skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed.

Admittedly, "passion and interest don't really come across" might've been a valid impression, since the post after sounds like it wasn't the top priority:

> I decided to apply even though I was pretty busy that weekend, hoping my schedule would clear by the time the hackathon came around.

However, this could be yet another instance of gatekeeping that has sprung up, now that there's tons of money involved, and a whole lot of petty posturing and maneuvering.

When I was a kid, from a non-affluent family, who was fortunate to be able to start programming computers, I could just do things.

I'm not aware of anyone ever being appointed arbiter of whether I had enough "passion and interest" to participate in some activity or venue.

You'd just show up, and other enthusiasts would be reasonably encouraging and supportive.

Too much nowadays in our field has a whiff of being about classism and collusion, to create barriers to joining the clique.

Don't get me started on the obviously frat-pledging interviews that Google popularized, and then way too many newcomers mimicked that gatekeeping baggery, as if it was good and reasonable, rather than bro snobbery.
Yeah, they forget as the chat context gets too large. A good example I’ve had is where I’ve been using chartkick to create a lot of charts, and suddenly they want to use another ruby gem. I have to remind them. We’re using chart kick.
Big fan of Michael's content over the years - will miss his videos with Dalton.

One incredible thing about Michael is behind every sentence you can hear the amount of pain he had to endure to succeed. He's not just giving you startup advice, he's a lone survivor who's come back to tell the tale. The whole startup game is about extreme outliers and he's always been very real about this fact.

Was re-reading his post on How to Pitch Your Company from 2016 (The Seven Questions), it's a great read:

https://www.michaelseibel.com/blog/how-to-pitch-your-company
Lunar far side samples bolster theory that the moon was once covered in magma
I believe it has to do with the amount of work they're handling in the hiring process. The hiring process itself is time consuming and draining, so whenever feedback is asked, it is appreciated but perhaps not in the priority list of the hiring manager.
> And besides, damaging someone’s personal property is effectively the same thing as damaging their person. Because property takes time out of a persons life to earn, therefore depriving someone of their property is almost exactly the same thing as depriving them of their life / health

This is one of the most absurd things I've ever heard. Cars are insured, and even if they weren't... this is still absurd. I can't even put into words how absurd it is. So if someone burns your house, it's the same as getting your feet amputated? Or what exactly is your scale? Losing the phone the same as going bald?
Could an answer here be for smaller websites to convert their sites into chatbots which could prevent AI scrapers from slurping up all their content/drive up their hosting costs?
This would tend to indict an artifact in measurement rather than an indictment of the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
It's annoying to read on my phone. Text and pictures are moving at different speeds than I'm scrolling.
It's a great job. I joined with no prior experience in the field, and none of the positions on my team require hardware experience.
Neo-Luddism is less stupid when you remember that the Luddites weren't angry that looms existed. Smashing looms was their tactic, not their goal.

Parliament had made a law phasing in the introduction of automated looms; specifically so that existing weavers were first on the list to get one. Britain's oligarchy completely ignored this and bought or built looms anyway; and because Parliament is part of that oligarchy, the law effectively turned into "weavers get looms last". That's why they were smashing looms - to bring the oligarchy back to the negotiating table.

The oligarchy responded the way all violent thugs do: killing their detractors and lying about their motives.
Optical tweezers reveal cell dynamics in milliseconds
Pre-EL Red Hat here!
I'd already forgotten the President of the United States stood on the white house lawn and read off prices for different Tesla models.
And another headline from the Dept. of Sensationally Miss-Represented Scientific Results.

Vs. reality - the ">100%" is at nano-power levels, and is powered by the LED's temperature falling.

So, while the underlying effect might have some practical application, this is ">100% efficiency" in the same sense that "turned off the LED's electric power, set it on fire, then measured the fire's light output" is ">100% efficiency".
> This week, a new technology was tested in Jõgisoo, Harju County, as part of a nearly €1.3 million research project.

