Hacker News Reader

ZeroGravitason My fireside chat about agentic engineering at the Pragmatic Summit

I ask the llm what Simon Willison would recommend to ensure I'm using up to date Python approaches.

ZeroGravitason Italy Explores Nuclear Return After 40 Years as Energy Costs Hit

No, they're "exploring" the possibility of considering it while they just passed a new law to encourage and subsidise gas usage and work around EU carbon markets.

ZeroGravitason Library of Short Stories

One well formatted ebook source:

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/e-m-forster/short-fiction

ZeroGravitason Italy Explores Nuclear Return After 40 Years as Energy Costs Hit

And so keeping the right wing fossil fuel grift going another few years.

Much better headline for them than "Italy reaps the obvious consequences of not adopting renewables fast enough".

Summary from 2021:

> Gas-reliant Italy lags behind in Europe’s race to renewables

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/gas-reliant-italy-i...

ZeroGravitason Jeff Bezos wants Washington Post’s newsroom budget halved, productivity doubled

That's assuming the pro-billionaire propaganda it produces doesn't make him many hundreds of millions more.

In that light an arbitrary but vaguely plausible reason to fire anyone who insists on doing actual journalism and not billionaire propaganda is a useful tool.

ZeroGravitason U.S. Tech Giants Flocked to the Persian Gulf. Now They Are Targets

Though most of the "rare earth" stuff seems to be bullshit based on memes built on not understanding that rare earths aren't rare.

Like the Venezuela oil stuff, it's a half remembered fantasy of what was important when Trump's brain still functioned, several decades ago.

They're destroying America's reputation and alliances for fools gold.

ZeroGravitason Curses-exec: interactive xargs for less

Feels similar in shape to fzf (and similar tools) except normal mode vim keys in the middle of the pipe rather than fuzzy search and ctrl-* for advanced actions

ZeroGravitason Palantir CEO Makes Confession on Disrupting Democratic Power

> If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best college educated woman, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." -- LBJ remixed by AI

ZeroGravitason Does Where You're Born Matter More Than How Hard You Work?

All obviously true but for this audience you have to, sadly, address the Nazi mind view that is explicitly built to counter this.

The parents lived in the better location because they are better, purer Aryans. That's why the kid did better, because they have the good genes. They deserve their success. The poor deserve their poverty.

Zoom out to different countries and you can find top level members of the government making this argument on a daily basis. "They" are poor because they are inferior human beings and do not deserve to be treated as full human beings.

ZeroGravitason Britain is ejecting hereditary nobles from Parliament after 700 years

I'll tell Hillary Clinton, she'll be thrilled.

ZeroGravitason Whistleblower claims ex-DOGE member says he took Social Security data to new job

Openlibrary has a scanned copy in French and English it seems:

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1161327W/R%C3%A9flexions_sur...

ZeroGravitason Whistleblower claims ex-DOGE member says he took Social Security data to new job

Something DOGE relied on when publicizing all those 300 year old people claiming benefits.

Who turned out not to exist.

Or when they put loshed that website full of their savings.

Which turned out not to exist.

ZeroGravitason Germany's Solar Boom Eases Power Costs as Gas Price Jumps

The recent "Offshore Wind Investment Pact" announcement was aiming for 1 Trillion euro of investment into North Sea wind by 2040.

Plus there's lots of other stuff happening. Also lots of pushback from those clinging to fossil fuels.

ZeroGravitason Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)

https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/ev-fossil-cars-climate

This even compares cars built in an unrealistic 100% coal grid, and fuelled on 100% coal grid. Driving 14k miles a year for 10 years a Tesla Model 3 built under those extreme conditions beats a gas Fiat 500

ZeroGravitason Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)

An EV running half on coal is better than a gasoline car for carbon emissions. A similar story for heat pumps.

China is more electrified than most Western nations and getting more so faster than Europe or the US:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-as-a-share-of...

ZeroGravitason Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)

Recent data on import depdency from a link someone posted:

> Ireland's energy import dependency was 79.6% in 2024, up from 78.3% in 2023 (for comparison, the EU average for 2023 was 58.3%).

> Ireland imported 100% of its oil, 79.5% of its gas, and 14.0% of its electricity in 2024.

ZeroGravitason Ireland shuts last coal plant, becomes 15th coal-free country in Europe (2025)

The actual causes of electricity cost rises in Ireland being higher than Europe are:

Lower population density on a grid without good connections to neighbours.

Previous underinvestment in network infrastructure.

