MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vel0city | 2026-02-22 13:33:18+00:00
But if the CO2 recently came from the atmosphere it's still a net zero impact though.

Like, take 5 units of carbon out of the atmosphere to create the fuel. Burn it and release 5 units of carbon to the atmosphere. What's the net increase again? (-5) + 5 = ?

FWIW I'm not saying these processes actually achieve this in reality. Just pointing out that it could be carbon neutral in the end.
by danaris | 2026-02-22 13:33:20+00:00
I've seen a lot of very rich people* say it's amazing, it's changing my life, it's going to change your lives (it's going to take away all your jobs so we don't have to pay you anymore), we're about to hit the singularity and start a new golden age with it.

I've seen some apparently-smart people say they're using it for all kinds of things and it's doing great for them.

I've seen roughly the same number of apparently-smart people say they've tried it, they've given it a really good shot, but it doesn't work well for them, and in fact, when they tried, it made them less productive.

When I've personally tried it (almost exclusively on local generation), I've found it entertaining, but not reliable enough to use for more than that. And I do not trust any of the hosted models not to take everything I feed them and monetize it, including by selling it to organizations like ICE which I find utterly reprehensible.

So while I'm not bigstrat2003, about me, at least, you're wrong: I am paying attention, and I'm being intellectually honest. I'm also evaluating it for more than just "does this make me more money in the short term?"

* Who just so happen to be heavily invested in AI companies...
by abustamam | 2026-02-22 13:33:29+00:00
> What previously would've taken a multi-man team weeks of planning and executing, stand ups, jour fixes, architecture diagrams, etc. can now be done within a single week by myself.

This has been my experience. We use Miro at work for diagramming. Lots of visual people on the team, myself included. Using Miro's MCP I draft a solution to a problem and have Miro diagram it. Once we talk it through as a team, I have Claude or codex implement it from the diagram.

It works surprisingly well.

> They are amazed however that what has taken months previously, can be done in hours nowadays.

Of course they're amazed. They don't have to pay you for time saved ;)

> reap benefits of LLMs for as long as they don't replace me
> What previously would've taken a multi-man team

I think this is the part that people are worried about. Every engineer who uses LLMs says this. By definition it means that people are being replaced.

I think I justify it in that no one on my team has been replaced. But management has explicitly said "we don't want to hire more because we can already 20x ourselves with our current team +LLM." But I do acknowledge that many people ARE being replaced; not necessarily by LLMs, but certainly by other engineers using LLMs.
by kjellsbells | 2026-02-22 13:33:44+00:00
Frequency lists are very useful but learners need context in order to use them, because little word atoms like prepositions, pronouns etc are heavily over represented in the core set. So make sure to study how to use those, and master the core to be/to have verbs too. Some languages have two verbs that roughly translate as to be so you need to crack that too.

Beware free lists on Ankiweb. They are very variable in quality. Frankly better to build your own.
by Amezarak | 2026-02-22 13:34:00+00:00
Are you sure you haven't been victimized by manuscripts with modernized spellings?

When I look up ealry manuscript scans of the Comedy, I get:

*Nel mezo delcamin dinra uita / mi trouai puna(?) felua (long s letter) ofcura / che la diricta (some bizarre letter in there) uia era fmarrita (long s).

https://www.digitalcollections.manchester.ac.uk/view/PR-INCU...
by rrr_oh_man | 2026-02-22 13:34:26+00:00
Maybe if you add a new variable to a table and need it in a query five views down? But honestly I much prefer using assisted queries like the supabase package, but leaving the tables alone. ORM can be very unwieldy in an unstable environment.

I’ve once tried a "type-safe" SQL extension and it was pretty neat.

Imho something like this is much more useful than a lot of ORM-overhead.
by jMyles | 2026-02-22 13:37:43+00:00
> If they didn't violate the licence agreement then I'm struggling to understand why it's off putting

What? Who cares about the license agreement? Lawyers and bureaucrats maybe. The real issue with _any_ software project is whether it is meant to be a step toward a more livable and peaceful world or not. Sure, some people make guided missile software to murder people for profit, but that's just obviously antisocial behavior, regardless of how well it complies with license agreements.
by j45 | 2026-02-22 13:37:48+00:00
Agreed, ORMs are OK to start with if you like and then optimize the queries where needed.

