MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hnaccount_rng | 2025-05-04 06:17:32+00:00
Installation costs dominate largely due to one-off things (getting the contractor/customer, roof access, adapting to bespoke roof layout, etc) which are disproportionately larger for smaller installation sizes. However for new construction those things are essentially free. So yes, I’d absolutely expect that solar will be added during larger rebuilds. But that is not an effective way of “deploying solar”
by zelphirkalt | 2025-05-04 06:17:55+00:00
Well, not by talking about AbstractFactoryProxy, that much is for sure. Rather by talking about which parts of the system are modular and what kind of flexibility the system allows for, what capabilities it has. Nowhere in that picture does a low level implementation detail like an AbstractBlaBlubFooBar enter the the conversation.

There is more to computer programming than the OOP clutter.
by WalterBright | 2025-05-04 06:18:04+00:00
The US was not settled by wealthy people, or even middle class people. The poor people came by the scores of millions. Many came as indentured servants. The Irish came here because of the potato famine. And so on.

If you like, name a wealthy American who came from royalty. I can't think of any.

Fun fact: the Titanic was not built to transport rich people to the US. Quite the contrary, the bulk of it was for poor people immigrating to the US. The first class section was for status and marketing. The money came from the rest of the human cargo.
by petesergeant | 2025-05-04 06:18:06+00:00
> A customer who wants to track the status of their order will tell you a story about how

I build NPCs for an online game. A non trivial percentage of people are more than happy to tell these stories to anything that will listen, including an LLM. Some people will insist on a human, but an LLM that can handle small talk is going to satisfy more people than you might think.
by lofaszvanitt | 2025-05-04 06:20:30+00:00
"We agree with the DOJ. A hollow win that leaves Google’s monopoly intact is not beneficial to either US consumers or businesses, and Google’s counter-proposals will not fix the underlying problem: that Google held and has abused its monopoly in search.

However, we’re concerned that if the DOJ goes too far, particularly by forcing a sale of Chrome and banning search deals with smaller browser vendors like Mozilla, it will do lasting harm to the web platform."

And then they go on to quote totally inept and zero people (like the simple idiots who created react) doing virtual fellatio saying the web will be dead without Google owning Chrome :DDDD. Trying to reassure readers this is the way to go.

Lololol... domain name checks out: https://open-web-advocacy.org/

LASTING HARM! What lasting harm? That utterly useless features will finally not be implemented in Chrome. Maybe we finally get a browser that makes some improvements to... how we experience the web. Just look back at early Firefox and the innovations it introduced (and then removed) and then compare it to today's Google-fed Firefox and look in awe at the desert that surrounds today's browsers.

Finally, Firefox would cease to exist. Since they got money from Chrome, they did NOTHING. The same goes for the Chromium forks. Same shit, repackaged. Time for them to go.

I'm sure the DOJ ruling will be a nothing burger, so nothing will really change, but these articles and all the stupid people who can't see today's realities are just ridiculous.
by petre | 2025-05-04 06:20:50+00:00
They don't want to be subject to app store approval policies, shitty TOS, nor pay Google or Apple a 30% cut. Installing the app is easy, visit the web site, clck the install banner, add to home screen and you're good to go. On the developer side you get to deploy as iften as needed.

Yes, the service worker thing is annoying but you possibly don't need it if you have a server backend. It's basically a glirified website with a home screen icon. Most of the native vehicle, asset or fitness tracking apps need a backend anyways and they fail miserably when disconnected from the network.
by Pamar | 2025-05-04 06:22:46+00:00
Airlines tend to work like this: at the start of the "season" analyst define the margin for each seatbof each departure. Let's say that for Sunday flight from Venice to Hamburg, Economy, your target is 112€. (For simplicity I will discuss only a direct flight, but the same idea applies to any leg of any Itinerary).

Yield manager for that area/period has now the task to make sure he gets 112 or more on each ticket. And take in account that an unsold seat gets 0, so lowers the averge margin (which is what the yield is calculated upon).

This will soon make you realize that any chance to sell again a newly vacated seat is a boon.

