MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by GlibMonkeyDeath | 2026-01-30 15:53:28+00:00
Not surprising at all - photovoltaics yield about 50 W/m2 on average at mid-ish latitudes. Last time I checked (see below) biofuels are around 100x less efficient per acre (and in the case of algae-based biofuel, have a lot of post-processing that make them even less attractive.)

1 acre of corn ~ 500 gallons of ethanol (~6kWh/Liter for ethanol)
so 50046e3 = 12 MWh/4046 m^2 ~ 3000 Wh/m^2 for corn. If there is one growing season per year, then that energy is spread over 24*365 hours. So about 0.3 W/m2 on average.

Of course, the ethanol can be stored, and has a pretty awesome energy density. So it isn't completely stupid (e.g. aircraft are a thing), although it is pretty stupid.
by famouswaffles | 2026-01-30 15:54:05+00:00
>I’ve never really understood why, e.g. Pepsi and Coke spend so much on advertising

When was the last time you saw an ad for something non digital and you stopped everything and bought it or even made concrete plans to do so later ? Probably almost never right ? So why still so many ads ? More importantly, why is it still so profitable ?

Because much of the impact of advertising is sub conscious imprint rather than conscious action. Have you ever been in a grocery store and you needed to get something and picked a "random" brand ? Yeah, that choice may not have been so random after all.
Or perhaps you're sitting at home or work and have a sudden seemingly unprompted craving for <insert food place>. Yeah, maybe not so unprompted.
by aftbit | 2026-01-30 15:54:30+00:00
No, there's basically no reason you'd ever want an alkaline battery except cost. For your use case of long-term storage or a rarely used flashlight (e.g. in a car emergency kit), you'd want a Li/FeS2 as the parent poster recommended, also called just a "Lithium" primary (i.e. non-rechargable) cell. They have a longer shelf life, don't leak, hold more energy, can provide a higher discharge current, work over a wider temperature range, and have safety characteristics very similar to alkaline.
by Matl | 2026-01-30 15:54:33+00:00
I don't think I edited my comment...

> you're still stuck talking to your credit card company

AFAIK Apple still talks to it too, they just have a deeper/better experience on the platforms they own and provide a service where they can generate a virtual card for you, so you're shielded from the merchant, but not from your card issuer.

> Apple's app store payment percentage, the open/closed nature of their appstore, and the ability to sideload apps are 3 separate issues

Yes and no, because Apple wants to use the closed nature of their ecosystem to offer their solution as the only possible one, yet at the same time claim that they deserve their 30% cut because it's the best solution out there and they provide so much value.
Show HN: I Made Something Weird
by xsh6942 | 2026-01-30 15:54:33+00:00
Struggling with mental health and building a philosophy to cope. The site is fragments of that philosophy drifting through space. Click one, it expands. Some are abstract, some are very personal. They're mixed together, undistinguished. The form is the content — ideas moving, fading, discovered by attention rather than presented. I built it because I needed to articulate something for myself. Figured I'd share the weird thing that resulted. No promises of more
by itissid | 2026-01-30 15:55:08+00:00
Is it true that a walking system only to operate its legs and limbs would still consume more power than a rocker bogie — with all the innovations in battery tech?

Ofc Yes.

On Mars would any other mobility system today achieve better performance for it's purportedly stated(neigh most ridiculous stated but to be fair difficult engineering) goals i.e. colonization? Also no.

I am surprised after watching this that there is so much of the Boston dynamic stuff man/dog walking out there, given that mobility is so well accomplished. Do you need — to invest — an anthropomorphized man to scale walls and be stable after getting kicked around?? I know one thing here on earth all large scale semi(think agro machines) and almost fully(delivery bots) autonomous look nothing like anthropomorphics or canines.

Maybe I have the dunning Kruger effect, because I am not a robotics engineer, but why is building an anthropomorphic _mobility_ platform so important to solve _pragmatic_ problems?
by jezze | 2026-01-30 15:55:17+00:00
I am curious, what was it I said that you consider to be a myth? If I have some misunderstanding I would like to know. I looked at JOVIAL on wikipedia quickly but I can't see exactly how it would be thinner than C or if it's compiler would output something vastly different to a C compiler. Or did you mean it's as thin as C but it came out earlier?
by optymizer | 2026-01-30 15:55:26+00:00
> because one is hooked on and dependent on the genie, the natural circumstances that otherwise would allow for foundational and fundamental skills and understanding to develop, never arise, to the point of cognitive decline.

