MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by uecker | 2026-01-18 07:19:34+00:00
All you are discussing the wrong points. All your conclusions rest on the assumption that nuclear is the more cost effective solution, but this is not true (and we could discuss this). You did not notice the price drop in renewables? Germany still pays subsidies (technically there are not subsidies though) but those are far less than initially. The cost drop caused a huge amount of investments world-wide in renewables far ahead of investments in nuclear. The reality is that nuclear needs more government support than renewables. The EDF in France was renationalized because operating it as a profit-driven company wasn't exactly a success story (especially since the electricity price is kept artificially low in France and does not all EDF to make the profits to make necessary investments)

Since nuclear is more costly, that all your arguments about the economic issues turn around and go into the other direction.
by vivzkestrel | 2026-01-18 07:20:10+00:00
- for those of you that dont want to install this locally, run this inside docker

*`Dockerfile`*

```
FROM python:3.12.10-slim-bookworm

RUN apt-get update -q -y && apt-get install -q -y \
build-essential \
git \
python3-dev \
&& rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*

RUN groupadd --gid 10000 python \
&& useradd --uid 10000 --gid python --shell /bin/bash --create-home python

WORKDIR /home/python/app

RUN git clone https://github.com/originalankur/maptoposter.git

RUN chown -R python:python ./maptoposter

# 5. Switch to non-root user
USER python

RUN pip install --no-cache-dir --upgrade pip && \
cd ./maptoposter && \
pip install --no-cache-dir -r requirements.txt

CMD ["sleep", "infinity"]

```

*`main.sh`*

```
#!/usr/bin/env bash

# https://github.com/originalankur/maptoposter
# Read the documentation to change themes and settings for each city

# Get the directory where THIS script is located
SCRIPT_DIR=$(cd -- "$(dirname -- "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}")" &> /dev/null && pwd)
cd "$SCRIPT_DIR" || exit 1

# TODO: kolkata is done already, change to some other city both here and on that notepad.pw link in Chrome
readonly CITY="kolkata"
readonly COUNTRY="india"

readonly CONTAINER_NAME="map_to_poster"

if ! docker buildx build \
--file "Dockerfile" \
--progress none \
--tag "${CONTAINER_NAME}" \
--quiet .; then
printf "Error: %s" "while attempting to build the docker container:${CONTAINER_NAME}"
exit 1
fi

if ! docker container run \
--detach \
--interactive \
--name "${CONTAINER_NAME}" \
--tty \
"${CONTAINER_NAME}"; then
printf "Error: %s" "while attempting to run the docker container:${CONTAINER_NAME}"
exit 1
fi

container_id=$(docker ps -aqf "name=${CONTAINER_NAME}")

if [ -z "$container_id" ]; then
echo "Container not found!"
else
echo "The ID for ${CONTAINER_NAME} is: $container_id"
fi

docker exec -i "${CONTAINER_NAME}" /bin/bash << EOF
cd /home/python/app/maptoposter
python create_map_poster.py --city "${CITY}" --country "${COUNTRY}"
EOF

mkdir -p "${HOME}/map_to_poster"

if ! docker cp "${container_id}":/home/python/app/maptoposter/posters "${HOME}/map_to_poster"; then
printf "Error: %s" "while attempting to copy map files from container:${CONTAINER_NAME}"
fi

if ! docker stop "${CONTAINER_NAME}"; then
printf "Error: %s" "stopping container:${CONTAINER_NAME}"
fi

if ! docker rm "${CONTAINER_NAME}"; then
printf "Error: %s" "removing container:${CONTAINER_NAME}"
fi

```
by grayhatter | 2026-01-18 07:22:00+00:00
I believe LLM, (specifically code gen) has produced nothing of substance. I'm looking for evidence to disprove that assumption. You're welcome to share nothing, but when you brag about how it's fantastical, it's reasonable to ask. And then no one can never prove it... I can only hear that as; I could if I want to, I just don't want to.

If you don't want field questions about it, don't brag about it?