I’m already using the €235,999 Harbor Freight version for my bridge tests
Now we just need a perpetual entropy-powered photo-electric computer that uses a contained low-light LED array for internal data transfer, storage, and computation mechanisms as well as a power source. Okay, maybe not that, but this could lead to some interesting applications.

For some context, this researcher did publish quite a few more things: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=s6Fu0woAAAAJ&hl=en
Actual battery prices may be dropping but cost to install batteries to your solar installation in CA have not dropped - in fact they've gone up.

Not sure why this is the case.
100% this. or 95%. When you say "grass, America's largest crop" I assume you are referring to lawns, but actually I think your last point is the crucial one: "...municipal usage is a small fraction of water usage (about 8%). Agriculture..."

California has plenty of water for it's people. If you add up ALL residential, commercial and industrial use, including all outdoor landscape watering, baseball fields, golf courses, etc - it all adds up to around 10-20% of the water used (depending on rainfall).

Where does the rest (80-90%) of California's water go? Agriculture. Half the produce of which is exported to other states and countries. Did you know CA grows a LOT of rice near it's capitol, which is naturally almost a desert? And about half of that rice is exported, much to Asia (!!)

California is rather like Saudi Arabia, with the farmers pumping out all the water and selling it in the form of agricultural produce.

But take a shorter shower please! And you don't really NEED to flush that toilet.
I'd be interested if there was something for this at the router level with specifying specific devices. Too weak otherwise.
Screw cloudflare, I rather host my own proxies.
I'm not a number theorist, but I note that 16 is 2^4 and 8 is 2^3 (both powers of 2). Maybe there is a provable statement about whether these lists are finite in bases that are not 2^k, and maybe there is a bound on the length of the list by the value of log_2(base).

I'm not going to write it out, there is certainly a proof that the list is infinite in base 2^k (for integer k >= 2). I'm more wondering about how hard it is to prove that the list is finite in a different base.
"The days are long but the decades are short"
Show HN: Mobile Use
Dead Simple Snapshot Testing in Zig
> Run by Masa who many consider an oracle because his placed massive bets years before other people and those bets have paid of big.

I'm not sure how many folks these days would consider him an "oracle". He clearly did fabulously well with some early Internet investments, but he also was famous for folly after folly of overpriced investments in the 2010s (the Softbank "Vision Funds").

I'd be curious if there is a simple accounting list of Softbank's major investments ranked from biggest winners to biggest losers. I guess it pretty much highlights the dynamics of the VC business model - you only need a few giant winners to offset the boatload of losers. In Softbank's case, I'm guessing their biggest winners are Yahoo Japan (which was the dominate site in Japan for a long time, and long after the US Yahoo fell into irrelevance) and Alibaba, which saw their early $20 million investment balloon into billions.

But did Softbank have any winners from their 2010s spending spree (along the time where they shoveled good money after bad into WeWork)?
well, I got tired of Groovy and found out that using Jenkins with plain bash under source control is just right for us. Runs everywhere, very fast to test/develop and its all easy to change and improve.

We build Docker images mostly so ymmv.

I have a "port to github actions" ticket in the backlog but I think we're not going to go down that road now.
HTTPS isn't very critical for a static site. Only the Sith, and security zealots, deal in absolutes.
Probably through the buddy network is your best bet.
> the price of the water can’t be equal to marginal cost of getting more water

Increased demand by definition means consumers will pay more for the same quantity. Even if the marginal cost was flat it is in the producers interest to raise prices. You're essentially asking why markets have to do what markets do.

> Water can be piped in from elsewhere, can be made from reverse osmosis from even briney aquifers or seawater or even sewage.

Do you think that costs the same as pumping water out of a lake or water table?

> is it just a mispricing of the water?

