skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Again, "sheer blind adoration of trees" isn't really my position. I recognize there are costs, downsides, and contraindications. By contrast, you seem to think PV is all upside and trees are all downside.

Again, even accounting for PV roof shading, the energy audit showed a 15x improvement in keeping trees vs. cutting down trees and adding PV. That roof shading was already 'baked in.' Accounting for PV roof shading is basic stuff in sustainable architecture.

If we're being fair, we should acknowledge that solar panels can also reduce the longevity of the roof they're on, due to poor installation, the addition of new roof penetrations, and wind funneling. It's easy to say "well don't get a poor installer then," but of course the problem is you don't always know that going in! The presence of PV also greatly increases the cost of replacing/repairing a roof, since the PV has to be essentially uninstalled and reinstalled to access the roof beneath.

Well-positioned trees will shade a structure in the hottest parts of the day (normally south and west), which is precisely the "evening peak" when the grid is most stressed. PV instead produces most of its energy in the "afternoon lull," when electricity demand dips. So trees are effectively producing 'negawatts,' (credit to Amory Lovins) reducing demand on the end-of-line distribution grid at exactly the right time of day.`

At the risk of stating the obvious, if trees are crashing through your living room they're not "good" shade trees! Any competent arborist will be able to give you advice on setbacks, trimming, and (yes) removal if necessary. Remember that the trees are most likely giving you a much greater "energy payback" than PV[1], so you should use an appropriately levelized playing field when comparing the expense of paying an arborist every ~decade vs. the expense of paying PV installers every ~2-3 decades.

If I seem one-sided in my presentation, it's only because I'm needing to counter-balance your initial extremely one-sided presentation. My point is precisely that you need to look at both the cumulative upsides and the cumulative downsides of both technologies, and not simply look for evidence supporting a preconceived bias, in either direction. I think we're in agreement on that!

Anyway the exchange has been fun, and hopefully enlightening to at least one other reader, so I'm voting up all. cheers

[1] To quantify this, I would encourage hiring a sustainable design professional to do an in-person energy modeling of the home or business in question.
No, but as a Fediverse user I can tell you firsthand that it's a less successful or attractive platform than X or Facebook.

Not that I mind, but I think the statement still stands.
I didn’t fully know what I was getting into when I got it, but it honestly puts the MacBook Pro screen to shame
Four attempt and all failed , How does it even happen ? Its not like it was a non existent market as whatsapp/discord/messenger is thriving.
> Blind requires employees to use their official workplace emails to sign up, as a way to authenticate that users actually work for the companies they are discussing.

That’s a pretty bad design decision. It’s also not a good idea to access such forum from you work computer, even when not using the company email.
> Dead wrong, but interesting.

Hah, hard agree!

> Sure, a 40-0 roll being a 50 isn’t immediately obvious, but this is the only internally consistent method I can see here.

The author is trading the ability to intuitively read numbers for consistency, which isn't needed. I'd much rather remember the one special case - `00-0` being 100 - rather than the un-intuitive need to treat every `X0-0` as `(X+1)0`.

And in any case... consistency is whatever you choose and stick with.
> Theft is a clear line

Right, and clear lines are reactionary and emotional, in my opinion.

> I dont see how Meta has any moral obligation to prevent exploit

They don't, companies have no moral obligations to do anything because it's impossible for them to have morals, because they aren't people. Which is why I never give companies the benefit of the doubt - that's reserved for entities capable of morality, in my mind.

> Can you explain the moral justification for someone with a 400k salary to steal from their employer

Sure. There's a young boy dying of a rare illness. The employee cannot make or buy the drug, but he knows a company has access to it. They refuse to give it up. So he steals the drug, saving the young boys life. Saving a life is more important than keeping the drug, therefore the situation is moral.

Or imagine a company is evil in some way, and theft might prevent them from doing something evil. Again, moral. This is also the rationale behind why killing is sometimes moral. If I'm about to get killed and I defend myself, I therefore killed to prevent something evil happening.

