MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JulianWasTaken | 2025-08-09 16:18:06+00:00
Not directly relevant, but my PTAC in NYC started having issues this summer just as things got hot (of course).

The compressor would come on for a few seconds then shut off.

After 2 different HVAC companies quoted me $275 to come out (plus hourly and the repair once they find the issue) and then also told me it would be 10 days before they had availability I finally bit the bullet, bought a $30 multimeter, watched a few videos on how capacitor failure is super common and how to hopefully not kill myself, and after confirming with the multimeter and buying the $7 capacitor everything was right back to working with 2 minutes of work.

I did have a moment where I dreaded thinking I'd need to replace the unit and if so whether I'd want a split put in but for $53K I'd better get a third job... Quite glad not to have had to get too far down this road.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-08-09 16:18:17+00:00
While I was being glib, that is an insignificant detail in the context of this post about legacy admissions.

The point is you can gain admission via some nebulous definition of merit, some combination of merit and knowing someone who gained admission before, or paying for admission.

Also, while the “institution” receives the money, I guarantee some people (the highest admins and their friends - fund managers, construction contractors, etc) gain more than most others (e.g. adjunct teachers and students).
by bwfan123 | 2025-08-09 16:18:39+00:00
> What made you believe this is true?

I am yet to see a theory coming of the LLM that is sufficiently interesting. My comment was answering your question of what does it mean to "understanding something". My answer to that is: understanding something is knowing the theory of it.

Now, that begs the question of what is a theory. And to answer that, a theory comprises of building block symbols and a set of rules to combine them. for example, building blocks for space (and geometry) could be points, lines, etc. The key point in all of this is symbolism as abstractions to represent things in some world.
Repoless – DevOps platform for Ruby Devs who hate overpaying for hosting
by Whlthy | 2025-08-09 16:18:48+00:00
Hey HN,

We're launching Repoless tomorrow — a DevOps-as-a-Service platform we built because we were bleeding money on PaaS hosting.

We're a small team building Ruby apps and our PaaS bills were killing. We also did not cherish the alternative of spending hours managing servers on Hetzner.

So we built what we needed, a platform that handles all the DevOps complexity.

Technical details: 1. You provide API keys (Hetzner, Cloudflare, GitHub/GitLab/Bitbucket) 2. Repoless provision and configure everything: Ubuntu, Ruby, PostgreSQL with automated backups, nginx, Let's Encrypt SSL etc 3. Git push triggers builds and zero-downtime deploys 4. You get full SSH access — it's your server, your code, no lock-in

Currently Ruby/Rails focused because that's what we use, but the architecture supports any stack.

We're going live tomorrow on Product Hunt: https://www.producthunt.com/products/repoless

First 50 users get lifetime 20% off and early access: https://repoless.com

We would love some feedback.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-08-09 16:19:05+00:00
I don't know of any MOH recipients in my Irish-American family, but I lost 3 great uncles in WW2 and my grandfather was a paratrooper who survived the war but was wounded in combat (but didn't receive a purple heart) and also injured in a jump. Maybe there is/was an Irish cultural tendency to take the initiative.

Also, some aspects of the stereotype are true: we're violent as fuck, but perhaps that's true of all h. sapiens sapiens.
by 827a | 2025-08-09 16:21:13+00:00
Calories in / Calories out might be broadly accurate, but reality is a lot more complicated than that. People are really bad at tracking how many calories they take in. Its impossible to measure how many calories you're actually exerting with exercise. Its even more impossible to measure how many calories you pee, poop, perspire, breathe, and radiate out. Microvariations across your current body state, body temperature, and even the time of day can influence how efficient your gut is at absorbing incoming energy.

Some people operate with a goal of a caloric deficit of even something as small as e.g. 200kcal. But because all these things are impossible to measure accurately, a difference of just 10% beyond a daily BMR of 2000kcal isn't just a possibility; its the norm. You run for an hour; what if that burns an extra 50kcal that your Apple Watch did not account for? You eat a slice of bread which advertises it contains 80kcal; but it actually contains 100kcal [1]? You sleep poorly, which causes some mild systemic inflammation the next day, which raises your body temperature?

