MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eigenspace | 2026-02-03 19:02:32+00:00
GP was mocking you (not calling you names) because your comment was just a classic uninformed (some would even say stupid) opinion, and was presented as you "looking at wind as objectively as I can"

Maybe if you look at the comment context a little more objectively, you'll agree there's some thing quite funny about it.

_______________________________

Putting that aside though, lets look at your claim:

> there's serious ecological problems with these turbines, the materials cant be recycled, and their uninstallation is incredibly costly

First of all, it's only one subset of the materials (the fiberglass in the blades) that are difficult to recycle, the vast majority of the actual material is highly recyclable steel. The blades in a modern offshore turbine usually weigh around 80 metric tons at the high end.

Your typical modern offshore wind turbine has rated output of around 15 MW of power, with a yearly capacity factor of around 40% at the lower end, so an average output of around 6 MW. Multiply that by the more or less standard 25 year rated lifetime of the turbine, that means you can expect the turbine to produce around 1300 GWh of electrical energy over the course of its life.

How much energy is 1300 GWh? Well, to get 1300 GWh of electricity out of a high-efficiency (i.e. 50% efficiency) natural gas power plant, you'd need to burn around 175,000 tons of natural gas, (dumping all of the waste product into the gigantic open sewer we call our atmosphere).

That's about 3 orders of magnitude more mass in natural gas that will need to be burned (and don't forget, natural gas is non-recyclable!!1!!1) than the blades weigh.

This means that you went and tossed a thousand wind turbine blades in an incinerator for every turbine you actually install, you'll still break even on the amount of non-recyclable material

So forgive me for not taking your complaints very seriously.
by mlsu | 2026-02-03 19:02:33+00:00
> If you start imposing laws or other practices every time a group of people feel “uncomfortable”, the world will quickly grind to a halt.

I mean, yes, quite an apt description of our reality. This has basically been the modus operandi of the whole of American society for the last 3 decades.

Can't have your kids riding bikes in the neighborhood. Can't build something on your own property yourself without 3 rounds of permitting and environmental review. Can't have roads that are too narrow for a 1100 horsepower ladder truck. Can't get onto a plane without going through a jobs program. Can't cut hair without a certificate. Can't teach 6 year olds without 3 years of post grad schooling + debt. Can't have plants in a waiting room because they might catch on fire. Can't have a comfortable bench because someone who looks like shit might sleep on it.

Can't can't can't can't ...
by r2vcap | 2026-02-03 19:02:43+00:00
Wait…

https://xcodereleases.com hasn’t shown anything since last December, so I assumed Apple had taken a breather from Xcode development, but they released an RC build today?

Anyway, the Swift version seems unchanged (6.2.3), so is this update mainly for the so-called “Coding Intelligence” features?

In any case, Xcode isn’t my favorite IDE—it’s too slow and feels quite different from other major IDEs—so I probably won’t use it for day-to-day coding (though it’s fine for building and debugging).
by bityard | 2026-02-03 19:02:44+00:00
You are not wrong, small models can be trained for niche use cases and there are lots of people and companies doing that. The problem is that you need one of those for each use case whereas the bigger models can cover a bigger problem space.

There is also the counter-intuitive phenomenon where training a model on a wider variety of content than apparently necessary for the task makes it better somehow. For example, models trained only on English content exhibit measurably worse performance at writing sensible English than those trained on a handful of languages, even when controlling for the size of the training set. It doesn't make sense to me, but it probably does to credentialed AI researchers who know what's going on under the hood.
by allthetime | 2026-02-03 19:02:56+00:00
Honest question.

I've been using XCode for 10 years. For me, it's only improved and I don't have any real pain points. They are definitely fixing bugs. I make software for iOS, macOS, car play, and apple watch.

Sure sometimes I've got to reset or clear a cache, but this has never stopped my day.

