skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That site seems to have broken TLS.
On this map Germany always looks bad until you zoom out enough to see the USA.
Not quite the same time period :) but I enjoyed it when it happened: Sigur Rós doing a whole day loop around Icelandic Route 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G54tllj-SKI (with their soundtrack)
Thanks to this I've learnt that Heathrow Airport had a terminal in central London at the time! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_London_Air_Terminal

It's also interesting to see how many things this "advanced motorist" does that would result in a test fail or fine nowadays. Like at 8:21 when he flashes his lights and honks at traffic to get out of the way(!) A pointless manoeuvre at 12:14 and a very poor overtake at 15:05 that forces oncoming traffic to slow down. Baseline standards have certainly improved since then..
All kind of idiot (objectively) environmentalists were fighting against nuclear for decades in Germany and other countries. They weren’t the only factor but nuclear was already effectively dead by 2011 in Germany.
> Is the idea behind using AI to create software to just let those same stakeholders talk directly to a computer to create a SMS based survey? Is AI going to ask probing questions about how to handle all the possible issues of collecting survey data via SMS? Is it going to account for all the things that we as human beings might do incorrectly along the way and how to handle those missteps?

Have you tried? I mean I had a very quick chat and it brought up issues around SMS quickly. I gave it significantly less information than a client would have done, and I have done no iteration on this it's a first attempt at this.

https://chat.openai.com/share/9b88e1e4-aec1-48d3-9540-553ea3...

> In order to produce a functional piece of software from AI, you need to know what you want and be able to clearly and precisely define it.

Why? Why can't AI be used in an agile process? You can definitely ask for changes to existing code and have a LLM spit out diffs.

> It’s everything before that. Artificial intelligence can do some extraordinary things, but it can’t read your mind or tell you what you should want.

Humans can't read your mind, and LLMs can tell you what you might want.

I think there's a broader point though:

> Once you get the hang of the syntax, logic, and techniques, it’s a pretty straightforward process—most of the time.

No. It is for you and me. It is not for many people. There is a level of technical precision that requires frankly slightly odd people to do well enough, and even halfway decent engineers need to make this a regular thing they do not just a few times a year when they need code written.

There are lots of people who could do the other parts but not the actual coding.

I think a lot of positions are reasonably safe, because the demand for software outstrips the supply of programmers so dramatically that making software easier or cheaper will for a decent chunk of the time just expand the amount done. But remember as well that for your job to disappear your profession does not - programming can be a job but you make struggle to get a programming job if demand is lower than supply.
First-Class Automation Testing Company
Confirmation that I was right not to get my PhD!
Germany's energy consumption per capita has dropped about 20% since its 1980s peak and has been trending down fairly sharply since 2007 [0]. AfD is polling extremely well on the back of a "stop this madness" environmental platform.

German renewable energy policies have been a failure at securing human prosperity.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab...
Germany is “green” same as California: high air pollution with most energy imports of any state in the nation. Blood diamond economics applied to energy. I predict that France will become an international leader in nuclear energy, while Germany will kill the most birds.
Show HN: AI-Powered Encyclopedia – Beautiful TLDR Articles
While summarizing videos (I'm the Eightify founder), I've been secretly working on an AI-generated encyclopedia, and here's why. I found myself thinking a lot about AI and content. Now we have knowledge (think Wikipedia) and intelligence (LLMs). They will both significantly improve soon. What we lack is *a knowledge interface for humans*.

What I don't like about current interfaces:
- ChatGPT: to get an answer how I want it, I need to craft a perfect prompt
- Google: need to spend time avoiding affiliates and unreliable sources
- Wiki: great, but boring to read, too much information

What I love is Kurzgesagt:
1. Concise
2. Visually appealing (dopamine-inducing, as I call it)
3. Fact-checked, so I can trust it
4. Up-to-date

I'd love a 5-minute Kurzgesagt video for every question I have, like "How do I hire a marketer?" or "Is it bad to eat bananas every day?" (this question was on my mind the other day).

So, I made an MVP — trying to generate Kurzgesagt-like content for any prompt I have. My current MVP nails the first two principles (concise & beautiful). The other two are achievable, but it'll take longer.

These are the articles I like most:
- https://explore.eightify.app/Universe
- https://explore.eightify.app/Black-Holes
- https://explore.eightify.app/Psychedelics
- https://explore.eightify.app/Yoga

Also, you can order your own article. I am now starting the generation machine, so please complete this form if you want one: https://forms.gle/UkjRJCTUA8Fay4Vb7

Before I go any further, I'd love to hear your thoughts:
- Do you like the idea?
- Would you find it helpful?
- What do you think should be my next step and why?
Already done, the low tech way even.

https://www.wired.com/story/99-phones-fake-google-maps-traff...
This. Only a few years ago Hacker News commenters were crying out for new laws and regulations to subsidize the construction of Google Fiber to every home in America. “It’s a basic human right” they would say.

