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RobinLon GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT

Same:

Yes — the Romanian player is Costel Pantilimon. He won the Premier League with Manchester City in the 2011-12 and 2013-14 seasons.

If you meant another Romanian player (perhaps one who featured more prominently rather than as a backup), I can check.

RobinLon Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity

FWIW, here's a chart showing current prices across developed countries, showing UK is worst! https://fullfact.org/economy/uk-world-electricity-prices/

RobinLon Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity

I think it's best to view this from an economics point of view - in a nutshell price signals are usually the most powerful way to create behavioural change; in this case, we want people to shift demand away from peak times. Nobody is being forced to, they just have to pay more for the convenience of not bothering.

> IMO this is just setting us up for insane surge pricing for those people who don't do the good citizen thing of becoming nocturnal

It actually costs a lot more to produce marginal energy at peak times, the cost just reflects the cost of production. It doesn't seem unreasonable for me for the consumer to bear the cost, and also get the benfit if they choose to put their car to charge overnight rather than at peak time.

This also has a nice secondary benefit: anyone on agile tariffs who shifts demand away from peak time actually benefits those who don't want to bother, because the peak price/cost goes down, and so the overall average price of electricity goes down.

> I see this as just yet _another_ job the government/business is making us do instead of them

In most other market, people are expected to respond to price incentives. When local apples are cheap relative to imported cherries, people don't complain that government/business is making us do a job to push demand in the direction of apples.

> Is it too much to ask for my government to provide sensibly and simply priced energy so we can get on with our day, working, studying, raising kids etc?

The free market price _is_ the agile price. The government intervention is actually in the direction of fixing prices (e.g. by the energy price cap, which is sometimes below the free market price at peak times). In general, markets do not work very well when the government fixes the market

When you let the market clear and send out price signals, markets almost always become more efficient (which means that consumers benefit overall)

RobinLon Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity

Yeah - unfortunately the UK has some of the highest electricity prices in Europe.

Almost all households are on fixed tariffs, typically about 26p/kwh at the moment.

RobinLon Australia has so much solar that it's offering everyone free electricity

In the UK, you can go on an agile tariff that does exactly this. I'm on one.

It's quite fun (and educational) with the kids to work out when to put the car on to charge, when to run the dryer etc, looking at the few days ahead forecasts.

Last month, we paid 11p per kWh on average, which is less than half what you'd pay on a standard tariff, and it's nice to be doing something good for the environment too. It's particularly satisfying to charge up the car when tariffs go negative.

Here's today's rates (actuals): https://agilebuddy.uk/latest/agile

Here's a forecast: https://prices.fly.dev/A/

RobinLon Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

https://docs.astral.sh/uv/concepts/projects/init/#creating-a...

I use the 'bare' option for this

RobinLon A sharded DuckDB on 63 nodes runs 1T row aggregation challenge in 5 sec

It's main purpose is to solve the problem of upserts to a data lake, because upsert operations to file based data storage are a real pain.

RobinLon A sharded DuckDB on 63 nodes runs 1T row aggregation challenge in 5 sec

Yes - OLAP database are built with a completely different performance tradeoff. The way data is stored and the query planner are optimised for exactly these types of queries. If you're working in an oltp system, you're not necessarily doing it wrong, but you may wish to consider exporting the data to use in an OLAP tool if you're frequently doing big queries. And nowadays there's ways to 'do both ' e.g. you can run the duckdb query engine within a postgres instance

RobinLon Solar energy is now the cheapest source of power, study

I'm generally pro nuclear and think it should be a significant part of the energy mix. But an interesting point is that the floor price of nuclear is the cost of the turbines, which are surprisingly expensive, and aren't really getting cheaper. Solar can go much cheaper than that, potentially at least. More on this point in the recent Casey Handmer interview of Dwarkesh.

RobinLon AI-generated “workslop” is destroying productivity?

I largely agree. As a counterpoint, today I delivered a significant PR that was accepted easily by the lead dev with the following approach:

1. Create a branch and vibe code a solution until it works (I'm using codex cli)

2. Open new PR and slowly write the real PR myself using the vibe code as a reference, but cross referencing against existing code.

This involved a fair few concepts that were new to me, but had precedent in the existing code. Overall I think my solution was delivered faster and of at least the same quality as if I'd written it all by hand.

I think its disrespectful to PR a solution you don't understand yourself. But this process feels similar to my previous non-AI assisted approach where I would often code spaghetti until the feature worked, and then start again and do it 'properly' once I knew the rough shape of the solution

RobinLon Are touchscreens in cars dangerous?

If that were the case they'd be no need for seatbelt laws

RobinLon Cape Station, future home of an enhanced geothermal power plant, in Utah

This provides a lot of interesting info on geothermal: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/watt-lies-beneath/

And more: https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/fracking-aust...

One interesting point made here is that the cost of turbines puts a floor price on any form.of generation which uses them, whether renewable or not, meaning in the long run solar has a big advantage: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/casey-handmer. I don't know how accurate that is

RobinLon Polars Cloud and Distributed Polars now available

100% agree. I've also worked as a data engineer and came to the same conclusion. I wrote up a blog which went into a bit more depth on the topic here: https://www.robinlinacre.com/recommend_sql/

RobinLon Melvyn Bragg steps down from presenting In Our Time

May be of interest: https://www.braggoscope.com/directory (a categorised catalogue of episodes)

RobinLon U.S. Emissions Rise 4.2%, China's Fall 2.7%

That stat is bonkers. China's GDP is only 5x that of UK. Total UK solar is about 19GW.

