MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by PunchyHamster | 2025-11-26 16:38:33+00:00
I am annoyed how water-water pumps are consistently much more expensive than water-air despise the fact complexity doesn't really change, only the type of heat exchanger (they are just less popular).

Hybrid system where the fluid could be sent to radiator (at night, or in summer when you want to cool) or some solar heat panels on the roof wouldn't be that much expensive, if not for pump costs.
by shagie | 2025-11-26 16:38:34+00:00
One of the neat things that I've stumbled across is https://thinkzone.wlonk.com/SS/SolarSystemModel.php

Make the model scale to be 10000000 (10 million). The sun is a chunky 139 meters in diameter. Earth is 15 km (9 miles) away. Pluto is 587 km (365 miles) away. The speed of light is 107 kph (67 mph).

Alpha Centauri is 4.1 million km (2.5 million miles) away... that is 10 times the earth moon distance.

Another comparison... Voyager 1 is moving at 30 light minutes per year. (Andromeda galaxy is approaching the Milky Way at 3.2 light hours per year)
by dpark | 2025-11-26 16:38:35+00:00
This is one of those things that sounds profound, but only until you think about it. Depending on how you read this, it either excludes life entirely or includes all sorts of things that are not meaningfully alive.

1. Living things locally decrease entropy but globally increase it.

2. Many other processes do the same. As chermi noted, a liquid solidifying has the same characteristic.
by hamdingers | 2025-11-26 16:38:49+00:00
FTL isn't even necessary. Consider the majority of tanker ships travel at bicycle speeds[1]. If you're transporting sufficiently profitable nonperishable goods in extremely high quantities, and have enough automated ships, you could have a functional interstellar supply line at a fraction of light speed.

Of course, this isn't how it's usually presented in science fiction, but that's because a sci-fi story about a non-sentient fully automated mining machine wouldn't be very interesting. Gotta get humans out there.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_steaming
by eitally | 2025-11-26 16:38:51+00:00
You're making a ridiculously overconfident statement.

* Show me a discrete manufacturing company using AI models for statistical process control or quality reporting

* Show me a pharmaceutical company using AI models for safety data analysis

* Show me an engineering company using AI models for structural design

The list goes on and on. There are precious few industries or companies that have replaced traditional analysis & prediction with AI. Why? Because one of two things are true: 1) their data is already in highly structured relational stores that have long legacies of SQL-based extraction and analysis, 2) they're in regulated industries and have to have audit-proof, explainable reporting, or 3) they need evidence-based design and analysis that has a key component coming from real people observing real processes in action.

For all the hyped "AI Automation" you read about, there are 100 other things that aren't, or where firms don't believe they can be, or where they'll struggle to for [reasons].
by stego-tech | 2025-11-26 16:39:07+00:00
While I can see where your argument comes from (because up until about ten years ago, I would’ve written it verbatim myself), I must respectfully disagree with it. Some programmers build tools to help people, but most do not. They build tools for surveillance, engines for advertising, exploit human psychology with patterns and site designs that deliberately hinder users, not help them. Most programmers never contribute to Open Source, but instead go to work for tech conglomerates to make money, because that is what society demands of us and coding - until recently - was a solid path into Middle Class status.

I question the sincerity of this narrative that the AI companies are doing this to “help” us, when their actions say otherwise at every turn. I also question that diffusion models and LLMs “enable” programmers to somehow create things others could do with a pencil, paper, and practice. I question this notion that a human must be able to be entirely self-sufficient through technology rather than cooperative with their fellow man, or that every skill must be commoditized for maximum extraction of wealth instead of respected as expertise within a community. I do not hate AI because to do so would be to hate a hammer, or a screwdriver.

Where the hate in my heart lies are towards those who demand we reduce humanity, its chaos, its ephemeralness, its qualia, to a mathematical model devoid of entropy. I hate that because these people - not the tools themselves - deign themselves superior men who are somehow above or immune to the fundamental force of reality (entropy), devoid of responsibility or accountability for their actions or harms.

