MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hbbio | 2025-04-29 12:26:31+00:00
Thanks!

Turns out just is not the word here. My benchmark is made using conversations, where there is a SystemMessage and some structured content in a UserMessage.

But Qwen3 seems to ignore /no_think when appended to the SystemMessage. I can try to add it to the structured content but that will be a bit weird. Would have been better to have a "think" parameter like temperature.
by starfezzy | 2025-04-29 12:26:32+00:00
The mobile site is pretty seriously broken in multiple places. This does not inspire confidence in the project.

One major breakage is that I can't watch the demo video on a modern device (S24U, firefox).

If I press play, the video comes up and begins playing with a massive play button over it. If I press the maximize button, the video goes away and it locks the view into a horizontal orientation centered on apparently some random part of the webpage.

Other broken parts made me think I hate Dark Reader installed (I don't), and the testimonials at the bottom overlap—maybe they're meant to be swiped through, but that doesn't work.
by anthk | 2025-04-29 12:26:37+00:00
>Specially in Spain

Wait until you find Spain it's the 2nd most mountainous region in Europe. Hint: anything non-coast can have dry summers and cold winters, brutal in the mountain regions such as Asturias and Leon, were they burnt coal like crazy, and having temperatures below 0 was and it's still the norm, not the exception. And not just the south of Cantabria, Asturias and so; the Castilles, Aragon and the mountain regions can amaze tourist as if they were phonied expecting a 'sunny' Spain like the beaches.

Mostly humid and foggy panoramas with mountains; and hot and dry summers in the Castilles; but it's like Ohio and the inner USA: you have extremes in both sides. Scorching sun and crazy cold winters, and yet the corn -wheat in Spain- raises like nothing.

So, one valid approach for one region can be void for another one. You can't except to set a global energy policy that works everywhere. Kinda like the US; not everything it's like Texas or Florida.

And, yes, we had tons of dams too near the Tagus and Duero rivers, they can produce tons of power too.

Nowadays, well, I'm pro nuclear, coal was something obsolete since the 80's and 90's.
by greenavocado | 2025-04-29 12:27:04+00:00
If you're willing to take the risk and trust the developer there is a fully prepared Windows distribution called Windows 11 24H2.3775 16in1 x64 - Integral Edition 2025.4.9 on zone94

Their other distributions are very good as well, especially for Windows XP because they bundle a lot of important drivers for old software to work correctly
by martinald | 2025-04-29 12:27:08+00:00
Which is basically every winter in Northern Europe at least, and is usually when electricity demand is the highest (very cold days tend to have the least wind).

The UK was very very close to a blackout last winter for this exact reason. If Denmark weren't able to suspend maintenance on part of their grid to max out the Viking HVDC (it was running at half capacity) there would have been loss of supply. Potentially contained to one region and temporarily but it's hard to say for sure.

What's worse is the communication from NESO (now government owned, very recently) was downright misleading to how close it came.
by phyalow | 2025-04-29 12:27:24+00:00
On the contrary, I would class myself a mid to high skill dev, I have a CS degree and about 10 years of Java/C++/Rust/Python under my belt (focused on Financial Market applications).

I would consider myself today 2-3x more effective than where I was 12 months ago.

I can grok on a new code bases much faster by having an AI explain things to me only a grey beard could previously, I can ask Gemini 2.5 (1M context length) crazy things like “please create a sprint program for new feature xyz” and get really good high quality answers. Even crazier I can feed those sprints to Claude Code (CI/CD tests all running) and it will do a very good job of implementing. My other option is I can farm those sprints out to human dev resources I have at hand and then spend 90% of my time “thinking, hand holding and talking about code and solutions” and working with other devs to get code in prod.

Imo this is a false victory, emphasis should be on shipping. Although each domain / pipeline / field needs and prioritises different things and rightfully so. AI lets me ship so much faster and for me that means $$$.

