MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cavisne | 2025-08-10 03:29:03+00:00
I have a similar experience with a heat pump saving a lot less money than I expected.

Poor insulation does not explain it, a heat pump should still be heating that poorly insulated space at much higher efficiency that space heaters.

The physics makes sense but I wonder how strictly these units are tested. The control loops for things like deicing the outdoor coils are complex.
by cheschire | 2025-08-10 03:30:25+00:00
I set aside some money for a monitor and it was years before I got a good one. one day at Costco I was walking by this monitor I had been eyeing for about six months. It was on sale. Last one. Floor model. No box, no book, just the monitor and the power cable. Saved $150. Cost about $350 after the mark down. It’s been great for over a year without any issues.

Your deal will come! Just keep your eyes open and your budget prepped.
by mockingloris | 2025-08-10 03:30:25+00:00
Is it okay; I took some liberties and REworded your entry for light readers.

--- EASY READING: ---

--- Why Boring Businesses Beat the AI Hype ---

Everyone’s chasing the AI gold rush—every pitch deck screams "AI-powered," and startups claim to be "ChatGPT for X." But while entrepreneurs crowd into overhyped markets, the real money lies in solving unglamorous, overlooked problems.

--- The Hidden Gold in "Boring" Problems ---

Take government assistance forms: a bureaucratic nightmare of confusing paperwork. One company tackled this "unsexy" issue and now generates $30M in annual revenue. Why? They fished where others weren’t—solving a real pain point with paying customers.

--- AI Startup Risks ---

Commodity Trap: As AI tools become common, differentiation vanishes. Your AI chatbot looks like everyone else’s.

Hype Hangover: When the AI bubble bursts, investors will demand profits, not demos. Many AI startups lack a path to profitability.

Dependency Risk: Building on evolving AI models means one API change can break your business.

--- Advantages of Boring Businesses ---

Less Competition: Entrepreneurs chase trends, leaving mundane problems underserved.

Sticky Customers: Solving operational headaches creates deep integration, making your solution hard to replace.

Predictable Revenue: Ongoing problems lead to reliable subscription income.

Lower Acquisition Costs: Real solutions spread through word-of-mouth.

--- How to Find Your "Boring" Gold Mine ---

Start with Pain Points: What frustrates you daily? If it annoys you, it likely annoys others.

Mine Your Network: Ask colleagues, “What’s the worst part of your job?” or “What wastes your time?” Look for patterns.

Spot Manual Processes: Spreadsheets or faxed forms in 2025? That’s an opportunity.

Follow Complaints: Reddit, Twitter, and forums are treasure troves of broken processes begging for solutions.

--- Takeaway Skip the AI hype. ---

Find a boring, underserved problem, solve it well, and build a business with real staying power.
by jdpage | 2025-08-10 03:32:13+00:00
Buy in bulk if it's cheaper per unit that you buy, and per unit if it's cheaper per unit that you use. (EDIT: with the understanding that you're unlikely to buy much more than you use if just-in-time per-unit purchasing is available). No, it's not groundbreaking advice, but it's a very easy trap to fall into, especially if you're talking to someone who's good at selling you stuff.

I'm sure we've all had an experience at least once where we've bought something in a larger container from the grocery store thinking we were getting a deal, only to find that we didn't get through it as fast as we thought we would, it started spoiling, and we got to scrape our savings into the trash can.

And many of us have had an experience where someone higher up in the company has insisted that we use a tool that isn't very good "because we've already paid for it", so it's clearly needed advice, even if it's not groundbreaking. Everyone sometimes needs "obvious" conclusions pointed out to them, I think. It's a quirk of our mental processing as humans.
by beoberha | 2025-08-10 03:33:26+00:00
Ignoring the ridiculous complexity of Entra and how easy it is to not realize you’re making a mistake with it (especially internal at Microsoft where there’s no delineation between all the internal tenants you need to support and 3P customer tenants), it’s really scary how people think an auth token is the only layer of security you need. These sites shouldn’t have ever been exposed to public internet (they’re not now). Network security is such an afterthought but it’s the best layer of defense you can have!
by refulgentis | 2025-08-10 03:33:39+00:00
I will forever remain radicalized how every tech company decided to just say fuck it in 2023. (ex-Google and left in 2023 over similar shenanigans)

Should be a major public reckoning over this. But there can't be, they hold the cards, the only real view of this you'd have is day-to-day on Blind and some occasional posts that stir honest discussion here.

