MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hollerith | 2026-02-26 14:27:56+00:00
The average person in the US uses about 80 to 100 gallons of water per day. Of course, just to survive, he or she would need vastly less than that (mostly for cooking and drinking, a little for washing and rinsing wounds). A person can of course survive for years without bathing or showering. Indirectly, the average consumption rate is a lot more -- about 2000 gallons. Food production accounts for about 90% to 95% of that, but again during the months and years right after a massive nuclear attack, the survivors of the attack can obtain most of their protein and calories from food grown before the attack. So, you can sustain a "population center" on rainfall, ground water and surface water especially of the members of the "population center" can relocate if they find themselves in a place (Phoenix AZ?) where there is not enough water to go around.

Fuel is similar: the amount currently used by the average person is much higher than the amount needed (i.e., to transport food and other essentials) just to keep people alive until our industrial base can be reconstituted enough that survival becomes easy again, so we can expect to be able to survive for a few years on fuel that was produced before the attack. Most motor vehicles will probably survive the attack, for example, according to analyses made by US war planners during the cold war, and the fuel tanks of each of them will on average be about half full even if no warning of the attack reaches the general public. Home heating is not strictly necessary for survival except maybe on the coldest nights of the year, which is good because I doubt there is enough firewood in the continental US to keep the survivors of the attack warm every night for a few years.
by elcritch | 2026-02-26 14:28:56+00:00
> For me it's the constant feel of everything being "exciting" while no real information is actually conveyed. It's a common tactic of both AI and clickbaity articles.

Yes! You put your finger on what bugs me about "no LLM" rules. It's not that LLMs writing isn't uniquely bad, but that it tends towards low quality clickbaity prone writing we already see everywhere. Banning LLM content is redundant.

Side note, I'd guess LLMs don't tend towards vapid writing just because of clickbaity training material. Rather it's more fundamental. Writing well takes effort and energy. LLMs seem to avoid effort just like humans. Emotional based reasoning in humans is itself a heuristic system favored by evolution. Thinking is expensive. Emotional slop is cheap.
by clcaev | 2026-02-26 14:29:08+00:00
We really could use better treatments for chronic pain.

I've found low dose naltrexone to be somewhat effective for severe chronic pain. Not as good as opiods.

THC can also help somewhat, but its action seems so dissociative. At an effective level for chronic pain, I'm sleepwalking though the day.

Opioids or their analogues cause or complicate bowel issues. Four years of 200mg/day Tramadol really helped me, but it shredded my gut. Getting off Tramadol wasn't hard for me. I'd stay on it were it not for the gut issues.

As an aside, lacing hydrocodone with acetaminophen is truly a horrific practice. Doctors prescribe this to patients on hepotoxic drugs and are shocked when they get liver damage.
by itmitica | 2026-02-26 14:29:39+00:00
I appreciate your work.

But, again, from a productivity point of view, and from a correctness of approach point of view, I have learned this:

1. Avoid overengineering against/at all costs.

2. Doing the project is doing the project, anything else is ... not doing the project :) https://www.softwaredesign.ing/blog/doing-the-thing-is-doing...
by piltdownman | 2026-02-26 14:30:16+00:00
I mean they're the discount bus of the skies, designed for students and people on weekend breaks inter-EU. Avoid flying to Paris (Buvais) or certain other 'city' airports, keep your carry-on luggage within limits, and they're basically fine.

They've a safety record that's beyond reproach, and where else are you going to get flights for ~€50 across Europe?

If nothing else they disrupted a predatory pricing cartel. I'm old enough to remember when a flight England->Ireland or Spain->Portugal could be the guts of €300 or €400. Now we have a complete revision on pricing and it paved the way for multiple good budget carriers like Transavia.

Not to mention Michael O'Leary being an absolute rogue with his PR - particularly the recent spat with Elon Musk

https://www.euronews.com/business/2026/01/21/big-idiot-boost...
by HelixSequencing | 2026-02-26 14:30:18+00:00
What's wild to me is that people worry about writing style fingerprinting while casually uploading their literal DNA to consumer genomics companies. 23andMe went bankrupt and suddenly 15 million people's most identifying data imaginable is an asset in a fire sale.

