MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jaggederest | 2025-11-04 08:44:34+00:00
Calculate the return on investment for a solar installation of a specified size on a specified property based on the current dynamic prices of all of the panels, batteries, inverter, and balance of system components, the current zoning and electrical code, the current cost of capital, the average insolation and weather taking into account likely changes in weather in the future as weather instability increases due to more global increase of temperature, the chosen installation method and angle, and the optimal angle of the solar panels if adjusted monthly or quarterly. Now do a Manual J calculation to determine the correct size of heat pump in each section of that property, taking into account number of occupants, insulation level, etc.

ChatGPT is currently the best solar calculator on the publicly accessible internet and it's not even close. It'll give you the internal rate of return, it'll ask all the relevant questions, find you all the discounts you can take in taxes and incentives, determine whether you should pay the additional permitting and inspection cost for net metering or just go local usage with batteries, size the batteries for you, and find some candidate electricians to do the actual installation once you acquire the equipment.

Edit: My guess is that it'd cost several thousand dollars to hire someone to do this for you, and it'll save you probably in the $10k-$30k range on the final outcomes, depending on the size of system.
by Someone | 2025-11-04 08:45:09+00:00
> I was taken back when I saw what was basically zero recall loss in the real world task of finding related topics

By moving the values to a single bit, you’re lumping stuff together that was different before, so I don’t think recall loss would be expected.

Also: even if your vector is only 100-dimensional, there already are 2^100 different bit vectors. That’s over 10^30.

If your dataset isn’t gigantic and has documents that are even moderately dispersed in that space, the likelihood of having many with the same bit vector isn’t large.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-11-04 08:46:23+00:00
How you reject the first one of these, compared with the hundretth and the millionth(!) is probably going to be an interesting development over next few years.

Personally, I've felt drained dealing with small PRs fixing actual bugs by enthusiastic students new to projects in the pre-slop era.

Particularly if I felt they were doing it more to say they'd done it, rather than to help the project.

I imagine that motive might help drive an increase in this kind of thing.
by nicbou | 2025-11-04 08:47:00+00:00
I live in Berlin and I am self-employed. I earn a living from simplifying German bureaucracy for immigrants.

I am quite stereotypically left-leaning, and hostile to greedy behavior and "move fast and break things". I mesh pretty well with the vibe on HN, because most people here seem pretty jaded about Big Tech, finance bros and the like. I also like how polite the conversation is.
by fragmede | 2025-11-04 08:47:11+00:00
You'd think so, but there's always people complainers that something is an ad. It just happened to be my turn. Mostly because the type of person who would complain that something is an ad and raise a fuss wouldn't complain about this one, and was feeling like pointing out that hypocrisy. Unfortunately I didn't strike the exact right tone for the peanut gallery. Maybe I'll have better luck next time!
by WillPostForFood | 2025-11-04 08:47:59+00:00
Regulation, for example occupational licensing of jobs, has become much more prevalent. 60 years ago, only 5% of the workforce was occupationally licensed, now it is 25%.* There is a bipartisan push to reduce occupational licensing, and recognize licenses across state lines. So not irrational, unsubstantiated, partisan, or ideological.

*https://documents.ncsl.org/wwwncsl/Labor/NCSL_DOL_Report_05_...
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-11-04 08:49:11+00:00
Also the initial claim is just false — “if you live in the United States today, and you accidentally knock a hole in your wall, it’s probably cheaper to buy a flatscreen TV and stick it in front of the hole, compared to hiring a handyman to fix your drywall“. I can tell you that this isn’t true in San Diego. Unless they’re using flatscreen tvs that cost less than $300? Or perhaps making extremely difficult-to-patch holes somehow
by zwnow | 2025-11-04 08:49:35+00:00
AI generated code is threatening the whole tech industry while also threatening to hurt tons of users, because people that have no business in building and deploying apps suddenly feel like they can. That Tea app was a good example for that, endangering thousands of women by leaking private conversations and address data.

If AI slop infiltrates projects enterprises are built upon, its likely companies and their customers are metaphorically hurt too, because of a spike in outages etc... (which already happens given AWS got like 7000 outage reports after getting rid of another 14000 employees).