Equally, to your condemnation: the problem with AI enjoyers is they claim it's nearly perfect, and it can do everything, and it makes them so much faster. But every example is barely more than boilerplate, or it's a sham.
by pugdogdev | 2026-01-18 07:23:07+00:00
I explore writing ideas using various LLM tools,
This helps me build the text structure and gather ideas and information in one place.
I review everything, of course, and this is not just an automated process.
Same for this post,
I am combining my own natural tone while keeping some segguestion, like this line, that has a super "Marketing feel," and for that, the "GPT tone" is noticeable.
But I think this is nice information to put in this post, so I kept it
All my replies are manually typed, and I use Grammarly to fix typos and improve sentence structure.
by isoprophlex | 2026-01-18 07:24:57+00:00
I've spent the last ~9 months building a system that, amongst other things, uses a vLLM to classify and describe >40 million house images of number signs in all of Italy. I wish I was joking, but that aside.

When asked about their confidence, these things are almost entirely useless. If the Magic Disruption Box is incapabele of knowing whether or not it read "42/A" correctly, I'm not convinced it's gonna revolutionize science by doing autonomous research.
by danpalmer | 2026-01-18 07:25:25+00:00
I remember looking into podcast advertising for my previous company back in ~2018. I listen to a podcast that I believe claimed ~50k regular listeners at the time, and a 2 minute sponsor read (1 of 3 per show) was priced at something like $4000.

I never understood how that sort of pricing would work. The unit economics were never even close for us. I can see how they might be closer for SaaS businesses like Squarespace, but for retailers? Feels very unlikely. I'm not surprised the money dried up, or rather, figured out that funnelling VC cash into podcast ads doesn't turn into profitable growth.

Interestingly, now in 2026 that same podcast (which according to the hosts hasn't grown), no longer lists their pricing for ad reads, and frequently only has 2 filled spots, and has had periods of only 1 or even no ad reads per show over the last few years as times have been tough. They've now diversified into overpriced memberships.
by antisol | 2026-01-18 07:25:27+00:00
I can't resist bragging:

I'm in the top 5% of all seti@home contributors. I'm in the top 2000 overall and I'm in the top 50 in Australia. According to boincstats I Accumulated more credit than 99.90166% of all SETI@Home Users - 28.91 quintillion floating-point operations. I think that's a lot.

I was sad when seti@home shut down. My CPU fans were not.
by nebula8804 | 2026-01-18 07:25:47+00:00
>Yes I have seen this as well.

I find SQL becomes a "stepping stone" to level up for people who live and breathe Excel (for obvious reasons).

Now was SQL considered some sort of tool to help business people do more of what coders could do? Not too sure about that. Maybe Access was that tool and it just didn't stick for various reasons.
by breezefox | 2026-01-18 07:26:41+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm a developer and a father of two.

I built LinxMemo because standard contact apps (flat lists) are terrible at modeling the "many-to-many" relationships inherent in school environments.

In a school setting, you don't just know a person; you know a "graph" in a family unit (e.g., Alice is Bob's mom + Charlie's wife + usually picks up on Tuesdays).

The Problem: I kept forgetting parents' names at pickups. I needed a way to query "Who are the parents of this child?" instantly, without navigating through complex notes or creating messy duplicates in my main Contacts app.

The Solution: LinxMemo links contacts into Families and Groups using a graph-like structure.

- Data Model: It links entities (Parents, Children) bi-directionally.
- Privacy: It is strictly local-first. All data resides on the device. No signup required, no ads.

It's currently in public beta via TestFlight. I'd love feedback on the UI and must-have feature requests.

TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/9UVTzxtP

Thanks!
by jfoster | 2026-01-18 07:26:50+00:00
Can you try converting one of them here? I'm curious whether it works or not.

https://bulkresizephotos.com/en?preset=true&scale=100&format...

If it doesn't work, any chance I could have a copy of one of the images for testing with? (and trying to file the right bugs to get it fixed)
by zkmon | 2026-01-18 07:27:18+00:00
To be fair, both dark mode and light mode are bad. For me, optimal is with some dark grey background that mixes well with the surroundings around the screen. The point is, not to have contrast with surroundings. Kindle, or the text consoles on older CRT monitors looked good because they were not too bright against the surroundings.

And the content on the screen felt like real-world tangible object.