Your writing style can theoretically be masked with an LLM. Your genome can't. And it doesn't just identify you -- it identifies your relatives, your disease risks, your ancestry, things you might not even know about yourself yet. The deanonymization vector here is permanent and irrevocable in a way that no amount of OPSEC can fix after the fact.

The semantic approach in this paper (interests, clues, behavioral patterns) is scary enough. Now imagine combining that with leaked genetic data. You don't even need to match writing styles when you can match someone's 23andMe profile to their health subreddit posts about conditions they're genetically predisposed to.
by nickdothutton | 2026-02-26 14:30:40+00:00
Unfortunately the UK now has an economy which is 83% services vs around 50% in 1970. Services are much more volatile with less certainty than say manufacturing or primary industry. So employment in services is going to be volatile and hard to predict, certainty has declined for all, employers and workers. A given employer only has the power if he is the only, or one of just a few in town. If not then the worker has the opportunity to seek hours somewhere else from someone else, at least if these jobs/gigs are relatively unskilled, which most are.

What I don't agree with, the underpayment of workers enabled by government "subsidies". A barista in London may be offered £21K per year to work all his shifts (I'm looking at a job ad), yet needs double that to live, so government "subsidises" the employer by providing the other "missing" £20K in universal credit, housing benefit, and so on. It's no wonder employers take advantage of this.

Meanwhile the customer thinks his coffee costs him £3, in fact the true cost is a multiple of that because of the ~£20K "subsidy". Meanwhile you can hear the faint sound of laughter, which is the employer, knowing that the taxpayer is picking up half his true wage bill.
by cmrdporcupine | 2026-02-26 14:31:12+00:00
Anthropic has been doing these things independent of what the US admin has publicly asked for, even before Hegseth started breathing down their neck. They were already taking DoD contracts and like, just like the rest of them. Hegseth, with the skill all schoolyard bullies have, simply smells their weakness and is going for the jugular now.

They also have never had any guarantees they wouldn't f*ck around with non-US citizens, for surveillance and "security", because like most US tech companies they consider us to be second/lower class human beings of no relevance, even when we pay them money.

At least Google, in its early days, attempted a modest and naive "internationalism" and tried to keep their hands clean (in the early days) of US foreign policy things... inheriting a kind of naive 1990s techno-libertarian ethos (which they threw away during the time I worked there, anyways). I mean, they only kinda did, but whatever.

Anthropic has been high on its own supply since its founding, just like OpenAI. And just as hypocritical.
by sgarland | 2026-02-26 14:31:28+00:00
Neither is Vonnegut's (which your short, choppy sentences reminded me of), but he was a very successful and beloved author. I'm in no way comparing myself to Vonnegut, but my point is just because it doesn't appeal to you, it doesn't mean it isn't good.

Writing is art. Does it get the intended point across? Does it resonate with the reader? Does it make them feel something? Then it is good.
by adamtaylor_13 | 2026-02-26 14:32:02+00:00
I have a family member with a serious health problem, and I've been using Claude code to put together a very comprehensive medical dossier.

I'm not worried about the privacy aspect though many suggest that I should be. The power the dossier has given them to navigate the medical industry in the United States has been absolutely incredible. They don't have to be stuck when a random doctor who has never heard of their illness suggests that they might be overreacting. They can simply find someone who will help them. They can talk, in medical lingo, about their test results and discuss them with the doctor on equal footing.

