MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Aurornis | 2026-01-17 16:44:30+00:00
Canada's climate is really different when it comes to the extreme cold.

Heat pumps are getting better at lower temperatures, but in an environment like Canada you still want auxiliary heat to be safe.

> It should also be noted that although heat pumps are very efficient, even when it's below freezing outside, they cannot raise the temperature of the house very quickly. Consumers are generally quite unhappy when it takes 8 hours to raise the temperature of the house by 1 degree

That would be an undersized heat pump in any regard. The installer would be at fault for screwing up that badly.

You're right that efficiency falls off at lower temperatures, 8 hours to move 1 degree would be from the installer sizing the unit wrong.
by chongli | 2026-01-17 16:45:15+00:00
Flat bottom woks need a lot more oil to stir fry properly, due to the lack of pooling. Flat bottom woks on electric cooktops (radiant or induction) also tend to have essentially nonexistent heating of the side slopes, preventing you from using the technique of splashing soy sauce (and other cooking sauces, as well as cooking wines) in a wide arc so that it reduces rapidly to form a sticky coating for the food. Instead, all of the sauce will just run down to the bottom where it joins the rest of the liquids coming out of the food, contributing to boiling/steaming rather than stir frying.
by proc0 | 2026-01-17 16:45:34+00:00
Good points. Design has a higher amount of creativity than the implementation based on specs, and AI is missing something that hampers its creativity, if it even has anything analogous to it.

I suspect this is also related to agency, and why we need to spell things out in the prompt and run multiple agents in a loop, not to mention the MoE and CoT, all of which would not be needed if the model could sustain a single prompt until it is finished, creating its own subgoals and reevaluating accordingly. Agency requires creativity and right now that's the human part, whether it's judging the output or orchestration of models.
by mmarian | 2026-01-17 16:45:48+00:00
Interesting, was thinking of building a reputation score service for this reason as well.

Surprised the Show HN hasn't had more success! But then again, I remember others tried this as well in the past...maybe it's one of those problems that people like to complain about but don't want to invest in fixing it?

I think it also doesn't help that the repo shows you've used Claude. The same people who don't want to trust AI PRs will probably be sceptical of an AI-written extension as well.
by YackerLose | 2026-01-17 16:45:50+00:00
> Scott Adams felt the contradictions of nerd-dom more acutely than most. As compensation, he was gifted with two great defense mechanisms. The first was humor (which Freud grouped among the mature, adaptive defenses), aided by its handmaiden self-awareness. The second (from Freud’s “neurotic” category) was his own particular variety of reaction formation, “I’m better than those other nerds because, while they foolishly worship rationality and the intellect, I’ve gotten past it to the real deal, marketing / manipulation / persuasion / hypnosis.”

Scott Adams was basically a classic Sophist, believing that rhetoric was the only thing worth cultivating. Nobody special; snake oil salesmen are up there with prostitutes and mercenaries in oldness of profession.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-17 16:45:55+00:00
Interesting fact: A lot of modern gas cooktops have safety features that will cut the gas off when the electricity is out. The safety mechanisms are powered by electricity, so if they can't confirm that the operation is safe they fail with the gas valve shut off.

It comes as a surprise to most users because power outages are so rare. They just assume it will work until 8 years later when they try to cook something during the first long outage in their area.
by chvid | 2026-01-17 16:45:56+00:00
Can we talk about how he in the end buried himself in vile racist politics?

Sure I enjoyed Dilbert.

The story about the frustrated highly intelligent engineer at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy. At the bottom of the social hierarchy.

So what does this archetypical mistreated highly intelligent nerd finally do? Reads up on junk psychology on how to manipulate and influence people. Goes to the gym to get buffed. Gets high on alt-right politics on how the white man now is under whipping hand of woke women and ungrateful immigrants.

Just a fascist joke of a person.
by svilen_dobrev | 2026-01-17 16:46:58+00:00
Science is hated because its mastery requires too much hard work, and, by the same token, its practitioners, the scientists, are hated because of their power they derive from it. - Dijkstra '1989

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD104...
by fc417fc802 | 2026-01-17 16:48:29+00:00
> Which is why it bugs me so much when people talk about the flaws of both in one breath as if they were even remotely comparable.

I agree. But it was not my intent to portray them as even remotely similar, hence the misunderstanding.

Reading about things like the balloon escape and what surrounded it gives a very real sense of just how bad things were. So when you see just how much better we have it, the sheer amount of opportunity available to our society in a general sense, it's more than a bit depressing to think that this is how we (collectively) chose to use it so far.

A rough analogy might be, we figure out advanced bioengineering and then the next thing you know we as a society have collectively gone to great lengths to apply it to create the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus. Like yeah I think the advanced bioengineering is a fantastic accomplishment. I don't think we should get rid of it. Things were definitely worse before we got that figured out. I don't miss amputations and lobotomies. But is it really necessary to so badly misappropriate the opportunity that it affords us?

