MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xbmcuser | 2025-04-08 22:04:06+00:00
Cost of solar+ battery has actually reached cost parity to coal in China and they have cheap labour to use coal for electricity. Trump and Co are blaming renewables for death of coal but reality it was natural gas and fracking in the past. But now renewables solar wind + batteries are already so cheap and getting cheaper that investing in coal plants will not be a good investment.

In Dubai they just signed a contract for providing 1 GW electricity 24h hours a day using solar and battery for $5 billion for 10 years. Where as a 1 GW coal plant will cost to build $1.5-2 billion and consume $3-400 million of coal a year. Coal has become uneconomical now people will fleece government money to run coal plants with your president supposedly wants to cut waste.
by phendrenad2 | 2025-04-08 22:04:09+00:00
Is there a source for the claim that solar provides 7% of the world's power? I'm trying to track down the source of this figure. I see that the global "photovoltaic (PV) capacity" is at 6.6% (according to a trade organization that represents manufacturers of solar panels). I don't see a definition for "PV capacity", but I assume it means the total theoretical output of all installed solar panels, even if the output is much lower (due to panels being sub-optimally located, aligned, or having degraded over time).

I'd love to be proven wrong, but I'm just not buying the 7% figure as the evidence stands.
by palmotea | 2025-04-08 22:04:16+00:00
> We’re cooked then. To give you some perspective I had some Chinese sales reps visiting my shop, they saw us working on some designs and casually asked about working hours i told them about 40hs/wk they laughed and said “in China engineers work 12hs a day 7 days a week”.

Oh, the fallacy that grinding harder and longer leads to more and better results. Do you think you do your best work when you're exhausted?

Also, 996 is more typical in China, hated, and I believe illegal too. That kind of thing is one of the (many) reasons their population is starting to collapse.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-08 22:04:17+00:00
80 countries have instant/real time payment systems today [1], and the Bank for International Settlements is working on cross border interoperability [2].

Cryptocurrencies will likely never go away, and will remain in use for certain use cases from a cross border value transfer perspective, similar to gold; either the token moves or the ownership is updated. More interesting is offering digital wallets for a single or basket of currencies to anyone you can remotely identity proof in the world (similar to nsave [3]).

[1] https://www.volt.io/real-time-payments-world-map/

[2] https://www.bis.org/about/bisih/topics/fmis/nexus.htm

[3] https://www.nsave.com/ | https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/nsave
by echelon | 2025-04-08 22:04:21+00:00
> Using the prompt to detect and choose the most appropriate model checkpoint and LoRa(s) along with rewriting a prompt to most appropriately suit the chosen model has been pretty bog standard for a long time now.

Which players are doing this? I haven't heard of this approach at all.

Most artistic interfaces want you to visually select a style (LoRA, Midjourney sref, etc.) and will load these under the hood. But it's explicit behavior controlled by the user.
by voxleone | 2025-04-08 22:04:28+00:00
>>The root for ta’rif is ‘arafa, which means "to know". (from TFA)

It's interesting that in the Portuguese world [like Brazil] there is still a document in logistics called "Conhecimento" == "Knowledge".

It is also a brutal historical irony that the arguably main tenet of capitalism, "Laissez faire, laissez passer", has been destroyed from the inside [Trump].
by tialaramex | 2025-04-08 22:04:47+00:00
There are loads of edge cases where of course your specialist bot can be geared for that edge case, but each such bot is different.

So Boston Dynamics sells fifty companies their $1M robots (example, I have no idea of actual prices) meanwhile a custom robot costs $1M because of the extensive design and engineering work for each such custom robot. If you were buying a lot of them they'd be cheaper, but you aren't and they know this custom design won't suit the next customer.

If you were conjuring into existence arbitrary environments, Boston's humanoids lose, but the reason they picked humanoids† is that in these environments the existing workforce are humans. Humans don't mind the weird ledge needed because of a legal change in 1896, or the uneven weight distribution in the boxes, they adapt and so can Boston's robots. Humanoids couldn't fit down a 6cm diameter pipe, a custom robot could, but, since the people doing the job last month were humans it's not in a 6cm diameter pipe, the humans doing it required an access hatch, and the humanoid robot can operate that hatch too.

† You can make a similar argument for the canine robots. People already use dogs so more of our world is tweaked to make it suitable for dogs.
by pixl97 | 2025-04-08 22:05:48+00:00
>But I think it’s going to be a rough ride, and whatever new equilibrium we reach will be the result of much turmoil.

