skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's a lot of speculation about when peak coal and fossil usage is going to be in China. There is some suggestion that that might actually be right now. China's aggressive rollout of solar, wind, and battery is shifting a lot of their plans by years or decades. The official line is still that they want to be carbon neutral by 2060. But they might actually get there a lot sooner if the current trends continue.

In any case, the economic case for coal is indeed pretty clear at this point: it's simply too expensive in most markets. Even in markets where coal mining is a big part of the local economy.

And while gas has taken up some of the slack (especially in the US), the vast majority of additions to the grid world wide are renewables.

Peak gas usage world wide is a bit murky. Projections range from right now to 2030 (IEA). But the bottom line is that we're not really replacing coal with gas. There are a lot of gas peaker plants not running all the time that were designed originally to be running 24/7. That massively changes the economics and profitability of these things and makes them a lot less attractive to investors.
We tried this and it was an absolute shit show for us.
As I was working in Denmark, we had a lot of Lenovo resellers providing better offers than the normal list prices. This was a couple of years ago, maybe this is still the case.
Haha indeed, but I’m a gooner. You’d never see me admit that.
Ask HN: What Are Your Most Important Software Testing Ideas and Practices?
We're exploring ways to improve software testing in modern development workflows and would love to learn from this community's experiences.

What are the key ideas, practices, or philosophies that have been game-changers for your testing process? This could be:

Automated testing tools or strategies
Unique approaches to integration or unit testing
How you handle edge cases, performance testing, or regression
Ways to integrate testing into CI/CD pipelines effectively
Lessons learned from testing failures

Looking forward to hearing about what has worked (or not!) for you. Let's spark some great ideas that can benefit everyone in the industry!

--
PS: If you have open-source tools or frameworks you swear by, please share!
aw. of course. Backlight. Filtering. My brain was hallucinating UV emitting LCD with phosphors in place of filters, that's OLED... thanks.
Show HN: Simplify Tailwindcss with This Library
TailwindCSS is powerful, but it can be hard to read.

Writing conditional styles can also be a hassle.

That’s why I created this lightweight and simple library.

It makes your TailwindCSS code cleaner and easier to manage.

Try it out, and feel free to share your feedback anytime!
You roll back a schema migration on a dev/test database by nuking it and regenerating it, probably with the same tools you use to manage the rest of your environment.

You don't rollback a schema migration to a production database, because that is impossible. What has been done cannot be undone.
No, I think it is the optimism of someone who writes drivers when they need them.

Bit of a fixer-upper.
A few decades ago, a French minister was being interviewed on US TV about the French nuclear power program. He was asked how France had managed to get all their nuclear plants approved and built. He said, "We had a vote in the Chamber of Deputies. I understand you do things differently in America."
What, the Vietnam war?
In fact it was looked into by Caltrain's predecessor, the Southern Pacific railroad

https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=SDI19210907.2.17

Stockton Independent, September 1921

> Electrification of Lines to Be Looked Into by S.P.

> SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 6. — William Sproule, president of the Southern Pacific company, has received authorization from the board of directors of the railway to investigate the feasibility of electrifying the Southern Pacific lines between San Francisco and Peninsula points, It was announced here today. Better and more frequent service would result from electrification of the peninsula lines, according to parties who petitioned the Southern Pacific to take this action.

(Unfortunately, it was dismissed a couple weeks later: https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=d&d=SDI19210917.2.13)
couldn't agree more!

We need to separate and design modules as unitary as possible:

- zip should ARCHIVE/COMPRESS, i.e. reduce the file size and create a single file from the file system point of view. The complexity should go in the compression algorithm.

- Sharding/sending multiple coherent pieces of the same file (zip or not) is a different module and should be handled by specialized and agnostic protocols that do this like the ones you mentioned.

People are always doing tools that handle 2 or more use cases instead of following the UNIX principle to create generic and good single respectability tools that can be combined together (thus allowing a 'whitelist' of combinations which is safe). Quite frankly it's annoying and very often leads to issues such as this that weren't even thought in the original design because of the exponential problem of combining tools together.
Yeah it’s extremely sketchy but legal. Sports betting is treated as a game offered on the casino’s terms and they get to choose who and for how much they’ll play with. You can see it in the financials of the big companies. Where the theoretical win for the casino on most sports bets is around 5%, DraftKings and the others are regularly hitting 3x that much. They ban/limit winners and push everyone else toward bad bets (e.g. same game parlays).
That's a bummer. I'm trying to do the exact same thing right now, digitize family photos. Some of mine have German on the back. The last OCR to hit headlines was terrible, was hoping this would be better. ChatGPT 4o has been good though, when I paste individual images into the chat. I haven't tried with the API yet, not sure how much that would cost me to process 6500 photos, many of which are blank but I don't have an easy way to filter them either.
Gas peaker plants aren't intended to be run 24/7. That's why they're called "peaker plants". Most of the cost is fuel, so they can be profitable if run only during peak periods.