So in the case of the OP the company can either assume that it was a honest mistake and he will somehow miracously get there in time to get on the second flight (3% chance?) or assume that he decided he does not care anymore, he had a serious accident, got fired, won the lottery, whatever (97%) and promptly put the seat back on sale.

The problem with a-b-c costing less than a-b is less obvious, maybe, but it has similar causes: for the airline it is more efficient to sell you the itinerary with a stopover so their pricing reflects that.

There have even been attempts to take passengers to court for getting off at the intermediate stop (they were dismissed) so it's definitely not just because the airlines are throwing a fit if you decide to change your plans.

Probably the a-b leg and the b-c legs sold alone are not very popular so they want more money to maximize the yield, while everyone wants to go a-c and return.
by brazzy | 2025-05-04 06:23:33+00:00
> Democracy, then, will be stable so long as the expectation of costs and the uncertainty of the future give the losers sufficient incentive to accept that they have lost.

Brilliant, and provides a foundation for an idea that I've seen elsewhere: that the true test of a new democracy is not the first democratic elections, but the first transition of power, i.e. the first subsequent election where the incumbent loses.
by pjmlp | 2025-05-04 06:23:38+00:00
And since I listed all the books I used routinely I didn't know that.

Parent,

> I should know the answer to this, but was using the BIOS the only way to interact with hardware like disks, mice, and keyboard?

First link from your URL

> READ CHARACTER FROM STANDARD INPUT, WITH ECHO

Also drivers loaded via config.sys would extend MS-DOS, and be exposed via additional interrupts, e.g 0x33h for mices.

Now is interrupt 0x33h populated by MS-DOS, after loading a mouse driver configured in config.sys, still MS-DOS API or not?
by wenc | 2025-05-04 06:24:12+00:00
I don't quite agree.

SQL queries are one area where correctness matters a lot, because downstream applications rely on them to be correct. If you get a query wrong, especially in an ETL process, you can generate a lots of garbage data for a very long time (I'm speaking from lived experience). It might take a long time to correct (via backfill) and sometimes the original data might no longer be available.

I use LLMs to generate ideas for writing complex SQL, but I always need to understand the query 100% first before I deploy. Mistakes are costly, and sometimes irreversible. I need to trust but verify, which requires deep SQL knowledge.

To write correct SQL, you not only have to know the syntax, but also the schema (easily provided to an LLM) and the expected data values (you can provide a sampling to an LLM which helps, but domain knowledge helps even more). There are lots of surprising things in data that only reveal themselves via visual inspection. (though I think with MCO, an LLM will one day be able to inspect the data itself by sampling the database)
by disambiguation | 2025-05-04 06:24:29+00:00
There's the tool and then there's how you use it. We're all still learning how to live with rapidly changing tech, but it sounds like your kid tried to pass off someone (something) else's work as their own. Cold and impersonal is a problem too, but this situation touches on ethical concepts like fraud and deception by omission - not to make a big deal out of a kid's fan letter :) but seems like an opportunity to teach a moral lesson too.
by arrosenberg | 2025-05-04 06:26:15+00:00
If you have an alternative hypothesis, I’m all ears. The lack of good paying jobs and the knock on effects of expanding wealth disparity seems to be underlying most of the issues driving radicalism, left and right, up and down.

In America, at least, workers think tomorrow will be worse than today and they are resorting to populism to try and reverse the trend.
by delusional | 2025-05-04 06:26:37+00:00
This doesn't seem true to me at all. Humans are not rational drones that analyze the business and coldly determines the required number of people. I would be surprised if CEOs didn't keep people around because it felt good to be a boss.

Facebook might be able to operate with half the headcount, but them Zuckerberg wouldn't be the boss of as many people, and I think he likes being the boss.
by Glyptodon | 2025-05-04 06:27:16+00:00
If someone gave me replacement value for my stuff I would not have an issue with this. But realistically nobody is going to give $50k+ to replace all your furniture, electronics, dishes, tools, and so forth. And it only really adds up if you either (a) are wealthy enough that it's not a meaningful cost, or (b) barely have anything in the way of furniture and tools. It's also complicated by things like decently made shelves that aren't wildly expensive being much harder to find than 20 years ago. Like if I could get equivalent shelves adjusted for inflation donating and replacing them would be fine. But I literally can't - I can only find cheap crap or rather expensive stuff that's moderately nicer than my old stuff.
by masklinn | 2025-05-04 06:29:00+00:00
That’s what lots of sites used to do in the late 90s and early aughts in order to have fixed elements.