Honestly visual media just seems to be the start. In the past two years we've seen about as much robotics progress as the last 20. If this momentum keeps up then we're not just talking about artists that are going to have issues.
by whisman | 2025-04-08 22:06:22+00:00
Mr Doob is the goat... Nice work on this. Performance is better than I was expecting. My suggestion - took me a bit to figure out how to do a normal orbit camera. I added the orbit effect to the camera which made it orbit, but then I had to separately add the look at effect card to make it actually have the normal orbit style feel. Can you combine these somehow?
by i-use-nixos-btw | 2025-04-08 22:06:46+00:00
Honestly, I’m against this.

As soon as that is added, people will start to try to optimise their profiles to place them high in the list on certain things, rendering the tool pretty much useless.

The talent people want to find in the talent that doesn’t do everything in its power to say “hey, look at me, I’m talent”, but just… well… does things.
by Analemma_ | 2025-04-08 22:07:38+00:00
Your dismissive characterization is not really accurate. Even in the cell-shaded anime waifu genre, there is a spectrum of gameplay quality and gamers do gravitate toward and reward the better games. The big reason MiHoYo games (Genshin Impact, Star Rail) have such a big presence and staying power is that even though they are waifu games at the core, the gameplay is surprisingly good (they're a night-and-day difference compared to slop like Blue Archive), and they're still fun even if you resolve to never pay any microtransactions.
by Jtsummers | 2025-04-08 22:07:44+00:00
With the 4 common answers (all 4 people answered them the same) we know that no more than 3 of them can be correct (because Lisa scored 3 points). We also know at least one must be correct (otherwise Mary can't score 7).

Examine what Mary and Dan have in common besides those 4... Nothing. They disagreed on each of the remaining 6 answers.

We can break this down into three cases, either 1, 2, or 3 of the common answers are correct:

1 - Impossible. Mary gets 6 of the remaining correct, Dan gets 4 of the 6 remaining correct, but they have none in common so this doesn't work.

2 - Impossible. Mary gets 5 of the remaining correct, Dan gets 3 of the remaining correct, but again their answers disagree so they cannot share a common answer out of the 6 remaining.

3. Mary needs 4 of the remaining 6 and Dan needs 2, this is feasible.

At this point you can ignore the 4 common ones other than to say Colin has at least a score of 3.

Since we now know that everything outside those common ones are incorrect for Lisa, cross everything off that Lisa and Colin share of the 6 non-common answers. There are only 3 that disagree with Lisa so they must be correct (because everything Lisa answered here is wrong). This gives Colin a final score of 6, three in common with everyone and three from disagreeing with Lisa.

The reason there are 4 keys in Hillel's solution is actually kind of funny, they don't matter. Those 4 keys only disagree on which of the 4 common answers are incorrect. They agree everywhere else.

EDIT: Presentation and some typos
by gopher_space | 2025-04-08 22:07:59+00:00
> Can Gen-AI, moot the need for code?

During interviews one of my go-to examples of problem solving is a project I was able to kill during discovery, cancelling a client contract and sending everyone back to the drawing board.

Half of the people I've talked to do not understand why that might be a positive situation for everyone involved. I need to explain the benefit of having clients think you walk on water. They're still upset my example isn't heavy on any of the math they've memorized.

It feels like we're wondering how wise an AI can be in an era where wisdom and long-term thinking aren't really valued.
by c7b | 2025-04-08 22:08:20+00:00
Pix (and UPI, a related system in India with similar success) are my two go-to examples for how it makes sense for the central bank / public sector to get into the retail payment space. It baffles me that most major central banks (that are considering it at all) are considering doing so in the form of CBDCs [0]. CBDCs are like a bundle of two services, central bank money and a payment system. The central bank money part is the one that has everybody questioning its use cases, the reason why banks generally oppose it (hence making them likely to nudge their customers away from it), and it's a genuine financial stability concern that requires safety measures like holding limits [1] that complicate UX and/or the design.

The payment system is the part that imho makes complete sense, in multiple ways: more competition in a market dominated by two US networks, strategic independence wrt to a critical infrastructure, providing a public good for underbanked demographics,... I don't get why places like the ECB, Bank of England, Bank of Canada, PBC,... (the US Fed is one of the few not pushing too actively in that direction) insist on bundling the two together instead of focusing on the payment system. If you succeed there, the potential for success is massive, without needing a central bank money feature, as shown by Pix and UPI. Getting one such feature right is hard enough, I don't get why they don't just focus on that and leave the central bank money baggage by the wayside.