...You think a drought is a mispricing of water? As if water was more expensive, there would be no shortage? A draught is a mis-cost of water; when water becomes more expensive than is sustainable.
Dish soap?
You don't stop the buyer from buying on speculation about what the business might become. The buyer can do whatever they want based on whatever rationalization they want.

You stop the seller from pumping up the stock price based on lies.
I've been in the market for 30 years, had some of the best jobs on earth doing FE, and only did my first React project last year. Maybe I'm an anomaly but I never felt that not knowing React has been a problem. "table stakes" is too strong a phrase.
There have been a lot of these threads. Usually the bulk of the flags (as far I've seen from checking this) come from users who are tired of the repetition and don't feel like the stories are on topic for HN. With high-indignation, high-intensity hot topics, commenters mostly repeat their intensely held, pre-existing positions. That is already not the curious conversation this place is supposed to be for, and it has a large chance of degenerating into outright flamewar, which is against the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

We sometimes turn off flags on these stories - you can find previous explanations about that at these links:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43212835 (Feb 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389 (Feb 2025)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011 (Feb 2025)

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

We turned off the flags on a couple major threads about this general topic over the last few days. At some point there has to be a limit, because otherwise the front page would consist of nothing but this, and similar, topics. That would turn HN into a current affairs site, which is not the mandate of this place.

If you (or anyone) will a look at the above links and take in the basic explanations, I'd be happy to answer any question that hasn't already been answered there.
Microsoft Fails to Support MS SQL Server for Django
Exactly, it consumes heat.

> ... took advantage of small amounts of excess heat to emit more power than consumed.
Another great YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Will_Zhao
Yes it was just flagged and removed.
Yes Apple of the 2020s era seems to be trying to do EVERYTHING while also their scale means almost nothing moves the needle for them unless its huge.

I do not understand why they desire to have also-ran versions of Netflix, Spotify, Steam, Peloton, Kindle, etc. Maintaining what 5 segmented computing OSes - Mac, iPad, iOS, WatchOS, VisionOS..?

Continuing to flood each of their hardware lines with confusing overlap.. very 2010s Samsung to me.
Pretty soon virtually everything will be paywalled.
Ironically, it will provide us with a good metric that lets us find out whether AGI has arrive or not: when it does, paywalling will stop working because AGI could derive more value from accessing things and will thus outbid us.
This doesn't integrate the antenna, so it's not comparable.
prefer this to allowing conservatives to have any power. why should guys doing the heil hitler salute get a turn at the wheel
Yep. It's taking environmental heat energy alongside electricity and converting to light.
Yes, it's drawing heat from the environment: the diode itself gets cooler as it emits light, and presumably at some point there's no more available energy in this way and so efficiency goes back below 100%
AI-Assisted Coding: The Hype vs. the Hidden Risks
I might be naive, but I think it's time we seriously start implementing "HTTP status code 402: Payment Required" across the board.

"L402" is an interesting proposal. Paying a fraction of a penny per request.
https://github.com/l402-protocol/l402
There are options beyond auth walls for detecting/enforcing behavior as well since these scrapers have very recognizable device signatures: https://stytch.com/blog/detecting-ai-agent-use-abuse/
In addition, we need to start paying attention to the growing legislation about AI and copyright law. There was an article on HN I think this week (or last) specifically where a judge ruled AI cannot own copyright on its generated materials.

IANAL, but I do wonder how this ruling will be used as a point of reference whenever we finally ask the question "Does material produced by GenAI violate copyright laws?" Specifically if it cannot claim ownership, a right that we've awarded to trees and monkeys, how does it operate within ownership laws?

And don't even get me ranting about HUMAN digital rights or Personified AIs.
Counterpoint: Serviceberry: abundance and reciprocity in the natural world, by Robin Wall Kimmerer (consider using your publicly-funded library, thriftbooks, or bookshop rather than Amazon)

Abundance mindset is more along the lines of "public luxury, private sufficiency" than "let's figure out how to make so much stuff we drown in it!"
Thank you! In some ways, I feel like we are re-inventing the apprenticeship type of model.