Nuclear plants are all fixed cost. So reducing power produced during off-hours increases cost per KWh.
Sea Snail Toxin Could Inspire New Diabetes Drugs
I think you are correct. Ziply Fiber said they were seeing 2.1 times their normal peak [1].

But also people were saying they weren't having any issues streaming on Ziply.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ZiplyFiber/comments/1gsenik/netflix...
Hi all, I'm the author of llama-ocr. Thank you for sharing & for the kind comments! I built this earlier this week since I wanted a simple API to do OCR – it uses llama 3.2 vision (hosted on together.ai, where i work) to parse images into structured markdown. I also have it available as an npm package.

Planning to add a bunch of other features like the ability to parse PDFs, output a response in JSON, ect... If anyone has any questions, feel free to send them and I'll try to respond!
This is the funniest thing I’ve read today
Is this argument not also applicable to us and our lives?
Prior to the Caltrain electrification, BART existed and it's pretty much a suburban rail system. Just served a different part of the Bay Area.
OCR tools sometimes make errors, but they don't make things up. There's a difference.
FWIW, "environmental studies" don't necessary restrict themselves to "the environment" like trees and birds or whatever. The project increases frequency and capacity so they have to plan around things like how much longer per day grade crossings will be blocked and things like that.
I was consulting at a place, there was a very bad programmer whose code looked sort of like this

cost arrayIneed = [];

const arrayIdontNeed = firstArray.map(item => {

if(item.hasProp) {
arrayIneed.push(item);
}

});

return arrayIneed;

the above is very much a cleaned up and elegant version of what he would actually push into the repo.

he left for a competitor in the same industry, this was at the second biggest company for the industry in Denmark and he left for the biggest company - presumably he got a pay raise.

I asked the manager after he was gone, one time when I was refactoring some code of his - which in the end just meant throwing it all out and rewriting from scratch - why he had been kept on so long, and the manager said there were some layoffs coming up and he would have been out with those but because of the way things worked it didn't make sense to let him go earlier.
That's fair, but do realize that sometimes people do have to send around archives from the last century (they got archived for a reason!) or created by eldritch-horror tools that just make weird files (which, sometimes, are the gold masters for certain very important outputs...). And it's kind of annoying when these weird but standard files get silently dropped. Especially when that same file went through just fine yesterday, before the duly zealous security settings changed for whatever reason.

All I'm saying is, don't drop my stuff silently because your code couldn't be arsed to deal with (ugly) standard formats. At least give me a warning ("file of type not scannable" or whatever, the actual words are not so important). And then when I have to yell at the Shanghai people I can yell at them for the correct reasons.
Where can I read more about this? If this was a fact I think people would be way more excited about cryonics. Casually browsing wikipedia suggests that we are not there yet with the ability to thawn large animals or even organs.
Should be up, please try again!
… which is why the label makes sense. They may have been contaminated with nuts during production.
Not anymore: PEX now supports including an interpreter in the package: https://docs.pex-tool.org/scie.html

And unfortunately, PyOxidizer went into maintenance mode: https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2024/03/17/my-shifting-open-so...
Are you an engineer who could have done better?
I think acting as if peanuts are actually nuts for purposes of communication is much more defensible than acting as if tomatoes are vegetables, in short you are dying on a hill that was paved over long ago.
They have done a few live shows maybe not of this magnitude
I’ve been told that I tend to “TED Talk” / lecture, and on re-reading I can see why someone might get that vibe.

It isn’t my intention to condescend, I know a bit about this stuff and try to make informative comments when the opportunity arises.

Thank you for having my back on the substantial accuracy of the comment.
AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry
Hmm. I've found that it's much easier and faster to write a lot of code than to take the time and be thoughtful of what you end up shipping.

> I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.
Mark Twain [0]

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/21422-i-didn-t-have-time-to...
The terrestrial plants use only a small part of the spectrum, because the available light is frequently too abundant for them, which was even more true at the beginning of their evolution, when there were no forests providing shadows.

For terrestrial plants, it is usually a more important problem to not be overwhelmed by too much energy captured from light, than to capture more.

This is why the green plants dominate on continents, because they reflect a good part of the light, instead of absorbing it, so they are not destroyed by excessive light.

On the other hand, in the oceans the green algae are a minority in comparison with diatoms, brown algae and other kinds of algae that absorb much larger fractions of the solar light, because they can use only the less intense light that remains after passing through water.

