skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author estimates that electricity prices would be reduced by up to 33% (from $0.45 blended rate to $0.30), but PG&E’s profit margins are only 11%. That’s a good hint that this hypothetical is missing some important details

The article hedges against someone pointing this out by admitting that Walnut Creek is an unusually optimistic location and that PG&E is also recognizing large expenses related to ongoing infrastructure buildouts, but no solutions are offered for these caveats.

The hidden problem with projects like this is that once you roll these utilities into the city’s budget it’s too tempting to start dipping into taxpayer funds for needed improvements rather than raising electricity rates. When problems arise, politicians try to kick it down the road so it becomes their successor’s problem, or they try to offload the expense onto a growing debt load because that delays the problem to the next generation. It becomes easier to keep the highly visible rate down, but taxes might go up to cover the infrastructure costs instead.

So I’m skeptical. If there was an analysis that showed a drop in rates that was not 3X higher than the profit margins of the private utility I’d be more open to the idea, but as presented this feels like back of the envelope math that generates savings by ignoring all the details that didn’t make their way onto the envelope.
"You don't have the slightest idea what kind of rabbit holes this will lead into."

Instead of making assumptions about what I know or don't know about programming language theory and type systems, could you list these rabbit holes?

Java inspired languages like Kotlin, Scala and C# all considered checked exceptions and all decided to drop them and I've never heard users of any of these language express any wish to re-introduce them. I've used all three professionally and I have no idea what "rabbit holes" you're talking about?

In fact there isn't a single widely used language besides Java that feature checked exceptions. Arguably Eiffel had them but that's seriously stretching the definition of "widely used".
Is it trivial to audit? Here is a critical overflow in a matrix transpose: https://vulert.com/vuln-db/crates-io-transpose-125781

This is exactly the mistakes we also have in C and Rust people would do a little dance and take such bugs as argument why C is really dangerous and needs to be avoided. But rather obviously, mistakes can also happen in Rust and Rust does not "eliminate a class of errors" except when completely avoiding unsafe blocks. Maybe Rust is still more memory safe than C, I actually also believe this, but it is nowhere as safe as people like to claim and whether this is worth all the complexity is entirely unclear.
> Because by pointing out a problem, you are still implicitly asserting that some solution exists.

Um, no you're not.

> And the counter to that is: no, no solution exists,

If that's the case, it's probably helpful to know it.

> we all know everything is shit, what are you proposing we do about it?

Give up on whatever doomed goal you were trying to reach, instead of continuing to waste time on it?
Haven't had my coffee yet but this strike me as, "reinvent the Makefile".
Which I have certainly used as a place to codify steps with benefits.
maybe i dont get it, but can we conclusively say that the gorilla wasn’t “seen” vs. deemed to be irrelevant to the questions being asked?

“look at the scatter plot again” is anthropomorphizing the llm and expecting it to infer a fairly odd intent.

would queries like, “does the scatter plot visualization look like any real world objects?” may have produced a result the author was fishing for.

if it were the opposite situation and you were trying to answer “real” questions and the llm was suggesting, “the data is visualized looks like notorious big” we’d all be here laughing at a different post about the dumb llm.
I've enjoyed a great many of the games I've played lately :)
Let's say that we both agree that Linus should be making clear statements here, and that lack of clarity is causing lots of problems.

That one bug happened one time does not mean that the promise is broken. To be clear, it's a bad thing, but acting like this means the entire working rules are a lie is overreacting.
Enjoying programming is harder than u think.
Maybe Jesus bringing them penicillin and condoms is worse somehow
Because they’re all in the same tiny social circle and went to the same schools, joined the same clubs, intermarried, and just generally isolate themselves from the rest of us.

Its called “being out of touch” I believe
I typically tell it that there at 5 problems in the logic. Summarize the steps, why it’s necessary, and what typically comes after that step. Then please list and explain all five errors.
Codes and inspection were eliminated for owner/builders (but not landlords) decades ago in my county. None of the apocalyptic predictions came to fruition. It was mostly licensing contractors building death traps, not people that intend to live in something they build themself. And a death trap is often better than being homeless in any case, or coming short in healthcare/food/education.
EDIT: should have read the comments first. Answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42983369

I am unable to reconcile these two seemingly contradictory takes in the article (rest of it I concur with):

"We are destroying software telling new programmers: “Don’t reinvent the wheel!”. But, reinventing the wheel is how you learn how things work, and is the first step to make new, different wheels."

"We are destroying software pushing for rewrites of things that work."

By rewrite do you mean 1-to-1 porting the code to another language because reason is: faster/easier/scalable/maintainable/_____ (insert your valid reason here)?
Yup, that would be the fix. It is a logical error to even try to be dividing by zero, so your code should handle it. Regardless of whether there is a panic, this is what you'd want to do.

