MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gambiting | 2025-04-08 13:40:19+00:00
>>What happens when they are robbed and now your address and how to make a key for your lock are in the hands of some criminals in your area?

I'd hope that Microsoft's key storage is harder to break into than a random local lock company. And there is no need for theoreticals - all my locks are key coded and the manufacturer can make more keys for them if I ask them. They also have my address since they know where they shipped the locks. And yet, I'm not worried about this - I suspect a wannabe robber will just break my windows with a brick not infiltrate the manufacturer's production facility to make a clone of my key.
by rchaud | 2025-04-08 13:40:33+00:00
> “I have no idea how he ended up as an art director when he can’t visualise what he wants in his head unless can see some end results”, Bradley says. Rather than beginning with sketches and ideas, then iterating on those to produce a more finalised image or vision, Bradley says his boss will just keep prompting an AI for images until he finds one he likes, and then the art team will have to backwards engineer the whole thing to make it work.

Sounds like an "idea guy" rather than an art director or designer. I would do this exact same thing, but on royalty-free image websites, trying to get the right background or explanatory graphic for my finance powerpoints. Unsurprisingly, Microsoft now has AI "generating" such images for you, but it's much slower than what I could do flipping through those image sites.
by flkiwi | 2025-04-08 13:40:40+00:00
BUT it's doing a stunningly better job replicating previous scenes than it did before. I asked it just now for a selfie of two biker buddies on a Nevada highway, but one is a quokka and one is a hyrax. It did it. Then I asked for the same photo with late afternoon lighting, and it did a pretty amazing job of preserving the context where just a few months ago it would have had no idea what it had done before.

Also, sweet jesus, after more than a year of hilarious frustration, it now knows that a flying squirrel is a real animal and not just a tree squirrel with butterfly wings.
by nathan_compton | 2025-04-08 13:40:43+00:00
With the advent of language models I really despair of new technologies catching on. LLMs are deceptive in their intelligence, as far as I can tell - they can seem expert in one domain and then fail absurdly on some new take on similar ideas that don't appear in the training data. Consequently, one loses a lot of productivity when switching to a fringe technology, even if its better.

Startup types used to say that its not enough to be better than the current solution - you have to be 100 times better to justify the switching cost, and with LLMs it seems like that is like 1000x. It sucks.
by throw0101d | 2025-04-08 13:40:53+00:00
Abstract:

> We study the relationship between tariffs and labor productivity in US manufacturing between 1870 and 1909. Using highly dis-aggregated tariff data, state-industry data for the manufacturing sector, and an instrumental variable strategy, results show that tariffs reduced labor productivity. Tariffs also generally reduced the average size of establishments within an industry but raised output prices, value-added, gross output, employment, and the number of establishments. We also find evidence of heterogeneity in the association between tariffs and value added, gross output, employment, and establishments across groups of industries. We conclude that tariffs may have reduced labor productivity in manufacturing by weakening import competition and by inducing entry of smaller, less productive domestic firms. Our research also reveals that lobbying by powerful and productive industries may have been at play. The era’s high tariffs are unlikely to have helped the US become a globally competitive manufacturer.
by palmotea | 2025-04-08 13:40:56+00:00
>> why would it be bad for federal workers to be surveilled? is there an expectation of privacy while you're working?

> they’re creating a conflict between perceived political disloyalty and professional ethics

I think that gets to the heart of the matter: what is the purpose of the surveillance? In this case, it appears to be to root out people who have wrongthink about the leaders, e.g.

