MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by johnea | 2025-04-04 20:47:28+00:00
That's why the OP is commenting that replacing a heater, with a heater _and_ an a/c, is a big part of why the bill will double.

heating + cooling > heating alone

That said, its also important to point out, that the author is in Berkeley, and electricity costs in California are among the highest in the US.

Three major utilities service pretty much the whole state (1/8th of the US population). Regulating them has been a major failure of the California democratic party controlled state governance. The CPUC is a major rant rabbit hole, industry capture is rampant.

Disclaimer: I say this being registered "no party" and considering myself left of most people.

Gavin's administration in particular has been extremely industry friendly, with a steady reduction in citizen/consumer protection in the face of ever increasing utility profits.

Ever since first seeing this article yesterday, I felt it was clickbait. This outcome was 100% known in advance. It's not new news in California that electric heating is more expensive than gas heating.

The conversion to heat pump was a great first step (and should also include increased insulation). The next step is battery and solar, in that order. Part of the affordability erosion in CA is the removal of net-metering credit for solar generation.

A battery that charges _from_the_utility_ off-peak, and is available to consume during the day, pays for itself faster than solar now! But adding solar in addition to the battery, completes an investment that pays for itself in about 1/2 to 1/3 of it's service lifetime.

I know several modest sized homes that generate all of their own electricity consumption, including charging EVs. In comparison, I don't know anyone with their own on-site natural gas production.

Electrification is the straightest path to energy independence, and from utility price gouging.

Rejection of electrification by the US right is one of it's biggest self-inflicted wounds (except for those that own petroleum companies).
by joshdavham | 2025-04-04 20:47:31+00:00
I haven't read that book, but I can personally attest to Josh Starmer's StatQuest Youtube channel[1] being awesome! I used his lessons as a supplement to my studies when I was studying statistics in uni.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtYLUTtgS3k1Fg4y5tAhLbw
by ceejayoz | 2025-04-04 20:47:51+00:00
Again, as an unpaid intern. (And their visa application was in 2022. Two related, but separate things.)

The judicial process will now determine if that was a willful oversight on the permanent residency application, and if it would have had material impact on the application.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/doj-says-mahmoud-khalil...

> However, the government will have to prove to the immigration judge that Khalil willfully failed to disclose that information, and whether that disclosure would have impacted his eligibility for permanent residency.

It may even be that the administration is lying. They do that.
by enaaem | 2025-04-04 20:48:03+00:00
I get the idea that small fractions of bigger pies can be more than a big fraction of a small pie. And I can assure you that Scandinavians are well aware of tax revenue optimisation.

I will even say that it is very likely that they are already near the optimum for their country. The reason is simply that if every time you increase taxes and notice revenue goes down, you will naturally reverse it. Society moves through incremental changes.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-04-04 20:48:43+00:00
There exists a shade of purple that is indistinguishable from violet because it triggers the cones of the eyes at the same level that violet does.

You can buy paint called "violet". This isn't the spectral violet, it's a shade of purple that looks very similar to spectral violet.

Tetrochromats can distinguish between that purple shade and real violet. But if you mixed the paint using 4 tints rather than 3 you could fool them too.
by jeofken | 2025-04-04 20:50:21+00:00
PMS as in Pantone Matching System or Premenstrual Syndrome?

AirBNB can be equally frustrating for users as well. Recently ended up at night in a new city in northern Japan where the host told me the listing was at a different address, where I found nothing, and got only radio silence from the host. Every hotel room in town was occupied that night. Airbnb support, seemingly in far away India, told me to try contacting the host, and that was that.

Also recently stayed at a place with a dog that shat inside due to the owner not taking them out; due to politeness no one had complained in the reviews.

Also Airbnb lists one price but when booking it always ends up being way more with more fees added.

