skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
NPX on windows was broken for years when your username had a space in it. Never underestimate how long bugs can stay around when it doesn't affect any of the developers and for everyone else the workaround is quicker than fixing it
Out of curiosity, I tried to use freely available LLM to generate simple Python tests. I provided the code and specified exactly what requirements I want to be tested. What I found out is that initially it generates repetitive, non-DRY code so I have to write propmts for improvement like "use parametrization for these two tests" or "move this copy-paste code into a function". And it turns out that it is faster to take initial version of code and fix it yourself rather than type those prompts and explain what you want to be done. And worse, the model I was using doesn't even learn anything and will make the same mistakes the next time.

But, this was a generic LLM, not a coding assistant. I wonder if they are different and if they remember what you were unhappy with the last time.

Also LLMs seem to be good with languages like Python, and really bad with C and Rust, especially when asked to do something with pointers, ownership, optimization etc.
I applaud the effort to expand charging across the nation as this will inevitably increase the comfort level of the average joe on the fence with range anxiety.

The elephant in the room that nobody is talking about is the connector.

There are SEVEN different competing charging connector types in North America. if i dont have an adapter, im either screwed into spending 3 hours at a charging station or im calling a tow truck. Until the USA adopts a reasonable national standard then all this electric car futurism is just branded nonsense and patent profiteering.

ICE automobiles have TWO standards for fuel, regular pump, and hi-flo nozzles with a wider diameter built to fit commercial trucks. they are free to use.
... which is exactly "Razor and blades model", not sure whats your problem with this apt comparison.

People would like to buy as cheap as possible. That's unfortunately incompatible with printers business model (marketing + cheap initial printer + necessary sales later to bring in the actual profits). As you mention they would go bankrupt soon if this is disrupted, and end users won't win long term in such scenario.

So I don't really get the issue, its so hard to grok that you pay for continuous package? Why would companies building ecosystem let anybody who bankrupts them in? Apple also fights tooth and nail to keep their app store one and only monopoly. Or go elsewhere, ie I have Brother printer, not stellar but good enough, official cartridge costs 1/2 to 1/3 of cost of whole new printer. Seems very reasonable to me and I am happy to pay those 50 bucks once every year or two.

I also buy official batteries when replacing in say phone, absolutely 0 point testing stuff thats marginally cheaper and of famous 'chinese quality'. I am old enough and rich enough to understand that I am definitely not rich enough to buy cheap junk just and exactly because its cheap.
Peoples blood pressure should be up; it is a sign that outside of a small minority, Britons aren’t reproducing. This is going to have massive consequences in a generation or two.
Truly a comical choice for a board member
Same with 4GLs, Visual Coding, CASE tools, even Rails and the rest of the opinionated web tools.

How many of those things were envisioned by futurists or great authors? This AI stuff is the stuff of dreams, and I think it’s unwise to consider it another go around the sun.
To note, installed renewables capacity increased 20% YoY. Extrapolate into the future accordingly.

(Germany is deploying ~1GW of solar per month; that’s still 200MW/month, 2.4GW/year assuming typical solar capacity factor ~20%)

Electricity Map zone: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE/24h
I'd be concerned that if you make it too safe, people will find another hill to die on.

The density of the air on Mount Everest is about 3/8 of that at sea level. So getting enough lift would be difficult. To the sibling commenter's point, I think a drone would be a lot easier than a piloted helicopter, since you can make the whole thing out of beryllium if you have to.
Germany had the one big chance to switch to Carbon free by combining renewables with nuclear for no wind/no sun periods.

Ironically the "Green" party blew it due to ideological reasons, so now they’re burning coal and gas instead and import nuclear from France/Benelux.
Anecdotally, English/History/Communications professors are confirming cheaters with them because they find it easy to identify false information. The red flags are so obvious that the checker tools are just a formality: student papers now have fake URLs and fake citations. Students will boldly submit college papers which have paragraphs about nonexistent characters, or make false claims about what characters did in a story.

