skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article posted by wolfram74 is part one of two, covering solar PV history up through the early 1980s.

Here's part two of the series with more recent history: https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-did-solar-power-g...

Even this fairly long two-part discussion misses some of the more important technical developments of the past 20 years.

Converting trichlorosilane to pure silicon via CVD growth in Siemens-type reactors is now much more energy efficient due to changes in rod geometry and heat trapping via reactor design. A significant minority of purified silicon is now manufactured via even more efficient fluidized bed reactors.

The solar industry is dominated by Czochralski process monocrystalline silicon, but it's now continuous Czochralski: multiple crystals grown from a single crucible, recharging the molten silicon over time; the traditional process used a crucible once and then discarded it.

The dominant silicon material has switched from boron doped p-type silicon to gallium doped p-type silicon (mentioned by pfdietz) to phosphorus doped n-type silicon (used by the currently dominant TOPCon cell technology as well as heterojunction (HJT) cells and most back contact cells).

Changes in wafering that you mentioned (like the reduced kerf diamond wire saw) have reduced silicon consumption per wafer and therefore per watt, even holding cell technology constant.

The dominant cell technology has moved from Al-BSF to PERC to mono-PERC to TOPCon. Heterojunction and back-contact cells are not yet dominant, but they are manufactured on a multi-gigawatt scale and will probably overtake TOPCon eventually. Each one of these changes has eked out more light conversion efficiency from the same area of silicon.

Cells mostly still use screen-printed contacts made from conductive silver pastes, much like 20 years ago, but there has been continuous evolution of the geometry and composition of applied pastes so that silver consumption per watt is now much lower than it used to be. This is important because silver has the highest cost per kilogram of any material in a typical solar panel, and it's the bottleneck material for plans to expand manufacturing past the terawatt scale.

Wafer, cell, and module manufacturing have become much more automated. That reduced labor costs, increased throughput, and increased uniformity.
Instead of the homepage, I now just browse lists > active and "flagged" now means "interesting for you!"
TIL I learned that yaml has versions and now I'm wondering what version of yaml parsers are running where. I think I might be on a new level of hell.

It would be better to delete your comment so nobody else has to has to ever have this crisis.
This isn't an outlandish idea. For example V8 has "pointer compression" https://v8.dev/blog/pointer-compression/. This is basically just 32-bit pointers with a know base offset. They still point at bytes (but known alignment is used for tag bits, so they don't really point at bytes, but more some VM-defined word)
Could We Store Our Data in DNA?
Open AI: Pssst ... Live Stream, 10am Pacific
Github is too busy dumping all their engineering power into more useless copilot features than actually doing anything to improve their platform.
Most people are just storing them in the browser but that’s not stopping people from coming up with easy to guess passwords.
I think the most likely case is users are less likely to flag those stories. Or, they're less likely to generate discussion that causes those stories to get flagged.
Isn't Marvell/Cavium still in the ARM server business, too?
UC Berkeley Peter Abbeel's Vision for AI-Powered Humanoid Robots
UC Berkeley Peter Abbeel's Vision for AI-Powered Humanoid Robots from GTC 2025
Nice work! Curious about your tech-stack, if you don't mind sharing.

Also what are your plans for monetizing, if any?
You're in a tiny enough minority that it doesn't matter to them. It's like Amish complaining that they can't use a drive-thru window or something. Except it'd take you 30 seconds, one time, to solve your problem forever.
The chaotic demise of Indian online delivery pioneer Dunzo
Everybody even the elderly have debit or credit cards. You have your card, you insert it, and walk away with two hours of parking.

An app often requires some account setup with spam emails to follow.
But they're not deprecated. Where's the forced churn?

Every place that I've been at has made the gradual shift to migrate stuff away from class components as new stuff gets built or refactored. Seems like a pretty common development habit.
I build simple applications for personal use like issue tracker, day planner, etc,. By default if you ask Claude it will generate React for frontend but I ask it to use HTML/CSS/JS instead. Because as a backend developer that makes sense to me. I find it hard to read the react code and want to avoid having dependency on npm.

