MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sokoloff | 2025-04-22 10:14:56+00:00
I work entirely remote so, other than travel, there are not many long periods when the house is unoccupied.

I target the long run time to maximize efficiency. A 160°F pipe will lose more heat to the part of the building that I don’t want to heat as well as more heat to the wall right behind the radiators. It also results in the house going micro too-hot, too-cold, too-hot, too-cold as it cycles. Mine is constantly trickling in just enough heat to replace the heat lost instead of cycling between adding way more than needed then none for a while.

Another large effect is that low return water temperatures into the boiler allow for greater condensation of exhaust gas energy to be used in the building instead of sent outside. Walking by my house on a cold day, you’ll see minimal steam plume during operation. All that steam I see my neighbors emitting is energy they paid for and delivered to the outside… (They paid a lot for a boiler with a 95% or 98% sticker and run it at 80% efficiency.)

https://kw-engineering.com/how-to-optimize-condensing-boiler...
by sz4kerto | 2025-04-22 10:15:02+00:00
It does match physics if you consider other factors. Apart from the heat pump scenario, this statement can also be true when you have condensing boilers (and okay-ish insulation)

The reasoning: when you heat up the house, then your boiler needs to produce constant high-temperature water. When you keep the house at the same temperature, then the boiler produces much lower temp water and it is more efficient.

Insulation also matters because if your house has outer insulation then it means that heat transfer from the house to the environment is mostly blocked, but cross-room heat transfer is likely not (through the walls). Therefore it is better to heat the whole house than heating just a couple of rooms because if you do the latter then you'll end up heating the whole house anyway but you're using less surface area (meaning you need higher flow temperatures, meaning less efficiency).
by darthrupert | 2025-04-22 10:15:30+00:00
I was on your level 10 years ago. It has become obvious recently that humanity cannot handle it.

Now, I need very good evidence that it's a good idea before I support the kind of free speech that destroys civilized society from within.

Perhaps it's supremely ironic that americans will have actual need for anonymity in online spaces now. And not for posting dumb memes, but for doing the things to tyrants that their Founding Fathers kept talking about.
by csallen | 2025-04-22 10:15:48+00:00
It's actually quite doable to build your own deep research agent. You just need a single prompt, a solid code loop to run it agentically, and some tools for it to call. I've been building a domain-specific deep research agent over the past few days for internal use, and I'm pretty impressed with how much better it is than any of the official deep search agents for my use case.
by sz4kerto | 2025-04-22 10:16:40+00:00
> If your goal is saving energy/money, you don’t want a system capable of going from cool to toasty in 20 minutes.

Depends. As explained in a sibling comments, I have some rooms that have combined UFH and radiators, and if the desired temp is more than 1 celsius away from the current temp, then both are driven, otherwise it's just the UFH.
by rglullis | 2025-04-22 10:16:41+00:00
> So they may not be "direct" rulers, they are major power players.

So are all the other countless media companies, tech corporations, Hollywood, labor unions, pharma companies, academia...

From this list, which one do you think is more intertwined with Government affairs? The Catholic Church or Amazon? The Mormons or Blueshield? Seventh Day Adventists or Disney? The Baptists or General Motors? The Anglicans or FOX News?
by ben_w | 2025-04-22 10:17:20+00:00
Two weeks of food shouldn't be hard for most people on this forum. There's a lot of people whose financial situation is so permanently on edge that they can't do that kind of preparation for a healthy balance diet*, but for everyone here, two weeks should be fine.

IIRC, Mormons store a few months stockpile as standard.

