MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gwbas1c | 2025-10-25 00:29:22+00:00
My mini-split was installed sometime between fall 2017 or spring 2018 when my house was built. It failed when it was 6 years old, and the lineset had to be replaced because there was too much acid in the insulation and it corroded the copper.

The problem was that the lineset was in my walls, so replacing it would require ugly lineset in a highly-visible place on my house. All the quotes to fix / replace it were absurdly expensive.

Because the mini-split was for a room that I use occasionally, I just use a portable air conditioner and a space heater.
by bcrl | 2025-10-25 00:29:42+00:00
Unfortunately, a lot of the shared state with userland became much more difficult to implement securely when the Meltdown and Spectre (and others) exploits became concerns that had to be mitigated. They makes the OS's job a heck of a lot harder.

Sometimes I feel modern technology is basically a delicately balanced house of cards that falls over when breathed upon or looked at incorrectly.
by RainyDayTmrw | 2025-10-25 00:29:57+00:00
The nice thing about Blum-Blum-Shub or Blum-Micali is that they come with a proof of security. Even then, they tend to be impractical, due to performance and side channels.

This one is missing the most important part, the proof. Indeed, a sibling comment notes that empirical results look pretty flawed.
by orev | 2025-10-25 00:30:50+00:00
Heat pumps are just air conditioners in reverse. They use the same amount of electricity whether heating or cooling. While many people have air conditioners, and grids seem to be able to handle them in the summer, an assertion that the grid can’t handle them in the winter is doubtful. Plus there are fewer people using them in the winter (just because fewer are installed). Most people in the NE heat with oil, gas, or wood, so that would reduce the electric load (compared to summer) even further.

There would be an increase only if people were supplementing the heat pump with electric heat, which to be fair is a possibility.

There’s a lot of misinformation about heat pumps, especially by HVAC people who don’t have a lot of experience with them, so they tend to recommend what they’re more familiar with.

But yes, understanding the electricity cost is essential when considering one.
by Nifty3929 | 2025-10-25 00:31:51+00:00
No. Math and especially numbers are not just symbol manipulation. Geometry is a counter-example. So is multiplication, for that matter.

Maybe you could say that algebra is just symbol manipulation.

And in any case - "set of rules" is exactly what transformers aren't good at. Transformers are good at capturing the essence of what you meant and responding in a sensible, but not rule-bound way. This works well for language problems.

Perhaps you could argue that transformers are just a set of rules (weights/parameters) being applied, and you might similarly argue that numbers reduce to logical symbols like S(0), S(S(0)), but then I'd argue that you're missing the point.
by Avamander | 2025-10-25 00:32:15+00:00
> I don't know where you got the idea that "almost no C programs [are] without UB". Did you get it from personal experience working with C and you having trouble avoiding UB? Unless you have a clear and reliable statistical source or other good source or argument for your claim, I encourage you to rescind that claim. C++ should in some cases be easier to avoid UB with than C.

From the fact that a lot of compilers can and do rely on UB to do certain optimizations. If UB wasn't widespread, they wouldn't have those optimization passes. You not knowing how widespread UB is in C and C++ codebases is very telling.

You're however absolutely free to find me one large project that will not trigger "-fsanitizer=undefined" for starters. (Generated codebases do not count though.)

> It definitely, very much is. As just some examples among many, consider aliasing and pinning https://lwn.net/Articles/1030517/ .

Difficult to understand or being unsafe does not make unsafe Rust worse than C. It's an absurd claim.
by sivacheekula | 2025-10-25 00:32:43+00:00
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by dbetteridge | 2025-10-25 00:35:01+00:00
It's a great analogy.

People seem to apply different rules of decorum interacting with "free" software that they wouldn't apply anywhere else.

Is it the internet aspect that makes it so? Or the ease of feedback to the creator?

I don't know, but it has become very obvious that what worked in the smaller "high trust" internet, doesn't work as well for a lot of people now.
by kragen | 2025-10-25 00:36:20+00:00
No, I'm not talking about net metering, which has nothing to do with the cost per peak watt.

You're right that you do need energy storage, though. Even sensible-heat thermal energy storage is completely adequate for this purpose, and it's very cheap, on the order of US$2–3/kWh. See the sand-battery outline I wrote yesterday in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45690085. Electric night storage heaters are widely available off the shelf in many countries already, though not in the US.

For some other kinds of energy storage, it's debatable whether utility-scale storage or household-scale storage is more efficient; you're trading off economies of scale against transmission and distribution losses and transaction costs. But low-grade thermal energy storage is clearly better at household or neighborhood scale; my design outline linked above comes to a price per kWh that's 3% of the price of the batteries needed for BESS, and maybe 15% of the optimistic cost estimates for sodium-ion. You have to reduce the energy to low-grade heat up front to store it so cheaply, but that makes it hard to redistribute later—to redistribute low-grade stored heat from a central energy storage facility, you need something like New York's steam district heating systems. It's far cheaper to store the thermal energy at the point of use.

