skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Nuclear is a viable option and requires a shit ton of people to operate and pollution is nil compared to coal and O&G.

How are you getting uranium at scale? Mining.

What do you need to mine at scale? O&G.

Nuclear also has extremely high upfront costs with significant opposition from society, making land acquisition and maintenance costs extremely high.

Nuclear Plants also tend to require significant education with some amount of college education.

> There are plenty of ways to get this done. However our shitty economic policies based on neo-liberalism economics of the 1970s to 2010s have put us in a place where we are powerless to do anything about it. Decades of deregulation, tax cuts for billionaires and multibillion dollar companies, stock buybacks, subsequent cutting of public services, corporate glazing, hyper capitalistic culture have left us with very little to tackle this issue

Maybe, but a major reason why a lot of green energy is viable today is precisely because most of the inputs and maintenance are largely automated, making it much more cost effective at scale.

It's difficult to make a case to unionized employees at in the O&G industry to say goodbye to SWE level salaries. The amount of retraining is very high (as these are complex systems) and often require a college education.
Cos shipping things is not a concern
I have found openbsd to be one of the best unix desktop systems. Which is strange as that is not something they advertise as being good at. A large part of this is familiarity with the system(surprise, if you use a system a lot, you get comfortable with it) but some of it is this subtle feeling that the developers actually use it as a daily driver, which is often not the case with many linux systems.

Now there are some huge caveats to this statement, When I say unix desktop I mean fairly bare bones terminal heavy classic unix type operating environment, If you want something more like a mac or windows desktop, but don't want to use mac or windows, than a linux distro offering that is probably more suitable. But openbsd does.. ok... here as well.

Most problems with the heavy wimp style desktop environments are system administration related, where they don't understand openbsd system administration. personally I prefer cli based administration tools, and get a bit agitated when I have to worry about conflicting with some unknown desktop manager app that also wants to admin the system. So this works out great for me.
I don't eat a lot of refined sugars but not eating any carbs feels extremely boring to me, and basically anathema to my Asian heritage where we eat rice daily. But yes, if it worked for you then that's great.
You aren’t buying them from Amazon, are you? I’ve never had a genuine Bic do that, but I’ve had some cheapo bootlegs leak.
Well, that and Mullenweg did a bunch of actually illegal stuff instead of just arguably immoral stuff.
50 different dependencies covers a _lot_ more behaviour than a list.c. The point would be to audit a list package, and have audited it for all users, rather than all users needing to audit their own.
Yes, wildfires get incredibly hot. But the fires essentially always travel by embers or direct contact with fire - your comments about IR radiation seem to imply that IR alone will cause ignition, which is rarely if ever the case.

Here is a story about a bunch of people who survived the Camp fire in Paradise, CA, surrounded by the raging inferno, by staying in the middle of a parking lot: https://www.firehouse.com/operations-training/wildland/news/...
hey, the other creator of the SDK here!

We're actively exploring what people would want to do with tech like this right now. Docs should be much more specific on a few of those hopefully by tomorrow.

Right now, the idea is to let the user interact with a chat that simply allows you to chat with a model that can generate components and call developer-defined functions.

This could form a customer support "feature sink", allowing users to interact with features not provided on your website by generating them on-the-fly (think product comparisons etc). It could also be a complete replacement for frontends for internal tools, allowing devs to build fully-interactable apps with just their backend APIs.

Hope we're able to get to a place where this makes much sense more over the next couple days! Wanted to showcase what we're making.
> Just not quite as cool and useful.

I am genuinely trying, but I am finding hard to find modern software that qualifies for those words.

Is Slack "super cool and useful"? Is Word/Excel a lot cooler and more useful than... well honestly 20 years ago? Does Microsoft Teams qualify for that? Facebook? Instagram?

I don't think that more powerful hardware allows developer to write "cooler" and "more useful" stuff. What it allows is to write more, faster. Since the early 2010s, it feels like we specialized in writing worse software, but writing a lot more of it.
I hope that’s a trend. My experience has always been that they give zero information about such circumstances.
So what’s the alternative to Wordpress? I run a few small business sites and I just didn’t care enough. But the guy seems to meltdown in his own juices too much. Can’t be sustainable.
MS Bob didn’t invent those things. It just grafted them onto a crude gui metaphor that tech companies are still trying to find a buyer for: “What if the UX was as close as possible to the physical world?”

You don’t open a file, you “walk” to a “filing cabinet”, “pull the drawer out”, and “reach in and pull out a specific piece of ‘paper’”.

You don’t make a phone call, you sit in virtual meeting space with virtual bodies while wearing a mocap suit.

