MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ngruhn | 2025-08-23 17:18:14+00:00
> You might think Europe is simply too far north to need AC. But latitude is no longer the defense against heat that it used to be

Naa I'm pretty sure that is the reason. I live in central Germany and the summers are sure getting hotter but it's fine. I was in Japan a few weeks ago and good lord it was like 40 degrees (104 Fahrenheit I guess) plus high humidity. If it would get that hot I would definitely get AC.

Come on, as if people would die of heat stroke just not to use that pesky Yankee tech. Europe has adopted tons of American technology. Honestly I wasn't even aware that AC is American. I'm sure as the summers get hotter here more and more people will get AC as well.
by projektfu | 2025-08-23 17:19:20+00:00
I disagree, both because LLMs can be less likely to make those errors than a lot of humans, and because it's easier for me to review and critique its code than to review my own. I can also have a basis for testing, and I can tell it to fix problems in the code rather than having it make up a new answer.

If what I am doing is summarizing data and it will likely have uncertainty as a result, I can include statistics in the specification of what I want.

I have also been impressed from time to time where Claude Code catches a mistake I would have written. For example, I asked it to create a configuration file with some names of my staff to use for a query. It then ran the query and noticed that one name I gave was not in the database, but that there was a similar name, and it recommended changing the config.

I am pessimistic about whether these tools are intelligent or will ever achieve intelligence, but where they are useful, we should use them.
by pcrh | 2025-08-23 17:19:21+00:00
Up until the late 20th century, British homes were very poorly served for heating during their long damp winters. No insulation, no central heating, etc.

Coal was the usual source of energy, and coal fires were usually continually burning, being "banked" at night. In this context, the "always on" AGA was not so unusual.

So the AGA stove served not only as a cooker, but also as a source of heat, similar to masonry heaters. Many were also connected to a hot water tank.

The sales manual above states that the cost of running an AGA stove in 1935 was £4 per year, or £247 (~US$330) per year today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masonry_heater
by th0ma5 | 2025-08-23 17:20:26+00:00
I have personally witnessed web technology related components in the critical path of complex enterprise insurance systems. Setting aside things like the whole of .NET being steeped in web browser components, and the added complexity of being forced to isolated these components by the court, things like Selenium are used for getting around integration and licensing problems. It isn't right, it isn't efficient, it will be a year long project to change them... We've already seen outages caused by XML engines dereferencing domains that aren't available anymore causing subtle and hard to find bugs. People don't realize that we built a lot of cool stuff on XML and semantic web stuff that all works and is all needed in various ways! It would not surprise me if web browser automation is not central to a ton of backend integration and automation for absolute sure.
by pritambaral | 2025-08-23 17:20:26+00:00
> you could do ca. 1200 prompts per double decker. Which is a lot.

If humans had evolved to do prompts (while retaining everything else that makes human thought human), that number doesn't sound that big.

OTOH, if LLMs had to do everything humans need energy for, that number would be waaay too big for LLMs.

----

Humans don't even have an efficient energy input system. How many of those 1.3M joules actually get assimilated? Silicon is a lot more efficient at energy, because a lot of effort has been put into making it so, and is fed raw energy. It doesn't need to process food like humans, humans already did that for it when they captured the energy in electricity.

----

I'm sure there's more ways of making the comparison more fair, but I doubt your parent was trying to prove their claim with such deep research. So let me try another angle: No human can burn through as much energy as the top hosted LLMs do for one prompt, in as much time.
by untech | 2025-08-23 17:21:02+00:00
Second Primitive Technology (don't forget to turn on the captions). Don't recommend Technology Connections to be honest (a lot of talk to the camera, I prefer videos that show things that can't be conveyed via text).

Here's the channels I like, in no particular order:

- https://www.youtube.com/@TechIngredients Thumbnails and titles are clickbaity, but don't let that fool you. One of the most thorough channels. Polymath like Applied Science.