Yes AI can be cool, but can we stop being this blind regarding its limitations, usecases, how its actually used, how it actually benefits humanity, and so on? Like give me a valid reason for Sora existing (except for monetizing attentionspans of humans, which I consider highly unethical).
by rmunn | 2025-11-04 08:51:03+00:00
When I moved from country A to country B, I shipped quite a lot of stuff (books, board games, etc) that was too heavy to take on the airplane and which I could live without for a month or two. Country B did not charge me customs duties on my books, but did charge me customs duties on my board games; I think they must have looked at how many I had and thought "There's no way this is personal possessions, he's bringing this into the country to sell them." I decided not to argue with them about it, so I got double-taxed on some of my property (sales tax on it in country A when I bought those games, then customs duties in country B years later).

P.S. My collection of board games is not particularly impressive for a board gamer: it's in the double digits, but not in the triple digits. I know some board gamers with far more games than I have.
by ivankahl | 2025-11-04 08:51:07+00:00
What are your organization's expectations or policies regarding PR size and acceptable AI usage? Even if your organization hasn't set any expectations, what are yours—and have you communicated them to the author?

If expectations have been shared and these changes contradict them, you can quickly close the PR, explain why it's not acceptable, and ask them to redo it.

If you don't have clear guidelines on AI usage or haven't shared your expectations, you'll need to review the PR more carefully. First, verify whether your assumption that it’s a simple service is accurate (although from your description, it sounds like it is). If it is, talk to the author and point out that it's more complicated than necessary. You can also ask if they used AI and warn them about the complexities it can introduce.
by diffeomorphism | 2025-11-04 08:53:05+00:00
Not inane at all, just your phrasing.

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

This is not about "X sucks", but the very first questions from an engineering perspective should be whY? What do you want to accomplish? Is X actually a good approach towards Y?

If it turns out that trying to shoehorn X into kinda accomplishing Y is very hard work, then suggesting to use X2 instead is a perfectly sensible suggestion.

If you have a hard constraint that you must use X, even if it does not fit well to Y, fair enough. Then you add that as a reply or state it in the beginning.
by cyberax | 2025-11-04 08:53:20+00:00
> Can you use the time in a car while commuting to work to do the same?

Yes. In a well-designed city, a car trip will give you more time to do that.

> What makes a city "well-designed" in your eyes?

Not large, at most 300000 population, and designed for the needs of people, not for bike-lanes. So wide roads, plenty of parking (including parking lots), low density, large houses providing plenty of space, etc.
by anthk | 2025-11-04 08:53:20+00:00
Forget MAME; I'd love a forked project for this minus the shaders for old machines. Where you just get the terminal emulation with a good TTF font and that's it. There are similar projects for the Altair 8800 where they scrapped their code from SIMH (now I prefer simh-classic) to just emulate a CP/M 2.2 Altair machine and that's it, because these people don't need to emulate PDP10's with ITS, old BSD's, current VAX NetBSD releases or the rest of the DEC machines...
by refactor_master | 2025-11-04 08:53:21+00:00
Consider this simple example: Storing all your sensitive user data in one centralized location (e.g. a US server) would be great for any kind of analytics and modeling to tap into, and is technically very easy to do, but it also violates virtually every country's data privacy laws. So then you have to set up siloed servers around the world, deal with data governance, legal stuff, etc.

Sure, it then becomes a technical challenge to work around those limits, but that may be cost/time prohibitive.
by gloosx | 2025-11-04 08:54:07+00:00
> Any thinking that happens with words is fundamentally no different from what LLMs do.

This is such a wildly simplified and naive claim. "Thinking with words" happens inside a brain, not inside a silicon circuit with artificial neurons bolted in place. The brain is plastic, it is never the same from one moment to the next. It does not require structured input, labeled data, or predefined objectives in order to learn "thinking with words." The brain performs continuous, unsupervised learning from chaotic sensory input to do what it does. Its complexity and efficiency are orders of magnitude beyond that of LLM inference. Current models barely scratch the surface of that level of complexity and efficiency.