Given how different your perspective is from my own I can appreciate that my original short and rather flippant comment failed to convey that particular message.
by staticassertion | 2026-01-17 16:48:58+00:00
> With the wal redis runs with perfectly reasonable performance. Of course you're not going to have the performance of an in-memory only DB if you're flushing to disk on every write.

But that's not what gets benchmarked against.

> You'll never get that kind of performance with other databases because they intentionally don't give you that granularity.

Okay but you also won't get horizontal scaling while maintaining consistency in Redis.

> The metadata of the filesystem isn't the performance bottleneck in most cases.

Okay, but they do show that other metadata stores are 2-4x slower than Redis, so it would be great to see whole-system benchmarks that use those.
by nindalf | 2026-01-17 16:48:58+00:00
You're claiming that the JS VM was implemented. Is it actually running? Because this screenshot shows that the ACID3 benchmark is requesting that you enable JavaScript (https://imgur.com/fqGLjSA). Why don't you upload a video of you loading this page?

Your slop is worthless except to convince gullible investors to give you more money.
by swiftcoder | 2026-01-17 16:51:27+00:00
Successful people also tend to overestimate what portion of that success was down to timing/luck. Zuck had a lot of early-mover advantage in the social media space (especially in the university demographic Facebook started out in).

A lot of his later ventures have been trying to break into markets that are already crowded by more established players, and that's just a lot harder to execute on.
by tsunamifury | 2026-01-17 16:51:35+00:00
"Russia was never run by engineers?" That's a massive oversight of 20th-century history. The Soviet Union was the world’s first and most committed technocracy. The GOSPLAN (State Planning Committee) was a literal attempt to run a continent-sized economy as a deterministic engineering problem. By the 70s, the Soviet leadership was more densely packed with engineers than any administration in US history.

They failed because they tried to 'refactor' nature. Stalin’s 'Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature' and Mao’s 'Great Leap Forward' (which applied industrial throughput logic to biology/close-planting) are the ultimate warnings of what happens when you treat complex, probabilistic systems (ecology and humanity) like a closed-loop machine.

Mao wasn’t an engineer by degree, but he was a High Modernist by practice. He believed society could be 'debugged' and 'optimized' through central planning. The result wasn't a more efficient system; it was a total system crash that cost tens of millions of lives.

Current China is a perfect example of 'Success by Engineering'—high-speed rail and ghost cities built on a demographic 'memory leak' (the One Child Policy) that is now crashing the entire stack. This is exactly my point: Engineers optimize for the metric they can see, while ignoring the high-dimensional chaos that actually sustains life.
by 0xCE0 | 2026-01-17 16:51:46+00:00
Great ideas are cheap to copy but not cheap to generate (time-/skill-/moneywise). Execution has always some cost, and the cost trend is towards 0 (but not 0, because everything cost eventually and someone has to pay the amortized cost).

I'd say what matters again is authenticity, i.e. intentful design and intentful business==product(s). Giving prompt "make me a unicorn" isn't authentic/intentful business/product design. Real businesses==products have to prove their reason for existence (and keep doing it ad infinitum), so customers can trust them and keep them alive with cash flow.

If there is a bad business/product in market, in a long run it is buyers to be blamed, because they are the ones supporting its existence with cash flow. VC/loan cash can only give time==money for companies couple of years, because eventually someone has to pay the cost.

And I'd say the most "quality/intentful" products are not the ones that makes the most money on the market. One has to choose whether do design "The Witness" xor "Candy Crush Saga".
by jjjbokma | 2026-01-17 16:52:08+00:00
Wow, the 5 seconds one is really fast! My static microblog generator [1] takes 30 seconds to generate 2600+ HTML pages from a single Markdown file (it uses a single Markdown file with additional directives to define seperate posts). Example can be visited at [2]. Tested on a Mac mini Late 2014 (!).

I plan to buy an M4 or M5 Mac mini later this year. Curious how fast it will generate my blog then.

[1] https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog/
[2] https://plurrrr.com/
by chongli | 2026-01-17 16:52:41+00:00
It's not just the efficiency of the heat pump that is at issue, it's the insulation of the house. As the outside temperature plunges, the house begins cooling off much more rapidly. This means the reduced efficiency of the heat pump (operating in cold outdoor temperatures) needs to produce more heating than it would at higher temperatures, and it's just not capable of that. My house was built in the 1980s and its insulation has always been more than adequate for the original natural gas furnace to be able to heat.