After using AI to code, I came to the same conclusion myself. Interns and juniors are fully cooked:

- Companies will replace them with AI, telling seniors to use AI instead of juniors

- As a junior, AI is a click away, so why would you spend sleepless nights painstakingly acquiring those fundamentals?

Their only hope is to use AI to accelerate their own _learning_, not their performance. Performance will come after the learning phase.

If you're young, use AI as a personal TA, don't use it to write the code for you.
by Jill_lee | 2026-01-30 15:55:30+00:00
Notes: best results come from selecting a clear local region rather than tiny details. Extremely fine-grained edits are still challenging, and this does not replace full manual 3D modeling.
Over the past 16 months, we’ve focused on making 3D AI more controllable, with features including editing, partial redo, component-level splitting, pose control, and multi-view support etc. View more here: https://www.notion.so/Hyper3D-AI-User-Guide-192f6a0e7ea8807f...
by beepbooptheory | 2026-01-30 15:55:39+00:00
This doesn't really seem to be the point? Op is being prescriptive, talking about what we should do, not about what could be done.

Apply to anything else: you could eat out at restaurants every night, and it would do a great job in feeding you! Think of all the productivity you would gain relying on agential chefs. With restaurants even I can eat like a French chef, they have truly democratized food. And they do a perfect job these days executing dishes, only some mistakes.
by brk | 2026-01-30 15:55:40+00:00
I think this was primarily about speeding up the measurement time.
With just two electrodes you had to wait for the device to achieve equilibrium with the material being measured. If the concentration of oxygen on the probe side of the barrier was higher or lower than the material side you would get false measurements, particularly in low oxygen scenarios because you have oxygem trapped in the probe.

By keeping the state of oxygen inside the probe constant and replacing consumed molecules you now can measure almost instantly.
by chneu | 2026-01-30 15:55:42+00:00
Its not as much as you'd expect and the townsfolk often get saddled with higher utility costs, among other things.

When the tax incentive timelines runs out, the data centers just claim they'll move away and the tax cuts get renewed.

Its happening in Hillsboro, Oregon right now. The city promised some land just outside of the boundary would stay farm land until 2030 or later. The city reneged on that already. The utility rates have also doubled in recent years thanks to datacenters. The roads are destroyed from construction which damages cars, further increasing the burden on everyone else.
Ask HN: Anyone tried Spotify's AI DJ feature?
by playlistwhisper | 2026-01-30 15:55:48+00:00
Hi folks, Spotify has been rolling out an AI-powered DJ feature for a little while now. It’s available to Premium users, but I don’t have access to it here in France yet.

I’m curious:
- Has anyone here actually used Spotify’s AI DJ?
- What’s the experience like compared to regular playlists?
- Does the AI voice/commentary add value or get irritating?
- How good are the recommendations and adaptability to your taste?
- Any standout strengths or obvious limitations you’ve noticed?

Would love honest feedback from those who’ve tested it. Thanks!
by datsci_est_2015 | 2026-01-30 15:55:54+00:00
Land value underneath railroad tracks is an interesting subject. Most land value is reasonably calculated by width * length, and maybe some airspace rights. And that makes sense to our human brains, because we can look at a parcel of land and acknowledge it might be worth $10^x for some x given inflation.

But railroads kind of fail with this because you might have a landowner who prices the edge of their parcel at $1,000,000,000,000 because they know you need that exact piece of land for your railroad, and if the railroad is super long you might run into 10 of these maniacs.

Meanwhile the vast majority of your line might be worth less than any adjacent farmland, square foot by square foot, especially if it’s rocky or unstable etc.

Having a continuous line of land for many miles also has its own intrinsic value, much more than owning any particular segment (especially as it allows you to build a railroad hah).