I'm not sure this would've been nearly as successful without Opus 4.5/4.6 driving the harness. I'm not also not sure what real privacy risk there is here; it all sounds very theoretical.
by nephihaha | 2026-02-26 14:32:04+00:00
Yeah, a shiny object gets dangled in front of them. The Drew Pavlou case in Australia is very telling. The University of Queensland was pretty much in the pocket of the CCP, including having the local consul on its board. When Pavlou protested on Chinese human rights issues, he ended up suspended for two years. The UoQ obviously relishes Chinese students and investment, but wouldn't allow criticism of the regime.
by Jackson__ | 2026-02-26 14:32:12+00:00
As someone who is new to the whole google cloud ecosystem, the amount of dark patterns they employ are absolutely shocking. Just off the top of my head:

1. You never know how much a single API request will cost or did cost for the gemini api

2. It takes anywhere between 12-24 hours to tell you how much they will charge you for past aggregate requests

3. No simple way to set limits on payment anywhere in google cloud

4. Either they are charging for the batch api before even returning a result, or their "minimal" thinking mode is burning through 15k tokens for a simple image description task with <200 output tokens. I have no way of knowing which of the two it is. The tokens in the UI are not adding up to the costs, so I can only assume its the first.

5. Incomplete batch requests can't be retrieved if they expire, despite being charged.

6. A truly labyrinthine ui experience that makes modern gacha game developers blush

All I have learned here is to never, ever use a google product.
by spwa4 | 2026-02-26 14:32:29+00:00
That's because the reasoning does go in circles.

0) Zero tolerance! We still remember how it ended last time!

1) But ... pain medication helps against anything. From headaches to hernia to bone cancer (of course in some cases it's in a "die somewhat dignified" sense). And in quite a few cases it's the only thing that helps ... In the medical sense of "helping", after all medicine can't make people live forever so that can't be the goal. The goal is better quality of life, ie. mostly longer life, including the ability to live (think "sing, dance and play tennis") ... and not life at any cost.

The problem here is that this is an entirely correct argument. Some diseases are either incredibly painful or long-term painful. Bone cancer or hernia can serve as examples. We cannot really help such people (by that I mean: not in a way that the pain stops). So can we at least make their life livable?

2) This pain medication sure helps these very seriously ill people well. But X suffering is at least as bad as bone cancer! X then is everything from still serious diseases, psychological suffering, and of course this then goes down and down until someone points out pain medication also helps existential dread and lackluster parties.

Again, all of that ... is true. That's not the problem.

3) The medication becomes the problem. Mostly because of what people do to get money for their fix (and the crime, prostitution, ... that it leads to). But this is not the only problem. It makes people who broke a bone last week go skiing again. And ... I'm almost afraid to say it but you can increase the effect of morphine ... by damaging yourself. You can guess how that ends.

The problem is that pain medication, irrespective of whether it's physically ("biologically") addictive is addictive. Anybody who's had a serious pain for a week, say kidney stones, knows that they would have sacrificed their favorite cat for it to stop. The problem is not just that morphine is addictive. The problem is the pain, and the fact that pain medication is a temporary non-fix.

4) The medication becomes the problem, but doesn't just affect patients. It goes from "you know this funny thing happened to my niece ... and she did it to herself ..." to it destroys families, neighborhoods, childhoods ...

Result: ONLY ONE SOLUTION! ZERO TOLERANCE!

GOTO 1.
Show HN: Deploy OpenClaw in 60 seconds – one-click setup, no DevOps needed
by Abhinayguptha | 2026-02-26 14:32:30+00:00
Hey HN — I built openclawsetup.tech after seeing dozens of comments about people giving up on OpenClaw's setup process.
The traditional setup (VM, SSH, Node.js, API keys, messaging channels) takes 60+ minutes. This reduces it to 3 clicks: sign in, choose a model, deploy.
Managed hosting handles the infrastructure. Free tier available.
Would love feedback from this community.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2026-02-26 14:32:55+00:00
> concerns will turn towards the ecological ramifications of covering so much of the Earth's surface with ecological deserts

About that "solar panels cause ecological deserts" trope:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

https://glassalmanac.com/china-confirms-that-installing-sola...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrivoltaics
by simoncion | 2026-02-26 14:33:01+00:00
> Buses have a long tradition of user-hostile design. "Exact change only"...

On every pay-in-cabin bus I've ever ridden, this is synonymous with "No change given". The machines are quite happy to accept more money than is needed for a single ticket, and the reason for that is pretty obvious.

> It has always baffled me why they make it so hard for first-time users in particular.