The heat pump I have is only a few years old and cost $12,000 installed (before tax credits). To be able to rapidly heat the house when it's -40 outside would require a system costing several times that! Much cheaper just to use a furnace for those few days per year.
by krapp | 2026-01-17 16:52:42+00:00
They don't care. No one is punishing them for not complying with releasing all of the Epstein files, and no one is going to punish them for anything in those files. Jeffrey Epstein was the first and likely last person to suffer any consequence beyond reputational harm.

There are numerous reasons why the US will probably go to war with Iran at some point (it's part of the "Axis of Evil" after all) but distracting from Epstein isn't one of them.
by kyboren | 2026-01-17 16:52:47+00:00
The Internet is the ultimate low-trust society. Your virtual doorstep is right next to ~8 billion other peoples' doorsteps. And attributing attacks and enforcing consequences is extremely difficult and rather unusual.

When people from high-trust societies move to a low-trust society, they either adapt to their new environment and take an appropriately defensive posture or they will get robbed, scammed, etc.

Those naïfs from high-trust societies may not be morally at fault, but they must be blamed, because they aren't just putting themselves at risk. They must make at least reasonable efforts to secure the data in their custody.

It's been like this for decades. It's time to let go of our attachment to heaping all the culpability on attackers. Entities holding user data in custody must take the blame when they don't adequately secure that data, because that incentivizes an improved security posture.

And an improved security posture is the only credible path to a future with fewer and smaller data breaches.

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25574200
by elmerfud | 2026-01-17 16:52:53+00:00
I'm not sure where you're located but is it really racial profiling or just confirming someone understood what they ordered? I haven't experienced this in the US but it is common to get these kind of questions when I'm traveling overseas. Especially to Southeast Asian countries where many of the places that serve traditional foods serve them spicy.

I don't consider this racial profiling for them to make sure that I understand what I'm ordering is spicy because the general perception is that white people don't tolerate spicy foods as well as the locals. This doesn't come out of a racial bias It comes out of practical experience where someone has ordered something and then complained that it was way too hot. There's simply wanting to make sure that what they make for you is what you're willing to pay for. It's good business.

Funny story the first time my wife traveled with me to Thailand she had no concept of how hot Thai curry can be. At a restaurant she ordered Curry and I told her she did not want that here. It started a small argument with her telling me how much she loves Curry and I acknowledge that I know she likes Curry but she doesn't want the curry here. Needless to say after one bite I was proved right and she no longer wanted the food she ordered.

Now imagine some tourist whose only had the Thai or Indian or something that has been adapted to the American palate and the served in the US, or adapted to the Australian palate and have only eaten that. Then they go to those countries get something that tastes completely different it is so hot that they now have flame shooting out both ends and they're mad and complaining at the owner of some small shop where the food costs are higher than the labor costs.

I don't think that's racist at all. It's ensuring that you're going to be happy with what you get. More businesses should do this.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-17 16:53:16+00:00
> but it’s weird for my boss to make that message the focus of what is ostensibly a corporate team-building event.

Having been a manager: I bet your boss didn't want to be there any more than you did. They were forced to do corporate team-building and they recognized the absurdity of it all.

So they tried to come up with something entertaining that they could claim was passably work-related. They were trying to do their best by you within the constraints of what was mandated by their job.

This looks like a nice gesture. You are too occupied viewing your manager as "the other" to recognize when they were trying to bond and do something nice for the team within the constraints of their job.

You're lucky. At corporate team-building retreats I never got to watch any fun movies. One had us listen to lectures by a manager whose primary experience was as a little league coach and who thought leading his team was the same thing. The other involved the manager giving us a psychology test of his own creation and trying to lecture us about what he thought our learning styles and weaknesses were based on all the different self-help books he read.
by jackfranklyn | 2026-01-17 16:53:54+00:00
The pattern that gets missed in these discussions: every "no-code will replace developers" wave actually creates more developer jobs, not fewer.

COBOL was supposed to let managers write programs. VB let business users make apps. Squarespace killed the need for web developers. And now AI.

What actually happens: the tooling lowers the barrier to entry, way more people try to build things, and then those same people need actual developers when they hit the edges of what the tool can do. The total surface area of "stuff that needs building" keeps expanding.

The developers who get displaced are the ones doing purely mechanical work that was already well-specified. But the job of understanding what to build in the first place, or debugging why the automated thing isn't doing what you expected - that's still there. Usually there's more of it.
by dijit | 2026-01-17 16:54:33+00:00
I've watched the same pattern play out with my field (systems administration) over the past two decades. The constant push to either outsource it (cloud) or fold it into development (DevOps/SRE) mirrors what the article describes for developers.

What's particularly frustrating isn't just the job market shift, it's the historical revisionism. You'll hear claims that SREs are fundamentally different because "sysadmins couldn't code" (we could: Perl, Bash, C, plenty of Python). Or that modern infrastructure is much more reliable, justifying that the job is obviously different now (overlooking that better hardware, operating systems, and decades of operational knowledge do most of that heavy lifting).