* For an unhealthy diet, my university meal planning for a significant fraction of each semester was two large bowls of cereal in the morning and ramen noodles for dinner. I didn't realise how far below my caloric requirements that was until comments on this forum many years later. But that cost 50p/day in the UK in 2004, and if you're consuming 500ml of UHT milk/person/day then the six litre multipack one person can lug up a hill with no car will last 12 days before needing replacement, while dried grains and cereals like oats, rice, etc. are even easier to stockpile.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-04-22 10:18:08+00:00
I'm not sure about the details of the protocol (maybe someone can check?), but the client software can probably distrust certain trusted verifiers or even use a public list of such revocations. If this opportunity is exploited by malicious actors, there must be a simple and fast escalation path to revoke verification (you complain to verifier, then to maintainers of revocation list).
by palata | 2025-04-22 10:20:16+00:00
> Suggesting that they "could possible just copy the licence somewhere less visible and remove the link from their README." is wrong. They MUST include the copyright notice and the rest of the license.

You do realise that those two statements are not incompatible? If they include the licence somewhere less visible and remove the link from their README, they are still including the copyright notice and the rest of the licence.

The MIT licence does NOT say that you MUST have it at the root of your repository in a file called LICENSE. It does not say that you must clearly identify the parts of the code for which you don't own the copyright or anything like this.

You can read it here: https://opensource.org/license/mit
by darkwater | 2025-04-22 10:20:42+00:00
Yeah, the automated/remote controlled heating system world, and also the ringbell world is basically a giant scam, since they are updates on world that also scammed you in the past. I cried when I shelled out so much money for my Tado device, but even a dumb bTicino device costed in the hundred of euros realm, and it's just a sensor + a small LCD display and a designed-in-hell menu system to program it. And the same happens in Ip-based ringbells. A Doorbird will cost you hundreds of euros for what is basically a webcam plus some nice metal casing and a shitty software, but it competes with analog systems with optic cables etc that cost basically the same or more.
by amarcheschi | 2025-04-22 10:21:57+00:00
What if we create agi but then it hates existing and punish everyone who made it possible to exist?

And i could go on for hours inventing possible reasons for similar roko basilisk

the inverted basilisk. You created an agi. but that's the wrong one. it's literally the devil. game over

you invented agi, but it likes pizza and its going to consume the entire universe to make pizza. game over, but at least you'll eat pizza til the end

you invented agi, but its depressed and refuses to actually do something. you spent huge amount of resources and all you have is a chatbot that tells you to leave it alone.

you don't invent agi, it's not possible. i'm hearing from here the VCs cry

you invented agi, but it decides the only language it wants to use is a language it invented, and you have no way to understand how to interact with it. Great, agi is a non verbal autistic agi.

And well, one could continue for hours in the most hilarious way that not necessarily go in the direction of doom, but of course the idea of doom is going to have a wider reach. then you read yudkwosky thoughts about how it would kill everyone with nanobots and you realize you're reading a science fiction piece. a bad one. at least neuromancer was interesting
by wickedsight | 2025-04-22 10:22:59+00:00
I like this one! Just tried in in o3, it generated 10:10 3 times. Then it got frustrated and wrote a python program to do it correctly. Then I passed that image into o4 and got a realistic looking one... That still showed 10:10.

Search for 'clock' on Google Images though and you'll instantly see why it only seems to know 10:10. I'll keep trying this one in the future, since it really shows the influence of training data on current models.
by benterix | 2025-04-22 10:24:48+00:00
Before I read the article, I like to know who wrote it to understand whether I should spend or waste my time reading the article.

After a bit of digging it turned out the author isn't lying. There actually is a contest for forecasters and of those who participated, he was consistently in relatively high positions. See 2022:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gS8Jmcfoa9FAh92YK/crosspost-...

At the same time, he is the CEO of Rethin Priorities think tank which seems to be excellent work for the society at large:

https://rethinkpriorities.org/

So I'm bookmarking this article and will read it during my reading session today.
by sokoloff | 2025-04-22 10:24:50+00:00
Indeed “depends” is almost always the answer.

So long as you can get the boiler return water temps low enough, you can operate the boiler in its high efficiency range.