I guess we just get to grin and bear it while they give gold statues and millions to the right politicians.
by RainyDayTmrw | 2025-08-10 03:35:38+00:00
I think legacy admissions are bad and wrong. But I also don't think that removing legacy admissions will make a dent, not on the state of college admissions, and especially not on any broader socioeconomic context. Prestige schools doing bad things only highlights that it's a mistake to let prestige schools exist in the first place.
by runako | 2025-08-10 03:36:00+00:00
> I've noticed reduced hours, reduced staff, and increased prices

Anecdotally, this also describes how things have played out in the South generally. (Southern states generally have no set minimum wage, so they mostly default to the $7.25/hr set in 2009.) Perhaps this is different in other regions?

I have similarly stopped going to most "fast" food restaurants because the waits are interminable.

This is in states where an hour of minimum-wage labor will not gross you enough money to buy a pound of store-brand ground beef.

It's not the wage.
by billy99k | 2025-08-10 03:37:45+00:00
I used to phish scammers for fun. Most are greedy and stupid. My favorite tactic was to get them to click on a link (usually pretending to be to my bank account, or something they want, actually pointing to my domain) and then have a fake re-auth page for whatever web-based email address they were using where I collected their username/password.

It worked 100% of the time. I usually logged in, changed the password on them, and then proceeded to loot the email account of credentials/other interesting information and warn anyone they were directly contacting that they were being scammed. My goal was to shutdown the entire operation.

The sad part is that it was mostly romance scams with elderly men and women that just lost their spouse, and didn't believe me when I told them they were being scammed.

It gets more complex these days with 2FA, but it's nothing evilginx can't solve.
by orbital-decay | 2025-08-10 03:38:32+00:00
>what you can't see from the map is many of the chains start in English but slowly descend into Neuralese

That's just natural reward hacking when you have no training/constraints for readability. IIRC R1 Zero is like that too, they retrained it with a bit of SFT to keep it readable and called it R1. Hallucinating training examples if you break the format or prompt it with nothing is also pretty standard behavior.
by gonzobonzo | 2025-08-10 03:40:49+00:00
> You’re comparing human beings working to survive to used vehicles.

You could flip this and say "you're comparing people who are selling off an essential possession just to survive to a bit of company work."

The way people frame things in completely different ways to justify their preexisting beliefs is part of the reason why it's difficult to get people to consider other possibilities. The person could be doing their job to survive, or they could be working a few hours on a fun job on the weekend for a bit of extra cash. A person might just be getting rid of their used vehicle, or they might be giving up an essential possession because they're in dire straights.
by throwaway3060 | 2025-08-10 03:44:43+00:00
There is so much wrong in this statement, but more history required to explain it than a single post can cover. I'll try to cover only a few right now:

- The more famous antisemitic movement in Germany, while still fully responsible for its actions, used earlier Russian-published conspiracy theories as its foundational documents.

- The antisemitism of the late Russian empire was to the point that millions left to escape it.

- In the late Stalin years, Jewish figures of note would end up either assassinated or imprisoned, with rumors abounding of a mass deportation coming.

- In the years beyond and up to the collapse, Jewish culture, language, and religion were almost completely suppressed. References to the Holocaust could not mention Jews as victims. Systematic and state antisemitism was tacitly allowed, even encouraged.

- By the time of the collapse, almost all Jewish cultural knowledge had ceased to exist, only the most basic and vague knowledge remained. (Contrary to popular belief, the Nazis only played a partial role here once they lost - much of this culture still existed in 1945).

