MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kaydub | 2026-01-22 17:44:46+00:00
Yeah, I'd say I'm thinking and doing way more.

One of my favorite things is that I no longer feel like I need to keep up with "framework of the year"

I came up over a decade ago, places I worked were heavy on Java and Spring. Frontends were Jquery back then. Since then I've moved around positions quite a bit, many different frameworks, but typically service side rendered MVC types and these days I work as an SRE. The last 5 years I've fiddled with frontend frameworks and SPAs but never really got into it. I just don't have it in me to learn ANOTHER framework.

I had quite a few projects, all using older patterns/frameworks/paradigms. Unfortunately these older paradigms don't lend themselves to "serverless" architecture. So when I want to actually run and deploy something I've gotta deploy it to a server (or ecs task). That shit starts to cost a bit of money, so I've never been able to keep projects running very long... typically because the next idea comes up and I start working on that and decide to spend money on the new things.

I've been working at a cloud native shop the last 7 years now. Damn, you can run shit CHEAP in AWS if you know what you're doing. I know what I'm doing for parts of that, using dynamodb instead of rds, lambdas instead of servers. But I could never get far enough with modern frontend frameworks to actually migrate my apps to these patterns.

Well, now it's easy.

"Hey Claude, look at this repo here, I want to move it to AWS lambdas + apigw + cloudfront. Break the frontend out into a SPA using vue3. I've copied some other apps and patterns {here} so go view those for how to do it"

And that's just the start.

I never thought I'd get into game development but it's opened that up to me as well (though, since I'm not an artist professionally I have issues getting generative AI to make assets, so I'm stuck plodding along in aseprite and photoshop make shit graphics lol). I've got one simple game like 80% done and ideas for the next one.

I never got too far down mobile development either. But one of the apps I made it could be super useful to have a mobile app. Describe the ux/ui/user flow, tell it where to find the api endpoints, and wham bam, android app developed.

Does it make perfect code one shot? Sometimes, but not often, I'll have to nudge it along. Does it make good architectural decisions? Not often on its own, again, I'l nudge it, or even better, I'll spin up another agent to do code reviews and feed the reviews back into the agent building out the app. Keep doing that loop until I feel like the code review agent is really reaching or being too nitpicky.

And holy shit, I've been able to work on multiple things at the same time this way. Like completely different domains, just have different agents running and doing work.
by owenversteeg | 2026-01-22 17:44:54+00:00
The only asterisk this time is that this is electricity, not energy. Still impressive, but electricity is only 22% of total energy use, so they are at about 12% of the total for the EU and 7.8% for Europe.

For that, you want this graph: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

Fun to play around with, you can also change the selection to view the world, US, China, individual EU countries etc.

You can see that this the gain in renewables in the EU has been mainly at the expense of coal (down >50% as a share of total energy use in 10 years), gas (down 4%), and nuclear (down 20%.) Oil use as a share of the total is up by 5%.
by tptacek | 2026-01-22 17:44:55+00:00
So, wait: this is just based on taking the 40 best/most consistent Nano Banana outputs for a prompt to do pixel-art versions of isometric map tiles? That's all it takes to finetune Qwen to reliably generate tiles in exactly the same style?

Also, does someone have an intuition for how the "masking" process worked here to generate seamless tiles? I sort of grok it but not totally.
by when_creaks | 2026-01-22 17:45:07+00:00
Encouraging. However, it isn't clear from the article at first glance (or the deeper analysis being referenced) how electricity consumption by power source is changing.

