MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by crgwbr | 2025-10-24 23:23:47+00:00
That’s true, but still doesn’t always make heat pumps the most cost effective choice to operate. For example, last winter I paid an average of $0.24/kWh for electricity vs $0.05/kWh for natural gas. Even if a heat pump had a perfect 4.0 COP all winter, gas would be ~15% cheaper. Electricity prices really need to come down before it will be viable for everyone.
by lrvick | 2025-10-24 23:24:38+00:00
Using an AI to think for me would be like going to a gym and paying a robot to lift weights for me.

Like sure that is cool that is possible, but if I do not do the work myself I will not get stronger.

Our brains are the same way.

I also do not use a GPS because there are literally studies with MRI scans proving it makes an entire section of our brain go dark compared to London taxi drivers required by law to navigate with their brains.

I also navigate life without a smartphone at all, and it has given me what feels like focus super powers compared to those around me, when in reality probably most people had that level of focus before smartphones were a thing.

All said AI is super interesting when doing specialized work at scale no human has time for, like identifying cancer by training on massive datasets.

All tools have uses and abuses.
by dekhn | 2025-10-24 23:24:56+00:00
What exactly are you suggesting- that the SAT solver example given in the paper (applied the HP model of protein structure), or an improvement on it, could produce protein structure prediction at the level of AlphaFold?

This seems extremely, extremely unlikely for many reasons. The HP model is a simplification of true protein folding/structure adoption, while AlphaFold (and the open source equivalents) works with real proteins. The SAT approach uses little to no prior knowledge about protein structures, unlike AlphaFold (which has basically memorized and generalized the PDB). To express all the necessary details would likely exceed the capabilities of the best SAT solvers.

(don't get me wrong- SAT and other constraint approaches are powerful tools. But I do not think they are the best approach for protein structure prediction).
by XorNot | 2025-10-24 23:25:07+00:00
Except it isn't. It's a disclosure to say "If I'm wrong, it's not my fault".

Because if they'd actually read the output, then cross-checked it and developed some confidence in the opinion, they wouldn't put what they perceive as the most important part up front ("I used ChatGPT") - they'd put the conclusion.
by syncsynchalt | 2025-10-24 23:25:08+00:00
I'm assuming you're referring to partitioning of boot-critical binaries into `/bin`, but "the reason for having a separate /usr" is even older and worse than that. In original Unix `/usr` was for home dirs[1], and was colonized by the operating system in 1971 when it no longer fit on a single 1.5MB RK05 disk. Nobody ever untangled that change and we've been living with the hack ever since.

[1] https://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/07...
by darth_avocado | 2025-10-24 23:25:25+00:00
> most homeowners in california actually see operating cost parity or a slight decrease, even with super expensive electricity

But you’re missing my first point though, installing a heat pump system comes with a price tag of tens of thousands of dollars. I’m not doing that if my operating cost is at parity or a slight decrease. It’s the same reason people are no longer incentivized to install solar. And to add to that, installing heat pumps also come with additional costs that can range anywhere from a few thousand dollars to replace the main electrical panel to tens of thousands of dollars for a full electrical upgrade if your house is on knob and tube wiring to reduce fire risks.
by GMoromisato | 2025-10-24 23:26:39+00:00
This is a good point.

My comment is really an emotional reaction to the (very common) denigration of software engineers, so don't take it too seriously.

But I also think that good software engineers can scale the reliability of their software to fit the purpose. There is a ton of software in medical devices, and despite the well-publicized fatal bugs, 99.9% of medical software works without error.

In fact, the automation of things like drug dispensing at pharmacies has decreased mistakes. I think if you deleted all the medical software in the world, deaths would increase.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-10-24 23:26:41+00:00
The overall "I want you to have a project, not a product" vibe put me off using this when deciding what robot to buy. I want a clean floor, not another hobby that turns into a chore at the least opportune moment.

Luckily, someone explained to me that in practice once you've set up, it usually just works, and it runs completely on the robot (i.e. no second device/server/homelab that you'd have to maintain) and since updates are optional, you shouldn't be required to deal with it unless you want to.