> Musk’s team is rolling out AI to monitor workers, including looking for language in communications considered hostile to Trump or Musk

Hostility to Trump or Musk is what you want, if they're pushing to do something illegal or unethical.
by claudex | 2025-04-08 13:41:35+00:00
It's 24 TOPS per CPU, so 192 TOPS for a full mainframe. And you can add Spyre accelerator which have 32 AI unit per card (so 32x24 TOPS) and up to 48 cards per mainframe (so 48x32x24 = 36 864 TOPS). But yeah, you could buy a lot of H100 for the price of a mainframe with such a configuration.
by nathan_compton | 2025-04-08 13:42:49+00:00
Yes, but none of that is anomalous. The primary novelty of the timescape model is just a more careful application of boring old General Relativity to cosmological models, which are highly idealized in order to make them tractable. It is still very misleading to characterize effects like frame dragging or time dilation as unresolved mysteries. They are very straightforward, experimentally confirmed, elements of classical General Relativity.
by ninkendo | 2025-04-08 13:43:06+00:00
> The ad revenue is in the billions and is steadily increasing each year. I would bet that the costs are more than covered.

You're changing the context of the discussion here. snailmailman had said:

> Youtube so badly wants me to pay for premium. But the ads they show me are almost entirely scams and questionably legal content [...] On desktop uBlock still works in Firefox at least. But I’ve basically given up YouTube on iOS.

Saying they're unwilling to tolerate ads in YouTube. When asked why not just pay for YouTube premium, you came and said why you don't pay for YouTube premium. When pressed, you say "because YouTube's ad model will make them the money they need to host the videos."

Since you haven't said whether you block ads, there's two ways of interpreting this:

1. You don't block ads, you're ok watching YouTube ads, and you pay the creators directly through patreon. Great! But that makes your reply -- to why snailmailman doesn't pay for YT premium -- a little off-topic, because we were discussing ad-blocking.

2. OR, you're not ok watching YouTube ads, you block them, and then pay creators on patreon directly, meaning you don't care about covering the costs of hosting videos, because you don't believe YouTube should be showing you ads, and you don't want to pay them for the service. In which case we're back to "who should cover the costs." Maybe your answer is "other suckers, but not me", which is quite hypocritical.
by lanfeust6 | 2025-04-08 13:43:07+00:00
It would be an understatement to call this a skewed perspective. In most of the anecdotes they seem to try really hard to trivialize the productive benefits of AI, which is difficult to take seriously. The case that LLMs create flawed outputs or are limited in what they can do is not controversial at all, but by and large, reports by experienced developers is that it has improved their productivity, and it's now part of their workflow. Whether businesses and hire-ups try to use it in absurd ways is neither here nor there. That, and culture issues, were a problem before AI.

Obviously some workers have a strong incentive to oppose adoption, because it may jeopardize their careers. Even if the capabilities are over-stated it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy as higher-ups choices may go. Union shops will try to stall it, but it's here to stay. You're in a globally competitive market.
by ben_w | 2025-04-08 13:43:36+00:00
It can copy/simulate anything with a stream of pixels that change in response to labels equivalent to button presses.

Put an iPhone on the dashboard of a car and simultaneously record steering wheel, pedal, and gear positions, and you've got a photorealistic driving simulator of wherever you were driving that car.

Strap it to a bodycam and pair with annotated recordings the wearer's motion as if it were control inputs, and you have a photrealistic first-person simulation of whatever they were doing, be that paintball, skating, US Army urban combat training, or birdwatching.

Feed it sports TV annotated with player motion, golf, tenis, cricket, soccer, etc.
by tempera | 2025-04-08 13:43:45+00:00
Bitcoin, the hardest money ever discovered. 1.6 T dollar asset. Commodity, limited supply, from 0 to 100k, now at 80k, sure to go to 150k and over! Cannot be censored, cannot be forged, backed by mathematics. Satoshi Nakomoto, the anonymous creator, DISAPPEARed, just like God in the Second Testament.

Wait till the rest of the world learns about it. It will take time, but Bitcoin will prove it in the next months.
by ghc | 2025-04-08 13:44:09+00:00
You're right, which is why factories are already automated that way.

Where humans still reign supreme is in two areas: assembly and work in human-centered environments.

So, it's a lot easier to have a human welder do welding inside a Hyundai-built ship because the interior of the ship is designed for humans to walk around.

Likewise, it's easier for humans to work with machines on assembly, because humans are flexible and assembly lines typically need to be rapidly reconfigured for different production runs.

