MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jhanschoo | 2025-10-25 18:15:01+00:00
If we accept the functional framing (as being able to give a suitable suggestion conditioned on input), then it seems to me that parsimony is the only sensible general framing; every deviation from that is something that is specific to an application or another and can be modeled by a transformation of the input space/output space.

> There are probably cases where a small TM explains a very large but finite set of observations, but if a few new ones are added the parsimonious explanation becomes much longer and looks much different from the previous one.

Indeed, to use an analogy, if you have 99 points that can be described perfectly by a linear function except for one outlier, then clearly your input isn't as clear-cut as might have been originally assumed.

On the other hand, you may be in a different setting where you have noisy sensor inputs and you expect some noise, and are looking for a regression that tolerates some noise. In such a situation, only when the stars align perfectly would your input data be perfectly described by a linear function, and we just have to accept that a broken watch is perfectly right twice a day whereas a working one is almost always only approximately right, but all the time.
by JeremyPOsborne | 2025-10-25 18:15:03+00:00
Some are trying to cut HVAC install costs in half, and a lot of people are already working on it including Jetson (where the author works) and disclaimer my company Electric Air.

Average install is about $20K in California (varies by state). Here’s how that usually breaks down:

- Equipment: $3–5K for a basic swap (some go up to $10K for single system)

- Direct labor: $3–4K (about 15–20%)

- Materials: $2–3K

- Permits and testing: around $1K total

That leaves about a 45% margin to cover overhead:

- Indirect labor: $2.5K (installers when not installing, install managers, attending city inspector visits, call backs when installers make mistakes)

- Sales: $2K (around 10%)

- Project management: $500

- Trucks: $500

- Misc costs: $1.5K (insurance, software, payment processing, etc.)

Total overhead: $7K: Net margin: 10%

10% net margin at the end of the year isn't egregious.

That’s how a typical small-mid HVAC shop runs. The best HVAC shops can make these numbers be much more competitive. How do we make it better:

- Bulk order equipment

- Streamline direct labor

- Use virtual site visits instead of in-person sales calls

Do all that and you can bring a $20K install down close to half, while paying installers better and speeding up electrification.
by DangitBobby | 2025-10-25 18:15:49+00:00
Soc. At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. Phaedr. Yes, Socrates, you can easily invent tales of Egypt, or of any other country.
by bossyTeacher | 2025-10-25 18:15:58+00:00
Not sure what makes you think I was on the defensive, I asked a question. I am a regular user of both operating systems so I have no 'team' nor am I an iOs hater.

A similar app has existed for Android for about 15 years at a time when nothing like that existed for iOs. It was actually used by Google to showcase Android's potential for automation in contrast to iOs which had nothing like that at the time.
by AndyNemmity | 2025-10-25 18:16:16+00:00
The thing that always bothers me is when the comments involve things that have nothing to do with the PR.

Like, they are reasonable ideas, but open up a new issue. If every reviewer wants to tackle large topics in the PR Review that have nothing to do with what specifically is happening, then it explodes and gets even harder for others to review now that we are changing things that have nothing to do with the change.
by axoltl | 2025-10-25 18:16:48+00:00
It means more surface (both from extensions themselves and the loader code), relaxation of things like KTRR/CTRR (you now need to add executable EL1 pages at runtime), plus the potential for signing keys to leak (Finding enterprise signing keys even for iOS is fairly easy).

As far as Windows goes, https://www.loldrivers.io is a thing.
by andy99 | 2025-10-25 18:16:52+00:00
If we kept opium dens there probably wouldn’t be widespread fentanyl use, isn’t it a reaction to the challenges of getting less dangerous opiates, i.e. is more potent and easier to smuggle?

Many places have “supervised consumption” sites or decriminalization now that has gone very poorly, I think in retrospect having opium dens for those who choose to live that way might have been a better alternative to the current state.
by hunterpayne | 2025-10-25 18:17:01+00:00
> The Nazis made the same choice in WWII and even though they were able to control the Baltics and had Finland as an ally never seriously threatened to take the city.

There was an 18 month siege of SP during WWII. SP starved and people there resorted to cannibalism to survive. I don't remember if it was ever taken but the Germans definitely tried to. And the situation there was ghoulish, so even if they didn't, they almost did.
by cryptonector | 2025-10-25 18:17:17+00:00
> And how long did it take for binary attachments to be reliable, encodings unfucked, etc?