I’m using hotels.com with a filter for “has kitchen” these days, which was the only reason I used Airbnb in the first place
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-04-04 20:50:30+00:00
Docker, k8s, Terraform etc are nice. I make extensive use of them too. But in my opinion they can't be used for everything, because mutable infrastructure is a reality of the world that must be accounted for at some point. For example, at my employer we have on-prem k3s clusters running on bare metal servers. Chef is a perfect tool to manage those, because they are by their nature not something we can treat as stateless, immutable configurations.

It seems to me that this is kind of like abstraction levels in programming. If you can use a high level language with lots of powerful tools, you do. But some people have to live in the world of C or even assembly, because (as James Mickens said) you can't just place a Lisp book on top of an x86 chip and hope it learns about lambda calculus by osmosis. I view IaC tools in the same way: if you can use Terraform or Docker, great! But someone has to use lower level tools to provide the environment in which those things exist. And that's why people shouldn't look at Chef (or other similar tools) as outdated, any more than assembly is outdated just because Lisp exists. They still very much have a strong use case that won't ever go away.
by bitbasher | 2025-04-04 20:50:37+00:00
I really like Sourcehut, but Drew's (fairly) constant social/political posts and opinions drive me away from ever using Sourcehut. I feel like he's one or two years away from rage quitting everything and the service going defunct.

Yes, Mark Z is incredibly wealthy and has a massive net-worth. I'm not going to cry about it and compare myself to it.
by prewett | 2025-04-04 20:51:24+00:00
I sort of knew the story, but the way Gates presents it in his article makes it pretty blunt. There is no contrition; rather it is a story of glorious success, a story of hard work to be proud of, all started by the lie. In fact, the lie is presented as the nucleating event, as positive thing that spurred them to turn the lie into truth.

To me it felt consonant with the ethics of Harvard, and more saliently, the fact that their founding event was a lie seems consonant with the trajectory of the company. The summary of the book makes it sound like the real title is "A Glorious Life", and I would expect no contrition about DR DOS, Netscape, and other Microsoft ruthlessness under Gates.

(To be fair, I loathe Microsoft and their products, which help me accomplish my goals the way a spoon helps me cut a steak, and I have never seen Gates as virtuous. So I am hardly unbiased.)
by sherdil2022 | 2025-04-04 20:51:29+00:00
I wonder what these ‘leaders’ tell their family and children - to stand up to bullies or to succumb to them. All those who paid to the inauguration ‘ceremony’ and just capitulating. I always wondered how and why dictators and Nazism took hold. I have the answer now. All the Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerbergs in the world allowed it to happen by I wonder what these ‘leaders’ tell their family and children - to stand up to bullies or to succumb to them. All those who paid to the inauguration ‘ceremony’ and just capitulating. I always wondered how and why dictators and Nazism took hold. I have the answer now. All the Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerbergs in the world allowed it to happen by I wonder what these ‘leaders’ tell their family and children - to stand up to bullies or to succumb to them. All those who paid to the inauguration ‘ceremony’ and just capitulating. I always wondered how and why dictators and Nazism took hold. I have the answer now. All the Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerbergs in the world allowed it to happen by consolidating power and prioritizing profit over humanity. They’ve created a world where influence is bought, and the voices of the people are drowned out by the loudest wallets. These tech giants and billionaires have shaped a society where the strong get stronger, the vulnerable get weaker, and moral integrity is sacrificed for personal gain. Their silence, or worse, their complicity, fuels the rise of those who prey on fear and division. So, yes, the seeds of authoritarianism were sown by those who could’ve made a stand but chose to benefit from the chaos instead.
by hoten | 2025-04-04 20:51:30+00:00
Another potential option is to allow for multiple "active" states (everything in view). If the content is long enough, it can kinda work out. As you transition from one section to the next, both headers would be "active". For short content it would highlight too much though.

snake-y example: https://zquestclassic.com/releases/2.55.0/
by Edman274 | 2025-04-04 20:51:52+00:00
If the argument is that it's not a big deal because it doesn't even work, then why collectively are we even bothering? Either it works and is something for reactionaries to fear and is effective social pressure, or it's a bunch of ineffective sound and fury that gives cover to your right wing aunt to tell stories about how "someone she knows" got fired for telling a joke. If it works, then let's own it completely, with all its flaws. If it doesn't work, then why bother at all? If it doesn't even work, then why try to defend the practice? Do we want it to work? Do we want it to be an effective form of social control?
by gavinray | 2025-04-04 20:51:52+00:00
My Ayn Rand "unpopular opinion" is that Atlas Shrugged is a wordier, less interesting The Fountainhead.