There are cases where older ORMS might be more optimized for some cases compared to new ones, and vice versa.

Avoiding learning SQL is the biggest gap. Selecting a NoSQL database because it seems easier, and then spending so much time trying to make a NoSQL database into a relational database is usually not too pretty.
by LutumVeritas | 2026-02-22 13:38:03+00:00
This uses Windows UI Automation (UIA) — the same COM API that screen readers use. Every standard Windows

application exposes its entire element tree through this interface: buttons, text fields, values, coordinates.
Including browsers, Electron apps, and yes, antivirus software.

What makes this different from typical automation tools:

- It reads any application's UI as structured text — no screenshots, no OCR

- It can intercept and manipulate inputs on the fly, acting as a man-in-the-middle between user and application

- It simulates real human input events (keyboard, mouse), not injected API calls — making it indistinguishable from actual user interaction

- It's a 2MB static binary with zero runtime dependencies

- There is no process injection, no hooking, no DLL loading — just standard Windows COM calls that every screen reader makes

- it dont touched any TOS , EULA or Laws and its Protected by the Assecibility Laws and with that not patchable.

The uncomfortable implication: the same API that exists to help blind people navigate their computer gives any program full read/write access to every running application's UI. Windows treats this as intended behavior, not a security boundary.

Longer writeup: https://dev.to/tlrag/i-built-a-new-software-primitive-in-85-...
by cyberax | 2026-02-22 13:38:15+00:00
It depends on a writer, but it can be very legible.

I used to be able to jot down notes during lectures almost as fast as the normal spoken speed. We often traded notebooks when preparing for the exams, and I rarely had problems reading other people's notes.

It's also really nice to write, once you learn it. I was surprised after moving to the US that almost nobody here knows how to write in cursive anymore.

A part of this is a really terrible cursive variant that schools in the US used to teach ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Method ). Modern Russian (and Ukrainian) cursives are closer to the older Spencerian script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencerian_script
by Bender | 2026-02-22 13:38:18+00:00
Old tech could work around these outages. Set up GSLB at a DNS provider that does health checks or perform your own health checks to both origin and CDN's and use API's to change DNS. If the origin servers are OK and the CDN is not, automatically change DNS to a different CDN. That does mean having contracts with more than one CDN provider however the cost should be negotiated based on monthly volume. i.e. the CDN with the most uptime gets the most money.
by ece | 2026-02-22 13:38:34+00:00
And yet, these same people will install modchips on consoles, pay for VPNs, use ReVanced, and generally find ways to do what they want rather than what corporations want, and safely too.

People can learn about links to payment websites, self-signed apps and unlocked bootloaders, because anything less is restricting computers for idiotic reasons.
by yorwba | 2026-02-22 13:40:33+00:00
Any given computation either halts or it doesn't. You can encode that information in a single bit, as a specific number. Since there is a countably infinite number of possible computations, you'd need a countably infinite number of bits.

So you can never find enough storage to hold the full solution of the halting problem in the real world. But you can find enough storage in a real number. Because real numbers can have a countably infinite number of digits after the decimal point. So you can stuff your countably infinite number of bits representing the solution of the halting problem in there.

Which specific real number you get depends on the details of the encoding, but it's definitely some real number. And it cannot be computed, because if it could, you could read the solution to the halting problem off its digits, but the halting problem is known to be uncomputable.
by maccard | 2026-02-22 13:41:19+00:00
> LLMs don’t usually fail at syntax?

