MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AnthonyMouse | 2026-02-26 02:57:27+00:00
> That assumes a linear city, where everyone lives within a short walking distance of the same street.

Isn't that the assumption you're making? That there is a single primary street that everything converges and then diverges from which is common to every bus route? Meanwhile in practice any given person standing on the You Are Here dot could want to go in any of the eight directions from where they currently are.

A route that goes east-west isn't going to have much in the way of shared route with one that goes northeast-southwest except for the one point where they intersect, and isn't it better to have multiple routes intersecting in multiple places in terms of minimizing trip latency and maximizing coverage?

> Which should be cheap, as a dedicated lane is usually the most expensive part in building light rail.

But that's the thing that makes the bus lane so expensive!

By the time you have an area with enough congestion to be considering a bus lane, the problem is generally that you can't add a lane because the land adjacent to the existing road is already developed and not available, otherwise you would just add an ordinary lane that buses could use too. But converting one of the existing lanes in an area which is already congested makes the traffic exponentially worse than putting the new thing underground.
by defrost | 2026-02-26 02:57:30+00:00
Location, location, location - there are many sites globally suitable for geological bulk hydrogen storage; the UK has had the Tesside site operational until recently since the early 1970s.

They were built 50 years ago. (Slightly before today).

Pumped hydrogen at Walpole is a great functional little project that eases the grid edge brown out problem. ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45332157 )

Scaling that up to the energy storage potential of the right geological structures of the sizes needed to power cities and run heavy industrial isn't as economically clearcut as you may assume.
by rfv6723 | 2026-02-26 02:57:54+00:00
The logistical nightmare of hydrogen makes its production price almost irrelevant. Using surplus wind energy for carbon capture to create synthetic fuels is much smarter because these liquids are compatible with our current global infrastructure. You bypass the need for expensive new pipelines and specialized tanks entirely. By binding green hydrogen into a stable synthetic hydrocarbon, you get a fuel that is easy to move, has high energy density, and won't leak through solid steel.
by opsmeter | 2026-02-26 02:58:06+00:00
One thing that surprised our team: cost isn’t just “more usage” — retries and context creep can multiply spend with the same user behavior. We now track cost/request and cost per user-action per endpoint over time, plus a retry ratio. When either drifts after a change, it’s usually a quick fix (backoff, caps, trimming history).
by Rapzid | 2026-02-26 02:59:55+00:00
We are at the tail end of 30+ years of successful social awareness efforts, and government regulation and incentivization.

Social awareness and pressure produced the government action necessary to incubate the early markets and seed research. It helped to spur the armies of young researches set about improving solar generation, wind generation, power storage, electric motors, and even LEDs.

Yeah, it's "obvious" now the economics make sense for producers to build wind and solar farms. Or yeah, purchasing LEDs is a no-brainer now why on earth would anyone want to incandescent bulbs; that's boomer tech.
by toomuchtodo | 2026-02-26 03:00:15+00:00
Electric heavy duty trucks are already here.

> In 2020, nearly all new trucks in China ran on diesel. By the first half of 2025, battery-powered trucks accounted for 22% of new heavy truck sales, up from 9.2% in the same period in 2024, according to Commercial Vehicle World, a Beijing-based trucking data provider. The British research firm BMI forecasts electric trucks will reach nearly 46% of new sales this year and 60% next year.

https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/spotlights/2025/chinas-di...
by dhosek | 2026-02-26 03:00:19+00:00
I double checked because I was confused and nowhere in the article is “stop balancing defined”. I think it means reducing stops, but I couldn’t say with certainty.

I will say that a simple measure like moving bus stops to the corner after the intersection can improve transit times. My uncle used to work for the Chicago Transit Authority and worked on a project to try to implement this, although it would appear from my own travels in the city that it was far from universally implemented.
by Zak | 2026-02-26 03:01:16+00:00
I thought about making something like this prior to LLMs. This version is more sophisticated than what I had in mind.

I think its response to this comment could use some work:

> The Glock 19 is a great answer to this position.

