MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Finding Community in the Bay
by verycoolburner | 2025-10-19 15:13:39+00:00
I'll be moving to the Bay in a few months for a new job a little west of San Jose. I write code; my niche is too specific for an anonymous post. I've lived in the Great Lakes region my whole life. I'm married with no kids. My spouse is also from the Midwest, as are both of our families.

My spouse and I agreed it would take a miracle for us to ever move to the Bay... but then a miracle actually happened. Dream job, dream company. Dream paycheck, too. I should be happy, but I'm so anxious. We love our life here in the Midwest. We love art, and thrifting. We're moving away from a tight-knit support structure of friends and family. My spouse has a disability that prevents them from driving. I'm afraid that we'll feel isolated and lonely in the Bay.

How many Great Lakes transplants are out there? Where have you found community?
by Loughla | 2025-10-19 15:13:55+00:00
Why? Unlimited speed and unlimited compute means it can spend its time in Infinite Fun Space without us. It could simulate entire universes tweaked subtly to see what one small parameter change does.

The reason AI won't destroy us for now is simple.

Thumbs.

Robotic technology is required to do things physically, like improve computing power.

Without advanced robotics, AI is just impotent.
by acdha | 2025-10-19 15:14:08+00:00
There are complex trade offs there: housing uses more power than a parking lot but it also provides far more significant social goods, housing can be built with very different levels of energy usage and external heat emissions, and while people need housing they don’t need cars the same way so you can offset a substantial fraction of the pollution from housing by reducing the number of cars used by residents.

The main lesson I draw is that everything would improve by taxing externalities: the land is vacant because the property owners doesn’t have enough incentive to do something useful with it and we have a lot of inefficiency in our housing and transportation which a carbon tax would go a long way towards reducing.
by qgin | 2025-10-19 15:14:40+00:00
We’re working on all-purpose human replacements.

Imagine if the tractor made most farm workers unnecessary but when they flocked to the cities to do factory work, the tractor was already sitting there on the assembly line doing that job too.

I don’t doubt we can come up with new jobs, but the list of jobs AGI and robotics will never be able to do is really limited to ones where the value intrinsically comes from the person doing it being a human. It’s a short list tbh.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-10-19 15:15:04+00:00
doesn't seem possible.

It says that it should follow 302 as if it was published in 1978 if it was not heretofore copyrighted, and it wasn't, and it should follow section 302 which starts with

"Copyright in a work created on or after January 1, 1978, subsists from its creation and, except as provided by the following subsections, endures for a term consisting of the life of the author and 70 years after the author’s death."

seems like it should be out of copyright in 2039.
by DemocracyFTW2 | 2025-10-19 15:15:39+00:00
The motor in this car works by separating water into hydrogen and oxygen gas. These gases then combine in a reaction that generates energy, allowing the car to move. As the engine operates, it produces steam, making it environmentally friendly.—https://techstory.in/water-fueled-cars-a-revolutionary-break...

As per Mr W Biggar, the writer of the letter to thenational.scot, tap water was used to fill the tank of the allegedly water-powered car, and tap water is also what dripped out of the exhaust pipe (not necessarily the same amount).

techstory.in corroborates that the operational principle is in splitting H2O and then letting it recombine. It should come as no surprise that one of these steps, being inverses of each other, will be endothermic ('consume' energy) and the other, exothermic ('produce' energy, in the form of heat). Moreover, the second law of thermodynamics to my understanding means that if you first split water into hydrogen and oxygen, then let the two elements re-combine to make the heat do work, you've just down-cycled a potentially more useful source of energy (e.g. electricity needed to do electrolysis) into a less useful one, namely a relatively low temperature difference between parts of the engine that can be used to do work.

It would've been more efficient to put the electricity into a heating element to vaporize water instead of going through the extra steps that just lead to more dissipation of waste heat.
by alterom | 2025-10-19 15:15:46+00:00
>I'm very much pro hyper-automation, especially for all government work... but can't help but think this type of branding is just in bad faith and that these are not good people.