> Do you have a concept of one-ness, or two-ness, beyond symbolic assignment?

Obviously we do. The human brain's idea of "one-ness" or "two-ness" is grounded in sensory experience — seeing one object, then two, and abstracting the difference. That grounding gives meaning to the symbol, something LLMs don't have.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-11-04 08:54:16+00:00
> He's a software developer from a different era

Ivory tower politics is never an excuse, and failure to adapt to the shop standards usually means your position ends. Inflicting a goofy meta-circular interpreter on people is a liability.

Anyone competent would normally revert that nonsense in about 30 seconds, as it looks like a compressed/generated underhanded payload. "Trust me bro" is also not a valid excuse. =3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conways_Law
I made a tiny desktop app for Mac called CleanKeys
by dadangnoes | 2025-11-04 08:55:07+00:00
I often get frustrated when cleaning my Mac keyboard from things like dust, oil, or other dirt. Even though I use a silicone cover, it still gets through.

Sometimes when I wipe it with a cloth and cleaning liquid, I accidentally press some keys or trigger shortcuts. That’s why I made this small desktop app, this tiny macOS app that lets you toggle “Cleaning Mode” so key presses are ignored while you wipe the keyboard. It uses a global CGEvent tap to swallow key events, then restores them when you turn it off. No network, no analytics.

hopefully it helps you too. Don’t forget to leave a star, thanks!

Repo: https://github.com/rbayuokt/CleanKeys
by lucafeu | 2025-11-04 08:55:11+00:00
Location: Munich, Germany

Remote: yes

Willing to relocate: no

Technologies: Agile (Scrum, Kanban, Nexus), Project Management, Process Optimization, Compliance, Jira/Confluence, Azure DevOps, Bitbucket, Git/GitHub, SQL, T-SQL, VBA, Python, Microsoft Excel/Power Query/Power Automate, Reporting/Dashboards, Test Management, RPA

Résumé/CV: https://lucaf.eu/

Email: lucaf@lucaf.eu

IT Project Manager | Product Owner

Specialist in IT transformation in highly regulated industries (automotive, insurance, reinsurance). Combination of mathematical-analytical background (M.Sc. in Business Mathematics, LMU Munich) and many years of project experience in large-scale agile projects. Positioned at the interface of process optimisation, compliance and technical implementation. Proven ability to translate complex regulatory requirements into functioning processes, tools and software solutions. Author of own knowledge platforms Scrum.wiki, blog, open source projects.
by matsemann | 2025-11-04 08:55:31+00:00
Working at a company in Norway hiring lots of internationals, I've heard so many stories. I'm myself born here, but to foreign (EU) parents. Getting a citizenship for me was quite "easy" (in the sense that I didn't have to do anything or be at someone's mercy, just had to apply), but still lots of bureaucracy. For instance, I had to order a transcript from the police saying that I hadn't committed certain crimes. This document I would have to bring to my appointment for citizenship at the police station. But the document had a short expiration date, and didn't know how long it would take to obtain or not when my appointment would be. So it's a gamble if you hit the timing, shrugs. I think however they now just pull up the records themselves instead of doing this weird dance.

One coworker had lived her for many years on a string of temporary working visas. He was then eligible for a permanent one, and applied. However, while that was processing, he kinda was in limbo. Still legal to live and work here, but somehow wasn't guaranteed entry if he were to leave for a vacation / visit his home country/family. I don't know the exact details, but so weird how he suddenly was stuck here for months, with many delays. In the end he needed to travel for work, and our company sent a letter and his application got fast tracked.
by massens | 2025-11-04 08:55:34+00:00
Happy Scribe | Product Engineers (Growth & Staff) | Onsite & Hybrid (Barcelona, Spain) | Full-time

Hi there, Happy Scribe founder here. We built one of the web’s most accurate multilingual transcription platforms with 0$ vc money, trusted by hundreds of thousands of users each month.

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You’d be joining a team of ~20 people, close-knit and pragmatic. Some of us are scaling a mature, revenue-generating platform. Others are prototyping new products that push the limits of speech and agentic AI.