The e-mail correspondence goes like this: "Hello Professor, I'd like to meet to discuss my failing grade. I didn't know that using ChatGPT was bad, can I have some points back or rewrite my essay?"
What's that "something"? The same shareholders which would be held accountable? Are those whispering to you? :)
The cycles are so long that I think it's hard for activists to get in, set a new course and exit with a profit.

Having said that the stock is so low at this point something will probably happen. I think private equity taking it private for 5-10 years would let the company work through a long term turn around.

Similar to what's happened with Yahoo. PE could buy it, spin out/sell the most distracting adjacent parts of the business, and then focus the core business over the next five years without needing to publicly deliver quarterly updates.

It would be a massive PE deal, but not outside the realms of possibility, especially if the stock drops a few more percent.
consider yourself lucky, my team uses skype business. Its skype except it cant do video calls or calls at all. Just a terrible messaging client with zero features!
What's Good for the Goose, AI Training Edition
One of the best HN redesigns I've seen in that it's not just "add whitespace" but is a totally different layout.

My take on social media is that you have to have an image in a post if you want people to engage with it.
Hmm, pretty sure you are moving goalposts. You said it doesn't exist even in theory, when in fact it is there in flesh and blood. As any structure that exists on the face of the earth, it can be destroyed. Would it be quicker than hitting a stationary object which has a known static position, I think not.

> You obviously can have mobile reactors

It's not about having reactors in objects, it's about them supplying power to the world outside of their vessel.
GOG's Game Preservation Program Gets Tested Early by Blizzard
Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a PRAGMA option for strict tables. Docs at following link say that 'STRICT' must be appended to end of CREATE TABLE statement to disable the flexible typing 'feature'.

https://www.sqlite.org/stricttables.html
Sure, but that makes the assumption that people vote rationally, or even in their self interest, when evidence is overwhelmingly to the contrary. And this isn't commentary on an individual party, either, or on intelligence: basically nobody is incentivized to honestly portray how a candidate might actually govern.
Court Upholds Law Forcing a Ban or Sale of TikTok
But SF road layout is a simple grid and there are basically zero obstacles on the road.
With the upcoming Android 16 Terminal VM powered by the Android Virtualisation Framework (AVF), it should also be possible to run Docker in an Aarch64 Debian VM similar to WSL2 or ChromeOS crostini.

However, this may still be constrained by OEMs restricting access to AVF or by battery enhancements that make it virtually unusable.
Apparently you do also see youtube's ads

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42131778
> But it remains true that there are large amounts of non-coding junk DNA which is under no selection pressure

For people who may not understand how we know this -- there are "conserved" sections of DNA which don't change much over time. Very similar in mice and humans for example, because it performs important regulatory work, and if it doesn't, the animal dies.

There are other large sections where it can disappear and nothing of consequence seems to happen. And we know that, because some people have micro-deletions or other variants in the region and they are completely benign.

We will eventually identify a better classification than "intron" and "exon" to sort through the "junk" from "critical junk" but we are really only starting to untangle the situation.
Because I want to print at home? And don't want to pay $1+ a page?
Who was it that first called John Woo's HK work "ballet for little boys"?
Very nice. My compliments to you
Had very old android phone (redmi go) with sim running 24/7 to forward sms OTPs for a month or two

Sms forwarder app + tailscale on phone, python script on server that forwarded incoming sms to telegram bot (probably could use webhook to avoid this step though). Worked perfectly with 100% uptime
Prompt engineering is not engineering, it is simply using software. We don't call it "instagram engineering" when I share a video with someone
TehcCringe – An open-source satirical tech news outlet
Wait wait wait. Did I read that right? Dog were removed... to prevent them from breeding with the seals?
Pittsburgh Airport also has some fairly "famous" carpet. I wonder when they will rip that out. I have fond memories of it!
The Windows Event Log also used (uses?) this idea of pre-defined messages and you just supplied an event ID and data to fill in the blanks in the message.