I think I am a realist and your last point about “engineering” - is a contradiction. Maybe try better tools? Lastly:

“While the problem of ai can be viewed as, “Which of all the things humans do can machines also do?,” I would prefer to ask the question in another form: “Of all of life’s burdens, which are those machines can relieve, or significantly ease, for us?”

Richard Hamming, pg.43 The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn
by nonrandomstring | 2025-04-29 12:27:37+00:00
Very far from confirmed. I just finished reading [0,1] accounts of atmospheric heat anomalies being touted as a cause - alongside speculation about cyber-attacks. Something to remember about terrorist groups and propaganda merchants, is that they'll claim "responsibility" or otherwise misattribute acts immediately to gain attention. Often the first thing reported is what sticks in the public mind.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/apr/28/spain-and-p...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43830946
by lolinder | 2025-04-29 12:28:04+00:00
> every AI-generated image one sees represents an instance where someone who might have contracted for an image did not

This is not at all true. Some percentage of AI generated images might have become a contract, but that percentage is vanishingly small.

Most AI generated images you see out there are just shared casually between friends. Another sizable chunk are useless filler in a casual blog post and the author would otherwise have gone without, used public domain images, or illegally copied an image.

A very very small percentage of them are used in a specific subset of SEO posts whose authors actually might have cared enough to get a professional illustrator a few years ago but don't care enough to avoid AI artifacts today. That sliver probably represents most of the work that used to exist for a freelance illustrator, but it's a vanishingly small percentage of AI generated images.
by rgoulter | 2025-04-29 12:28:11+00:00
Since LLMs are sometimes wonderfully useful, and sometimes not, I'd suggest effective use involves figuring out in which cases it's likely to succeed, which it's likely to fail.

For example, the mentioned graph has "initial prompt with iterative tweaks", followed by iterations of 'starting from scratch'. -- I don't understand why you'd think "this is an ineffective way of doing things", and then keep doing it.

Describing LLMs as "slot machines" seems like the author has no curiosity about the shape of what LLMs can/can't do.
by klaussilveira | 2025-04-29 12:28:41+00:00
I've recently re-watched John Carmack's 2004 Quakecon keynote (https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=602&v=OOVUZZr655...), which happened during the Doom 3 launch. In that keynote, he mentions that he didn't see any differences between stencil and shadow maps. He mentions that he experimented a lot with both approaches, before settling for stencil shadows which were much faster.

I got curious about that statement, since shadow maps tend to look much different. I also knew that he left part of the experimental renderer in the GPLed code. So, I've decided to go on that rabbit hole of Doom 3 graphics, specifically Carmack's experimental renderer and ended up implementing his approach, as well as adding some poisson disc sampling and fixed the peter panning: https://github.com/klaussilveira/exp-dhewm3

I also spend a lot of time on archaic game engines. I like to call it software archeology.
by Hasnep | 2025-04-29 12:29:09+00:00
Vscode is permissively licensed, but some of the Microsoft created extensions are proprietary, e.g. the C/C++ extension and the Pylance extension. They state in their license that they can only be used with Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code and crash if you try to use them with VSCodium for example.

There are open source alternatives, the basedpyright extension is better than Pylance and I've heard the clangd extension is good.
by fuoqi | 2025-04-29 12:29:15+00:00
I haven't wrote that the government said that. But a lot of online commentators and even some news outlets immediately started to discuss "cyberattacks" (including the linked article) and asking "maybe it was the Russians?".

Most people who are familiar with how electric grids operate are in agreement that high degree of renewable generation has likely made the situation worse not better. We know that right before the blackout the grid had a sudden dip in frequency, which is exactly the condition which leads to unstable work of inverters used by renewable plants. Just watch this Practical Engineering video [1], if you are not familiar with the topic. It discusses exactly the problems I wrote about. So renewables may have not been the direct reason for the blackout, but they are highly likely have helped to tip the gird behind the critical point.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7G4ipM2qjfw
by jim180 | 2025-04-29 12:29:22+00:00
Laziness mostly - no need to think about design, icons and layout (responsiveness and all that stuff).