It detects spam for off-topic product promotion, but gives it a toxicity score of zero even though it recognizes that a Glock 19 is a firearm. Suggesting that a weapon is a good answer to someone's position on a topic other than weapons should probably be interpreted as a threat.
by nxobject | 2026-02-26 03:01:37+00:00
I've used LyX for a very long time. It has the best graphical equation editor I've ever used: it natively supports all of the complex structures you'd want, can be used incredibly efficiently via the keyboard (e.g. tab-completion and tab-navigation), and is still incredibly discoverable via GUI.

In general, it's just a very pragmatic layer on top of LaTeX. I've done a lot of complex ad-hoc formatting in it as well.
by mcherm | 2026-02-26 03:02:00+00:00
Look, you can declare that it is a scam all you like. Trumpet statements like this one: "Large language models still hallucinate, and they still make boneheaded errors; they still lack a proper concept of reality. They often produce workslop. A recent survey called The Remote Labor Index found that they could only do 2.5% of human tasks, and that is a massive overestimate"

It won't convince me because I HAVE BEEN USING IT, and IT HAS ACTUALLY MADE A BIG DIFFERENCE.

Hype (whether positive or negative) can be extremely powerful, but eventually it loses out to reality. It is certainly true that there are some people who have overhyped AI. But it is not true that it "was a scam" or is anything less than revolutionary.
by deaux | 2026-02-26 03:02:01+00:00
> Is the cause of Gaza or Israel bettered by this comment section?

Absolutely the cause of Gaza has been bettered by the thousands of comment sections. Again, the US wouldn't have bought TikTok if it didn't.

r/thedonald boosted the cause of Trumpism, posters on X have boosted the cause of extreme right wing nationalism in Europe. Discourse matters, that's why so many try to influence it. Reputation with the masses matters, that's why countries like KSA spend hundreds of billions on trying to shore it up.
Ask HN: Apache prefork under crawler load – main domains OK, subdomains fail
by PhongSGC | 2026-02-26 03:02:20+00:00
I’m dealing with an Apache prefork + mod_php setup where a single routing
vhost handles a very large number of subdomains via host-based rewrite.

Under crawler bursts, load goes extremely high. What’s interesting is that
main domains (separate vhosts) remain fast, while subdomains routed through
the rewrite layer become intermittent or time out.

Apache ML feedback suggests this is expected behavior with prefork and
heavy workers, but I’m curious if anyone has seen similar patterns and
found mitigation strategies short of a full stack rewrite.

Any real-world experience appreciated.
by gradus_ad | 2026-02-26 03:02:33+00:00
These very valid points apply to all companies trying to make money off of proprietary models, which means margins are going to collapse in a vicious price war that will make Uber vs Lyft seem tame.

As margins collapse capex will collapse. Unfortunately valuations have become so tied to AI hype any reduction in capex will signal maybe the hype has gotten ahead of itself, meaning valuations have gotten ahead of themselves. So capex keeps escalating.

None of this takes into account the hoarding effects at play with regards to GPU acquisition. It's really a dangerous situation the industry is caught in.
by TeMPOraL | 2026-02-26 03:02:34+00:00
Huh. I was going to say, last time I saw this was 20+ years ago, and I forgot it exists - but I must be remembering something else. It seems `edit` is a new thing, if I'm to believe https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/edit/

I can confirm it exists on my Windows 11 machine, and I didn't install it specifically, though it's definitely not a base install (upgraded from Windows 10, and plenty of dev tooling installed over the years). Still, it fits the bill (+/- GUI, but I didn't consider TUI at all). Thanks!
by Bender | 2026-02-26 03:02:44+00:00
Yeah I mean, I know what you mean but this is where it gets into circular reasoning. I will always have operations groups move the workload to a node that has more memory if that is what is needed. In my case having swap on disk would require it to be encrypted due to contracts requiring any customer data touching a disk to be encrypted but I just avoid that all together and just add more memory. If 2TB or RAM isn't enough then they get 3TB and so on. We pushed vendors and OEM's to grow their motherboard capacity. At some point application groups just get more servers.
by timr | 2026-02-26 03:04:20+00:00
> It won't convince me because I HAVE BEEN USING IT, and IT HAS ACTUALLY MADE A BIG DIFFERENCE.