But the problem is that people make mistakes or forget every once in a while, and as you get more people working on large programs, these mistakes happen more often.

So you have to assume that it'll most likely happen in your production software sooner or later. Crashing the whole program is a fairly catastrophic outcome in my opinion, and should be reserved for only truly unrecoverable problems like hardware failures.
But that's the same interface every time. You select a character and a lookup pops up. The Pleco controls are "touch a character to pop up an entry", "move end of selection window left", "move end of selection window right", "jump to previous 'word'", and "jump to next 'word'". The popup will display an entry for whatever is the longest prefix of the selection window that has an entry. How do your touch interfaces differ?
Ongoing here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42970412
In The Field Guide to Human Error Investigations Dekker talks about how “number of minor incidents” correlates inversely with “number of fatal incidents” for airlines (scaled per flight hour or whatever). I have forgotten whether this was all airlines or Western only. I wonder if it still holds.

The rest of the book is also quite a good read including a fun take on Murphy’s Law that goes “Everything that can go wrong will go right” which is the basis for normalization of deviance: where a group of people (an org whatever) slowly shifts from their performance metrics as they “get away with it”.

I wonder how modern organizations fight this. Most critically I imagine warfighting ability can experience massive multipliers based on adherence to design. But also civilian performance to a lesser extent (outcome is often less catastrophically binary).

Anyway, I got a lot of mileage out of the safety book wrt software engineering.
This is great. I'd love it for flashcard creation - paste in a block of text I'm reading and extract vocabulary from it.
Before you needed someone else to have thought of your need, created a solution, made it available, and still be in the sweet spot where they have yet to monetize it. Even then, what telemetry is it sending?

Right now you can just ask for what you need and bring it into existence with a prompt. What a time to be alive.

Let’s hope software complexity doesn’t catch up to this trend.
It's an extremely common exception for exactly the reason you don't like it. If you block it you get widespread breakage because so many things use it. Then even more things use it because it's allowed and novel protocols aren't.

And what do you think happens in the places that do block ssh, instead of unblocking other things? I hope you like VSCode over ssh over HTTPS VPN.
> Just like a UNIX file system ends up filled with .dotfiles garbage I didn't ask about to have around.

Which one is better - a configuration file in some place or default configuration buried inside binary blob?
Incredible site! Thanks for posting.
'We left pieces of our life behind': Indigenous group flees drowning island
I use rclone for that because, while the "complete opposite of do one thing”, it (mostly) solves the extremely annoying problem of "dealing with things that look like files in potentially remote locations, each with it's own bespoke API".

(it also has, for most of my use cases, better performance that sshfs).
I was interested in this question so I trained NanoGPT from scratch to sort lists of random numbers. It didn't take long to succeed with arbitrary reliability, even given only an infinitesimal fraction of the space of random and sorted lists as training data. Since I can evaluate the correctness of a sort arbitrarily, I could be certain that I wasn't projecting my own beliefs onto its response, and reading more into the output than was actually there.

That settled this question for me.
> we have enough of much everything.

Not advanced healthcare, education, and laborious tasks such as cleaning people, and working in hot or cold cramped spaces to provide utilities.

>we are less resource-constrained in this regard than ever in human history.

Some things are plentiful, but some things are scarcer. Part of it is people have more opportunity and knowledge to choose to more preferable things rather than less preferable things.

>That Social Security is unsustainable is not due to a lack of physical resources nor manpower, but capital. Money.

Money is a proxy for manpower. For sure there is lots more room to take wealth from workers and give it to non workers, but expect more and more political headwinds and long term consequences. We have already been doing it for many decades, mostly via reducing the purchasing power of the currency (which hits workers the most) and inflating price of assets. I would posit it is at the forefront of the zeitgeist of young people feeling despondent. As I wrote before, it is trivial to know that young people today will get less than they pay in (absent the development of a robot that can pretty much do all the dirty tasks humans would rather not do).
He could also replace the folders with hidden junctions or symlinks.
It thought my bald colleague was a plant in the background. So don't have high hopes for it. He did wear a headset so that is apparently very plant like.
We have so much data to backup, that we can only restore samples.

A full restore of our live cluster is currently 180days+ (means: no real disaster recovery possible).

Thanks to budget cuts on a state level.
Ah, my favorite instructions, 'hw_ldl/l', 'hw_stl/c', 'ldl_l', 'stl_c' and their quadword siblings.
scroll the map a bit
> Many engineers would be happy to polish the thing that exists, perhaps adding complexity the form of scalability, modularity or reusability that isn't actually needed, and in fact may make it harder to adapt to broader changes in the ecosystem that the company operates in

When done correctly it absolutely adds business value and should not make it harder to adapt or change, that's the point of good engineering. The problem is that you need years, if not decades, of technical experience to see this, and it's also a hard sell when there is no immediate "impact". It's basically something that happens because consumers don't know any better, so then it becomes low priority for making profit... at least until a competitor shows up that has better software and then it has a competitive edge, but that's a different matter.
I mean , there does come a point of asking about the legacy. Yes , Richard stallman has created gnu which is great. But not everybody has such legacy. Not everybody can have such legacy.

