MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nkurz | 2025-08-23 16:51:36+00:00
Essentially, wherever AC gets rolled out, heat-related death plunges. Taking Barreca’s estimate and applying it to Europe suggests that as many as 100,000 European lives — 0.013% of the population — could be saved every year if the 80% of European households who don’t have AC were to get it.

Is the effect strong enough to show up in life expectancy tables? Average lifespan is already quite a bit longer in much of Western Europe than the US (https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1lih4a0/oc...) that it surprises me that this would push it even farther. Am I wrong to be skeptical?

For that matter, does it show up in differences between US states? Personally I've lived in 9 different states, 4 which are in the top ten for life expectancy, and I haven't had central air conditioning in any of them. Is this an anomaly? Is there any correlation between air conditioning use within the US and life expectancy?
by dunham | 2025-08-23 16:51:51+00:00
I had a block for a while because I _had_ chosen a name for my language. Suddenly what I was writing was the official implementation, it had to be "right", and I got design paralysis. I found I was making further progress doing exercises outside that repository. (It's all good now, and I have a self-hosted language.)

At the function level, I'll often write the function and then rename it with F2 after I've written it.
by kaffekaka | 2025-08-23 16:51:56+00:00
This is important. I can't speak for GP obviously, but for many people who get up unusually early there is no doubt that it is about having "extra time", but it only means they sleep less than they should or that they simply shifted their sleep (ie no extra time).

There is no free lunch and compromising sleep quality and amount is really a fool proof way into physical and mental issues.
by mythrwy | 2025-08-23 16:52:29+00:00
Sure. I intend to put it in a blog at some point.

I'm several hundred miles due south of you in SE New Mexico, also right along the rocky front range, so similar climate with intense sun and day/night temp swings, although we are much warmer obviously.

The frame of the shade house in the video is cattle panels and the cover is called "aluminet". The cattle panels are hooped and tied to a wooden frame with posts sunk in the ground. It started as a simple 10'x20' structure but I kept adding rooms and and other portions are not hoop type. Someone gave me a 10x10 frame that is very tall from an old "greenhouse" so I tacked that on. The doors are used screen doors also covered with aluminet. It's been an ongoing process over years. But it hasn't been expensive, I would say under $1000 for the entire structure including redoing the cover once. The cover is secured with a zillion zip ties and has nylon straps to keep it from flapping (we get extreme winds).

There is a lot more I could say on the subject but hopefully that gets you some things to look into.
by noirscape | 2025-08-23 16:52:53+00:00
To be fair, the sites resorting to extreme anti-bot measures are also often not the ones that are a clientside JavaScript hell.

Thinking of the most extreme option (throwing proof of work checks at browsers), the main stuff that jumps to mind is sites like sourcehut, Linux Kernel Archives and so on and the admins for all of those sites have noted that the traffic they get is far outside of expectations[0]. Not whatever blogspam ended up on the top of Google search that day.

The badly designed sites are often the ones that don't care about their bandwidth anyways.

[0]: https://drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externali...
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-08-23 16:52:56+00:00
I think CostCo's self-checkouts are best designed/staffed. Other than not accepting cash, they are my favorite (even though still verify scanning of each item, verified by bag-area weighing).

WalMart has two popular designs within my city (not sure if one is just un-updated, yet¿) — their type which accepts half dollars is my favorite cash design.

I have seen designs which don't weigh each item, allowing simultaneous scanning... that also call an attendant to verify if it thinks you snuck an item by (then plays a loop/clip of its alleged violation).

Personally, I have a family member that works as attendant to a dozen self-checkouts... and it seems like it would make more corporate sense to have more human checkers and only allow cash with them.
by SoftwareMaven | 2025-08-23 16:53:23+00:00
While I agree with you almost universally, I think in this case, the pricing is meant to be part of the loss aversion technique the creator is employing.