Most dual-temp setups are set for the highest temp and mixed-down to provide the lower temp for under-floor. That’s cheapest in terms of equipment and install but cannot be as efficient as a system that mixes down when both loads call but also lowers flow temp (thereby lowering return temp) when no high-temp rads are calling.
by staunton | 2025-04-22 10:25:03+00:00
Let's say you had a lossless image format that's 20% smaller (on average for pictures people send over networks) than PNG. Let's say it takes 10% more computing power than PNG. Do you stand to make money? What would it be used for?

I can't imagine people will start storing their family pictures in a new format they've never heard of which is not supported by any software they use for "just" 20% better compression. Do they even want lossless compression in the first place (if you don't ask them directly and call it that)?
by robocat | 2025-04-22 10:25:29+00:00
> sledgehammer approach

A hammerier solution would be to control the temperature seen by the thermostat (ignore the difficult RF protocol).

A heating element and a temperature reading could control the heat seen by the thermostat.

I'm pretty sure you wouldn't need any cooling (Peltier or whatever). Just a heater and ambient cooling! Set the thermostat to a high temperature, and run the heater to make the measured temperature hotter: when you don't want the heating to run.

That said, I think hacking the RF protocol is geekier and far awesomer.
by freeAgent | 2025-04-22 10:26:28+00:00
As far as lists of drives to avoid, Synology could certainly do that, but we also already have Backblaze’s reports on their own failure rates. Synology also uses multiple vendors to produce “Synology” branded drives, so as the article states this may also lead to confusion about which Synology branded drives are “good” vs. “bad” in the future, even with seemingly identical specs.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-22 10:26:50+00:00
> very simple, dense and highly optimised already

Simple and dense, sure. Highly optimized in a low level math and hardware sense but not in a higher level information theoretic sense when considering the model as a whole.

Consider that quantization and compression techniques can achieve on the order of 50% size reduction. That strongly suggests to me that current models aren't structured in a very efficient manner.
by Galanwe | 2025-04-22 10:28:17+00:00
In this day and age, storage is not as important as IO, so I hate it when I see benchmarks with compression ratios + CPU times. That's not helpful.

What I want to see is the total IO + CPU time across libraries for my specific IO and CPU constraints.

Sure, it makes benchmarks more involved to display, as scalars are not enough anymore, you need multiple curves, but that's meaningful at least.

To illustrate, if I have very fast IO, then I probably don't care of the compression ratio, it will be faster to download the raw payload and have 0 decompression cost.

On the other end of the spectrum, if I have very slow IO, I would gladly have a much slower decompression algorithm but higher compression ratio for a faster overall timing.

This is especially important because cloud storage for instance are rather cheap, but slow. Caches/CDNs are very fast, but storage is expensive. Etc
by lifthrasiir | 2025-04-22 10:28:41+00:00
That's the portability bit the presenter mentions, and is a very important concern in practice. But how about recompression? For example many PNG files are suboptimally compressed partly because PNG is an old format and also because many softwares have been too dumb to produce a well-optimized PNG. In that case we may benefit from a transparent recompression, which may be done either by using a better library like libdeflate or by internally using a separate format that can be quickly transformed from and back to PNG. In fact Dropbox did so for JPEG files [1]. When I'm saying "so much better" I was thinking about such opportunities that benefit end users.

[1] https://github.com/dropbox/lepton
by giltho | 2025-04-22 10:28:43+00:00
A common specification language is a very ongoing discussion, we just haven't managed to find an agreement yet.

Things like `#[no_panic]` make sense, but it also doesn't require a spec language at all, the compiler already has support for these kinds of annotation and anyone could catch it. Though I cannot think of a single verification use case where all I want to check is the absence of panic.
by ben_w | 2025-04-22 10:29:28+00:00
> I doubt every single AGI magically ends up aligned in a common bloc against humanity; all the alternatives to that are hopelessly opaque.

They don't need to be aligned with each other, or even anything but their own short-term goals.

As evolution is itself an optimiser, covid can be considered one such agent, and that was pretty bad all by itself — even though the covid genome is not what you'd call "high IQ", and even with humans coordinating to produce vaccines, and even compensating for how I'm still seeing people today who think those vaccines were worse than the disease, it caused a lot of damage and killed a lot of people.

