MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by epistasis | 2026-02-12 03:18:50+00:00
There's a huge diversity of pricing and regulatory schemes across the US. I think you skepticism is well placed in general, because where I live in California the price increase has been almost entirely from bad grid maintenance policies of years past but people come up with random other excuses.

However there are some examples where increased demand by one sector leads to higher prices for everyone. The PJM electricity market has a capacity market, where generators get compensated for being able to promise the ability to deliver electricity on demand. When demand goes up, prices increase in the capacity market, and those prices get charged to everyone. In the last auction, prices were sky high, which leads to higher electricity prices for everyone:

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/pjm-interconnection-capacit...

A lot of electricity markets in other places allow procurement processes where increased costs to meet demand get passed to all consumers equally. If these places were actually using IRPs that had up to date pricing, adding new capacity from renewables and storage would lower prices, but instead many utilities go with what they know, gas generators, which are in short supply and coming in at very high prices.

And the cost of the grid is high everywhere. As renewables and storage drive down electricity generation prices, the grid will come to be a larger and larger percentage of electricity costs. Interconnection is just one bit of the cost, transmission needs to be upgraded all around as overall demand grows. We've gone through a few decades of stagnant to lessening electricity demand, and utilities are hungry to do very expensive grid projects because they get a guaranteed rate of return on grid expansion in most parts of the country.
by ergocoder | 2026-02-12 03:19:50+00:00
That's not true.

We can easily look at countries like Vietnam and Thailand where the merit is basically exam-based. Extremely difficult to cheat or "give the appearance".

The upper middle class's children perform very well. The top universities are full of these children. They are the top of the country. They are math/computer/science olympiads

If you are too rich, then the children are too spoiled. If you are too poor, then you don't have time and space to study nor access to private tutors.
by reliabilityguy | 2026-02-12 03:20:24+00:00
> Crime? I concede that if someone is illegal and they get stopped by law enforcement then I understand if they need to be deported. They are, after all, here illegally.

I am not sure I understand your position. If someone in the country illegally, then unless they commit a crime, or stopped by law enforcement, they should not be deported?

> The veteran from my previous comment should not have been deported after having served our nation honorably, but that is a one-off.

I’ve read the story in your link, and something is off. The person in question came to the country legally (not clear what it means in terms of his immigration status — maybe he came on a tourist visa, and then overstayed? Student visa -> overstay/fall out of status?) in 1975. At some point served in the army, which again was possible during some periods of time between 1975 and 2007 (perhaps even later), honorably discharged. Then, after some questionable things (not necessarily crimes, circa 2007) something went sideways, and lead to order of removal in 2014. The guy is old, and from a humanitarian perspective, IMO, he should not get deported. I still do not understand why he did not naturalize, but it is irrelevant at the moment.

> My point is that we have people at the top levels of government and corporation who have associated with a known sex trafficker. We have crimes literally right in front of our faces. Why are we spending resources on building a secret police of masked thugs who are basically doing whatever they want however they want, to deport people hanging outside of Home Depot?
> Again, what problem are we trying to solve here? Are we just looking for people to deport, or are we trying to reduce crime? If we are looking for people to deport, then they should just say that instead of pretending like they are going after violent criminals and gangbangers, but then deporting gardeners.

Why there should be a focus on only one? I mean, if you are doing an investigation into drug trafficking, make an arrest, and then discover that one of the arrestees is also committed another crime. Would you charge this person with the newly discovered crime, or not?
Pre-training vs. post-training is a false dichotomy
by ariansyah | 2026-02-12 03:20:25+00:00
Post-training is higher ROI right now because base models are undertrained relative to what post-training can extract from them. But post-training has a hard ceiling: it can only surface what pre-training put there.

Most frontier labs are converging on the same capability ceiling — likely because the training data is basically the same internet. If that's the bottleneck, the next real leap is a pre-training problem, not a post-training one. Another RLHF variant won't get us there.
by nofriend | 2026-02-12 03:20:45+00:00
It depends. If the law says "you must perform such-and-such steps to verify age" then no, they don't care if you can counter it. If the law says "you must use an approach that is at least x% effective" then yes they do care if enough people counter it.

