MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by timoth3y | 2025-05-07 05:22:09+00:00
This is so frustrating.

Energy Star has been a huge success over the past 30 years. It's (now) widely supported by industry, has reduced the TCO to consumers for most household appliances, and results in hundreds of billions of kWh of electricity saved every year.

Energy Star is not some tree-hugging, drum-circle, feel-good program.

The US urgently needs to expand and modernize our grid. Every GW of power saved, is GW of generation and transmission capacity that we don't have to build and maintain.
by pmarreck | 2025-05-07 05:22:26+00:00
> It's entirely clear that every last human will be beaten on code design in the upcoming years

LOLLLLL. You see a good one-shot demo and imagine an upward line, I work with LLM assistance every day and see... an asymptote (which is only budged by exponential power expenditure). As they say in sailing, you'll never win the race by following the guy in front of you... which is exactly what every single LLM does: Do a sophisticated modeling of prior behavior. Innovation is not their strong suit LOL.

Perfect example- I cannot for the life of me get any LLM to stick with TDD building one feature at a time, which I know builds superior code (both as a human, and as an LLM!). Prompting will get them to do it for one or two cycles and then start regressing to the crap mean. Because that's what it was trained on. And it's the rare dev that can stick with TDD for whatever reason, so that's exactly what the LLM does. Which is absolutely subpar.

I'm not even joking, every single coding LLM would improve immeasurably if the model was refined to just 1) make a SINGLE test expectation, 2) watch it fail (to prove the test is valid), 3) build a feature, 4) work on it until the test passed, 5) repeat until app requirements are done. Anything already built that was broken by the new work would be highlighted by the unit test suite immediately and would be able to be fixed before the problem gets too complex.

LLM's also often "lose the plot", and that's not even a context limit problem, they just aren't conscious or have wills so their work eventually drifts off course or goes into these weird flip-flip states.

But sure, with an infinite amount of compute and an infinite amount of training data, anything is possible.
by timewizard | 2025-05-07 05:22:35+00:00
> Before energy star, refrigerators were made with heating coils glued to the outer panels

Do you have any examples of such products? I don't believe I've ever seen one.

> it was cheaper to warm the outside of the fridge to avoid condensation

A refrigerator has an evaporator inside the fridge to get cold but it must have a condenser on the outside to discharge heat. The outside of the fridge is going to get warm no matter what you do. The only time I've seen an actual heater used is when a fridge is placed outside where temperatures go below freezing.

> but the parts cost was a few dollars lower.

The labor cost was also significantly lower and the rate of production was higher.

> than it was to install adequate insulation inside the fridge

They used to be insulated with cork and then fiberglass which were the common technologies for their time. As soon as foam became more prevalent they switched to that.

> Energy star and those yellow power consumption stickers changed that.

It normalized the patchwork system that existed before it. California, as always, experienced the initial problem and created it's own standards on refrigerators sold in the state. Other states followed, the federal government picked at it slightly, and finally Energy Star came into existence mostly by industry demand.
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-05-07 05:23:03+00:00
This always seems really disingenuous to me. He was hiding in an extremely concealed manner. Never ever went outside, and it's not as if the Pakistani military can just break into every house nearby and search for him everywhere.

How they caught him was crazy in and of itself, and required fake vaccination drives, another thing no military can do to its own people to catch terrorists.

I really don't think they are blameless at all, at all, but this kind of stuff feels conspiracy-level to me. This was the most wanted guy in the world, no country, no army could plausibly have concealed him and coordinated that effort to keep him hidden. Someone along the chain would have given him up
by perrygeo | 2025-05-07 05:24:43+00:00
> no one wants to live next to a reactor that isn't regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission

Even if given a choice (is that even guaranteed at this point?) some people would chose to fight it, sure. But then you have Starbase, TX that sold their soul to Musk by democratic vote. So there will always be some people who would gladly sell out for anything, including living near a local renegade nuclear reactor, for a chance to make more money.
by atoav | 2025-05-07 05:25:34+00:00
> but I don't think it's been predictive of someone's political identity before?