Really? My experience has been that it’s incredibly easy to get them stuck in a loop on a hallucinated API and burn through credits before I’ve even noticed what it’s done. I have a small rust project that stores stuff on disk that I wanted to add an s3 backend too - Claude code burned through my $20 in a loop in about 30 minutes without any awareness of what it was doing on a very simple syntax issue.
by jongjong | 2026-02-22 13:41:21+00:00
I believe the monetary system is broken and creates asymmetric monetary playing fields based on distance from monetary injection points (banks and governments). The tax system makes it hard for each unit of currency to travel far from a 'money printer'. After just 6 hops, a dollar is taxed down to about 10 cents; so people who are more than 6 hops from a money printer live in a much more scarce monetary environment than people who are in the front row. It's Cantillon effects on steroids. It means that the entire economy has become a kind of social climbing game to get closer to the money printers. I feel that this game is immoral and people shouldn't be forced to participate. Private currencies should be protected by law.

I essentially believe that the economy is fake. That people get money due to purely social factors and then make up plausible narratives to explain their success in a way which omits all the critical social elements... And these explanations sound plausible to people in their social circle who are at a similar distance from a money printer so the false beliefs and perceptive distortions are socially validated.
by dogma1138 | 2026-02-22 13:41:59+00:00
FPGAs would be less efficient than GPUs.

FPGAs don’t scale if they did all GPUs would’ve been replaced by FPGAs for graphics a long time ago.

You use an FPGA when spinning a custom ASIC doesn’t makes financial sense and generic processor such as a CPU or GPU is overkill.

Arguably the middle ground here are TPUs, just taking the most efficient parts of a “GPU” when it comes to these workloads but still relying on memory access in every step of the computation.
by pfdietz | 2026-02-22 13:43:00+00:00
Hydrogen burning could have a place in an all-renewable grid: it could be much more economical for very long duration storage than using batteries. The last 5-10% of the grid becomes much cheaper to do with renewables if something like hydrogen (or other e-fuels) is available.

A competitor that might be even better is very long duration high temperature thermal storage, if capex minimization is the priority.
by simoncion | 2026-02-22 13:43:37+00:00
Yeah. Seriously.

I can see a few other benefits to the "Sell at a reasonable markup, rather than 'market price'" strategy.

* You get a reputation for not price-gouging.

* Your company gets used to operating with "enough" cash, rather than having "crazy" amounts of cash that it might be tempted to spend on misadventures.

* When the collapse of LLM Mania burns the LLM industry and its hangers-on to the ground, you get to keep your prices the same and keep your business practices the same... rather than scrambling to figure out how to make do with far less cash.
by adrian_b | 2026-02-22 13:43:41+00:00
In the beginning, the oceans were acidic, because they were formed by the condensation of volcanic gases, which consisted of water, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen chloride (i.e. hydrochloric acid) and a few other less abundant acids.

In time, the oceans have become less and less acidic, by dissolving from the volcanic silicate rocks the oxides of the alkaline metals and alkali earth metals, i.e. mainly of sodium, potassium, magnesium and calcium. This dissolution has affected both the rocks on the bottom of the oceans and the continental rocks, where rain has washed the soluble oxides, transporting them through rivers to the oceans.

At some point, so much of the alkaline and alkali earth metals from the volcanic rocks have been dissolved that the oceans have become slightly alkaline instead of acidic, like they are today.

At that time, the carbonates of calcium and magnesium have precipitated from sea water, forming sedimentary rocks. Also around that time, many living beings have evolved mechanisms for controlling this precipitation process, in order to build skeletons for themselves. This has resulted in the fact that many sedimentary rocks are not formed by direct precipitation from sea water, but by precipitation from sea water into skeletons, followed by depositing on the bottom the skeletons of dead living beings.

Now, with increasing concentration of CO2, there is the danger that the oceans will become so acidic as to reverse this, dissolving again a part of the carbonate rocks, including the skeletons of many living beings that are made of carbonates.

There is an equilibrium between the concentration of CO2 in water and in air, depending on temperature and pressure. When the CO2 from water precipitated with calcium or magnesium into rocks, that has drawn more CO2 from air into the water, until a new equilibrium was reached, at a reduced concentration of CO2 in the air. If carbonates would be dissolved by acidic sea water, that would liberate CO2, a part of which would go into the air, further increasing the concentration there.