These are not hard problems obviously, but getting to 80%-90% is faster than doing it by hand and in my cases that was more than enough.

With that being said, AI failed for the rest 10%-20% with various small visual issues.
by OtherShrezzing | 2025-04-29 12:29:47+00:00
On Google's earnings call - within the last couple of weeks - they explicitly stated that their stronger-than-expected growth in the quarter was due to a large unexpected increase in search revenues[0]. That's a distinct line-item from their ads business.

>Google’s core search and advertising business grew almost 10 per cent to $50.7bn in the quarter, surpassing estimates for between 8 per cent and 9 per cent.[0]

The "Google's search is garbage" paradigm is starting to get outdated, and users are returning to their search product. Their results, particularly the Gemini overview box, are (usually) useful at the moment. Their key differentiator over generative chatbots is that they have reliable & sourced results instantly in their overview. Just concise information about the thing you searched for, instantly, with links to sources.

[0] https://www.ft.com/content/168e9ba3-e2ff-4c63-97a3-8d7c78802...
Show HN: I built a simple tool to track real-time crypto rates
by madjidbr | 2025-04-29 12:30:47+00:00
Hey HN,

I’ve always found it annoying to jump between exchanges just to check live cryptocurrency prices, especially when I just want a fast, clean view of the top coins without distractions. So I spent a few hours building a minimalist site that shows real-time crypto rates with no fluff, popups, or login walls.

It pulls data live and focuses on simplicity (no ads, no widgets, just raw numbers). The idea is to have something you can keep open in a tab and glance at throughout the day.

Would love feedback if anyone finds it useful or has suggestions!
by kaoD | 2025-04-29 12:31:36+00:00
Yes, I used Cursor and tried providing both the whole Liquidsoap book or the URL to the online reference just in case the book was too large for context or it was triggering some sort of RAG.

Not successful.

It's not that it didn't do what I wanted: most of the time it didn't even run. Iterating on the error messages just arrived at progressively dumber not-solutions and running in circles.
by Qem | 2025-04-29 12:31:46+00:00
This whole treating spermatozoa as race cars stunt got me curious about how many horsepower their engines pack. I've found a paper[1] where optical tweezers[2] were used to determine they produce 44 ± 20 pN of force. A figure often quoted for their speed is around 5 mm/min. Force*Velocity has units of Power, so the product of the two gives a power estimate of ≃ 3.7 ± 1.7 femtowatt, or 4.9 ± 2.2 attohorsepower. This estimate is close to figures from simulations in another paper[3], that gave results in the range of 6-9 femtowatt (8-12 attohorsepower):

> In the walled simulation, the power consumption is 0.0127 pW, which is likely to be close to the actual power consumption of the sperm, but it is underestimated by almost fifty per cent, with an average of 0.0084 pW, when walls are ignored. Again, it can be seen that the instantaneous power consumption varies throughout the beat cycle. Cell σ2 has beat frequency component of 11.22 Hz contributing 70 % of the tail amplitude and a component at 15.24 Hz contributing 30 % of the amplitude and so (3.1) gives a power prediction of 0.006–0.009 pW.

The Saturn-V rocket had a power rating of 160,000,000 hp[4]. That probably gives the Apollo astronauts among all humans the more extreme ratio between minimum and maximum power output of travel means across the whole lifecycle, spanning 25 orders of magnitude.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Karsten-Koenig-3/public...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_tweezers

[3] https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/6249/1/6249.pdf

[4] https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-missions/saturn-v-r...
by justlikereddit | 2025-04-29 12:32:01+00:00
How?

If the power is out, do you imagine that all the load that is out there disappears too?

If I'm in a blackout and put my multimeter into the grid socket, will the measurement be something that my local inverter can drive an AC load through with no problems?

And if that's not possible, how do we get an AC wave out to my 5000 local solar panel neighbors? And if we don't get any carrier wave to synch it to, then how do all these thousands of individual inverters decide on the unison synchronization necessary to all start jumping together?

And if they try and fail, will all the connected load accept a graceful out of synch mixed power noise at 0-220v until things properly latch together?