On the bottoms of waters there are many places where there are combined algal and bacterial mats that act like a multijunction photovoltaic cell, i.e. there are multiple layers of different algae and bacteria, e.g. diatoms, blue-green algae (cyanobacteria), purple non-oxygenic phototrophic bacteria and green non-oxygenic phototrophic bacteria, so that each layer absorbs a different part of the solar light spectrum, resulting in almost complete absorption through all layers.
How did you get your child to start programming? I had some success with Scratch, but it is not something my 9 year old would do for fun. (He likes 3D printing, but it is mostly just dragging stuff around.)
If that's their official default recommendation, and they didn't say something to the contrary specifically for this recall, then that is what they're recommending for this recall.
I tried open source and closed source OCR models, all were pretty bad. Google vision was probably the best of the "OCR" models, but it liked adding spaces between characters and had other issues I've forgotten. It was bad enough that I wondered if I was using it wrong. By the time I was trying to pass the text to an LLM with the image so it could do "touchups" and fix the mistakes, I gave up and decided to try LLMs for the whole task.

I don't remember the exact models, I more or less just went through the OpenRouter vision model list and tried them all. Gemini Flash performed the best, somehow better than Gemini Pro. GPT-4o/mini was terrible and expensive enough that it would have had to be near perfect to consider it. Pixtral did terribly. That's all I remember, but I tried more than just those. I think Llama 3.2 is the only one I haven't properly tried, but I don't have high hopes for it.

I think even if OCR models were perfect, they couldn't have done some of the things I was using LLMs for. Like extracting structured information at the same time as the plain text - extracting any dates listed in the text into a standard ISO format was nice, as well as grabbing peoples names. Being able to say "Only look at the hand-written text, ignore printed text" and have it work was incredible.
Which reality? Does a middle class Californian FAANG worker spending its day on Twitter know more about, I don't know, the Congo or Thai mangrove forests than a philosopher in a hut?

Unless by reality you mean YOUR slice of the world, a sheltered place of its own.
All the best engineers will leave for Netflix, Facebook, heck even Oracle are progressive on the remote working policy and others.
Fastly says they do 6M ccv for superbowl (i'm actually surprised they let them do the entire thing and don't mix different CDNs) and I'm not sure they do encoding and manifest serving - they might just cache/deliver chunks. Do you really think tyson vs other guy was only 600k ccv? I'd be shocked if Netflix can't handle this.
Netflix engineers have a cash comp higher than almost any of their peers barring quantitative trading.
Los Angeles had an extensive electric train system operated by Pacific Electric in the 1920s, but eventually they were all removed to improve motor traffic, and because the owners sold all of the real estate that the Red Cars made more attractive. This article feels like experiencing the past to me.
In general tools written for a single platform are better than their cross platform alternatives.
All true, but this part of your GP comment:

> a company that fundamentally only does a single thing, which is this

… isn’t true. From the couch, watching Suits and watching a live sports match may seem similar but they’re very different technical problems to solve.
Is this "by Ubuntu" or a third party project?
Insurance design to protect women from health and income effects of extreme heat
For the same reason that pointing out the sun rose in the east today would be ridiculous but if it happened to rise in the west, or you perceived it to rise in the west, that would be worth sharing.

Being able to livestream a sporting event is the default now and has been for at least over a decade since HBO’s original effort to stream a Game of Thrones season opener failed because of the MSFT guy they hired, and they fixed it by handing it over to MLBAM.

Maybe that’s what Netflix should do. Buy Disney so they can get access to the MLBAM people (now Disney Streaming because they bought it from MLB).
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/04/entertainment/chris-rock-netf... (2023-03-06)
I think you're forgetting about temporal safety (use after free). Presumably that brings it up to the 70% of security issues being related to memory safety, which many studies have shown - remarkably consistently.
Why doesn't my heart keep beating if my brain dies then? Or would it?
For what use case? Watching a movie on anything that isn’t OLED is a painful experience for me now, but coding backends on an IPS is perfectly fine.
Iconic time clock used in the time-travel anime 'Steins;Gate'.

Wikipedia says it is "considered one of the best anime series of all time by critics and fans alike.". [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steins;Gate_(TV_series)]
Discover Hacker News in Simplified Chinese
A platform offering concise, high-quality summaries of Hacker News articles in Simplified Chinese. Perfect for quick updates and non-English readers.
My account is two years old and I have more updoots than you. Maybe address my comment instead of my username.
> Generally, it seems to me that a lot of people are saying, basically, "I don't want to engage in a social network that isn't and echo chamber of my beliefs."

> I find it incredibly sad. But it does feel like the direction society is moving toward.

It's not that I don't want to engage. I just don't want to be submerged there all the time. I want to spend most of my time surrounded by 'my people' and only once in a while peek outside.