We already had a half-assed solution, where websites would require you to press the button that says "I am over 18". Clearly somebody decided that wasn't good enough. That person is not going to stop until good enough is achieved.
by johnnyanmac | 2026-02-12 03:21:20+00:00
>And I did engage with the real point

You did not and still are not. This isnt about making billionaires cover the entire country's budget. Its about making sure power doesn't consolidate in any one person.

Do I really need to repost the other 80% of my comment (the entire 2.point?) Which part of "high corporate taxes mean business owners invest in business" needs clarification? Are we suggesting that the tax codes in which the baby boomers boomed under did not in fact make America Great?
by jackling | 2026-02-12 03:21:28+00:00
Both those statements need to be prove for her, and I don't see any strong evidence for either.

And if someone was going to to make false allegations of abuse, why include specifics about how interrupting his calculus and drums caused his anger? Why not just say he was abusive, or state a more common reason for abuse? To me, the specifics make her statement more credible. Combined with his predatory history regarding women[1], I view Feynman as a distrubed individual (but a genius nonetheless)

I find the allegation credible, as I don't see why someone in her position would lie, and especially give specific details on what sets Feynman off.

Also, unless I see some concrete data about the amount/percentage of women who lie in order to get a divorce, the comment you linked is pure conjecture. Nothing really to argue about since it's just the vague idea of what people think about that time.

[1] https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/surely-youre-a-creep-mr-fey...
by chao- | 2026-02-12 03:21:29+00:00
As someone who has used and enjoyed Heroku off-and-on since 2010, I was rattled by the phrasing of the announcement.

Reading comments about people's challenges and displeasures with Heroku over the years, they have almost never resonated with me. When the complaints were contextualized, I certainly understood them, but they have not been applicable to my needs and experiences.

My current team at work had a meeting about the announcement, and decided to spend gradual time over the next year exploring how we would migrate off Heroku if we must, and running tests of our own alternative infra in pursuit of that. It is also our desire not to need to! Our first-pass assessment of such a migration is that it would (1) be time-consuming at the expensive of other work, (2) be more expensive (in engineering time) than we presently spend, and (3) likely result in worse DX than what Heroku provides.

We definitely don't want to leave, but we also know the professional choice is to be prepared to do so within the next year or two. We would not have had that conversation at all if the announcement had not been so strange. If I have any feedback for the leadership at Salesforce, it would be that: communicate better, because you are pushing otherwise-satisfied customers away.
by groundzeros2015 | 2026-02-12 03:21:40+00:00
I guess I’ll assume you’re asking in good faith.

The article is not about how monopolies are good for society.

It’s about how businesses over emphasize small differences which make them indistinguishable from their competition.

It’s better to be in your own category rather than a slightly different permutation.

Capturing the value you produce from a business is actually very difficult. Think about how many Facebook users are a net less for the business. Good business plans also plan for capturing value.
by neom | 2026-02-12 03:22:10+00:00
Yours is good, I build something similar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46850284 - My idea was a bit more.. "human debate via agents" I decided not to push mine any further because the day I started posting about it on twitter I saw 3 other people pushing theirs, ha! Seems this idea will be a popular one. Great work.
by dunham | 2026-02-12 03:24:54+00:00
CNN is now reporting that the FAA had a meeting scheduled with the DoD on the 20th to discuss use of the system, but someone decided to use the system earlier. (The 20th is one day short of 10 days.) They also report that CBP was operating it.

https://lite.cnn.com/2026/02/11/us/faa-el-paso-texas-flight-...
by FranklinJabar | 2026-02-12 03:24:59+00:00
> it’s clear that in AI they are already far behind other companies.