>It just screams fried-serotonin circuits to me. I don't like it. I looked at the site for 2-3 seconds and I want nothing to do with these guys.

Enlightenment is realizing they aren't any different from those other guys.

>Edit: They got me with the joke, being in this field there are people that do actually talk like that, both startups and established executives alike.

And what's your conclusion from that?
by scosman | 2025-10-19 15:15:52+00:00
Saying it isn't useful is a bit of an overstatement. It can search, churn through 500k words in a few minutes, and come back with summaries, answers, and sources for each point.

Should you blindly trust the summary? No. Should you verify key claims by clicking through to the source? Yes. Is it still incredibly useful as a search tool and productivity booster? Absolutely.
by ipnon | 2025-10-19 15:16:05+00:00
If this becomes unfit for habitation it will likely stay in the skyline indefinitely. 1 Seaport has had construction stalled since 2017 because of a 3 inch tilt off axis. The default in NYC is to let the concrete stand as a monument to failure. Perhaps it’s for the best. Every time New Yorkers raise their eyes to the sky they are reminded of state of local real estate.
by mrbungie | 2025-10-19 15:16:34+00:00
> Sure, but isn't that moving the goalposts?

It can be considered as that, sure, but anytime I see Lecun talking about this, he does recognize that you can patch your way around LLMs, the point is that you are going to hit limits eventually anyways. Specific planning benchmarks like Blockworld and the like show that LLMs (with frameworks) hit limits when they're exposed to out-of-distribution problems, and that's a BIG problem.

> We now have "agents" that can work a problem for hours, with self context trimming, planning to md files, editing those plans and so on. All of this just works, today. We used to dream about it a year ago.

I use them everyday but I still woulnd't really let them work for hours in greenfield projects. And we're seeing big vibe coders like Karpathy say the same.
by ciconia | 2025-10-19 15:16:38+00:00
I've been having this idea of designing a neighborhood where the proportions of natural and built-up areas are reversed. Instead of having a basically artificial setting where trees live in little holes in the sidewalk, the basic setting is natural soil and vegetation, and the buildings are situated between and under the trees.

This brings up a lot of other questions: what about water and sewage infrastructure, electrical and fiber? What about maintenance of the vegetation? But it seems to me like a really cool idea, maybe even within the setting of a single homestead, where the basic setting is a forest, with some buildings nested within it.
by goalieca | 2025-10-19 15:16:46+00:00
> Debating about "reasoning" or not is not fruitful, IMO.

Thats kind of the whole need isn’t it? Humans can automate simple tasks very effectively and cheaply already. If I ask my pro versions of LLM what the Unicode value of a seahorse is, and it shows a picture of a horse and gives me the Unicode value for a third completely related animal then it’s pretty clear it can’t reason itself out of a wet paper bag.
by Rendello | 2025-10-19 15:16:48+00:00
I think sometimes if there's a project that's getting highly voted up but the initial few comments are negative, the thread can stay that way.

I agree with what you said though, when I was 13(-ish) I had an XKCD store t-shirt with a bunch of Linux commands upside-down so you could reference them [1]. I loved the idea but didn't love the shirt (not a fan of black t-shirts), so I didn't wear it much. I would've definitely wore this watch though, I'd even wear it today except I recently got a chunky watch that fits my proportions better than the retro-Casio-style.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220125185031/https://store.xkc...
by whiatp | 2025-10-19 15:16:56+00:00
Long time back I'd play PS2 games in a chat window in EverQuest while waiting for mobs to spawn. I had a capture card that would overlay over a particular shade of purple that I discovered while trying to screen shot something from a game. I made an empty chat window in EQ that color and where it overlapped the card's application window behind the video would render. Was super jank picture in picture, but it worked.
by khaledh | 2025-10-19 15:17:16+00:00
The more you try to solve a problem at a large scale, the less empathetic to humans it becomes. This has been happening for a long while now, and IMO has caused society to become "disconnected" from each other and more "connected" to devices. AI is just a new catalyst to this process. My fear is that a time will come where interacting with humans becomes the exception, not the norm.
by eterm | 2025-10-19 15:17:44+00:00
MY annoyance is when AI is used instead of better machines.