Anyway, suffice to say, I don’t think “land value underneath railroads from the 18th century” is something that’s easily estimated.
by AnotherGoodName | 2026-01-30 15:56:23+00:00
And just to add to this the reason the Apple macs are used is that they have the highest memory bandwidth of any easily obtainable consumer device right now. (Yes the nvidia cards which also have hbm are even higher on memory bandwidth but not easily obtainable). Memory bandwidth is the limiting factor for inference more so than raw compute.

Memory costs are skyrocketing right now as everyone pivots to using hbm paired with moderate processing power. This is the perfect combination for inference. The current memory situation is obviously temporary. Factories will be built and scaled and memory is not particularly power hungry, there’s a reason you don’t really need much cooling for it. As training becomes less of a focus and inference more of a focus we will at some point be moving from the highest end nvidia cards to boxes of essentially power efficient memory hbm memory attached to smaller more efficient compute in the future.

I see a lot of commentary “ai companies are so stupid buying up all the memory” around the place atm. That memory is what’s needed to run the inference cheaply. It’s currently done on nvidia cards and apple m series cpus because those two are the first to utilise High Bandwidth Memory but the raw compute of the nvidia cards is really only useful for training, they are just using them for inference right now because there’s not much pn the market that has similar memory bandwidth. But this will be changing very soon. Everyone in the industry is coming along with their own dedicated compute using hbm memory.
Show HN: Julie Zero – my screen-aware desktop AI that works out of the box
by luthiraabeykoon | 2026-01-30 15:56:30+00:00
I’ve posted here before about Julie, an open-source desktop AI assistant I’ve been building in public. The OSS version is local-first and powerful, but it assumes you’re comfortable bringing your own models or API keys.

A lot of people told me the same thing: “I just want to install it and have it work.”

So I built Julie Zero.

Julie Zero is the premium tier that works straight out of the box. No API keys, no setup. Install it and start using it immediately.

What Julie Zero does:

Sees your screen and understands what you’re looking at in real time

Helps across apps by clicking, typing, navigating, and automating workflows

Uses on-screen context, not just text prompts, so responses are actually relevant

Fast and low-latency, so it feels usable during real work

Built with a local-first mindset and tuned for everyday workflows

The open-source version is still there and always will be. Julie Zero is just about removing friction for people who don’t want to configure anything.

Pricing:
Julie Zero is $9.99/month, which is a fraction of the price of similar screen-aware tools like Cluely’s premium tier.

Giveaway:
I’m giving 3 months of unlimited Julie Zero access to 10 people.

To get it:

Star the open-source Julie repo on my GitHub: https://github.com/Luthiraa/julie
(make sure a social is connected to your gh so i can reach out!)

I’ll send you a one-time code for 3-month premium access

I’m building this very hands-on and iterating fast. Would love feedback from people using it in real workflows. Happy to answer questions.
by unicorn_cowboy | 2026-01-30 15:56:45+00:00
Can someone explain the actual use cases for this that folks are excited about?

Nobody wants to be responsible for writing the film they're watching, as they watch it. Nobody wants to engage with a virtual world that has no story, narrative, meaning, purpose.

What is the actual use case for this, once we move beyond the tech demo stage?

The idea it will wholesale replace existing 3D graphics/rendering pipelines and processes any time soon seems so far-fetched to me (even just logistically) that I can't wrap my head around what people are thinking here.

This strikes me as a fancy parlor trick. Unless I'm mistaken, we need proper world models to do the things people are mistakenly projecting this to be capable of one day.
by keybored | 2026-01-30 15:57:19+00:00
> I keep gravitating to the term, "prompt adherence", because it feels like it describes the root meta-problem I have: I can set up a system, but I can't seem to get myself to follow it for more than a few days - including especially a system to set up and maintain systems. I feel that if I could crack that, set up this "habit that monitors the process of adding habits" and actually stick to it long-term, I could brute-force my way out of every other problem.

Executive function.
by skydhash | 2026-01-30 15:57:25+00:00
Most projects don’t change that much either. Head over to a big open source project, and more often you will only see tweaks. To be able to do the tweaks require a very good understanding of the whole project (Naur’s theory of programming).