(The offputting statements are at https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/why-not-valetudo.html: "it is very much not [a product]. [...] Instead, it is highly idealistic, anti-consumerism, anti-hypergrowth and anti just-continuing-what-we-do-now. [...] these aspects are baked into its design. There is no way of using it without being constantly confronted with them. If you’re not willing to reflect, introspect, grow and most importantly stop, you will not be happy with Valetudo.", plus this "not selling PCBs out of principle so people have to source and solder themselves" - I can solder, but I prefer to delegate boring, efficiently automatable tasks to robots in a factory and would much rather pay someone 10 bucks for a finished board than pay more for the shipping of individual parts and end up with 4 extra unpopulated PCBs that I have zero use for.)
by mort96 | 2025-10-24 23:28:34+00:00
I mean I already answered that, didn't I? I find it worse to buy from the explicitly political pro-fascist company than to buy from the "normal company" which just "incidentally" benefit fascist governments through their normal business operations.

To exaggerate, we could imagine that there was an explicitly nazi computer manufacturer who put swastika stickers on their laptops and everything. When faced with the choice of Lenovo and this explicitly nazi manufacturer, I would probably choose the Lenovo, even though you could probably do the same consequentialist math and conclude that Lenovo does more actual harm through their utility to the CCP than what the tiny nazi computer company can do. I imagine you feel the same way.

What Framework does is obviously way less egregious than my hypothetical example, but I'm still not comfortable associating with a company which so publicly funds DHH, for the same kind of reason that I would not be comfortable associating with the nazi computer company.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-10-24 23:29:19+00:00
As others have noted, Linux is fine on older hardware, always. In fact, laptops I would have otherwise thrown away were given totally new life by Linux alone. Windows is too bloated the last few years. It is really ridiculous how much Windows bloat there is, no amount of breaking the OS with unstable tweaks ever did it any better either. With Linux you can go as lean and minimal as you want and need, without breaking the OS.
by stickfigure | 2025-10-24 23:29:20+00:00
Counterpoint: "Chatgpt said this" is an entirely legitimate approach in many contexts and this attitude is toxic.

One example: Code reviews are inherently asymmetrical. You may have spent days building up context, experimenting, and refactoring to make a PR. Then the reviewer is expected to have meaningful insight in (generously) an hour? AI code reviews help bring balance; it may notice stuff a human wouldn't, and it's ok for the human reviewer to say "hey, chatgpt says this is an issue but I'm not sure - what do you think?"

We run all our PRs through automated (claude) reviews automatically, and it helps a LOT.

Another example: Lots of times we have several people debugging an issue and nobody has full context. Folks are looking at code, folks are running LLM prompts, folks are searching slack, etc. Sometimes the LLMs come up with good ideas but nobody is sure, because none of us have all the context we need. "Chatgpt says..." is a way of bringing it to everyone's attention.

I think this can be generalized to forum posts. "Chatgpt says" is similar to "Wikipedia says". It's not the end of the conversation, but it helps get everyone on the same page, especially when nobody is an expert.
by Merad | 2025-10-24 23:30:02+00:00
I have to agree. I've spent about 2/3s my life in houses with heat pumps and the last 5 years with a gas furnace (the rest being wood heat as a child). Mostly in Western NC and Eastern TN near the mountains, so chilly but not extreme cold.

Heat pumps work, but they aren't nearly as _pleasant_. You can write essays about the efficiency of heat pumps, how lukewarm air works just fine to warm the house, how heat pumps are great _most of the time_ and you can supplement with space heaters or whatever when they fall short... But as long as furnaces are accessible and affordable, an awful lot of people are going to choose to have nice warm heat that is always going to be nice and warm regardless of the outside temperature.
by araes | 2025-10-24 23:30:02+00:00
Very much alive. https://steamdb.info/app/730/charts/#12y

From mid-2018, CS2 has trended upward at +150,000 players/year. Starting at 500-600,000 that lasted from ~2015 to 2018 with mostly flat rate, after Covid, CS2 has been linearly upward pretty much constantly. The 24hr peak recently was 1,550,265 logged in.