If a bunch of members of the Nazi party stole and fled the country, we wouldn't have had a holocaust. If Oppenheimer stole the secrets to the atomic bomb, hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese civilians wouldn't have been killed. If someone stole the guns from the Columbian killers, that tragedy would've never happened.

I'm not saying that theft is morally justified in this particular circumstance. What I am saying is that generally it could be. And Meta handled this in a piss poor way that hurts them much more than the employees.

Really, I'm looking out for Meta. So, you're welcome Mr. Zuckerburg.
Hey, same here! For better or worse, I use Opera Mini for much of my mobile browsing, and it fares far worse than Firefox with uBlock Origin and ResistFingerprinting. I complained about this roughly a year ago on a similar HN thread, on which a Cloudflare rep also participated. Since then something changed, but both sides being black boxes, I can't tell if Cloudflare is wising up or Mini has stepped up. I still get the same challenge pages, but Mini gets through them automatically now, more often than not.

But not always. My most recent stumbling block is https://www.napaonline.com. Guess I'm buying oxygen sensors somewhere else.
Show HN: Sonata - platform for self-improving internal tools
Hey everyone,

I'm Cameron and I'm building Sonata, which is a knowledge graph for internal LLM tools.

My thinking is that internal tools are going to become more and more prevalent and complicated with LLMs as it becomes easier to generate high quality software. A core piece of infrastructure that we'll need for this to work is a high quality knowledge graph i.e. a place where all of the information, preferences, goals, terminology etc lives.

I think the future will be that at every company:
1. There will be a load of really great internal tools (e.g. Klarna replacing Salesforce and Workday with internal tools)
2. Your single sign on for these tools will come with this knowledge graph.

Another way to think about this is that current "AI Workers" are always on their first day in the job, but with Sonata they'll start on day 100 and only get better with time.

Would love any feedback but more importantly I'd love to demo anyone the product and get you using it.

Thanks!
Liberate tute me
This is a really good point and I have thought about this multiple times along the way. Web Crypto API seemed ideal, but it brought its own complexities, especially if you want to have quick access on multiple browsers/devices.

It's true that as it is, it still requires trust. We do have our own custom servers, and we made sure that no logs related to personal data are ever stored, and encryption is done on the application level before it is sent on the DB server.

This is something I want to see implemented 100%
In the example in the docs, they show someone marking an image that has slipped through the filter as one that's AI generated. But, it comes from Adobe Stock - and I think this really highlights the biggest weakness with how they've gone about implementing this. It's not looking at the images at all, it's looking at where they come from.

The problem is that now that Pandora's box has been opened, all sorts of sites (incl. anywhere like social media that accepts user content) are going to have comingled AI-and-legitimate images that they host.

This is a hard problem to solve.
RHS Wisley is also fantastic. Unfortunately slightly more difficult to get to; you really need to drive there.

Agreed about the riverboats. Tried the Thames clippers for the first time a few weeks ago. They're delightfully empty during weekdays and serve drinks and snacks on board.
> The speed of light is the same in both frames of reference. What you think is going affect the speed is actually the slowing of the proper time which effectively causes the photon to redshift.

No. You can drop a ruler onto the surface of Earth and measure from the Moon the time it takes the light to travel from one end of the ruler to the other. It will be slower than the lightspeed from your point of view. This is a real effect, we've measured it.

However, it will be lightspeed from the point of view of an Earth observer.
You might be ok with being a lab rat, but most people are not. People buy products to satisfy their needs, not to participate in somebody else's experiment. Given the option (in the absence of monopoly) they will search for another company that treats them correctly.
You are totally right. Was knee jerk thinking of generic free speech protections from private companies.

That being said, blanket blocking access to a forum might still be ok? You do not know specifically what would be discussed there.
It is very cumbersome to look at individual images in the search for e.g. reference images just to sort out the garbage. Using AI images for that would defeat the purpose. Not just because of the fact that training AI with AI output degrades the model, indicating it's a net negative on average.

