MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lovich | 2025-05-07 03:51:01+00:00
> I don't see how shutting down this program would affect costs

> Plus, a private certification program could easily fill in the void.

Ah there’s your problem. It turns out private solutions actually cost money, and relying on a private certification program to “fill the void” as you say, is what actually changes the costs.

Alternatively if you believe that private corporate actions are always free when comparing it to government services, then this is a net zero change
by exabrial | 2025-05-07 03:51:16+00:00
I will say this works up until about 38 years old. My memory just isn't what it used to be. A few photographs every once in awhile help me remember neat events that happened I would otherwise not recall without prompting.

Instead of taking a photo to prove to other people you were at a place and gain likes, take a photo to remind yourself of an emotion. (another words, don't take pictures _just_ to post to social media)
by Jtsummers | 2025-05-07 03:51:22+00:00
And migrate off oil consumption as much as possible while energy is cheaper (to bootstrap manufacturing/construction of other energy production systems). If the costs are down now because of OPEC+, then they'll go up. That's when we want to be able to sell (improving our trade deficit, a stated goal of this administration) to other countries. The US is the world's largest oil consumer, we consume 50% more than China. If we reduced our rate of consumption we could shift more towards exporting and be the ones controlling prices, since the US is also the biggest producer.
by sagarpatil | 2025-05-07 03:51:30+00:00
I’ve been a WindSurf customer since day one. It was my first true AI agentic experience.

[Dev mode] While working on Alembic migrations I broke one of my migration files. After an hour of manual debugging I handed the task to WindSurf. It methodically checked every config file, applied the migrations one by one, and narrowed the issue to a single file. It rewrote the migration, verified the fix, wrote tests, ensured everything passed, and opened a PR. I reviewed it and it worked flawlessly.

Regarding the acquisition I don’t understand why OAI would pay $3 B. The team is strong, they have lots of data, and the agentic flow is great, but all of that feels commoditized.

Claude Code launched two months ago and I prefer it to WindSurf, Cursor, and Aider. Augment Code also ranks above WindSurf for me.

If I were in Sam’s place I would have doubled or tripled down on Codex CLI. Just my 2 cents.
by joegibbs | 2025-05-07 03:51:45+00:00
I really like the code that Gemini 2.5 Pro writes but it tends to stop for no reason and needs to be reprompted to start again. I'm not sure why this is. Also, what's the difference between 2.5 Pro and 2.5 Pro Max? Or Claude 3.7 and 3.7 Max?

Aside: it would be good for Cursor to add something to tell their agents not to run tool calls that run forever (like test watchers). I add this in my .mdc files but I think it would be a good default so that it can run tests, update the code, run them again until it works.
by alephnerd | 2025-05-07 03:52:38+00:00
> Yes. When you have a sectarian conflict, the only lasting solution is moving people around. Hateful people don’t learn to stop hating each other.

Jammu Division is an entirely separate ethnic community (Pahari) from that in Kashmir Division (Koshur).

Even during the worst of the partition and the Indo-Pak Wars, the mountain areas where active fighting was occurring never saw the same kind of religious violence you'd see in neighboring Kashmir or Punjabi speaking areas like Jammu City or Mirpur City.

This would be solving a non-existent problem, as the leadership making decisions for conflicts on or around the LoC are not from these regions.

And btw, the Indian and Pakistani army did attempt that when my grandmother was a child, but it didn't stick and people from one side or the other would just cross back - and this was the norm until the 1980s.

---------------

There are ways to resolve the problem longer term, and that requires forcing professionalization of the Pakistani Armed Forces and cajoling India back to the negotiating table using the carrot and the stick. Similar precedent already exists with the Israel-Egypt peace accords under Sadat, and would have happened under Bajwa, Nawaz Sharif, or Musharraf if they weren't undermined.
by musicale | 2025-05-07 03:54:22+00:00
The problem isn't limited to creativity. When you let machines think for you, your own ability to think atrophies.