It was really shit. Browser navigation cues disappear, minor errors will fuck up the entire thing by navigating fixed element frames instead of contents, design flexibility disappears (even as consistent styling requires more efforts), frames don’t content-size so will clip and show scroll bars all over, debugging is absolute ass, …

And it increases resource use.
by wodenokoto | 2025-05-04 06:29:18+00:00
Why do you use haver-sine over geodesic or reprojection?

I’ve been doing the reprojection thing, projecting coordinates to a “local” CRS, for previous projects mainly because that’s what geopandas recommend and is built around, but I am reaching a stage where I’d like to calculate distance for objects all over the globe, and I’m genuinely interested to learn what’s a good choice here.
by light_triad | 2025-05-04 06:30:25+00:00
Interesting that some people here are advocating for fewer investments and board seats when angel investing. It's rather the opposite: you need more investments and less time spent on companies.

Angle investors are vital to the startup community as they take a lot of risk and are able to fund ideas that sound too crazy to get regular funding. In this case though given a hit rate of let's say 1% for argument's sake, 54 investments in 15 years is too low. You need hundred of investments to make the math work. Also doing it for fun and to learn is laudable but in the end hitting an Uber or an Airbnb is all that matters. It sounds like the job became full time consulting which is great if you're wealthy and want to give back to the community but can become unsustainable otherwise.
by Findecanor | 2025-05-04 06:31:45+00:00
Bluetooth mice use the HID protocol borrowed from USB, except with Bluetooth as carrier. But HID had not been designed for the possibility that packets could get lost: it sends movements as a relative vector since the previous packet.

I don't know how Logi Bolt works, but Logitech has claimed that it should work better than BLE when the 2.4 GHz band is congested. Also that it would have better security than BLE.
by Pamar | 2025-05-04 06:32:09+00:00
See above: let's say that on Frankfurt-Hannover and back you get on average 52 passengers a day, and Hannover-London is more or less the same, while people flying Frankfurt-Heathrow are so numerous that direct flights are always full and therefore you need to offer FRA-HEA with a stopover to satisfy the extra request.

If you are sure that 80% of your passengers will go to Hannover only to then fly to London (and back) your prices will reflect that... and Frankfurt-Hannover cannot be lowered too much because you still has to try to reach your quota for the flight per se.
by simianwords | 2025-05-04 06:33:25+00:00
Am I the only one who prefers a more serious approach to prefix caching? It is a powerful tool and having an endpoint dedicated to it and being able to control TTL's using parameters seems like the best approach.

On the other hand the first two approaches from OpenAI and Anthropic are frankly bad. Automatically detecting what should be prefix cached? Yuck! And I can't even set my own TTL's in Anthropic API (feel free to correct me - a quick search revealed this).

Serious features require serious approaches.
by elric | 2025-05-04 06:33:56+00:00
I have no idea what sort of sway a US Attorney has over Wikipedia, beyond what's outlined in this article. But reading this, I start to worry about the vast array of open source projects with US-based charitable foundations. The same sort of BS reasoning can probably be used to pressure the FreeBSD Foundation, or many Linux distros. After all, plenty of "foreign actors" use those, and I'm sure many of them do so in a way the current US administration sees as evil...
by fnordpiglet | 2025-05-04 06:34:36+00:00
HTTP was never an extraordinarily different protocol, there was really nothing to it from a technical perspective. What was important was it wrapped up a lot of the concepts from the various hypertext and linking protocols that existed into a standard that was widely supported. The standard and the compatibility across servers and clients made it important. This is generally true for protocols across the board. In fact very few standards protocols are particularly revolutionary from a technical perspective. That’s in many ways very much not the point.
by wenc | 2025-05-04 06:34:54+00:00
I don't know if it's ever been a core skill. You can ask any dev. Many tell me SQL is not something they use every day, so even if they learned it, they usually forget it in no time.