In other words, as an example, a 10% increase in solar power generation does not necessarily mean that there was a 10% increase in electricity consumption where that electricity was generated via solar.

i.e. It is entirely possible for a growing solar fleet to generate more power during the middle of the day than previously, and simultaneously for not all of that increased power to be used / usable.
by leroy-is-here | 2026-01-22 17:45:08+00:00
Which ones are you going to? 90% of what is in a grocery store is pre-packaged processed food. In fact, many grocery stores are starting to sell clothes. The produce sections are small compared to the aisles and aisles of boxed foods, frozen foods, soda, alcohol, and candy. I've never been into a major grocery store in any state that wasn't like this.
by the_gastropod | 2026-01-22 17:45:32+00:00
My listing was as-is, no returns. Didn’t matter. And I tried challenging it. Recorded a video where I opened the returned machine, assembled it, and pulled a perfect shot of espresso. Based on my server’s access logs, nobody at eBay even viewed the video. Whole experience cost me over $200 in shipping fees. Horrible experience.
by eigenspace | 2026-01-22 17:45:37+00:00
The answer is likely going to have to be hydrogen, but there's a pretty difficult catch with hydrogen: it makes zero sense to invest in any hydrogen electricity storage infrastructure until the grid is already like 80+% renewable.

There's simply no sense in turning electricity into hydrogen so that it could be used in 6 months (losing 50+% of the energy along the way as heat!) when you could just sell that electricity right now, or stick it in a battery so you can use it 6 hours from now.

There will be an economic case for hydrogen energy storage in Europe in 10 years, but unfortunately the technology is basically sitting at a standstill right now with no attention and no investment because it's not needed yet.
by schopra909 | 2026-01-22 17:45:52+00:00
Per the RAM comment, you may able to get it run locally with two tweaks:

https://github.com/Linum-AI/linum-v2/blob/298b1bb9186b5b9ff6...

1) Free up the t5 as soon as the text is encoded, so you reclaim GPU RAM

2) Manual Layer Offloading; move layers off GPU once they're done being used to free up space for the remaining layers + activations
by skruger | 2026-01-22 17:45:55+00:00
I faced exactly this situation a few years ago - I went with APL as the “OG”, but it probably doesn’t matter that much. Learning k or j once you know APL is much easier. I wrote a bit about this (apl and k)

https://xpqz.github.io/learnapl

https://xpqz.github.io/kbook
by toomuchtodo | 2026-01-22 17:46:00+00:00
Looks like it's starting. Kudos for some courage and will on the EU's part.

Macron says €300B in EU savings sent to the US every year will be invested in EU - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46722594 - January 2026

Macron says €300 billion in European savings flown to the US every year will be invested in Europe from now on. All 27 EU states agreed to establish the S&I Union, a step toward the full Capital Market Union - https://old.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1qjtvtl/macron_says... - January 22nd, 2026

https://streamable.com/m4dejv
by treis | 2026-01-22 17:46:12+00:00
I think it fundamentally shifts the cost of transport from marginal to capitalized. Meaning a 20 minute trip is $0.50 of gas and some fraction of the manufacturing cost of the car. Today it's that plus $5-10 to the driver.

It's somewhat equivalent to the advent of trains but on a personal level. In the way that trains made shipping goods across the country more or less free once the rail was built that's what's going to happen to people and packages getting around cities.
by freakynit | 2026-01-22 17:46:13+00:00
Two broad reasons (as far as I can think of):

1. A lot more can be done in a given amount of time. Looks good on resume. Recall that India is still extremely poor (dont get influenced by the GDP numbers.. ) and getting a job as fast as you can after college can make a real difference to your living standards here.

2. Our education system is shit. And so are our teachers(mostly). Meaning, when folks are out of college, they generally are not as competitive as maybe their counterparts from western regions are(not in terms of hardwork, but, knowledge and hands-on tasks). LLM's makes it possible to do complete much more complex work than otherwise was possible at current experience.

Indians are extremely hard-working. The problem is people are extremely poor (~2400 median income... that's per YEAR). Even after adjusting for PPP. this translates to less than 10K USD/YEAR. Now think about living on 10K/year and supporting 5 family members (partner with 4 kids, or parents with 2 siblings).
by lbrito | 2026-01-22 17:46:52+00:00
>One could also say that TV makes humans angry and violent

It does

Anderson and Bushman (2002)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11440811_The_Effect...
Evidence is steadily accumulating that prolonged exposure to violent TV programming during childhood is associated with subsequent aggression.

Paik, H., & Comstock, G. (1994). The effects of television violence on antisocial behavior: A meta-analysis. Communication Research, 21(4), 516–546. https://doi.org/10.1177/009365094021004004
Results showed positive and significant correlation between TV violence and aggressive behavior

Ironically I used Gemini to look those up. Being a social studies thing, of course there is no absolute proof of this, there are many caveats and ways of looking etc.