- https://www.youtube.com/@HuygensOptics Optical Systems and connected topics from a veteran of the field

- https://www.youtube.com/@Borgedesigns Designing 3d-printed tools

- https://www.youtube.com/@Nighthawkinlight Like Applied Science, but trying to do stuff with easily acquirable materials

- https://www.youtube.com/@AdvancedTinkering Chemistry and vacuum tech

- https://www.youtube.com/@ExcessiveOverkill Hardware projects, one of the biggest is controlling an industrial robot arm, but others are cool too

- https://www.youtube.com/@SamZeloof Reached home-made semiconductors

- https://www.youtube.com/@projectsinflight Trying to reach home-made semiconductors

- https://www.youtube.com/@christopherhelmke Building industrial 3d-printed parts sorting system

- https://www.youtube.com/@MariusHornberger Most thorough woodworker

- https://www.youtube.com/@BreakingTaps Like Applied Science, but with more free time

- https://www.youtube.com/@benmakeseverything Cool hardware projects

- https://www.youtube.com/@ancientjames Holograms

- https://www.youtube.com/@NileRed More entertaining than educational, but a prominent chemistry channel

- https://www.youtube.com/@BenEater Classic: made computer on a breadboard

- https://www.youtube.com/@theCodyReeder Like Applied Science, but more outdoors type; builds a Martian-like base

- https://www.youtube.com/@colinfurze A welding guy with extremely high energy, builds underground garage

- https://www.youtube.com/tomstantonengineering Hardware projects mostly about flying stuff

- https://www.youtube.com/@mymechanics Machining guy restoring things; currently restores a car by individually handling every nut and bolt (yes)

- https://www.youtube.com/@HyperspacePirate Hardware / Chemistry projects, made liquid nitrogen with disassembled AC units in a long-running series of attempts
by wenc | 2025-08-23 17:21:39+00:00
The conversation has also moved on -- I have a heat pump (split unit) in my apartment, and my monthly power bill has always hovered around $40 in the summer here in WA.

Now, arguably the capex for a heat pump is substantial, and that's a valid point. Also WA summers are not that hot outside of a few really warm weeks (in the 90s).

All that said, the energy consumption (and thus costs) of running AC is much lower these days.

Heat pumps are to traditional A/Cs what LED lights are to incandescents.
by cyanydeez | 2025-08-23 17:22:11+00:00
Yeah, there's just no magic bullet: a single file with all the code is easy to ctrlf but context disappears. Multiple folders mimics hierarchy and dependency but can easily mismatch control structure or circularity of flow.

What might help is a LLM that could seamlessly create various overlay files which would be editable allowing for differing usecases eitger project determinative or coder preferences.

IDEs try to do this but the success of vscode suggests theres space for multiview editors.
by solardev | 2025-08-23 17:23:09+00:00
As someone who grew up on DOS, Windows, OS/2 and Linux, macOS definitely took some getting used to (and I still have many gripes with it, especially the window management). Rectangle makes it better: https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle

That said, though, Macbooks are far and away the best laptop hardware you can get right now, and the combination of a POSIX/unix-like CLI environment and the ability to run common general-user desktop apps (Adobe/Microsoft/entertainment/etc) is very nice. On Linux you'd have to emulate some of the desktop apps, and on Windows you'd have to use WSL or Docker or such to gain a good *nix shell. And you'd have to put up with all the Windows ad spam and copilot spam.

But I do wish Apple would allow other operating systems on their laptops, and properly support them. I'd love to be able to properly BootCamp into Asahi or Windows for Arm with all the required drivers, etc.
by marcosdumay | 2025-08-23 17:23:50+00:00
It's very much the wrong time to scale carbon capture. Doing some pilot plants for research is a good idea, but if your goal is to see the effects on the global plots, you should be working on something else.

There's a sibling with the long-form reasoning. The problem is that we are pushing a lot of new carbon into the atmosphere, you just won't be able to scale anything enough and there's a really big opportunity cost to try to push the tide away.
by deathanatos | 2025-08-23 17:24:04+00:00
No, WTF-8[1] is a precisely defined format (that isn't that).

If you imagine a format that can encode JavaScript strings containing unpaired surrogates, that's WTF-8. (Well-formed WTF-8 is the same type as a JS string, through with a different representation.)

(Though that would have been cute name for the UTF-8/latin1/UTF-8 fail.)