Maybe long division wasn't a particularly necessary skill (though I think learning arithmetic algorithms is beneficial). But calculators could only complete a small subset of school assignments, while the set of traditional school assignments that gen AI cannot complete is getting smaller and smaller.

On the other hand, the game of "turn in assignments until you have enough grade letters to get a piece of paper" game seems to be over, at least in its recent form.
by pansa2 | 2025-05-07 03:54:44+00:00
> Any access of memory using a union, where the union includes the effective type of the memory is legal. Consider:

union { int i; float f; } *u; float f = 3.14; u = &f; x = u->i;

> In this case the memory pointed to by “u” has the declared effective type of int, and given that “u” is a union that contains int, the access using the “i” member is legal. It’s noteworthy in this that the “f” member of the union is never used, but only there to satisfy the requirement of having a member with a type compatible with the effective type.

Is this a typo? Should it say "declared effective type of float" and "“u” is a union that contains float"?

It's interesting to see type-punning using a union - I've read that it should be avoided and to use `memcpy` instead. Are there any issues with the union approach in C? Or is the advice to prefer `memcpy` specific to C++, where AFAICT the union approach is undefined behaviour?
by tomhow | 2025-05-07 03:55:55+00:00
No. I know of a YC startup co-founded by a person (a friend of mine) in their 50s in the past few years. In the past there have been some who are older than that. There are plenty in their 30s and 40s.

Most startups are founded by people in their 20s because that's the stage of life when people generally have fewer constraints/obligations (particularly on time/attention, finances).

Later in life, people have families, mortgages, other obligations and preferences that make it harder to go "all in" on a startup, the way co-founders and investors expect you to.

But YC still funds plenty of older founders who are willing and able to make that choice. There are some advantages to being older; e.g., more experience, established networks.
by fasthands9 | 2025-05-07 03:55:59+00:00
This is interesting - though I suspect the net effect in the US is opposite? I believe the energy needed heat a building from 0F to 70F is much more then the energy needed to cool it from 95F to 70F.

And its still the case that the northeast has a disproportinate amount of people live in areas where the average temperature is less than 70F.
by Alex_001 | 2025-05-07 03:57:28+00:00
That paper is a great pointer — the creativity vs. alignment trade-off feels a lot like the "risk-aversion" effect in humans under censorship or heavy supervision. It makes me wonder: as we push models to be more aligned, are we inherently narrowing their output distribution to safer, more average responses?

And if so, where’s the balance? Could we someday see dual-mode models — one for safety-critical tasks, and another more "raw" mode for creative or exploratory use, gated by context or user trust levels?
by fngjdflmdflg | 2025-05-07 03:57:51+00:00
Agreed that technical specs cannot easily be crowdsourced. And even comprehensive reviews quickly get outdated when new products release. I remember there used to be a Google engineer who would review USB-C cables on Amazon for compliance.[0] After looking at this again Amazon apparently ended up banning the sale of out of spec cables altogether. That kind of thing is the only real way to protect consumers. We can't rely on Google engineers to leave reviews for our products on Amazon. I do think products with clearly defined technical specs should in general be reported to the consumer. Same thing with nutrition labels.

The lower the skill needed to evaluate something and the more well defined the problem space is, the easier it is to crowd source. For example Open Street Map works because the barrier to entry is relatively low and new cities aren't coming out every day. Similarly IMDB has a section that allows users to give their own parental rating to movies with their own explanation. That can compete with MPA film ratings because again the barrier to entry is low and movies don't change after they are released (in general).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benson_Leung
by Centigonal | 2025-05-07 03:58:06+00:00
Very interesting! The one thing I don't understand is how the author made the jump from "we lost the confidence signal in the move to 4.1-mini" and "this is because of the alignment/steerability improvements."