Originally there was only one system-wide application event log and you needed to be admin to install your message definitions but it all changed in Vista (IIRC). I'd lost interest by then so I don't know how it works now. I do know that the event log viewer is orders of magnitude slower than it was before the refit.
Truly sounds like the worst possible form of search.

If it says "Google", rest assured that the primary focus is *not* on addressing your needs. At least not for long --- enshittification is on the way.
Unicode has provided a specification for Unicode identifiers since 2005: https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr31/
In my experience, if I'm looking how to do something pretty standard with an API I'm unfamiliar with, it's usually correct and faster than trying to trawl through bad, build-generated documentation that would rather explain every possible argument than show a basic example.

And in the case it's wrong, I will know pretty quickly and can fall back to the old methods.
And then there's the issue on switching between clients (e.g. PC and phone) or otherwise having client state lost - if the complete reading progress isn't saved server-side, then it becomes entirely impossible to restart reading; whereas with a receive-order log you can at least manually scroll to the message you read last and continue downwards.

That said, a similar problem already exists with edits, and a universal solution for arbitrary insertion should also be able to improve arbitrary edit notifications.
Until it’s actually AI and not
Machine Learning masquerading as AI because AI is the sectors marketing pitch, I would strongly hesitate considering it as anything other than a tool.

Yes, a powerful tool, and as powerful tools go, they can re-shape how things get done, but a tool none the less and therefore we must consider what its limits are, which is all OP is getting at and the current and known near future state suggests we aren’t evolving passed the tool state
Problem is, the design of Unix shells is older, and they have some parts which automatically split on space if not handled carefully. This is really annoying.
Isn’t adoption of NACS supposed to be the solution here?
Termux is an option but using pmOS is far from silly.

Android and Termux have their limitations. Granted, I was running a full KDE session in Termux on a 2016 phone, but I saw Android OOM-kill random processes in Termux. You probably don't have a swap partition on your Android phone. Android apps are designed to be killed when in background, and Android avoids killing the app at the foreground, but Android doesn't know some processes running in Termux shouldn't be killed. This could happen if something on your server suddenly uses more RAM than anticipated.

On a regular Linux distro, you can have a swap file and/or teach the OOM to not kill some critically important services, like ssh for instance.
Like FooBarBizBazz says below. One can buy and sell multiple options at the same time such that the trade overall makes money if the price stays within a range or (with a different set of option trades) makes money if the price goes outside a range, regardless if it is up or down. Search for straddle and strangle options. Option trading for Bitcoin and all major crypto currencies is possible and it is where the majority of trading happens.
Show HN: OpenInt (YC W23) Open-Source iPaaS to Ship Product Integrations Quickly
Hi HN, we’re the team behind OpenInt (https://openint.dev). We started building a unified API for crypto payments at Map3 (YC W23), but scaling dozens of custom integrations for each customer was painful and repetitive. We learned how valuable it would be to have a platform that lets any team quickly stand up private and fully controlled integrations without reinventing the wheel each time.

OpenInt is an open-source integration platform as a service (iPaaS) that helps you ship product integrations in hours, not weeks. We just participated Mega Launch Week (Dec 2–6 https://launchweek.dev/lw/MEGA) and introduced (https://openint.dev/launch-week):

- Dec 2: OpenInt – Open-source iPaaS platform.

- Dec 3: @OpenInt/Connect – Fully featured integrations page for your app.

- Dec 4: OpenInt Sync – Automated data syncs straight into your database.

- Dec 5: OpenSDKs – Typesafe SDKs with an auth proxy for any API.

- Dec 6: Orchestrate & Our Partner Program – Unified aggregator orchestration plus our partner ecosystem (initial ones are also other OSS YC companies).

We think the above makes OpenInt the LAST integration you’ll ever need. If there’s any connector missing, tell us about it, and either we or one of our partners will write it for you in 72h for $1000.