And to your point regarding history/ethics/philosophy, these topics come up inevitably. In the earlier experiments we've done, the discussions can turn very philosophical. A part of me wants to include these topics in the website, but another part says it might scare off some students who may not recognize the relevance yet.
> Seems all that protesting... is for naught. According to you.

The pipeline went live in 2017. Did protesting work?
You forget that the number of decimal digits grows linearly with the exponent. To generate the first n numbers of the form 2^n numbers you need O(n^2) time.

For example, 2^(10^10) is 10^10 bits and about 3 billion decimals digits.

So for n up to 10^10, you need to do about (10^10)/2 = 5×10^19 elemental operations. At one operation per nanosecond that takes 1584 years of CPU time. Not at all easy to brute force!
That's a laughable idea.

Job market is formed by the presence of needs and the presence of the ability to satisfy them. AI - does not reduce the ability to satisfy needs, so only possible situation where you won't be able to compete - is either the socialists will seize power and ban competition, or all the needs will be met in some other ways. In any other situation - there will be job market and the people will compete in it
Desalination is not trivial. It must be done on the coast and produces truly immense amounts of brine which kills everything, -- all plants, all animals -- in the vicinity. People talk about desal as if you can just plop a plant anywhere and get infinite water, but it does not work that way, you need to manage the brine. Either you commit ecological genocide or you find a way to pump corrosive salt water miles out to sea (and in a spread out network of underwater viaducts to keep the concentration down). Very very expensive.

It's basically a non-starter at agricultural scale. It's suitable only for small amounts of drinking water.
I dont feel this is blog spam it's more of a quick comment of the situation pointing to the actual article. I dont see anything wrong with writing a short post boosting or commenting on another article. There are no ads so I dont see this as blogspam which I associate with financial gain or clout.
Don’t get me wrong—I’d be all for batteries ruling the world if they were both affordable and technically advanced enough to meet various demands. That means they shouldn’t degrade too quickly, for example, when capturing and releasing wind energy in milliseconds. Or they shouldn’t lose too much energy over time due to self-discharge. Or they should be able to supply large amounts of energy instantly. Overbuilding is also a valid approach, especially in connection with a smart grid spanning multiple countries. All of that is fine.

However, the point of the study is different, and that makes it still relevant today: The barrier to expanding energy storage isn’t a technical one—it’s a political one. The study also shows that there is a great deal of variability, and the often-used argument that there’s not enough lithium or rare earth elements doesn’t hold up. More recent studies validate different storage technologies depending on their specific use case, showing that they can complement batteries in a meaningful way—also from a financial perspective.

Another perspective is that we still have a long way to go before full electrification. Right now, batteries are used in suitable scenarios, but many other areas haven’t been electrified or optimized at all. Other storage technologies might still become relevant. Building a house around a 20,000-liter tank to store energy for heating in Alaska over six months might already be financially and technically viable. But whether the logistical challenges of such solutions will ever make them truly feasible—that’s something I neither want nor can predict.
ChatGPT hit with privacy complaint over defamatory hallucinations
I can't help but recommend an accounting software called Manager (https://www.manager.io/). You install it on your computer and its free. It's probably the most beautifully designed accounting software i have come across. They also have a cloud version.

I first came across Manager about 5 years ago and wanted my accountants to use it. However they chose Xero because they were 'used to Xero'.

I still have Manager installed and play around with it whenever i need inspiration.

The downloadable version is single user. All data is stored in an SQLITE file which you can just copy-paste if you have to move computers. You can decide where you want to store the SQLITE file. I ended up choosing a shared dropbox folder. Guess what, now i have a multi-user version. Although, i'm not sure if the Manager team would recommend this approach.