One week variance is maybe ~700,000 during low timeframes, and 1,500,000 during peak hours pretty much every single day. Tends to peak yearly in May, with low tides in May and Nov-Dec usually, although last Dec was relatively up. 2020 and 2023 were both large years, 2025's looking similar.

On the player age question, the best data I was able to find on a quick search was https://www.hltv.org/

Total search over the full range returns 955 entries. Breakdowns by age look like its a pretty heavily 19-24 playerbase. 25-30's also pretty significant. Almost 77% of the player base between them.

13-18, 90, 9.4% 19-24, 460, 48.2% 25-30, 271, 28.4% 31-35, 93, 9.7% 36-40, 41, 4.3%

Probably trends really hardcore, since the people listed average 360 (+-140) maps, and 7800 (+-3000) rounds.
by ninkendo | 2025-10-24 23:30:09+00:00
Eh… your complaint describes every single piece of information available on the internet.

Let’s try it with other stuff:

“Looking at solutions on stack overflow outsources your brain”

“Searching arxiv for literature on a subject outsources your brain”

“Reading a tutorial on something outsources your brain”

There’s nothing that makes ChatGPT et al appreciably different from the above, other than the tendency to hallucinate.

ChatGPT is a better search engine than search engines for me, since it gives links to cite what it’s talking about and I can check those, but it pays attention to precisely what I asked about and generally doesn’t include unrelated crap.

The only complaint I have is the hallucinations, but it just means I have to check its sources, which is exactly the case already for something as mundane as Wikipedia.

Ho hum. Maybe take some time to reevaluate your conclusions here.
by rileymat2 | 2025-10-24 23:30:26+00:00
For me, I am not sure it has eliminated thinking.

I have recently started to use codex on the command line. Before I put the prompt in, I get an idea in my head of what should happen.

Then I give it the instructions, sometimes clarifying my own thoughts while doing it. These are high level instructions, not "change this file". Then it bumps away for minutes at a time, after which I diff the results and consider if it matches up to what I would expect. At that point lower level instructions if appropriate.

Consider whether it was a better solution or not, then ask questions around the edges that I thought were wrong.

It turns my work from typing code in to pretty much code design and review. These are the hard tasks.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-10-24 23:30:28+00:00
Which is extra frustrating because I recall reading a Microsoft apology about how they could not easily add support for different line endings to Notepad. The software is so entrenched that they are terrified to edit it. Which, fine, maybe that is sort of justifiable, but seems like something that Microsoft has the resources to test.

A few years later, AI slop gets embedded into everything, reasonableness or performance be damned (the new Notepad is embarrassingly slow to launch with multiple visual glitches).
by theamk | 2025-10-24 23:31:01+00:00
Yes, if you find a book that is as bad as AI advice, you should definitely throw it away and never read it. If someone is quoting a known-bad book, you should ignore their advice (and as a courtesy, tell them their book is bad)

It's so strange that pro-AI people don't see this obvious fact and keep trying to compare AI with things that are actually correct.
by ac29 | 2025-10-24 23:33:02+00:00
I've been using Linux for 25 years and I think its been nearly that long since I had kernel issues that required patching the kernel (if ever). Maybe back in the 2.5 days?

The only drivers that I've had memorable issues with over the years are printer drivers, but those have nothing to do with the kernel. And printers are pretty cursed on every platform.
by reassess_blind | 2025-10-24 23:33:44+00:00
The question is whether, if the models plateau, and "AGI" as it was claimed in the beginning never arrives, if it's enough to justify these ongoing multi-hundred billion dollar deals.

I mean, probably, LLMs as they are today are already changing the world. But I do think a lot of the ongoing investment is propped up on the promise of another breakthrough that is looking less likely.
by shoo | 2025-10-24 23:35:37+00:00
I was curious about the spec of this new GOB format, there's a comment down thread explaining that there isn't a spec yet but discussing some of the details of the format: https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/new-osm-file-format-30...