Wouldn't suggest anyone read Atlas Shrugged, saying this as someone who also read Peikoff's "Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand"

Just read The Fountainhead and imagine that with trains and the railroad.

"Anthem" is a short read and also pretty solid.
by havblue | 2025-04-04 20:52:25+00:00
Well. Yeah, if they made great decisions like Capcom did, the adventure genre may have been more prominent to this day. I mean, Capcom even developed the Ace Attorney games which are themselves visual novels/adventure games.

If you look back at my post though I acknowledged that they would have attempted to modernize had the merger not occurred. And I never said they were doomed, I said they were in deep trouble regardless. So I'm not sure what people are arguing with me about here other than semantics.
by nabla9 | 2025-04-04 20:52:25+00:00
(For those who only read titles: 60% is not the risk for recession of US Economy)

Recession for the US economy is virtually certain if these tariffs stay.

Trump folds easily when there is push back that makes him look bad. This makes me think that there is double digit percent change that Trump cancels or lowers tariffs significantly before they come into effect (and declares he won for no reason).

---

JPMorgan's analysts found that this week's announcement, on the heels of earlier tariff increases, raises the US average tax rate "by roughly 22%-pts to an estimated 24%," equivalent to roughly 2.4% of the total value of all goods and services produced within the country, or GDP.

"A hike of this size would be on par with the largest tax hike since WWII," the JPMorgan research note reads. Its effects could be magnified "through retaliation, a slide in US business sentiment, and supply chain disruptions."
by insane_dreamer | 2025-04-04 20:53:05+00:00
Nah, as a parent of a high achieving daughter who had higher GPA/ACT scores than this teen, I can tell you the issue is that a high percentage of students who apply to places like Stanford and MIT also have perfect scores. A 4.0 GPA 34 ACT doesn't mean much anymore. My daughter was waitlisted or rejected by every Ivy+ engineering dept she applied to. (Granted she might have gotten in had she applied for general admission; applying directly to Engineering is doubly-hard. She ultimately accepted a full scholarship at a good "second tier" engineering school and graduated debt free, which is maybe better.) There's just so much competition these days, especially from foreign students who have spent most of their lives perfecting test taking and spend considerable money on tutoring for their applications/essays as well.
by Telemakhos | 2025-04-04 20:53:59+00:00
So, let me see what I think I understand here:

1. AI models are good at Cæsar-cypher transposition, because it occurs often enough in training models for certain values of the cypher offset. Outside those values, AI doesn't handle the transformations well.

2. Somehow AI models perform this cypher also within high ranges of Unicode, because the characters are encoded as three tokens each, of which the last one encodes the same difference as between alphabetic letters, and so the first two tokens get discarded as irrelevant, meaning that by sheer chance the alphabet maps perfectly via Cæsar-cypher (with a two-token offset) to a specific range of Unicode characters reserved for Byzantine music notation.

3. This is easy to understand for one AI model, because its explicable by chance that the offset between the alphabet and Byzantine music notation should coincide perfectly with two less-significant tokens. It's harder to understand why this works in more than one AI model, though.
by glenstein | 2025-04-04 20:54:08+00:00
We must have fundamentally different ideas of what it means for something to be a good explanation. It takes more than gesturing toward the hypothetical possibility of acting due to unacknowledged motives for it to count as a best, or even good, explanation.

I used to follow a lot of RSS feeds and the political blogosphere when that was a thing. And one of the best was Brendan Nyhan, and he had a routine segment criticizing op-ed sections for fabricating internal monologues of political actors, making assumptions about internal states of mind that could never be disproved and proceeding to analysis that depended upon such unfalsifiable speculation.