Thus the formation or destruction of carbonate rocks and skeletons adds a positive feedback to the changes of the CO2 concentration in the air, which has the potential to be bad for us.
by kurouna | 2026-02-22 13:44:16+00:00
Thank you for the welcome! Yes, it is exactly related to the Windows Emacs IME issues. Emacs is a product I deeply respect, but configuring it to handle Japanese input smoothly on Windows has always been a challenge for me.

There were two main pain points I desperately wanted to solve for my daily workflow:

1. Prefix keys being swallowed by the IME:
In Windows Emacs, if your IME is ON and you try to split the window using C-x 2, the 2 (or full-width ２) gets captured by the IME. The command fails, meaning you constantly have to toggle the IME OFF just to run basic window or buffer commands.
In elecxzy, I implemented fine-grained control: when the editor enters a "prefix state" (like after pressing C-x or C-c), it actively prevents the IME from capturing the next keystroke. This allows you to smoothly execute commands like C-x 2 or C-x b even while the IME is left ON.

2. IME User Experience (Positioning and Fonts):
In Windows Emacs, unless you apply specific patches or complex configurations, the IME candidate window often fails to appear right next to the text you are typing. Furthermore, the font used during IME composition often differs from the editor's main font. These details really hurt the overall typing UX.
By using Electron, elecxzy places an invisible <textarea> exactly at the virtual cursor's pixel position. This lets the browser engine handle the IME natively. The candidate window always tracks the cursor perfectly and the composition text seamlessly matches the editor's styling, without requiring any special configuration from the user—it works smoothly just by running elecxzy.exe.

Eliminating these small, daily frictions was my biggest motivation for building this!
by manuelabeledo | 2026-02-22 13:44:18+00:00
Mostly agreed with the author about ORMs. The provided querying abstraction works against developers when queries reach a certain level of complexity, and at the end of the day, understanding these complexities is not optional.

But I would caution against adding too much business logic to the database, and tying message passing to your database doesn’t sound like the best of ideas.
by MHordecki | 2026-02-22 13:44:31+00:00
I’ve found this article lacking. Like some other articles in this space, it introduces isolation levels through the lens of the phenomena described in the SQL standard, but I find that there’s a different, more intuitive approach.

I think it’s more tractable to define this problem space starting from the concept of (strict) serializability, which is really a generalization of the concept of thread safety. Every software engineer has an intuitive understanding of it. Lack of serializability can lead to execution-dependent behavior, which usually results in hard-to-diagnose bugs. Thus, all systems should strive towards serializability, and the database can be a tool in achieving it.

Various non-serializable levels of database transaction isolation are relaxations of the serializability guarantee, where the database no longer enforces the guarantee and it’s up to the database user to ensure it through other means.

The isolation phenomena are a useful tool for visualizing various corner cases of non-serializability, but they are not inherently tied to it. It's possible to achieve serializability while observing all of the SQL phenomena. For example, a Kubernetes cluster with carefully-written controllers can be serializable.
by nohillside | 2026-02-22 13:46:01+00:00
How often do you start your editor? I start emacs once at booot and keep it running, using emacsclient to open additional files from the command line.

Look, I think that writing your own editor is useful because one learns a lot. And of course, it doesn't need to use Lisp or even be extendable at all. But it's not Emacs any longer if you remove the Lisp part.
by guyomes | 2026-02-22 13:46:06+00:00
According to the book "A Convergence of Civilizations" from Youssef Courbage and Emmanuel Todd [1], the Iran revolution actually happened at the end of the 70s. And indeed, the political situation is not stable yet. The authors argue in the book that historically, it can take from 30 to more than 100 years before a country gets a stable democracy after a revolution.

Notably, the book was written before the Arab Spring revolutions, and yet, it predicted them rather accurately. The main thesis of the book is that a revolution arises when most of the men and most of the women in a country can read.

[1]: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/a-convergence-of-civilizations...
by adithyassekhar | 2026-02-22 13:46:09+00:00
This might be controversial.