The SFMTA (the San Francisco bus/train operator) provides a document that addresses almost everything you brought up. [0] The "unhelpful and condescending and impatient drivers" thing isn't addressed, but I've never run into a Muni driver that was anything but helpful. [3] As an added bonus, the most useful information about fares is posted in the paybox inside the bus.

[0] <https://www.sfmta.com/getting-around/muni/how-ride-muni-quic...> (via [1])

[1] <https://www.sfmta.com/visitors> (via [2])

[2] <https://www.sfmta.com>

[3] Granted, sometimes that help is "I don't know where that is, but I know you can't get to it on this line.".
by WarmWash | 2026-02-26 14:33:24+00:00
I'm not sure you understand what that krugman post is saying, but it's not saying that Europe has actually been keeping up with the US. It also doesn't refute anything I said, and infact actually supports it.

It's saying that prices of goods in Europe have remained in line with income that people get, people are happy, so who cares about anything else? And then there is short sentence at the end about tech is bad because it makes billionaires, so Europe need not worry.

Which all basically goes back to my point about Europe being happy with the status quo (the 30 yr post cold war vacation), and unwilling to change. However, like Krugman doesn't mention at all in his post, the status quo includes immense American tech and Chinese hardware imports.

So if Europe wants to stand on it's own, it's going to need to do very antithetical things relative to the current culture, that will in the short term be very painful for Europeans, but in the long term will provide the stability and independence they need.
Show HN: Coding agents find the right GPU bottleneck 70% of the time, fix it 30%
by ayushnangia16 | 2026-02-26 14:33:26+00:00
One of the authors. Some things that surprised us while running these experiments:

The tasks are pulled from real merged PRs in vLLM and SGLang, so there's a known-good human solution for each one. Agents get the full codebase, the issue description, and a test harness. Pretty generous setup.

What we didn't expect: the agents are genuinely good at diagnosing the problem. They read the code, find the bottleneck, describe the right fix. But then the generated code has subtle bugs. Off-by-one in kernel indexing, wrong tensor shapes, missing synchronization barriers. The kind of stuff that passes a code review at first glance but segfaults under load.

The other weird result: agent rankings completely invert between codebases. Claude Code is the best performer on vLLM (46%) but the worst on SGLang (27%). TRAE with GPT-5 is the opposite pattern. Same underlying models, different agent scaffolding. It suggests the scaffolding around the model matters at least as much as the model itself.

We also tried three open-source models. None produced a single working optimization. One of them (MiniMax-M2.1) got stuck in a loop printing "I need to actually use the tools now" 2,412 times without ever making a tool call.

The benchmark, all agent transcripts, and evaluation code are open: https://ayushnangia.github.io/iso-bench-website/

Curious what others think about the scaffolding result in particular feels underexplored.
by pooooka | 2026-02-26 14:33:44+00:00
The US did this dance with the devil in the pale moonlight before anyone, way back in the 19th century. Tens of thousands (millions) of wounded soldiers came back from the civil war in chronic pain and addicted to morphine. They put them on "lists" and prescribed them dope and it spiraled out of control. It got so bad that they engineered Heroin to be a safer alternative. And people forget, but the temperance movement wasn't just focused on alcohol. They were the primary forces behind the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914. And these people weren't bible thumping crusaders, many were like early feminists that lost children\husbands to drugs and alcohol. I think Europe eventually comes around to this same conclusion when enough damage has been done. Metering out hard drugs has always been a road to ruin.
by zug_zug | 2026-02-26 14:33:45+00:00
I do agree that bots are or will be an existential risk for every online forum. But I also think that an attempt to fix it that takes away anonymity is a cure that's worse than the disease.

My best understanding is yes -- there are signal that somebody is a bot (like how quickly they post), but if HN bans based on those signals then whoever made the bot will keep tweaking the code.

I feel like I rarely see bots in the top 5 comments of any article I read, or otherwise causing major disruption.

I think we just need to get creative about ways a platform can prove somebody is an invested human without tying it back to any personally identifiable information.
by gverrilla | 2026-02-26 14:34:02+00:00
Great reply, thank you!