What is so horrible about XCode?
by spwa4 | 2026-02-03 19:02:58+00:00
This is one problem, but in the GPDR's case it's worse: the law is designed for governments. The only people who can actually take action based on the GPDR ... are NOT the courts (same with the AI act btw).

Which governments have immediately used to:

1) exempt themselves from GPDR (e.g. allowing the use of medical data in divorce cases, and then refusing deletion of medical data from public institutions "for that reason". Then of course this was extended to tax enforcement (some of you European bastards DARE to try to get dental treatment when owing back taxes! Some things CANNOT be allowed)

2) they used it to attack certain firms for entirely reasonable reasons. One example, one of the very first cases, before the law was even in force was against Google. You see there are some online articles about José Manuel Barroso, the communist non-executive chairman and senior adviser of London-based Goldman Sachs International (yes, really, communist, not a joke), ex-socialist, then EU commission president ... that according to him violate the "right to be forgotten" (which technically doesn't apply to public figures, but apparently EU commission presidents aren't public figures)

There were some articles he wanted deleted about how technically he is (was?) a murder suspect (he organized and participated demonstrations where some people were killed by a mob that he was part of, and probably the leader of), and how there were complaints against him by his students that allege he beat them up (as in physically), apparently in arguments about financial systems (yes, even when he was a pretty extreme communist he was a professor). He couldn't get the articles deleted ... and so he wanted them hidden. He got what he wanted, without court involvement.
by mgbmtl | 2026-02-03 19:03:01+00:00
We have EU clients that now force us to use BBB (big blue button) for security reasons. It's not perfect, but good enough, and Zoom/Hangouts/Teams all have their quirks. We decided to adopt it where I work, and cut a few paid Zoom accounts.

Some clients use Jitsi, but I find it more complicated to run Jitsi in-house. BBB was really easy to setup.
by southerntofu | 2026-02-03 19:03:03+00:00
> de Gaulle would be considered insanely far right today

As much as it pains me to say this, because i myself consider de Gaulle to be a fascist in many regards, that's far from a majority opinion (disclaimer: i'm an anarchist).

I think de Gaulle was a classic right-wing authoritarian ruler. He had to take some social measures (which some may view as left-wing) because the workers at the end of WWII were very organized and had dozens of thousands of rifles, so such was the price of social peace.

He was right-wing because he was rather conservative, for private property/entrepreneurship and strongly anti-communist. Still, he had strong national planning for the economy, much State support for private industry (Elf, Areva, etc) and strong policing on the streets (see also, Service d'Action Civique for de Gaulle's fascist militias with long ties with historical nazism and secret services).

That being said, de Gaulle to my knowledge was not really known for racist fear-mongering or hate speech. The genocides he took part in (eg. against Algerian people) were very quiet and the official story line was that there was no story. That's in comparison with far-right people who already at the time, and still today, build an image of the ENEMY towards whom all hate and violence is necessary. See also Umberto Eco's Ur-fascism for characteristics of fascist regimes.

In that sense, and it really pains me to write this, but de Gaulle was much less far-right than today's Parti Socialiste, pretending to be left wing despite ruling with right-wing anti-social measures and inciting hatred towards french muslims and binationals.
by skippyboxedhero | 2026-02-03 19:03:10+00:00
Failing to make xenophobic choices when it comes to...enterprise software, is the issue?

The US has spent tens of trillions defending Europe indirectly subsidizing social policies despite this the US has persistently been unpopular with Europeans because, obviously, they are a political target for domestic politicians (btw, you see this almost everywhere...if country A gives country B subsidies, you will almost always find that country A's people are virulently hated by a significant proportion of country B's population, the US was more unpopular than Russian before the Ukraine invasion in Germany...let me just repeat: a country which invaded Europe was more popular than a country which gave hundreds of billions a year in defence subsidies).

Acting as if xenophobia towards the US hasn't always been part of the European political climate is not based in reality. Europe has been trying to protect its own market for decades, unsuccessfully. What is more, there is very limited trade WITHIN Europe in certain industries because of the hurdle of national xenophobia and protectionism. Europe has made an industry out of failure and greivance...and, for some reason, part of this narrative is that no country contributes as much as Europe.