On the sideline there were a much, much smaller minority who looked at those comments in horror, with the context of knowing that wireless was a serious alternative that wasn’t that far away and was being broadly ignored
The people from Solar Roadways actually got support from several governments in the US. It's totally bonkers. They never had a proper functioning system. The whole idea is ridiculous and people pointed it out since the beginning. But it generated so much news that governments were so ready to jump on it. And they are STILL at it. So here we are, 10 years later, and still talking about putting solar panels in places where they will: break, get very dirty, be hard to fix and replace. We can't have good things because money and politics talk, not science.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OLnfNrCQM4
Ask HN: Is working at office getting traction?
I believe a "war" is about to start.

I'm seeing employees, who benefited from working from home, now trying to justify going back to the office with pseudoscience and productivity BS statistics.

Basically, it looks like brainwashing is going on.

I feel like we are being squeezed more and more to go back to the old model. Is working at office getting a heavy traction now?
As someone from the Alps, I'd really see a source on that. Most alpine roofs are built to survive extreme snow loads. My father just covered his roof in solar and that roof was built in the 70s.
Just to add: the German NPPs were not able to regulate output fast, b/c they were of an older generation.
So you must disable UBlock Origin to use Threads? Life is full of choices to be made!
Not a viable solution in America. Americans are allergic to public transportation and density. Even in places where public transportation is relatively good by American standards it's seen as a money pit.
ECS on Fargate is still serverless. It seems that people think only Lambda is serverless, when serverless just means "product category where you pay for the usage directly, instead of for the resources provisioned to serve it".
Lambda is a burstable, short-lived compute service; it's only natural that it's not well suited to situations where you have predictably sustained high throughput and homogeneous task requirements. To not even talk about how dumb the original architecture was for shuffling frames in and out of S3.
Strong disagree. That would imply that Germany should be criticized more than the US, but this cannot be. The US did not close its nuclear plants, but is still at 60% fossil fuels.

I don't think this is a coincidence because when Diablo Canyon was extended, the first thing that happened is that they asked for a billion dollars so they are able to even run. Nuclear is an expensive distraction and a hog of resources (time and money)
Astro framework lowers competitors by ~40% on performance graph to looks better
What's wrong in building nuclear power plants?

And before teaching lessons to Eastern European countries, remember that the West had 50 years after the WWII to build up the economy and infrastructure. It would be only fair to let Eastern European countries to develop for the same period, without demanding them pay the costs of higher energy prices.
> a weird way of describing it

Hence the bunny quotes. Not really «mak[ing] something extremely small», the idea is to pack as much wonder value as achievable in as as little resources as possible.

You can use 'compress', as long as the need to interpret as needed is held - the term is legitimate for the idea of e.g. "pressing together" what would normally be the content of a wardrobe in a suitcase.
Starmer et al. aren't any less authoritarian than the Tories.
> the comeback of coal was minimal

As the moment of writing, Germany is producing 12% of its electricity with coal.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE
> it's mostly Americans pointing

That’s such a random claim to make…
How are those two concepts related
Cryonics 101: A deep dive into deep freeze
I believe here it is used as an adjective, not the name of a political party.
> It's.. complicated. Nuclear is super clean at the consumption site, but not super clean at the mining site [0].

It's almost certainly not complicated. The CO2 produced by mining uranium is irrelevant compared to the CO2 produced by burning coal fuel.

> And then there's the problem that France's access to cheap uranium is a relic of extractive colonialism, and these countries don't exactly see the fair profits from France's hunger for energy [1].

Uranium is not a large contributor to nuclear energy cost anyway, so this is no argument against nuclear energy.

> So yes, France's energy is cleaner, but it's a complicated picture.

I don't see how it is "complicated". Nuclear is clearly much better than Germany's coal+renewable. (Renewable-only was not an option since wind and solar are extremely volatile.)
This is the blog I had since 2005: https://www.jimwestergren.com/

I use my own CMS and my own web analytics.

My latest article: https://www.jimwestergren.com/my-recommendations-for-a-happy...
Windows Papercuts for *Nix Developers
https://github.com/ArchitectingSoftware?tab=overview&from=20...
NASA has also existed for 80 years and conducted far more manned missions than spaceX has.
Yeah, targeting individual transport with inefficient public transport and bicycles while restarting abandoned coal power plants and abandoning running nuclear power plants is going to work wonderfully indeed.
If your resources are infinite you can. But they are not so you can't.
Let me know if there’s something I can do to help.

Running Unifi on NixOS is a bit of a pain since the license means that there is no binary cache for the package, resulting in frequent rebuilds.