Previous OpenAI models were instruct-tuned or otherwise aligned, and the author even mentions that model distillation might be destroying the entropy signal. How did they pinpoint alignment as the cause?
by withinrafael | 2025-05-07 03:58:23+00:00
The GAO wrote a report on fraud, waste, and abuse potential of Energy Star in 2010. They were able to get a gas-powered alarm clock (and 14 other fake products) marked as Energy Star compliant. Worth a read/laugh.

https://www.gao.gov/assets/files.gao.gov/assets/gao-10-470.p...
by krainboltgreene | 2025-05-07 03:58:43+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. Even German ambassadors in Ukraine were caught off guard having to leave that night.

Modi is a different type of beast, he's a long term political power that doesn't need a wartime economy, and is still establishing his internal power. He's going to have to deal with the insane SS brigade he's fostered eventually. Also while Putin and others thought that Ukraine would fall like Afghanistan (quickly), zero people think that Pakistan is going anywhere within this eon. While it's not the graveyard of empires, it's definitely the hospice.
by timewizard | 2025-05-07 03:59:17+00:00
> beyond, say, JD Vance throwing out some rhetoric on the campaign trail

JD Vance. Matt Gaetz. Josh Hawley. Ken Buck. They literally started calling them Khanservatives. There is strong anti-trust sentiment in parts of the Republican party. Just like there are "somewhat more progressive parts of the Democratic party."

> is revisionist history.

Or the story is more subtle and nuanced than people care to admit.
by dmix | 2025-05-07 03:59:31+00:00
Just sounds like a good deterrence for Pakistan to not go to war to me. It really is in their hands right now.

India just wants to save face over the terror attacks, a very easy game to play diplomatically. This missile strike was even smaller and more symbolic than even the Israeli Iranian ones. And those two are much more inclined (and far more prepared) to do something stupid.
by dwattttt | 2025-05-07 03:59:34+00:00
I find myself working through a hierarchy of error handling maturity as a project matures.

Initial proof of concepts just get panics (usually with a message).

Then functions start to be fallible, by adding anyhow & considering all errors to still be fatal, but at least nicely report backtraces (or other things! context doesn't have to just be a message)

Then if a project is around long enough, swap anyhow to thiserror to express what failure modes a function has.
by TowerTall | 2025-05-07 04:00:17+00:00
No, if you exclude a folder its children will also be excluded. You could Exclude everything else in ~/Library but that means that you have to maintain a long list of exclusions; any new folder you or macOS adds later will start getting backed up until you exclude it.

You can also mark sub‑folders with the "do not backup" xattr

xattr -w com.apple.metadata:com_apple_backup_excludeItem com.apple.backupd ~/Library/Caches (Time Machine picks this up automatically).

or you can switch to Carbon Copy Cloner. It allows you to build positive include rules
by zdragnar | 2025-05-07 04:01:57+00:00
I don't think I ever have. I've gone by customer and professional reviews, physical size, presence of features and anti-features (I won't get anything IoT-ified), but the energy star rating hasn't ever been a factor.

I honestly don't remember for sure, but I have a vague impression of "significant difference in energy star rating is outweighed by significant difference in purchase price". Could be that was just the particular type of appliance years ago, though.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-05-07 04:03:11+00:00
IMHO TUIs are the best of both worlds. Generally light and responsive [0], transparent over SSH, neatly falls into a tab/pane/window in screen/tmux/zellij, offer essentially everything I wanted from a GUI except graphics [1] which isn't usually a problem, and delightfully free of the latest charming "innovations" in UI reinvention (GNOME, I am looking directly at you).

[0] It is if course possible to make a light GUI and a slow+bloated TUI, but both are less common than the alternative.

[1] Sixel et al. exist but IME they rarely work well. Sadly.
by adventured | 2025-05-07 04:04:00+00:00
They're paying $3 billion because money is hyper plentiful for OpenAI at present. Basically because they can. Money isn't their problem right now, it's not a scarce resource (maybe it will be in the future of course). They're trying to capture and lock-in, so as the hurdles and regulations go up they're one of the huge winners left standing.