I'm not affiliated with Manager.
the word you're looking for is "confabulation"
That's actually an argument in favour of kicking AWS off the Internet. We rely too much on their services, to the point we're afraid of banning their IPs if they do something bad. Better stop this now than being worse off later. The best moment would have been ten years ago, the second best moment is today.
While some of the residential IPs are from malware, a lot of it is from residential IP proxies, where people are paid to run proxy software from their home. If it starts getting around that people who run this software quickly become blocked by the majority of the internet that will lessen that part of the problem.
Would love something that sets up EKS and ingress without me tearing my hair out and actually wishing I were using Azure (yikes).
Wasm, WebGPU, a bunch of PWA features etc...
Remind me, who controls the House, the Senate, and the Presidency in the US? And how do you propose building all of this infrastructure? Are we going to put peoples' taxes to work on this kind of problem? What makes that a more valid use of the money versus water conservation efforts? Is it just that this is your dream, much like Germany once dreamed of farming the Mediterranean sea floor?
I think AI is currently much poorer for this use case, if you want to generalize it. There is less assembly code training data available where existing bad coding patterns are matched to actual bug descriptions. Assembly is more verbose so they also take more context width from LLMs. False positive are the biggest pain in this area. With LLMs it is also surprisingly difficult to test the existence of vulnerability in general - often you give a hint about the possible issue with the prompt itself. If you do it in large scale, false positives are everywhere.
Right, so the gap I'm seeing is that anyone who wants to identity farm just does what you've done. The problem isn't the assurance that you receive, it's the assurance you give to anyone else that any of your customers are flesh-and-blood.
Polymetallic nodules obviously will have electric potentials that could maybe electrolyze water slowly, but... whence the energy? Do the metals in the polymetallic nodules mix better -thus reducing the electric potential- as they electrolyze water? Do they oxidize? If they oxidize, how much of the oxygen they produce goes to oxidizing them, and how much is made available to the local biome?

(When you extract energy from a magnet it loses its magnetization. I imagine something similar must happen here.)

How long does it take for these nodules to form, and how long does it take for any process to render them no longer able to electrolyze water?
If you had to commute daily, wouldn't you buy a smaller commuter EV? Something from Hyunda or Nissan? The depreciation on that Lighting will be rough if you had to drive it 80 miles/day.
Mercedes crossed 50% thermal efficiency in 2018 with their F1 engine: https://www.roadandtrack.com/motorsports/a15049580/mercedes-...
Their recent interviews suggest they are up by 2 to 3% on that

Honda did too but they never marketed the explicit number.
Is it actually cheaper to power this with nuclear plants (especially micro-reactors that don't really exist in production) than just deploying a lot of wind/solar/batteries to do it?
One way to interact with HN as a social media site, because it -is- a social media site, is to mostly use the site through it's search bar.

I've had a set of quick links to searches for topics I am interested in for quite a while, typically for the last 24H, sorted by time, usually comments. For instance, I have had a link to a search for "Musk in title" on my bar since the Twitter acquisition, which has made it a lot easier to see what actually gets flagged and what doesn't. Similarly, if you really want a pretty horrific set of opinions, a search for Hamas will reveal that there are plenty of vocal folks here okay with incinerating children.

On one hand, I understand that a lot of folks have a very specific idea about what they want to see on HN.

On the other hand, I'm mostly here because I want to get the opinions of "centrist" capitalists, VC folks, and aspiring tech folks about a wide range of cultural issues. I don't usually want to have those kinds of folks (who I believe are often exhibiting some kind of sociopathy) in my other social media feeds or, god forbid, meat-space life.

Anyhow, it's entirely possible to bend the site to ones' usage (it is a "hacking" space after all). There is much more on the site than what happens on the front page and it's much more useful to log in and see the flagged/dead content.
I’m always a bit skeptical about these sorts of things. Perhaps I’m just ignorant about the methods used.. but the amount of data we can get from the most distant known galaxy can’t be very much. How confident can we be that the shift in observed light or whatever is actually from the presence of Oxygen and not one of probably countless other causes, both known and unknown.