A true AI booster should be screaming angry that this compute capacity is being squandered on shitty image generation and chatbots that convince teenagers to commit suicide or psychologists that they’re discovering inter-dimensional communication. These vaunted tools should be used to balance the economy, uplift the populace, hold the powerful to account, mediate disputes, improve outcomes in quality and longevity of life.

They are emphatically not being used in this capacity, and their owners have made it abundantly clear through their repeated actions that said outcomes have never been, and never will be, their intent.

And that is the source of my personal hate.
by m000 | 2025-11-26 16:39:38+00:00
I think you're missing that a lot of what we call "learning" would be categorized as "busy work" after the fact. If we replace this "busy work" with AI, we are becoming collectively more stupid. Which may be a goal on itself for our AI overlords.

As mr Miyagi said: "Wax on. Wax off."

This may turn out very profitable for the pre-AI generations, as the junior to senior pipeline won't churn seniors at the same rate. But following generations are probably on their way to digital serfdom if we don't act.
by bgrossman85 | 2025-11-26 16:39:58+00:00
Built a tiny tool that randomly decides “who goes first” for games. My children always argue about who gets to go first so I made ¯\(ツ)/¯ decide for us. Hope you find it useful or amusing

I added some different categories and fun date based themes to make it more fun. There are other apps/websites that do this but so far, my kids prefer this one!
by emporas | 2025-11-26 16:40:17+00:00
>Pre-training is mostly dead.

I don't think so. Serious attempts for producing data specifically for training have not being achieved yet. High quality data I mean, produced by anarcho-capitalists, not corporations like Scale AI using workers, governed by laws of a nation etc etc.

Don't underestimate the determination of 1 million young people to produce within 24 hours perfect data, to train a model to vacuum clean their house, if they don't have to do it themselves ever again, and maybe earn some little money on the side by creating the data.

The other part of the comment I agree.
by stevenjgarner | 2025-11-26 16:40:19+00:00
So in this sense then, human beings themselves are obligate metabolic parasites on the planetary ecosystem, particularly on other life forms (plants, animals, microbes). The term "parasite" here is used in the metabolic sense of relying on another organism to produce essential compounds one cannot produce oneself. The molecules we must obtain fully synthesized from our diet are called essential nutrients. And for a Sukunaarchaeum, everything is an essential nutrient.
by cyral | 2025-11-26 16:40:39+00:00
Great comment. I'll add that despite being a bit less powerful, the Composer 1 model in Cursor is also extremely fast - to the point where things that Claude would take 10+ minutes of tool calls now takes 30 seconds. That's the difference between deciding to write it yourself, or throwing a few sentences in Cursor and having it done right away. A year ago I'd never ask AI to do tasks without being very specific about which files and methodologies I want it to use, but codebase search has improved a ton and it can gather this info on it's own, often better than I can (if I haven't worked on particular feature or domain in a few months and need to re-familiarize myself with how it's structured). The bar for what AI can do today is a LOT higher than the average AI skeptic here thinks. As someone who has been using this since the GPT4 era, I'd say that I find a prompt about once a week that I figured LLMs would choke on and screw up - but they actually nail it. Whatever free model is running in Github Copilot is not going to do as well, which is probably where a lot of frustration comes from if that is all someone has experienced.
by mh- | 2025-11-26 16:40:56+00:00
I'm not aware of any FTC rule that would preempt this sort of product as long as it met the endorsement disclosure rules (16 CFR Part 255), same as paid influencers do today.

What are you imagining they run afoul of?

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/ftcs-endorse...

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-B...
by pavel_lishin | 2025-11-26 16:40:56+00:00
> These kinds of McGuffins lean towards physics are different in other parts of the galaxy/universe if there are minerals found only in certain parts of the galaxy.

Or the local conditions are such that they produce different chemical compounds.

I'm not going to strike gold in my backyard, but people in Colorado might. There's not a lot of diamond production happening within reach underneath my location, but there's plenty in parts of Africa.