[1] https://health.clevelandclinic.org/are-calorie-counts-accura...
by fransje26 | 2025-08-09 16:21:20+00:00
> "Camry" of Mercedes-Benz in terms of reliability, except it had one huge problem: rust.

Absolutely. The rust.. The rust..!!

> The true "million mile" Mercedes are probably the W123 diesels.

Yes, for sure. And the W124 diesels.

> It's weird how some cars are much more prone to rust than others

Different levels of anti-rust efforts. Where Mercedes-Benz truly angered their clients, was by coming up with a new model with a lot worse rust properties. (Well, they cut corners on other things as well, like the quality of the interior, but the rust would be the first thing you'd notice.)

MB had the know-how and the processes in place to make a car less susceptible to rust, and just decided to go with the cheaper option, clients and longevity be damned.
by JFingleton | 2025-08-09 16:21:56+00:00
When the UK was in the EU, hardly anyone I know voted in the EU elections, and equally they weren't covered by the media. I believe there was so little interest in the EU elections and it felt so far removed from the uk that I'm not sure it really counted as "democratic" (perhaps someone will correct me here?).

I'm hoping voters in European countries feel differently, I suspect not though.
by yakkers | 2025-08-09 16:22:19+00:00
If it's a mechanical one, there's a possibility that it's been repaired or replaced. The mechanism after all these years will likely wear out. At the same time, I know someone with a car whose odometer has been at 249,999km for a few years now.

As for (early) digital odometers, does the soul more specifically exist in the EEPROM chip in the instrument cluster* that stores the odometer data?

*at least on my late-90s car, this is how the odometer/trip meter works.
by musicale | 2025-08-09 16:22:25+00:00
Stanford undoubtedly did the math and determined they would lose money overall (gifts are 7% of Stanford's income, tuition and fees 13%).

Boo-hoo, rich university loses money. Like the 21% Trump tax on endowment income, etc. Maybe they'll have to fire some useless, non-teaching administrators and build fewer country club dorms and luxury amenities, right?

But... Stanford would probably argue that admitting a single less-qualified donor child can cover the financial aid expenses of dozens of qualified students whose parents simply have less money. (Financial aid is 5% of Stanford's budget.)

If this is true, California's goal of banning legacy and (especially) donor admits could have an unintended consequence of reducing the number of qualified but non-rich students who will be admitted.

But... many gifts are restricted, you say! Buildings. Endowed faculty chairs. Particular research centers and programs. Specialized scholarships. Etc. Nonetheless, Stanford has to balance its budget, and even restricted gifts save money and allow them to shift dollars from one place to another. (Note debt service is 4% of the budget as well.)
by alephnerd | 2025-08-09 16:24:04+00:00
Yep. To quote The Bullvine [0] (Axios for the cattle and dairy industry):

"Here’s another force reshaping the industry that has nothing to do with immigration: processor consolidation. According to industry analysis, just three major cooperatives—Dairy Farmers of America, Land O’Lakes, and California Dairies—now handle over 80% of the nation’s milk marketing.

These processors need massive, consistent volumes. New processing plants require millions of pounds of milk per day to operate efficiently. From a logistical standpoint, it’s far more efficient to contract with a dozen 5,000-cow dairies than 500 smaller operations.

I was at a dairy conference in Wisconsin last year where a DFA representative candidly admitted: “We’re building plants that need 4-5 million pounds per day. We can’t deal with 200 small farms—we need 10 large ones.”

This “processor pull” creates powerful incentives for farm-level consolidation. I’ve seen it happen firsthand in regions where a new mega-processing plant opens—suddenly, there’s pressure on every farm in the area to either scale up or get squeezed out"

Also [1]

-----------

The fact that a country like India can support 228 milk cooperatives each generating around $500M-2B in revenue and outcompete American dairy+cattle in production and even reducing environmental impact with marginal subsidizes [2] means distribution+processing consolidation and it's side effects (cattle monoculture, non-competitive prices given to farmers, dairy processers NOW becoming animal feed manufacturers) are a good example of market failures due to oligopolic control.