[1]: https://simonsapin.github.io/wtf-8/
by maciejw | 2025-08-23 17:24:31+00:00
Growing in Poland I'd say Eastern Europe was until recently too poor to afford AC, but also the climate was indeed less extreme just 30 years ago. Nowadays most new detached houses do have AC in at least one room (bedroom or living room) - mine included. Alternatively many new houses have heat pumps. Apartament blocks are less consistent in that matter, but there are interesting initiatives as well - like using combined-heat-and-power citywide heating installations for cooling (by pumping cold water through them).
by ozlikethewizard | 2025-08-23 17:24:42+00:00
I'm British so pretty far north so YMMV, but while it can get hot here these days, it's very rarely hot enough to justify owning an air con unit for the whole year. There's probably 2 weeks of the year at most (and I'm on the south coast) where I feel like I need air con at home. And being on the south coast means the sea and it's breeze are a 10 minute walk away anyways. This does feel like it's changing every year though, definitely not a bad time to get into the AC business.
by wltr | 2025-08-23 17:25:05+00:00
I don’t know for sure, I need to confirm it, but it feels like my similarly specced Arch machine would just shrug at it. It’s a 10 years old PC, yet it feels like it’s a non issue for it to handle this. I bet my MacBook Pro from 2014 (with Arch too) won’t even start a fan. It depends on these 50 tabs, I guess, but the rest is just doesn’t feel like a big deal to handle.
by nicwolff | 2025-08-23 17:25:08+00:00
I've added a subagent to read the "memory_bank" files for project context after being told the task at hand, and summarize only the pertinent parts for the main agent. This is working well to keep the context focused.

https://gist.github.com/nicwolff/273d67eb1362a2b1af42e822f6c...
by mytailorisrich | 2025-08-23 17:25:16+00:00
It's because Europe has managed for the last, what, 30,000 years without AC even around the Med when "normal" temperatures reach 40C under the Sun in summer.

When AC appeared it was a luxury that became affordable so people could do "like Americans".

Now, serious heatwaves are become usual so this may change. But on the other hand, adequate architecture and practices may help, too. Even traditional ones vs "modern" overuse of glass, for example.
by sargstuff | 2025-08-23 17:25:18+00:00
Bit dated, but [1] might be of use. American certification(s) bit more demanding.

Blurb on certification/backround differences [2]

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

[1] : https://www.soa.org/globalassets/assets/library/proceedings/...

[2] : https://www.reddit.com/r/Actuary_news/comments/ox4t30/why_do...
by zahlman | 2025-08-23 17:25:45+00:00
They should have at least all used a single system. Instead, we have:

* European-style combining characters, as well as precomposed versions for some arbitrary subset of legal combinations, and nothing preventing you from stacking them arbitrarily (as in Zalgo text) or on illogical base characters (who knows what your font renderer will do if you ask to put a cedilla on a kanji? It might even work!)

* Jamo for Hangul that are three pseudo-characters representing the parts of a larger character, that have to be in order (and who knows what you're supposed to do with an invalid jamo sequence)

* Emoji that are produced by applying a "variation selector" to a normal character

* Emoji that are just single characters — including ones that used to be normal characters and were retconned to now require the variation selector to get the original appearance

* Some subset of emoji that can have a skin-tone modifier applied as a direct suffix

* Some other subset of emoji that are formed by combining other emoji, which requires a zero-width-joiner in between (because they'd also be valid separately), which might be rendered as the base components anyway if no joined glyph is available

* National flags that use a pair of abstract characters used to spell a country code; neither can be said to be the base vs the modifier (this lets them say that they never removed or changed the meaning of a "character" while still allowing for countries to change their country codes, national flags or existence status)

* Other flags that use a base flag character, followed by "tag letter" characters that were originally intended for a completely different purpose that never panned out; and also there was temporary disagreement about which base character should be used

* Other other flags that are vendor-specific but basically work like emoji with ZWJ sequences

And surely more that I've forgotten about or not learned about yet.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-08-23 17:25:47+00:00
Well first of all, you're implying this measures our consumption at all. But it's left completely vague what this is a median of. They said "A point-in-time analysis quantified the energy consumed per median Gemini App text-generation prompt, considering data from May 2025".

Considering what data? All queries sent to Gemini? Real users? A select few? Test queries from Google?