Also in software, we can do big refactors. F1 teams are restricted to the version they’ve put in the first race. But we do have a lot of projects that were designed well enough that they’ve never changed the initial version, just build on top of it.
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-30 15:57:37+00:00
An airport that services large passenger jets will absolutely tank property values if you happen to fall within the flight path. Yet I don't believe that owners typically receive any compensation when that happens. I assume other externalities are handled similarly (ie not handled at all). Then it shouldn't be surprising that people don't want to be the one to take the fall for everyone else's benefit.
by lo_zamoyski | 2026-01-30 15:57:38+00:00
> industry machinery could match the average artisan or even beat the average

Whether it could is distinct from whether it will. I'm sure you've noticed the decline in the quality of clothing. Markets a mercurial and subject to manipulation through hype (fast fashion is just a marketing scheme to generate revenue, but people bought into the lie).

With code, you have a complicating factor, namely, that LLMs are now consuming their own shit. As LLM use increases, the percentage of code that is generated vs. written by people will increase. That risks creating an echo chamber of sorts.
by tsimionescu | 2026-01-30 15:58:21+00:00
Sure, but the 3x comparison is not based on reported incidents, it's based on estimates of incidents that occur. I think it's fair to assume such estimates are based on data about repairs and other such market stats, that don't necessarily depend on reporting. We also have no reason a priori to believe the Tesla reports include every single incident either, especially given their history from FSD incident disclosures.
by qnpnpmqppnp | 2026-01-30 15:58:38+00:00
> This not a prediction. The crash is currently happening.

The stock market being at an all-time high, a crash in the usual meaning of this term is not, by definition, currently happening.

Since apparently this isn't what you mean by "crash", could you define what you mean by this term so we're all on the same page?
by Xmd5a | 2026-01-30 15:59:34+00:00
> MI5Victim (Mike Corley, a.k.a. Boleslaw Tadeusz Szocik) – paranoid user who goes through periods of binge posting, claiming that MI5

They are all paranoids. The first three are interpretive paranoids. Sarfatti too. Nancy Lieder too, she might also be erotomaniac (another modality of paranoid personality), but I'd need to go further into this rabbit hole to be sure.

The criminal ones correspond to quarreling or revendicative paranoid personality. Naggum too.

And Baez is just a legend. Period.
by heyitssim | 2026-01-30 15:59:35+00:00
Love the workflow focus in this release. 2D animation and terrain creation was tedious enough that I built a tool around it—draw, animate, export to Godot if anyone needs it. It also now become a full game engine!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBLFv5R8jJI

[2] https://craftmygame.com/
by nayuki | 2026-01-30 15:59:36+00:00
> Doin’ It With A 555: One Chip to Rule Them All

> We also know that microcontrollers implement logic gates – AND, OR, NOT, NAND, etc. But you don’t have to deal with those complicated logic functions, or worse, the software that runs on those microcontrollers. Get down to brass tacks and use hardware (555 ICs and 555 timer ICs, to name a few the only important ones) that just works!

Come on, you haven't even described how to implement combinational logic using 555 timer chips. Just show us how to build NAND, please.
by bespokedevelopr | 2026-01-30 16:00:22+00:00
That only means they have to be built in counties which are part of that compact, or have approved provisions to return the water back to be net-neutral and comply with environmental impact laws (unless your Foxconn or legacy manufacturer or farmer). However, Beaver Dam WI as this article calls out is along a fresh water source and does not require Lake Michigan water.

The other locations like Oracle’s dc in Port Washington or MS in Racine/Kenosha area are located such that they are within the defined boundaries outlined and dc unlike Foxconn are all ‘closed-loop’ which of course isn’t entirely perfect but certainly not on the scale of Foxcon’s 7mil gal/day nonsense.
by thethimble | 2026-01-30 16:00:22+00:00
Clawdbot is one of those things that's really hard to get unless you have experienced it.

It's got four things that make it great:

1. Discord/Slack/WA/etc integration so those apps become your frontend

2. Filesystem for long term memory and state

3. Easy extensibility with skills

4. Cron for recurring jobs

Sure, many of these things exist in other systems but none in a cohesive package that makes it fun and easy.
by mschuster91 | 2026-01-30 16:00:25+00:00
> Yes, they want Taiwan, but that’s a silly national pride thing. It would not really benefit them to take it by force.