Having said that, I feel that dark mode (full dark) is a product of "new is exciting", "game theme", "dark means serious, mystery, suspense", "no glaring", "linux/console style, so geek", "we are coders, so different from normal people" etc

The reality is, full dark theme requires more brightness and more power consumption. It feels like searching for things in a dark room without light (mystery, suspense factor). Light theme can feel more relaxed, with lower brightness settings.
by pugdogdev | 2026-01-18 07:29:01+00:00
Yes, the menu bar is a big issue.
So many useless icons and menus.
Because in macOS 26 it is easier to remove icons from the bar, I have added this "inline mode". A few users have already told me they removed everything and just put extra bar items, customized them however they want, so this makes it nicer.
by rurban | 2026-01-18 07:29:08+00:00
You need to understand the difference between general matching and pattern matching. Maybe should have read more older AI books. A LLM is a general fuzzy matcher. A pattern matcher is an exact matcher using an abstract language, the "pattern". A general matcher uses a distance function instead, no pattern needed.

Ie you want to find a subimage in a big image, possibly rotated, scaled, tilted, distorted, with noise. You cannot do that with a pattern matcher, but you can do that with a matcher, such as a fuzzy matcher, a LLM.

You want to find a go position on a go board. A LLM is perfect for that, because you don't need to come up with a special language to describe go positions (older chess programs did that), you just train the model if that position is good or bad, and this can be fully automated via existing literature and later by playing against itself. You train the matcher not via patterns but a function (win or loose).
by kev009 | 2026-01-18 07:29:23+00:00
He gives some interviews on this YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/c/LaptopRetrospective that are interesting to hear about the backstory on some iconic ThinkPads.

I had no idea David did the swooping mid-1990s AS/400s, I have a couple of those in my system collection and they definitely have an aesthetic.
by gyulai | 2026-01-18 07:32:26+00:00
I optimize for maximum amount of natural sunlight hitting my retina throughout the day, as that tends to have positive effects on my psychological wellbeing.

So I've set up my desk at a 45° angle bridging a corner of my office where I have windows along one of the walls (with me looking at the corner, of course, not into the room).

So, I'm as close to the windows as possible and have a wall of windows with natural light hitting my eyes from a 45° angle. This is important on overcast days which, where I live, is most of them because otherwise, I would get barely any natural light at all.

With dark mode, this setup runs into trouble on sunny days because sunny spots in the room tend to reflect off the screen, producing glare. This leads me to start drawing blinds and almost always spirals into me sitting in a dark room on the sunniest of days when I most want to enjoy the sun.

With light mode, I can get away with regulating the light through a movable paravent that moves with the sun and takes care of the worst of sunny spots reflecting off my screen and maybe drawing the blinds only partially.
by catlifeonmars | 2026-01-18 07:32:59+00:00
I’m confused by this. I still see this kind of phrasing in LLM generated content, even as recent as last week (using Gemini, if that matters). Are you saying that LLMs do not generate text like this, or that it’s now possible to get text that doesn’t contain the telltale “its not X, it’s Y”?
by unethical_ban | 2026-01-18 07:33:00+00:00
I highly disagree with your analysis. And yes, some of my perspective is based on the ideology that the ICE agents are largely incompetent, racist, hateful human beings led by people of the same quality.

You are correct, she didn't get shot in the head, she was shot in the chest and lived for 20 minutes while she was denied medical attention.

Any resistance to tyranny will involve disobedience of varying levels of severity. This administration is fascist in the true meaning of the word. A woman blocked the street, got killed then called a f*cking b*tch by the cop after he shot her, and a domestic terrorist before her body was cold by the DHS secretary and president and vice president.

You say she shouldn't have been there. I say ICE shouldn't have been there, shouldn't have issued conflicting orders, shouldn't have gotten in front of her car, and should have kept going around her like they had been. I say her demeanor before she left meant she clearly was not trying to harm anyone. Period.

Authority is not ipso facto moral.
by y00zzeek | 2026-01-18 07:33:07+00:00
Since the edit window is closed, I want to clarify the AIR structure for those asking about the "row" definition.

In Hekate's Keccak AIR, the relationship is ~25 trace rows per 1 Keccak-f[1600] permutation.