Does it include AI summaries of google searches? Because if the data includes stuff as simple as "How tall is Lee Pace," that is obviously going to bring the median query down, even if the top distribution is using many times more energy.

But still, the median is not useful by itself. It tells us 50% of the queries measured were under 0.24Wh. It obviously obscures policy-relevant information to not include the mean, but it also obscures what I can do individually without more details on the data. Where am I on this median?

It makes the most sense to provide the entire distribution and examples of data points.
by TranquilMarmot | 2025-08-23 17:26:34+00:00
I used immich-go to upload photos from Google Photos and it worked great, I'm not sure how well that works with iCloud but it's at least a supported option (...although with a TODO next to it)

https://github.com/simulot/immich-go?tab=readme-ov-file#from...

> Are there PAYG hosted instanes of Immich?

I was really surprised to learn that there aren't right now. It sounds like FUTO, the org behind Immich, is working on something like this but they haven't put out any real details so it's probably far off.
by 827a | 2025-08-23 17:26:42+00:00
In less than a year when A16z is finished with the few, pointless experiments they want to run on this and it is relegated to a closet forgotten, some poor founder is going to see it appear as part of their term sheet. "Oh, yes, $75,000 of our $500,000 commit is compensated through this state-of-the-art AI Workstation"
by cyanydeez | 2025-08-23 17:27:26+00:00
I find it funny that type systems often confuse me even though theyre trying clarify the the components, and while in a few more seconds i can parse them, i simply cant scan them.

So even though i can write systdms complicated enought to require good types, because naming fails, i cannot because the use of all the arbitrary symbolics is a speed bump.
by dns_snek | 2025-08-23 17:27:52+00:00
> Documentation exists

Where does a beginner go to learn how to use the package manager these days? It looks like they still won't find any clues in the "Learn" section of Zig's website.

There's a promising page titled "Zig Build System" in there which references a "Package Management" section, but when you click on it, it doesn't exist!
by tannhaeuser | 2025-08-23 17:27:54+00:00
I was surprised this wasn't brought up earlier, as it always is in these discussions. It's trivial to mitigate security risk arising out the use of entities. SGML even has the CAPACITY ENTLVL built-in entity nesting limit.

TBH, a browser has one million other potential leaks and exploits and denials to care about. Unlike a markup language with carefully crafted rules about what to expand in which context, a browser providing a Turing-complete language trivially runs into infinite loops or recursion and could at best heuristically terminate JS code, after using laborious best-efforts methods such as execution traces and watchdog timers. Moreover, JS syntax itself and how it's represented in markup unneccessarily gives rise to obfuscation and escaping attacks. And the browser in addition also plays fast and loose with an ever-expanding, potentially Turing-complete styling language with super complicated styling syntax and constraint-based layout models with a complete lack of formal semantics or any other formal reasoning. CSS itself can contain HTML literals at several places such as data URIs and the content property with questionable escaping, but I guess this is par for the course when CSS is basically just tunneling yet another syntax through HTML attributes and elements. Context Security Policy is just bolted on to limit this pointless and careless gratuitious syntax proliferation, and of course must invent its own little item-value microsyntax to be tunneled through HTTP headers and HTML header tags.

Considering these glaring and obvious deficits weren't discussed at the same time I assume those who brought up XXE and suggested SGML/XML could leak documents or smuggle executable instructions did so in bad faith or were repeating hearsay to sound clever or something.
by jyounker | 2025-08-23 17:28:05+00:00
I think you're overstating his point.

While you can grow them in, lets say, Houston, they're not easy to grow. They get infections at the drop of a hat, and if you so much as turn around, some sort of insect will munch through them. They don't yield much fruit, and the fruits they do yield generally leave something to be desired in the flavor department.

This is his point. The plants don't have much energy to fend off infections or predators, and they don't have much less energy to put into their fruit.

If you put a tomato plant in a more suitable climate, the things are nearly weeds. You put them in a bucket, make sure they get enough water, and you a few months later you have sweet, juicy, flavorful fruit with basically zero effort.