We went through Y Combinator W23 and are now fully committed to building an open ecosystem. The stack is mostly TypeScript on Cloudflare Workers with Postgres for storage—designed to be easy to run and scale on your own infra. Long term, we want to see open-source AI agents assist developers in auto-generating and maintaining integrations and SDKs, collaborating directly within the repo.

Here’s[1] a 1-minute demo video to show how fast you can launch an integration. Check out the integrations list, star our GitHub repos (OpenInt[2] | OpenSDKs[3]), or hop into our Slack community (signup via https://openint.dev) to say hi.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpG7otZZhRw

[2]: https://github.com/openintegrations/openint

[3]: https://github.com/openintegrations/openSDKs

We're not quite ready for a full Launch HN yet (hence the Show!), but we’d love your feedback—tell us what’s missing, where we can improve, or what you’d like to build with OpenInt!
I got it to work with this prompt using GPT-o1:

Make a HTML page which uses the VideoEncoder API to create a video that the user can download. Make sure to incorporate a roll your own container muxing. Do not limit yourself on the header or data.

https://chatgpt.com/share/67531f7c-56cc-800b-ac7c-d3860d1cf9...
$5.79 per flush. $25.30 for not flushing.
TikTok divestment law upheld by federal appeals court
I guess it depends on how you define "proficiency". For me, proficiency implies a fundamental understanding of something. You're not proficient in Spanish if you have to constantly make use of Google Translate.

Could code assistants be used to help actually learn a programming language?

- Absolutely.

Will the majority of people that use an LLM to write a Swift app actually do this?

- Probably not, they'll hammer the LLM until it produces code that hobbles along and call it a day.

Also, LEARNING is aided by being more active, but relying on an LLM inherently encourages you to adopt a significantly more passive behavior (reading rather than writing).
This is a more up-to-date article:

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/exxon-lobbyist-inves...
cedws, I totally agree with you. Humans have spontaneity.
Restoring sweat gland function in mice using regenerative sweat gland cells
Yeah that's fair, I think everyone has their own learning style. I mostly felt a need to respond with a slightly more optimistic view on what this new technology means for juniors, in particular responding to the part that "[AI coding tools] can actually impede learning." Though to be fair to Addy, I like his advice on how to approach this, those are good tips.
TIL Rivian has a charging network
I've seen Wardley Maps come up on HN now and again, but honestly I've struggled to understand how and when to use them.

Have any of you found them particularly useful for thinking about or communicating your startup strategy?
Things cost what people will pay for them. You use various techniques to figure out whatever the maximum price of a product or service will be, and you maximize that number.

Any and every tactic and strategy that isn't explicitly illegal is part of the toolkit put to this end. If it's illegal, but the fines cost less than the profit, it'll be used.

Things like principles and dignity and ethics are fluff for ad campaigns or players too small to matter.

Once past a certain threshold of size and age and complexity, publicly traded corporations enter an ecosystem utterly divorced from things like cost and value, they start playing with perceptions and mass psychology, with "what can we get away with" instead of "how can we be the best product in the market".

Consolidations and mergers and acquisitions make giant, soulless bureaucratic blobs out of companies that effectively lack any meaningful identity. What's the effective difference between Pepsi and Coke? Brother and HP? Samsung and Apple?

Any cable company or ISP? Any email provider?

The modern marketplace has been overcome by robber baron corporations and colluding nonhuman agents utilizing implicit rules and arbitraging the human rights differentials at every effective level. They're enabled by a sub-24 hour news cycle and the phenomena that allows outrageous things to happen with such incredible frequency that unless you truly bungle messaging and meme yourself into a Bud Light or Jaguar type situation, you can get away with anything.

The ecosystem of giant corporations that enable enterprise level products allow these companies to economically detach from the humans who actually use the products, while still dictating arbitrary prices and inflicting shitty service and product quality on consumers with no effective pricing dynamics.