I’ve also not had a great time with the mongo upgrades in the past that caused my controller to not start.
Ask HN: Assume AI replaces programmers in 5 years. What is your backup career?
It's old and it still blows me away.

I've seen movie CG that looks way way shittier, that's ten years newer.
T-Mobile vs. Verizon vs. ATT: new 4G and 5G tests yield two nationwide winners
I know this. It's also very impressive, and coded on a C64 IIRC (checked the page, yes).

This demo is more on the side of "do magic and observe output", rather than "let's make something looking normal in an impossible way" (i.e: elevated) or "let's make something impossible possible" (i.e. 8088 MPH [0]).

All three kinds are equally impressive in my book, yet I prefer the latter ones more.

My main takeaway from Demoscene is not "compression", but the possibility of writing code which performs very well, and what I found is, it's not very hard to do at the end of the day. You just have to be mindful about what you're doing, and how that thing called computer works under the hood.

[0]: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=65371
Relevant comment from someone involved with the project.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36596036
Blockchain is just an accounting tool.

It doesn't make judgments about those using it. It works just as well for fraudsters and cyber criminals as anyone else. There are reasons ransomware extortionists always request payment in some sort of blockchain based crypto --- usually bitcoin.

In other words, blockchain *facilitates* fraud and crime as easily as it *prevents* it.
Not to mention that it's only recently that Blender has become bearable, even if 3dsMAX,etc is ancient those kinds of tools were often used in the past and Linux was a kind of no-starter.

Also since intros were size-limited you kinda needed control of your pipeline to achieve the smallest size of the _binary_. For a 4k intro different compilers could produce different sized binaries, the .exe compressor crinkler mentioned above does some "function-order-randomization" to improve compression by a few bytes by having the correct ordering of data/functions so just running a slightly different version and/or not long enough could fail to produce something below 4k.
It will be enforced against undesirable market places though. Winners and losers will be selected.
This is great and exactly captures the PhD experience. Both in the simulator and in real life, I mostly survived until the end by slacking off frequently, and needed around 5 years.

Some highlights:

> INBOX: Based on the reviewers' comments, we regret to inform you that your manuscript has been REJECTED for publication. One of the reviewers pointed out that there is no comparison with a state-of-art method.

> You came up with a bunch of ideas. However, upon further searching, you found that they have already been done before.

> You found the missing piece during a shower. You develop one of your preliminary results into a major result.

> You found one of your ideas appears in a recently published paper. You can no longer work on it.

> Three years passed. You have witnessed many graduations. You began to worry about whether your can graduate on time.

> The simulation took a much longer time than you expected. The results are not available yet.

What was missing:

1.) Growing feeling of getting too old

2.) Growing family obligations (marriage, kids, trying to write a thesis at 3am with a crying baby next room)

3.) Questions asked by friends and relatives regarding progress

4.) Teaching obligations
Electricity generation is decreasing year over year in Germany since 2015… but the fact is that it should be increasing to electrify heating and transportation. What is really happening is that industries are moving out of Germany to help pretend that the country CO2 emissions are better as no one really count imported CO2 in finished product.
My favourite demo of all time https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=56112

It features programming in multiple languages: cobol, fortran, lua, pascal, ruby, vala, ada, d, java, objc, scheme, visualbasic, asm, javascript, ocaml, python, shell

Big shame no videos of it are up on the internet anymore, I've looked quite hard, but nothing. The code is available here however: https://launchpad.net/binaryofbabel/+download
Tech Ingredients has a better video on this https://youtu.be/dNs_kNilSjk
> I do wonder why threads wasn't just included in the Instagram app.

May be because they are trying to create a separate identity and attract twitter crowd which may or may not like IG much. No one likes IG much these days tbh. Just using IG to logging in is an entirely different matter, people are used to logging in using different service providers like google, facebook etc.
We did choose to put solar on our roof with heat pump when we built our home only four years ago and at the time, there was no certainty if this investment will be any good. This year we also bought a battery and can run the house with this setup from spring to autumn with small input from the grid.

Only winter sucks because the heat pump is less efficient when it's cold. Would be great to have better storage for the grid to get cheaper energy during that time.
Makes sense, matches with my experience. For those who mean this by "trunk-based development" -- and I'm not sure everyone in this thread, including OP, does -- I think it would be clearer to just say "avoid long-running branches", instead of calling that a new method "trunk-based development".

But either way, yeah, what you say matches my experience and the consensus on best practice in communities/teams I have worked on already. I didn't really realize this was not universal, is perhaps my confusion! But I am still not sure if simply avoiding long-running branches is what OP was describing!
That's exactly my point. It's not a language feature, it's a library. Haskell, F#, and any other language that supports monads (or as you say, first class continuations), have the ability to do async/await - in a way that appears first-class - but actually is just regular code.