It's surprising how well the core technology works without fancy front end frameworks. Claude does most of the grunt work related to CSS/JS allowing me to focus on more interesting things. I only have to do few minor changes here and there which I am happy to do.
The magic of proof of work is that it's something that's really hard to do but easy to validate. Anubis' proof of work works like this:

A sha256 hash is a bunch of bytes like this:

394d1cc82924c2368d4e34fa450c6b30d5d02f8ae4bb6310e2296593008ff89f

We usually write it out in hex form, but that's literally what the bytes in ram look like. In a proof of work validation system, you take some base value (the "challenge") and a rapidly incrementing number (the "nonce"), so the thing you end up hashing is this:

await sha256(`${challenge}${nonce}`);

The "difficulty" is how many leading zeroes the generated hash needs to have. When a client requests to pass the challenge, they include the nonce they used. The server then only has to do one sha256 operation: the one that confirms that the challenge (generated from request metadata) and the nonce (provided by the client) match the difficulty number of leading zeroes.

The other trick is that presenting the challenge page is super cheap. I wrote that page with templ (https://templ.guide) so it compiles to native Go. This makes it as optimized as Go is modulo things like variable replacement. If this becomes a problem I plan to prerender things as much as possible. Rendering the challenge page from binary code or ram is always always always going to be so much cheaper than your webapp ever will be.

I'm planning on adding things like changing out the hash in use, but right now sha256 is the best option because most CPUs in active deployment have instructions to accelerate sha256 hashing. This combined with webcrypto jumping to heavily optimized C++ and the JIT in JS being shockingly good means that this super naïve approach is probably the most efficient way to do things right now.

I'm shocked that this all works so well and I'm so glad to see it take off like it has.
It's an investment company that primarily specializes in Telecom and telecom adjacent industries (eg. Internet companies, Energy, Space Tech, Hardware).

Most people on HN have only heard of SoftBank's Vision Fund, but that's basically an autonomous organization within SoftBank staffed with Deustche Bank alumni who left in droves in 2017-2020.

> Ie is its ultimate goal not merely profit?

Yes. Their goal is profit.

> I've become less and less interested in its investments as it seems to simply act like a giant government money channel with questionable investments that don't seem to make sense from a typical VC/PE perspective

This investment is part of their strategy for 6G and IIoT, which is synergistic with their telecom focus.

There has been work over the past 4-5 years to become the leader for creating the standards for 6G, and SoftBank is trying to position themselves to be that player.
> The answer to "what's best for others" should not be "that which we want for ourselves" regardless of expertise.

Do unto others what you would do unto yourself and all that.

On top of that, a lot of people want interoperability, they just don't know how to express it in terms that the regular highly technical divorced from reality crowd on HN understands.

An anecdote: My mom has used Apple's Books it since it first came out. Apple keeps redesigning the app, and making it worse and more cumbersome to use. Even if there is an app that better suits my mom, I can't recommend it to her because Apple in its infinite wisdom does not let you change the default epub reader on iOS/iPadOS.

And it's just on anecdote out of hundreds. There won't be a single person who wants all of the interoperability. There will be multiple people with multiple different requirements for interoperability. From epub readers to navigation apps to Pebble watches (https://ericmigi.com/blog/apple-restricts-pebble-from-being-...).

Too bad they can't express their wishes in terms of "we want interoperability", and instead express them in terms of "why the hell Apple redesigned Books again" and "why can't Pebble show notifications". Then their wishes don't count, apparently.

> We're not talking about regulation improving human lives in general. We're talking about regulation that will stick it to foreign companies we think are too big

How did "Let's make platforms more open to increase competition and the umber of things people can do on those platforms" become "it's bad, and only exists to stick it to big US companies" is beyond my understanding (and defies all logic, if we're honest).