We move fast but think long-term. There’s room here to own, shape, and ship real products — not pitch decks. We hire only builders and kind people :)

Please apply directly to our website: https://www.happyscribe.com/careers

Cheers!
by apexalpha | 2025-11-04 08:55:36+00:00
I had no idea travel was this difficult for people who aren't EU citizens.

Wow, I'm almost annoyed on the authors behalf of how much hoops there are to jump through.

>To apply for British citizenship, you need to prove you were physically in the UK on your application date but five years ago. Not approximately five years, not that week—that exact day when you press "submit" on the form minus five years. Miss it by 24 hours and your application is reject after months of waiting, and you have to pay a hefty fee to re-apply.

That's a hilarious requirement. I wonder how that ended up in there.
by ako | 2025-11-04 08:56:53+00:00
Most AI tooling is shipped with a feedback loop around the LLM. The quality of Claude Code for example lies in the feedback loop it provides on your code. Maybe the LLM itself isn't thinking, but the Agent which ships an LLM plus feedback loop definitely shows thinking qualities.

Just now in an debugging session with claude code:

* let me read this file... * let me read this file... * I think there's a caching issue with the model after dropping the module. Let me check if there's a save or reload needed after DROP MODULE. First, let me verify something: * creates a bash/javascript script to verify its assumption * runs the script (after review and approval) * Aha! I found the problem! Look at the output...

How is this not thinking?
by gitonthescene | 2025-11-04 08:57:03+00:00
All good decisions are a product of the particular circumstances in which they arise. This post seemed to be about generalizing that process which I would guess comes out of a supposition of fungiblity.

As much as one can use a given style for a personal project so can one for a professional one so long as it fills the given need. Too often (in my view) fungibility is seen as a preeminent requirement and layers and layers of self justifying processes are built on top of that. I’m only saying that’s a choice and the costs and benefits are not as obvious as most suppose.

Also you can minimize risks with redundancy but most presume those costs to be too high. But again this quickly becomes about politics.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-11-04 08:57:12+00:00
I remember a “choose your own story” stick figure Flash app, called Time to Die (I believe), where the “protagonist” was a condemned convict, used as target practice by scientists.

You could pick weapons used by the scientists. In most, he’d just get blown away, but in one scenario, he grabs the gun, and kills everyone in the facility.

Not sure if it was this guy, or was just inspired by him.
by grodriguez100 | 2025-11-04 08:57:54+00:00
Don’t. I would refuse to review a PR with 9000 LOC and 63 new files even if written by a human. Something that large needs to be discussed first to agree on an architecture and general approach, then split in manageable pieces and merged piece-wise in a feature branch, with each individual PR having reasonable test coverage, and finally the feature branch merged into master.
by palebt | 2025-11-04 08:58:07+00:00
SEEKING WORK | REMOTE | Worldwide Availability (EU-based)

Technologies: Kotlin (Android), Python (Django), Java, Dart (Flutter), Stripe, FHIR, Compose Multiplatform

About Me: Formerly at Google and Amazon, driven by a deep passion for software and technology

Contact: myerou {at} paleblueapps.com

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/myerou
by fragmede | 2025-11-04 08:58:29+00:00
It's hard to really discuss in the abstract though. Why was the generared code overly complicated? (I mean, I believe you when you say it was, but it doesn't leave much room for discussion). Similarly, what's partially correct about it? How many additional prompts does it take before you a) use it as a starting point b) use it because it works c) don't use any of it, just throw it away d) post about why it was lousy to all of the Internet reachable from your local ASN.
by keiferski | 2025-11-04 08:58:35+00:00
I don’t see how being critical of this is a knee jerk response.

Thinking, like intelligence and many other words designating complex things, isn’t a simple topic. The word and concept developed in a world where it referred to human beings, and in a lesser sense, to animals.

To simply disregard that entire conceptual history and say, “well it’s doing a thing that looks like thinking, ergo it’s thinking” is the lazy move. What’s really needed is an analysis of what thinking actually means, as a word. Unfortunately everyone is loathe to argue about definitions, even when that is fundamentally what this is all about.

