MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by enricozb | 2025-11-04 06:51:24+00:00
I used to make animations with https://pivotanimator.net/ a lot as a kid, trying to make fight scenes like these. A sort of related thing is ToriBash, which is kind of a multiplayer 3D animation game where you fight each other by making decisions on which muscles to contract at each time interval.

Loved this stuff so much. I miss my summers off from school, where I would never think of a day gone as time "spent".
by LaFolle | 2025-11-04 06:53:21+00:00
> if you can find the logic and the will to do it.

This is important. Both logic and will are required. If only one of the 2 exists the impact can be limited if any at all. Broadly speaking, mostly, people have the logic but not the "will" in a sense that latter gets diluted by factors like ego, seniority, org lag etc.
by magicalhippo | 2025-11-04 06:53:57+00:00
Yeah edited it, should have clarified.

> 23k didn’t sound too far off what an American installer would try charge for a new system in a high cost of living area

I've heard these insane prices. I think 2.3k is pricey enough, you can get cheaper units here but SO wants the pretty indoor unit so pretty indoor unit she gets.
by toast0 | 2025-11-04 06:54:51+00:00
There's lots of reasons, among them:

Overhead distribution wires are insulated primarily by air and distance; wires in the ground need more material and cost to be insulated from the ground and each other. That insulation and the ground is likely to trap heat; in urban settings, it's common to have fluid filled underground cables to manage heat, but I don't know how necessary/viable that is in rural areas.

Construction is more expensive and invasive. Rather than clearing to ground level every so often for towers and then managing (or not) tall trees between towers, you've got to clear to ground level for trenching. I'm pretty sure you can't lay distribution lines with directional drilling like you can with communications cables; you've also got to do a lot of specialized fill around the cables themselves.

Maintenance is more expensive; you need to keep the ground above the cable clear, so that it's possible to access when needed, and so tree roots don't mess with your cable.

Repairs are more expensive and time consuming: damage could be hidden, and anyway you need to dig to repair breaks or replace sections of wires. This one trades off with the expectation that underground wires will require fewer repairs.

Connecting is more expensive; underground utilities may require digging to access.
by s1gsegv | 2025-11-04 06:54:53+00:00
If it was so lucrative, wouldn’t more people set up shop undercutting the current offerings? Why not become an HVAC installer and make millions, if you’re really able to make $15k profit on a job you can turn out in a day.

The truth is probably more that the various money sinks in our society are starting to add up, things like healthcare, legal protection, licensure, compliance, rent (business or personal), even just having appropriate work vehicles, fueling them, compensating people for the time spent sitting in traffic to come across town to your house. Somehow you’re paying for all of that when someone’s livelihood is installing your mini split. A lot of those costs have grown faster than wages, if you try to point to a reason why it’s different today than 20 years ago. More people looking to make a quick buck without doing any work or providing any real value, and more people succeeding.
by XorNot | 2025-11-04 06:55:14+00:00
I agree.

Given that as soon as cloud computing happened we stopped bothering to debug VMs and just started deleting them and rebuilding, I don't know why people find the idea this applies to other industries surprising.

Repair involves establishing where in a very large state space an item is, and finding a path back to optimal.

Whereas building a new item simply involves traversing an already known path to optimal.
by Roark66 | 2025-11-04 06:55:40+00:00
Many people gave good tips, so let me answer in general.

As someone on the "senior" side AI has been very helpful in speeding up my work. As I work with many languages, many projects I haven't touched in months and while my code is relatively simple the underlying architecture is rather complex. So where I do use AI my prompts are very detailed. Often I spot mistakes that get corrected etc. With this I still see a big speedup (at least 2x,often more). The quality is almost the same.

However, I noticed many "team leads" try to use the AI as an excuse to push too difficult tasks onto "junior" people. The situation described by the OP is what happens sometimes.

Then when I go to the person and ask for some weird thing they are doing I get "I don't know, copilot told me"...

Many times I tried to gently steer such AI users towards using it as a learning tool. "Ask it to explain to you things you don't understand" "Ask questions about why something is written this way" and so on. Not once I saw it used like this.