I think it was a good principle against which to judge media accountability, and I would generalize by saying that such speculation involves relaxing the norms that usually apply to critical thinking writ large. At the level of genre, this category of speculating I would say does not enjoy default legitimacy due to its departure from normal critical thinking principles relating to substantiation and a fundamental lack of interest in responding to arguments on their merits.
by m11a | 2025-04-04 20:55:12+00:00
> that's not what _humanity_ is about

I've not spent too long thinking on the following, so I'm prepared for someone to say I'm totally wrong, but:

I feel like the services economy can be broadly broken down into: pleasure, progress and chores. Pleasure being poetry/literature, movies, hospitality, etc; progress being the examples you gave like science/engineering, mathematics; and chore being things humans need to coordinate or satisfy an obligation (accountants, lawyers, salesmen).

In this case, if we assume AI can deal with things not in the grey zone, then it can deal with 'progress' and many 'chores', which are massive chunks of human output. There's not much grey zone to them. (Well, there is, but there are many correct solutions; equivalent pieces of code that are acceptable, multiple versions of a tax return, each claiming different deductions, that would fly by the IRS, etc)
by bluGill | 2025-04-04 20:55:50+00:00
The real effect of congestion charges when there isn't good other options is whoever enacts them is voted out of office and anything they might have done to give people other options is scrapped as well. NYC can get away with them in the dense parts because there are enough options that the people who vote there mostly use transit and so they don't pay the price anyway and thus don't care.
by sershe | 2025-04-04 20:56:55+00:00
The thing missed in all these arguments is a large variety in life expectancy between states, and demographic controls. The states all have more or less the same problems and non problems with their healthcare system, so it cannot really explain that. And I'm pretty sure levels of car dependence won't explain a large part of it either since most states are largely car dependent.

Iirc (phone post) japanese Americans have higher life expectancy than Japanese, or at least in the ballpark.

Maybe some cultures/lifestyles, like whatever they are doing in the South, just suck. OTOH, maybe we should allow people to make choices. I'm pretty sure I'd live longer if I did interval sprints instead of reading HN, but that's a tradeoff I am willing to make.
by janalsncm | 2025-04-04 20:57:30+00:00
The US has also exercised eminent domain historically. We can do it. American cities weren’t all government property before Uncle Sam put highways through many of them. It might be wise to revisit this for other improvements.

When the Chinese government exercises eminent domain, my understanding is that many people want their homes to be targeted because of the (comparatively) lucrative payouts. Cash neutralizes concerns 1, 2, and 3.

Now that people in California have held their homes long enough, buying them out is a lot more expensive. There are better ways to make the numbers work, though.
by btilly | 2025-04-04 20:57:50+00:00
One of the major reasons why there are so many low effort gotchas is that her message is so emotionally uncomfortable for many. Facing what is legitimate in her criticisms is hard. And so people only consider her views long enough to come up with easily rejected caricatures. The arguments that they then use to reject those caricatures show how they did not actually process her point of view.

But this is not just a problem that faces non-Objectivists. For example consider how Ayn Rand rejected the scientific evidence for smoking causing harm. She never had a logical argument. What she had was such an overwhelming emotional commitment to smoking being good that she would latch on to any plausible sounding argument against smoking being bad.

For a more current example, look at Alex Epstein's arguments on global warming. It quickly becomes apparent that he has such a strong emotional alignment with the great good caused by fossil fuels that he easily accepts any argument, no matter how flawed, that they might also cause harm. Compounding the trouble, global warming presents the exact kind of tragedy of the commons that undermines the economic theories by which Objectivism should lead to an economic utopia. This fact adds to the emotional dynamics for ignoring evidence that reality doesn't actually work in the ways that Ayn Rand claimed.
by settrans | 2025-04-04 20:57:56+00:00
That depends on your vantage point.