Sure, let's just have supranational companies create walled gardens with arbitrary rules. Nothing bad has ever come out of that.
Unfortunately, most of those games you named are labours of love, and do not bring as much revenue per dollar spent as shitty mobile gambling slot machine games.

And those are what's available as work these days, but has increasingly been outsourced to cheaper locations. Good riddence, but it also means lost jobs.
Alternatively, be OK with the fact that anything you put in public can be used for anything and by anyone, regardless of licensing and laws. A pirate's dream basically.

Personally, when I first got connected to the internet around ~1999, that was the approach I've followed since, I don't share things I am not OK with others to use for whatever they want.
Our data pipeline looks like this:

hardware/PLC --modbus--> kepware --mqtt--> mosquito broker --mqtt--> mqtt2prometheustool --http--> Victoria Metrics

The mqtt2prometheustool is something we developed in house. I am looking at removing one or more of the above steps and using telegraf instead, as it can ingest OPCUA or modbus data directly.

We use excel files just as the output of our reporting tools. For analysis it's the standard python data science stack of pands/numpy/scipy. Most people work in Jupyter notebooks, and their tools are eventually moved to services in our k8s cluster.

Temp and voltage are the main "cell level" datapoints we collect. I don't think we have any vibration sensors at site now.
There's no direct lineage.
>It's cold rolled steel which has nice properties but makes it difficult to install flanges.

I know nothing about materials science, but I'm curious if it could then be stamped at the corners/edges to create some sort of surface that could be used to attach using rivets/weld/bolts
Because it could save other people from the same abuser
Always have been (⌐■_■)
Believing that tech has nothing to do with politics is magical thinking.
> The C++ community is still only recently generally requiring C++11.

this doesn't match what I see. The Jetbrains 2023 survey reported that 80% of C++ in use was >= C++17. Qt, one of the most common C++ UI framework, has been requiring C++17 for five years and support C++20 types in its API.
I hope the free speech administration...

well right there is where you went off the rails isn't it.

These people never said they supported free speech. Maybe people assumed that's what they were saying? But that wasn't actually what any of them said.

Mostly what they were saying was that they felt conservative viewpoints were being systematically removed from public discourse. That's subtly different than saying they support free speech.
We're doing the same, but replacing the bash script with Dagger.

Once you get on Dagger, you can turn your CI into minimal Dagger invocations and write the logic in the language of your choice. Runs the same locally and in automation
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43422396 - Big discussion here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43424152 - related discussion here
You can still write class-based components in React, no problem. It might not be in vogue, but for the most part, you can still write React 18.x roughly the same way you wrote React 0.x.
There is nothing that says you can't charge money for FOSS software. FOSS is more about having the ability to inspect and freely change your software to your use-cases.
Frontend has always been a pain for me.
Just switched from React to Vue since it's getting harder to stay with React.
then I was thinking maybe just the old bootstrap(alpine.js,htmx) with SSR approach? it's simpler and more importantly, can be maintained a few years down the road without a revamp(due to frontend breaking changes).
In the end, I still stick to Vue.js, as the SSR approach has its own problems, nothing is ideal.
That's the thing, I used to think tests are annoying but now I'm advocating for em, maybe a sign of growing up ha. Unfortunately not my call. Yeah it's just tone, tone changes the outcome of some conversation. Puts person on defensive, stops thinking, that kind of thing.
> Ie is its ultimate goal not merely profit?

This isn't the vision fund or any of those VC initiatives from SoftBank.

I'd see this as SoftBank who owns ARM is now buying something useful in the same group / segment to consolidate.

Having said that interest in Japan is at record lows (compared to the rest of the world) so financing is a lot easier.
If your use case is covered by strtok(), why not? Like all functions, you have to use it properly, and the use case for strtok() is narrow, but sometimes, it is just what you need.

I rarely use it myself, but emulating it is silly. Also strstr() is probably not the most appropriate, maybe you mean strpbrk()?

As far as I know, the only function from the libc that you should never use is gets(). It is even written in the manual: "Never use this function". As expected, it is removed from recent standards.
Vision seemed more like an experiment that … you could / everyone did just avoid.