This is a pretty astounding claim. On which data did you base that conclusion? Because if it is purely anecdotal, you might consider that this is a bit like with Apple fanboys. Apple generally makes good products. Most people who use their stuff don't even talk about it, but those who do talk about it tend to have strong opinions that extend the quality of Apples products themselves.

But these opinions are not even remotely representative of the broad majority of Apple users.

Rust similarily lends itself to fanboyism, because the language has a strong narrative going for it, that is part of its success. The narrative isn't even a bad one: create a programming language that makes certain common classes of mistakes impossible and others much harder. Like every topic with strong narrative this will draw in a certain amount of people who will strongly defend said narrative, but those aren't necessarily the manority of the people who use the language.

So unless you made a proper poll that tries to select for a broad set of Rust users instead of basing your judgment on a loud online minority I wouldn't be confident in the result.

I with "identity based bent" you mean they are inclusive and have strong community rules, it might just be that this is normal where the Rust users are from. Last time I checked Rust was very popular in European countries and over here these kind of rules are pretty off the shelve standard. But please tell me this isn't about you calling them "woke" and confusing basic human dignity with politics.
by moralestapia | 2025-05-07 05:27:19+00:00
>What makes you think the others are significantly different?

ChatGPT's prompt is on the order of 1k, if the leaks turn out to be real. Even that one seems a bit high for my taste, but they're the experts, not me.

>It’s logical to use the context to tell it what to do.

You probably don't know much about this, but no worries I can explain. You can train a model to "become" anything you want, if your default prompt starts to be measured in kilobytes, it might as well be better to re-train (obv. not re-train the same one, but v2.1 or whatever, train it with this in mind) and/or fine tune, because your model behaves quite different from what you want it to do.

I don't know the exact threshold, there might not even be one as training and LLM takes some sort of artisan skills, but if you need 24k just to boot the thing you're clearly doing something wrong, aside from the waste of resources.
by toofy | 2025-05-07 05:29:24+00:00
> The problem is that everyone says we want this then votes with our wallet that we don’t.

I don’t see that as a problem whatsoever.

i see this idea of “i need to manipulate people for them to give me money” as the problem.

“if i don’t manipulate and obfuscate, no one wants my product” should make one reconsider their business model to one where they can be upfront and people still want the product.
by grep_it | 2025-05-07 05:29:41+00:00
There was a period of time in my life where I had recently moved to California from Canada and I was desperate for a job. I got a job doing door-to-door sales for Comcast. I hated it. I often sat in my car playing VVVVVV on my phone while shirking my responsibilities. Thank you Terry, for the reprieve.
by willvarfar | 2025-05-07 05:31:21+00:00
A lot has changed over the years. While the soviets were supplying India and propping up their puppet state in Afghanistan the US used Pakistan as a proxy.

But by the time the US were hunting Bin Laden a lot had changed and support has been trailing off.

Now most recently Trump has been growing the US pro-Israeli - and basically being broad-stroke anti-every-kind-of-muslim - policy and actions in the gulf and has put the now-meagre levels of ongoing US aid to Pakistan completely on hold.
by TFYS | 2025-05-07 05:32:01+00:00
You can choose who to work for, but you can't choose the nature of the relationship. It's always the same, you're a worker who has to give away a part of what you produce and you have to do what the owners tell you or you're gone. That choice closer to getting to choose which government official you work for in a communist country. That choice only prevents the worst abuses, and only if you're not in a position desperate enough that you have to accept any owner's offer. It does not give a person freedom from being exploited.

A capitalist system would collapse without workers, so not everyone can be a business owner. Someone needs to actually do the work, capital does nothing on its own. I guess you could imagine a world where everyone is a one man business and a subcontractor in someone else's business, but that wouldn't really change the nature of the relationship. The ones with capital would still be in a position power and take a part of what people with no power produce.
by vesinisa | 2025-05-07 05:34:00+00:00
Ukraine was not and still is not economically strong enough for war. It just suffered an unprovoked invasion by its neighbor and had no option but to either capitulate or fight.