2^24 Rows = The raw size of the execution trace matrix (height).
~671k Permutations = The actual cryptographic workload (equivalent to hashing ~90MB of data).

The benchmark compares the cost to prove the same cryptographic work, regardless of internal AIR row mapping.

THE MANIFESTO:
https://github.com/oumuamua-corp/hekate
by theothertimcook | 2026-01-18 07:34:16+00:00
Does anyone else feel like this is an attempt at a poisoned chalice?

If the opposition does well in the mid-terms they have an utter shitshow to clean up, but if that doesn’t happen they get to pull out their own splinter and claim a victory.

I’m really hopeful the rest of the world continues to strengthen trade and cooperation in the absence of US leadership and stability.
by danielscrubs | 2026-01-18 07:34:35+00:00
Ive seen it in action. When you get lazy, you start to notice that the single most important aspect is posturing.

So to be lazy you start posturing, selling people how great you and your project is. The more projects you have under you, the higher the chance of something very successful too.

It works, suddenly they can work even less and get promoted.

Ofc this is horrible for the company, having the worst people doing the most “internal sales for positioning”. This also creates a giant middle management layer.

I wouldn’t say they are dumb, they just noticed that great work has no correlation with performance. What does have a correlation is how you act and speak. The All-In Chamaths of the world (not saying he is dumb, he isnt, but damn if boosting isn’t everything for him).

This is why Manifesting, was so popular for the management layer, suddenly it wasnt “being untruthful” it was “manifesting into existence”.
by monero-xmr | 2026-01-18 07:34:40+00:00
It’s just really, really hard to get someone to pay you money. This AI boom has made earning money optional for some companies, but for the long tail of AI-adjacent companies you need revenue. Convincing someone to pay you is just simply so so hard. No one really gets it until they have to actually make revenue. It’s sooooo hardddd
by zahlman | 2026-01-18 07:35:11+00:00
> I choose what seems like the "dumb" solution at first glance: a trie (prefix tree).

> There are "smarter" solutions like... hash tables.... A goal of my project is to make the code simpler to understand and less of a black box, so a simpler data structure made sense, especially since other design choices would not have been all that much faster or use that much less memory for this application.

Strangely, my own software-related answer is the opposite for the same reason.

I was implementing something for which I wanted to approximate a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortest_common_supersequence , and my research at the time led me to a trie-based approach. But I was working in Python, and didn't want to actually define a node class and all the logic to build the trie, so I bodged it together with a dict (i.e., a hash table).
by saghm | 2026-01-18 07:36:23+00:00
Much of a difference from which, the array of objects or an object containing arrays? The article points out at least one major optimization that the runtime performs on arrays that doesn't (and as I understand it, can't) exist for objects. My point is that it's not obvious whether there are others, and if so, where they might apply.

Pretty much the entire last paragraph of my comment that you responded to is an argument that it's potentially wrong to just naively assume "arrays are just objects". It's not clear to me why you're confident that this is wrong without giving any additional context that clarifies whether you've actually considered that possibility or not.
by mantas | 2026-01-18 07:37:24+00:00
Coming from ex-USSR… I’m used to unused fields. Nowadays situation is better. Where soil is best, all (most?) fields are used. But in other parts of the country unused fields are not uncommon.

It doesn’t help that we are getting only a fraction of EU farming subsidies. While fancy machinery cost the same as for western counterparts. So Netherlands with higher wages are outpricing our farmers :D

I think it’s matter of time when more and more of those deals will reach the tipping point. And after that it will be very hard to restore local agriculture.
by post_below | 2026-01-18 07:37:26+00:00
I don't follow the logic that "it hallucinates so it's useless". In the context of codebases I know for sure that they can be useful. Large datasets too. Are they also really bad at some aspects of dealing with both? Absolutely. Dangerously, humorously bad sometimes.