SQL is burned into my muscle memory because I work on ML models with large datasets. It took me a lot of trial and error to get decent at SQL. I imagine most devs just don't have the reps because their work rarely exposes them to SQL.
by enjo | 2025-05-04 06:35:34+00:00
Maybe. But I often think about my grandparents. Both lived to be 96. Neither had significant health issues until the day they died.

My grandmother was extremely active throughout her life. She worked out. She was active at church. She volunteered throughout her 70's and 80's. She was always happy to go out to dinner with anyone that wanted.

Most of my memories of my grandfather (her husband) where him sitting on a recliner watching TV. He rarely left the house.

Their quality of life in the last 15 years of their lives was so different. Grandma died on her feet. She had a heart attack in the middle of the night and that was it. The day before she had been out with friends and had dinner with the family. My grandfather just sort of wasted away. He was weak, frail, and kind of miserable.

All I'm saying is there sure seemed to be a lot more than dodging all of those diseases and issues with those two. My grandmother invested in herself. She worked really hard to maintain that quality of life.

She's my role model as I age.
by bestham | 2025-05-04 06:37:57+00:00
Instead of talking about the fundamentals like Fourier transforms, Shannon/Nyquist and wave propagation i usually refer to human speech: how increasing the rate of speech (signalling rate) comes with 1) substantial reduction in transmitting distance as the environment affects signal quality and 2) places a higher burden on error correction (interpretation of language) that is independent of the actual ability for the transmitter to create the faster speech.
by decimalenough | 2025-05-04 06:39:29+00:00
Donald Trump is, indeed, personally signing the executive orders instructing the US government to do a lot of questionable things. Obama, by contrast, did not sign an executive order directing the FAA to hire unqualified air traffic controllers.

Of course, bureaucrats do stupid shit when they are attempting to please their masters, and this is a prime example. But that does not absolve them of their responsibility in dreaming it up and executing it.
by Glyptodon | 2025-05-04 06:39:47+00:00
It's hard to say w/o knowing what, but even getting a couple reasonably priced and finished Amish pieces for something could easily add up to half that. But if you're talking something like a large and well made leather sofa-recliner-sectional type thing it's plausible that it could add up to that much for one piece depending on size, construction, and leather.
by freehorse | 2025-05-04 06:40:27+00:00
I don't know why USB dongles are popular for manufacturers (I assume to make their product more plug-and-play friendly), but I don't think they are a better solution than bluetooth. For example, it is common that if another USB device is plugged close to a USB dongle, it can cause interference to it, which results to unstable connection and eg makes a mouse "jump", keystrokes not register etc. Finding the right place for a USB dongle can be a pain. USB dongles with proprietary RF protocols are usually a terrible solution imo. I have never had any similar kind of connectivity issues with a bluetooth mouse or keyboard.
by throwaway743 | 2025-05-04 06:41:08+00:00
I just went through that exact situation.

5-6 years ago my buddy and I got violently ill on a trip to Japan. Both agreed it's the sickest either of us have ever been, and we both lost 15-20lbs each. Shortly after our illnesses went away we both developed digestion issues. Went through stool samples and colonoscopies. He got diagnosed with uc and I got diagnosed with post-infectious ibs-d. Was told all tests were fine, but life since was hell. That is up until 2 months ago when I went to the ER with an infection.

Was given 2 weeks of doxycycline and voila, I'm no longer scared to fart, not running to the bathroom after eating anything, not going 7 times a day, and having solid stools. Might be tmi but whatever this is something that I'm happy and feel incredibly relieved (no pun intended) about.