I hope I am not biased but it really does not seem comparable to the border situation in Kashmir where both sides are showing aggression towards each other and weighing the costs of going to an all out war.
by spaceman_2020 | 2025-05-07 05:35:36+00:00
The difference this time around is that leadership in both countries is more religiously hardline than the last serious war like situation we had (after Nov 26 2011).

Asif Munir is the son of an imam and an avowed Islamist. India’s ruling party is openly pro-Hindu. Modi is also under pressure from the hardline religious wing of his party for the recent focus on caste instead of religion
by sofixa | 2025-05-07 05:35:43+00:00
> Putin is a particularly deranged type of fascist though, much like Bush, who is okay making the poor calculation of a Ukrainian invasion for the benefit of a wartime economy

While Putin is undoubtedly deranged, I think his goals with invading had much more to do with delusions of grandeur and trying to rebuild the Russian/Soviet empire than wanting the "benefit" of a "wartime economy". Russia was drastically unprepared for a long war, and its economy, heavily reliant on export of raw materials and import of finished goods, has suffered.
by HPsquared | 2025-05-07 05:37:00+00:00
Thinner walls on the fridge would mean greater internal volume. If volume is the only performance metric available, designs would tend towards something like that to maximise sales.

That's all in theory though. I wonder if this could be a confusion arising from the use of heating coils to defrost the evaporator coil (auto-defrost). that's a different thing though.
by lwo32k | 2025-05-07 05:37:12+00:00
Too simplistic. Its also about preventing fanatics from taking control of Nukes or the military.

We already know what happens when Islamic fanatics take over the army in Afghanistan/Iran/Lebanon/Gaza.

If the Muslim Brotherhood took over Egypt (and they did win the elections) instead of a US propped up Military Dictatorship that would just add another layer of chaos to the middle east.

Its not black and white. Plus all sides make mistakes cause the problem is way above everyones pay grade.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-07 05:37:42+00:00
> Ukraine was not and still is not economically strong enough for war. It just suffered an unprovoked invasion by its neighbor and had no option but to either capitulate or fight

The Western consensus about the outcome of the invasion that of a rout.

> both sides are showing aggression towards each other and weighing the costs of going to an all out war

Outside an Indo-Chinese land war, the only paths for industrial war emerge from New Delhi. Either in reacting to a miscalculation by Islamabad. Or because India's going imperial. The latter would be shockingly like Russia invading China in both scale and capacity to get drawn out by outside backers.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-07 05:39:17+00:00
I'm really not claiming anything that requires more than a cursory review of the history of proxy wars. Or, like, talking to someone who lives in a country we've recently proxy warred. The people fighting in the wars we proxied were fighting for a domestic cause. Outside powers then glommed onto that dispute. Nobody thought they were dying for the superpowers' ends; they were fighting a local civil war or rebellion or reconquest.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-07 05:40:55+00:00
> The moment Pakistan's military stops its terror funding and support activities, India will not care whether it Pakistan lives or dies

I'll entertain this is possible. But it's not only unlikely but irrational so long as Pakistan deepens its ties with China. It's made almost certain by the attitude you're presenting: countries that do "not care whether" their neighbours live or die generally aren't on peaceful terms with them.
by hakfoo | 2025-05-07 05:41:37+00:00
I can only think of one private scheme in this space that's worked well - 80 Plus. For a voluntary program, it's been pretty broadly adopted, and it created an implicit factor of "why is it not certified" that puts pressure on the worst junk products.

Across the board though, PC PSU quality has gone up quite a bit in the last 20-25 years though.
by dragan_visidra | 2025-05-07 05:41:54+00:00
I built TimeTracks to scratch my own itch — a minimalist, developer-friendly time tracking tool. It supports:

Live clock-in/out Project + task-based reports Token-based API (JWT) Multi-tenant support (teams/freelancers) Tracking CI/CD jobs and background tasks

Backend is Express + DynamoDB. It’s API-first, serverless, and optimized for dev workflows. You can try it here: https://timetracks.visidra.com Would love any feedback, suggestions, or questions. Thanks!
by Aidevah | 2025-05-07 05:42:25+00:00
Great job! For converting music to readable images, the latex of music typesetting is lilypond, which has the ability to create legible music at any size by scaling the notational glyphs accordingly[1]. This sounds like what you were trying to achieve achieve with opencv.