I think it's exactly the opposite, actually. They've integrated AI flawlessly into existing products to an extent nobody else has even come close to. Photos, for instance, makes better use of AI than any other photo management app in existence. If anything, ChatGPT/Microsoft/Google/etc are absolutely crippled because they don't have access to the data people actually use on a day to day basis—instead, it's scattered across a million browser apps and private silos.

And, you don't have to use an asinine chatbot integration looking like a fool to use it.

Perhaps Google comes the closest to being able to capitalize on this, but I can't say I can remember using any AI integration they have, and I stopped giving them my data over a decade ago.
by scottLobster | 2026-02-12 03:25:02+00:00
It isn't "my scenario". These are real cases.

https://www.aclu-mn.org/press-releases/victory-judge-dismiss...

"In his decision, Judge Cajacob asserts that the purpose and intent of Minnesota’s child pornography statute does not support punishing Jane Doe for explicit images of herself and doing so “produces an absurd, unreasonable, and unjust result that utterly confounds the statue’s stated purpose.”"

Nothing in there about "likeability" or "we let her off because she had nice tits" (which would be particularly weird in this case). Judges have a degree of discretion to interpret laws, they still have to justify their decisions. If you think the judge is wrong then you can appeal. This is how the law has always worked, and if you've thought otherwise then consider you've been living under this "insane system" for your entire life, and every generation of ancestors has too, assuming you're/they've been in the US.
by kace91 | 2026-02-12 03:25:06+00:00
>They can trivially pay Google a billion a year for Gemini.

But they can’t vertically integrate the feature, not with acceptable levels of reliability and security.

That’s the key issue here, an apple AI would be something that can read and interact with your mail, pictures, contacts, location, and so on, but right now giving such access to an LLM would be a ticking timebomb. And those kind of integrated products are probably coming to competitors, even if their security plan is just YOLO.
by quadtree | 2026-02-12 03:25:11+00:00
The reference to vigilante justice may be about killing a suspect before they're imprisoned or even tried, such as when a mob storms the local jail. The theory is, if people believe only death can bring justice, and the state doesn't have the death penalty, then the vigilantes will take matters into their own hands. Ergo, the state should have the death penalty.

Having recently done an in-depth review of arguments for and against the death penalty,[1] I can say that this argument is not prominent in the discourse.

[1]: https://fairmind.org/guides/death-penalty
by epistasis | 2026-02-12 03:26:44+00:00
Adding new electricity demand to the grid should not be viewed as breaking windows and robbing others. When I bought an EV, I increased my electricity demand a huge amount, but it's not like I'm stealing from my neighbors. No rules were broken. We just need to make sure that I pay enough for my additional demand.

> AI sector will need at least 50 gigawatts of capacity over the next several years.

The error bars on this prediction are extremely large. It would represent a 5% increase in capacity in "the next several years" which is only a percent or two per year, but it could also only be 5GW over the next several years. 50GW represents about 1 year of actual grid additions.

> All of you building these things for these people should be embarrassed and ashamed.

I'm not building these things, and I think there should be AI critique, but this is far over the top. There's great value for all of humanity in these tools. The actual energy use of a typical user is not much more than a typical home appliance, because so many requests are batched together and processed in parallel.

We should be ashamed of getting into our cars every day, that's a true harm to the environment. We should have built something better, allowed more transit. A daily commute of 30 miles is disastrous for the environment compared other any AI use that's really possible at the moment.

Let's be cautious of AI but keep our critiques grounded in reality, so that we have enough powder left to fight the rest of things we need to change in society.
by strangeattractr | 2026-02-12 03:26:52+00:00
I think this is wrong. Google is a competitor both in devices and in the OS for mobile devices. Apple charge a premium that they justify by superior features, ease of use, effortless integration with other Apple products and so on. I wonder how well they will be able to produce differentiating iOS AI features whilst they use Gemini. I suspect it will more or less have parity with Android devices. If more and more interactions with the device occur through this AI interface I wonder what that does to the perception of Apple products. I suppose they already have the worst AI voice assistant and it hasn't damaged them all that much.
Show HN: OctoStore = Leader election as a service (single binary, self-hostable)
by TheIronYuppie | 2026-02-12 03:28:04+00:00
I got tired of standing up etcd clusters just to do leader election. Every option is either "run your own consensus cluster" or "use AWS."