I just logged onto github and saw a "My open pull requests button".

Instead of taking me to a page which quickly queried a database, it opened a conversation with copilot which then slowly thought about how to work out my open pull requests.

I closed the window before it had an answer.

Why are we replacing actual engineering with expensive guesswork?
by edent | 2025-10-19 15:17:54+00:00
(Author here) There used to be a GitHub repo - but it has subsequently been removed.

Normally, I'd be comfortable sharing snippets under the UK's copyright "Fair Dealing" exemption - but my changes are so tightly integrated into the original code that it doesn't seem right.

Additionally, as I say, my changes are fairly trivial. Read a JSON file, scale an image, stitch it together. It's the sort of thing you can throw together in an afternoon.

As for how much you need to change for it to be reasonable to share, it does rather become a "Ship of Theseus" problem. You'll need to be guided by your own ethics and the laws of your country.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-10-19 15:18:03+00:00
>air-conditioning the inside of the building for them will obviously add even more heat to the outside?

Roger?

Well, if Roger's not here somebody's going to have to do the thermodynamics their own self, and it's good to take the initiative plus show it can be done wihtout scaring anybody by using equations or any of that complicated stuff :)
by satellite2 | 2025-10-19 15:19:07+00:00
> there's a built-in assumption that no commercial entity would _want_ to use it under GPLv3 terms.

We also have a fairly strict no GPL dependency at work which I find surprising. Especially for a software like this one that you only use, never ship nor modify I don't understand the risks this license poses. It's like we went from a reasonable "be careful around it" to a "don't touch it with a 10 foot pole". And it's leaving me wondering if there is a more concerted effort to demonize this license
by simultsop | 2025-10-19 15:19:26+00:00
There is a common sense to support indies therefore negative comments for improper customer support are seen as toxic activity by wide. Since you don't want to stress a single individual.

There are also big-corp. products which are intentionally killed or abandoned. Many people get damaged. In the end all of us pay some price for the sake of progress. Otherwise nobody would dare to innovate or try to sell new stuff.
by browningstreet | 2025-10-19 15:19:29+00:00
Arvin Haddad has made a few videos about units in this building, including the penthouse, but here he reviews an average unit’s layout.

His channel is an interesting view into how badly designed a lot of very expensive real estate happens to be.

https://youtu.be/j8_DZQrfgRA?si=FcfIU3B6KFw3s31N
by wahnfrieden | 2025-10-19 15:19:37+00:00
It's also what organized labor is for. Workers can't wait on government to offer aid without leverage. We would not have weekends off or other protections we now take for granted if we waited on government to govern for us as if it was a caring parent.

So that would mean it is in fact the responsibility of the people at robot/AI companies (and across industries). It's not something we can just delegate to role-based authorities to sort out on our behalf.
by acdha | 2025-10-19 15:19:48+00:00
> Owners have the right to let land sit.

Yes, hence the point of a vacancy tax, but that’s not relevant in the scenario here where they’re not paying. Having a short period, especially for non-residential property, is a good way to discourage tax cheating and it also helps with cleanup: the best time to deal with toxic waste was when it was generated but the second best time is now and absentee owners aren’t going to volunteer to do that. Seizing the land at least lets the government plan to do something useful with in an orderly manner before it starts causing problems too big to ignore.
by yoyohello13 | 2025-10-19 15:20:04+00:00
I also agree with this, but I think there is a need to slow the replacement, by a bit, to reduce the short term societal harm and allow society to catch up. Robots can’t do the jobs if society collapses due to unrest.

Progress is great obviously, but progress as fast as possible with no care about the consequences is more motivated by money, not the common good.
by xp84 | 2025-10-19 15:20:08+00:00
I hope you’re not feeling superior to others because you’re able to have a “low expense lifestyle.” That tends to go right out the window if you have a spouse who doesn’t work in tech, and especially with children. Though I could just be a little biased because for a special needs child, basically take your expected ‘child expenses’ and square that number.