But the latter doesn't invalidate the former.
by FridayoLeary | 2026-01-18 07:37:49+00:00
>There’s another distance limit at work here, and that is the speed of light. It takes milliseconds for the signal in your phone to reach the hotel above ground and be handed over to the mobile network. But if it takes too long to get from phone to hotel, then your phone call s..a.rt..s..t o. br..e..ak up. As it happens, that distance is about 12km, so Boldyn needs nine hotels around London to cover the whole of the Underground

I find that interesting. Another fascinating rabbit hole the article has sent me down is that there is an unused station called north end. I've been down that stretch before and i had no idea. Does anyone know if passengers can see it?
by abhgh | 2026-01-18 07:37:56+00:00
I once modeled user journeys on a website using fancy ML models that honored sequence information, i.e., order of page visits, only to be beaten by bag-of-words (i.e., page url becomes a vector dimension, but order is lost) decision tree model, which was supposed to be my baseline.

What I had overlooked was that journeys on that particular website were fairly constrained by design, i.e., if you landed on the home page, did a bunch of stuff, put product X in the cart - there was pretty much one sequence of pages (or in the worst case, a small handful) that you'd traverse for the journey. Which means the bag-of-words (BoW) representation was more or less as expressive as the sequence model; certain pages showing up in the BoW vector corresponded to a single sequence (mostly). But the DT could learn faster with less data.
by pietroppeter | 2026-01-18 07:38:04+00:00
If you happen to pass by Ivrea (short trip from Turin or Milan) there is a very nice small museum which showcases most of the machines mentioned. It has also a working Programma 101 and if you are lucky there might be a volounteer that can demo it. There also volounteer giving guided tours and if you are with kids you have the option to have them do a workshop (includes some 3d printing).

https://www.museotecnologicamente.it/category/collezione/
Best approach for generating SVG graphics with LLMs?
by huly11 | 2026-01-18 07:38:54+00:00
I'm working on a project that needs to dynamically generate simple icons and diagrams. I've tried GPT-4 and Claude - they can output SVG code but the results are hit or miss, especially for anything beyond basic shapes.

Has anyone found a reliable workflow for this? I'm wondering if there are specialized models, better prompting techniques, or if I should just use a traditional graphics library and skip the LLM route entirely. What's actually working in production for you?
by kurisufag | 2026-01-18 07:39:17+00:00
mildly related: when i want a single bit of entropy in my day-to-day without fooling myself, i think of a random long-ish word and decide based on the evenness of the number of letters. probably this isn't an unbiased oracle, but it's good enough when i don't have a coin handy and care about avoiding self-delusion more than fair odds.
by uecker | 2026-01-18 07:40:04+00:00
I see you edited your comment. But the CO2 emissions between a completed transition away from fossil fuels (France last century) and Germany (still ongoing) can obviously not be compared. With the roll-out of renewables there is a corresponding drop of emissions (and the electricity sector is the one saving Germany's climate targets by overachieving its goals while transport and building is behind). Once the transition is done, it will be essentially done. It would be same if Germany had decided to move to more nuclear, which would take even longer because building nuclear takes much.longer.
by nebula8804 | 2026-01-18 07:40:09+00:00
> I'd argue that some of the best podcasts ever made have come out in the past 2-3 years, but if you're not giving the median listener the thrill of the first season of Serial, they don't listen past the first episode or two.

Is there a good discovery mechanism for people looking to go past the first 3 episodes? Is there anyone trying to do curation of any sort? I wonder if AI that knows you super well could be used to find the right podcast for you.

I'd love to explore more political, science and other types of podcasts but it is too easy to set one up nowadays which results in so much garbage and I have wasted enough time with Rogan, Friedman and their ilk to realize that I'm forced to do curation. For one bit of gold there is so much trash and time is the most valuable thing you have.
by LeratoAustini | 2026-01-18 07:40:17+00:00
Oh so maybe they are just initialising the TTS by default, ready for those who need it for accessibility? That would make sense.

I'm on a Debian, so that ties in with what you mentioned.

It's easy to get rid of the error, I was more just curious. Thought maybe mainstream websites had started blasting speech at users as soon as they arrived.
by nextlevelwizard | 2026-01-18 07:42:27+00:00
>What will the Foundation do?

>The number one goal of the Handmade Software Foundation is to support, promote, and sustain the development of Handmade software.

I would love some concrete ideas what this means. My primary concern is that if any money is involved, like stipends for handmade software it will be gamed and there is no way to monitor if LLMs are used or not. In current world it is hard for me not to be cynical when I heard about new good thing, but also they are asking for money and they don’t really tell what they will do with it