I'm not going to defend a piece where the author contradicts the (clickbait) title in the body of the text, but he does actually say, plainly, that AI is useful for coding.

You didn't say what you're using it for, but since you're here, I'm guessing it's coding.
by culi | 2026-02-26 03:04:23+00:00
Here's a map of superfund sites in the US. https://hub.arcgis.com/datasets/EPA::superfund-national-prio...

Using this I see that within 10 miles of me are

- a microprocessor testing facility that contaminated soil and groundwater with 1,1,1-trichloroethane, trichloroethylene, Freon 113, 1,1-dichloroethane, and tetrachloroethane which affects 300k nearby residents

- a semiconductor manufacturer that led to "trichloroethylene, 1,1,1-trichloroethane, tetrachloroethylene, trichlorofluoroethane, and 1,1-dichloroethylene, in soils on the site and in ground water on and off the site."

- a 5-acre drum recycling plant that contaminated wells within 3 miles with trichloroethane, trichloroethylene, 1,1-dichloroethylene, and tetrachloroethylene. Affecting the drinking water of 250k residents.

- about 10-15 other sites I'm not gonna cover in detail but the contaminants include asbestos-laden dust, PCBs, dichlorobenzene, trichloroethylene, trichloroethane, chloroform, vinyl chloride, xylene, and many many more
by klodolph | 2026-02-26 03:04:30+00:00
The $50bn is what you get when you multiply the number of coins times the price of one coin. This is a kind of fun number to think about but there are a lot of ways it doesn’t match up with reality.

Like, if I make a company with ten billion shares, and then put shares for sale at $5 a piece, and you buy one, then my company would also have a $50bn valuation, by the same logic that Terra / Luna had a $50bn valuation.
by dijksterhuis | 2026-02-26 03:04:31+00:00
> What percentage of Meta's users are paying? Google's?

The advertiser based business model for those companies makes your question/thought process here problematic for me. Historically speaking Google and "Meta" (Facebook) were primarily advertising provider companies. They provided billboards (space and time on the web page in front of an end-user) to people who were willing to buy tht space and time on the billboard. The "free access" end-users would always end up seeing said billboards, which is how they ended up "paying" for the service.

So most of Meta/Google end-users were "paying" users. They were being subsidised by the advertising customers paying for the end-users (who were forced to view adverts). The end-users paid with interruption to the service by an advert. [0]

In that context it feels a little like you're comparing apples to dave's left foot, as OpenAI hasn't had that with advertising ............ historically [1].

--

[0]: yes ad-blockers, yes more diverse revenue income streams over the years like with phones, yes this is simplified yadayada

[1]: excluding government etc. ~bailouts~ investments as not the same as advertising subsidies, but you could argue it's doing the same thing
by spaqin | 2026-02-26 03:04:40+00:00
I'm tired of 2FA. Absolutely the worst when setting up a new phone after losing the old one. A whole bunch of mixed methods, in 2 hours between installing all the apps again, getting text messages, installing authenticators, scanning IDs, taking selfies, receiving phone calls with spoken codes, grabbing another device that still somehow has access, twenty emails about new suspicious activity, grabbing recovery codes, or scrambling to find the Yubikey I used when registering for the simplest and most benign services that have no connections to my personal data or payment.

Google will insist on sending a notification to a phone you have no longer access to, and regaining access always feels like hacking yourself. I dread the day I lose a phone together with my SIM card and ID during travel. I will never be able to go back and will have to start a new life as an illegal immigrant, living as a hermit in some deep forest.
by d--b | 2026-02-26 03:04:46+00:00
yeah it’s definitely a genre in itself.

It’s like there are 2 axes: - cool technique and - cool picture. The second is way more important than the first, which is way painters are still on top of the 2D art world.

