HN Best Comments

Re: Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants This still has to pass with the people in a referendum. The discourse on nuclear is still quite chaotic in politics in Switzerland. All left leaning parties and greens parties are strongly against nuclear. I am not expecting informed and civil discussions about this topic. Switzerland has a summer/winter energy problem. We have lots of potential of producing energy in the spring and summer (when our dams are full from the melting of snow and the sun is shining), and much less so in the winter. We can still improve 10 to 20% our hydro production, but that's it. All the water sheds are already well used and rely on our glaciers to replenish, which will become less predictable with climate change. We shouldn't completely closing the doors to all forms of nuclear technology. Obviously, we can't build blindy without any considerations. But we may need it on the second half of the century, especially if we are going to electrify all forms of transport. We can't be buying France's nuclear energy all the time. jokteur, 22 hours ago

Re: Noam Shazeer Joins OpenAI Some context for people who haven’t followed the full loop: Shazeer was a long-time Google researcher, joined Google in 2000, and was one of the co-authors of “Attention Is All You Need.” He left Google in 2021 to co-found Character.AI. In 2024, Google brought him and some Character.AI researchers back via a licensing/talent deal with Character.AI (reportedly around $2.7B). He was then made a Gemini co-lead. Now he’s leaving Google again for OpenAI. Exciting times! gzer0, 18 hours ago

Re: W Social, public institutions and the theater of European digital sovereignty W Social felt extremely shady since their first advertisement on HN. Also, for all their talk about human verification, I have 6 accounts under different names :) pocksuppet, 24 hours ago

Re: AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs This was never marketed as a feature of the consumer CPUs and if some malignant actor does get physical access to my (consumer) hardware, then them being able to read out bytes through cryo-freezing the RAM really isn't high up on the list of things I'm going to worry about. thg, 1 day ago

Re: U.S. science is in chaos I just want to vent: climate change is not a controversial topic, it's an inconvenient topic for people making a lot of money. IsTom, 2 days ago

Re: Modos Color Monitor Pushes E-Paper Displays Further There is an awesome YouTube video about this from the person who made it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nHbA2-_qzH4 varun_ch, 21 hours ago

Re: Want your images back? That'll be $5 Considering they explicitly said they had some photos of yours ("You shared them. We protected them."), this seems like chargeback territory. equinoxnemesis, 2 days ago

Re: How Madrid built its metro cheaply (2024) > Unlike infrastructure projects in Britain or America, which are heavily reliant on external consultants to handle all stages of the project, this group of well-paid in-house engineers led much of the Madrid Metro expansion. The team stayed largely the same throughout the different projects, meaning that they were able to learn from their experience and apply it to future projects. Imagine that: building expertise in-house and within the governmental org results in better planning and management and thus outcomes. thatmf, 24 hours ago

Re: Humiliating IIS servers for fun and jail time I front all my honeypots with the IIS landing page precisely because it attracts black hat jagoffs. Nothing makes me happier than knowing I've wasted hours of their time chasing their own tails. naturalmovement, 2 days ago

Re: U.S. science is in chaos > When the shutdown ended in mid-November, Reynolds’s team had just two weeks to get on budget. It failed. The plan the group submitted would cost too much and take too long. “Our last hope was that NASA headquarters would understand what had gone on and give us some leeway,” Reynolds says. NASA did not. After nearly 10 years of work, AXIS was dead. If the scientists haven't left science behind after an experience like this, probably nothing will. What an absolute kick in the nuts to have a decade of your life erased because someone did a keyword search for science projects to stop, in the name of saving money, while at the same time wasting even more money on other things. I think I should feel angry, but I just feel sad for all the humans involved here, I hope they manage to come out with a more positive perspective than I'm able to here. embedding-shape, 2 days ago

Re: The founder of Craigslist has given away half a billion dollars I don't know much about this guy, but I remember reading an interview with him maybe 15 years ago where he was asked if his lifestyle had changed since he came into money and if he bought a new house or anything, and his answer was basically something like: "Not really, and I've already got good water pressure where I'm at, what else do I need?" I can't help but like his attitude. helterskelter, 4 hours ago

Re: U.S. science is in chaos > whether there are black holes at a redshift of 10 or not is not a partisan issue. Anything that depends on a basic understanding of the scientific process, and resulting scientific facts is absolutely a partisan issue right now. Rebuff5007, 1 day ago