This is not a new idea. It's the idea behind adobe walls, Russian stoves, rocket mass heaters, electric night storage heaters, dol beds, kachelofens, kangs, earth-bermed walls, Trombe walls, and ondols. People have been doing this for 7000 years, without an electrical grid or, for that matter, electrical power at all. It definitely doesn't rely on net metering!
by timsneath | 2025-10-25 00:36:47+00:00
Ha! But that's not semantically meaningful Swift code in any normal context, nor is it idiomatic. `self` is equivalent to `this` in C++, and is never normally null.

You use this construct for unwrapping nullable fields, for example something like this:

guard let httpResult else { return }

Note that you don't need to assign the value to itself in modern Swift. This line takes an optional (httpResult?) and returns early if null. If not, you can use it with strong guarantees that it's not nullable, so no need for ? or ! to unwrap it later in the scope.
by neilv | 2025-10-25 00:37:22+00:00
I'm hoping for a really great IP lawsuit against a corporate code LLM user.

Until then, the emergent behavior of most corporations' incentive structures will be to get away with it in the short term, due to everyone pursuing their bonuses and promotions, while leaving the legal repercussions as someone else's problem.

Plaintiff: "In summary, they clearly copied our product's code."

Judge: "According to all the evidence of how they used your IP, looks like you now own their company."

Defendant: wearing tie-dye shirt, whimpering "But... vibe coding..."

Plaintiff: "Your honor, we're asking them to vacate their office building by the end of the day, since we've scheduled an, ahem, ozone treatment for tomorrow morning."

Defendant: pulls out bong, takes a hit "Can't you feel the vibe, mannn..."
by ssuds | 2025-10-25 00:37:42+00:00
Quality control by the contractor is soooo important. Formicary corrosion like you described can happen if a contractor doesn't pull a proper vacuum on the system to evacuate moisture before releasing refrigerant. I saw an anecdote where Bill Spohn, who literally owns an HVAC tools company, had this happen with the contractor installing a system in his own house! (https://www.heatpumped.org/p/are-heat-pumps-a-commodity)

I suspect it's especially bad with new builds, as new builds are a race to the bottom and every subcontractor is fighting to get the lowest bid. The best way to make it cheaper is skip steps, and that hurts in the long run. Sorry you ended up in that situation, crummy experiences like this set the industry back. For what it's worth, the same corrosion could happen with a traditional AC system too (it's not just heat pumps). But the difference is, often those refrigerant lines don't get as hidden on interior walls as the ones for ductless mini-splits do.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-10-25 00:38:06+00:00
In order to lay a due foundation for that separate and distinct exercise of the different powers of government, which to a certain extent is admitted on all hands to be essential to the preservation of liberty, it is evident that each department should have a will of its own; and consequently should be so constituted that the members of each should have as little agency as possible in the appointment of the members of the others.

...

It is equally evident that the members of each department should be as little dependent as possible on those of the others, for the emoluments annexed to their offices. Were the executive magistrate, or the judges, not independent of the legislature in this particular, their independence in every other would be merely nominal.

...

We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power, where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights. These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the State. But it is not possible to give to each department an equal power of self-defense. In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates. The remedy for this inconveniency is to divide the legislature into different branches; and to render them, by different modes of election and different principles of action, as little connected with each other as the nature of their common functions and their common dependence on the society will admit. It may even be necessary to guard against dangerous encroachments by still further precautions. As the weight of the legislative authority requires that it should be thus divided, the weakness of the executive may require, on the other hand, that it should be fortified.

- Excerpt from James Madison, Federalist 51, 1788

The founders were unable to have conceived of a nation of 340 million, mass media or social media, or politicians beholden to foreign nations, lacking in integrity, and slavishly enriching themselves and their wealthy buddies. This is a system that that refuses to be reformed from within and is essentially completely captured as a play thing for an economic aristocracy. This is merely a pulling back of the curtain of ostensible pretense rather than a change in fundamental nature. It's a big, extra "F U" to everyone not rich.
by hunterpayne | 2025-10-25 00:38:34+00:00
The author explicitly says that punishment doesn't work. He implies heavily that only the academics and elites know this because its counter-intuitive.

My point is that what is driving populism is poor performance by the elites. The other side of this coin is regular folks noticing the bad performance while understanding (in this case correctly) the problem. The populism only happens when both of these things are happening at the same time (bad performance, and normies noticing the bad performance).