Oh I can't remember. Binary attachments have worked since I started using them long long ago. It worked at least in the mind-90s. Back then I was using both, Internet email and x.400 (HP OpenMail!), and x.400 was a massive pain (for me especially since I was one of the people who maintained a gateway between the two). I know what you're referring to: it took a long time for email to get "8-bit clean" / MIME because of the way SMTP works, but MIME was very much a thing by the mid-90s.

So it took a while if you count the days of UUCP email -- round it to two decades. But "by the md-90s" was plenty good enough because that's when the Internet revolution hit big companies. Lack of binary attachments wasn't something that held back Internet adoption. As far as the public and corps are concerned the Internet only became a thing circa 1994 anyways.

> As for group addressing, distribution lists are pitiful in comparison especially on discovery side.

Discovery, meaning directories. Those are nice inside corporate networks, which is where you need this functionality, so I agree, and yes people use Exchange / Exchange 365 / Outlook for this sort of thing, though even mutt can do LDAP-based discovery (poorly, but yes). Outside corporate networks directories are only useful within academia and governments / government labs. Outside all of that no one wants directories because they would only encourage the spammers.
by bradgranath | 2025-10-25 18:17:21+00:00
It's not just certification/permitting. The manufacturers often state that the unit must be verified to be installed by a qualified technian or the warranty is void.

Around here anyway, I was getting quotes of 20k for the install & equipment of a central air handler and the outdoor unit.

I'd be dead before the thing paid for itself in electricity cost savings. $20,000 ÷ (~90yrslife - 40yrsold) = $400 / year of neccesary savings to break-even as my casket is lowered into the ground.
by dafelst | 2025-10-25 18:17:23+00:00
Can you elaborate a little more on what structures and patterns those are? I have built some database like things in rust (lots of zero copy and slice shenanigans, and heavily multi-threaded) and while it was tricky in some spots I haven't run into anything I have had to substantially compromise on.

Your use cases are likely more complex, so I'm curious what I should be looking out for.
by montyboy_us | 2025-10-25 18:17:33+00:00
I love Cory’s writing, but this piece leans a bit too much on the metaphor lacking a bit in the mechanics. The walled gardens, DRM, and jailbreak bans long predate the last two administrations. They’re more business model problems and not new authoritarian inventions. Removing an app isn’t the same as adding a backdoor. I think we need to talk more about the real root issue - its a structural one as old as time - closed ecosystems have/will always create the potential for abuse regardless of who is in power.

Now, I'm not sure how we get 'open' ecosystems to a tipping point, but have observed the likes of Apple and Microsoft doing a pretty good job of slowly and steadily 'self-owning'... so maybe it's a waiting game?
by nodesocket | 2025-10-25 18:17:38+00:00
I'm running a Python 3.13 Flask app in production using gunicorn and gevent (workers=1) with gevent monkey patching. Using ab can get around 320 requests per second. Performance is decent but I'm wondering how much a lift would be required to migrate to FastAPI. Would I see performance increases staying with gunicorn + gevent but upgrading Python to 3.14?
by Judgmentality | 2025-10-25 18:18:04+00:00
> it actually harms the cause to be dismissive of people who can contribute by simply making their peaceful objection visible

I think it harms the cause to feel better about accomplishing nothing. You've created a morale booster, but you haven't actually achieved anything or put forth any sort of plan to enact any sort of change. Assuming your goal is to make the government function according to written laws, why would the current president give a shit about anything you say when he can just continue to ignore you? If he ignored you before, you holding up a sign isn't going to do anything.

Protests work when there is some sort of threat behind it. Most protests you read about in history aren't a few hours on the weekend, they're ongoing where everybody is already participating in a strike. And many of them have the obvious threat of violence behind them. This "protest on the weekend" shit is pathetic. I'm not going to congratulate you for wasting time while everything continues to get worse. From my perspective you are part of the problem.
by svieira | 2025-10-25 18:18:19+00:00
Yep - you're still missing the distinction. Jesus is the person. This person has two natures (we've been working with the "being a judge and a doctor" analogy here and both can be operative together, as when the judge is hearing a case where his knowledge of medicine has bearing on his ability to judge the situation). One nature is immutable, the other is mutable. Nothing contradicts there. "Jesus, in His human nature, changes. God the Son (His divine nature) does not change." But you can make it sound contradictory, just as you could say (if we make "The doctor does not judge, but the judge does" sound contradictory if we say "Susan does not judge but Susan judges!") It is not a logical contradiction for two distinct things to be distinct.
by jebarker | 2025-10-25 18:18:38+00:00
So, did anyone here actually read the book? I’m halfway through and I think there are compelling ideas around how self-replication emerges naturally from a fundamentally computational universe and how that leads to increasingly complex computation (and ultimately “intelligence”). The book definitely has Wolfram vibes but it’s thought provoking to draw a connecting line through many domains like the author does. It’s best treated as pop-sci, like most of the AI literature.
by kelnos | 2025-10-25 18:18:40+00:00
I've never used Backbone, so I can't speak to its ergonomics, but I've used React (a bit back in 2015, and now again this year I've been updating my knowledge and re-learning it), and absolutely agree with the author's frustrations with its "magic".