With that being said, although lilypond is very intelligent about all sorts of typesetting minutiae, but it's probably difficult to wrangle it to run on smart glasses.

[1] https://lilypond.org/doc/v2.24/Documentation/essay/engraving...
by energy123 | 2025-05-07 05:43:37+00:00
This is my view. We've seen this before in other problems where there's an on-hand automatic verifier. The nature of the problem mirrors previously solved problems.

The LLM skeptics need to point out what differs with code compared to Chess, DoTA, etc from a RL perspective. I don't believe they can. Until they can, I'm going to assume that LLMs will soon be better than any living human at writing good code.
by ncallaway | 2025-05-07 05:44:17+00:00
> Simple, broad laws can absolutely be written,

This isn’t a law. It’s a regulatory policy.

Simple, broad laws have another term that you can often use to describe them: “sweeping”.

Those kinds of changes are better left to legislators, who are responsive to political pressure and subject to elections.

I’m all for regulatory rulemaking by executives, but it should generally be careful narrow rulemaking. Simple, broad, sweeping changes should generally be left to the legislature.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-07 05:44:53+00:00
> in India-Pakistan relations, they (UAE and KSA, not Qatar) are increasingly the only mediators with whom both parties can negotiate offramps

Only the most minor ones. Anything significant requires an outside security guarantar.

> Large pole countries don't have the same heft they may have had 15-20 years ago, and even the Russian-Ukraine War has shown that power differentials are not that significant between major powers and regional powers

Russia was trying to replicate America's offensive successes in Afghanistan and Iraq. (What Devereaux calls the modern system [1].) Moscow couldn't even achieve air superiority. (America got supremacy in hours.) Russia's invasion of Ukraine showed that Russia isn't operating a modern, combined-arms military.

Great powers have always overestimated their power. That doesn't mean it's not there at all.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
by matsemann | 2025-05-07 05:45:24+00:00
I do that for a lot of stuff. Got a bit annoyed with internal tools that was so difficult to set up (needed this exact version of global python, expected this and that to be in the path, constantly needed to be updated and then stuff broke again). So I built a docker image instead where everything is managed, and when I need to update or change stuff I can do it from a clean slate without affecting anything else on my computer.

To use it, it's basically just scripts loaded into my shell. So if I do "toolname command args" it will spin up the container, mount the current folder and some config folders some tools expect, forward some ports, then pass the command and args to the container which runs them.

99% of the time it works smooth. The annoying part is if some tool depends on some other tool on the host machine. Like for instance it wants to do some git stuff. I will then have to have git installed and my keys copied in as well for instance.
by rendaw | 2025-05-07 05:46:47+00:00
I don't think GGGP was complaining about the price. I think they were complaining about it being a non-disclosed fee (like tax) while also not being a clearly defined amount (pseudo-tax) and with aggressively bad consequences if someone doesn't go along with the mind game (deliverer eats the food, wastes an hour of your time while you're hungry, need to follow up with support, etc) rather than just an up-front rejection.

Obviously nobody wants to order food on ebay, and if you're going to argue that an auction is the only possible outcome why wouldn't that apply to the restaurant itself too? The restaurant could aggressively underpay/understaff chefs, then you go to pick up the order and restaurant says "Oh someone else offered to buy food at a higher price, but feel free to order again and offer more, and sit here for 30m while we prepare it!"
by johntarter | 2025-05-07 05:47:18+00:00
I'm going back and forth between Windsurf and Github Copilot right now. Windsurf's development iteration speed is much fast and features are added faster.