But this is not everyone. Some people have this skill which lets them get a lot more out of pair programming and AI. I had a couple trainees in the current team 2 years ago that were great at this. This way as "pre-AI" in this company, but when I was asked to help them they were asking various questions and 6 months later they were hired on permanent basis. Contrast this with: - "so how should I change this code"? - You give them a fragment, they go put it in verbatim and come back via teams with a screenshot of an error message...

Basically expecting you will do the task for them. Not a single question. No increased ability to do it on their own.

This is how they try to use AI as well. And it's a huge time waster.
by ulfw | 2025-11-04 06:56:06+00:00
Location: wordwide

Remote: Yes worldwide possible (as either part time, fractional, consulting, board, advisory, freelance or similar arrangement.) No full time. Hell no.

Willing to relocate: No. For what?

We all know no one is getting hired. So posting this for funsies.

eMail: calstanford at gmail dot com
by ogarten | 2025-11-04 06:56:45+00:00
SEEKING WORK | Germany | Remote | CV: Full CV and details on request Email: hello (at) orellgarten.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ogarten

Website: https://orellgarten.com

Technologies & Skills: Data Engineering, Software Engineering, Data Modelling & Pipeline Design, Python, FastAPI, SQL, AWS, Azure, DuckDB, API design (full list on request)

Experienced data engineer looking for data engineering contracts to solve business problems.

I usually work on the entire data chain from data generation up to BI or ML use cases at the end. Main focus is data from your business operations (logs, sensor data, process data, ...).

More than 7 years of experience in various industries (Aviation, Automotive, AdTech, ...) where I have helped my clients successfully tackle their challenges.
by est | 2025-11-04 06:56:53+00:00
That's precisely what Wechat is doing. Most chinese "mega apps" do this.

Elon absolutely on his track to copy this important feature [1]

The webview works as a traffic faucet. Elon can turn it on or off for every third-party site, you know, for "Internet safety".

My take:

Next step is X.com proprietary APIs inside the Webview, like payment and everything.

The ultimate goal is a "mini-app" framework that use PWA-like techs to run everything based on the Webview and circumvent Appstore.

And last a phone that runs the "mini-app" framework because why not, as an "AI edge node" like Elon recently proposed.

[1]: https://x.com/danmurrays/status/1683446630245187584
by eschatology | 2025-11-04 06:57:56+00:00
While the article title is true (errant is a very specific and concise word), to me it did not convey clear enough that this is just ucs-detect / unicode support (compliance?) ranking. The article title "State of Terminal Emulators in 2025" implied a larger comparison of terminal emulators than just ucs-detect.

Personally I also question the practicality or usefulness of this table because why should I care about having "the best unicode support"?

Curious, I briefly compared top ranked emulator (ghostty) on how fast it can print 10000 lines and it took 432ms compared to alacritty, ranked 18 (50ms), and Terminal.app, ranked 29 (50ms). If this is the trade-off to have the best unicode support, why should I want it? Why does it matter?
by skytreader | 2025-11-04 06:57:57+00:00
Location: EU

Remote: Yes, EU timezones preferred

Willing to relocate: Depends on the location (but with a strong bias for EU-Schengen/US locations)

Technologies: Java, Python (and variants thereof like Groovy, Clojure, Pypy), Node/TS | AWS/Lambda Serverless, GCE/Kubernetes | Redis, MySQL, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB

Resume: https://bit.ly/3B3o65M (It links to my CV repo at Github, pinky promise. You can also visit github.com/<hnusername>.)

I'm not actively looking (hence why my resume link is obfuscated like that) but I'm at least interested in getting a feel for the market right now. That said, I'm willing to consider a position with a great fit for my skill set and career goals.

Here's my pitch: I have experience in a multitude of industries and positions. From improving legacy infra and processes in an established telco company to scaling a fast-moving startup from 200K to 2M users. In my free time, I love writing Code That Is Poetry but day-to-day I am not an idealist engineer who doesn't compromise. Well-engineered code is clean and correct but correct above all else.