Does anyone still remember why we got computers in the first place?
I always thought it curious that we crave sugar so much yet have zero interest in eating straight sugar.
It's true, they're not part of the standard library. Nevertheless, it is conventional to provide implementations for things you reasonably expect your users might want to serialize and deserialize. Standard guidance includes telling you to name a feature flag (if you want one for this) serde and not something else so as to reduce extra work for your users.

Because Rust's package ecosystem is more robust it's less anxious about the strict line between things everybody must have (in the standard library) and things most people want (maybe or maybe not in the standard library). In C++ there's a powerful urge to land everything you might need in the stdlib, so that it's available.

For example the FreeBSD base system includes C++. They're not keen on adding to their base system, so for example they seem disinclined to take Rust, but when each C++ ISO standard bolts in whatever new random nonsense well that's part of C++ so it's in the base system for free. Weird data structure a game dev wants? An entire linear algebra system from Fortran? Comprehensive SI unit systems? It's not up to the FreeBSD gatekeepers, a WG21 vote gets all of those huge requirements into FreeBSD anyway.
It gave us Comic Sans, which had a notable impact on culture. I wouldn't call that a flop.
We had Bob in an attempt to make my technophobic mother capable of using the computer.

My main memory of it was that it allowed you to add shortcuts to other installed programs, so I added the few games on the computer to Bob. This used way too many resources, causing Bob to crash and me being unable to get into my profile to fix it. It may have broken the program for anyone else using it too, I can't recall. Relatively standard behavior crashing the program far beyond their target market's ability to fix it.
Yes I did! Thanks
The problem of non-compliant old buildings eventually solves itself, as seen here. All new buildings must comply with current building codes.

Same thing as in all European cities in the middle ages, where building codes eventually enforced itself.
There Is a Safety Valve for Private Home Insurance in California
but I don't need to add a flag in Rust
... it's tricky. In Java there's a cultural expectation that you name a package like

package organization.dns.name.this.and.that;

but real scalability in a module system requires that somebody else packages things up as

package this.and.that;

and you can make the system look at a particular wheel/jar/whatever and make it visible with a prefix you specify like

package their.this.and.that;

Programmers seem to hate rigorous namespace systems though. My first year programming Java (before JDK 1.0) the web site that properly documented how to use Java packages was at NASA and you still had people writing Java classes that were in the default package.
This. IME, JS devs rarely have much experience with an OS, let alone Linux, and forget that Python literally runs parts of the OS. You can’t just break it, because people might have critical scripts that depend on the current behavior.
You're right. just look at the devolution of Windows by generation. As everyone on HN comments on, how terrible Windows 11 is compared to windows 10, compared to windows 7, etc. (bloat, unnecessary apps, intrusiveness and so on.) Advertising? WTF?
We all thought - when we were running Windows 3.11, imagine if we had a faster computer ?!
Very easy to do an AI prompt injection attack if the AI is reading every one of the forum's comments.
Ireland is within the EU and uses the Euro as its currency (unlike when the UK was in the EU and stuck to the Pound Sterling), so you were never wrong.
You believe core WordPress code should be poorly engineered and less efficient to increase resource use?
I was most certainly not being facetious.
I Believe the Universe Might Be Able to Think [video]
Sabine Hossenfelder
One of the coolest "immediate novelty" things I've read in a while

Sent it to my whole family

The way your mind locks in and focuses on the middle one seems a testament to the brain processing behind vision we take for granted
Does marrying the CEO count?
JPMorgan Chase disables employee comments after return-to-office backlash
Isn’t disabling employee comments about working conditions (including at least one mention of a union) in violation of labor laws? I wonder if JPMC thinks they can get away with it because the new administration will not pursue a labor complaint against them.
Yes: you can notice this, for example, in the announcements they put out while the area around the Getty Villa evacuated and then burned, where they pointed out that non-emergency staff had evacuated. Similarly, I think JPL always had (emergency) staff present, and their own firefighting resources.

Having heard about wildfire policies for some high-profile institutions in fire-prone areas, they'll often have their own procedures, in coordination with local authorities, which may not involve evacuating when others do, and may involve people coming to the site when others are evacuating.
But LLMs is literally a "person in the room" that actually knows how it works.

The simplification and explanation abilities of chatGPT are off the charts in precisely these cases. I honestly don't understand why I'm being downvoted.

You wanted a simpler make file before ? go spend 2 days learning the make syntax

You want a simpler make file now ? just ask for it as long as as the explanation with it of all the concepts to ChatGPT and you'll get it
Ask HN: Futuristic and Sci-Fi Solutions to Fire Safety
Imagine you are tasked with a step function (10x, 100x, 1000x) improvements in fire safety, containment on a large scale basis. What would you dream up? Cost is not a factor in this case. Imagine fire becomes the existential threat. Imagine that climate change continues to be getting worse, and root causes for addressing climate change are being handled in another project.