I'm working on both a backend (in Rust) and a frontend (Typescript, React). The backend makes sense; the code I write does what I expect it to, and there's no magic. The frontend... oh boy. I constantly run into infinite-loop re-renders, input elements that won't update or randomly lose state, etc. I ask Claude Code to help me fix it, and it ends up doing a bunch of the stuff mentioned in the article: adding useCallback, useMemo, tweaking dependency lists, restructuring things in useEffect, adding state variables, etc.

Fortunately I can read the changes and understand what Claude is doing and why, but all of these things feel like huge holes in the abstraction. They're arcane workarounds for problems that React itself creates. And despite learning via Claude's fixes, I still keep making similar mistakes, a phenomenon I've never encountered with any other framework or library I've ever used before.

Having said that, I'll keep using React: it has a huge community around it, answers to problems aren't hard to find, and Claude Code seems to be good at working with it when I screw up and can't be arsed to poke at it until it works. This unfortunately feels a lot like the old saying, "nobody gets fired for buying IBM", but... it is what it is.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-10-25 18:19:10+00:00
i386 is a great target for toy OSs. There's no risk of getting a bit megalomaniacal and thinking your OS could ever be anything more than a toy. Also, it's more challenging than RISC-V, ARM, and even x86-64, so it feels like more of an accomplishment if you actually make it to userland and back without catastrophic failures.
by hippo22 | 2025-10-25 18:19:18+00:00
My point is that, the reason people don’t let one bad car experience ruin all cars is because people understand that different manufacturers make cars with different levels of quality. So one bad car will ruin the perception of one manufacturer instead of cars in general.

What is the equivalent when it comes to medical advice? Using vaccines as an example, one concern people have is the mercury content. The FDA, doctors, and drug manufacturers have said that the mercury is safe. The same doctors, manufacturers, and FDA has said that MRI contrast containing another heavy metal, gadolinium, is safe. It turns out that, no, it is not safe.

Given these facts, is it really surprising that people would turn away from the FDA and doctors just like people would turn away from a car manufacturer after receiving a lemon? While I personally trust the FDA, I can see the logic in the distrust after events like this.
by GuB-42 | 2025-10-25 18:19:25+00:00
Yes, that's a tradeoff, bondage and discipline languages like Ada and Rust are popular in some fields for a reason.

What I like the most is a middle ground: have a language that it permissive when it comes to generating code, but be strict with warnings. Again, problem is that too many people don't care about warnings. Way too many times, I had people call me to investigate their bugs, see a warning, point it out and tell them "here, that's your bug".
by bigbadfeline | 2025-10-25 18:19:51+00:00
> Because Napoleon didn't want to depose the Tsar, much less to conquer Russia... A heavily defeated Russia wouldn't have helped him into achieving [the blockade of Britain].

You think a heavily defeated Napoleon would help him a lot in that matter? Realistically, there was no third option, going in guaranteed than one of them would be heavily defeated.

At that point in time, Napoleon was in command of the largest and most heavily armed military force in history. And he assembled it to go beg the Tsar to blockade a third country? It doesn't make any sense.
by dtornow | 2025-10-25 18:20:19+00:00
At Resonate, we are using generators (both for the typescript sdk and the python sdk) to implement Distributed Async Await, Resonate's Durable Execution Framework. Because generators transfer control back to the caller, you can essentially build your own event loop and weave distributed coordination (RPCs and callbacks) and distributed recovery (restarts) right into the execution with fairly little lines of code.