To diminish the intense level of antisemitism by comparing it to anything in America is absurd, and highly problematic.
by tlogan | 2025-08-10 03:44:44+00:00
While pitched as “helping people,” California’s fast-food minimum wage law has a different goal: reshaping the state’s tourism appeal. By making dining out feel more distinctive (and by nudging the market toward small restaurants and local chains) it’s a strategic play to make California a cooler place to visit and eat.

That’s how I’ve interpreted it - because otherwise, it makes little sense why the wage for the same work would vary based on the size of the company.
by CityOfThrowaway | 2025-08-10 03:45:44+00:00
I agree that it might not be reasonable to expect people to keep up with the latest.

For this specific thing (LLM-assisted coding), we are still in nerd territory where there are tremendous gains to be had from keeping up and tinkering.

There's a lot of billions dollars being invested to give devs who don't want to do this the right tools. We aren't quite there yet, largely because the frontier is moving so fast.

I made my original comment because it was so far from my experience, and I assumed it was because I am using a totally different set of tools.

If somebody really doesn't want to be left behind, the solution is to do the unreasonable: read hacker news everyday and tinker.

Personally, I enjoy that labor. But it's certainly not for everybody.
by rtkwe | 2025-08-10 03:46:26+00:00
I actually looked at getting a sheet of these when I was at Treasury after touring the printing but they charge a pretty steep markup for their bill sheets. It goes as high as just shy of 200% for the smaller 4 note sheets (sold for $22) and gets better until you reach their full sheets which are 32 notes (still sold for $102). Ended up not getting one because of that.

They'll happily ship them to your door if you're interested: https://www.usmint.gov/paper-currency/uncut-currency/?start=...
by o11c | 2025-08-10 03:48:29+00:00
That sounds concerning, especially since Debian had hard-coded (!) a tiny /boot partition for encrypted disks for a long time. This already caused problems quite frequently (you have to manually delete them quite frequently, and which inhibits your ability to revert after a kernel regression - which, hm, I have noted to have been relatively common for Debian 12 "Bookworm" compared to usual ... hopefully Trixie is better, but if it makes the kernel-management problem harder that's a bad sign)
by SV_BubbleTime | 2025-08-10 03:48:30+00:00
100% opposite experience.

Whether agentic, not… it’s all about context.

Either agentic with access to your whole project, “lives” in GitHub, a fine tune, or RAG, or whatever… having access to all of the context drastically reduces hallucinations.

There is a big difference between “write x” and “write x for me in my style, with all y dependencies, and considering all z code that exists around it”.

I’m honestly not understand a defense of copy and paste AI coding… this is why agents are so massively popular right now.
by 3vidence | 2025-08-10 03:49:35+00:00
In a non-smug kind of way sometimes I just wonder if they types of problems I work on are just harder (at least for an LLM) than a lot of people.

Currently working at a FAANG on some very new tech, have access to all the latest and greatest but LLMs / agents really do not seem adequate working on absolutely massive codebases on entirely new platforms.

Maybe I will have to wait a few years for the stuff I'm working on to enter the mass market so the LLMs can be retrained on it.

I do find them very very useful as advanced search / stack overflow assistants.
by makeitdouble | 2025-08-10 03:49:53+00:00
That sounds incredibly obvious on the face of it though ?

Having the study at hand is nice of course, but environnemental factors being alleviated through money and discriminatory policies is rampant enough I don't get the surprise.

People using high quality water filters or straight buy clean water tanks in areas where tap water is bad, getting better indoor air filtering, blocking construction of pollution sources to move them further away (near poorer areas) in the county, redlining/manipulateing zoning rules to make it systematic etc.

It's a old as humans.
by rayiner | 2025-08-10 03:50:38+00:00
Yes, that's been a blackpill for me. When you look at these institutions today you see what looks like assimilation, but it's superficial. For example, you might see WASPs and non-WASPs at Harvard aligned in support of social programs. But the former are motivated by self-sacrifice at the expense of their own group, while the latter often are motivated by self-interest in favor of their own group. Similarly, for the former, any sort of ethnic identity or in-group preference is condemned while for the latter those attitudes often are promoted or encouraged. At Harvard, it is not taboo for anyone to say "my ancestors built this country”—except for those whom that statement is the most true.
by realitysballs | 2025-08-10 03:52:07+00:00
Good link.