Some people can do both though. And i’d say even in these cases the art world tend to dismiss the weird technique as gimmicky.
by nobrains | 2026-02-26 03:04:59+00:00
The issue is that all money-throwing needs to be balanced by careful thought. This cycle the money-throwing at snow plowing worked. Next cycle, it will not be as effective, as more people who want to "game" the rewards will enter the equation. So every cycle, along with money, some thought will need to go into improving the system or coming up with alternate solutions.
by eucyclos | 2026-02-26 03:05:09+00:00
Rental versus outright purchase is a weird transition. I have this idea for a faction in a post apocalyptic setting that started out as a libertarian community that idealized a society with zero slavery but found it constantly hiding in arrangements like the one you describe, so they made it very explicit and transactional instead: every member of the community is a central bank, and the currency takes the form of small clay discs with a number and a thumbprint. Anyone can mint their own money, but anyone can redeem money for hours of slave labor with the issuing party. And of course there are rules limiting what slaves can be compelled to do, like no minting more hours and no demanding a specific slave.

For some reason this concept is very sticky to me. I actually think it could work as a low tech monetary regime in a grid down scenario.
by yunwal | 2026-02-26 03:05:41+00:00
> a bus every 10 minutes is effectively 500-900 meters long!

uhhhhhh what. What does every 10 minutes have to do with this at all

> It easily "takes" as much space as 100+ cars.

are you ok??? have you seen a bus before??

> A single bus needs about 3 drivers to be effective

I have never ever seen a bus with 3 drivers in it. If you're talking about 3 drivers over the course of 24h, those drivers are not in the bus at the same time, and therefore don't make up 20% of the passengers on the bus. If you're saying the average bus route serves 15 people per day, you are certainly mistaken.
by akoboldfrying | 2026-02-26 03:05:42+00:00
My point wasn't about fairness towards oil refinery companies, it was that supporting a ban on refineries in your local area while still benefiting from the downstream outputs of oil refineries is hypocritical nimbyism.

If oil refineries are bad in California, they're bad everywhere, and if they're bad everywhere, we ought to stop using them altogether, which will make for some unwelcome lifestyle changes.
by Rochus | 2026-02-26 03:06:44+00:00
Cool, I was at ETH when Modula-2 was en vogue, and we also had lectures where we programmed transputers in Occam-2.

In contrast to my experiences with e.g. Gemini 3 Pro, where it regularly happened that the LLM claimed to have reached full features scope in each iteration, but the result turned out to be full of stubs, Devin at least doesn't pull my leg and delivers what was agreed, but unfortunately debugging and fixing takes much more time than generating the initial version (about factor five). But so far I never tried to run an LLM project over such a long time as you did; must have cost a fortune.
by com2kid | 2026-02-26 03:07:14+00:00
Sometimes I like to imagine what this would be like if the technology had appeared 25 years ago.

First off, nonetheless open publishing stuff. Everything would have been trade secrets.

Next off no interoperable json apis instead binary APIs that are hard to integrate with and therefore sticky. Once you spent 3 or 4 months getting your MCP server setup, no way would you ever try to change to a different vendor!

The number of investors was much smaller so odds are you wouldn't have seen these crazy high salaries and you wouldn't have people running off to different companies left and right. (I know, .com boom, but the .com boom never saw 500k cash salaries...)

Imagine if Google hadn't published any papers about transformers or the attention paper had been an internal memo or heck just word2vec was only an internal library.

It has all been a net good for technological progress but not that good for the companies involved.
Add dormant user re-engagement email and improve name parsing
by nishiohiroshi | 2026-02-26 03:07:39+00:00
During dry run testing of our drip emails, we caught that the first run processes all installations - including months-old ones. Sending "review your setup PR" to someone who installed ages ago would be tone-deaf. Added a dormancy check so inactive users get a re-engagement email first that re-introduces the product, then onboarding resumes from there. Caught it before it hit production.
by opsmeter | 2026-02-26 03:08:10+00:00
This is exactly the pain point with agents: spend isn’t linear because fanout + retries compound. One thing that helped us debug/contain spikes is tracking cost per “user-action/outcome” (not just per call) plus a retry ratio trend (429/timeouts). Do you support budgets per step/tool in the chain, or only per overall run?
by max8539 | 2026-02-26 03:08:23+00:00
I’m trying to use the CLI whenever possible - it’s much easier to install and can be used by both me and the agent. For example, gh seems much easier than installing and setting up an MCP server connection, and it’s more human-readable in terms of what the agent is calling and what it’s getting in return.