Oh, also, I'm great at writing documentation. I consider myself introverted but apparently my communication skills are above average for Software Engineers. I also pride myself on my humility and modesty.

I'm currently a backend engineer developing features and improving infra for an online game with millions of daily active users. I'd love to explore other technical positions in the games industry short of joining a AAA studio because (a) I don't want to crunch and (b) my skill set does not lay that way; other tech-creative industries would also appeal to me! Another particular interest is in B2C businesses where the 'C' is software developers. I'd love to chat and network about opportunities; if you think you have a product that could benefit from my skill set, drop me a line!
by ryao | 2025-11-04 06:58:14+00:00
If you need R410A refrigerant, the high costs are due to government regulations causing the shortage. I very much hope that the heat pump I had installed 2 years ago does not leak. Theoretically, if the leak occurs under warranty, it should be covered. The central A/C unit I replaced with the heat pump had developed a leak right before the warranty expired, which resulted in a costly repair being covered. Unfortunately, we paid another company to refill it before learning that it would be covered as part of the warranty repair by the company that installed it. It then developed a second leak several years later, so I had a heat pump installed. Of course, that heat pump uses R410A refrigerant.

The leaky A/C unit had been made by Lennox while the new heat pump was made by Fujitsu. I very much hope that Fujitsu engineered its heat pump to last. The heat pump had also replaced an oil heating system that was around 25 years old and still could have been used for many more years. Expecting similar or better longevity out of a heat pump does not seem unreasonable.
by itake | 2025-11-04 06:58:34+00:00
I’ve heard that in Wisconsin, it’s common for retirees to sell the family home and buy a cabin on a lake. The dad spends his remaining years fishing and enjoying the quiet.

But downsizing to a lower-cost, rural area often means less access to healthcare. Eventually, Dad passes away, and the widow is left snowed in each winter: unable to afford moving back, now that home prices and interest rates have climbed far beyond what they sold for.

> If you can’t afford your home without help, you probably shouldn’t buy one and you don’t have the financial stability needed for it.

My prediction is more and more families will provide down payment support. $2m homes are affordable if you put 100% down and just need to worry about taxes, repairs, and insurance.

Assuming everything else even (career/income, etc), the person with the family assistance will get to own the home pushing the goal post further away from the people that don't have family assistance.
Why isn't there a universal + standard VoIP/data SMS-like message protocol?
by abcqwerty9876 | 2025-11-04 06:58:52+00:00
I find it surprising how the stickiness of most of Meta's products revolve around the idea that, in essence, there is no equivalent "SMS" (provided by all telephony / telecommunications data plans) but over data rather than SMS? I.e., you use IG messenger or WhatsApp but you can't talk to users who are not on IG messenger or WhatsApp like you could just SMS someone with a regular phone.

I know there's Signal, Viber, WhatsApp etc, but all these services require you to register with the service provider rather than being able to send a data based message from User A with Telco Z to User B with Telco Y.

Has there been standards before? Any thoughts on why it hasn't emerged?
by khafra | 2025-11-04 06:58:54+00:00
> Generalizing your experience to everyone else's betrays a lack of imagination.

One guy is generalizing from "they don't work for me" to "they don't work for anyone."

The other one is saying "they do work for me, therefore they do work for some people."

Note that the second of these is a logically valid generalization. Note also that it agrees with folks such as Tim Gowers, who work on novel and hard problems.
by locknitpicker | 2025-11-04 06:59:03+00:00
> In Japan you can get minisplit's installed for $1k a unit, here you regularly find quotes over $10k.

How much does the unit cost? What work does it take to install it? How large does it need to be to support your home?

What are the energy needs of your typical home in Japan vs your home town?