Tangential - "find meta-analysis to back up my point" is ridiculously easy with AI, and it can be used on both sides. I could just as easily negate the ask and get compelling results.

I would hate having to write a dissertation right now.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-22 17:47:10+00:00
> It's not as if homes outside of cities have their own diesel generators to power their house.

Yeah, no true, I don't understand the point/argument though?

More people relying on renewables == long term better for everyone on the planet

That includes moving people outside of cities to renewables energy sources, is your point that this isn't so important because they're a small piece of the population usually?
by bob1029 | 2026-01-22 17:47:17+00:00
I think .NET is Microsoft's best product, followed very closely by MSSQL.

SQL Server has some incredible 3rd party tools build up around it. 3~4 Red Gate tools can one-shot your entire devops lifecycle.

I still prefer SQLite for anything that can handle reasonable, non-zero recovery point objectives. But, if it's serious business and we cant drop anything on the floor I am reaching for MSSQL without even blinking.
by mort96 | 2026-01-22 17:47:29+00:00
Isn't zstd primarily designed to provide decent compression ratios at amazing speeds? The reason it's exciting is mainly that you can add compression to places where it didn't necessarily make sense before because it's almost free in terms of CPU and memory consumption. I don't think it has ever had a stated goal of beating compression ratio focused algorithms like brotli on compression ratio.
by ezst | 2026-01-22 17:47:36+00:00
> That is just like when loom machines took money away from weavers back in the 19th century, or computers took money away from typists/secretaries in the 20th century. We should carefully consider whether or not that is a net good for society.

I don't want to sound like a luddite, but each of those contributed to a consolidation of wealth that was largely offset by new jobs and new markets. How exactly do you think this is paying off here? Tech companies get to benefit, we know that, which sounds like a dead end. So it's ok that everyone else loses?
by cush | 2026-01-22 17:48:01+00:00
The idea of a search index being a public utility is an interesting idea but I’m not sure what it would do for trust. Governance is the biggest question mark, and with the current administration I’d say let Google run it and have less restrictive access to the index. My Google search usage has dropped probably 99% over the last two years.

My hope is that the powers that be figure out how to monetize these products with dollars instead of attention. Google’s ad-driven business model ruined the internet - we don’t need that in our AI products too.
by llm_nerd | 2026-01-22 17:48:09+00:00
"For a few years the UK had few enough that you could list their names, then gradually four, three, two, one, none"

Sure, it's embarrassing that we still have any coal plants. But really, there are only eight small units remaining, located in the provinces of Nova Scotia (4), New Brunswick (1), and Saskatchewan (3). Every other jurisdiction abolished them.

Maybe small nuclear will be the solution for these holdouts. The fact that Alberta held onto coal for so long, and never built a nuclear plant, was outrageous.
by nthdesign | 2026-01-22 17:48:12+00:00
I was at a conference in Phoenix in November and took seven Waymo trips during my stay. Four of those were fairly long (20-minute) trips. I preferred Waymo to the Uber/Lyft experience because it felt private. It was just me and my colleagues in the car, no strangers. It also felt futuristic and novel, which I'm sure will wear off. We experienced no weird or erratic driving, with one minor exception... Waymo always followed the speed limit. On a major road where the speed limit was 40mph, other cars were zipping around us at 55mph+. And, one parking lot had 5mph speed limit signs posted. As you can imagine, Waymo was the slowest vehicle in that parking lot by a wide margin.
by to11mtm | 2026-01-22 17:48:15+00:00
> Advice: If you want better results from Indian engineers(or designers or anyone else really), especially juniors (speaking as of now, things might change in near future), try to reduce the "authority" gap early on. Make it clear you are approachable and that asking questions is expected. For the first few weeks, work closely with them in the style you want them to follow.. they usually adapt very fast once they feel safe to do so.