C#, and other languages that have taken the C# approach [to async/await], don't have first class continuations (well, C# does with LINQ, but that compromises most ways the average OO dev works). They implement async/await with first-class keywords that indicate where to slice a method in two.

In my language-ext [1] project I have added the LINQ operators to `Task<T>` which allows C# tasks to be used in the same way that Async is done in F#.

[1] https://github.com/louthy/language-ext/blob/main/LanguageExt...
We wanted to try something fun and see what people create in a virtual hackathon that combines decentralized web3 tech with the power of generative AI.

Come showcase how you can combine the two and make something really special. We are accepting submissions until the end of July and look forward to seeing what you can make!
For a fair judgement one must look at the bigger picture for example by looking at the CO2 emissions in general per capita. The latest data I could find is of 2021.[1] Germany is 8.09t, while Australia is 15.09t, USA is 14.86t, Canada is 14.30t. Germany is not so far away from countries which are very "green" on the map you linked, such as Iceland (9.11t -- more than Germany!) Norway (7.57t), Austria (7.24t) and Finland (6.79t).

This is only an example. Also CO2 emissions per capita does not provide us with a complete picture. (For example, if a country emits CO2 in the production of export goods, to what extent should the emissions actually be attributed to the importing countries?) By phasing out nuclear energy, Germany has made a major contribution to environmental protection. However, since this is a completely different category of environmental protection, it cannot objectively be offset against presumably associated CO2 emissions. In an open democratic society, such considerations are therefore not the task of a technical elite, but of the people as a whole. As an individual, of course, one can always take a different view of such majority opinions on the matter and campaign for them to be revised. However, one should always be aware that the weighing of such alternatives is fundamentally opinionated.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-per-capita-marimekko?...
The intent was not to take a stab at NASA but rather provide a dumb counterargument to the parent poster's immature rant which would still make more sense than his positioning. Juvenile and counterproductive in retrospect.
It's complicated in the political sense. They are spelunking former colonies to meet green energy targets, while those same countries struggle to progress.
Sigh...

Beyond the security researchers' own little "computer savvy 1%" bubble, is there any intended audience for such Open Letters?

Could they actually communicate with normal people if they (somehow) wanted to?

Are there laws in the UK that make it too risky to just say something like "This bill will make it so much easier for the next Wayne Couzens to find his perfect Sarah Everard."?
There's a sizeable portion of the voters, also sizeable here in HN (see the discussions StartX vs SLS), which demands a minimal government, no intervention, no trust in them and all that. I guess we cannot both have the cake and eat it.
I'd call it easy listening 60s jazz. Some of the tracks in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJuqUErChmM are very similar.
Well, actually, the basic manual inputs of an orbital rocket are "go up" and "explode". The rest is automated.

(Has anyone trained a neural networks to play Kerbal Space Program?)
The activist groups like Last Generation, etc are doing a brilliant job of making ecological movements look like complete buffoons at this time

In fact I kinda hope they are a lobby financed agitprop operation because I couldn't think of a more entitled group outside of the London Houses of Parliament
I built most off my UI off of FlowBite (which is a tailwind UI library). Did not need to use complex prompting resources, though I would sometimes switch between Phind and chatGPT-4 to get a better answer.

I think it works because its not a very complex app and since it's gated with a sufficiently high entry, I don't expect a ton of traffic, hence scaling is not an issue. I also chose the easiest options to deploy (Vercel for the frontned, Heroku for the backend), which might end up costing me in the long run - but I figure I'll get that fixed later
Very nice blog!
I am a fan of the idea of late architecture.

If the architecture supports your intuition of the problem then coding can be straightforward.

I am unsatisfied by many representations of problems in OOP languages, functional languages and LISP.

The requirements of "must be endlessly available, scalable, multithreaded, multi availability zone, secure, robust, extendable, cheap, hirable for" are quite expensive
I love the use of AI-generated imagery. Typography could be better though, but that's subjective.

https://explore.eightify.app/Climate-Change-and-Renewable-En...
A very high-priced consultant hired to clean up the mess made by managers who asked AI to build an enterprise system but didn't think it through or specify it correctly.
Doesn't SQL alchemy make it pretty easy to use raw SQL?
> It's hard for renewables to replace coal or nuclear though, because coal and nuclear provide baseload power, whereas wind and solar are very intermittent and require basically 100% gas backup (as there will be circumstances with very low wind and solar, which tends to happen in europe on very cold, still, winter nights when demand is the highest).

I absolutely agree with you that we need the coal plants and imports for base load. For a fully renewable grid, we need massive storage capacity. This, however, is far from an unsolved problem. The problem is that the economic incentives aren't aligned with that goal yet. There is reason to be optimistic though, and that the money Germany is saving on nuclear, is more sustainably and effectively spent on renewables and storage.