[0] Central Bank Digital Currency, a form of money that has similar UX to bank accounts but represents a central bank liability, as opposed to commercial bank liabilities like your usual bank account. It doesn't need deposit insurance, it's legal tender and is at the same level as physical cash economically (M0).

[1] see eg https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpops/ecb.op326~d5c223d9b...
by Uzmanali | 2025-04-08 22:08:36+00:00
Tailscale just got a lot of money to keep growing. But what they are doing is more important than the money. They are helping computers talk to each other in an easy and safe way.

Before, the internet was built to connect places, not people. That made things messy. People had to set up tricky stuff like VPNs and firewalls. Tailscale makes this much easier by using your name or account, not just numbers like IP addresses.

Now, big companies and people at home use Tailscale to keep their computers and apps connected. It works without a lot of setup, and it’s safe. Even people building smart robots and AI are using it.

What’s really good is that Tailscale still helps small users for free, and they try hard not to break anything when they update their tools. If they keep doing that, they can become a very important part of how the internet works in the future.
by handfuloflight | 2025-04-08 22:08:51+00:00
Interesting how you claim domain expertise while dismissing industry-standard terminology documented by established authorities. I cited verifiable sources that explicitly include internal documents like feature requirements under product documentation. Your response? More appeals to personal authority without a single citation. When confronted with evidence contradicting your position, you resort to name-calling rather than engaging with the facts. If you've spent 30 years in a bubble where terminology differs from broader industry standards, that's a limitation of your experience, not everyone else's.

Semantics. What a hill to die on.
by tokioyoyo | 2025-04-08 22:09:12+00:00
I just don’t get what is the long term plan of who is even going to work in these factories. If they completely automate it, then it’s not bringing those jobs back. If they don’t… the median age in the US is 38.5. It’s not 80s when it was like 30. I don’t even think China can do what they did with their current demographics. An average person who will lose their service job won’t be competitive in a factory just because of their physical limits.

Oh well, good luck to you guys.
by tucnak | 2025-04-08 22:09:33+00:00
Why are you being disingenuous? Simply having access to the eval in question is already enough for your synthetics guys to match the distribution, and of course you don't contaminate directly on train, that would be stupid, and you would get caught, but if it does inform the reward, the result is the same. You _should_ quit, but you wouldn't because you'd already convinced yourself you're doing RL God's work, not sleight of hand.

> If an MMLU question asks about an abstract algebra proof, is it cheating to have trained on papers about abstract algebra?

This kind of disingenuous bullshit is exactly why people call you cheaters.

> Generally, I don’t think anyone here is cheating and I think we’re relatively diligent with our evals.

You guys should follow Apple's cult guidelines: never stand out. Think different
by perrygeo | 2025-04-08 22:09:37+00:00
Your hypothesis makes sense. I'd call it "human exceptionalism" - the (wildly unsupported) assumption that we are separate from nature.

Religions that see humans and nature as part of the same system don't have this idea of "unnatural" landscapes. They have no concept of "wilderness". All landscapes are landscapes to which we both belong and shape through our actions.
Show HN: UIT – Library for performant, modular, low-memory file processing
by janwilmake | 2025-04-08 22:10:25+00:00
UIT is a library for performant, modular, low-memory file processing at scale, in the Cloud. It works by offering a 4-step process to gather a file hierarchy from any desired modalty, apply filters and transformations, and output it in any desired modality.

- *performance*: speed is of essence when navigating and searching through large amounts of data - *low-memory* by applying streaming and parallelization we can run this in low-memory environments such as Cloudflare workers - *modular*: modularity is beneficial because by making it composable we get a clear high-level overview of all building blocks. also, not all building blocks can be ran in the same runtime or location. UIT has come about after many iterations of the platform of uithub, which started as a simple node-based parser of zipfiles. While building more and more features and add-ons, I found myself limited by the memory a lot as I was not streaming enough, and going back to JSON too early (because using the Streams API is tricky!). Thus, as features and complexity grew the need was born to create a more modular extensible architecture with good serverless practices in mind.
by alephnerd | 2025-04-08 22:10:42+00:00
> most major central banks (that are considering it at all) are considering doing so in the form of CBDCs

Other than the EU and UK, which other major CB is considering CBDCs alone?