It's not a dumb feature, this is what I wished for less than a week ago when using Google. I don't want my time wasted from judging AI images based on perception, I don't even want to perceive them.
What’s so bad about bad grammar?

Sure, I’d prefer it if people didn’t use bad grammar, but here are some things that are higher priority:

- keeping spam off the platform

- keeping harassment off the platform

- keeping porn off the platform (unless you’re a porn social network, I guess, in which case you need to keep child porn off your platform, which in context is a harder problem)

- keeping sock puppets / psychops / etc off the platform

Also, I wouldn’t like it if people were prevented from posting due to bad grammar, and I wouldn’t like it if people were forced to rewrite their posts because of bad grammar. If people want to opt in to having their grammar corrected, then great, but don’t force it on them.
Yeah because most people do not find chess, go or backgammon particularly fun. Sorry to burst your bubble if you thought they were somehow perfect games.

BGG rankings tend to be pretty good. I find they rate co-op games, sequels, kickstarted games and very heavy games a bit too highly. But apart from that they're good.

I don't know why you would expect Backgammon in particular to be highly ranked. It's got more strategy than most highly random games (e.g. cribbage) but it's not fun, at least not compared to the many many better board games that exist now.
Ask HN: Is it possible to ditch Google Play as a solo mobile app dev?
Hey everyone! I need some advice..

I am a student and solo app dev, and I recently made a game on iOS that reached the top of the front page on Hacker News. I want to bring the game to Android, but am struggling with Google Play's policies for solo devs.

The one that is bothering me most is having to display my physical, home address on the play store for paid apps. I personally think this would be a pretty big security and privacy hazard, but there isn't any way around it that I have seen. There are also other things like requiring solo devs to test any new app with 20 testers for 2 weeks.

My Point Is: If I launch the app instead on the Epic Game Store / Amazon App Store, or even both, do you think the app can still be successful? Is it really possible to get good reach without the Play store, or will users just ignore the app if it's not on Google Play?

I am on iOS and don't know too much about the Android stores / user behavior, so any advice is appreciated.

Thanks!

Link to app for reference: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6720712299
On a wiki rabbit hole from that link to the Apophis asteroid, to rage and rage 2 video game plots.
Not sure that would have solved the problem here as the company can just set up a catch-all redirect on emails from Blind’s domain(s). Blind doesn’t send out emails without someone signing up for them so it’s pretty obvious what the content would be even if it were encrypted.
ScholarlyArticle: "Amplification of electromagnetic fields by a rotating body" (2024)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49689-w

> Could this be used as an engine of some kind?

What about helical polarization?

"Chiral Colloidal Molecules And Observation of The Propeller Effect"
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3856768/

Sugar molecules are asymmetrical / handed, per 3blue1brown and Steve Mould. /? https://www.google.com/search?q=Sugar+molecules+are+asymmetr....

Is there a way to get to get the molecular propeller effect and thereby molecular locomotion, with molecules that contain sugar and a rotating field or a rotating molecule within a field?
I noticed this a while back when I was trying to read cloudflare's own blog.
Periodically they would block my newsreader.
I ended up just dropping their feed.

I am glad to see other people calling out the problem.
Hopefully, a solution will emerge.
> ... Cloudflare’s anti-DDoS protection for government services, which is fine since it can be done securely with end-to-end encryption in a zero-trust model.

Unless it's below L7/HTTP, the possibility of doing it securely is very questionable.

Up until very recently it was very trivial to conduct "domain fronting" of sorts but with colocations in hostile locations. So Chinese or Russian servers decrypting your TLS traffic no questions asked, and that was with their premium (DLS) offerings.