Those are the key factors, not how many years someone spends in tradeschool.
by Genego | 2025-11-04 07:00:39+00:00
SEEKING WORK | Full-stack Python/Django Developer (Creative AI Focus)

Location: Thailand (UTC+7) Remote: Only Technologies: Django, Python, HTMX, Tailwind, Postgres, Replicate API, image generation pipelines, LoRA training workflows Résumé/CV: https://edwin.genego.io/about Email: edwin@genego.io

Sr. Software Engineer building production Django apps with practical AI integration. I specialize in creative AI tooling , image generation pipelines, multi-model orchestration (Flux, SDXL), prompt engineering systems, and cost-optimized workflows. Current work: 20+ custom management commands for AI image generation, character IP systems, scene replication with layered prompt architecture. I help teams ship AI-powered creative tools without risky rewrites, handling multi-model workflows, resume-capable operations, and obsessive cost tracking. Looking for fractional or project work (2-6 week cycles) involving generative AI, creative tooling, or content pipelines.

https://edwin.genego.io/
by Hoshang07 | 2025-11-04 07:00:56+00:00
We’re putting together a small Slack group for ops, data and devs who are hands-on building internal AI agents — people experimenting with things like n8n, LangGraph, Zapier, Make, OpenAI agents, Agno, or custom setups.

The goal’s to share what’s actually working: use cases, architecture ideas, prompt design, and maybe a few fails too.

If you’re building agents for analytics, internal ops, or workflow automation inside your company — would love to have you join.
by GordyNumberOne | 2025-11-04 07:01:03+00:00
Workmind.cloud | Cloud SysAdmin | Remote - Southeast Asia | Full-time contract

Workmind is a seed-stage startup building operational AI agents for US home service franchises. Our agents are the product of years of experience building and delivering AI agents for small/medium businesses, and we emphasize reliability and consistency.

We're looking for an infrastructure engineer experienced with Google cloud to build and monitor our DevOps, CI/CD, and data pipelines. Full job description is at https://workmind.cloud/jobs/reliability-eng/

The engineering team is based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and we strongly prefer applicants based in Southeast Asia.
by robot-wrangler | 2025-11-04 07:01:30+00:00
Since we're doing PSAs, isn't it also now just a completely broken platform on mobile for everyone who isn't logged in?

> Something went wrong, but don't fret - let's give it another shot.

This is all I've seen for literally years now. No real error, does not even say to login or install an app, just blames it on my privacy extensions (I don't actually have any) and offers a button to pointlessly try again. No big loss, but surprising! On the one hand, it's the only time big tech isn't engaged in obnoxious harassment, but it's also a conspicuously dumb oversight in the funnel
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-11-04 07:02:21+00:00
> A quick Google says it takes 4 years to get a license to be an HVAC technician in my state.

A flat time mandate for HVAC tech certification seems really out of place. And a 4 year path of any sort seems excessive for a technician. I couldn't find anything like that. Most results I found were in the 6-12 mos range - which is often spent employed.

WV was an outlier with a 2000hr requirement. How I have seen (non-hvac) 2k requirements get satisfied are thru a HS VoTech (my son) or 18-24mos doing paid tech work toward the official certification (electrician techs do this).

I can't find a state that requires anything a like a 4yr college degree, where life is put on hold to focus on that. And then 4yrs of living and school expenses are investments that need to be earned back. Not for any trade tech.
by keiferski | 2025-11-04 07:02:25+00:00
I assume most people agree with that framing. “Thinking” generally implies a level of consciousness or self-awareness.

“Let me think about this.” “I have to think on it.”

My brain regulates all sorts of processes unconsciously, like breathing, for example. I don’t treat those as “thinking,” so I don’t know why other unconscious brain activity would be either.
by AnIrishDuck | 2025-11-04 07:02:33+00:00
> Sometimes after a night’s sleep, we wake up with an insight on a topic or a solution to a problem we encountered the day before.

The current crop of models do not "sleep" in any way. The associated limitations on long term task adaptation are obvious barriers to their general utility.

> When conversing with LLMs, I never get the feeling that they have a solid grasp on the conversation. When you dig into topics, there is always a little too much vagueness, a slight but clear lack of coherence, continuity and awareness, a prevalence of cookie-cutter verbiage. It feels like a mind that isn’t fully “there” — and maybe not at all.

One of the key functions of REM sleep seems to be the ability to generalize concepts and make connections between "distant" ideas in latent space [1].