No one at the WI and MI state Dem level is chatting about this based on some of my own meeting with them recently. This is the kind of swing vote topic that can flip all 3 branches of government in 26 and 28.

If someone like me who has been somewhat hesitant about Lina Khan until after getting deep into the dairy industry recently, I think HNers should recognize the opportunity this provides. 84% of Americans consume dairy and dairy products [3] - this is an easy win if some sympathy was provided.

Yet, the comments I'm seeing here on HN (and with those who I chatted with at the state level Dems) are reminiscent to those who blamed autoworkers and coalworkers for not learning to code back in 2014.

[0] - https://www.thebullvine.com/dairy-industry/dairys-great-cons...

[1] - https://www.thebullvine.com/news/will-your-dairy-farm-surviv...

[2] - https://www.thebullvine.com/dairy-industry/from-extinction-t...

[3] - https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/agriculture/our-insights...
by overgard | 2025-08-09 16:24:09+00:00
One thing that seems to always get lost in the AI hype cycle is actually screening articles by the source. Maybe it's just because in this age of social media we don't have much in the way of journalism. I have zero interest in what Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Thomas Dohmke, etc. have to say because they obviously want to sell something.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-08-09 16:24:14+00:00
> I'll probably always write an obviously correct version first

I’m not usually so confident in my own infallibility, so I prefer to think of it as “I might get this wrong, the LLM might get this wrong, our failure modes are probably not very correlated, so the best thing is for us both to do it and compare.”

Agree it is always better for the human engineer to try writing the critical code first, since they are susceptible to being biased by seeing the LLM’s attempt. Whereas you can easily hide your solution from the LLM.
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-08-09 16:25:46+00:00
When learning how to git bisect, you're learning two things:

1. the specifics of how to use git (*) to carry out a task

2. the conceptual underpinnings of the task, which would exist whether you use git or perforce or bitwarden or any future RCS.

Being overly focused on either #1 or #2 is a mistake. It's not good understanding the task if you don't know how to use the tools you have right now to carry it out (or what available tools are appropriate). It's not good knowing how to run the tools if you don't understand what you're actually doing. The two go hand-in-hand.

(*) not exactly the product of a mega-corp
by NewsaHackO | 2025-08-09 16:26:12+00:00
It's because they always put things that seem way to specific to certain issues, like riddles and arithmetic. Also, I am not a WS, but the mention of "proud boys" are things that can be used as fodder for LLM bias. I wonder why they even have to use a system prompt; why can't that have a separate fine-tuned model for ChatGPT specifically so that they don't need a system prompt?
by k310 | 2025-08-09 16:26:25+00:00
I think that most of us use ad-blockers.

I occasionally have to turn off javascript for the page for un-dismissable nags, and I use readability features all the time thanks to narrow columns and tiny, "gray on light gray background" type.

And worse, when a site asks "Type your email address", and I type "your email address" as it demands, it fails. (JK)
by TFYS | 2025-08-09 16:26:31+00:00
That's like saying anyone with legs can be a professional runner. In theory yes, but not in practice, not in a meaningful way.

Defining poverty as bottom quintile is also useless, yes. Defining poverty by comparing to the average or median income is the most useful definition. Someone earning less than half of average, for example. That tells you how well they can afford the limited resources of any society, as those track the average purchasing power.
by nayuki | 2025-08-09 16:27:33+00:00
The article and comments show that as usual, the general public doesn't use metric prefixes effectively.

While it is technically correct to say "1.2 million km" or "1,200,000 km", it is needlessly verbose. It is written more succinctly as "1.2 Gm (gigametres)". However, it is incorrect to stack prefixes like "1.2 Mkm".

After I point this out, the usual complaints will surface: "But no one knows what a gigametre is! We're all used to talking about odometers in only kilometres. No one uses big prefixes." Oh really? Are you telling me you don't know the difference between a kilobyte and a gigabyte? Should we revert to calling a 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi frequency as "2.4 million kHz", because kilohertz is familiar to people working with audio frequencies and AM radio?