Reality? Iran...continued to break US sanctions for years so that failing European defence companies could sell their junk, investigations of Iranian politicians bribing EU parliamentarians. Russia...continued to break US sanctions after Ukraine invasion, had an extremely subservient relationship with Russia despite being repeatedly told by the US that NordStream 2 would lead to Ukraine invasion, former German president actually works for NordStream. On and on, the same mistakes being made all the time because there has never been any real strategy apart from extreme short-term political advantage to protect continued failure to generate social or economic gain in most of Europe (not all tbf, but the executive polling numbers that you see in some countries is incredible, you wouldn't think they have elections).
by echelon | 2026-02-03 19:03:12+00:00
I see all of these analyses, and I think they're all wrong. They say stuff like:

> The main reason cited? The astronomical cost.

> Then there’s the state of the world. Climate change is looming over us. War is breaking out across the globe. Political instability has never felt more visceral than it does in an age where we see people murdered by state officials on our news feeds. It’s no wonder people are electing to delay or avoid having children to protect potential offspring from growing up in a broken world.

I call bullshit on both of these.

People who live in less comfort have more children.

I think we've reached such a high standard of living - autonomy, freedom from boredom, entertainment at the press of a button, etc. - that I couldn't even imagine trying to fit children into this as a man with all the money in the world.

There isn't enough time.

The middle class today have access to better lives than King Louis. Infinite entertainment, better food, vices, etc. Despite pressures, we're living in luxury relative to the past (minus that post-WWII bubble of abundance - that was an outlier). Life is too good, and we're holding everything to an incredible standard. Nobody wants to give up on that.

One hundred and fifty years ago you'd send your child to school barefoot and in rags.

Peter Zeihan likes to call children "expensive furniture". In the past, kids would be free labor for the farm. Nowadays, they come with rules, expectations, appointments. You're meant to helicopter over them, spend tons of money on them. They cost "a million dollars each" or something ridiculous. Gone are the days of making your children paint the fence for a nickel.

Who made these ridiculous rules?

But even that isn't the main reason.

We're asking modern adult parents to give up concerts, smart phones, video games, travel, hanging out with other adults. This is a uniquely post-millennial adulthood experience. In the past, these entitlements for adults were scarce. Adults had children and bore responsibility, and that's it. Now that's unthinkable. Adults have fun. Fun that's so abundant that we all have to maintain a baseline of dopamine, otherwise we feel ill.

Imagine going a week without your smartphone. That's the environment that produced the most kids. That era is gone.

The poorest regions are still having kids because they haven't been absorbed into the modern social internet experiment and pleasure chamber yet.

Smartphones and modern dopamine addiction killed kids.

I'm not making a value judgement, I'm just saying this is the reality we're in now vs. the past.
by kstrauser | 2026-02-03 19:03:22+00:00
I'll concede that, but that's still several years after the law was deployed and people had to kind of guess for a while.

GDPR isn't unique in that. When HIPAA came out in the US, no one was sure what it actually meant. I personally talked to hospital administrators who were convinced that we'd have to put up a "take a number" device in waiting rooms and call out "#53? It's your turn #53!", which the owners of the practice I ran flat-out refused to do: "the waiting room is currently occupied by Mr. Smith and Mrs. Jones, who have known each other since kindergarten, and I'm not going to refer to them as numbers". It took several years to build consensus on how to comply with it.
by poulsbohemian | 2026-02-03 19:03:23+00:00
>RealID is unrelated to citizenship.

