skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author, Sam Cooper, is not the kind of source I'd trust. Hilariously from their Wikipedia controversies sections:

> In September 2024, Cooper published a report in The Bureau claiming to show video evidence of a meeting of spies in a Macau casino. The video footage actually was from the 2014 action-comedy movie “From Vegas to Macau”, starring Chow Yun-fat.

Stupendous journalism.
A shame, really, because they're so nice. And in the US you can even DIY the install! (It cost twice as much to get one in Ireland because I needed an F Gas certified tech).

Is aircon rare on the west coast? I recall basically everywhere having it when I grew up in Sacramento. But I do remember it being less common in San Diego...
Yeah, but it's cheaper.

The context right now is that OpenAI, with first-mover advantage, cutting-edge-hardware, and tens of billions of dollars of investment, are not getting benchmark performance better than Chinese-developed models that are trained with cut-down nvidia GPUs and a lot less money.
Yeah the people "it gives you the answer when you give it the answer" have kind of ruined my morning. Oh well.
Discussion (27 points, 4 day ago, 7 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42954058
For fruit wines: you can ferment any fruit with enough sugar. They tend to be made sweet, as many fruits can have bitter or unpleasant flavors that come out when dry, such as strawberry. That said, one of my favorites was a dry raspberry that my dad made.

The Chinese stories could be referring to rice wine, a spirit similar to sake. If the stories refer to regions along the Silk road though, they could easily also be referring to grape wine.
Lowest temperature so far this winter has been -21°F and my Haier Arctic heat pumps kept going (although I concede it was only lower than -15°F for a few hours in the early morning while I was asleep). As for costs, they're pretty much on par with oil currently but my house isn't yet adequately insulated.

I suspect once I have sufficient insulation and air sealing, and condensing gas hydronic heat for when the exterior temperature drops below 5°F (COP 2.0) the overall system will be very cost effective month to month. Although the upfront cost is nontrivial, so it's a payback period measured in decades.

I also augment with a wood burning stove.

For new construction that's properly air sealed and insulated, heat pumps with resistive baseboard backup would probably be sufficient.
I disagree with the theory but even if, It won’t be irrelevant, and can/will continue without US if needed. Either way, Russia is too weak to invade another sovereign nation for the next four years
I don’t have enough karma to downvote adverts.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42896559
I now use this on all of my systems. It is great for remapping laptop keyboards. I still use via/vial on my corne.
Is the problem up-front cost on the heat pump (vs pure AC)?

I have a friend remodeling a home in Seattle right now and they’re installing a heat pump in the extension/basement. Seems like a no-brainer given the relatively mild highs and lows. The original house had no AC and radiators of some sort (1920s build, maybe).
> The entity which should crack down on this is the government.

The problem with fraud is what else these same people are organizing themselves to do. Today it's fake gadgets, tomorrow it's fentyl precursors, the next day it's kidnap for ransom. You go after it for the same reason the US Federal government took on the mob 60 years ago.
No one in history has ever looked at a piece of machinery and thought, "You know what would make this better? Castration by EU government regulations."

Meanwhile the EU bathes in the same Chinese garbage imported by the boat-load as long as it carries the CE mark, which they are allowed to self-certify in nearly every case, making it meaningless.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could just keep collecting premiums and get paid salaries for doing nothing productive for society?

Honestly, it's like that Bilbo meme where he's thinking about keeping the Ring.

I'm sure every neoliberal capitalist dreams of just entrenching themselves in some kind of regulatory-protected business model paradise, so that they can keep "running the business" for hundreds of years, but that's not a good thing to aspire to if you have even a shred of human decency or ethics.
>
Remember when maintaining a blog was THE way to build your developer brand?

Jeff Atwood's (co-founder of Stack Exchange) Coding Horror comes to mind, and how the teenage me was amazed at how someone got offered such a good job with such an amazing office [0] because of blogging.

The smaller, more intimate internet was truly something else.

[0]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/five-things-you-didnt-know-abo...
I would guess, three for family, three for end-of-civilisation emergencies, two for politics, that leaves two for miscellaneous.
I don't have social media so my blogs are often the only ways my family and friends connect with me. I think this original article is misguided and the big tech brainwashing has us forget that we blog all the time on their social media apps. Those blog posts on TikTok, Instagram, or X are always there. It's a little insidious that there's no mention of that.
Despite the similar "zero" names, DeepSeek-R1 Zero and AlphaGo Zero have nothing in common.

AlphaGo came before AlphaGo Zero; it was trained on human games, then improved further via self-play. The later AlphaGo Zero proved that pre-training on human games was not necessary, and the model could learn from scratch (i.e. from zero) just via self-play.