I would argue that the current crop of LLMs are overfit on recall ability, particularly on their training corpus. The inherent trade-off is that they are underfit on "conceptual" intelligence. The ability to make connections between these ideas.

As a result, you often get "thinking shaped objects", to paraphrase Janelle Shane [2]. It does feel like the primordial ooze of intelligence, but it is clear we still have several transformer-shaped breakthroughs before actual (human comparable) intelligence.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Sleep 2. https://www.aiweirdness.com/
by magicalhippo | 2025-11-04 07:04:27+00:00
> The reason is that a tech's time is expensive

Yeah labor costs also make a lot of repairs uneconomical. There's been talk here about removing the 25% VAT on repairs to make the value proposition a bit better, but doesn't seem to have much traction currently.

> At least in the US, refrigerant costs have been high because of a shortage, not taxes.

The guy said it was due to taxes, specifically that they had gone up so much in recent years. Seems it's because the tax is tied to CO2 tax[1], which has been going up since they introduced it in 2020. Not sure what refrigerant they use in my minisplit, but even if it's one of the cheaper one the tax is about $90 per kg, so adds up quick.

edit: mine uses R-32, so yeah about $90/kg.

[1]: https://www.vke.no/artikler/2024/okning-avgift-hfk/
by morshu9001 | 2025-11-04 07:05:35+00:00
Python: I get how PyPy is better in some ways, but calling C libs is the most important feature of Python. It doesn't have a lot going for it otherwise.

Go: Greenthreading is a big deal in backends. Arguably the main reason for Kotlin is because Java didn't have that, but now there are vthreads. Rust has chipped away at the Go systems use cases, so it's mainly for backends and CLIs now, but I wish it had better error handling.

Rust: There's a very good preso from the Rust team about how they arrived at async/await, and also how every other language does concurrency. Greenthreading was considered, main problem being you need a runtime for that.

C++: Torvalds was right about it all along.

JS: Honestly the best high-level language, made better choices than Python, never made huge breaking changes, somehow had a decent answer to cooperative multitasking before most other langs, deserves its popularity.
by mxkopy | 2025-11-04 07:06:20+00:00
There’s a way to talk about this stuff already. LLMs can “think” counterfactually on continuous data, just like VAEs [0], and are able to interpolate smoothly between ‘concepts’ or projections of the input data. This is meaningless when the true input space isn’t actually smooth. It’s system I, shallow-nerve psychomotor reflex type of thinking.

What LLMs can’t do is “think” counterfactually on discrete data. This is stuff like counting or adding integers. We can do this very naturally because we can think discretely very naturally, but LLMs are bad at this sort of thing because the underlying assumption behind gradient descent is that everything has a gradient (i.e. is continuous). They need discrete rules to be “burned in” [1] since minor perturbations are possible for and can affect continuous-valued weights.

You can replace “thinking” here with “information processing”. Does an LLM “think” any more or less than say, a computer solving TSP on a very large input? Seeing as we can reduce the former to the latter I wouldn’t say they’re really at all different. It seems like semantics to me.

In either case, counterfactual reasoning is good evidence of causal reasoning, which is typically one part of what we’d like AGI to be able to do (causal reasoning is deductive, the other part is inductive; this could be split into inference/training respectively but the holy grail is having these combined as zero-shot training). Regression is a basic form of counterfactual reasoning, and DL models are basically this. We don’t yet have a meaningful analogue for discrete/logic puzzley type of problems, and this is the area where I’d say that LLMs don’t “think”.

This is somewhat touched on in GEB and I suspect “Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies” as well.

[0] https://human-interpretable-ai.github.io/assets/pdf/5_Genera...

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089360802...
by teiferer | 2025-11-04 07:06:57+00:00
> I hadn’t interacted with any of the office staff, but they’d seen me.

This story would have taken a very different turn if early on he had realized that befriending the office staff would have scored him a permanent place in one of those empty unused cubicles. No need to be best friends, but just being friendly and forthcoming now and then would have avoided their attitude of "who's that weirdo let's involve the site manager to get rid of him". It fits with his lonely wolf persona though which makes it easier for him to be a hero in his story and which he seems to cultivate in purpose.