Except that it appears one of the primary reasons this has become a thing is that the Feds are angry at states like Washington that don't verify citizenship when issuing driver's licenses. The whole point was that Washington (as an example) wanted to make sure people were able to get an identification and driving with a license (IE: some degree of documentation, had achieved some degree of driver's education and testing somewhere along the line...) regardless of their immigration status - and that pissed off the Feds. So it shouldn't be related to citizenship but that's part of how we got here.
by unyttigfjelltol | 2026-02-03 19:03:26+00:00
This is interesting! A fraudulent deed on your title doesn’t change rights, but it might require you to clarify them in court, which is costly and inconvenient. Traditional title insurance only covered addressing clouds on title that existed when you acquired, meaning post-acquisition clouds would be your problem, but supposedly there is an enhanced coverage that title insurance companies offer as well, and the decision to surface the difference (at least where I live) lands with the closing attorney… who isn’t actually required to do or say anything about this….
Show HN: A Python time and space complexity reference
by heikkitoivonen | 2026-02-03 19:03:28+00:00
Hi HN, I built this while doing a lot of LeetCode-style Python problems.

I ran into a case where I used a Python stdlib class but couldn’t confidently state its time or space complexity. The official docs didn’t mention it. When I asked in Python discussion forums whether complexity should be documented, the response was mixed.

I originally assumed a comprehensive reference would take too much manual effort, but realized that coding agents could help bootstrap it by extracting and summarizing information from the documentation and CPython source code.

To reduce errors, I had multiple agents (using different models) independently check the same sections and compare their results. The project is open source, so the idea is that remaining inaccuracies can be corrected over time.

I’d appreciate feedback on missing cases, incorrect assumptions, or whether this is useful in real Python work.

https://pythoncomplexity.com/
by dudeinhawaii | 2026-02-03 19:03:41+00:00
> Nah I disagree. A charter plane with 200 Dutch tourists is lower risk than a flight coming out of Bolivia.

What a weird and random thing to say. There's literally no data that can support for or against and neither have a history of terrorism.

Ironically KLM ('dutch') has had more terrorism per flight than any Bolivian airline. Both minimal (Bolivia 1954, KLM 1973,1994). There's literally no other piece of data between these countries that I could find to support this "lower risk".

Further, the travel advisory for Denmark and Netherlands cite terror risk while Bolivia cites civil unrest.

While being woke is not helpful, neither is 'winging it' based on 'what feels white, ahem, right'. At least do a Google search.
by its_magic | 2026-02-03 19:04:13+00:00
> Systemd is a standardization that is appealing to developers. They want to adopt it because it makes their life easier. It is just nice to know that all the tools you need for a system are there and work together. Pluggability is hard to maintain and is only done if there is no standardization.

That's the official story, but like most official stories, it doesn't really hold up to scrutiny.

I built an entire system from scratch with over 1,500 packages installed. Everything under the sun. Works just fine with sysvinit. Completely seamless.

If KDE/Gnome can't figure out how to fit in with the overall system design the same way thousands of other packages somehow manage to do, then their services are no longer required. Good riddance to their bloated asses. I prefer to invest my CPU cycles in better software.

Init scripts for services and such are properly handled by the distro maintainer (packager), not the developer, although it's always nice to see examples he's provided to help guide the development of my preferred version.
by dathinab | 2026-02-03 19:04:28+00:00
> point of impracticality to run a website

only if your site insist to use any of the widely used Ad networks

through there are Ad Networks which base ads on what is on your site instead of who visits

and the popup you link is _not_ a GDPR popup but is related to some other older and very misguided law(s). (Not EU wide laws, but EU sites want to be compliant with every member countries laws.)

Having a EU decision which requires countries to remove this older misguided laws has been on the agenda for years. It's just given that most sites anyway will have popups (e.g. for Google Ads) things move way way way to slow :(
Lightweight tools vs. enterprise RMMs: what works for small teams?
by brintha | 2026-02-03 19:04:32+00:00
A lot of infrastructure tooling today seems optimized for large organizations. That makes sense — those buyers have budget and compliance needs.

But I’m not convinced that same tooling works well for smaller teams.