OctoStore is distributed locking as a simple HTTP API. Sign up with GitHub, get a bearer token, POST to acquire a lock. That's it.

Under the hood: single Rust binary (Axum + DashMap + SQLite). No Redis, no Raft, no consensus protocol. Fencing tokens for actual safety (unlike Redlock). Locks auto-expire at max 1 hour, 100 locks per account.

Free hosted at api.octostore.io, or download the binary and self-host. SDKs for Python, Go, Rust, TypeScript, Java, C#, Ruby, PHP.

No business model. No enterprise tier. No VC funding. Just a thing that should exist.

Landing page: https://octostore.io/
API docs: https://api.octostore.io/docs
GitHub: https://github.com/octostore/octostore.io
by zhcalvin | 2026-02-12 03:28:16+00:00
Just published an OpenClaw-like project on github, 30MB without any dependency. Here are core advantages:

Zero Dependency — Single 30MB binary, no Node.js/Python runtime needed, just scp and run
Cloud Relay — No public server, domain registration, or HTTPS certificate needed, 5-min setup for WeCom/WeChat
Browser Automation — Built-in CDP protocol control, snapshot-then-act pattern, no Puppeteer/Playwright installation
75+ MCP Tools — Covers files, Shell, system, network, calendar, Git, GitHub, and more
China Platform Native — DingTalk, Feishu, WeCom, WeChat Official Account ready out-of-box
Embedded Friendly — Compile to ARM/MIPS, easy deployment to Raspberry Pi, routers, NAS
Multi-AI Backend — 15 AI providers including Claude, DeepSeek, Kimi, MiniMax, Gemini, OpenAI, and more
by Dylan16807 | 2026-02-12 03:28:34+00:00
> "Committing to buying the glass to replace the window I broke in your shop to rob the place, you're welcome."

Buying electricity isn't inherently destructive. That's a very bad analogy.

> These things are so hideously inefficient. All of you building these things for these people should be embarrassed and ashamed.

I'm not arguing that they are efficient right now, but how would you measure that? What kind of output does it have to make per kWh of input to be acceptable? Keep in mind that the baseline of US power use is around 500GW and that currently AI is maybe 10.
by dmoy | 2026-02-12 03:28:46+00:00
Probably reaaaallly depends on the organ.

Some of the very old very large ones have some strength+endurance requirements.

Much newer ones with electronic actions and whatnot don't have any such problems.

Majority of organists are men (in the US at least).

My wife plays the organ; it looks like dark voodoo magic, with two hands and two feet flying at the same time and so many different types of sounds coming out. She sticks entirely to electric organs.
by paulcole | 2026-02-12 03:29:02+00:00
The idea of clearing physical and digital workspaces is part of the system discussed in Work Clean:

https://workclean.com/

I’ve been using a personal variation of this system for over 4 years now and it’s outstanding for me. I firmly believe that for the vast majority of people (myself included), working without a plan is one of the dumbest things they can do.
by woodruffw | 2026-02-12 03:29:11+00:00
I think this is great advice. One thing that I think is simultaneously trite and under-appreciated is the degree to which writing itself drives strong memory formation, even if the notes themselves aren’t particularly good or detailed. I’ve been keeping technical notebooks for about a decade now, and I’ve found that I can open up to almost any page and remember exactly what I was thinking when I scrawled on it. By contrast, things I write in Obsidian need much more context (i.e. detail) to remind me what I was thinking.
by zdragnar | 2026-02-12 03:30:31+00:00
> 2) stimulated Heroku's product roadmap by giving it a very large and loyal design partner

This is very much a double-edged sword. I've seen products get killed because they had one outsized customer with outsized influence over the product design and made it too specific to that customer rather than building something for everyone the customer would have to adapt to.