I suspect that if you're in a hostile country where CF announces their prefixes locally, it's still doable. Unfortunately that's a bit more difficult to test than it was before.
It would make sense to expect some ramp up because immigration is a stronger electoral issue than it was previously, and because a second Trump administration will probably be more coordinated and effective in implementing its goals than the first one was. Given how laden with unintended consequences any change in immigration policy is, though, there are probably some limits on the rate of change that would be possible and politically prudent.

For example, without undocumented immigrants, milk would be a lot more expensive (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/15/magazine/milk-industry-un...). The current election is showing us quite starkly how significant grocery staple prices are in shaping public perception of a nation's economic health.
Blocking signups to a specific forum using company email is not blocking salary discussions.
On Windows, some subregions of the screen flicker in garbage data sometimes, but very briefly.

On Linux, I successfully built a kernel but I have not gotten the firmware working. My WIP is here and I am very much a novice in this area: https://github.com/conradev/x1e-nixos-config
Another win for merchandise? Really?
> 2000

Did you mean 2020?
I tried the the linked example search for "baby cat" and it returned the same three AI cats you can see in their Google search comparison screenshot on the first page. None of them labeled as AI generated.

Edit: When I explicitly choose to "Include" AI images from the toolbar option, they disappear. When I choose to "Exclude" them, they reappear. Still seems a bit buggy.
That Google Doc is painful to read. You point at the stars and Matt looks at the finger.

> you can just continue to use WordPress without any impact

That's nice—

> on any other host than WP Engine

That's the whole point, Matt.
What desktop runs Android?
The Syrian state ran out of ordinary munitions during the civil war, but so desired to ethnically cleanse Sunni Palestinian refugee camps that they improvised by packing metal oil drums with high explosives, nails, scrap, and bearings, and then dropping them from helicopters onto the camps. There's video footage. Soldiers in the helicopters have to light fuses on them by hand, like 1920s silent film villains. They adopted a tactic of dropping a barrel bomb, waiting 10 minutes for responders to come help the wounded, and then dropping another one on them; they apparently called it a "double tap". They did this deliberately, exclusively targeting civilians.

And, of course, they did this in addition to deploying Sarin gas. Have you ever read the New Yorker story about the Baathist Sarin attacks on Halabja? If not, can I ask that you go read it (it's on archive.is; steel yourself) and then come back and tell me how you think the IDF stacks up regionally?

By the way: these are the people Hezbollah engaged its largest ever military mobilization to support. In Madaya, they deliberately blockaded food supplies into the suburb for months; people ate their pets, and then grass. Then they starved to death. Hezbollah leaders set up food displays with fresh proteins and produce and filmed joke videos.
It's hobby and home stuff that needs the biggest stimulant push for me. At work there's social pressure to provide motivation, but when I'm alone there's no sources of motivation.

SSRIs make me even more lazy, which results in anxiety about not doing anything and failing responsibilities.
The website is great, fast and slick. but sometimes I wished there were notifications when I needed it. Of course a mute everything option would be handy as well.

Like for this post it'd be faster if I can click a button to see the responses instead of go to my submissions.
If you think that sort of thing isn't happening regardless of who's in charge you must live in paradise.

Companies worth hundreds of billion, even a trillion dollars, these are "national interest" level entities, core parts of the US economy, with billions of users abroad which makes them major tools of international influence. Their CEOs have the president on speed dial and vice versa. Turning that into a partisan talking point just shows your naivete (or dishonesty, but I assume good faith).
Hard agree on not using JS Date, but why not use Temporal API?
You'd want to be very sure that at no point an email/text along the lines of "let's do this, because people are discussing salaries" was sent that might show up in discovery.
New requirement for app updates in the European Union
So then it depends on taxi services. I'm not in the US, and all the three points you listed are more than guaranteed by actual taxi companies around here. In addition to that, I also will be made aware of the price in advance.
Matt’s response to DHH was really some of the pettiest stuff I’ve seen from a major public figure in the tech world

Maybe its a newfound persona, maybe its a new marketing angle, or maybe its just someone going a little unhinged. But all isn’t right in the WordPress world
This is the likely real reason - employer provided meals are a big deductible and providing the proper documentation and management of expenses can be a good kickback on providing that perk.