Aside from OSM specifics, performance friendly formats for spatial data that support spatial indexing can make huge impact on usability and productivity of applications. e.g. trying to view a large dataset in QGIS that has been saved as KMZ (zipped XML) can make QGIS basically hang for minutes, while the same dataset saved as something like flatgeobuf [1] can be loaded instantly.

[1] https://flatgeobuf.org/
by dekhn | 2025-10-24 23:35:50+00:00
I was talking about things inspired by (for example) hidden markov models. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_model

In biology, PGMs were one of the first successful forms of "machine learning"- given a large set of examples, train a graphical model using probabilities using EM, and then pass many more examples through the model for classification. The HMM for proteins is pretty straightforward, basically just a probabilistic extension of using dynamic programming to do string alignment.

My perspective- which is a massive simplification- is that sequence models are a form of graphical model, although the graphs tend to be fairly "linear" and the predictions generate sequences (lists) rather than trees or graphs.
by Jnr | 2025-10-24 23:36:11+00:00
It took a while for me to fully set up Nextcloud with STUN/TURN, Office server, etc. in a properly containerised setup. It clearly felt like it was built before containers and modern devops approaches were a best practice.

And while community is great, I don't think Nextcloud developer community is that big and active. Their plugin system is basic, archaic, lots of things there are begging for rework.

So while Nextcloud is decent once set up, I am happy to see some fresh OSS projects solving similar issues appear. Maybe their approach will be better.
by Razengan | 2025-10-24 23:36:46+00:00
> The most important question for every cross platform framework is what happens to the UI?

For that, there needs to be a single definitive agreement on UI somewhere.

Like what does it mean to be a "list"? How does it behave with mouse, touch, keyboard?

How many different kinds of lists? (for example, a list for "favorites" behaves slightly differently than a list for "bookmarks", vs lists of "products/offers" and so on)

I bet any example you can give I or others can nitpick some flaws in that.

Hell, there are differences of opinion right off the bat: Should content move up when I scroll/swipe down or move down when I scroll up?
by NedF | 2025-10-24 23:36:53+00:00
> and it really is a wonderful system.

Absolutely, how many ghetto kids are in the school? It weeds them out through $ and expulsions.

Thinking the Montessori system is relevant to the public system shows your schooling failed.

Montessori has the ability to chose pedagogy so certainly has facets that are the quite good and should be applied publicly except for liberal arts graduate ideals.

This study is very young children, limited pregnancies and gang bangers, and also not random. It's randomised on kids who enter the lottery.

Discipline is the only thing that matters in schools, $, class sizes, teacher education levels above average, amazing resources all don't matter except how it apply to discipline. We have 100+ years of data. Air-conditioning to control behavior is an example of what helps. Liberal arts graduates destroy anything else that could work so don't interact with them, stay outside their broken world.
by em-bee | 2025-10-24 23:37:00+00:00
i think the constructivist idealism got in the way here. i believe the expectation was that they wouldn't need to train the teachers because the students should figure out the laptops on their own.

seems they missed that figuring out the laptop and integrating it into the curriculum are two different things.

i read your post btw, one thing i am wondering about is that you wrote that countries didn't improve electricity in schools because OLPC claimed that this wasn't necessary.

my own speculation is that they simply didn't enough research and didn't expect that the situation would be so bad. it is also my understanding that the hand crank was dropped early because the laptop could not handle the physical stress of cranking, it would break apart. but then a separate hand crank charger was eventually produced after all: https://wiki.laptop.org/go/Peripherals/Hand_Crank but if i did the math right then it would still take an hour to charge the battery with that.

since there was no hand crank the need for electricity was already well known before any deployment, and part of the deployment efforts included improving the electricity infrastructure.
by bethekidyouwant | 2025-10-24 23:38:05+00:00
Well, they have electric boilers, gas boilers, and gas/heat pump hybrid boilers. but not restive/heat pump hybrids. (for houses heated with hot water) I suppose this is because the return temperature to the boiler is already 50 Celsius so the heat pump can’t help you at all

Edit: Oh actually, I was wrong.(and I guess it makes sense. It would suffer the same problems as an electric hybrid) There is no hybrid gas heat pump for hydronic heating. Basically my entire city is hydronic heating so heat pumps are not an option. However

a bunch of my neighbours have heat pumps and I suppose it’s just heating one room in their house and it’s not even connected to the thermostat of their hydronic heater in any way.. Seems pretty silly to me. At least you get an air conditioner out of the deal so that you can use more electricity in the summer.
by bsimpson | 2025-10-24 23:39:01+00:00
Appreciate the response!