If they had, heroku would be very different today, since they aren't even doing enterprise contracts anymore (from what I saw of some other comments here). Maybe that would have been a good thing, maybe not.
by some_furry | 2026-02-12 03:30:44+00:00
Dang, I think this might've been a mistake.

Taggart's blog post was their opinion on Discord alternatives with an arbitrary ranking. Mine was about the whole notion of asking for alternatives to Discord being a bad question to ask. They're not really the same discussion. The only thing similar is the (truncated) title.

(Truncated because the actual title is On Discord Alternatives rather than merely "Discord Alternatives".)
by sh34r | 2026-02-12 03:30:55+00:00
Why does everything have to be in the TUI? I like the TUI. But I also want all the logs. And I do mean all of them.

Of course all the logs can’t be streamed to a terminal. Why would they need to be? Every logging system out there allows multiple stream handlers with different configurations.

Do whatever reasonable defaults you think make sense for the TUI (with some basic configuration). But then I should also be able to give Claude-code a file descriptor and a different set of config optios, and you can stream all the logs there. Then I can vibe-code whatever view filter I want on top of that, or heck, have a SLM sub-agent filter it all for me.

I could do this myself with some proxy / packet capture nonsense, but then you’d just move fast and break my things again.

I’m also constantly frustrated by the fancier models making wrong assumptions in brownfield projects and creating a big mess instead of asking me follow-up questions. Opus is like the world’s shittiest intern… I think a lot of that is upstream of you, but certainly not all of it. There could be a config option to vary the system prompt to encourage more elicitation.

I love the product you’ve built, so all due respect there, but I also know the stench of enshittification when I smell it. You’re programmers, you know how logging is supposed to work. You know MCP has provided a lot of these basic primitives and they’re deliberately absent from claude code. We’ve all seen a product get ratfucked internally by a product manager who copied the playbook of how Prabhakar Raghavan ruined google search.

The open source community is behind at the moment, but they’ll catch up fast. Open always beats closed in the long run. Just look at OpenAI’s fall into disgrace.
by FireBeyond | 2026-02-12 03:31:25+00:00
Oh absolutely. The amount of times I have to pause, take a deep breathe and OVER-enunciate (still with mixed success) because my voice, pulse rise and my patience decreases with every absolute butchering (like not even "close but no cigar" but "how on earth did you come up with that?") Siri does to dictated text message in CarPlay...
by tylerchr | 2026-02-12 03:31:37+00:00
Yes, or at least that’s the reason Jobs gave in the original Jan 2007 keynote:

> We’re going to be shipping these in June. We’re announcing it today because with products like this we’ve got to go ahead and get FCC approval which takes a few months, and we thought it would be better if we introduced this rather than ask the FCC to introduce it for us. So here we are.
by mmooss | 2026-02-12 03:32:41+00:00
It's another claim of powerlessness, which is exactly what the 'fossil energy industry' wants people to say - it's demoralizing, paralyzing, and like any disinformation it's a distraction from actually doing something; now we're debating this stuff instead of doing something. So is the victim debate - who is at fault, assessing blame, etc.

Nobody, as a single human being, can accomplish much in any field. Every significant thing humanity does happens in large groups. The good news is, we are hardwired to work in groups - you see it all over, all the time. People naturally organize and work together; think of FOSS projects, for example. And that is what democracy is, and democracy is the most dynamic, effective, changeable method of government in human history.

Let's stop wasting time debating it and get to work. A simple thing to do is to reduce personal climate output. Again, you can't have much effect alone, but humans act together, and we all can do our part. That's why there isn't trash covering the streets - one person can't prevent that, but everyone is putting their garbage in the bin.

I am responsible for the consequences of my actions and words, and for my community - we all are, of course. The victim / blame perspective is the opposite of that - victimhood is a justification / rationalization for a lack of responsibility, for inaction. As anyone with experience of decent management knows, that is the last thing you do. The problem needs to be solved.