When these were social networks, I remember my friends and later myself too, changed our profiles to public, send requests to random strangers, messaged them to like our pictures. We were teenagers and we were competing on who's more famous by having a bigger number next to our friends list or likes. There was no influencer culture back then yet everyone was trying to be this new thing. There were rarely any influencer type features on these platforms.

So I won't blame facebook or Instagram for being what it is today, moving away from friends to social media stars. They saw what people were doing and only supported them. People did what people did.
by kj4211cash | 2026-02-22 13:48:02+00:00
This rings so true and I only ever took one polygraph test. I was a nerdy 21 year old and they told me I had failed on the marijuana use question and encouraged me to think about it and come back and retry. I remember being very confused. I withdrew my application and never went back. I wonder how many others gave up on a job opportunity because it was drug abuse Wednesday or whatever.
by torginus | 2026-02-22 13:49:14+00:00
It's a RAM issue all right - browsers are set up in a multiprocess manner to allow sharing resources between tabs while sandboxing every single one.

So the footprint of the whole browser might be heavy, but each individual tab (origin) adds only a little extra.

Unfortunately both Tauri and Electron suck in this regard - they replicate the entire browser infrastructure per app and per instance, with each running just a single 'tab'.

And I share your concern for both disk space and RAM - but the solution here is to move away from browser tech, not picking a slightly differently packaged browser.
by christophilus | 2026-02-22 13:49:41+00:00
Porsager’s Postgres package does a great job of letting you feel like you’re writing raw sql, but avoids the attack vectors.

Anyway, I agree that ORMs are pretty terrible. I like writing SQL or using a lightweight builder like Kysely. Was a huge Dapper fan back in my C# days.

There are plenty of reasonable alternatives to ORMs that don’t open you to SQL injection attacks.
by 1718627440 | 2026-02-22 13:49:49+00:00
> git rebase origin/main

When is that command actually useful? When you want to rebase it is likely because your local and the upstream branch have diverged, so this would just result in weird conflicts, because origin/main is no longer an ancestor to main. Wouldn't you want to use something like:

git rebase $(git merge-base main origin/main) main --onto=origin/main

or

git rebase origin/main@{1} main --onto=origin/main

?
by Waterluvian | 2026-02-22 13:50:01+00:00
When someone says that X is bad and not to use it, what I really hear is, “I’m ignorant to some use cases but that won’t stop me from having a loud opinion.”

I oscillate on being tired or amused by just how common tech people make this basic error. But I don’t believe it’s ever in bad faith. I think people in general suffer from perceiving their context as the context even though they’ve experienced maybe 1% of what there is out there.
by RickJWagner | 2026-02-22 13:50:04+00:00
Ah, now I see your point.

Yes, you are right in the strictest sense. Piracy still happens, not everybody stopped.

I was meaning to say that places like Napster and Limewire were essentially put out of business, and the ‘small time crooks’ that were using them had good reason to think twice.

In today’s terms, it’s like the folks just going to trial for vandalizing Tesla dealerships some months ago. The government is threatening sentences of several decades, which is a healthy deterrent. They could use the same tactic against people that destroy cameras.
by lelanthran | 2026-02-22 13:50:41+00:00
>> Over a thousand pull requests merged each week at Stripe are completely minion-produced, and while they’re human-reviewed, they contain no human-written code

> I pity the senior engineer, demoted from a helmsman into a human breakwater, tasked to stand steady against an ever-swelling sea of AI slop.

I'm skeptical that the human-in-the-loop, whose only task is to read code, is going to be able to review at the rate that the AI can produce.

It's Undefined Behaviour, now in every language.
by lowsong | 2026-02-22 13:51:08+00:00
Parameterized queries have been a thing for decades, which mitigate SQL injection attacks.[1] This is true of the examples in the post too, they used this:

query = """
SELECT * from tasks
WHERE id = $1
AND state = $2
FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED
"""
rec = await self.db.fetchone(query=query, args=[task_id, TaskState.PENDING], connection=connection)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_injection#Parameterized_st...