My problem is there is no such thing as a lifetime subscription anymore. More like "until the company gets acquired and the new parent company gets bored or until I get bored, whichever comes first".
by aliljet | 2025-08-23 16:54:21+00:00
This article is a great way to showcase A16Z standinging head and shoulders above other VCs with REAL technical expertise in the partnership. Love reading this kind of stuff, but the article really needs a price to put this in perspective. It would be the VC that would ignore price, lol, but roughing this out it looks like it costs 45k to build this thing. Seems, at first glance, that this is a cost efficient way to dodge buying a Kia Carnival and get a tier-1 GPU workstation..
by kldg | 2025-08-23 16:54:43+00:00
Yeah, I think it's pretty messy. I bought some keplers a year ago (far below MSRP), and they are fine -- but the trouble becomes software support; sort of like tablets/phones where the hardware's still more than enough, but because software stops supporting it, the landfill becomes landfilled -- excepting those people willing to set up the very specific environments where there's still use in them -- and to that end, obviously the things're more than a decade old, but hardly useless, though it would be fair to say most people would not run them.

If you can keep up software support, the hardware becomes much more valuable both now and later, but this is much harder to do in the consumer space where the software than in the industrial/AI space; I'd say the majority of my PC replacements until I was established financially were the result of software not supporting my hardware (not that it couldn't do the task if there were support, but simply that there was no support), and I should say, too, that in almost every case, I regretted dumping $1k in today-dollars for a single game or application otherwise.

Obviously, the problem's much worse with phones/tablets where most people use them for Cloud activities; people use them for 2-3 years and they go in the trash or their service provider might buy it back essentially as e-waste to be scrapped (despite marketing implications of them being reused to help surgeons in Africa).
by henning | 2025-08-23 16:54:59+00:00
> access to raw compute is still one of the biggest bottlenecks

> We are planning to test and make a limited number of these

So this does approximately nothing to solve the original problem of supply and cost. Even if you sold it at a loss, that GPU is still going to be expensive.

Just be honest and say you thought it would be cool and you're not Y Combinator so you gotta do whatever you can to make your firm seem like a special smart kids club.
by eschneider | 2025-08-23 16:55:30+00:00
So much this. As I've gotten older, instead of working half the night on a difficult end-of-day problem that I'm stuck on, I just set it aside at the end of the day and by the time I start back up in the morning, I've got a good idea how to solve it.

Does it mean THAT problem gets solved later? Sometimes, but often not. And more importantly, I'm maintaining a pace that's SUSTAINABLE. I can crank on hard problems almost constantly, but I leave myself some space so I don't get burned out.
by ozgrakkurt | 2025-08-23 16:55:37+00:00
For me it was very difficult to make an io library on io_uring that is properly safe.

Also using arena and other special allocators in different sections of the program. While maintaining hard memory limits for different sections of the program.

These are possible to do in rust but it is very difficult for me so I decided to just not do it. Otherwise I have to spend 5x the normal amount of time to make sure the library cannot be misused by the user ever.

This is pretty pointless since I’m the only one who is going to use that code anyway.

Could be skill issue or w/e but I just find zig easier to make progress in
by tgv | 2025-08-23 16:56:04+00:00
It's about perception and feelings. If anime cat girls have sexual connotations (for a large enough group), that's the way it is. That critique didn't come out of thin air, and its age is hardly relevant. The association has been established. If you use a symbol that has a certain association, you shouldn't be surprised if people react to that association when they encounter that symbol.

There's nothing wrong with "subjective", by the way. You seem to think it discredits something (can't say what exactly), but this topic is subjective. It's not about logic (as if anything outside maths ever is).
by pron | 2025-08-23 16:56:07+00:00
It isn't optional, and yet it's also not at any cost, or we'd all be programming in ATS/Idris. From those languages' vantage point, the guarantees Rust makes are almost indistinguishable from C. Yet no one says, "the conversation is over unless we all program in languages that can actually guarantee correctness" (rather than one that guarantees the lack of the eighth most dangerous software weakness). Why? Because it's too expensive.