Respectfully, the demos on your page look like impostors on Android. For apps that wouldn't bother supporting Android in the first place, maybe this is an improvement. But for apps that want all customers to feel considered, that's not a direction I would recommend.

Would still like to see a call out to this in the blog post above ("For UI, you can use Swift for business logic and use Android's SDK to create the interface. Or you can use a library like our partner skip.tools to write SwiftUI apps directly.")
by danielodievich | 2025-10-24 23:39:09+00:00
Right as COVID lockdowns were starting in early 2020, our gas furnace reached the state of nearly broken and would have been unfixable if it finally broke. We called local HVAC for a quote and they convinced that instead of simply replacing the furnace, we should get full-house air conditioning with electric heat pump with gas furnace backup. We agreed and what was amazing was that they wanted to install it the NEXT DAY. Unprecedented speed. This was because it was COVID and everyone was stopping construction projects etc. Their technicians were ready to go and needed all the work. Next day wasn't good so we installed it the next next day. 4 burly guys, all masked and gloved, did it all in just a few hours. Our friends trying to do the same couple of years ago had to wait months for installation. We've been enjoying AC since then, a lot.

I think it cost about $13k for heat pump and furnace and labor, maybe a bit more with tax, and I got ~1.7k rebate/refund of some sorts? Or 1.3k? I don't fully recall why but it must have been government sponsored.

My ongoing energy costs are about the same, but the mix completely switched from gas to electricity. I cook with gas so there is just a bit every month, but virtually no heating with it, the gas hardly ever starts except in the height of winter. If I only had solar to feed it with sun, but the house location with shade, hill and trees isn't suited for it. Instead I pay a little extra to energy company to presumably source my electricity from solar. Works.
by Jcampuzano2 | 2025-10-24 23:39:24+00:00
It's probably a US centric take you're replying to.

Having worked at multiple companies making apps in the US and the company I work at right now which is a company almost everyone knows the name of and the vast majority of our revenue comes from our native apps - practically every feature we build is iOS and web first and only if it performs well do we even consider adding to android most of the time. And it's primarily because product/execs know iOS users are more likely to pay for things.

It's sad as an android user myself, but android is very much a second class citizen in the US
by alyxya | 2025-10-24 23:40:07+00:00
I didn't really convey my thoughts very well. I think of the actual valuable "more efficient ways of training" to be paradigm shifts between things like pretraining for learning raw knowledge, fine-tuning for making a model behave in certain ways, and reinforcement learning for learning from an environment. Those are all agnostic to the model architecture, and while there could be better model architectures that make pretraining 2x faster, it won't make pretraining replace the need for reinforcement learning. There isn't as much value in trying to explore this space compared to finding ways to train a model to be capable of something it wasn't before.
by aitchnyu | 2025-10-24 23:40:44+00:00
Camera phones were a controversy. Gyms worldwide banned them as a menace to women. Middle Eastern markets got the optic-free versions of latest phones. The Indian expats used to carry gadgets since it was much cheaper than buying it in India and they skipped the phones. Seems article is alluding to ME buyer still following the restriction in the age of ubiquitious smartphones.

2006 reference https://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_expands_eseries_with_e50-news...
by mort96 | 2025-10-24 23:41:52+00:00
Don't get me wrong, it still is an excellent machine. But the prospect of over double the multi-core performance and 1.5x the single-core performance, hopefully equating to close to half the compile times, is tempting. Wildly better GPU performance would also be useful now and then. I'd also take the opportunity to get more RAM (16GB is usually enough but not always) and more storage (1TB is sometimes a bit tight to be honest and I find myself uninstalling things to make space for other things).

Do I need it? No, of course not. But could I make use of the extra power? For sure.

And shiny new things are fun.