Overall, I think we should use the right prefixes for the right job. If you're talking about city blocks, use metres. If you're talking about a single trip, use kilometres. If you're talking about annual driving distance, use megametres. If you're bragging about how long your car has survived, use gigametres (or at least thousands of megametres).
by sethhochberg | 2025-08-09 16:27:43+00:00
If all of the trades were there on the same day and each could begin their work immediately after the prior specialist had finished it might have taken a day or a few, but it sounds like much of that month was simply waiting. If you're handy and in a part of the world where you can just do all of this work yourself at your own pace its no surprise you can be much faster.

NYC is a famously difficult place to have work like this done, especially in a shared-ownership building like a condo. You need your neighbors to agree its okay to do, your board/management company needs to review and be satisfied with the insurance your contractors carry, the city has requirements for electrical that always require permits and often require a master electrician to do the work, and even once the work starts the walls and spaces you're working in aren't exclusively yours and your contractors will be discovering things along the way... plumbing for that spigot you didn't know your neighbor had on their terrace, roof drains, etc.

The process of just getting approval to do work can vary from "chill but time consuming" in small buildings to "impenetrable bureaucracy so don't bother if you're not using the approved vendors" in large co-ops. Once it starts, that master electrician you hired to run the 220v service isn't gonna waste his time repairing drywall, a cheaper subcontractor will do that, and the latency just cranks up from there

I love city living and understand that most of these rules and regulations exist because bad things happened when they didn't - frankly I wouldn't trust most of my neighbors in buildings I've lived in to do their own electrical work or pierce the building's envelope for any reason - but also sort of understand where the outsider's perception that city homeowner life is hard and expensive comes from. It very often is, by comparison.
by simonw | 2025-08-09 16:28:09+00:00
Because LLMs aren't human beings.

I wrote a note about that here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/using-llms-for-code/#s...

> Don’t fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing LLMs and assuming that failures which would discredit a human should discredit the machine in the same way.
by ipython | 2025-08-09 16:28:40+00:00
They don’t say what the kWh usage is, just that the electricity cost in $$ is over $1000 on the highest month. For a unit surrounded by what should be other conditioned spaces, that’s insane to me.

A quick web search indicates that nyc $/kwh is about 31c. So that’s 3225kwh in one month! My standalone house plus pool pump, dual zone ac, and ev charger doesn’t even come close. Clearly there is a major insulation issue which is the root cause and everything else is just trying to put bandaids on an arterial bleed.
by masklinn | 2025-08-09 16:28:46+00:00
> The entire point of the returned context is that it's cancelled if an error occurs, yet the author never uses it again until after he's done with the errgroup.

`Wait()` also does that. And the examples in the package documentation don't show the context as a way for the caller to be notified that things are done (that's what `Wait()` is for) but as a way for the callees (the callbacks passed to Do) to early abort.

This is mostly confirmed by the discussion dantillberg linked above, where someone suggests passing the errgroup's context down to the callbacks as parameter and the package author replies they don't do that because the lack of inference makes for nasty boilerplate (https://github.com/golang/go/issues/34510#issuecomment-53961...).
by agons | 2025-08-09 16:29:17+00:00
Is there a reason the Zig compiler can't perform type-narrowing for `u` within the `U::A(_) | U::B(_)` "guard", rendering just the set of 2 cases entirely necessary and sufficient (obviating the need for any of the solutions in the blog post)?

I'm not familiar with Zig, but also ready to find out I'm not as familiar with type systems as I thought.
by akshayka | 2025-08-09 16:29:44+00:00
Thanks for the comments. I'm the original creator of marimo.

Habitually running restart and run all works okay for very lightweight notebooks, but it's a habit you need to develop, and I believe our tools should work by default. It doesn't work at all for entire categories of work, where computation is heavy and the cost of a bug is high.