Gas price rises combined with Ireland having less renewables that the EU average (middle of the pack for electricity, 3rd from bottom on total energy).

Maybe saving the world a bit harder would have helped keep prices down. It's certain that building more renewables now is the likeliest path to cheaper electricity.

A report supporting those claims: https://www.nerinstitute.net/sites/default/files/research/89...

ZeroGravitason New imagery suggests U.S. responsible for Iran school strike

"The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don’t kid yourself. When they say they don’t care about their lives, you have to take out their families,” Trump said.

https://edition.cnn.com/2015/12/02/politics/donald-trump-ter...

During the past week, in a series of interviews and events, Trump has articulated a loose, but expansive set of principles that, if enacted, would mark a fundamental shift in U.S. foreign policy from the limits put in place by Democratic President Barack Obama and the Republican-led Congress. In addition to arguing in favor of reinstating waterboarding, a technique that mimics the sensation of drowning, and "much more than that," Trump has advocated the killing of suspected terrorists' wives and children, which appears in violation of international law.

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/to-fight-isis-torture-terror...

ZeroGravitason Lawmakers Want DoD Investigated for Biblical 'Armageddon' Claims

Don't immanentize the eschaton!

ZeroGravitason Global warming has accelerated significantly

You've gone from hating the far left for trying to push their agenda via global warming to hating the Democrats for not targeting the rich to solve climate change within the span of two comments.

Perhaps you have cognitive dissonance because you've fallen for some very low quality propaganda.

ZeroGravitason LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first

Does it work if you get the agent to throw away all of its actual implementation and start again from scratch, keeping all the learning and tests and feedback?

Gemini seems to try to get a lot of information upfront with questions and plans but people are famously bad at knowing what they want.

Maybe it should build a series of prototypes and spikes to check? If making code is cheap then why not?

ZeroGravitason New imagery suggests U.S. responsible for Iran school strike

Trump has repeatedly, on record, enthusiastically endorsed killing the wives and children of enemies.

ZeroGravitason Mozilla is working on a big Firefox redesign, here is what it looks like

Second?

Firefox was a UI rewrite before it was even called Firefox and there been several more since then.

ZeroGravitason Claude Used to Hack Mexican Government

He still does, but he used to as well.

ZeroGravitason China's CO2 emissions hit Q1 record high after 4% rise in early 2023 (2023)

What's the relevance of this today?

ZeroGravitason Claude Code told me what tools it needs to work faster

I'm never sure whether to believe llms about themselves.

Anthropic create developer containers with a selection of tools installed. Is that a better guide? Some of the config seems aimed at human developers but if claude likes the tools why aren't they in this list?

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/.devcont...

ZeroGravitason US tech firms pledge at White House to bear costs of energy for datacenters

An actual problem was them trying to avoid paying.

They'd ask the utilities to make Gigawatts of energy available over the next two decades and the utilities would say "No problem, just sign here and agree to pay for us building out the grid to support that".

Then the AI companies said "No we only want to pay for energy if we actually use it, if we go bust or decide not to use the energy in a couple of years we want you to charge all the others consumers to recoup that cost".

No idea if that's addressed here. I'm assuming not.

It was never clear if that reflected uncertainty about future demand or of they just like shifting costs and risk onto other people whenever possible.

edit: the pledge references this problem, whether it actually solves it I don't know.

ZeroGravitason Does that use a lot of energy?

The upstream energy costs of supplying fossil fuels can also be counted. They add about 1/4 or 1/5th of the total in what are called "Well to wheel comparison". The comparison in the article is "tank to wheel'

It's not a direct analogue to energy but CO2 emissions per km are roughly 4 times lower for an EV charged on the EU grid in 2025, well to wheel.

ZeroGravitason NRC issues first commercial reactor construction approval in 10 years [pdf]

France's nuclear operators have been claiming this for years. But recently started claiming that wind and solar are bad because they force nuclear to flex which is too expensive.

> Electricite de France SA said growing solar and wind generation was increasing equipment wear and maintenance costs at its nuclear reactors, which are forced to reduce output when power demand is insufficient.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-16/edf-warns...

ZeroGravitason NRC issues first commercial reactor construction approval in 10 years [pdf]

People can live without gas pipes. One of the big tasks at the moment is planning to stop people building new gas pipes that won't be used enough to justify the price and how to phase out the existing gas pipes so the pricing doesn't enter a "death spiral" as people start leaving the network, leaving the government to bail it out.