38:41+00:00
In your first link the narrator says he "doesn’t understand the physics of it" but there's really no physics involved (ignoring scatter). It’s just a consequence of the math. It’s relatively easy to understand if you think of it in terms of the surface of a sphere. There is a fixed amount of light coming from a point source, and as the light travels outward you can think of it as being spread over the surface of a sphere. Since the surface area of a sphere is 4pir^2, if you double the radius the area quadruples, and therefore the light intensity at any point on the sphere drops by a factor of four.

edit: And now after rtfm I see there's a nice demo of this!
by IAmBroom | 2026-01-08 14:38:47+00:00
> I knew somebody who would talk about mindfulness just before he walked into an open pit.

Ironically (or not), there is a Buddhist story about this...

A monk comes to see his master, and announces that he had achieved perfect mindfulness.

The master said, "That is wonderful! And, when you came in, how many umbrellas were by the door?"

The monk realized he had not achieved perfect mindfulness.
Show HN: Nucleus - AI prompt framework
by dulakian | 2026-01-08 14:39:08+00:00
Nucleus is an experimental mathematical prompting framework for AI. It's a 3 line prompt that makes practically any text generation AI better. It is math equations as operational behavior principles. It works on most models that are big enough, including local models. I tested on all the biggest models like chatgpt, anthropic, google, and local models like glm-45-air and qwen3-vl.
by scottlamb | 2026-01-08 14:39:18+00:00
> When Jeff Dean goes on vacation, production services across Google mysteriously stop working within a few days. This is actually true. ... It's not clear whether this fact is really true, or whether this line is simply part of the joke, so I've omitted the usual (TRUE) identifier here. Interpret this as you see fit :)

I think this one's true-ish. Back in the day when Google didn't have good cron services for the corp and production domains [1], Jeff Dean's workstation ran a job that made something called (iirc) the "protocol buffer debug database". Basically, a big file (probably an sstable) with compiled .proto introspection data for a huge number of checked-in protobufs. You could use it to produce human-readable debug output from what was otherwise a fairly indecipherable blob. I don't think it was ever intended for production use, but some things that shouldn't have ended up using it. I think after Jeff had been on vacation for a while, his `prodaccess` credentials expired, the job stopped working, maybe the output became unavailable, and some things broke.

Here's a related story I know is true: when I was running Google Reader, I got paged frequently for Bigtable replication delay, and I eventually traced it to trouble accessing files that shared GFS chunkservers with this database. I mentioned it on some mailing list, and almost immediately afterward Jeff Dean CCed me on a code review changing the file's replication from r=3 to r=12. The problem went away.

[1] this lasted longer than you would expect
by jonhohle | 2026-01-08 14:39:39+00:00
Not only that, but NTSC and VGA (and higher) CRTs. I had a 1600x1200 CRT on my desk in 1999. HD CRTs existed, but were basically always out of reach for most people. PVMs fo broadcast and medical were different still.

Now LCDs are used at effectively every scale - tiny embedded systems, watches, phones, tablets, laptop displays, monitors, TVs, projectors, and even billboards. CRTs can’t scale like that.
by Workaccount2 | 2026-01-08 14:39:49+00:00
People get used to a model and then work best with that model.

If you hand an iPhone user an Android phone, they will complain that Android is awful and useless. The same is true vice versa.

This is in large part why we get so many conflicting reports of model behavior. As you become more and more familiar with a model, especially if it is in fact a good model, other good models will feel janky and broken.
by geocrasher | 2026-01-08 14:39:51+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/27_Club

The 27 Club is an informal list consisting mostly of popular musicians who died at age 27. Although the claim of a "statistical spike" for the death of musicians at that age has been refuted by scientific research, it remains a common cultural conception that the phenomenon exists, with many celebrities who die at 27 noted for their high-risk lifestyles.
by vazkus | 2026-01-08 14:40:08+00:00
One piece of advice I got from my manager early in my career that really stuck with me is this:

- It’s okay not to respond to emails/messages/requests immediately.

- But if you know a response will take time, acknowledge the message and say so.

It’s simple: the sender gets a clear signal that their message was received and isn’t left wondering whether it got lost, accidentally deleted or ignored.

This doesn’t actually contradict the Napoleon technique... if anything, it softens the “he's ignoring me” factor while still protecting my time and attention.
by red-iron-pine | 2026-01-08 14:40:14+00:00
> italian port cities suddenly benefiting from a sudden influx of highly educated people bugging out from Constantinople; more a translation than a reappearance.

in particular the big trade cities like Venezia had been pulling out anything and everything as the ottomans closed in; had been going on for a while before Constantinople fell.

but broadly speaking, yeah the collapse of the Byzantines and their stores of classical history is what drove the rediscovery and later the Renaissance
by mothballed | 2026-01-08 14:40:16+00:00
Pennsylvania v Mimms absolutely did determine LEO need justification. It can only be done for officer safety or to perform an arrest, it's not just free license to ask anyone who is to be cited to get out of their car. This is even mentioned in the case; it was the "bulge" in the jacket that might be a gun that authorized the police to ask them to exit his vehicle.