The problem isn't like playing a sine tune of acoustic sound that's merely audible to your local neighbor, who can dial in his own tune, and then daisy chaining this until it matches on a grid sized level.
by psychoslave | 2025-04-29 12:32:35+00:00
Not every phenomenon is only cause on one side and only consequence on the other side, multiplexed feedback loops are often more appropriate models.

More poverty, more fears, more will to be perceived as an unbeatable threat no one dare to attack, more actual aggression fueled by us vs them mentality, more tragedies. Rinse and repeat.

Also having bad outcomes of a social structure being geographically condensed doesn’t mean they are decoupled from causal inter-dependencies with the places where all the happy shiny outcomes is jealously isolated.
by pllbnk | 2025-04-29 12:33:32+00:00
Given that the goal of generative AI is to generate content that is virtually indistinguishable from expert creative people, I think it's one of these scenarios:

1. If the goal is achieved, which is highly unlikely, then we get very very close to AGI and all bets are off.

2. If the goal is not achieved and we stay in this uncanny valley territory (not at the bottom of it but not being able to climb out either), then eventually in a few years' time we should see a return to many fragmented almost indie-like platforms offering bespoke human-made content. The only way to hope to achieve the acceptable quality will be to favor it instead of scale as the content will have to be somehow verified by actual human beings.
by jmisavage | 2025-04-29 12:33:37+00:00
We’re in the early stages of this transition. There’s no formal hiring freeze, but leadership has made it clear we should exhaust AI options before considering new hires. At the same time, raises and promotions are frozen this year, which has definitely caused a lot of frustration internally.

As part of this AI-first shift, all engineers now have access to Cursor, and we’re still figuring out how to integrate it. We just started defining .cursorrules files for projects.

What’s been most noticeable is how quickly some people rely too much on AI outputs, especially the first pass. I’ve seen PRs where it’s obvious that the generated code wasn’t even run or reviewed. I know this is part of the messy adjustment period, but right now, it feels like I’m spending more time reviewing and cleaning up code than I did before.
by paulcole | 2025-04-29 12:33:44+00:00
You can blame Trump but in the US, we’re all to blame here. Blaming somebody who’s not me just make it easier to feel good about myself and like I’m less of the problem.

I mean call them the Democrats tariffs. 2024 was a gift-wrapped election victory and the Democrats (shockingly) bungled it in staggeringly impressive fashion.
by djoldman | 2025-04-29 12:34:05+00:00
It would be amazing if there was regulation requiring the display of a "total tariff" line item to every product and service offered or listed for sale. Perhaps subject to a minimum total price, so that buying an apple didn't require such a burden on retailers.

The idea being that folks would pay attention to this stuff. There are a zillion tariffs affecting prices and they just sit there for decades.
by decimalenough | 2025-04-29 12:34:22+00:00
Semitic languages like Arabic & Hebrew have triconsonantal roots where the vowels dance around them to change meaning. k-t-b "to write" becomes kataba "he wrote", katib "writer", maktab "office", maktaba "library", istaktaba "had a copy made" etc etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_root
by tpm | 2025-04-29 12:35:05+00:00
Now imagine that storing the complete model is the last thing you do in a business transaction. So the workflow is something like 'user enters some data, then over the course of the next minutes adds more data, the system contacts various remote services that too can take long time to respond, the user can even park the whole transaction for the day and restore it later', but you still want to have an unique ID identifying this dataset for logging etc. There is nothing you can insert at the start (it won't satisfy the constraints and is also completely useless). So you can either create a synthetic ID at the start but it won't be the real ID when you finally store the dataset. Or you can just generate an UUID anywhere anytime and it will be a real ID of the dataset forever.
by TuringNYC | 2025-04-29 12:36:00+00:00
> Regardless of its realized effectiveness improvements it froze the intern/junior hiring pipelines.