Yes, there are political, economic, societal, forest management and current technological other factors that can be instituted today for fire safety, or that are preventing better fire management, but I'm looking for the dream scenarios, not the former.

Some examples I can think of:

* Preventing Ember Propagation:
- large shields made of nano insulating materials deployed from drones, blimps, balloons, helicopters that attract and extinguish embers. They would form "walls" around fire hotspots, and provide containment of embers. They would be net attractors of embers. Can be deployed at mega scale.

* Wind prevention
- Wind control/ wind shaping - Ability to alter the direction of winds, even on temporary basis.

* Rain formation
- Ability to trigger rain (I think they experimented something like that in the UAE), even on a temporary basis.

* Terraforming of fire trenches
- Ability to "instantly" deploy or instantiate trenches and ravines around perimeter, and have material and technology within to extinguish. Imagine for example, ravines opening up on demand.

* Animal safety
- I would be remiss to ignore this safety of living things, including animals. Maybe there is an attractor that attracts living creatures, and funnels them into massive temporarily holding areas.

etc.

(disclaimer: I am far from an expert on this topic)
As in, you think this shouldn't be possible or you think it should be written differently?
Just because you don't understand it, it's ok to call it an "anti-pattern"?

Reproducibility is important in many contexts, especially CI, which is why in Node.js world you literally do "npm ci" that installs exact versions for you.

If you haven't found it necessary, it's because you haven't run into situations where not doing this causes trouble, like a lot of trouble.
It also gave us the world’s greatest example of poorly thought through security practices.

You can set a password on your Bob account. If you fail to enter the right password three times in a row, Microsoft Bob lets you reset the password, no further questions.
> None of those are easier than not needing to do it at all though; if your functions exits are only where you specify, you can cleanup only once on those paths.

Huh? I don't get it. This:

stack.push_back(k);
absl::Cleanup _ = [&] { assert(stack.back() == k); stack.pop_back(); }
if (foo()) {
printf("foo()\n");
return 1;
}
if (bar()) {
printf("bar()\n");
return 2;
}
baz();
return 3;

is both easier, more readable, and more robust than:

stack.push_back(k);
if (foo()) {
printf("foo()\n");
assert(stack.back() == k);
stack.pop_back();
return 1;
}
if (bar()) {
printf("bar()\n");
assert(stack.back() == k);
stack.pop_back();
return 2;
}
baz();
assert(stack.back() == k);
stack.pop_back();
return 3;

as well as:

stack.push_back(k);
auto pop_stack = [&] { assert(stack.back() == k); stack.pop_back(); }
if (foo()) {
printf("foo()\n");
pop_stack();
return 1;
}
if (bar()) {
printf("bar()\n");
pop_stack();
return 2;
}
baz();
pop_stack();
return 3;

and unlike the others, it avoids repeating the same code three times.

(Ironically, I missed the manual cleanups before the final returns in the last two examples right as I posted this comment. Edited to fix now, but that itself should say something about which approach is actually more bug-prone...)
Bring back a version of this to help aging seniors deal with increasingly complex interfaces.
> what do other folks think is a better candidate for the biggest flop [in tech] of the 1990s?

The CueCat.
But I still need pip to install uv, right? Or download it using a one-liner alternatively.
That’s like a killer app type feature. However it says adhoc so you probably can’t get back to that setup easily
I remember when the first iPad came out, and the tech press marveled at how easily seniors could understand it. This no longer applies to modern iOS.

We don’t necessarily need Bob. We just need an iOS 1 mode, skeuomorphic design and all. Back when the camera app only had a photo or video switch, a take photo button, and a gallery button.
It's not absurd hyperbole. If I took the text of, say the NYT Bestseller this week, stored the text along with various Projects Gutenberg books, then created a program to randomly deliver you a chapter from any such book. That would probably get me a lawsuit.

This is just that with lots of levels of indirection.
In my case I install it from flathub.org (works from any distro):

https://flathub.org/apps/com.adobe.Reader
The inconvenient truth is that there isn't enough pie to go around. Sometimes the wind or solar isn't generating. A carbon tax would force people to cut down their footprint and be more selective about how they use carbon and at the same time it would encourage investment into green energy storage solutions since they are now worth the same as taxed carbon. It's pretty difficult to get competitive profit driven companies to care when the best option right now is to buy fake carbon credits and keep on polluting for cheap.
Maybe this is also why we're seeing the rise of more statically typed compiled languages like Go and Rust. I've successfully run Rust on mobile and it's great, very snappy compared to web apps.
> users (or the product owner) become more and more demanding

I disagree. For all my life, customers have been asking for as much as they can imagine. Customers wanted flying cars long before they wanted the latest iPhone.

The thing that changed is that we realised that if we write lower quality software that has more features (useful or not), customers buy that (because they are generally not competent to judge the quality, but they can count the features). So the goal now is to have more features.