In my experience, “enterprise-grade” often comes with:

long onboarding

dense dashboards

configuration you touch once and forget

agents that do far more than you need

For teams without dedicated ops staff, this creates friction rather than leverage.

I’ve been thinking about whether lightweight, focused tools age better for small teams — not as temporary solutions, but as deliberate design choices. I tried to write down that perspective here:

https://www.lynxtrac.com/lightweight-rmms-vs-enterprise-tools-what-small-teams-need

Curious how others see this:

do you grow into heavyweight tools over time?

or do simpler tools scale better than we give them credit for?
by buzer | 2026-02-03 19:04:35+00:00
On the "German DPA can only forward it to Czech DPA" there is now regulation (2025/2518) around the cross-border enforcement and as far as I understand it actually has hard deadlines. However it will only start being in effect around May 2027 and will only affect cases which were filed after that. It is still very long process and does require that the original DPA actually initiates things.

The spam filter loophole is unlikely to be legal. It it contrary to other DPA rulings (like Norwegian DPA ruling on Mowi ASA), EDPB guidelines don't strictly define it but I would say tilt towards that excuse not being sufficient & my understanding is that there are also some court cases from Germany and Austria that treat messages routed to spam as recieved (https://www.nospamproxy.de/en/emails-in-spam-folders-are-con...). Of course if you want to actually enforce it you would need to appeal the decision in court, I have no clue how easy or hard that is in Germany.
by caminante | 2026-02-03 19:04:37+00:00
>notorious

What happened to due process? Every major firm should have a "dawn raid" policy to comply while preserving rights.

Specific to the Uber case(s), if it were illegal, then why didn't Uber get criminal charges or fines?

At best there's an argument that it was "obstructing justice," but logging people off, encrypting, and deleting local copies isn't necessarily illegal.
by ValdikSS | 2026-02-03 19:04:43+00:00
>Why do we often say 1 kilobyte = 1024 bytes?

Because Windows, and only Windows, shows it this way. It is official and documented: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20090611-00/?p=17...

> Explorer is just following existing practice. Everybody (to within experimental error) refers to 1024 bytes as a kilobyte, not a kibibyte. If Explorer were to switch to the term kibibyte, it would merely be showing users information in a form they cannot understand, and for what purpose? So you can feel superior because you know what that term means and other people don’t.
by jjk166 | 2026-02-03 19:05:15+00:00
> at least if one corrects for preventable accidents and other such things

You can't really correct for these. Yes there are genuine accidents that will kill you under any circumstances, but for a lot of things both your odds of having an accident and the odds of surviving it are strongly linked to age. As a simple example, despite driving significantly less, the elderly get into more car accidents and suffer worse injuries in those accidents than people earlier in life. Only the age range of 15-24 has higher car accident fatality rates.

There is no such thing as death by old age. At most there are deaths in the elderly that don't get attributed to a specific cause (typically because of so many different things going on at once and no desire to cut up grandma after the fact to see which straw broke her back) which we tend to refer to as "died of old age" but it's not a recognized medical cause of death. People die of diseases, injuries, and various other things, many of which are strongly influenced by age but also heavily influenced by other factors.

You can set a cutoff point and say these things don't count as age related deaths whereas these others do. As long as you're consistent with these choices, you can learn something useful. But a wide enough net that is widely agreed to cover what we think of as aging is going to include a lot of other maladies, whereas a narrower selection criteria is probably going to yield wildly different results from one analysis to the next.
by Merad | 2026-02-03 19:05:33+00:00
My dad died at the end of last year, and was not too different from your grandma. For him the main problem was chronic pain from his failing body. Even fairly powerful opioids from a pain management doctor only helped a bit. Basically all he could do was sleep, eat meals, and sit in his chair in pain.

I feel similar to you, but I wonder if it's one of those those things where age changes your perspective. Dad was in assisted living and had several stints in rehab/nursing home facilities, and in both there were quite a few people with what I'd call poor quality of life who were still holding on to life.