A purpose-built facility excels at maximizing throughput for mass produced parts (paperclips), but doesn't work well for lower-volume integration tasks (cars, ships, etc.).
by simonw | 2025-04-08 13:44:41+00:00
How long ago?

The local models were mostly unusably weak until about six months ago when they suddenly got useful: Qwen Coder 2.5, Llama 3.3 70B, Mistral Small 3 and Gemma 3 have all really impressed me on a 64GB Mac and I expect Mistral Small 3 would work in 32GB.

Meanwhile this years's Gemini Pro 2.5, Claude 3.7 Sonnet and the most recent GPT-4o API models (or o3-mini high for coding) are significantly better than what we were using last year.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-04-08 13:44:43+00:00
Some languages like c++ don't have popular package managers, so adding even one dependency can be very difficult. Learning an unpopular package manager and asking your team to rely on it introduces the burden of teaching everyone how to use it, if the manager even allows it

In this hostile environment, many wheels are reinvented

C programmers actually consider this a point of pride
by petercooper | 2025-04-08 13:44:45+00:00
Browsers are getting built-in LLMs for doing things like summarization now, such as https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/summarizer-api - so even if you could license your creations in such a way, it wouldn't prevent a browser extension or someone using the JavaScript console doing it locally without detection. To me, the idea feels arguably similar to asking to opt out of one's words being able to go into a screen reader, a text to speech model, or certain types of displays.
by rchaud | 2025-04-08 13:44:54+00:00
> I realize that people are not actually complaining about AI, but about how modern capitalism is going to use AI.

Something very similar can be said about the issue of guns in America. We live in a profoundly sick society where the airwaves fill our ears with fear, envy and hatred. The easy availability of guns might not have been a problem if it didn't intersect with a zero-sum economy.

Couple that with the unavailability of community and social supports and you have a a recipe for disaster.
by ninalanyon | 2025-04-08 13:45:39+00:00
Surely he could have expressed himself better than that. Insulting some other country's universities seems a very odd thing to do when trying to make a point about your own universities. This is especially odd as the choice of country to insult has several universities that are well inside the top 10% worldwide and rank higher than Wesleyan.

We should expect better rhetoric from the rector of a liberal arts university.

Unfortunately I can't read the actual article to see what the rest of his argument was like. I wish that HN would automatically provide links to bypass paywalls.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-04-08 13:45:41+00:00
I think the main point of this article is that none of this is happening in a centralized, coordinated fashion. This is mainly folks slapping solar on any building with a roof, with the government helping out a bit on the regulatory side.

It does eventually need to be coordinated to avoid grid issues, but given the massive increase in battery manufacturing (and cost decreases) battery deployment is likely to happen at a lightning pace over the next 3-4 years.
by dspv | 2025-04-08 13:45:44+00:00
I’ve been working on Guardi.space, a lightweight web tool for monitoring satellite collision risks — mainly focused on CubeSats and small constellations.

What it does: - Uses public TLEs and SGP4 to predict potential conjunctions - Forecasts 14 days ahead, updated every 6h - Computes closest approach, relative velocity, and assigns risk levels - Includes a simple dashboard UI for browsing upcoming events

Tech: - Backend: Python (FastAPI), PostgreSQL - Frontend: React - Risk estimation includes basic covariance analysis (Chan/Alfano-based)

It’s open to use, no sign up or CC required — would appreciate any feedback on usability, data clarity, or edge cases I might have missed.
by mtlynch | 2025-04-08 13:45:49+00:00
This is one of the best articles about running a bootstrapped business that I've ever read.

These are all great tips that obviously come from years of hard work and introspection.

> When I started, I integrated with standard SaaS product analytics software that most big SaaS products use. They tend to have features like session recording, where you can see exactly where their mouse moves in your product, and funnel tracking for working out how many users make it the whole way through from landing page to using your product.

I had the same experience. When I started out, I'd see people talk about complicated views in their analytics with cohort analysis and A/B testing. I'd think those people were succeeding because of their analytics, so I kept trying to build complicated views in Google Analytics or investigate expensive alternative analytics platforms. And I eventually just landed on going even simpler than Google Analytics and not checking it unless I had a specific question I wanted to answer.