Semi related to this, one of the biggest 'breakthroughs' in building the right trust/rapport with an offshore team was sending an email to their leadership making it clear and on the record that "Comments against pull requests should not be used against the employee in reviews, if there is a recurring issue I will discuss it via other channels."

That one email changed PR back-and-forth entirely, cause yeah I guess sometimes they'd get dinged for too many PR comments on some metric. At first their management wasn't thrilled, thankfully there was a good enough improvement in quality and defect rate that in a couple months they were won over.
by boringg | 2026-01-22 17:48:50+00:00
How long have you had your system - biggest risk point is year 10-12 and then 20-24 on inverter failure replacement which is fixable but just stretches out your payback period.

Im with you I hate the people who preach fossil fuel talking points. I also don't like the shady solar sales people who say solar is a no brainer - they are just pushing product to install on your roof. It is a pretty good product but not 100%.
by striking | 2026-01-22 17:49:10+00:00
> If the page is AI‑generated but the domain is mixed (not mostly AI), we flag the page as AI‑generated but do not downrank it.

> If a domain is found to be mostly AI‑generated (typically more than 80% across its pages), that domain is flagged as AI slop and downranked in web search results.

I think that's pretty clear, no? One AI item is merely AI generated, a trough of AI items is AI slop.

Edited as I think I misunderstood: there's more slop of the AI kind than of whatever other low-effort content, and I think Kagi is already doing a good job of keeping a neat little index that avoids content farms, AI or otherwise. AI slop just happens to be a little harder to evaluate than regular slop (and in my experience is now more pervasive because it's cheaper to produce).
by JetSetWilly | 2026-01-22 17:49:15+00:00
In Scotland one issue is that the UK electricity market is national (unlike in eg norway). So even if local supply is very high and interconnects are not large enough to export to england - we must pay the higher national rate. As octopus ceo suggested if the UK energy market has regional pricing then electricity in scotland would often be a lot cheaper and in some cases industrial demand would move there. But that would disadvantage the SE of England so will never happen.

Conversely, standing charges ARE regionalised - because that does advantage the SE of England. Oh well!
by Capricorn2481 | 2026-01-22 17:49:22+00:00
> It won't turn most people into architects. It will turn them into PMs

That sounds awful. Every PM I've ever met, I did their job for them. They did nothing. And I've met some heavy hitter PMs with a lot of stripes and recommendations.

The job of being a PM is over-exaggerated. It boils down to writing things down and bringing them up later. Something I ended up doing for them, because they didn't know enough to know what to write down. Their skills are interviewing well and drinking beers with important people.

So what you said is a dreadful future, if true.

And side note, my last PM didn't even take notes, he had AI do it for him. They were always wrong. I had to correct them constantly.
by embedding-shape | 2026-01-22 17:49:23+00:00
> A much more common problem is if someone deploys another bot, which will lead your bot into having an endless back-and-forth with it.

This I'd understand, bit trickier since you're basically end up with a problem typical of distributed systems.

But one bot? One identity? One GitHub user? Seems really strange to miss something like that, as you say, it's one of the earlier things you tend to try when creating bots for chats and alike.
by WorldMaker | 2026-01-22 17:49:39+00:00
The trouble is that "just parse the tests" isn't always an option and running arbitrary code is the nature of how software is built.

The easiest example is JS testing. Most test harnesses use a JS file for configuration. If you don't know how the harness is configured how do you know you are parsing the right tests?

Most test frameworks in JS use the define/it `define("some test colection", () => it("some test", () => /* …test code… */))` pattern. Tests are built as callbacks to functions.

In theory, sure, you could "just" try to RegEx out the `define("name"` and `it("name"` patterns, but it becomes harder to track nesting than you think it is with just RegEx. Then you realize that because those are code callbacks, no one is stopped from building meta-test suites with things like `for (thing of someTextMatrix) { it(`handles ${thing}`, () => /* …parametric test on thing… */ }`.

The test language used most in JS is JS. It's a lot harder problem than "just parsing" to figure out. In most cases a test harness needs to run the JS files to collect the full information about the test suite. Being JS files they are Turing Complete and open to doing whatever they want. Many times the test harnesses are running in a full Node environment with access to the entire filesystem and more.