Fix the policy and the populism fades. But in this situation that is unlikely to happen because the author believes something that is just false. That's why he keeps going in circles about the wrong fixes, because he doesn't understand that he is just wrong in his understanding. Ironic no?

PS The stats you quote, are they all offenders or repeat offenders? Because that's basically the same mistake the author is making by confusing those two categories. I'm not sure that matters for you because you seem to understand policing is effective. For him, it breaks his entire analysis. I hope this explains my point. Edit: the reason why your way of looking at it isn't all that helpful is that its based in economics instead of policy. There are always rich and poor, there isn't always a big increase in crime.
by theamk | 2025-10-25 00:39:02+00:00
Of course I respect humans, I am a human myself! And I learned a lot from others, asking them (occasionally stupid) questions and listening to their explanations. Doing the same to other is just being fair. Explain a thing and make someone more knowledgeable! Maybe next time _they_ will help you!

This does not apply to AI of course. In most cases, if a person did an AI PR/comment once, they will keep doing AI PRs/comments, so your explanation will be forgotten next time they clear context. Might as well not waste your time and dismiss it right away.
by danielsju6 | 2025-10-25 00:39:09+00:00
Maybe I have scar tissue from COVID prices but $20k to install a ductless heat pump vs. a $200 to throw a window A/C in or $700 for a portable heat pump. While I get that these heat pumps are better for the environment and much more efficient it's a last mile issue. The installers charge an arm and a leg and I'm not hurting enough to self install. I'm hoping the window heat pumps that just run off mains will be available to more markets soon, I could buy one of those for every room in my house for less than the install on a single mini split.

Where it did make sense was when I was getting solar. It was only a few thousand since I already had the trades out and reducing the load was important for the ROI on the panels.
by bcrl | 2025-10-25 00:40:28+00:00
MADV_FREE is also extremely expensive. CPU vendors have finally simplified TLB shootdown in recent CPUs with both AMD and Intel now having instructions to broadcast TLB flushes in hardware, which gets rid of one of the worst sources of performance degradation in threaded multicore applications (oh the pain of IPIs mixed with TLB flushing!). However, it's still very expensive to walk page tables and free pages.

Hardware reference counting of memory allocations would be very interesting. It would be shockingly simple to implement compared to many other features hardware already has to tackle.
by appreciatorBus | 2025-10-25 00:41:40+00:00
You know that you can’t prove a negative. I know that you can’t prove a negative. Probably most people on HN know that you can’t prove a negative.

But when a person who doesn’t spend their time nerding out on science goes to the doctor and hears, “the substance is safe”, it is not a guarantee that they know that you can’t prove a negative. If you can’t be sure that your audience knows that it’s not possible to prove a negative, then you should be pretty cautious with your words.
by theamk | 2025-10-25 00:42:04+00:00
And as long as you don't copy-paste its advice into comments, that's fine.

No one really cares how you found all those .permission_allowed() calls to replace - was it grep, or intense staring, or AI model. All that matters is you stand behind it, and act as an author. Original post said it very well:

> ChatGPT isn’t on the team. It won’t be in the post-mortem when things break. It won’t get paged at 2 AM. It doesn’t understand the specific constraints, tech debt, or your business context. It doesn’t have skin in the game. You do.
by keyle | 2025-10-25 00:42:51+00:00
My personal experience

80/90s -> books -> pass out -> code 2000s -> altavista/tucows then google -> swearing -> code 2010s -> stack overflow -> swearing, hair pulling -> code 2020s -> LLM -> swearing, hair pulling, silent screaming -> code

It's going swell. /s (?)
by bcrl | 2025-10-25 00:43:10+00:00
Varish was very well done. It's disappointing that with HTTPS-first nowadays there is very little oppourtunity to make good use of local web caches of web content across browsers / clients. Caches would have been a godsend back in the 1990s when we had to use shared dialup to connect to the internet while using NetScape in a classroom full of computers.
by whatevaa | 2025-10-25 00:45:55+00:00
The risk with gadolinium is that it is never fully removed from your system and if you are allergic to it, it means a PERMANENT whole body allergic reaction. Skin itching and incurable chronic pain. It has nothing to do with kidney function.

I got familliar with this condition by a random persons blog who go affected by this during normal MRI and also didn't expect to be part of 1-2%. Unfortunately the blog is now gone, and that post now only lives inside my RSS reader.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-10-25 00:45:55+00:00
Marking for cookie isolation makes sense, but could be done more effectively via standardized metadata sent by the first party themselves rather than a centralized list maintained by a third party.

Informing decisions about blocking doesn't make much sense (IMO) because it's little more than a speed bump for an attacker. Certainly every little bit can potentially help but it also introduces a new central authority, presents an additional hurdle for legitimate operators, introduces a number of new failure modes, and in this case seems relatively trivial for a determined attacker to overcome.
by tomnipotent | 2025-10-25 00:46:15+00:00
> double down on their support in the face of push-back.