If we want to take it to space, there's not a lot of Helium-3 to be easily extracted on Earth, but apparently there's quite a bit more on the Moon.
by jtrn | 2025-11-26 16:41:06+00:00
Same is true for: insulin, Levothyroxine, Antiretroviral Therapy (HIV), Enzyme Replacement Therapy ( Pompe Disease or Gaucher Disease, antipsychotic medications for severe schizophrenia. And many others. And here’s the interesting twist, the closer the Number Needed to treat is to 1, the more helpful the medication should be viewed. All these medications have an extremely low NNT, including GLP1s.
by chimeracoder | 2025-11-26 16:41:40+00:00
> Unless you went on when you weren't really low because the men's vitality clinic pushed you into a treatment protocol

Saying that the men's vitality clinic "pushed you" into a treatment protocol is like saying that a fertility clinic pushed you into getting pregnant.

Sure, it's a common outcome, but you had an idea of what you wanted out of it before you walked in the door.
by munificent | 2025-11-26 16:42:01+00:00
Even starting small isn't a surefire way to avoid that problem. They'll just show up once the thing gets big enough.

Witness how the web was once a funny little collection of nerds sharing stuff with each other. But once it got big enough that you could start making money off it, the important people showed up and started taking over. The web still has those odd little corners, but it's largely the domain of a small number of giant powerful corporations.

I don't think there is a silver bullet for dealing with egomaniacs who want infinite power. They seem to be a part of the human condition and dealing with them is part of the ticket price for having a society.
Show HN: Interpret your Liver Labs like a top Longevity Clinic would
by zsolt224 | 2025-11-26 16:42:09+00:00
Dear fellow (bio)hackers.

Interpreting liver labs is challenging, since the normal ranges you see on your labs are skewed (most people are obese or overweight). So after six months of work, and with help from leading researchers in the field, I just launched the Liver Function Interpreter. The tool calculates various risks based on the best indices and runs differential diagnosis if something is wrong.

Everything is explained in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hJcKWQ88E8

I made it completely free and it will stay free forever. No sign-up or anything.

Link to the tool: https://www.longevity-tools.com/liver-function-interpreter

Note: I do not sell anything or promote anything paid. I do not collect any data.
by orwin | 2025-11-26 16:42:21+00:00
To a certain point yes, but also no. Depends on which fat you're talking about and which calories you are talking about (calories from carbs without fibers cost nothing to absorb, calories from fat cost more than half the energy they give you) (also if you have a good gut health, some calories are just never absorbed).

Calorie restriction works up to a certain point, and weirdly the benefits aren't linear, and almost flat for visceral fat(i.e: if you're using 2.6 kcal a day and eating 2.4 kcal, you will loose roughly the same amount of visceral fat than if you only ate 1.8kcal, and slightly more 'external' fat (that one you shouldn't care much if you're only interested in health)).

Calorie expenditure works linearly though, but it's hard to out-exercise your diet, and exercise while obese can be dangerous (my ankles still have to be reinforced despite me being under 24 BMI)
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-11-26 16:42:24+00:00
> With time dilation, the "now" on Voyager is out of sync with our now

A couple minutes [1].

> we will have to face the problem of time keeping across the galaxy

Not really. Barring relativistic travel, it’s not dissimilar from the problem seagoing voyagers faced on long trade routes. Ship time is set based on the convenience of the passengers and the route.

[1] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/56055/if-voyager-1...
by exasperaited | 2025-11-26 16:42:26+00:00
> But the reflexive shallow pro/anti takes on AI are way more extreme

But this is philosophy (and ethics/morality)

My feelings about AI, about its impact on every aspect of our lives, on the value of human existence and the purpose of the creative process, have less to do with what AI is capable of and more to do with the massive failures of ethics and morality that surround every aspect of its introduction and the people who are involved.