For DeepSeek-R1, or any reasoning model, training data is necessary, but hard to come by. One of the main contributions of the DeepSeek-R1 paper was describing their "bootstrapping" (my term) process whereby they started with a non-reasoning model, DeepSeek-V3, and used a three step process to generate more and more reasoning data from that (+ a few other sources) until they had enough to train DeepSeek-R1, which they then further improved with RL.

DeepSeek-R1 Zero isn't a self-play version of DeepSeek-R1 - it was just the result of the first (0th) step of this bootstrapping process whereby they used RL to finetune DeepSeek-V3 into the (somewhat of an idiot savant - one trick pony) R1 Zero model that was then capable of generating training data for the next bootstrapping step.
Many people wrote about why it is important to blog, but I never heard of what you just stated about credibility.
That's the best and most convincing thing I ever heard.
Thank you very much for having shared it here.
Micromanagement how?
I blog on gopher and gemini, maintenance is very easy and it is simple to convert between gemini and gopher.

Do people read them ? I doubt it, maybe 1 or two once in a while. But as the article said there are other reasons to maintain a blog.
In the UK at least, domestic air conditioning is extremely rare. Less than 5% of homes (I'm surprised it's even that high, although I am up North).
I've been treating public Git repository commits in the same vein - a receipt of incremental changes that show that an individual can do some programming. Granted this is not fool-proof - like all things that are complex, it needs to be evaluated with a suite of other factors and conditions to be determined valid. A website written in a personal voice is one of these factors.
I'm currently experiencing this with a Tauri-based app. Nix has been great for us for local dev and service builds, but building an application inside of Nix that needs to run outside of it has been challenging to say the least.
There's no frontier left where one can be free. Off grid living and homelessness (if you're are logistically minded). Might be the place to be free left.
> Humans make mistakes too.

Well, yes, but fortunately, we build computers to automate things using simple algorithms to remove the risk of such mistakes.

Except when we use LLMs, in which case we increase the risk of mistakes.

> I feel like we have been here before. With wikipedia. With stack overflow. Or with the whole debate about c/assembler vs garbage collected languages.

Well, Wikipedia is a great tool, but it is permanently weaponized.

C/Assembler vs. garbage-collected languages was about decreasing the risk (at the cost of increasing the resource requirement), so, unless I misunderstand what you write, it kinda feels like you're arguing against your side?
Not just clawed back, but spitefully used to encourage people to burn coal to heat their houses. Residential rolling coal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal
https://archive.ph/2025.02.08-005538/https://www.theatlantic...
On Linux, it completely captures your physical keyboard (meaning it doesn't work for other applications anymore) and creates a virtual keyboard using the uinput kernel module [1]. The configuration is for how the keys on the physical keyboard maps to the virtual keyboard.

It should be able to do whatever you suggest. But it can be a lot of configuration. I use 3 different layouts in 2 languages and that will be too much to configure manually. Instead, I just use 2 layers that are mostly just pass-through (they just pass the keystrokes to the native xkb layout). Layer1 is entirely pass-through except for a single tap-dance key to switch to layer 2. Layer2 has some additional features like home-row-mods that are not possible with plain xkb. The keyboard layouts are managed by xkb. Thus I'm able to use the features of both xkb and kanata.

[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.12/input/uinput.html
For ID=3, it shows o1 getting it wrong, but it seems to have succeeded? It did add a space between Tinker and bell, but that is the canonical way of spelling the character apparently.

(That just one caught my attention because I was curious what challenge o1-mini got correct that o1 did not.)
Catch unwind is useful when you have a dependency that for some reason panics and you can’t control it.
Yep, I haven't aged a day for last 10 years. :)
We haven't experienced that yet. I think the lowest temperature we experienced since it was installed was -4 F one night. We didn't notice any problems.

The only issue I've seen is the large buildup of ice below the outside unit. The unit is elevated on legs for just this reason so it hasn't affected its operation. The ice is formed when the outside unit goes through its defrost cycle in cold weather; water dripping off freezes when it hits the ground.
As much as I hate Twitter I was unable to read this @ Bluesky at my iPhone 13 Mini because left/right arrows covered words, this is a mobile design straight from the mid 00s. So bad.
Ask HN: Easiest way to create simple illustrations?
Id like to for example generate simple line drawn images of feet/rollerblading in various angles with arrows.

Or if I was making a tutorial on archery, generate various frames of a person holding a bow at different draw lengths, etc.

Now obviously theres a ton of ways to do this, what I am wondering if what's the laziest way I can do them?

LLMs sound great, but there's a couple issues:

1. They don't seem to be so great when you need something precise. When prompted to change something in particular, even if they get it right, they often mess up something else.