Because the push-back was dumb. This idea what we have to isolate and attack every person that we don't agree with is dumb. That you consider DHH's position on immigration sufficient to label him a fascist is dumb. All of it is moral showboating with no actual substance, otherwise you'd put your money where you mouth is and not purchase from most companies in the world that work with actual fascist regimes.
by appreciatorBus | 2025-10-25 00:47:42+00:00
It’s great that you’re taking responsibility at all, but in my opinion, a better system would be not releasing balloons that could impact aircraft in places that aircraft fly.

If that means that either you can’t release balloons or the aircraft can’t fly, then that’s a discussion that we should have about which we value more.

When I buy a ticket to fly on a aircraft, I do not want to know that I’ll probably survive if my plane hits a weather balloon, I want to know that my plane won’t hit a weather balloon.

I understand there are all sorts of inherent risks in aviation, and that if I want to fly, I must accept those risks. But hitting a balloon is not an inherent risk of flying, it’s a risk imposed on by others.
by throw0101a | 2025-10-25 00:49:32+00:00
> Mine struggles if it gets below 30, and might as well not exist below 10. They're not great at low temps.

What percentage of the (US) population gets temperatures like that? That's generally mostly IECC Zone 7 (though cold snaps in Zone 6) can happen:

* https://basc.pnnl.gov/images/iecc-climate-zone-map

ASHRAE—an HVAC organization—has data on the coldest and hottest days for areas so that you can design things for the coldest or hottest 1% of the year (4 hottest/coldest days):

* https://ashrae-meteo.info/v2.0/

I think that if you have an older, leaky/ier, less-insulated house you may need to 'brute force' heating your (probably older) domicile. But if you have a <4 ACH@50 air tightness, and reasonable insulation levels, a good portion of the US population could make do with a heat pump.

Mitsubishi publishes data were they have 100% heating capacity at -15C, which some models being 100% at -20C and -23C:

* https://www.mitsubishielectric.ca/en/hvac/home-owners/zuba

At -25C they have 80% capacity:

* https://www.mitsair.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/MEM-20240...
by anonymous908213 | 2025-10-25 00:51:25+00:00
No, it's perfectly apt. One comment is stating that using LLMs allows them to gloss over the details. The responding comment is saying that glossing over details is not a great idea, actually. I think that statement holds up very well on both sides of the analogy. You can get away with glossing over certain details when building a little shed or a throwaway python script. If you're building a skyscraper or a full-fledged application being used in the real world by thousands or millions of people, those details being glossed over are the foundation of your entire architecture, will influence every other part of the decision-making process, and will cause everything to crumble if handled carelessly.
by heavyset_go | 2025-10-25 00:51:52+00:00
Thanks for pointing out one thing that gets lost in a lot of these discussions: the fact that the Linux kernel itself is something that is desirable, especially if you're a power user, sys/networking/etc admin or developer.

There are so many big and little things you get for free with the kernel running directly on your hardware that you just don't, and can't, get on macOS or Linux VMs.
by ChoGGi | 2025-10-25 00:52:01+00:00
Going into it blind; Journey is a special treat.

If she is a fan of detective stories, then you wish to look into L.A. Noire or Shadows of Doubt.

Ori and the Blind Forest

Jusant or Tiny Glade have a distinct look.

Edit: Not art but for two player games, try Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, Untitled Goose Game, or Trine.
by benoau | 2025-10-25 00:52:14+00:00
> Reddit is NOT arguing that these companies are illegally scraping Reddit, but rather that they are illegally scraping… Google (which is not a party to the lawsuit) and in doing so violating the DMCA’s anti-circumvention clause, over content Reddit holds no copyright over. And, then, Perplexity is effectively being sued for linking to Reddit.

This will certainly be an interesting case...
by halfcat | 2025-10-25 00:52:16+00:00
This is a good perspective. In most disciplines where they need some level of repeatable quality, like medicine or construction, they have constrained the environment to such a degree that they can engage in somewhat repeatable work.

Consider how well cars would work if they had to traverse arbitrary terrain. Instead, we have paved the earth to make their usage somewhat consistent.

Construction projects repeat the same tasks over and over for decades. Surgeons perform the same surgeries for decades. But in software if something is repeatable and useful, it becomes an app or a library or a framework.

Some things in software have been heavily constrained to make the terrain navigable. Cloud computing in containers is one example. But in general, there’s a much higher degree of navigating uncharted territory in software than these other fields. Even building a CRUD app is often wildly complex, not the CRUD part, but the mapping of a specific business’s processes to that CRUD app, and getting those specific employees who currently work there to use it, is itself quite a novel undertaking.