Humans will survive. Humanity is on the ropes.
by metajack | 2025-11-26 16:42:50+00:00
Many blogs are completely dynamic and grab content out of a database on every request. The static site generation style fell out of early fashion when wordpress took over from moveable type, and didn't really return much until jekyll. Even today I think most blogs you see are mostly dynamic with the platforms using caching to avoid hitting the database every time.

Most people don't do performance tuning of their blogs because the average traffic is miniscule. This means that any configuration issues rear their heads when load happens. For example, having your max connections to the web server be far more than the database can support. Perhaps the machine could handle the load if properly configured, but no one did so because there was no need.
by PunchyHamster | 2025-11-26 16:43:09+00:00
hot water also have pretty high losses, because you need to keep it cycling constantly to keep the heat up (you don't want a case where opening a tap in the morning means letting up the hot water from the 30m length of pipe from the street to your house).

So paradoxically, if your heat is not "free" (cogenerated with electricity) it might be far more efficient to have a boiler in each house (and definitely a heat pump), than to push the heat that far away.
by aidenn0 | 2025-11-26 16:43:32+00:00
Wayland is missing one thing still for me. Perhaps someone can tell me there is a way to do this:

1. ssh into a machine with a running session

2. start (something) that lets me remotely connect to it

Right now I have two working solutions for X11 (x11vnc, freerdp-shadow) but zero for Wayland. I think this is intentional because the venn diagram of remote-access-tools and malware has a large intersection, but it's very useful too!
by andrei_says_ | 2025-11-26 16:43:40+00:00
I have only experienced the exact opposite - AI tools being forced on employees left and right, and infinite starry eyed fake enthusiasm amongst a rising ocean of slop poisoning all communication and written human knowledge at scale.

I am yet to see issues caused by restrain.

> It's why people can't post a meme, quote, article, whatever could be interpreted (very often, falsely) as AI-generated in a public channel, or ask a chatbot to explain a hand-drawn image without the off chance that they get an earful from one of these 'progressive' people. These people bring way more toxicity to daily life than who they wage their campaigns against.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-11-26 16:43:51+00:00
I think they are missing a few very significant revenue sources that likely going to grow beyond just simple enterprise user accounts for Chat GPT.

I'll call out two of them.

Image, video, and other content generation is going to become more important and companies will be spending on that. We've seen some impressive improvements there. IMHO near term a lot of that stuff might start showing up in advertising and news content, the whole media industry is going to be a massive consumer of this stuff. And there's going to be a lot of competition for the really high quality models that can be run at scale. Five years until 2030 is a lot of time for some pretty serious improvements to land.

Another area that the article skips over is agentic tools. Those are showing a lot of promise right now. Agentic coding tools are just the tip of the iceberg here. A lot of these tools are going to be using APIs. So API revenue is a source of revenue. There are applications across the entire IT industry. SAAS, legacy software, productivity tools, etc.

Yes 207B is a lot of money. And there's no guarantee that OpenAI comes out on top "winning" all these markets of course and we can argue about how big these markets will be. But OpenAI does have a good starting position and some street credibility here. It's a big bet on revenue and potential here. But so is betting against all that and dismissing things. And there's a lot of middle ground here.
by everdrive | 2025-11-26 16:43:53+00:00
>Somewhere along the lines of "everybody can code," we threw out the values and aesthetics that attracted people in the first place.

At some point people started universally accepting the idea that any sort of gatekeeping was a bad thing.I think by now people are starting to realize that this was a flawed idea. (at best, gatekeeping is not a pure negative; it's situational) But, despite coming to realize this I think parts of our culture still maintain this as a default value. "If more people can code, that's a _good_ thing!" Are we 100% sure that's true? Are there _no_ downsides? Even if it's a net positive, we should be able to have some discussion about the downsides as well.
by ferguess_k | 2025-11-26 16:43:53+00:00
I live in a cave and am not a system programmer -- what's so wrong with X11 so people need to replace it with something else instead of improving it?

Or, what's so wrong with anything so people need to replace it with something else instead of improving it?