Try replacing Uber today, it's impossible. Nobody is going to give you billions of dollars to try to do it. It'd be an absolute nightmare to attempt it.
by krzn | 2025-05-07 04:04:59+00:00
Yes, AI is only a threat to corporate art for now. But what will happen when the new generations grow up in a world with technology that can generate in seconds or minutes something they enjoy and keep them entertained? Why bother going through the painful process of learning new creative abilities when AI will probably be able to generate everything future generations will consume (if things keep going as they are)?

Something like that is already happening with video games and game engines. When you talk with other game developers about making a game "from scratch" the first question they ask is "why?". Why bother making your own engine if there's already Unity/Unreal/Godot?

That's just a little example of how as something gets more and more accessible people forgets and disregard making it more manually. The same can absolutely happen with art in general, which is sad.

The only way I can think this won't happen is that we end up in a future with enough free time to invest in our hobbies and that more people than I expect will enjoy making things by themselves or maybe using AI for new ways to express themselves, which is the "good" future many AI enthusiasts mention and what I honestly would prefer too, but I don't have much hope.
by mediumsmart | 2025-05-07 04:06:01+00:00
It’s just a few meaningful numbers like 0 accessibility errors, A+ for the securityheaders, flawless result on webkolls 5july net plus below 1 second loading time on pagespeed mobile. Once that has been achieved obsessing over stabilizing a flaky bloat pudding while patching over bugs aka features that annoy any user will have died.
by mech9879876 | 2025-05-07 04:06:31+00:00
My main intention in my argument was to convince you that moral hazard exists in current social welfare programs. Judging by your statements, you were already aware of this, but rely on discussion points that deny it exists. Starting off an argument with such a clearly untrue line of discussion sets up pretty poor grounds for an honest talk.

That's all I intend for this. There's room for agreement on some other points, but I doubt it would be a productive conversation when you deny the existence of the downside tradeoffs of your preferred policies.
by timewizard | 2025-05-07 04:06:54+00:00
> 100% of the votes against confirmation were Republican

And so no Democrat voted against her? Does a party line split ever look good regardless of how it breaks?

> Fewer than half the R Senators voted to confirm her.

Anti-trust issues have become more popular lately. Senators come and go. Like I said she had a rocky start.

> Obama nominee Edith Ramirez, was confirmed unanimously

And she did nothing. Do you see the connection between those two facts? I mean it's not like there was a bunch of consumer problems during Obama's term or anything. :|

> let the different parties take responsibility and/or credit for their decisions.

Party politics are just exceptionally dumb. They don't even reasonably reflect how decisions are actually made on the hill. It devolves into a weird left vs. right fight between citizens while the actual meaningful policies and civil servants are entirely ignored. I don't sense a way to improve anything by doing this.
by const_cast | 2025-05-07 04:07:53+00:00
Package managers per language are a (relatively) new endeavor. The oldest language I can think of that widely adopted it was Perl. Although, perl was quite ahead of it's time in a lot of ways, and php undid some the work of perl and went back to popularizing include type dependencies instead of formal modules with a package manager.

C++ "gets away" with it because of templates. Many (most?) libraries are mostly templates, or at the very least contain templates. So you're forced into include-style dependencies and it's pretty painless. For a good library, it's often downloading a single file and just #include-ing it.

C++ is getting modules now, and maybe that will spur a new interest in package managers. Or maybe not, it might be too late.
by dang | 2025-05-07 04:09:00+00:00
I hear you, but it's the other way around: when such posts appear, commenters need to be aware of their emotional reactions and (let's say) organize them in a way that respects the spirit of the community: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

This of course is far from easy, but it's what we all (including the admins) need to do.
by liendolucas | 2025-05-07 04:10:00+00:00
Try CUDA in a Docker environment. Yesterday it took all day long to download an Ubuntu image (5.27Gb) and its Python dependencies (another few Gb) to install Pytorch. I've probably wasted 10Gb of bandwidth just to have the environment up and running. Fortunately in the meantime I wrote 90% what I needed to do. Oh I forgot that I still need to download a couple of hugging face models. Nice.
by dang | 2025-05-07 04:10:01+00:00
They are the same topic in the sense that the HN threads about them are going to lead to the exact same discussion. If you read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43896978 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43901823, that should be clear - but if not, let me know and I'll try to clarify further.