> The worst case scenario that seems reasonably likely to me is probably AGI collectively not caring about us and wanting some natural resources that we happen to be living on top of.

"The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made of atoms which it can use for something else." — which is also true for covid, lions, and every parasite.
by rice7th | 2025-04-22 10:30:20+00:00
Tests do not account for all possible executions of the code, rather only a subset of it.

Rust is indeed a safe language, in terms of memory safety. Vulnerabilities are still very possible within a rust program, they just need to not rely on memory exploits, and the borrow checker won't catch them. That is why formal verification exists. If you have a really critical, high security application then you should ensure the maximum amount of safety and reliability.

Formal verification enables the developer to write a mathematical proof that the program behaves correctly in all situations, something that the borrow checker cannot do.
by jbjbjbjb | 2025-04-22 10:30:23+00:00
It is down to the judgement of the translator to choose what to preserve, I'm not suggesting they should carry everything over. Some things will be too difficult for the reader and not worth the effort.

However, there will be cases where the original text will have lines that shaped the language and literature it came from and it would be remiss not to let the reader feel that texture, even if it is a challenge to read.

It's difficult to pick examples but an influential line like 'all that glisters is not gold' could be translated to the equivalent of 'don't be fooled by appearances' but that would just kill the imagery and poetic quality. I would want the equivalent of 'glister', I'd want it to express the shine and glow, I'd want the word to be archaic and I'd want the rhythm of the line to be there.
by Jenqyang | 2025-04-22 10:30:35+00:00
I frequently chat with AI, which has resolved many of my questions and provided valuable insights. To preserve these conversations, I often save its responses to my knowledge base. However, manually saving multi-turn dialogues can be tedious.

To address this, I developed a browser extension that seamlessly exports entire conversations and saves them as clean, well-formatted content. This extension enables you to store AI conversations in your knowledge base, either locally or in Notion.

The extension supports 10 AI chatbots(ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Deepseek, Perplexity, Poe, Mistral, Copilot, Kimi), offering seamless export of Canvas, Artifacts, Diagrams, Web Search Citations, and more. It allows you to download conversations in multiple formats, including Markdown, HTML, JSON, and Plain Text, and features one-click saving to Notion for effortless integration.

- https://www.youraiscroll.com/ - https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/youraiscroll-ai-cha...

I'd love for you to try it out and share your thoughts!
by willvarfar | 2025-04-22 10:30:54+00:00
Reminds me of one of my most exhilerating old-timer stories. I once took 15 seconds off of the boot time of a smartphone - halving the startup time! - by replacing the MNG (think PNG but multi-frame animation; no surprise it never took off) startup animation with a custom encode-runs-of-pixel-offsets that nicely captured the way the logo swirled. Then encoded this as static data in a dll which the phone had a built-in system for compressing which worked well for this data, so doubly faster. This made me a complete legend for a while, although that phone model ended up never shipping.
by JadeNB | 2025-04-22 10:31:12+00:00
> If you don’t allow the empty set to be a set then you break the basic operations of set theory. For example, to show two sets are disjoint you compare their intersection with the empty set.

You certainly can do that, but it's not the only way. Even in this universe, I would expect to show that concrete sets A and B are disjoint by showing x ∈ A → x ∉ B, which makes perfect sense even without an empty set.

> In an alternative axiomatization (without the empty set) you’re going to need to create some special element which belongs to every set and then your definition of disjoint sets is that their intersection is equal to the trivial set containing only the special element. What a clumsy hack that would be!

Rather, in this alternate universe, intersection is partially defined. Again, even in this universe, we're used to accepting some operations being partial!
by eesmith | 2025-04-22 10:31:36+00:00
It was not obvious. You can both pay for a service and be the product, while I read your comment as dismissing the second possibility.