My interpretation here is that the location of a missing device can be passed around via Bluetooth mesh but that the last send must be sent via cellular or WiFi back to iCloud. So it’s P2P to relay getting location info back to final device with internet connection back to iCloud but the finder still need to connect to iCloud to view updated location.

“Find My works offline by sending out short range Bluetooth signals from the missing device that can be detected by other Apple devices in use nearby. Those nearby devices then relay the detected location of the missing device to iCloud so users can locate it in the Find My app—all while protecting the privacy and security of all the users involved.”
by ggm | 2025-08-10 03:52:46+00:00
Volcanic ash is highly productive and at the very least you would think latifundia would be there. If opportunistically you can find an old water cistern and turn it into an oven, why not?

Modern day Indonesian and Philippines and Pac rim Island farmers don't stay away from volcanoes any longer than they have to. Mud flows different. Ash? That's plantable. And tuff forms, you can build with it.
by stordoff | 2025-08-10 03:53:00+00:00
According to https://www.whatsmydns.net/#A/mylinkdrive.com, it resolves in most of the US locations and in Japan, China, and Singapore, but fails elsewhere.

https://dnschecker.org/#A/mylinkdrive.com gives similar results - resolves fine in North America (US/Canada/Mexico) and a few other counties (Brazil/Ireland/Russia/China, and one of the two Australia sites), but fails elsewhere (including in Singapore).

Geoblocking seems like a possibility.
by gus_massa | 2025-08-10 03:54:09+00:00
A degree is also about learning the tools of the trade, so I don't find this surprising. Before a Ph.D. in Math, you need to know Calculus 1 and 2, Differential Equations 1 and 2, a few Algebras, Topology, and I'm still missing like half of the courses.

Moreover, if you try to enter a Ph.D. in Math in my university and you have a degree in other area, it's usual to require as first mandatory course the last few courses of undergraduate degree.

Anyway, I don't understand why the other universities didn't offer her a full grant to pay the tuition+.
by jiggawatts | 2025-08-10 03:54:44+00:00
A simple model is that most countries internally are made up of many "competing communist orgs". Each large company is internally a communist dictatorship. Employees don't choose their bosses, and have no voting power whatsoever in the general case. Employees share the means of production, and the fruits of their labour is redistributed largely evenly, even if some employees are 10x or 100x as productive as others. It's only entire companies that compete in the capitalist free market sense.

This is... fine. Capitalism encourages innovation and efficiency, while Communism provides individual safety and reduces wealth inequality. Neither works in pure form, so just about every country combines the two.
by inkyoto | 2025-08-10 03:56:38+00:00
> Main deal breaker for me when I tried it was I couldn't talk to multiple models at once […]

… which seems particularly strange considering the size of the cloned GitHub repository to be 1.8GiB which swells up to 4.8GiB after running «make build» – I tried to build it locally (which failed anyway).

It is startling that a relatively simple UI frontend can add 3Gb+ of build artefacts alone – that is the scale of a Linux kernel build.
by darksaints | 2025-08-10 03:59:58+00:00
As someone who kinda followed this debate for a while, I will point out that there is actually a large split down the middle of the on whether minimum wage increases decrease employment. And that split isn't actually due to ideological bias (which is the usual accusation), but rather methodology: almost all of the studies which confirm employment reductions use one methodology, and almost all of the studies which do not confirm employment loss use another methodology, and there is a large debate in econometrics as to how reasonable the assumptions are for each of the two methodologies.

One thing that always seems to be at a disconnect between the economic literature and policy makers is the economic context of the raise in wages. Even those economists that have bought in fully that minimum wage increases don't typically decrease employment will have several caveats to that statement, usually worded in the form of "small increases in the minimum wage". That is to say that there are often small inefficiencies in our current markets which allow employers to reduce wages in cartel-like fashion, and small increases in the minimum wage can claw some of that back in favor of the employees at the expense of employers' economic rents, but not at the expense of economic output. But large increases in the minimum wage absolutely can jump the shark, decreasing economic output by effectively making low margin sectors untenable entirely. If that weren't the case, we would be able to raise it infinitely without any negative effects, which is absolutely absurd (and unfortunately that is the takeaway that ideologues often get from reading abstracts).