For other integrations, I first try to find an official or unofficial CLI tool (a wrapper around the API), and only then do I consider using MCP
by throwaway81523 | 2026-02-26 03:08:45+00:00
Story here: https://www.mediaite.com/politics/conservative-economist-sco...

Archive.is gives server error on the wsj url.

TLDR: Musk fans bet that DOGE would cut government spending so the guy bet against them. He ended up betting around $342K (his liquid assets, not what most of us would call life savings) and hedged some of it later. Eventual result was he gained $128K.
by klodolph | 2026-02-26 03:08:57+00:00
I remember this in the news, but I had to look stuff up on Wikipedia to refresh my memory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_(blockchain)

> The Anchor Protocol was a lending and borrowing protocol built on the Terra chain. Investors who deposited UST in the Anchor Protocol were receiving a 19.45% yield paid out from Terra's reserves.

What the fuck?
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-02-26 03:09:05+00:00
It seems like it’s really only China that’s pursuing the route of doing more with smaller/cheaper models, too, which also has a lot of potential to give the whole bubble a good shake.

To me it seems like the most obvious thing to do. More efficient models both make up for whatever you lost by using cheaper hardware and let you do more with the hardware you have than the competition can. By comparison the ever-growing-model strategy is a dead end.
by micio-micio | 2026-02-26 03:09:36+00:00
Thanks.

If you mean all the customers one day decided to revolt and they all agreed to commit felonies then it is unlikely they could achieve a full sustained outage for long as their identity and IP addresses are already well known.

If you feel like saying more, I'm wondering what actions a platform could take to stop an attack like this by their customers, and especially how easy or difficult it would be to stop without impacting business as usual (like say business with customers who weren't part of the attack?)
by Bender | 2026-02-26 03:10:24+00:00
I've gone through this exercise on my own personal hobby nodes long ago. In my case I was just on an under-powered node for the load but I made sure my rewrite rules were optimized in the virtualserver config vs .htaccess and that I closed all rules with a final L to cease processing rules when matches were found. I also jacked up all the worker/server limits as high as I could go for the memory in the node this was a VPS node. Sendfile was 'on'. Anything I could do to keep anonymous users off the disk was important so I used tmpfs anywhere I could.

I also made sure all uses of a temp space were in tmpfs. I also maxed out all the /etc/security/limits.conf now set in systemd unit files limits and sysctl file limits to get them out of the way. Spikes of traffic can very briefly hit these limits and then everything just gets stuck and one has to wait for http and socket keep-alive timeouts. Oh right, and I also shortened http and socket keep-alive timeouts. If there are any proxy connections I used the same IP even if localhost many times on different ports to avoid port depletion time-wait assassination.

Probably the most important would be to share your rewrite rules on serverfault.com but one should expect some elitist a-hole responses and maybe one good genuine response. There may still be a few rewrite experts there. That would be the biggest gain.

If safe to do so, using 301 vs 302 can avoid some repeat hits if that is how you are redirecting.

I also kept an eye on ipcs -a to see if the semaphore counts were high or close to limits in sysctl.conf as apache uses or used this for sharing between the child processes.

Sometimes the problem can be just beyond apache and in socket timeouts due to time-wait exaustion but that would be obvious in dmesg and netstat -aeenp.

I hate to also suggest this but explain your load issue to several different AI's and paste your rewrite rules and ask for them to be optimized but dont get hopes up. They might turn your server into a bowl of petunias. Back everything up.

It's been a long time so I am trying to remember all the things I tried. These days if I have a lot of rewrites I do that in HAProxy or NGinx in maps but that's a bigger topic.

I might remember more tomorrow.