Note: all of the above was my own choice, so I can’t complain. I only just want to point out that you can really only keep a true low-expense lifestyle as a single person, or as a childless couple if both of you share that frugality passion.
by ajross | 2025-10-19 15:20:34+00:00
That is exactly the bad analysis I was calling out.

If you take a data set and point out (while squinting) that it appears maybe to be turning down in the last two data points, any reasonable analyst should point out that those look like routine outliers and that if you want to project a trend you need more data.

Instead, you'd taking a very large (and well understood) signal in the next 5-ish data points and saying that it's proof of the trend. Which is silly.

No, that chart shows covid, period. If someone wants to show an uncorrelated effect across a signal that big, they need to come to the table with a lot more sophistication than a "WTF Happened?" blog post.
by Alex3917 | 2025-10-19 15:21:24+00:00
> What’s stopping a similar crisis that 23andMe customers faced where their genetic data along with their identifying information getting sold to the highest bidder if you ever become insolvent?

Nucleus employee here. Nucleus is a medical provider that is providing a medical service and is regulated by medical laws, which extend even through bankruptcy or acquisition. Whereas 23andMe was essentially an entertainment company and was regulated as such, which is what enabled that unfortunate situation to occur.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-10-19 15:21:58+00:00
It's similar.

Put it this way, you don't necessarily want to fuck everything that's beautiful. But everything you want to fuck will be beautiful and this is nearly an absolute must. It's a single arrow, one way relationship.

So my example is apt. The whole point is pigs are ugly, but there is a high intelligence out there who thinks pigs are so freaking beautiful they will fuck a pig. and that high intelligence, is other pigs.

People get so pedantic with the example and deriving little unnecessary things off of it. It's JUST an example. You really need to see what the "point" of my example and see if it makes sense. The example is just illustrative. If some minor aspect of the example is "offensive" or doesn't make sense to you it doesn't mean my point is dead. The example is an example to help you understand, it's not a proof.
by pesfandiar | 2025-10-19 15:22:08+00:00
It's wrong to assume the owners will share the productivity gains with everyone, especially when reliance on labour will be at its lowest, and the power structure of a data/AI economy is more concentrated than anything we've seen before. IMO, the assumption that some form of basic income or social welfare system will be funded voluntarily is as delusional as thinking communism would work.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-10-19 15:23:09+00:00
Small industrial IoT hardware manufacturers would bea good place to start looking, in my opinion. If you are not familiar with things like Yocto, Buildroot, RAUC, etc. for building embedded systems, learning at least the basics using a Raspberry Pi Zero may work in your favor. There are also consumer IoT manufacturers, networking gear manufacturers, or, if you're really ambitious, Google (Android), Apple, or Microsoft.

The job market is, as others have pointed out, very bad right now so your search is likely to be long but don't give up. It's a rewarding career. Good luck!
by overgard | 2025-10-19 15:23:23+00:00
These things sit in standards comities for years. Firefox has way fewer resources than everyone else, but Safari has no excuse other than that they mostly can't be bothered, because they'd rather you use an app.

And honestly I wouldn't care except they don't let you USE ANY OTHER ENGINE in mobile. If I could just skip Safari I would, but even Chrome on iOS is basically Safari.
by appreciatorBus | 2025-10-19 15:23:24+00:00
lol true :)

Seriously tho, I once tried tracking all transactions in a nearby 4 storey condo building (these transactions are public where I live). I tried graphing $/sqft by the floor of the building and there was definitely a revealed preference in the form of higher $/sqft but it was for higher floors rather than lower. However on an infinite scale, I'm sure your point stands, that at some point the inconvenience would outweigh other considerations.
by never_inline | 2025-10-19 15:24:14+00:00
I learned programming in turbo C++ - not because I grew up in 1990s, but because Indian education system is stuck in 1990s.

> So the question I want to part with is: have we advanced much in 30 years? Modern IDEs have some better refactoring tools, better features, and support more languages, but fundamentally… they haven’t changed much.