"Show HN" is a separate thing entirely - it's true that the submitter of this article was the author (which is great), but that's not enough to make a post a Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html).
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-05-07 04:10:09+00:00
The link actually provides some insight into this. It's from TECO, a Florida based electric company. In Florida (and maybe the rest of the US south, idk), a lot of houses have pools and the pumps for those run for hours every day.

Even if you don't want to use the pool, if the house has a pool the pump needs to run regularly with filtration and chlorination or else you end up with an expensive, putrid mess to clean up.

And of course in most parts of florida you can't drain the pool long term because of how high the water table is. An empty pool is just a concrete shell so without the weight from the water inside it, the pool essentially becomes boyant and tries to float upwards out of the ground, causing potentially thousands to tens of thousands of dollars of damage.

So a lot of people are stuck with pools with the water in them. So they are stuck with the pumps running.

And regardless of how recreational those pools are, that means a lot of pumps running across the state and that translates into a lot of power usage during the day.

So rebates for upgrading to more efficient pumps is an easy way to reduce power usage, reduce costs for people, reduce environmental costs, and reduce unnecessary overall load on the grid.

It's an incentive that just makes sense for everyone involved because it provides benefits across the board.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-05-07 04:11:08+00:00
I work in high-end data infrastructure, not games, but almost identical incentives and dynamics are at play. The state-of-the-art research isn’t coming out of academia for the most part. The R&D being done in private industry is slathered in NDAs that only slowly leaks out a decade or more after it was put into production. Many people don’t stay with it long enough to really master it.

There are some elegant and sophisticated techniques related to database kernels that have been passed around for a decade or two over beers that still don’t have a single reference in literature that I can find. The original researchers probably stayed quiet because it was under strict NDA but also likely retired years ago. No one writes it down because it sort of feels wrong to claim second-hand knowledge of unknown origin as your own, or to even lead people to assume as much. You show people, and they think it is amazing, but when they ask you for references or sources you have no idea where it came from.

There is a real gap here and it is getting worse.
by exabrial | 2025-05-07 04:11:13+00:00
My $0.02: Not a fan of wind anymore. The land area required and natural habitats intruded on or destroyed is just something I no longer want to see more of. It'd be nice to be outside and not have man made structures everywhere. Is it better than coal? yeah, I guess... if I had to choose between the two.

No issues with solar other than international geopolitical ones (where cells are made seems to cause some trade issues). Solar farms seem to be far more dense.
by kumarvvr | 2025-05-07 04:11:54+00:00
> There are options for a negotiated peace that involves swapping land, specifically, ceding Muslim-dominant territory to Pakistan and setting borders along rivers.

Sorry, why would that be done? When Pakistan was split from India, because of the Muslims voting against their own land that they have been living in for centuries, the lines are set and done.

Why should India cede more land?

Pakistan is on one of the most resource rich, fertile lands in the Indian subcontinent.
by nailer | 2025-05-07 04:11:57+00:00
> Before we go any further, let me just say he acknowledges floating point is not right for price and later talks about how he usually deals with it. But it makes for a nice example, bear with us.

OK but "this makes for a nice example" is silly, given that the only reason the example throws an error is that you used a float here, when both `quantity` and `price` would have been ints.

error[E0308]: arguments to this function are incorrect --> order/order-1.rs:7:5 | 7 | send_order("GOOG", false, 1000.00, 100); // Wrong | ^^^^^^^^^^ ------- --- expected `f64`, found `{integer}` | | | expected `i64`, found `{float}`

I love Rust, but this is artificial.
by tomhow | 2025-05-07 04:12:47+00:00
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43900231 and marked it offtopic.

Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html