Most of that applies to other test harnesses in other languages as well. To get the full suite of possible tests you need to be able to build that language and run it. How much of a sandbox that language has in that case shifts, but often it is still a sandbox with ways to escape. (We've proven that there's an escape Zero Day in the Universal Turing Machine, escapes are in some ways inevitable in any and all Turing Complete languages.)
by cryzinger | 2026-01-22 17:50:06+00:00
I don't know, on principle (and in matters of taste) I'm certainly not a fan of AI art, but I think Dwyer's work here was far from "peddling," and at least attempted to do something interesting with the format/medium:

> Shadow Searching: ChatGPT psychosis is a body of work made in collaboration with artificial intelligence which depicts a co-op between a human artist and AI that started as a thought experiment to produce a perfect partner based on one’s Jungian shadow. In the process of this goal a compounding relationship formed with the ai chat bot via recursive mirroring. The work explores identity, character narrative creation and crafting false memories of relationships in an interactive role digitally crafted before, during and after a state of AI psychosis. This highlights and embodies a growing trend that can be dangerous or unpredictable which you are not immune to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWy4UP-ti1s

The execution honestly doesn't impress me much--remember Loab? I would've loved to see the generic pretty girls devolve into something like that, lol--but I think AI psychosis and AI "companions" are relevant and potentially rich topics to explore. I respect it more than that "Théâtre D'opéra Spatial" piece that made a splash a few years back.
by velcrovan | 2026-01-22 17:50:06+00:00
Sure, but Windows has moved a long ways since the version that they're attempting to replicate. And again, their bar for success "is able to run Windows programs" is not actually high enough to achieve a practical Windows replacement, even if going back to Windows 95 is all we wanted.

It's interesting you mention Linux being a headache — it is, but there is an order of magnitude more people working full-time on just the Linux desktop experience than have ever even tried running ReactOS. That ratio would have to flip before the latter has a hope of being a useful Windows replacement. We’re much more likely to see Wine able to run 100% of Windows before ReactOS gets there.
by torlok | 2026-01-22 17:50:09+00:00
I'm from Poland too and the only thing we have is land, the sun, and wind. Coal poisons the air we breathe, and hurts the climate our children will live in. It's not about money, it's about security. The worst thing for polish security is being dependent on foreign oil and gas, and to be reliant on a few power plants that are an easy target for russian drones, and rely on water from rivers that are running dry more and more often. The transition away from coal should've come much, much sooner. When you hear a push back against renewables, and people praising oil and gas, who's benefiting from this? Poland, or oil suppliers like Russia?
by ActorNightly | 2026-01-22 17:50:18+00:00
>A need to be more self suficcient.

The thing is, while most people in rural lands think they are self sufficient, they still depend on technology and government services plenty, as well as money coming in. But yet they are on the high horse of thinking they don't need any of that. Until that changes, they aren't going to change their mind.

>I think that starts with people using their empathy and curiosity to understand the divide.

Nope. This has been the democratic approach for ages, and the right takes full advantage of the "weak" left. A lot of current bullshit could have been avoided if the Democrats went hard on MAGA instead of trying to unite the country and prosecuted Trump for insurrection to the full extent.

Its time for the complete opposite. People need to get scared again of getting a beating in public, or worse, if they voice their bullshit opinion.
by kieranmaine | 2026-01-22 17:50:21+00:00
EV smart charging is a solved problem in the UK IMO, at least for those with a parking space.

OVO[1] and Octopus[2] offer smart charging tariffs that give EV owners reduced electricity rates.

The usual caveat is you can only benefit if you can install a charger and park near that charger. Still, based on this 2021 article [3] 65% of UK homes have at least one off street space, so the potential for a majority of homes to smart charge is there.

To extend the benefit of cheap smart charging to more people, it would be good to see legislation that makes it easier for leaseholders and renters to require the installation of a smart charger where technically possible.

1. https://www.ovoenergy.com/electric-cars/charge-anytime
2. https://octopus.energy/ev-tariffs/
3. https://www.racfoundation.org/media-centre/cars-parked-23-ho...