2. No consistency in models. This is something I've been wanting in general (use the same character model for example in a different setting for example). I assume it exists, just haven't seen it mainstream yet.

3. Need something vectorized/modifiable.

So I am thinking the approach would be something like.

1. Generate LLM image.
2. Vectorize it.
3. Edit it manually with some Adobe software
Thanks, I didn't know about that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleidoscope
Heat pump water heater - is that ducting the waste heat outside somehow? I’ve thought about them but not sure I want something dumping extra heat into my basement when it’s 100* outside here in DC metro.
> The article literally says it's not a hallucination and that the detail came from real websites.

The "hallucination" term generally refers to any made-up facts. Harsh as it may be to put this weight of responsibility on LLMs, users of LLMs generally use them in the expectation that what is says is true, and has been (in some magic hand-wavy way) cross-checked or confirmed as factual. Instead they will print out what is most likely to follow the user's input, based on the training data.

Unfortunately, a vast amount of that vast corpus of training data is social media posts which can't be relied upon to be true. But if it gets repeated a lot then it's treated as true in the sense that "what does 'salary' mean" is generally followed by a billion social media posts saying "it referred to the time that Romans soldiers were paid in salt, because salt was a currency at the time"
Valid point, wonder why it was down voted.
I was thinking that question myself, yes write down your thoughts in a journal digital or analog and you can always refer back to that time and place but what benefit do you get by giving it away for all to ignore or consume?
That's a really interesting angle, I've never thought about paper reading clubs before. They seem much more fast-paced and could probably benefit from a shared notes side feature! Thank you for the food for thought!
Funnily enough, my impression is that Clojure, the most popular Lisp on the JVM, creates a lot of garbage—probably more than Java—but I believe that’s due to it using immutable collections and not due to it being a Lisp.
Comments moved to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42981756.
In most cases I expect saying "<this> assertion fires with <this> input" is enough to be useful. Or "I can't prove <this> assertion doesn't fire, but I don't have a counter example either". Assertion used broadly to include things like rules for avoiding undefined behavior.

Better explanations would be nice of course, but not obviously practical. I wouldn't actually trust the AIs reasoning much in the first place, only that it can't trick the proof checking tool.
Unflagged and discussed now at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42981756.
Also hidden assumption, or perhaps lack of clear perception of reality, that most jobs on the market are strongly dependent on factual correctness.

Also assumption that this is any different than human relationship with empirical truth is.
It is a quandry, the kernel is predominantly C, Rust has demonstrated a path forward, producing safer code without sacrificing performance, but it is undeniable that a mixed code base is far harder to maintain, not impossible.

Here's the thing, in the next couple of years languages like Carbon, Zig, even Jai, will come of age. They will have their proponents and people who want to introduce them into kernel code.

If there is a rust developer out there who doesn't resist the introduction of these languages as ardently as the chosen people (C) are resisting rust, then I will show you someone who lives in some kind of alternate reality.

Personally, I'd be pressuring the C committee to introduce defer, tout suite, otherwise Zig looks favourite. But the reality is that your preferred language is just that, your preferred language, most have seen this drama before and will choose not to participate.

As to whether Linus is failing in his leadership role? Nah, Then again, I wish Sony would open source the PS OS and we can be done with this juvenile debate as to which OS should rule the world. Either that or let's have an exokernal and move on from this monololithic story, surely that would meet the needs of the MY FAVOURITE LANGUAGE isn't appreciated crowd!!
https://archive.is/2025.02.08-005538/https://www.theatlantic...
It's best to email hn@ycombinator.com. Quite a few people did that; in this case the delay was me, as I was mostly offline yesterday (it happens occasionally!)
It's bad when shareholders are begging the company not to be so evil.
That is quite unfair. Fires are a function of quantity and time, so you should really be comparing vehicle-years.

For the Tesla Cybertruck, we overestimate the vehicle-years by counting the quantity at at the end of the year for the full year for a total of 34,438 vehicle-years.

For the Ford Pinto, we underestimate the vehicle-years by only counting the quantity at the start of the year for the full year only until the recall halfway through 1978 (e.g. we count 1971 production starting in 1972 until 1978.5 for a total of only 6.5 years). In that case, we count a total of 10,125,030 vehicle-years.

Counting only the 4 fire fatalities for the Tesla Cybertruck, that is 1 fire fatality per ~8609.5 vehicle-years versus the Ford Pinto at 1 per ~375,001 vehicle-years; making the Tesla Cybertruck ~43.5 times higher than the excess fire deaths of the Ford Pinto.