A more useful economic model would go a step further than just saying "you can raise the minimum wage without harm to the economy", by incorporating econometric analysis which can accurately predict when and how much you can raise it without incurring economic harm.
by refactor_master | 2025-08-10 04:01:11+00:00
Question as a complete outsider: If I run idempotent Python applications in Kubernetes containers and they crash, Kubernetes will eventually restart them. Of course, knowing what to do on IO errors is nicer than destroying and restarting everything with a really bigger hammer (as the article also mentions, you can serve a better error message for whoever has to “deal” with the problem), but eventually they should end up in the same workable state.

Is this conceptually similar, but perhaps at code-level instead?
by doctorpangloss | 2025-08-10 04:01:17+00:00
NVIDIA drivers send detailed telemetry.

Windows and macOS send detailed telemetry.

You have to install the pip packages and the models, which all come from websites, which collect detailed telemetry.

You don’t think Microsoft gathers detailed telemetry on all your interactions with GitHub?

The local setup doesn’t really help with that.
by vivzkestrel | 2025-08-10 04:02:52+00:00
Stupid question but I had to ask, let us say instead of training anything, you start off with a completely different idea. You take a node, fluctuate its weights from -0.1 to 0.1, then you add another node with the same thing, then you add a 100 more nodes, 1000 more, another layer of 1000 more, and then you take the first math problem, tweak weights to get the right answer, take the second math problem, tweak weights to get the right answer, do this a billion times, maybe a trillion. will you eventually reach end up making a GPT?
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-08-10 04:03:25+00:00
I tried to reproduce it again just now, and ChatGPT 5 seems to be a lot more meticulous about running a python script to double-check its work, which it tells me is because it has a warning in its system prompt telling it to. I don't know if that's proof (or even if ChatGPT reliably tells the truth about what's in its system prompt), but given what OpenAI does and doesn't publish it's the closest I could reasonably expect.
by grepfru_it | 2025-08-10 04:05:12+00:00
You don’t get the “full warranty” when you DIY hvac installs. You also need to call a licensed hvac tech to charge your system if it doesn’t come precharged. Mini splits are easy and I would 1000% DIY. Big, attic mount blower units I would leave to the pros for so many reasons. That said my cousin installed a 21 SEER unit for $5k. I was quoted $35k for the same system (:
by goosejuice | 2025-08-10 04:07:09+00:00
Somewhat, yes but it's much less powerful. In the BEAM these are trees of supervisors and monitors/links that choose how to restart and receive the stacktrace/error reason of the failure respectively. This gives a lot of freedom on how to handle the failure. In k8s, it's often just a dumb monitor/controller that knows little about how to remediate the issue on boot. Nevermind the boot time penalty.

https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/1.18.4/Supervisor.html

BEAM apps run great on k8s.
by esjeon | 2025-08-10 04:08:21+00:00
Ah, sorry, I did get that part, and my idea goes a little bit further, but somehow I thought I wrote enough.

One thing is that this problem occurs because we have two independent channels that we must independently verify. I’m pretty sure this is a whack-a-mole game, and will never be possible to fix.

Another thing is that, since we don’t trust emails, we hesitate sending links over email. However, the problem here is easy to avoid if services send login links directly to user, and those emails are automatically authenticated by the system.
by cakealert | 2025-08-10 04:09:09+00:00
People forget that while having a meritocracy is best for society, society doesn't make decisions, individuals do. And those individuals make decisions for their own benefit, not that of society. Colleges strike a balance by having some fraction be meritocracy, but going all in would be fatal.

Networks of wealth and power will start to congregate elsewhere and if necessary sabotage the place which now hostile to their interests (which includes that of their offspring).