However, once an employee starts putting expenses that won't pass the smell test, it could threaten the perk.
Samsung releases 24Gb GDDR7 DRAM for testing in beefy AI systems
I wonder if you could creatively combine this model with search algorithms to advance the state of the art in computer chess? I wouldn't be surprised to see such a bot pop up on tcec in a couple years.
Where the Digital Sidewalk Ends
he he. good one.

but you may have misunderstood what I meant.

I wasn't criticizing you.

it was just a joke related to that scheme book.
> It's not possible, because EM field doesn't affect all particles.

It's not the EM field, but gravity.

> If we stick 2E15 electrons together in a long line, then it will start to rotate too due to differences in gravitational field at inner and outer segments of the line.

Just look at an individual electron. Why would it curve? It's sufficiently point-like for the gravitational field gradient to be negligible.
That's not what the rule is. The rule is you get X amount of money, maximally, to spend on a meal.

From the employer standpoint it makes absolutely no difference if you got to a cheap place or an expensive place, because the rule is X amount. So you'd be stupid to go to a cheap place.

And the concept of having to eat it is stupid on the surface.

What happens if you get full, and you have to take some home? Are you now fired?
No, right? But you broke the rules?

You require some amount of leniency. If you follow rules hard and fast, it will backfire. It also creates perverse incentives. Like I said, I'm incentivized to buy as much food as possible and as expensive as possible.

I agree some of these employees probably did deserve to be fired. I don't think Meta handled it well though, and I do think this ultimately hurts them orders of magnitude more than anyone else. Often, we justify self-destruction because we're right. Nobody really cares how right you are when you hurt yourself.
Indeed, so much ink spilled on community drama but no one stepping up to fork the code.
I bet one person could probably build a pretty good synthetic NL->Prolog dataset. ROI for paying that person would be high if you were building a foundation model (ie benefits beyond being able to output Prolog.)
> That’s a pretty bad design decision

How would you design it?
That could actually be a top quality podcast - well moderated content from thoughtful people, many subject matter experts, with mostly thoughtful discussion.. (I read hn for the comments..) sounds good to me.
I see what you're saying now. Your brief analysis has a lot in common with analyses of class conflict and progress that are common in Marxism, though with some stark differences from many as well (e.g., pessimism about the likelihood of self-conscious class activity for makers, no indication of the possibility or goal of a "makers' state" or classless society, maybe a more whiggish or teleological notion of dialectical progress than is fashionable in contemporary Marxism).

Not exactly how I see things, but insightful and concisely put. Thanks for taking the time to write it out!
I mean when you describe most modern consumer software products, they’re pretty much that bloated.
Ever?

A book costs $20.

How many books could you get with $200?

That's it. Even my granma living in a remote village understood it.
I think humans are excellent survivors. I don’t lose sleep over externalities because of that alone. What I mean by that is that once people realise their daily lives are being affected by a negative externality, they start making decisions that alleviate that hardship.

I do recognise though that it’s an unsolved problem, and will lead to some form of regulation as our understanding is lacking.

I think only harmful monopolies should be broken up by force, since they’re a legitimate market force. I’m conceding some ground on that because I’m not prepared to claim that monopolies aren’t always harmless.
Personally, I feel like the bold statements about encryption should be removed until this is implemented to avoid misleading users.

Out of curiosity, is the data encrypted with a client-provided secret (eg. a password hash, or something that would otherwise be impossible to extract from the server), or is the secret stored on the server?
>I'm not saying that theft is morally justified in this particular circumstance. What I am saying is that generally it could be.

I was asking about this circumstance. It seemed like you were making the case that in this case it isn't bad, sorry if I was confused, and you agree it is bad.
He said in his tweet that he verified the results.
Weird that this article doesn't mention Carrom at all - maybe people in North America haven't heard of it.