A language like Rust exists precisely because correctness isn't the only concern, as most software is already written in languages that make at least as many guarantees. Rust exists because some people decide they don't want to pay the price other languages take in exchange for their guarantees, but they can afford to pay Rust's price. But the very same reasoning applies to Rust itself. If Rust exists because not all tradeoffs are attractive to everyone, then clearly its own tradeoffs are not attractive to everyone.

The goal isn't to write the most correct program; it's to write the most correct program under the project's budget and time constraints. If you can't do it in those constraints, it doesn't matter what guarantees you make, because the program won't exist. If you can meet the constraints, then you need to ask whether the program's correctness, performance, user-friendliness etc. are good enough to serve the software's purpose.

And that's how you learn what software correctness researchers have known for a long time: sometimes increasing correctness guarantees can have unintuitive cost/benefit interactions that they may even end up harming correctness.

There are similar unintuitive results in other disciplines. For example, in software security there's what I call the FP/FN paradox. It's better to have more FN (false negatives, i.e. let some attacks go through) than more FP (false positives, i.e. block interactions that aren't attacks) because FPs are more likely to lead to misconfiguration or even to abandonment of the security mechanism altogether, resulting in weaker security. So, in software security it's a well known thing that to get better security you sometimes need to make fewer guarantees or try less hard to stop all attacks.
by rlpb | 2025-08-23 16:56:26+00:00
> Degrowth frames climate change as a problem of personal overconsumption and extravagance to be curbed by austere self-restraint and government policy, rather than as a technological problem to be overcome by installing green energy

The elephant in the room is human overpopulation. Every doubling of the population and we'd have to halve our "personal overconsumption and extravagance" to keep the environmental effects the same. We've had more than one doubling in the time I've been alive.

But somehow large families are still celebrated instead of being treated as the eternal "personal overconsumption and extravagance" that they create.
by hn_throw2025 | 2025-08-23 16:56:28+00:00
I’m feeling benefits from just doing 10K steps a day. And that involves putting in earbuds, listening to podcasts or an audiobook, and just wandering around the house. I try to walk after my meals to help digestion. It’s no burden if you’re engrossed in what you’re listening to.

I’ve tried many forms of exercise over the years, but it’s true that consistency beats everything else.
by rotis | 2025-08-23 16:56:42+00:00
Exactly. This is a basic optimization technique and all the dinosaur era databases should have that. But if you build a new database product you have to implement these techniques from scratch. There is no way you shortcut that. Reminds me about CockroachDB and them building a query optimizer[1]. They started with rule based one and then switched to cost based. Feature that older databases already had.

[1] https://www.cockroachlabs.com/blog/building-cost-based-sql-o...
by capitainenemo | 2025-08-23 16:57:41+00:00
Sorry, I'm not a python guy, do you have a script you'd like me to run against python3? Just toss me a pastebin link, and ideally the version of python3 to run, since half the python3 scripts on my system seem to require a different version of python3 from the other half and a variety of isolated sets of python libs in virtual environments (heck, pip even warns you not to try installing libs globally so everyone can use same set these days). I'd rather not try to follow a set of suggestions and then be told I did it wrong.

As for typo, yep. But then, I've left this script essentially untouched for a couple of decades since I was given it.
by jsheard | 2025-08-23 16:58:12+00:00
The technical expertise of... buying four of the fanciest Nvidia GPU and plugging them into an off-the-shelf motherboard in an off-the-shelf chassis? A serious attempt at this kind of build would use the server variant of the RTX6000 and custom air ducts to cool them efficiently, but they packed four blower coolers like sardines so it no doubt sounds like a screaming jet engine under load.
by a-poor | 2025-08-23 16:58:25+00:00
This means you can't pass variables in as function arguments. Even the example in the official go docs doesn't handle the scope correctly:

func main() { var wg sync.WaitGroup var urls = []string{ "http://www.golang.org/", "http://www.google.com/", "http://www.example.com/", } for _, url := range urls { // Launch a goroutine to fetch the URL. wg.Go(func() { // Fetch the URL. http.Get(url) }) } // Wait for all HTTP fetches to complete. wg.Wait() }