I don’t see it as a vista thing.
you can put them in the same repository, if that is your thing.

If you put the build files in a .builds/ folder at the root of your repository, they will be run upon each commit. Just like in github or gitlab. You are just not forced into this way of life.

If you prefer, you can store the build files separately, and run them independently of your commits. Moreover, the build files don't need to be associated to any repository, inside or outside sourcehut.
I can't imagine having to build a frontend in React... I'm doing everything from mobile app to extensive frontend using Rails... no React anywhere. Just plain vanilla Rails and it's been a godsend!
Suggesting LibreOffice 19 years after Google Docs is so weird to me.

Are you expecting people to shuffle around single files to each other every time something is changed? Is that what we consider perfect?
C++ has many ugly parts to it, but I wouldn't call sticking with a 14 year old language "great". There's plenty of things that are really damn good, for example
- std::span
- std::string_view
- std::source_location
- if constexpr
...
Offering read-only mirrors via git+http:// might be a solution then, at least to shed the load if anything. It does remind me a bit about companies complaining about being scraped and trying to prevent it, instead of offering a API so no one would have to scrape them.
The destruction of Alderaan was completely justified (2015)
> Compare that to the frequent truck/car ramming attacks in Germany which seemingly always kill tourists. Should I avoid visiting German Christmas markets?

Personally I would find such a risk acceptable just as I find the risk of traveling to countries with a high homicide rate acceptable.

But if a friend or family member expressed concern about visiting a German Christmas market due to prior cases of terrorists murdering tourists there I would not dismiss their concerns as irrational or unfounded as there exists a rational basis for this concern.
Rustdoc merged doctests (solved) issue on stable
Services like FB have the concept of a legacy contact, an account that can manage your page after death. Also the concept of your profile switching to a memorial page, with your legacy contact doing moderation of posts.

I did the math years ago and even back then, thousands of users would pass daily and now with most of the world population on FB it probably comes in handy.
There likely is a trick but the above is also technically feasible as-is.

You have to do this for 10^10 (ten billion) powers. Each operation needs to check ~4.3billion decimal digits at worst (half that on average). It's highly parallelizable since each power is an easy to compute binary digit and you can do a binary->decimal conversion without relying on previous results which is a log(n) operation, ie one operation per decimal digit.

All up 10^10 powers * ((10^4.3)/2) decimal digits to calculate and check for each of those powers. Around 200 trillion operations all up in human terms. It's still hard enough you'd want a lot of compute. Getting each operation down to a nanosecond still means you're waiting 2.3days for a result. But it's also fair to say it's feasible.
> Commercial interests have been waiting for the day when they could start mining the seafloors globally for these nodules.

For all the folks thinking about Project Azorian[0], I recently read "Blind Man's Bluff"[1] and recommend it for the larger context of oceanic subsurface reconnaissance.

0. https://www.cia.gov/legacy/museum/exhibit/project-azorian/

1. https://www.amazon.com/Blind-Mans-Bluff-Submarine-Espionage/...
Classic Smashed Burgers
Not "afraid," but unwilling to travel there, and have just cancelled some plans to do so.

I'd have been travelling by air from Canada, so the border-crossing is on Canadian soil, which (probably) greatly reduces the risk of landing in detention due to the arbitrary decisions made by a MAGA-addled CBP agent.

Personal risk of harm or imprisonment aside, I have ethical concerns about continuing to behave as if the US is a normal, rational actor on the world stage while its administration threatens the sovereignty of Canada, Denmark and Panama.

As long as this bellicosity continues, the US should be shunned and isolated as much as possible by the global community.
Researcher finds way to diagnose people with sleep apnea while they're awake
This is plausible with brute-force, perhaps with some basic optimization.