Disclaimer: I'm the CEO of Resonate
by mikkupikku | 2025-10-25 18:20:55+00:00
Regular honest hard working people, who struggle to make ends meet in large part due to gambling addictions and related poor financial decisions. Financially the guys who gamble are even worse off than the alcoholics that don't; there's only so much money you can spend on shit beer a week. The gambling addicts lose far more money far faster. If they were all tossing dice and losing money to each other that wouldn't be nearly so bad, but the way of modern industrial gambling is that it's done through apps and run by far away corporations or even the government, who take their money and basically make it disappear from the community. There's no winning it back, everybody but the casino owners loses in the long run. I used to be libertarian on gambling but not after what I've seen. It hurts not only those who choose to gamble, but also their families and communities.
by tim333 | 2025-10-25 18:20:56+00:00
I don't know if you could have an independent government institution to help regulate booms and busts like the Fed does with the money supply? I'm not sure what you'd do with AI but there are fairly obvious things that could have been done with housing like restrict lending on the upside and spend on infrastructure in the bust.

Elected politicians have perverse incentives to let bubbles run so they can claim it's their policies providing never ending growth.
by jitl | 2025-10-25 18:21:33+00:00
This seems great, we are looking for a code sharing language between platforms and the options so far are the Usual Suspects:

- TypeScript: we have a few million lines already, but it runs poorly on Android midrange devices.

- Rust: very efficient on Android / iOS but on web there’s very expensive memcopy between WASM memory and JS. Safe but hard to write and refactor casually. Would be great for server perf tho. Async has many footgun for our JS devs. Biggest long term downside: borrow checker speed limit on developer velocity for business logic.

- Kotlin: can target JS directly avoiding bridge cost. iOS devs are uneasy about it. Async story is extremely confusing. Biggest long term downside: how Byzantine the JVM ecosystem is on the server.

Until I saw this Swift wasn’t really in the running. I need to explore the web target situation. Swift is maturing but still weak in ecosystem on non-Apple platform compared to other options. Still swift is moving towards a great combo of speed + safety + usability.

Biggest long term downside: type inference pain. Swift is the only language I’ve used that will tell me “the types seem wrong / ambiguous, but the compiler has no idea what your specific mistake is” and there’s no way to fix it other than trying random code permutations. I hit that one with node-swift yesterday and gave up.

Is there anything in the works for taming the type inference or some way to force-select which overload I want?
by pclmulqdq | 2025-10-25 18:21:58+00:00
They could use the description of what the software is supposed to do and an understanding of the current code to figure out how it should work and what edge cases need to be tested. They can also test random inputs and so on. When you write new software, you do this. When you add features, you do this. When you do a rewrite or refactor, you should also do this.
by toast0 | 2025-10-25 18:22:49+00:00
> It wouldn't have, uncertainty creates general panic as well, that soon turns into disarray of chaotic recommendations among the masses.

A disarray of chaotic recommendations from on high is preferable, I guess?

I especially enjoyed viewing the early covid health department stickers later on. While masks were mandatory, there were health department stickers everywhere from a couple months earlier telling us that they were unhelpful.

I know nuance is hard, but it is entirely understandable that many people have distrust in authority when the message seemed to be high confidence do A(t) and A(t) was often contradictory to A(t-1). At that point, people pick the A(t) that had the advice they like.

When there were things like tell people masks are ineffective because they actually are effective but in limited supply, that also breeds distrust. I don't know how you solve that one, other than having a functional pandemic response logistics chain, and I don't think we ever had that; we did some supply warehousing after SARS but without a process to refresh the stock, it was not effective for COVID. I suspect there's no effort to build that up again, but I'd love to be wrong; my impressions are that the US healthcare and disease control ecosystem has not learned anything from COVID, again, I hope I'm wrong. Maybe acceptance of mRNA based vaccination and some amount of deployment of genetic identification of infection from patients.
by ufmace | 2025-10-25 18:23:07+00:00
Assuming this quote from the article is true, it sounds like the only villain here is the school principal:

> It said the AI alert was sent to human reviewers who found no threat - but the principal missed this and contacted the school's safety team, who ultimately called the police.

So the company AI reviewers correctly determined that there was no actual gun, and the police responded appropriately to a report by a person (the school principal) who claimed to have seen this student with a gun. The question then is what the heck is this principal doing? Why do they have access to this pre-verified AI information, and why are they going off and calling the police with this information before doing any verification themselves?

Well also, none of the coverage includes what was said to the dispatcher, but maybe they screwed up too - I would expect a dispatcher to question the caller in more detail about what's going on. Like, what kind of gun was it, is it in their hand or in a pocket or what, did they point it at anyone or threaten anyone with it or are they just carrying it around, etc, and such information could be used for a more appropriate police response.