I can see all the problems you mention, but I haven't started playing with the harnesses myself yet. Will read that repo when I get there.

Before reading you reply, I was under the vague impression that a harness really needed a lot of bells and whistles, and that it would be hard for FOSS to compete at pace with Claude Code or similar because of that only. But I see now there's a different path :)
by kardianos | 2026-02-26 14:35:09+00:00
I live in Texas, which is still part of the USA, and we manufacture a great deal.

I have a friend who works as an environmental engineer at a chem plant. They work hard to keep things safe and clean, and rigorously monitor their output.

I'm sure we could do even more if we weren't competing in meany areas against legal jurisdictions which DON'T care about such things. We aren't "priced out". We are regulated out and out competed by jurisdiction which have many fewer labor laws and much more lax environmental monitoring. If we are out-competed on product, then we deserve to loose, which is where libertarians and free-trade have a point. But if we are out-competed on keeping people and the environment reasonably safe? That's when we enact trade barriers.

That is how you actually keep the environment and people safe.
by roryirvine | 2026-02-26 14:36:09+00:00
Yes: Austria and Slovakia still do, possibly others as well. And Germany only stopped preventing it within the last year or two.

The UK will happily facilitate dual citizenship for current British citizens when they acquire new citizenship in one of those countries (eg. America famously makes you hand over your old passport, but the UK will happily ship you a replacement in an unmarked envelope), but that doesn't really work so well in the other direction.
by rickydroll | 2026-02-26 14:36:14+00:00
Yes, and that's a good thing. Because if I'm on transit and I read, I miss stops, sometimes as many as four or five. Then my day is really fucked. I literally have to sit there and count off every single stop. With driving, I don't have that problem. I have internal mapping and external GPS to remind me what I need to do next.

As for getting work done, back when I was an employee and using transit, two factors kept me from doing work on the transit system. First, my employer already got enough uncompensated labor from me. I wasn't going to give them any more. Second, I use speech recognition, and dictating company confidential information in a public setting is unwise at best.
by falcor84 | 2026-02-26 14:36:36+00:00
It's not the best, but there's a photo of the butterfly in Figure 1(B) on page 20.

On a separate note, if you're looking for something more explicit, that same figure has some suggestive violin plots in item F in the same figure, ironically with the caption even saying "Nymphalidae" (here referring to the family of butterflies, but "nymph" is also a general anatomical term/prefix for female genitals, or particularly the inner labia or clitoris).
by jcgrillo | 2026-02-26 14:36:59+00:00
A diesel electric hybrid, at least naively, makes quite a lot of sense to me. Your generator can be sized such that at full output at its torque peak it's making enough power to push the truck at highway speed up a slight incline (just slightly overpowered for maintaining highway cruise). Batteries take up the slack for starting, pulling hills, etc. Remains to be seen whether it actually works.
Show HN: Real-Time Satellite Tracking and Intelligence Dashboard
by keveenwong | 2026-02-26 14:36:59+00:00
Hey HN,

We built Heimdall (heimdallspace.com) because the existing tools for space situational awareness are genuinely painful to use: clunky interfaces, fragmented data sources, slow rendering. The ones that aren't are locked behind enterprise solutions. We thought the foundation of this should be open and accessible.

The goal is a satellite observability platform: one place that gives operators complete, real-time insight into their assets and the orbital environment around them. Today's release is the foundation—aggregating and rendering the full public space catalog (30,000+ objects) in real time.

How it works technically:

- SGP4 propagation running across web workers, computing positions every few frames

- Go backend ingesting TLEs hourly from Space-Track.org with daily metadata enrichment from GCAT

- React + Three.js frontend rendering 30,000+ objects as GPU point sprites with custom GLSL shaders

- 8K Earth textures with accurate solar-positioned day/night cycle

- Self-hosted on a VPS

Any feedback is appreciated. We'd also love technical feedback on the propagation approach, data pipeline, or anything that looks wrong or could be done better. We're looking for professionals in the space industry who might be able to provide real-world insight into what they want from the platform. We're early and building in the open, so this is a real ask.