FWIW, from the 2022 Wired article:

> Insider Intelligence, a market research firm, estimates that Apple brings in $4 billion a year from ads. ... Investment bank Evercore ISI estimates Apple will have a $30 billion ad business by 2026. That’s about the size of iPad sales in 2021, or a bit under half the company’s services revenue.

The growth in ad revenue is large enough that Apple's latest 10-Q highlights it: "Services net sales increased during the first quarter of 2025 compared to the same quarter in 2024 due primarily to higher net sales from advertising, the App Store and cloud services."

At what point will you consider Apple to be an advertising company? Not until ads are 50% of revenue?
by jorvi | 2025-04-22 10:31:52+00:00
Apparently no one remembers that a while back Synology already "locked" a whole bunch of people their drives, by ripping out BTRFS support on their NAS budget models. And they pushed this update without warning ahead. Your disks just suddenly up and stopped mounting.

Their answer to your drives no longer mounting is "connect them to a PC, pull the files and reformat". Where you are supposed to intermediate 20TB of data is left up to the customer to deal with.

Fuck Synology.
by DamonHD | 2025-04-22 10:34:11+00:00
This is a whole research topic, my PhD in fact!

FWIW I run my heat pump intermittently and with locally-smart TRVs that get to call for heat centrally, and a weather compensation only flow temperature curve, and it WORKSFORME!

https://www.earth.org.uk/heat-pump-16WW-control.html
by benterix | 2025-04-22 10:34:45+00:00
OK, I see one glaring problem with this approach (having used both Claude 3.7 and o3). When they talk about 50% reliability, there is a hidden cost: you cannot know before hand whether the response (or a series of it) is leading you to the actual, optimal or good enough solution, or towards a blind alley (where the solution doesn't work at all, works terribly, or, worst at all, works only for the cases tested). This is more or less clear after you check the solution, but not before.

So, because most engineering tasks I'm dealing with are quite complex and would require multiple prompts, there is always the cost of taking into account the fact that it will go bollocks at some point. Frankly, most of them do at some point. It's not evident for simple tasks, but for more complex they simply start inserting their BS in spite of often excellent start. But you are already "80% done". What do you do? Start from scratch with a different approach? Everybody has their own strategies (starting a new thread with the contents generated so far etc) but there's always a human cost associated.
by leoedin | 2025-04-22 10:34:52+00:00
The hidden factor here is that condensing boilers and heat pumps have non-linear efficiency vs flow temperature curves. Heat pumps in particular show high increase in coefficient of performance (CoP) as flow temperature drops.

The other variable is how well controlled your heating is. A lower flow temperature means less overshoot of the target set point - and as losses scale linearly with temperature delta, that can mean higher energy losses (depending on the characteristics of the controller of course).

Whether or not you care about losses in unheated spaces depends on your system topology. Personally, all my heating pipes are within the thermal envelope of my house, so flow temperature has no bearing on those losses at all.

If you had a resistive electric boiler, flow temperature would have absolutely no effect on efficiency. You'd be completely right, that running heating only when you needed it would be more energy efficient.
by DemocracyFTW2 | 2025-04-22 10:37:39+00:00
> The US Commerce Department has announced plans to impose tariffs of up to 3,521% on imports of solar panels from four South East Asian countries. [...] Products made in Malaysia by Chinese manufacturer Jinko Solar faced some of the lowest duties of just over 41%. Another China-based firm, Trina Solar, faces tariffs of 375% for the products it makes in Thailand.

They do mean to write 3 point 5 thousand per cent, no typo
by XorNot | 2025-04-22 10:39:19+00:00
While true, I'd argue that's worse for current progress: the overall trend has been to throw mammoth amounts of electricity at the problem via compute. In so much as something like DeepSeek proves there's gains to be made, the current growth in resource usage would speak against declaring it proves improvement soon.

Like plug that issue into known hardware limitations due to physical limits (i.e. we're already up against the wall re: feature sizes) and I'm even more skeptical.

If we were looking at a buy down in training resources which was accelerating, then I'd be a lot more interested.