https://pkg.go.dev/sync#example-WaitGroup

You need to use this pattern instead:

for _, url := range urls { url := url // ...
by flufluflufluffy | 2025-08-23 16:58:45+00:00
I read their website landing page but it’s still kinda confusing — what exactly is readyset? It all sounds like it’s a cache you can set up in front of MySQL/postgres. But then this article is talking about implementing joins which is what the database itself would do, not a cache. But then the blurbs talk about it like it’s a “CDN for your database” that brings your data to the edge. What the heck is it?!
Ask HN: Solar+WiFi IP Security Cameras?
by beezle | 2025-08-23 16:58:47+00:00
Need three or four security cams on my property and power and connectivity are an issue that is not resolved without significant costs thus solar and wifi are musts.

The use case is good triggered image capture and occasional brief streaming, both locally and remote. Pan/tilt is nice but not essential if fixed wide angle.

Having a hard time trying to figure out what is garbage and what is actually worth considering. Just too much SEO/AI/fake reviews.

I doubt I'm the first on HN with these requirements so asking what the community has found to work well. Be gentle,

Ideally like to keep in the $150 per cam range and not be tied to vendor clouds or phone apps. Because I'll need the ability to view remote, security very is important too. I do have a remote server that can act as image repository.
by ck2 | 2025-08-23 16:58:49+00:00
Someday, maybe 100 years from now, someone is going to figure out a minimal codeset to "bootstrap" machine-learning for a wide range of devices so they basically teach themselves slowly but steadily and then each other

and at first it's going to be absolute amazing, followed by absolutely terrifying

The robots teaching themselves soccer (football) still sticks in my mind - at first they were falling over but after many iterations they had learned to pass the ball sideways and backwards to yet move it forwards to the goal
by mhh__ | 2025-08-23 16:59:40+00:00
1) they also brought about net zero, do you think they're so different?

2) labour are absolutely balls deep on this. "If you use a VPN you are either Jimmy saville or worse Nigel farage" says Peter Kyle.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/29/peter-kyle-...

The meta point here is that both parties are basically the dregs of the last generation of politicians to not be "native" to the interner and are now having one last go at ramming it into a box (e.g. all the bad stuff is shoved into X dot com) which they can ban.

The thing is there's a decent chance it'll work. We have beaten out any liberal or even conservative sentiment in mass consciousness
by tfourb | 2025-08-23 17:00:10+00:00
CO2 emissions are not the driving force behind economic development. Energy is. And energy generation has been decoupled from CO2 emissions in almost every major economy, including China. Heck, in many countries economic growth has been decoupled even from energy use, with economies growing while energy use shrinks.

And while technological innovation is always nice, we always possess all the technology we need to get rid of the vast majority of emissions today. It’s just a question of implementation (ie the political will to spend some money and maybe reduce the share price of a few fossil fuel companies).
by dehrmann | 2025-08-23 17:00:13+00:00
> With a P/E of 530 its hard to imagine a better short opportunity in the market

Bitcoin has an infinite P/E.

Edit: P/E is also goofy for barely profitable companies. If you plot earnings on the x axis, P/E on the y, and hold price constant, you'll get a 1/x curve. It's not continuous at zero, and it ramps up quickly.
by lupusreal | 2025-08-23 17:00:21+00:00
I have read that the French media have a talking point about AC being dangerous because walking into a cool building during a hot day might harm people through "thermal shock". It's almost too stupid for me to believe this is genuinely a claim made in France.

Perhaps some people in Europe are reacting against AC in a very silly way because they associate AC with America and some sort of national pride or ego gets in the way of rational thought about the subject.
by mnbpdx | 2025-08-23 17:00:35+00:00
Just double checking...we agree that this is suboptimal, right? Since might does not in fact equal (moral) right?

I'm not arguing for any previous arguments here, just want to argue that "might makes right" is a very dangerous system.