Until that conceptual clarification happens, you can expect endless messy debates with no real resolution.

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” - H. L. Mencken
by jjcob | 2025-11-04 08:58:37+00:00
It works best if you don't reply immediately. I recommend successively increasing the response delay. Keep it short enough to make sure that they don't start bugging you on other channels, but long enough to make sure they have time to cool down and question if the continued effort is really worth it.

As long as the response delay increases at least geometrically, there is a finite bound to the amount of work required to deal with a pull request that you will never merge.
by donatj | 2025-11-04 08:59:05+00:00
I've seen companies including my own pouring lots of money into AI. Outside of "replacing developers", I am genuinely curious what have people done that's actually useful?

We've got a sort of "business intelligence" AI they poured a lot of time and money into, and I don't think anyone really uses it because it makes stuff up.

I'm sure there are things. I just haven't seen them. I would love to hear concrete examples.

The cynic in me says I wouldn't want something with the error aptitude and truth telling of a small child taking any sort of important action on my behalf.
by palebt | 2025-11-04 08:59:40+00:00
SEEKING WORK | REMOTE (Contract) | Worldwide Availability (EU-based)

Technologies: Kotlin (Android), Python (Django), Java, Dart (Flutter), Stripe, FHIR, Compose Multiplatform

About Me: Formerly at Google and Amazon, driven by a deep passion for software and technology

Contact: myerou {at} paleblueapps.com

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/myerou
by Terr_ | 2025-11-04 08:59:47+00:00
Guessing it stems from "we need something dead-simple to evaluate that yields a definite yes-or-no answer, with no annoying variables."

I'm trying to think of some other reason they might want a specific moment rather than "pick your own instant within this span", but I can't think of anything. Even if it was to "make sure you aren't claiming the same time on two applications to different places", the person could have simply staggered the applications.
Show HN: AI Invoicing with Jinna – Create, Send and Chase to Get Paid Faster
by nikitaeverywher | 2025-11-04 09:01:50+00:00
Hello Hacker News!

I'm helping my friends to launch Jinna - your AI-mate built to get you paid faster.

Jinna lets you create invoices via voice, text, or file upload. Customize with logos, media, and payment links (with Stripe integration). The system automatically sends invoices and can follow up with configurable reminders based on your preferred timing and tone.

Happy to hear any feedback!
by internet_points | 2025-11-04 09:02:04+00:00
TIL `a ?: b`, that's actually pretty nice, a bit like Haskell's `fromMaybe b a` (or `a <|> b` if b can also b "empty")

and I do like `#define _(e...) ({e;})` – that's one where I feel the short macro name is OK. But I'd like it better if that were just how C worked from the get-go.

Very nice discussion at the end of the article. There are good things to be learnt from this code and its discussions even if you disagree with some or even most of the style.
by WalterSear | 2025-11-04 09:02:44+00:00
9000-line PRs were never a good idea, have only been sufficiently plausible because we were forced to accept bad PR review practices. Coding was expensive and management beat us into LGTMing them into the codebase to keep the features churning.

Those days are gone. Coding is cheap. The same LLMs that enable people to submit 9000 line PRs of chaos can be used to quickly turn them into more sensible work. If they genuinely can't do a better job, rejecting the PR is still the right response. Just push back.
by pmbanugo | 2025-11-04 09:02:49+00:00
I enjoyed reading this. It could be because I'm thinking of doing more of system/network programming (and learning Zig). I've spent the last 6 years in the JavaScript land and bored of yet-another-bundling or SPA-like pattern.

So there's hope that with consistency and patience, one could build expertise in a totally different area
by lccerina | 2025-11-04 09:03:00+00:00
"not designed by humans"? Since when? Unless you count cortical organoids /wetware (grown in some instrumented petri dish) every artificial neural network, doesn't matter how complicated, it is designed by humans. With equations and rules designed by humans. Backpropagation, optimization algorithms, genetic selections etc... all designed by humans.

There is no biology here, and there are so many other words that describe perfectly what they are doing here, without twisting the meaning of another word.