The "higher abstractions enable more productivity" argument has merit in theory. But in practice, I mostly see reinvention. Developers rebuild service discovery patterns on top of Kubernetes that we solved with simpler tools, recreate monitoring strategies because they don't know the foundational techniques their abstractions are built on. They're not learning faster, they're learning the same operational lessons again, just with different terminology and at significantly higher resource cost.

This mirrors the article's central point: each generation believes they've finally abstracted away the complexity, only to discover they've just moved it around. The expertise still matters, it's just been repackaged and sold as something entirely new.
by moregrist | 2026-01-17 16:55:00+00:00
> Mostly a myth by cooks that think it "heats faster"

It’s almost entirely about heat _control_, especially when you turn the heat down or off. Non-induction electric stoves can take minutes or longer for a burner to cool down. When you cut the heat on a NG stove, it’s essentially immediate.

This matters quite a bit for heat-sensitive dishes like omelettes.

Induction doesn’t have this problem, but also hasn’t been widely available until maybe recently and won’t work on a lot of aluminum cookware. So you’re asking people to change their cookware along with their range. That can be a bridge too far for many.
by dreamitheai | 2026-01-17 16:55:38+00:00
Dreami is marketed as an evolving mind. It autonomously messages users and if they have notificaations on it will pop up or they can see the messages whene they come back. If you are trying to solve a problem, it will pitch solutions. It is also great at creativity help and chatting. I am a dev, not a marketer so if anything is off, let me know.
by CodingJeebus | 2026-01-17 16:55:44+00:00
> But it's definitely concerning that (once again) a lack of technical and media literacy among these education types will lead to them letting (overall) unhelpful tech swarm the system.

I hate this kind of framing because it puts the burden on the teachers when the folks we should be scrutinizing are the administrators and other stakeholders responsible for introducing it.

AI companies sell this tech to administrators, who then tell their teachers to adopt it in the classroom. A ton of them are probably getting their orders from a supervisor to use AI in class. But it's so easy to condescend and ignore the conversations that took place among decision-makers long before a teacher introduced it to the classroom.

It's like being angry at doctors for how terrible the insurance system is in the US.
by kenjackson | 2026-01-17 16:56:15+00:00
People often will use .doc rather than .docx when they’re trying to convert to a format that non-Word apps are more likely to be able to parse.

And bad formatting can result in an almost unreadable document. For example all bullet levels becoming the same, which is an example of something I’ve seen before.

None of this seems off to me.
by reylas | 2026-01-17 16:56:42+00:00
You are part of the PJM. Read into what the "Fuel Adjustment" actually is. Yes, prices are regulated, but if your area is short of power, they can buy it from the PJM, usually from other sources they own, at "market" rate not regulated rate.

The Fuel Adjustment is the legal loophole difference in the regulated rate vs the market rate. A few scheduled maintenance windows and oh look, we are short power.
by tacostakohashi | 2026-01-17 16:56:46+00:00
If anything, there were a bunch of low barrier to entry software development options like HyperCard, MS Access, Visual Basic, Delphi, 4GLs etc. around in the 90s, that went away.

It feels like programming then got a lot harder with internet stuff that brought client-server challenges, web frontends, cross platform UI and build challenges, mobile apps, tablets, etc... all bringing in elaborate frameworks and build systems and dependency hell to manage and move complexity around.

With that context, it seems like the AI experience / productivity boost people are having is almost like a regression back to the mean and just cutting through some of the layers of complexity that had built up over the years.
by phil21 | 2026-01-17 16:57:04+00:00
> I'd expect most tech people will value the distributed nature of solar over equivilents, that by design require centralisation and commerical/state ownership and control.

I do, but I do not find value in rich folks who can afford solar wanting their cake and eating it too.

If you get a solar setup, get batteries. Then disconnect from the grid entirely. You should not be able to use the grid as a free backup energy source for the last 5% of the time you'll need it. Those last digits of reliability are the expensive hard problem to solve. That, or be charged appropriately for adding your potential usage to the capacity market. I understand that this is not legal in many places, and that folks disconnecting from the grid also cause the grid to collapse at some point as well. But at least there would be less of an individual perverse incentive involved.

Home solar folks seem to love their free battery though. Or even worse - getting paid to dump power to the grid when it's value is the smallest. Net metering is not the way to go - home solar should be being paid something around instantaneous wholesale pricing at best, plus fees to manage the more complex management of the grid they cause via being thousands of kilowatt-scale install vs. a single 50MW solar farm.

So far in the US at least, many solar programs have simply been a handout to relatively rich folks subsidized by poorer grid consumers. It's really put a sour taste on something that should be for the greater good. I don't mind that those subsidies were used to jump-start the industry, but that time has long since passed.