Strawman-ing: It sounds like the argument is "might implies right because you must have done something right to get that money"

There's a lot wrong with that. You didn't earn the money often, because inheritance. And we're assuming the "right" things you did to earn that money for capitalism maps somehow to "right" things for humanity, which obviously isn't a direct 1-1.

And imagine that logic flipped: "Less might makes less right" -> "less might implies less right because you must have done something wrong to not have money". Like, say that to a 5 year old, poor descendent of slaves.

But again, I'm strawman-ing. Just wanted to get that out there.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-08-23 17:00:41+00:00
Air conditioning has long been very rare in homes in Vancouver, but that's been changing in the past decade after a series of summer heat waves and rising temperatures. It's become a problem as many landlords and stratas ban the installation or operation of air conditioners, especially in older buildings where the wiring wasn't intended to support air conditioning loads. This has led to recent court battles where renters try to fight the bans, and also resulted in British Columbia updating the building code to ensure that all new buildings have at least one climate-controlled room (although it can be passively cooled).
by f4c39012 | 2025-08-23 17:00:56+00:00
I stayed in a house in Rome that kept out the fierce summer heat, because of thick walls. AC would be redundant. In other places, like Hong Kong, the thin walls of the apartments need AC to remain liveable in summer. I've read about the lack of shade in many built environments. Seen TV shows where someone builds floor-to-ceiling panoramic windows in a location that would be below 0 for much of the year. Unsustainable construction drives AC use and greenhouse gas emission that makes the problem worse.
by alephnerd | 2025-08-23 17:00:59+00:00
> Deregulate RISC-V

What does that even mean?!?

It's already OSS and royalty free. I've participated Series A and B rounds on startups working on RISC-V design.

> threaten Intel with loss of IP if they can't profit on fabs

Investing in Capex is inherently going to put you in a loss for several quarters

> threaten to cut Softbank off of American companies if Masayoshi Son won't onshore RISC manufacturing

He doesn't own RISC-V IP.

-------

This is why I hate HN now. ICs with no domain expertise think they should have a voice.
by chrismorgan | 2025-08-23 17:01:20+00:00
I’m not calling it irrelevant, just not part of the actual proposal and ensuing furore, which began this month. We discover there have been mutterings of this for years, and certainly those things led up to it, but this was the first public intimation. They don’t ever say “hi public, we know this is the first you’ve heard about it, but we’re removing a major feature next month”, which is basically what you were claiming (or what it amounted to). Far simpler and less controversial changes have taken many months to be shipped.
by JustExAWS | 2025-08-23 17:01:45+00:00
So here are a list of companies that are doing something with AI that are funded by YC.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44981253

How many of them do you think will be around in a year or have a successful exit?

As far as you idea of adding ads to a gen AI products, what customer are you targeting and why should any company use your potential product instead of just doing something in house?

What is your “unfair advantage”?
by jkaplowitz | 2025-08-23 17:01:47+00:00
I’m not arguing against compensation and other dissuasive/retributive punishment - I did call it a misdeed. Suitable compensation and punishment are absolutely appropriate.

But yes, I am arguing that four years of prison time (there’s also three years of supervised release - so seven years of court oversight total) is disproportionate punishment, and probably any prison time at all for this act. Prison makes the most sense for violent criminals.

I am fine with lots of other compensatory and punitive consequences, including the criminal conviction itself which should not be underestimated as a public record visible in background checks, at least some kinds of orders restricting future activities with computers and/or his former employer for a suitable duration, plus whatever monetary consequences are deemed appropriate.
by TranquilMarmot | 2025-08-23 17:01:50+00:00
Mapy looks nice!

> But there's no substitute for GMap's POI database.

I was surprised to see that Kagi uses Apple's POIs for searching maps. It seems to be pretty decent, and Apple is at least a little more privacy-friendly. Lately I've been using Kagi to search for businesses then opening the directions in Google Maps.

I tried using OSM directions, but the walking time calculations are always really far off from what Google Maps says. I don't drive anymore, only walk and public transit, so I can't really speak to how well OSM's driving directions are.