So even if you divide China's solar by 5, they added in a month what we have built in >10 years

RobinLon Data engineering and software engineering are converging

We use aws glue for spark (but are increasingly moving towards duckdb because it's faster for our workloads and easier to test and deploy).

For Spark, glue works quite well. We use it as 'spark as a service', keeping our code as close to vanilla pyspark as possible. This leaves us free to write our code in normal python files, write our own (tested) libraries which are used in our jobs, use GitHub for version control and ci and so on

RobinLon Data engineering and software engineering are converging

I think this may be a databricks thing? From what I've seen there's a gap between data engineers forced to use databricks and everyone else. From what I've seen, at least how it's used in practice, databricks seems to result in a mess of notebooks with poor dependency and version management.

RobinLon Do I not like Ruby anymore? (2024)

There's a good interview with DHH, who is the creator of Ruby in Rails here: https://lexfridman.com/dhh-david-heinemeier-hansson-transcri... I have no skin in the game having never used Ruby, but I found his arguments interesting

RobinLon The new geography of stolen goods

130,000 car thefts a year. That's over £1bn loss, probably closer to £4bn. In this context the total police budget of around £20bn seems remarkably low!

You'd have thought it'd be worth insurance companies paying people to track down the thieves!

RobinLon Does OLAP Need an ORM

When I read the title my brain immediately jumped to a slightly different idea. With olap, I often find it annoying to figure out the joins from the fk/pk relationships, so I was imagining a tool that kind of automatically followed the links for you. A bit like how a orm gives you auto complete, but without the user having to manually enter the schema.

And I wanted it to emit the raw SQL because that's generally what I want for olap.

So I had to go at building it. If anyone's interested a very rough demo/prototype is here: https://www.robinlinacre.com/vite_live_pg_orm/

Load in the demo Northwind schema and click some tables/columns to see the generated joins

RobinLon Hillary Clinton says she'd nominate Trump for Nobel Prize if he brokers peace

Misleading headline:

> she would nominate Trump for the award if he was successful in getting Putin to end his war and give back all the territory his forces took from Ukraine in the conflict

So the meaning of the comment is actually the opposite of headline. It's really a criticism of the basis of the negotiation

RobinLon GPT-5

Hypothesis: to the average user this will feel like a much greater jump in capability then to the average HNer, because most users were not using the model selector. So it'll be more successful than the benchmarks suggest.

RobinLon GPT-5 for Developers

Totally agree. At the moment I find that frontier LLMs are able to solve most of the problems I throw at them given enough context. Most of my time is spent working out what context they're missing when they fail. So the thing that would help me most is much a much more focussed ability to gather context.

For my use cases, this is mostly needing to be really home in on relevant code files, issues, discussions, PRs. I'm hopeful that GPT5 will be a step forward in this regard that isn't fully captured in the benchmark results. It's certainly promising that it can achieve similar results more cheaply than e.g. Opus.

RobinLon “No tax on tips” is an industry plant

Because you're artificially favouring one specific industry, at a cost to all other industries.

And because the implication of your argument is we should never tax anything because that's a benefit to both the consumer and the business

RobinLon “No tax on tips” is an industry plant

It's just supply and demand. It makes working in these industries relatively more attractive, increasing supply of labour and therefore reducing price of labour. So restaurant owners capture some of the benefits

RobinLon Observable Notebooks 2.0 Technology Preview

This looks great. I love the idea behind notebooks and for a long time it was my favourite environment to program in. But slowly I stopped using them because it never quite felt like the code was entirely mine, and alternatives became easier due to llms. This looks like exactly the remedy I was hoping for. I'm excited to start using them again.

RobinLon Ask HN: What are you working on? (July 2025)

A fuzzy matching community extension for duckdb: https://github.com/moj-analytical-services/splink_udfs

And I've been vibe coding some maths educational tools and games for (my) 6yo: https://rupertlinacre.com/

RobinLon Claude Code Is a Slot Machine

I have had similar experiences to OP. All of these apps (mostly maths learning, but also the bus one) were coded using a mix of copilot and Gemini CLI: https://rupertlinacre.com/

I'm probably capable of building all of them by hand, but with a 6yo I'd have never had the time. He loves the games, his mental arithmetic has come on amazingly now he does it 'for fun'.

All code is here: https://github.com/rupertlinacre

Much of this built out of a frustration that most maths resources online are trying to sell you something, full of ads, or poor quality. Just a simple zoomable numberline is hard to find

RobinLon ChatGPT agent: bridging research and action

This feels a bit underwhelming to me - Perplexity Comet feels more immediately compelling as new paradigm of a natural way of using LLMs within a browser. But perhaps I'm being short-sighted

RobinLon AI slows down open source developers. Peter Naur can teach us why

The problem is that code often takes as long to review as to write, and AI potentially reduces the quality bar to pull requests. So maintainers have a problem of lots of low quality PRs that take time to reject