Re: Midjourney Medical It's a controversial and complicated idea. The downside, and the reason why most doctors do not recommend full body scans, is that every human body is a bit weird and there will almost always be something "wrong" that will be visible in a full body scan. This can lead to unnecessary testing, anxiety, and even unnecessary procedures. Many of these oddities flagged by the scan would never have caused any actual issues had the patient never been aware. While there are many individual stories of full-body scans detecting early-stage cancer before it became symptomatic, there seems to be a general sense among doctors that implementing full-body scanning on a population level would lead to overall more harm than good. The thinking is that it is better to do regular targeted screenings for diseases that you're in a risk group for (e.g. colonoscopies, mammograms, cancer marker blood tests, etc.) rather than full-body scans. I'm not a doctor, and I personally do find the idea of full-body scans very appealing, but I also know that if the scan detects a possible cancer, I wouldn't be able to just ignore it if the doctor tells me it's likely ok. Any time I felt any pain or any sort of symptom in that general area, I know I would worry about it. Maybe that's worth it for the potential life-saving results, but it definitely is a cost of this type of scan that needs to be acknowledged. convnet, 17 hours ago

Re: Lore – Open source version control system designed for scalability Just today as I pushed some changes to Github, I was thinking how user-unfriendly Git's UI is:

    Enumerating objects: 5, done.
    Counting objects: 100% (5/5), done.
    Delta compression using up to 10 threads
    Compressing objects: 100% (3/3), done.
    Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 290 bytes | 290.00 KiB/s, done.
    Total 3 (delta 2), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
    remote: Resolving deltas: 100% (2/2), completed with 2 local objects.

I know all of these things communicate something to the die-hard Git user, but for most people (even most people using Git, I bet) this is just complete gobbledegook. What the hell is "delta compression"? Why do I care how many threads it's using? What is an 'object' and what does it mean when it's 'local'? What does 'pack-reused' mean? From the documentation, it looks like Lore does a bit better in this regard:

    Pushing 1 fragment(s)
    Pushed 1 fragment(s), 124.00 bytes
    Pushing a3f8c2d1... to branch main
    Pushed revision 1 -> a3f8c2d1... to branch main

niek_pas, 1 day ago

Re: Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly And to think that the "old" Outlook's splash screen is there for a reason: it used to take a while to open before SSDs became commonplace! Windows in general used to be usable on HDDs; SSDs would blow everyone's pants off making everything open instantly. These days we have 20+ Gbps SSDs without the AHCI latency tax and they're no longer enough to open an e-mail. THAT'S how low the ball has been dropped. m132, 8 hours ago

Re: I've always wondered if anyone used sharing buttons on news sites and blogs > The share buttons got clicked 14,078 times. That’s a 0.21% usage rate, which works out to about 1 in 476 visitors. In other words, people not only click share buttons, but do it quite often? raincole, 2 days ago

Re: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B Sam didn't lie, they are in fact a non profit. aizk, 20 hours ago

Re: The 2-Year Apartment Rule > Things start off fine, but then mold starts growing in the bathroom, and a recurring leak springs up in the living room, and then roaches start appearing in the kitchen. When I started reading the article, I thought the whole point was gonna be that the author doesn't take care of the apartment. The recurring leak might not be the author's fault, but the mold in the bathroom and roaches in the kitchen definitely are. Is this a case of a total lack of self-reflection? Or a post to scare people away from becoming landlords? tasuki, 11 hours ago

Re: US holds off blacklisting DeepSeek, more than 100 firms deemed security risks I use DeepSeek every day (via VSCode Insiders and Zed Editor). It's very affordable and, while it's slightly behind Claude (not sure how far behind Fable), it suits my working style well. I'm not using unsupervised multi-agent workflows and don't need a library of skills files - I'm writing most of the code and leaning on AI to help with mundane tasks - like; - generating types for APIs - generating boilerplate based on existing code - improving existing code (adding error handling, timeouts, things like that) - Writing SQL repository boilerplate / queries - Creating implementations against hand written tests - Helping me understand and implement APIs from third party libraries - Writing documentation I've spent like $2 in the last month and have used over 100 million tokens. It's doubled my productivity and unlocked work that I could not have done before. As an Australian, I'm not sure that I care about the safety of my data when it comes to LLMs. US companies already stole scores of data to train their models on and it's hard to imagine they suddenly grew some integrity. I'll care when regulators step in, until then it's out of my control so I'll just use the best price-to-productivity product available. apatheticonion, 19 hours ago

Re: Midjourney Medical > You want as much data as you can get about your health as quickly and as cheaply as possible. In other words, you want a technology optimized for getting as many “megabytes per second per dollar” of information about your body. This is so far from my vision of what I want from healthcare. I want a healthcare system that is optimised around A) proactively keeping me healthy, and B) reactively helping get back to healthy when I am not. I do not care about the amount of megabytes of data I have about my body. tmhrtly, 7 hours ago