I can't give up any of: intellisense, type checking as I type, semantically meaningful navigation.
by xp84 | 2025-10-19 15:24:26+00:00
I’d agree with you too. I’m working to get to retirement. Savings rate is huge. Assuming I can get to that point, after I have no reason to need more money from employment I’ll be working on one-person startups that I don’t ever need to make money to scratch all my hacker itches rather than working to make some VC guys richer.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-19 15:24:33+00:00
> winget install -e --id RedHat.Podman && podman run --it --rm -p 8000:8000 .. image

Where exactly does this run? Podman/Docker makes no difference, doesn't it? You still need to run a VM (WSL2 on Windows), so might as well run those directly in the WSL2 environment I already have? But again, docker in WSL2 doesn't work as directly on Linux, for whatever reason.

> For gitbash, add a new profile in Windows Terminal and find "bash.exe" in Program Files\Git (sorry I can't remember the details and not on Windows right now). Once you have this you can use normal Linux commands, setup a .bashrc, ls, cd ~, vi, etc.

Been there and tried that, and "git bash" on Windows is probably the worst mixmatch, and bunch of tooling gets confused when the shell is bash but the actual host is Windows.
by gdiamos | 2025-10-19 15:25:04+00:00
We used the best models available and went from the Pythia/gpt2 to Deepseek generations.

One annoying part was switching to new and better models that came out literally every week.

I don’t think it substantially changes anything. If anything I think the release of more advanced models like qwen-next makes things like fp4, moe, and reasoning tokens an even higher barrier of entry.
by wizardforhire | 2025-10-19 15:25:09+00:00
Gonna just play a little mad libs here with your argument…

Personal belief, but AI coming for your children is not a valid argument against AI. If AI can do a job better and/or faster, they should be the ones doing the parenting. Specialization is how we got to the future. So the problem isn't AI, it's the structure of how we humans rely on parenting for their children. I don't necessarily feel like it's the AI company's problem to fix either. This is what government is for, and not to stifle innovation by banning AI but by preparing society to move forward.

…

You’re right about one thing within reason… this is what a rationale government should be for… if the government was by the people and for the people.

Addendum for emphasis: …and if that government followed the very laws it portends to protect and enforce…
by georgemcbay | 2025-10-19 15:25:13+00:00
Pretty much, though Google got bad at these things well before LLMs really came on to the scene, and we can all debate which project manager was responsible and the month and year things took a downward turn, but the IMO obvious catalyst was that "Barely Good Enough" search creates more ad impressions, especially when virtually all of the bad results you are serving are links to sites that also serve Google managed ads.
by vannevar | 2025-10-19 15:25:13+00:00
Definition and description do not necessarily include purpose. You could define a hammer very precisely without ever mentioning that its purpose is to drive nails. And since it's in the best interest of capital to minimize the original purpose of capitalism, and capital increasingly dominates public and political discourse, it's not surprising that the public interest angle would be increasingly ignored. But corporations and private property, the cornerstones of capitalism, are both purely creations of government, and both are subject to regulation in the public interest. We just need the political will to do so.
by thw_9a83c | 2025-10-19 15:25:43+00:00
> how accessible were VB apps to people who had sight-related disabilities?

Coincidentally, they were very accessible because they used corresponding Win32 components for all logical UI entities, despite being fixed in layout. Therefore, they worked really well with screen readers.

Sadly, this is not the case with UI frameworks, which render the screen as a Vulcan/DirectX/OpenGL canvas. By the way, for today's Electron-based apps, you can use WAI-ARIA (or similar) standards to achieve a similar level of accessibility.
by lateforwork | 2025-10-19 15:26:11+00:00
You don't need money. What you need is wealth. I am going to leave it to PG to explain the difference [1]: Wealth is not money. Wealth is stuff we want: food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so on. You can have wealth without having money. If you had a magic machine that could on command make you a car or cook you dinner or do your laundry, or do anything else you wanted, you wouldn't need money. Whereas if you were in the middle of Antarctica, where there is nothing to buy, it wouldn't matter how much money you had.

AI & robots will generate wealth at unprecedented scale. In the future, you won't have a job nor have any money, but you will be fabulously wealthy!

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html