Having children / treating them well / them treating you well when you are old is great imo , and when we eventually die , we know that there would be a deep legacy left to somebody.

Yes we do have friends. But I am saying in a sense to maximize legacy.

I don't want to say something offensive , but friends are mine in a , yes I know him personality kind of way , family relations on the other hand are formed through the strands of dna itself sooo , IDK.

This line of thinking feels a lot like utilitarian (like its okay to do somethng bad short term for good long term)
But both models did see the gorilla when prompted with it…?

ChatGPT:

> It looks like the scatter plot unintentionally formed an artistic pattern rather than a meaningful representation of the data.

Claude:

> Looking at the scatter plot more carefully, I notice something concerning: there appear to be some unlikely or potentially erroneous values in the data. Let me analyze this in more detail.

> Ah, now I see something very striking that I missed in my previous analysis - there appears to be a clear pattern in the data points that looks artificial. The data points form distinct curves and lines across the plot, which is highly unusual for what should be natural, continuous biological measurements.

Given the context of asking for quantitative analysis and their general beaten-into-submission attitude where they defer to you, eg, your assertion this is a real dataset… I’m not sure what conclusion we’re supposed to draw.

That if you lie to the AI, it’ll believe you…?

Neither was prompted that this is potentially adversarial data — and AI don’t generally infer social context very well. (A similar effect occurs with math tests.)
this person must have never seen a bell curve meme

50 IQ: haha software is complicated whatever

100 IQ: (this post)

150 IQ: software is complicated whatever
This is actually brilliant. This is a step above every list of instructions that I've ever made without committing to full-blown all-at-once automation.
These isolated populations have higher incidence of genetic diseases. From the Wikipedia page you cited:

There are instances of health problems attributed to endogamy, including glaucoma. In addition, there is a very high (42%) incidence of asthma among the population, and research by Noe Zamel of the University of Toronto has led to discoveries about the genetic nature of the disease. Three of the original settlers of the island had asthma.
I think Amazon hasn't managed to find a way to monetize Alexa. It was Bezos' pet project, and when he left it languished. Our main use for Alexa is to set timers, and alarms to wake up to, and the random trivia question.
> Whether users could articulate what they're experiencing is a different question. The bad experience we're talking about had been normalised over the past 15 years or so.

I could counter that by saying people have had unpleasant experiences with software before, too; being way too technical and non-intuitive is one of that.

But my point isn't just that users won't notice anyway, but optimising for that isn't a good strategy anymore—at least from the perspective of commercial software vendors. Performance tuning reaches a point of diminishing returns very quickly.
> Overall, the former employees paint a picture of a company desperately behind its Big Tech rivals Google, Microsoft, and Meta in the race to launch AI chatbots and agents, and floundering in its efforts to catch up.

I feel like this is the feeling at every big tech company

Being on the outside looking in it seems like these companies rapidly innovate

But when you actually work at one, it feels like everything moves at a glacial pace and the “right” answers are never the ones implemented

A good friend of mine has worked at Nvidia for years and even he was complaining that “nothing gets done” there
> No the sun either is or isn't powered by nuclear fusion. There is no way of knowing whether that's the case until you can come up with a good explanation (hard to vary) everything before that is just guessing.

"The sun is powered by nuclear fusion" is a clear explanation of the phenomena we observe. "The sun is not powered by nuclear fusion" would be an explanation if we observed phenomena that were inconsistent with the sun being powered by nuclear fusion.

> I can assure you Deutsch is no confused by anything in that matter and it's obvious you don't know who he is.

Well, I do now, and I assure you he is still confused.

> He is literally the guy who created quantum computation and IS a scientist.

So, he's a programmer.

What hypotheses is he known for testing? What makes him a scientist in your mind?

> And no that's not his argument against the the sun is revolve around the earth.

I'm not sure who you think said it was; I certainly didn't.
i get my hair cut by an unlicensed guy. he works out of a spare room in his house. good churchgoing man, upstanding member of the community, and gives the best haircuts i've ever had. he makes more money even though he only charges $17 for a cut.
It's pretty hard to believe the article's authors when the third sentence in the abstract labels "arithmetic" as "complex calculations". There is nothing complex about arithmetic.
> Indefinitely jailing people to get a confession sounds like a midevil torture tactic.