> People will suggest you should build particular features to improve your product. They'll never use those features.

I've experienced this as well. Early on, prospective customers would tell me that they'd definitely buy if I had X feature, and I'd spend a week implementing it, and then the customer would disappear or say they couldn't purchase for some other reason.

> When a user signs up for OnlineOrNot, I have an automated email going out asking what brought them to sign up today. I explicitly tell them I read and reply to every email. This is the main source of my insight for building product.

I like this a lot. The main competitive advantage indie founders have is a personal touch and direct access to the founder.

I think too many indie founders over-automate and over-outsource their customer interactions. It always drives me crazy when I use a product from an indie founder, and I reach out with feedback and the response is just a generic, outsourced customer service rep who says, "Thank you for your feedback. I'll pass it along to the team."

> Tracking your MRR is a crap way to measure how you're doing as a business... Find another success metric to figure out if people are actually using your product, and whether it's bringing them value. Things like number of images generated, or number of form completions, for example.

I agree, but I'll add the caveat that the other metric should be as proximate to revenue as you can get.

Early on, I made the mistake of measuring success based on things like social media followers or SEO rank, even though those things didn't directly translate into revenue. I felt like I was succeeding, but I eventually realized I was pursuing metrics that were too loosely related to revenue.
by ewzimm | 2025-04-08 13:45:51+00:00
Wouldn't this depend a lot on how management responds to your use? For example, if you just kept a log of prompts and outputs with notes about why the output wasn't acceptable, that could be considered productive use in this early stage of LLMs, especially if management's goal was to have you learning how to use LLMs. Learning how not to use something is just as important in the process of adapting any new tool.

If management is convinced of the benefits of LLMs and the workers are all just refusing to use them, the main problem seems to be a dysfunctional working environment. It's ultimately management's responsibility to work that out, but if the management isn't completely incompetent, people tasked with using them could do a lot to help the situation by testing and providing constructive feedback rather than making a stand by refusing to try and providing grand narratives about damaging the artistic integrity of something that has been commoditized from inception like video game art. I'm not saying that video game art can't be art, but it has existed in a commercial crunch culture since the 1970s.
by palmotea | 2025-04-08 13:46:01+00:00
> The findings emerge in a world enraptured by artificial forms of intelligence, and they could teach us something about how complex circuits in our own brains evolved. Perhaps most importantly, they could help us step “away from the idea that we are the best creatures in the world,” said Niklas Kempynck, a graduate student at KU Leuven who led one of the studies. “We are not this optimal solution to intelligence.”

Some AI startup needs to get this in their marketing, stat.
by aspenmayer | 2025-04-08 13:46:01+00:00
Thanks for the link.

On a related note, that's a pretty neat site for podcasts.

I vaguely remember that John C. Dvorak had a podcast, but I honestly had forgotten about him since the TechTV/ZDTV days. Though I may not always agree with him, I've always appreciated his point of view and personality.

In the world of tech journalism, he's one of the best.
by wink | 2025-04-08 13:46:18+00:00
Some stuff is usable, but not fun.

I have a Centrino laptop from 2004, and it's single core, with 1.5GB RAM and, of course, spinning rust.

It works, but even playing a video on youtube can be taxing. I'm not arguing for "performance" tasks here, just sitting on the couch and surfing, and clicking random links.

Then again my home server is a 2013 i5 that does everything it needs to do (except be super power efficient). So I'd say ~10-14 years is the sweet spot, but 20 is historic and mostly useless, sadly
by kubav027 | 2025-04-08 13:46:44+00:00
1. Dunning-kruger effect describes difference in expected and real performance. It is not saying that humans confidently give wrong answers if they do not know correct ones.

2. That is not my experience. Almost half of the time LLM gives wrong answer without any warning. It is up to me to check correctness. Even if I follow up it often continues to give wrong answers.
by RattlesnakeJake | 2025-04-08 13:47:23+00:00
I use DuckDuckGo, with the occasional reddit !g appended if I'm looking for something experience-based.