Let's say I'm an old man favoring improving existing stuffs instead of starting from scratch. I like debugging and wish to work as a sys programmer specialized in debugging and fixing/improving legacy codebase. But again I'm not really a sys programmer so I'm probably on the wrong side.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-11-26 16:43:59+00:00
What don't we understand about the obesity epidemic? The story seems pretty clear to me at this point:

* Almost everyone has access to a wide variety of delicious food, which we on average enjoy eating more of than is required to maintain a healthy weight.

* We don't want the government to forcibly restrict people's food access.

* Research consistently shows that voluntary portion control works occasionally in the short term and not at all in the long term.

* Many people have proposed specific ingredients or nutrient classes that can be adjusted in a person's diet to resolve obesity, but none to date have checked out.

In principle, I suppose, there could be some crazy diet hack we don't yet know about. But why should we expect that to be the case? To be honest, I think a lot of the existing discourse on this topic was just wishful thinking, because before GLP-1s the bottom line was not "some people need a pharmaceutical intervention" but "some people are just gonna be obese and there's nothing we can do to help them".
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-11-26 16:44:22+00:00
> If they can figure out how to get the right kickbacks/referrals without compromising user trust

i'm trying to envision a situation in which the former doesn't cancel out the latter but i'm having a pretty hard time doing that. it seems inevitable that these LLM services will just become another way to deliver advertised content to users.
by sosodev | 2025-11-26 16:44:31+00:00
While that is part of the equation it's not at all that simple. If the average business owner wants a custom piece of software for their workflow how are they getting it now? For decades the answer would have been new hires, agencies, consultants, and freelancers. It didn't matter that most software boiled down to a simple CRUD backend and a flashy frontend. There was still a need for developers to create every piece of software.

Now AI makes it unbelievably easy to make those simple but bespoke software packages. The business owner can boot up Lovable and get something that is good enough. The non-software folk generally aren't scrutinizing the software they use. It doesn't matter if the backend is spaghetti code or if there are bugs here and there. If it works well enough then they're happy.

In my opinion that's the unfortunate truth of AI software development. It's dirt cheap, fast, and good enough for most people. Computer's couldn't write software before and now they can. Obviously that is real devaluation, right?
by mh- | 2025-11-26 16:44:36+00:00
This isn't a realistic concern unless FTC rules changed substantially from where they are today (see my other comment on this post for links). Sponsored link disclosures would be in place.

Everything else aside, it's simply not worth it for them to try to skirt these rules because the majority of their users (or Google's) simply don't care if something is paid placement or not, provided it meets their needs.
by throwaway290 | 2025-11-26 16:45:25+00:00
> it would know to render some kind of list to choose from.

but this is not executing a program. this interpreting markup to render some data in some format. HTML is the same programming language as XML or Markdown or JPG or MIDI or WAV... so, not really a programming language. it's input for a program written using some programming language

sometimes presenting data and programming are conflated, for example postscript, but this is not HTML

> Put more useful options in the select and maybe some other input elements with some useful <label> elements and I might just have myself a graphical interface which people can use to submit information to me. But

Handling form submissions, handling displaying select boxes etc, is all result of executing program that is browser itself. The input for that program is hypertext markup by webmaster.

(Running embedded JS however is executing a program by webmaster.)

I think trying to present markup as programming is very artificial and does not correspond to real world.
by wnolens | 2025-11-26 16:45:33+00:00
Why would I want to spend 1-2h researching humidifiers if I can spend that time in any other way, and still end up with a humidifier that fits my needs first try?

This kind of task is perfect for AI in a way that doesn't take away too much from the human experience. I'll keep my art, but shopping can die off.
by raincole | 2025-11-26 16:45:35+00:00
> It's like some cruel joke the universe decided to play on people who like to think hard and understand the systems around them.

Yeah. This cruel joke even has a name: The Bitter Lesson.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_lesson

But think about it: if digital painting were solved not by a machine learning model, but human-readable code, it would be an even more bleak and cruel joke, isn't it?