> I think that most users on a low budget would be better off with a second-hand

Which is exactly the problem we are talking about: you are pushing for people to get newer hardware. You just say that poorer people should get the equivalent of newer hardware for the poors. But people on a budget would actually be better off if they could keep their hardware longer.
You say that, but there seems be a vast chasm between “can solve LC hards” and “can administer an OS,” even though the latter is generally not at all abstract, extremely well-documented, and almost certainly has associated man pages.
Side question : open source models tend to be less "smart" than private ones, do you intend to compensate by providing a better context (eg query relevant technology docs to feed context)?
Can have the AI just flag posts for a human to review in v1? Then as you refine the prompt injection detection can move to have the AI be autonomous?
TypeScript has that.

Although it can infer types and generate the declaration fully
I find this sort of thing bothers me often enough that I've disabled downloadable_fonts. I think of the web as a place where I read things, so custom fonts that hurt readability are undesirable. I get why designers want a unique style, but I rarely want that as an end user.
I am someone who uses the console a lot; I do rely on fbterm for sanity, though, and I don't know how reliable/secure it is long term. Arch, for instance, does not include it in its repositories, though Void does.
What is the recommended hardware? GPU required? Could this run OK on an older Ryzen APU (Zen 3 with Vega 7 graphics)?
Stone doesn't burn, and neither does concrete. Glass melts. Steel evidently didn't burn at the temperatures these fires got to. So it makes sense that a building made of concrete and steel with stone facades and fiberglass insulation would survive the fire, especially after clearing out and hydrating the surrounding landscape so it wouldn't have the density or flammability of a forest. The Getty Center may have gotten lucky, but they might have also earned their "luck" through investment and planning.
I can see people that drink a lot of coke type sodas are trying to find a different study to dispute it.
I would compare it to seeing a nutrition team at Frito-Lay. Sure, it's always better to be marginally more healthy, but their primary output is almost surely going to be manufactured excuses for health-conscious people to justify eating potato chips.
You can measure productivity with correlated metrics. The issue has always been that the metrics which are easy to track don't line up incentives with the actual business goals. A group of 10 people who write 200k loc per year are probably more productive than a group of 10 people who write 10k loc per year. If you took those metrics and then did an investigation of the people in your company writing 10k loc you might find that they are slackers or that they write assembly.

The issue is when metrics are used to stack rank teams with no thinking put into it. You can't treat correlated metrics like direct metrics. A logger might be evaluated based on how many trees he cut down in a day. There is no comparable way to pay software engineers piecemeal.

Metrics are good, but people want to use them without thinking or taking context into consideration.
Outside of tech circles, I don't think us furries are all that mainstream either. Or at least, no more mainstream than we have been all along — we've always been there, e.g. Disney's Robin Hood, but most of the cultural memes today seem to be varieties of disapproval.

Inside tech, of course, there's loads of us. Emergency cat ears for the sysadmin, etc.
> thinking we can write better laws if we start from scratch is typical hubris from someone who's never really studied Law

It is. However, looking at the US legal system as someone who isn't profiting from it, it's difficult to justify its existence.
The engineers are only productive because they have the support structure in place.

The most productive fpga engineer I ever hired was so hopeless with git that I had to hire a second software engineer to babysit him.

After I left both of them got fired and the product they were ahead of schedule on when I left had slipped 2 years behind before it finally got cancelled three years later.
> It's not on by default but is effectively on in any codebase where anyone cares...

Then why is this a MISRA rule by itself? Shouldn't it just be "every codebase must compile with -Wall or equivalent"?
You state that energy storage is a fantasy, liebreich puts Long Duration Grid Balancing as a B on the hydrogen ladder. Sure it's going to be extremely expensive, but I don't see any cheaper alternative for countries without dark winters where also the wind can sometimes be not enough.

I agree though that it gets pushed in lots of inappropriate places, where better alternatives exist.
Keep it up, how else are nurses going to have a job?
There were some small indie shops that put out fun arcade games back then.

Cassidy & Greene's Crystal Quest is excellent.

Ambrosia Software had shareware versions of arcade classics as well as original concepts. Escape Velocity is still talked about today.
There is no way to get rid of a prompt injection attack. There are always ways to convince the AI to do something else besides flagging a post even if that's its initial instruction.
a weird disconnect... of any true innovation or even reality... such vague objectional blandness...

"They'd beg to work for us" - what the f8ck.... if they were the best they would not beg anyone how degrading...They would be there for a mission or wanting to improve something about themseves or other parts of the world.

There's nothing here apart from Agile coach wanting to get some more work.

1984 was released in 1949, if anyone thinks these words / values really mean what is writen wow. People, Internal Quality, Lovability, Visibility, Agility, Profitability...