For me, searches fall into one of three categories, none of which are a good fit for LLMs:

1. A single business, location, object, or concept (I really just want the Google Maps or Wikipedia page, and I'm too lazy to go straight to the site). For these queries, LLMs are either overkill or outdated.

2. Product reviews, setup instructions, and other real-world blog posts. LLMs want to summarize these, and I don't want that.

3. Really specific knowledge in a limited domain ("2017 Kia Sedona automatic sliding door motor replacement steps," "Can I exit a Queue-Triggered Azure Function without removing it from the queue?"). In these cases, the LLMs are so prone to hallucination that I can't trust them.
by kevlc | 2025-04-08 13:47:39+00:00
Hello!

I've been running my startup—a reservation SaaS for restaurants—for a while now. While I have a few customers, I'm finding it challenging to acquire new leads. Do you have any suggestions? So far, I've tried cold calling, in-person visits to restaurants, and Google Ads, but the results haven't met my expectations. I'm based in Paris, where two major players dominate the market, and most restaurants use their services. Our main differentiators are that we're three times cheaper than one competitor and that we charge no commission, unlike the other. Also, I'm not a native French speaker, though I can speak French (albeit with a foreign accent).

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
by hbsbsbsndk | 2025-04-08 13:48:53+00:00
Software developers are so aware of "enshittification" and yet also bullish about this generation of AI, it's baffling.

It's very clear the "value" of the LLM generation is to churn out low-cost, low-quality garbage. We already outsourced stuff to Fivrr but now we can cut people out altogether. Producing "content" nobody wants.
by Apreche | 2025-04-08 13:49:17+00:00
A better idea is to simply further regulate advertising. We already have many rules about advertising. We used to have more we got rid of, most famously Rx drug ads weren’t allowed, but now they are. I’m sure there are many ideas people have for how to do this. Personally I would just like to see us ban ads for Rx drugs, OTC snake oil, gambling, alcohol, and cars. Maybe also fast food and junk food. It worked so well for tobacco. Don’t need to ban the products, just ban ads for them.
by jpc0 | 2025-04-08 13:49:24+00:00
100% still search first. If I am not super knowledge on the domain I am searching for I use an AI to get me keywords and terminology and then search.

At most I use AI now to speed up my research phase dramatically. AI is also pretty good at showing what is in the ballpark for more popular tools.

However I am missing forum style communities more and more, sometimes I don't want the correct answer, I want to know what someone that has been in the trenches for 10 years has to say, for my day job I can just make a phone call but for hobbies, side projects etc I don't have the contacts built up and I don't always have local interest groups that I can tap for knowledge.
by mogrim | 2025-04-08 13:49:44+00:00
In the UK you have to declare the item, and local museums are then allowed to bid a fair market price for it, which you have to accept. This money would then be split equally between the person who discovered the item and the landowner. It works pretty well - there's an incentive to legally declare what you've found, as you'll get paid for it, and by doing so the archaeology is often preserved and the item doesn't just disappear into a private collection.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Act_1996
by asoneth | 2025-04-08 13:49:54+00:00
> I worry about "tax thing I don't like" policies

Equating "things I don't like" with "negative externalities" does not seem like a helpful framing for this discussion. I personally like traveling around the world and eating avocados, but they have substantial negative externalities. I personally dislike watching ballet or eating mushrooms, but they have minimal negative externalities.

Advertising may very well be something that the author dislikes AND that has negative externalities, but the point of a Pigovian tax is solely to apply a price commensurate with negative externalities, not the dislike.

> you to some extent want that activity to occur otherwise you've got budget issues

Perhaps, which is why he mentions "freebates", and why I find revenue-neutral Pigovian proposals like the "carbon-fee-and-dividend" so compelling. The primary purpose is not revenue, it is to ensure the correct price on negative externalities so society can rely on a free market to solve tricky allocation problems.