From the blog, you will see that reactive execution not only minimizes hidden state, it also enables rapid data exploration (far more rapid than a traditional notebook), reuse as data apps, reuse as scripts, a far more intelligent module autoreloader, and much more.

marimo is not just another Jupyter extension, it's a new kind of notebook. While it may not be for you, marimo has been open source for over a year and has strong traction at many companies and universities, including by many who you may not view to be "real devs". The question of whether marimo will catch on has already been resolved :)

https://github.com/marimo-team/marimo
by Seb-C | 2025-08-09 16:29:53+00:00
I originally put quotes around "know" and somehow lost it in an edit.

I'm precisely trying to criticize the claims of AGI and intelligence. English is not my native language, so nuances might be wrong.

I used the word "makes-up" in the sense of "builds" or "constructs" and did not mean any intelligence there.
by SoftTalker | 2025-08-09 16:30:06+00:00
> How much money did we save? Not as much as expected. The most expensive month in the next winter was $1000.

$1,000/month to heat a 3br apartment? Holy crap is he keeping it at sauna temperatures? The most I've ever spent on my poorly-insulated 1960's era bilevel house is about $250.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-08-09 16:30:22+00:00
> I see no reason that a Mars base couldn't eventually be entirely self-sustaining.

Seriously?

Problem 1: The atmospheric composition and pressure is trying to kill you at all times. Anyone who lives on Mars will either do so under massive domes to maintain breathable atmosphere at a pressure humans can survive at. Any breach in this dome is fatal to all inside. If we can't make a dome work somehow, we're now all living in tiny, pressurized shelters and any outdoor time at all requires a full EVA suit and is treated as life-threatening.

Problem 2: The law of thermodynamics is also trying to kill you at all times. Average temp is -81 degrees Fahrenheit. You must not only pressurize and condition air for human life, you must also heat it, continuously. If anything happens to your heating system, you are dead within a day.

Problem 3: To grow food will require all the atmospheric support the people already do, plus a reliable source of clean water. Mars has ice caps, but you're nowhere near them unless you land there, and then you better have an even bigger heater to solve Problem 2 with.

> The point of a moon base as a stepping stone to Mars habitation -- again, from 20 year old memories of articles -- is in studying the real-world, long-term effects on humans of living off-Earth, as well as a low-gravity environment in which to assemble the sort of large ship required to move humans such a long distance.

Any humans who live on Mars right now are guaranteed to die there, for the simple fact that it's logistically all but impossible to not only get people there, but to do so in such a way where they have the supplies for a trip home, including fuel for vehicular re-ascent and earth return. Not to mention food, water, living space, and the sort of space vehicle that can travel for 6-8 months, land/remain in orbit for mission duration, then return 6-8 months. If you want to live on mars for a week, you're committing to a year and a half in space, aboard a craft that cannot resupply at any point, no can anything go wrong that requires help from Earth. At our current technology, again, basically suicide.

And again, we could PROBABLY solve these issues, you're right. But we come back again to: why? Mars doesn't have anything we need, and even what could be useful, we have ample supplies back on Earth. A moon base I'll grant would be better for low-G construction, perhaps even of something that could make the journey to Mars itself, but that's a lot of money and risk to use one dead rock to leapfrog to a second dead rock.

And none of this touches on the psychological issues people will deal with being locked in a pressure vessel 270 million miles from home with about 4 sources of imminent death within reach at all times.
by d4mi3n | 2025-08-09 16:31:12+00:00
You have my condolences. I helped my wife care for her late father with Lewy body dementia. I think many people recognize they may need to care for the people that raised them at some point, but the realities of the costs--both financially and emotionally--are rarely discussed. @lemonberry feel free to reach out if you need a friendly ear, my email is in my profile.

On a personal note to anyone in this situation: Do not go it alone. Being a caregiver is hard, but being a caregiver for someone with serious memory issues is brutal and requires 24/7 monitoring. Your loved one will not always cooperate. They may change into someone who does not resemble the person you knew. Many states require such persons to be homed somewhere with a 24/7 nursing staff. Plan accordingly.