Would be great to see some industry-wide stats here. There are three OTHER factors are play here:

1. Record numbers of CS undergrads (more supply)

2. More remote-CS/tech grad programs (yet more supply, many overseas)

3. Bursting of the tech-vc bubble (less demand)

4. AI (???)

Not sure how much can be attributed to AI. That said, i'd confidently say our team is at least 2x more productive than 3yrs ago. Huge numbers of loose change get thrown to the LLM to solve, instead of writing clever algos, etc.
by blincoln | 2025-04-29 12:36:03+00:00
If one isn't technical, DRM sounds like a great thing. "Finally, a way to keep people from getting your content without paying for it!" Of course, it doesn't, and makes the experience worse for actual customers.

Seeing their work widely pirated is demoralizing enough for conventional content creators. I imagine the scale it happens at with adult material, and the intimate nature of the work magnifies that sense of being cheated dramatically for OF models.
by Qwertious | 2025-04-29 12:36:56+00:00
>It was almost impossible to find a map where the proposed HSR routes are overlaid with the current Interstate routes. I wonder why.

Because the biggest threat to any rail project in Cali is political protest and "environmental" lawsuits ("this construction will destroy my view of the landscape!") and the second biggest threat is being forced to buy land from a bunch of people who've had years to collude in only offering ludicrously high prices.

Any sensible project will do its level best to avoid any developed rural land; it's the only way to avoid the massive delays and cost overruns you're complaining about. And besides, once it's built, the land around it will be developed because of the HSR line itself.
by InsideOutSanta | 2025-04-29 12:37:14+00:00
> recently started to learn another language with Duolingo

Duolingo feels great when you're starting. You feel like you make a lot of progress quickly, and it's fun, so you do it every day. Before you know it, you've done it for half a year, and then you try to talk to somebody and realize that you've learned very little.

>the traditional "keep learning all the different grammar combinations first"

Yes, this is also a bad approach. They're both bad.
by joshuanapoli | 2025-04-29 12:37:18+00:00
In software development, we usually don’t really have a firm scope that gets completed in a clean way. So when developers get more efficient (from high level languages, OOP, Agile, Internet, AI, etc.) I think that we normally slide into a bigger scope, rather than finishing sooner or reducing the team size. Everyone usually gets the same boost from a coding productivity innovation at about the same time. So team size for products in competitive markets isn’t affected much by productivity. Improvements received by the customers accelerate, rather than developer job cuts.
by TuringNYC | 2025-04-29 12:38:11+00:00
I've seen the opposite -- more senior hiring because seniors can now outsource a portion of rote work to the LLM -- everything from trivial utilities to docs to testing.

Also, I get dozens of calls/emails a month from my undergrad/grad alma matter. The bottom seems to have fallen out of the labor force when even ivy leave and top-5 cs/tech schools have students desperately seeking entry level jobs.

To be fair, as I mentioned on another comment, there are other factors:

1. Record numbers of CS undergrads (more supply)

2. More remote-CS/tech grad programs (yet more supply, many overseas)

3. Bursting of the tech-vc bubble (less demand)
by soared | 2025-04-29 12:38:49+00:00
Similairly, while not perfect I use AI to help redesign my landscaping by uploading a picture of my yard and having it come up with different options.

Also took a picture of my tire while at the garage and asked it if I really needed new tires or not.

Took a picture of my sprinkler box and had it figure out what was going on.

Potentially all situations where I would’ve paid (or paid more than I already was) a local laborer for that advice. Or at a minimum spent much more time googling for the info.
by belter | 2025-04-29 12:38:51+00:00
Disagree strongly. They did a black start:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43820964

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43824032

At least HN did better than the BBC that started by reporting and I quote "It is thought to be caused by a Cyberattack".

Also should be noted the Guardian is not doing better as the article does not clarify what the cause was. Most likely explanation at the moment is this:

"What is "Induced Atmospheric Vibration"?" - https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/848666/what-is-i...

"Diagnosis and Mitigation of Observed Oscillations in IBR-Dominant Power Systems - A PRACTICAL GUIDE" - https://www.esig.energy/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/esig-rpt-...