Only problem is I still have what I went to the ER for, no one knows what it is, and I have to get another colonoscopy :/
by ibizaman | 2025-05-04 06:43:19+00:00
On NixOS we get one new grub menu entry per “deployment”, be it when you deploy to another host or the local one. They both then get a new grub entry. Of course you can still shoot yourself in the foot by making your system inaccessible remotely, by screwing up ssh config for example. There’s also a solution for that called deploy-rs which has a magic rollback feature which rolls back the system if it can’t connect back to the computer initiating the deployment https://github.com/serokell/deploy-rs?tab=readme-ov-file#mag...

I’m using these features since multiple years now and can vouch for them.

Not exactly related to your initial question but I also have my system build in CI and do some playwright tests which become more and more comprehensive as time passes. This all gives me quite a lot of confidence I’ll find an issue early or be able to revert back.
by chrisheecho | 2025-05-04 06:45:13+00:00
Hey there, I’m Chris Cho (x: chrischo_pm, Vertex PM focusing on DevEx) and Ivan Nardini (x: ivnardini, DevRel). We heard you and let us answer your questions directly as possible.

First of all, thank you for your sentiment for our latest 2.5 Gemini model. We are so glad that you find the models useful! We really appreciate this thread and everyone for the feedback on Gemini/Vertex

We read through all your comments. And YES, – clearly, we've got some friction in the DevEx. This stuff is super valuable, helps me to prioritize. Our goal is to listen, gather your insights, offer clarity, and point to potential solutions or workarounds.

I’m going to respond to some of the comments given here directly on the thread
by delusional | 2025-05-04 06:46:01+00:00
Personally, having worked in professional enterprise software for ~7 years now I've come to a pretty hard conclusion.

Most software should not exist.

That's not even meant in the tasteful "Its a mess" way. From a purely money making efficiency standpoint upwards of 90% of the code I've written in this time has not meaningfully contributed back to the enterprise, and I've tried really hard to get that number lower. Mind you, this is professional software. If you consider the vibe coder guys, I'll estimate that number MUCH higher.

It just feels like the whole way we've fit computing into the world is misaligned. We spent days building UIs that dont help the people we serve and that break at the first change to the process, and because of the support burden of that UI we never get to actually automate anything.

I still think computers are very useful to humanity, but we have forgot how to use them.
by chrisheecho | 2025-05-04 06:46:07+00:00
simonw, good points. The Vertex vs. non-Vertex Gemini API (via AI Studio at aistudio.google.com) could use more clarity.

For folks just wanting to get started quickly with Gemini models without the broader platform capabilities of Google Cloud, AI Studio and its associated APIs are recommended as you noted.

However, if you anticipate your use case to grow and scale 10-1000x in production, Vertex would be a worthwhile investment.
by James_K | 2025-05-04 06:46:25+00:00
The degeneration of American democracy seems an obvious conclusion to the basic premise set out there. Both parties in America are bad, they know they cannot be replaced because of the two party system, and therefore when they lose power, they can be assured they will gain it back again in a few years once people become dissatisfied with the alternative. There is no incentive for parties to better themselves because being bad at their job nets them valuable and necessary private donations from lobbyists with an interest in disabling the proper function of government.
by chrisheecho | 2025-05-04 06:46:26+00:00
I couldn’t have said it better. My billing friends are working to address some of these concerns along with the Vertex team. We are planning to address this issue. Please stay tuned, we will come back to this thread to announce when we can In fact, if you can DM me (@chrischo_pm on X) with, I would love to learn more if you are interested.
by chrisheecho | 2025-05-04 06:46:37+00:00
We built the OpenAI Compatible API (https://cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/generative-ai/docs/multim...) layer to help customers that are already using OAI library to test out Gemini easily with basic inference but not as a replacement library for the genai sdk (https://github.com/googleapis/python-genai). We recommend using th genai SDK for working with Gemini.
by chrisheecho | 2025-05-04 06:47:02+00:00
simonw, 'Google's service auth SO hard to figure out' – absolutely hear you. We're taking this feedback on auth complexity seriously. We have a new Vertex express mode in Preview (https://cloud.google.com/vertex-ai/generative-ai/docs/start/... , not ready for primetime yet!) that you can sign up for a free tier and get API Key right away. We are improving the experience, again if you would like to give feedback, please DM me on @chrischo_pm on X.