That's very clearly not what I wrote. You can demand information this way, not a confession... People in the UK generally have a legal obligation to answer any questions the court has, unless they are themselves the accused. There are a small few other exceptions.
do you really even need the lawyer friend? The email might bounce but they won't see the bounce only you will. Think of a better name than JohnSmith of course, and you need to use a real lawyer domain so if they goto www.whatipicked.com its real. But does this get you into more trouble with that actual firm? You say the cc isn't needed but I feel like it really puts your letter in another category all together. The category of "oh boy, he got a lawyer, just give up."
I think the point is that they’ll cut the services and contractors too.

they 100% will not cut services. this is how you lose subsequent elections (which they are well on their way already…)
dang has insight into the mens rea

Neither do you though? It's just not at all obvious to me, other than 'I think it's nazis because nazis are bad' (and nazis are, without question, really bad - no argument there), why one ought to assume that this is nazis, but every other time it happens (nearly daily) it's something else.

you should honestly just move on

done.
WoW! this is a realy realy valuable information.
there are people who have money and lawyers who will invest in anti gravity and THEN sue you.....righty then
it seems reasonable to try to monitize absolutely anything that fits within the known laws of the universe, as long as you get your lawyers, and accountant/astrophysisist/banker* to sign off on it.
and blithering on about aliens and antigravity isn't a liability
good to know, good to know!

*same persons seem to work in those collected fields
> The space to cache each individual possible output would be enormous and impractical. So you would still need repositories.

I've been using Gentoo for the past few weeks and this was my thought. There are so many ways to compile packages depending on your needs. It is practical to make binary sets for a few common configurations that are good enough for most people for each distro, though.

(Installing and using Gentoo has been an incredible learning experience. You have to go into it with the desire to take long tangents filling the gaps in your knowledge re: shared libraries, kernel modules, your init system of choice, gcc, your windowing system of choice, bootloaders, bash, etc. I feel like I've made more of a quantum leap in my Linux skills the past month than I have in years, and it's been quite fun and rewarding.)

> Different distros still have differences in the build commands they issue and the set of dependencies they enable.

Would it even make sense in theory for this not to be the case? What is a Linux distro but a set of programs, libraries, and environment choices chosen to be run on the Linux kernel?
It's a hangover from the ill-fated Clinton programming language, where you repeat an operator (such as "is") to ensure there is no ambiguity about what your intention is.
The US economy grew rapidly in the 19th century through long periods of deflation, particularly 1870-1896.
Eclipse is a platform, not a set of IDEs you have to install differently. What you have downloaded and installed is a “starting point”. My installation has all the functionality in a single installation.

Eclipse has two ways to install more features marketplace and “install new software”. Both are integrated to every Eclipse package you download. Python is provided by PyDev under marketplace.

Eclipse handles VCS globally and puts every VCS to their own folders. VCS features are tucked under “Team” menu. “Share Project” is what you want.

When you share a project it’s moved to its VCS folder, that’s true, but the project doesn’t disappear from your workspace view. You continue working from the same point.

Git management has its own view (called a perspective), reachable from top right. This perspective allows to manage any git repository regardless of they are your projects or not.

Eclipse has a different workflow than other tools, but I don’t find it backwards (I use BBEdit, KATE, Git Tower and countless others), every tool has a different take and that’s OK.

If you import a project from git directly, Eclipse works the way you expect.

If you still want to discover Eclipse, I can support you. If you don’t, there are no hard feelings. It’s a tool which has its own ways (like Vim, EMacs, XCode and VSCode and others). This doesn’t make it backwards, but different.
> price gouging

this is a crazy way of describing a lack of competitive pressure leaving prices high. compare this to the other alternatives that existed. it's not gouging.
Boring.

I don’t even like AI and I still will tell you this whole premise is bullshit.

ChatGPT got

> It looks like the scatter plot unintentionally formed an artistic pattern rather than a meaningful representation of the data.

Claude drew a scatter plot with points that are so fat that it doesn’t look like a gorilla. It looks like two graffiti artists fighting over drawing space.

It’s a resolution problem.

What happens if you give Claude the picture ChatGPT generated?
Important article.

What has to happen in any democracy to move to dictatorship is more or less the same, and here we have a good blueprint of that process.
Thank you; you just saved me 30min from testing it again, hoping it had dramatically improved. What you described is exactly how I remember it, from two decades ago.
Because you just drop that into one big bucket, "the events", and then e.g. every single tiny coding thing is it's own thing, instead of the "coding" bucket. And even then I'd say it's a stretch.
Maybe he's actually a spy
And then the ten-year visa agreement happened in 2014. Why are you commenting at all?
> whether he's just lying, or both things are true and he just deleted his account after it was suspended

This is obviously just a Mastodon bug (backend treats suspension and deletion as the same thing, for example). I'm not sure why one would entertain the idea of marcan making up a lie about being suspended from an instance he's an admin of.
Italian entrepreneurs got scammed by AI voice faking defense minister