Comparing against overall fire fatality rate [1]. In 2022, there were 650 confirmed deaths in vehicles where a fire occurred over ~232,000,000 household vehicles. That is a rate of about 1 fire fatality per ~350,000 vehicle-years; making the fire fatality rate of the Tesla Cybertruck ~41.4 times higher than the average vehicle.

Note that the Ford Pinto is just excess fire deaths attributed to the gas tank defect rather than the total fire rate which is not well reported which is why it might be comparable to the overall fire fatality rate of today despite higher fire safety on most modern cars. All fires for the Ford Pinto is likely a higher number than the 27 fire deaths directly attributed to the specific defect.

[1] https://content.nfpa.org/-/media/Project/Storefront/Catalog/...
U-Shaped Development
Fair criticism. But structurally the Fed Gov is fairly limited in this regard. Where the Fed can exercise power over the States is to withhold funding that the States need/want in order to push through some change (highway speed limits for example). But you can't force States to spend money on something they don't already have, so there isn't much leverage other than making the funding available and hoping that the States will take it the rest of the way.

The EV station rollout is similar -- Congress allocated a bunch of money, but they can't force States to come up with plans and the States have taken a long time to do so (of course these things take time anyway). And now the money is being taken away -- missed opportunity. But not sure what else Congress could have done?
The amount of deprecated sources doesn’t tell you anything about any bias without the number of allowed sources.
That would just cause more money going to the insurance company itself. What positive result comes out of that?
Social media posts are not really writing though. You do not write down detailed thoughts on social media it’s often more likely brain farts than anything.
There's also Norway, China etc, countries with productive SOEs. Those governments have debt but also significant assets.
Dunno, that's what high school level computer courses are for. I was in high school in the early 00's and they taught us stuff like Word, Excel, HTML, basic computer literacy stuff like filesystems, how to touch type, etc... And that was a required course in a public high school...
Double Loop Learning in Organizations (1977)
hn broke
"shouldn't be happening" is a weird way to describe the behaviour of health insurance companies in the US that they engage in every day.
This happens to me all the time. I could make notes about how I did something and lose them, or I could spend an hour or two extra and convert it into a blog post, and I'll be able to refer to it over and over again.
>dont understand how a major disk maker got caught up in something as skeezy as this

I'm not sure what you mean by "caught up in". You make it sound like their employees were involved. It's a pretty universal organized crime problem affecting all sorts of industries - used part dealers rolling back the odometer on things and sneaking them back into the supply chain as low milage or new. A store might be an "authorized distributor" but that doesn't mean they can't be tricked by a fake salesperson. Every brand battles counterfeiters and fraudsters somewhat. Here's a Western Digital odometer reset for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WL9u6QwTsW8 Gotta be careful what alleyway you buy your rolexes from.
https://archive.is/dRV8z
I do agree that alternatives and options for power users must be available, everyone should be able to tweek things until they are satisfied as everyone is different
The HVAC trade at least in the US is interesting. I have dealt with quite a few companies, and collected a range of quotes with wild variations in pricing for essentially what is the same exact system. In my anecdotal experience the residential HVAC industry is full of scams. Maybe it's just poorly run companies that need to break even is the reason for such gouging. A quote of 12,000 USD for a 2 head minisplit system installed from one company, was 5,800 USD from another. And a Mr. Cool DIY kit could be shipped to my house for 3,000.

I know there is some skill in braising the lines and evacuating the system, weighing the charge, etc... and the industry is gatekept with certifications, permitting and environmental compliance, but I image most any handyperson can handle an install. Especially with the pre-charged lines that are available in many kits.

I've had about a dozen residential HVAC technicians do some kind of work over the past year, due to a warranty claim and they had to visit 6 times, never could troubleshoot the problem, and in the end just installed an entirely new outdoor unit. The first technician claimed the problem was a 'dirty blower' and quoted $1,200 for them to come clean the blower fins on my condensers. The second one said it was definitely a board. Then it was the board on the other end. Then it was the same board they already replaced once. They were all wrong. But their troubleshooting was done over the phone with the manufacturer. I was civil and patient with them, but it was hard to watch. I think the residential HVAC industry is the biggest problem with US adoption... The rest of the world seems to be handling it fine.
> Ninth time this is being submitted.

> This article will keep being submitted until

This is unlikely to work and not a good way to handle this. One thing I learned the hard way and am happy to pass on to you guys: you can't fight the community and win.

Rather, the thing to do in cases like this is email hn@ycombinator.com. If it's really a clear case of an article being interesting and otherwise on topic of HN, we'll turn off the flags.

In this case it took a day to do it because I spent most of yesterday offline. Occasionally that happens.