While we've bred cultivars that can be grown in places like Houston or Florida, the plants don't particularly like it.
by DiabloD3 | 2025-08-23 17:28:20+00:00
No, I'm quite aware of how LLMs work. They are statistical models. They have, however, already been caught reproducing source material accurately. There is, inherently, no way to actually stop that if the only training data for a given output is a limited set of inputs. LLMs can and do exhibit extreme overfitting.

As for the Anthropic lawsuit, the piracy part of the case is continuing. Most models are built with pirated or unlicensed inputs. The part that was decided on, although the decision imo was wrong, only covers if someone CAN train a model.

At no point have I claimed you can't train one. The question is can you distribute one, and then use one. An LLM is not simplistic enough to be considered a phonebook, so they can't just handwave that away.

Saying an LLM can do that is like saying an artist can make a JPEG of a Batman symbol, and that's totally okay for them to distribute because the JPEG artifacts are transformative. LLMs ultimately are just a clever way of compressing data, and compressors are not transformative under the law, but possessing a compressor is not inherently illegal, nor is using one on copyrighted material for your own personal use.
by makeitdouble | 2025-08-23 17:28:38+00:00
> the computer is asleep

Technically the macbook never sleeps, it enters a low power mode, except when it's blocked by specific processes or does additional background tasks (updates etc.)

How well it's done on windows or linux depends on the maker of the machine (you, if you built it). The Surface lineup will also enter low power mode as flawlessly, if that's what you care about the most.
by gradientsrneat | 2025-08-23 17:29:52+00:00
With a16z's ridiculous, "spiraling to infinity" press release, or more generally the business culture that appropriates from Jorge Luis Borges' works to justify immense profits, one could generally apply Hanlon's Razor to a degree. With this open letter, I don't see that at all. It emanates pure evil and megalomania.
by Groxx | 2025-08-23 17:30:18+00:00
There are so many of them that I've always kinda suspected this, yea. I maybe-literally never saw anyone in any of them across a few years prior to COVID (despite working near enough to two that I saw them multiple times a day). But at the prices they go for I suppose they might only need to sell ~two a month if they got them for dirt cheap somehow, and owned the property or were grandfathered into extremely low rent? Or one person furnishing a mansion a year.
by mrangle | 2025-08-23 17:30:33+00:00
Since most people are lower income, and therefore a high-market share low unit price gas-station drink company like Monster will by definition have to have its largest customer base be from the largest ie: poorer demographic, the only slightly revelatory information is that the demographic is younger, male, and leans Hispanic.

This doesn't imply that people in higher income brackets don't drink it, even most of them (though probably untrue).

Also pertinent is that the data is specified for Monster Green, which is their full sugar product. Monster Zero is a pretty big product as well, and could have a slightly differing customer base.
by marcusb | 2025-08-23 17:30:35+00:00
A rough price out using new egg/microcenter pricing, substituting a few items where they didn't specify a specific item/brand. I didn't bother trying to figure out what case they used.

Grand total: ~ $41,000

Motherboard https://www.newegg.com/gigabyte-mh53-g40-amd-ryzen-threadrip... $895

CPU https://www.microcenter.com/product/674313/amd-ryzen-threadr... - $3500

Cooler https://www.newegg.com/p/3C6-013W-002G6 $585

RAM https://www.newegg.com/a-tech-256gb/p/1X5-006W-00702 $1600

SSDs https://www.newegg.com/crucial-2tb-t700-nvme/p/N82E168201563... $223 x 4 = $892

GPUs https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16888892012 - $8295 x 4 = $33,180

Case https://www.newegg.com/fractal-design-atx-full-tower-north-s... $195

Power Supply https://www.newegg.com/thermaltake-toughpower-gf3-series-ps-... - $314
by brabel | 2025-08-23 17:30:47+00:00
My god I had to put my Linux (Dell xps13 with Ubuntu from factory, though I installed KDE later) laptop in the drawer as I just couldn’t make it sleep with the lid down. It would simply wake up in the middle of the night and drive me crazy with the fan!! I loved that laptop but it gave me trouble after trouble (stuff like sound breaking after upgrades, Bluetooth failures and many more). My Mac just worked so I use only that now. Though it is old now, around 6 years, and I have to buy a new one soon. Luckily they are having good discount on the M4 right now as I suppose M5 is coming next month?!