Let me recommend an article by Noah Smith where he argues (IMO convincingly) why he thinks that the internet works better as a fragmented thing https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-internet-wants-to-be-fragm...
they changed this in southern california for the surfliner and it was a huge impact. really nice to not hear the train horn. then they added speakers that play fake train sounds at grade crossings… why
What about amber? Don't tell me that's a lie too
I've worked for many companies that said they hired the best. And to be honest when I hire I also try to hire good people. I think I could hire better if a) I had an open cheque, b) I was running coolest project in the universe. I did hire for some interesting projects but nothing close to an open cheque. Even under these conditions it's tough to find great people. You can go after people with a proven track record but even that doesn't always guarantee their next project will be as successful.

The reality though is that large companies with thousands of people generally end up having average people. Some company may hire more PhD's. But on average those aren't better software engineers than non-PhD's. Some might hire people who are strong competitive coders, but that also on average isn't really that strong of a signal for strong engineers.

Once you have a mix of average people, on a curve, which is the norm, the question becomes do you have an environment where the better people can be successful. In many corporate environments this doesn't happen. Better engineers may have obstacles put in front of them or they can forced out of the organization. This is natural because for most organizations can be more of a political question than a technical question.

Smaller organizations, that are very successful (so can meet my two criterias) and can be highly selective or are highly desirable, can have better teams. By their nature as smaller organizations those teams can also be effective. As organizations grow the talent will spread out towards average and the politics/processes/debt/legacy will make those teams less effective.
I hate XDG. I prefer app/kinds-of-data. If home directory clutter is the problem, I would prefer having a ~/crap folder. So it would be ~/crap/.cargo
Are you dog fooding your own product?

Can’t find a link to „onair“ you on your website.
In addition slack search becomes a great onboarding tool.
OpenAI Email Archives (From Musk vs. Altman)
I think a lot of the weirdness in pandas comes from firstly the original focus on time series, and secondly the attempt to make logical indexing work like it did in R.

I'm not a big fan of the pandas API but it's a super useful tool nonetheless.
It's surprising to me that Germany isn't at the forefront of incentivizing an agile startup economy in any way possible. Especially as they've always been the economic powerhouse of Europe, failure to get ahead of these global trends is surprising. And this is the first time I've ever heard anyone describe Germany's infrastructure as anything below world-class, although it's been ten years since I've been there now. The idea that the roads would be rougher than those in the Netherlands is fairly shocking. I do think it's a great teller, though. I live in Oregon where the roads immediately degrade when you cross the border from California; and I used to live in Argentina, where the roads degrade when you cross from Chile. The feeling you have crossing one of those borders says quite a bit about what's happening in the place.

Thanks for your honest reply.
I left because a large fraction of the things its algorithm was showing me were factually wrong. And I don't mean things that people accidentally got wrong. Or where the wrong things are there for entertainment purposes. No, I mean things where they purposefully are wrong and they want people to believe them.

I only ever followed a handful of accounts and those had stopped posting many years ago, so when Musk made it so the algorithmic feed worthless there was no reason to keep my account.
The fallacy of the cost argument here is that it fails to take into account the cost and economics of operating a coal plant. Coal energy is simply too expensive. Any time wind/solar pushes energy prices down, coal plants are operating at a loss. Shutting down and starting up coal plants is expensive too.

A lot of the reduction in coal plant capacity is not driven by environmental concerns but by economics. This is investors cutting their losses. The cost of continuing to operate these plants is higher than the cost of just getting rid of them. Keeping these plants going requires ongoing investments with very dubious returns. Financing that is getting hard; it's a bad investment.

Which is why a lot of countries are pretty far done decommissioning their coal capacity.
Every team needs a one-nine (CB channel for chat/truckers)
The article is about how tough being a girl sailor is. It's undercut in the first paragraph with the inclusion of the generous benefactor.
I don't understand why we're not allowed to regrow limbs. What did that make room for in our DNA?
It seems like just the general idea of ‘an audience’ is too broad.

Take a football match. The presence of your own fans has a big positive effect (usually). Presence of the other teams fans has a negative effect (usually).

I would expect that the belief of the person doing the task about the audience and whether they make them feel supported or nervous or angry or whatever other complex emotion would all change the effect
'After 1916, there is no record of him and his fate is unknown, but he was drafted into World War I as a military horse and "killed in action in 1916 or was consumed by hungry soldiers"'

I feel like regardless of confirmation behind how high the intellect of the horse was, this is no way him to go out. Hans truly loved him. This may sound dramatic but it feels like if my pet cat were to get killed in war and possibly eaten after i died
I think you're making some assumptions about the people who may have signed this. I don't know if you've read the letter or Amazon's leadership principles that they tout loudly, but the letter was very much in line with that.

I would also not read too much into headlines. When you read op-ed, you must understand that you're reading the author's perspective on things and that might not necessarily align with the subjects' view.
OpenBSD support is quite a bit further: https://roblillack.net/openbsd-arm64-on-the-thinkpad-t14s