For example, Github only autocompletes based on what file you have opened in the current editor's tab. Windsurf indexes your entire code base and seems able to autocomplete based on what other files you have in your project. Autocomplete also spans across multiple lines and open tabs.

Windsurf's agentic tool (Cascade) can run terminal commands and read the output without opening a terminal like copilot. It can undo the agent's actions easier than Copilot. Though I think Cursor is superior in that regard, it can undo multiple checkpoints.

Still evaluating Windsurf but it, Cursor, and Claude Code are all more sophisticated than Github copilot at the moment. I'm sure copilot will catchup but by that time the other tools may have already iterated ahead.
by brundolf | 2025-05-07 05:47:42+00:00
It's a common fallacy to equate "there's a limit to how much we can guarantee" with "guaranteeing anything is a waste of time". Each guarantee we can make eliminates a whole class of possible bugs

That said, Rust also makes it very easy to define your own types that can only be constructed/unpacked in limited ways, which can enforce special constraints on their contents. And it has a cultural norm of doing this in the standard library and elsewhere

Eg: a sibling poster noted the NonZero<T> type. Another example is that Rust's string types are guarantees to always contain valid UTF-8, because whenever you try and convert a byte array into a string, it gets checked and possibly rejected.
by eslaught | 2025-05-07 05:48:14+00:00
There has been talk of new language frontends for C++:

Cpp2 (Herb Sutter's brainchild): https://hsutter.github.io/cppfront/

Carbon (from Google): https://github.com/carbon-language/carbon-lang

In principle those could enable a safe subset by default, which would (except when explicitly opted-out) provide similar safety guarantees to Rust, at least at the language level. It's still up to the community to design safe APIs around those features, even if the languages exist. Rust has a massive advantage here that the community built the ecosystem with safety in mind from day 1, so it's not just the language that's safe, but the APIs of various libraries are often designed in an abuse-resistant way. C++ is too much of a zoo to ever do that in a coherent way. And even if you wanted to, the "safe" variants are still in their infancy, so the foundations aren't there yet to build upon.

I don't know what chance Cpp2 or Carbon have, but I think you need something as radical as one of these options to ever stand a chance of meaningfully making C++ safer. Whether they'll take off (and before Rust eats the world) is anyone's guess.
by pjmlp | 2025-05-07 05:48:53+00:00
Unfortunely thanks to the "code C in C++ crowd", there is this urban myth that goodies like proper encapsulation, stronger types, RAII, were not even available in pre-C++98, aka C++ARM.

Meanwhile it was one of the reasons after Turbo Pascal, my next favourite programming language became C++.

For me mastering C, after 1992, only became mattered because as professional, that is something that occasionally I have to delve into so better know your tools even if the grip itself has sharp corners, otherwise everytime the option was constrained to either C or C++, I always pick C++.
by cypherpunks01 | 2025-05-07 05:49:43+00:00
This system prompt that was posted interestingly includes the result of the US presidential election in November, even though the model's knowledge cutoff date was October. This info wasn't in the anthropic version of the system prompt.

Asking Claude who won without googling, it does seem to know even though it was later than the cutoff date. So the system prompt being posted is supported at least in this aspect.
by atoav | 2025-05-07 05:50:12+00:00
There are some advantages to pyproject.toml

1. You can differenciate between different dependency groups like build dependencies, dev dependencies, test dependencies and regular dependencies. So if someone uses some dependency only in dev previously you either had to install that manually or your requirements.txt installed it for you without you needing it.

2. It adds a common description for project metadata that can be used

3. Adds a place where tool settings like those of a linter or a formatter can be stored (e.g. ruff and black)

4. Its format is standardized and allows it to be integrated with multiple build tools, toml is a bit more standardized than whatever custom file syntax python used before
by dennydai | 2025-05-07 05:51:58+00:00
Just use shebang

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38987109

#!/usr/bin/env -S bash -c "docker run -p 8080:8080 -it --rm \$(docker build --progress plain -f \$0 . 2>&1 | tee /dev/stderr | grep -oP 'sha256:[0-9a-f]*')"