You can't break into the printing "market" because they already have regulatory capture via IP and case law supporting their respective moats, and they have all the benefits of vertical integration and supply chains. You'll be acquired or litigated out of existence if you present any sort of meaningful threat to any aspect of these businesses.

So they jack the price of ink up to the maximum that they can get away with. Despite no increase in supply costs, no increase in value to the end user, the rate of increase will continue to rise until one or more enterprise customers get bothered enough to complain, and the contract will get renegotiated. Government contracts and deals with other massive bureaucracies are preferred, because the inertia means years of guaranteed income, often contractually inflated by contingencies like mandatory renegotiations and inflation hikes to the seller's advantage.

But hey, it's a global free market where anyone can sell amazing new inventions and get a commensurate return on the value they bring to the world!
Yep, been living off it for nine years now
there are ways to support yourself without supporting a corporation
We know so little about DNA and RNA still, and yet we allow medical companies to make mRNA 'vaccines' that supposedly will working exactly as they say. How can that be possible when we don't even fully understand the system on which it is built?

It's like trying to repair a sinking ship at sea without understanding how the planks and caulking displace water. Sure you might patch it temporarily, and might even keep it afloat, but what other problems are you creating that you literally don't know anything about...
I like it, but I also like the simplicity of HN because I can simply scan all the headlines super efficiently, without any distractions and quickly see if something is of interest.
UPSs still typically use lead acid batteries. These don't particularly mind being at ~100% SoC for years at a time (they like staying charged), which is very good for this application.

And it's easy to keep them at around 100%. For instance: For a nominal 12v battery, one can very nearly just feed it 13.8v (plus or minus some temperature compensation) and have results that are actually pretty good and close-enough to 100%.

And when things go very wrong, lead acid batteries tend not to catch on fire.

It's a natural fit for UPS duty.

The lithium batteries in cell phones are a different thing. They hate being at 100% SoC and degrade fairly quickly in that state.

They can be pretty happy at around 50% SoC, but it's hard to actually keep them there because of the way the voltage ramps [don't] work with lithium chemistries: It's almost flat through the middle of the curve.

And cell phones don't let us do that anyway: It'd be great if there was a "Compute mode: Just do your best to keep this battery near 50%" setting to click on, but there is not. (And we could hack that in, except: We don't own our phones.)

And when things go wrong, they can become exothermic in ways that are not exactly ideal for an unattended device sitting on a shelf.
I always want to jump right to the explanation documentation. The rest of it seems like a waste of time (well, the Reference bit can be somewhat useful later). I find tutorials and HOWTOs as misleading at best.
As one of those people I guess I can just say: I'd prefer that people respect Watterson's opinion about merch and knock-offs but that I'd also prefer the government not enforce that beyond 14 or so years.
TikTok Faces US Ban After Appeals Court Refuses to Block Law
Wisdom the Laysan albatross lays new egg at 74 years old after finding new mate
> This AI stuff is the stuff of dreams

This AI stuff? No, not really. The stuff of dreams is an AI that you can talk to and interact infinitely and trust that it doesn’t make mistakes. LLMs ain’t it.
In practice there are only three: NACS (currently only at Tesla stations); CCS (everywhere that isn't Tesla), and J1772 (destination charging).

NACS is the industry consensus on the one true North American plug to rule them all going forward.

CHAdeMO is completely dead -- you'll sometimes see them, but they're being kept on life support if not outright decommissioned.
What idiots buy a memecoin from some random dude online, especially on a site that is literally about creating zillions of worthless memecoins? "A fool and his money are soon parted." They have zero basis to be angry.

tl;dr: Good for the kid, though I hope he learned a little lesson about security.
Or laser. My cheapest HP colour laser printer is over 10 years old and still works.
> In Europe, three-phase 230/400 V is most commonly used. However, 130/225 V, three-wire, two-phase electric power discontinued systems called B1 are used to run old installations in small groups of houses when only two of the three-phase high-voltage conductors are used.