If a policeman asks you to get out of your car without justification you can bet they're the sort that are more likely to not be disciplined with their use of force either. Police are always quick to cite this case but generally they're ignorant of what it says, they just mindlessly say "pennsylvania v Mimms" everytime they want to be a dick to someone by inconveniencing them or to incite an arrest of someone they think won't want to leave their car. Look up "Civil Rights Lawyer" online and he even uses PA v Mimms against one officer ordering someone out in a case because their order was unlawful.
Show HN: Agent Workflow Language – Open-Source Scala DSL for LLM Orchestration
by Dezmo | 2026-01-08 14:41:09+00:00
GitHub: https://github.com/awfl-us

AWFL is an open source suite for building and orchestrating LLM-driven agents. It includes:

- A simple Scala DSL for composing workflows that compile to Google Workflows
- Node services providing context, tools, and task orchestration for agents
- A customizable web UI for managing projects, sessions, and agents
- A CLI tool for granting agents local file access (pipx install awfl)

Why: AWFL is meant to be a transparent, locally runnable foundation for anyone building multi-agent or workflow-based AI systems.

Examples / POC:
https://github.com/cornerstone-ai
https://www.cornerstoneai.org/
by adornKey | 2026-01-08 14:41:48+00:00
When making a typo one guy I knew deleted the whole word with backspace and typed it new from the beginning. Anything else to correct the error he called cheating.

That was a long time ago - and he was still young. But not so long ago I asked some keyboard manufacturer (Ducky?!) to add more macro features for productivity - and I got the answer that it would be cheating to play back macros faster than normal writing speed - Recording macros on a keyboard and playing it back faster than recorded was impossible by design because they don't want to support cheaters.

Oh those coders... I wonder how much code on Github is invalid because of cheating...
by TZubiri | 2026-01-08 14:41:55+00:00
Legally speaking, why should the rules for important services be different than unimportant services. The price paid for the services is proportional to its value, if there are no consequences for a bug in your code, it was worth less and you should have paid less for it, the refund would be commesurate.

It's worth noting that you framed the discussion in terms of refunds, so any extra human life uncalculable value isn't really within the scope of a refund, you'd have a malpractice case which is entirely different from a breach of contract. This is just about the fees paid for the service.
by elektronika | 2026-01-08 14:42:07+00:00
>China did "over" solve it by building loads of houses, so everyone's house value just crippled down like crazy.

That's not really a bad thing unless you believe real estate should be a vehicle for investment. However, in T1 and T2 cities asset prices are roughly on par with western major metro areas. However, property management fees tend to be lower. I suspect the Hukou system contributes significantly to keep housing affordable, and it's not just the massive supply.
by agwa | 2026-01-08 14:42:16+00:00
> The Go module proxy doesn't make any guarantee that it will permanently store the checksum for any given module

Incorrect. Checksums are stored forever, in a Merkle Tree, meaning if the proxy were to ever delete a checksum, it would be detected (and yes, people like me are checking - https://sourcespotter.com/sumdb).

Like any code host, the proxy does not guarantee that the code for a module will be available forever, since code may have to be removed for legal reasons.

But you absolutely can rely on the checksum being preserved and thus you can be sure you'll never be given different code for a particular version.
by tedggh | 2026-01-08 14:42:16+00:00
People are so wanting to believe there was an advanced cyber attack to Venezuela’s grid and ISPs that they forget this is a country that hasn’t updated its infrastructure in more than two decades while also not providing any significant maintenance. Most of the “new” technology deployed at the state and federal level comes from corrupt foreign and domestic “suitcase” companies that charged a lot of money to deliver poorly designed systems often even lacking the as-sold equipment. So Venezuela isn’t precisely the most formidable adversary when it comes to cybersecurity.
by bhouston | 2026-01-08 14:42:18+00:00
You are correct! I hadn't checked since I had an M1 MacBook, back then it was 6K (https://juicedsystems.com/en-ca/blogs/news/macbook-m1-and-m2...), but it appears that since the M2 (according to the same website), the upper limit is now 8K.
by rickydroll | 2026-01-08 14:42:19+00:00
<pedantic>Voice recognition identifies who you are, speech recognition identifies what you say. </pedantic>

Example:

Voice recognition: arrrrrrgh! (Oh, I know that guy. He always gets irritated when someone uses terms speech and voice recognition wrong)

Speech Recognition: "Why can't you guys keep it straight? It is as simple as knowing the difference between hypothesis and theory."
by chii | 2026-01-08 14:42:19+00:00
> Things get exponentially cheaper as you make more of them.

not all things.

Things that can scale are things that have a non-linear scaling production output vs input. For the LCDs (and semi-conductors), the area of the output is squared, if you increased the size of the production by a linear amount (let's say, the glass width). But the work required is not quadrupled!

Things that are linear in scaling - e.g., a burger cooked, does not scale the same way (at least, not for a McDonalds burger) - it's a one to-one, even if you tried to make it scale up by having more cooks/more machines etc. Cars, to a similar degree, but the fixed cost of a car factory/assembly line vastly out weight the lack of scaling i suppose, and so cars did get cheaper but not from the scaling manufacturing, but from cheaper components, and more automated steps etc.
by alistairSH | 2026-01-08 14:42:32+00:00
Need to think about this some...
Would this end up being another way for MegaCorp to extract wealth from the rest of us (similar to student loans)? All new housing ends up rentals, and a generation+ of Americans are unable to use homes for storing/building wealth?

We know using housing as an investment, at an individual level, is problematic (NIMBYism and failure to infill/redevelop/etc). Not sure how incentivizing MegaCorp to do the same on a massive scale fixes anything?