If you accept the mainstream Palestinian viewpoint, i.e. the one that endorses Hamas and the Simchat Torah massacre, there is no such thing as too many, because every Palestinian death furthers the jihadist cause of demonizing Israel.

If you accept the mainstream Israeli viewpoint, all of these deaths were unnecessary because they directly resulted from an unprovoked onslaught against innocent civilians, and all of the casualties could have been avoided but for the Gazan misadventure of October 7th.

I'm not sure which camp GP subscribes to, however.
by bluGill | 2025-04-04 20:58:30+00:00
You have the cause backward. Induced demand is the observation that because people cannot get someplace they already want to go they are going something else instead.

The whole point of a city is all the things you can do. If you don't want to go someplace then what are you doing in a city - there are plenty of nice cheap places to live in very rural areas where you can sit in your house going nowhere. Thus cities need to build infrastructure to such that there is no induced demand and the people there can do what they want.

Note that I didn't specify what they build. Most cities should be building metro systems not roads.
by AdmiralAsshat | 2025-04-04 20:58:32+00:00
Not sure I understand your comment. Tekken was a fighting game, not a beat-em-up? Unless we're counting Tekken Force Mode from Tekken 3.

Fighting games made the 2D->3D jump just fine, although they kinda exist in parallel now, since some developers really like flexing their sprite chops in 2D fighters.
by deanCommie | 2025-04-04 20:58:36+00:00
Good points, but the other part of this is that back in "our time" (we may not be the same age - I was in University 1999-2005, but regardless) there was...basically no other choice.

If you wanted to work in CS, you had to get a degree. Then you'd get a shitty entry level job. Then eventually after a couple of years you'd be an "intermediate" engineer, have a good enough salary to live on your own (that's right - up until this point, you probably still needed to have roommates, if you are in a major city), take vacations, start putting in for retirement, etc.

Maybe if you were in Silicon Valley and already saw the dot com boom you saw another path. But most of the world didn't think like that.

Over the last several years you instead saw people go into CS thinking their first job will be 150k/year from a big tech, they'll be a senior within 3 years, and start working on their FIRE plan. And meanwhile they're surrounded by friends and peers who are either influencers, content creators, or have startup exit stories from the ZIRP era.

You and I remember endless work and drudgery. Those in our shoes today instead feel constant anxiety like they're already behind, they're not good enough, like maybe they missed their chance in the gold rush, and the only solution is to hurry up and dig faster.

I feel like that's another reason for the increasing # of shortcuts people are taking with their education.
by MrMcCall | 2025-04-04 20:58:40+00:00
> It's akin to looking at Stack Overflow and copying the first result, or going through a tutorial that tells you what to write without ever explaining it.

But if you're not digesting the why of the technique vis a vis the how of what is being done, then not only are you gaining nothing but a check mark in a todo list item's box, but you're quite likely introducing bugs into your code.

I used SO yesterday (from a general DDG search) to help me learn how to process JSON with python. I built up my test script from imports to processing a string to processing a file to dump'ing it to processing specific elements to iterating through it a couple of different ways.

Along the way, I made some mistakes, which were very helpful in leveling-up my python skills. At the end, not only did my script work, but I had gained a level of skill at my craft for a very specific use-case.

There are no shortcuts to up-leveling oneself, my friend, not in any endeavor, but especially not in programming, which may well be the most difficult job on the planet, given its ubiquity and overall lack of quality.
by low_tech_punk | 2025-04-04 20:58:55+00:00
And interesting comparison between Web search vs Gen AI.

Web search seems divergent: the same keyword leads to many different kinds of results.

Gen AI seems convergent: different keywords that share the same semantics lead to the same results.

Arguably, convergence is a feature, not a bug. But on the macroscopic level, it is a self reinforcing loop and may lead to content degeneracy. I guess we always need the extraordinary human artists to give AI the fresh ideas. The question is the non-extraordinary artists might no longer have an easy path to become extraordinary. Same trap is happening to junior developers right now.