You only need to test 10^10 values, and that is just less than 2^34 cases. Not hard to brute force at all, and trivial to parallelize too.
Genuinely curious, how much water do data centers consume? I would think they might need a good amount of water at startup, but any use would be in a closed system. Am I misunderstanding their water use? Do they lose a lot of it to the atmosphere somehow?
Sure, that’s what I’m referring to in the other comment about truck attacks. Germany on average is less violent but has outbursts of random violence targeting places tourists frequent, yet no one says don’t go to Munich.
Thanks for link to the Monash's paper.

>LLMs seem ill-suited to solving the optimization of combinatorial and geometric constraints and objectives required for good diagram layout.

I think this is where LLM distance NLP cousin can be of help namely CUE since fundamentally it's based on feature structure from the deterministic approach of NLP unlike LLM that's stochastic NLP [1],[2],[3].

Based on the Monash's paper, Constraint Programming (CP) is one of the popular approaches that's being used for the automatic grid layout.

Since CUE is a constraint configuration language belong to CP, and its NLP background should make it easier and seamless to integrate with LLM. If someone somehow can crack this then it will be a new generation LLM that can perform good and accurate diagramming via prompts and it will be a boon for the architect, designer and engineer. Talking about engineer, if this approach can also be used for IC layout design (analog and digital) not only for diagrams, it will easily disrupt the multi-billion dollars industry for the very expensive software for IC design and man powers.

I hope I'm not getting ahead of myself, but ultimately this combo can probably solve the "holy grails" problem mentioned towards the end of the paper's conclusions regarding layout model that somehow incorporates routing in a way that is efficiently solvable to optimality. After all some people in computer science consider CP as "holy grails" of programming [4].

Please someone somehow make a start up, or any existing YC startup like JITX (Hi Patrick) can look into this potential fruitful endeavor of hybrid LLM combo for automated IC design [5].

Perhaps your random thoughts are not so random but deterministic non-random in nature, pardon the pun.

[1] Cue – A language for defining, generating, and validating data:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20847943

[2] Feature structure:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feature_structure

[3] The Logic of CUE:

https://cuelang.org/docs/concept/the-logic-of-cue/

[4] Solving Combinatorial Optimization Problems with Constraint Programming and OscaR [video]:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=opXBR00z_QM

[5] JITX: Automatic circuit board design:

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/jitx
What's the Matter with Abundance?
This is an approach I've seen used and I'm not sure what success it has had. But logically it seems sound: explicitly reference paths that no human would actually see - traffic hitting those paths are bots. They can't help themselves.
I think a lot this comes down to huge cultural biases. And the two cultures are "hard energy" and "soft energy" folks. Coal, gas, fission, fusion, etc. are all hard energy. Coupled GDP and energy consumption was a core assumption. Renewables, energy efficiency, technological advancement via learning curves all fall under "soft energy".

Most of the energy industry was hard energy because that's what paid everyone's bills. Any estimates that did not cater at least a bit to those biases would just be completely ignored.

But there's another effect too: solar just completely outperforms even the most optimistic assessments. There's one famous solar financial analyst, whose name I'm blanking on, who continues to underestimate even though she knows the effect.
> Whatever framework you choose will be obsolete in 5 years.

I am predominantly not a frontend dev, but when I do do frontend work, (and I don't avoid it by any means,) I have been using React for the past... 10 years now? And while some sentiment has been moving towards Svelte, by the time Svelte overtakes React, it will have been in production for just as long probably. And Angular might eventually run out of steam, but it's been around even longer than React, if you want to count the Angular1 and Angular2+ days together. So honestly I think this is out-of-date logic. While frontend dev moves fast, it really isn't that bad. Pick boring choices and you get boring results.
I can see why you might think they are similar on the surface.

However those are paperwork exercises without any leverage that run into legal issues inside the US. “Anyone who signed a labor peace agreement with ProTech Local 33 has 90 days from the ruling to sign a new pact with a legitimate union or risk losing their license”

The Chinese version is stable as they are being actively propped up by the state.
Probably losing a leg would've.
Docker has raised money, we all use it. Dagger is by the originators of Docker, I personally feel comfortable relying on them, they are making revenues too.
Russian VVER Reactor