We thought the same about Putin, and yet he went and invaded Ukraine.

We thought the same about Trump, and yet he went and abducted the president of a sovereign country.

Never underestimate nationalist BS or outright mental deficiency.
by atonse | 2026-01-30 16:00:26+00:00
I built something like this over the last 2 months (my company's name is Kaizen, so the bot's named "Kai"), and it helps me run my business. Right now, since I'm security obsessed, everything is private (for example, it's only exposed over tailscale, and requires google auth).

But I've integrated with our various systems (quickbooks for financial reporting and invoice tracking, google drive for contracts, insurance compliance, etc), and built a time tracking tool.

I'm having the time of my life building this thing right now. Everything is read only from external sources at the moment, but over time, I will slow start generating documents/invoices with it.
by tonypaterson | 2026-01-30 16:00:50+00:00
A 4 seater dining table and chairs set with corner legs often restricts where people can sit. The unique cross-leg design of this 160 cm set allows for complete freedom along the perimeter of the table. This is particularly useful for UK homes where the dining room table and chairs might be pushed against a wall on one side, as it allows users to slide into the seats without hitting their shins on a table leg.
by nancyminusone | 2026-01-30 16:02:43+00:00
>we could see

Well, that's just it. Those extentitential risks aren't even proven yet.

Meanwhile, threats to resources are already being felt today. "just overhaul our infrastructure" isn't an actionable solution that will magically fix things today or next week. Even if these don't end up being big problems in the grand scheme of things doesn't mean they aren't problems now.
by 542354234235 | 2026-01-30 16:02:50+00:00
They aren't doing whataboutism. They are comparing prohibition/criminalization of a harmful industry to regulation, and the effects of both. Gambling isn't exactly good, but there is definitely a difference between a mafia bookies and regulated sports betting services and the second/third order effects from both. Treating drug use as a criminal act, as opposed to a healthcare problem, has very different societal effects.

Whataboutism is more like "Side A did bad thing", "oh yeah, what about side B and the bad things they have done". It is more just deflection. While using similar/related issues to inform and contextualize the issue at hand can also be overused or abused, but it is not the same as whataboutism, which is rarely productive.
by hedora | 2026-01-30 16:03:24+00:00
So, there are two theories:

a) Teslas are unsafe. The sparse data they're legally obligated to provide shows this clearly.

b) Elon Musk is sitting on a treasure trove of safety data showing that FSD finally works safely + with superhuman crash avoidance, but is deciding not to share it.

You're honestly going with (b)? We're talking about the braggart that purchased Twitter so he could post there with impunity. To put it politely, it would be out of character for him to underpromise + overdeliver.
by ollin | 2026-01-30 16:03:24+00:00
A lot of people mentioned this! The "dreamlike" comparison is common as well. In both cases, you have a network of neurons rendering an image approximating the real world :) so it sort of makes sense.

Regarding the specific boiling-textures effect: there's a tradeoff in recurrent world models between jittering (constantly regenerating fine details to avoid accumulating error) and drifting (propagating fine details as-is, even when that leads to accumulating error and a simplified/oversaturated/implausible result). The forest trail world is tuned way towards jittering (you can pause with `p` and step frame-by-frame with `.` to see this). So if the effect resembles LSD, it's possible that LSD applies some similar random jitter/perturbation to the neurons within your visual cortex.
by lossolo | 2026-01-30 16:03:24+00:00
You should ask yourself this, not me, you're the one who blindly believes what Musk says. He also said he was creating a new political party in the US, how's that going? Did you believe him when he talked about landing people on Mars in 2018? It’s 2026. How is boring company going? etc.
I think you're overinterpreting what I wrote and projecting. I'm telling you how the physics works, and the physics is simple here: unless you change the physics or discover some exotic, cheap materials, this is 100% not economically viable today or in the near future.
by MyHonestOpinon | 2026-01-30 16:03:39+00:00
My latest take on AI assisted coding is that AI tools are an amplifier of the developer.

- A good and experienced developer who knows how to organize and structure systems will become more productive.

- An inexperienced developer will also be able to produce more code but not necessarily systems that are maintainable.

- A sloppy developer will produce more slop.