Numerically, most people I know in the space are heavily motivated by the Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) model both India and Brazil have been using, and DPI has been a hot topic in the DevEcon space for 4 years now.

In fact, Indian and Chinese lobbyists now compete with each other across Africa for DPI related infra work (Biden admin even helped support India's evangelism of the Indian DPI model in ASEAN and Africa), and Brazil's Pix has seen significant uptake in Argentina and Uruguay.

And most regional economies like Vietnam, Pakistan, Nigeria, and South Korea have similar implantations

The big difference might be public versus private domain experience. In newer economies like BRICS and much of ASEAN, the infra and norm setting work fell onto regulators. But in more developed economies like the US, UK, or EU, similar developments could be done by the private sector.
by aucisson_masque | 2025-04-08 22:11:33+00:00
A.i. is a blatant case of darwinism.

There are those who adapt, those who will keep moaning about it and finally those who believe it can do everything.

First one will succeed, second one will be replaced, third one is going to get hurt.

I believe this article and the people it mentions are mostly from the second category. Yet no one with all his mind can deny that ai makes writing code faster, not necessarily better but faster, and games at the end are mostly codes.

Of course ai is going to get pushed hard by your ceo, he knows that if he doesn't, another competitor who use it will be able to produce more games, faster and less expensive.
by slt2021 | 2025-04-08 22:11:40+00:00
Question to the Netflix folks: I saw a lot of in-house developed tools being quoted, do you guys have service mesh like linkerd ?

Have you guys evaluated vendors like Kentik?

I would love to get more insight into what do you guys actually do with flow logs? for example if I store 1 TB of flow logs, what value can I actually derive from them that justify the cost of collection, processing, and storage.
by iloveburritos89 | 2025-04-08 22:11:52+00:00
I created a GUI to read the email archives from the legendary Cypherpunk listserve of the 1990s. These archives cover the period from 1992-1998.

The Cypherpunk listserve is a great time capsule of the encryption wars and the early days of the internet, when encryption was still considered a 'weapon' by the US government. The Cypherpunks fought for internet privacy, self sovereignty and security. Notable cypherpunks include Hal Finney, Nick Szabo, Adam Back, Julian Assange, and many many others you'll recognize.

Hope you enjoy reading these as much as I did!
by ang_cire | 2025-04-08 22:12:21+00:00
It really doesn't take that beefy of a machine to run a good LLM locally instead of paying some SaaS company to do it for you.

I've got a refurb homelab server off PCSP with 512gb ram for <$1k, and I run decently good LLM models (Deepseek-r1:70b, llama3.3:70b). Given your username, you might even try pitching a GPU server to them as dual-purpose; LLM + hashcat. :)
by TMWNN | 2025-04-08 22:13:28+00:00
Some of my favorite SCP entries are based on the idea of an ancient advanced civilization before recorded history.

<https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-1115>

<https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-1050> (not main subject, but what anomaly references)

<https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-4001>, then <https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/alexandria-burning>
by TMWNN | 2025-04-08 22:14:15+00:00
Some of my favorite SCP entries are based on the idea of an ancient advanced civilization before recorded history.

<https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-1115>

<https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-1050> (not main subject, but what anomaly references)

<https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-4001>, then <https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/alexandria-burning>
by tiborsaas | 2025-04-08 22:15:02+00:00
I'm the inverse, I still 90% of the time use search engines, mostly Google. LLM-s can't help me with researching Hungarian companies offering screws, furniture, TV-s etc I need for my home renovation. It can't find me the best route to go to a cafe, lookup users, find information on famous people. Google is also faster than me typing a good prompt.

I use LLM-s for what they are good at, generative stuff. I know some task take me a long time and I can shortcut with LLM-s easily.

So here's a ChatGPT example query* which is completely off:

https://chatgpt.com/share/67f5a071-53bc-8013-9c32-25cc2857e5...

* It's intentionally bad be able to compare with Google.

And here's the web result, which is spot on:

https://imgur.com/a/6ELOeS1
by gjvnq | 2025-04-08 22:15:02+00:00
assuming that the typo didn't lead to an invalid/unregistered key, you will see the recipient's bank, full name and masked CPF number in the confirmation screen.

I really dislike the lack of a more anonymous way to transfer money but given how prevalent scams are here I feel like there was no better option.

Also, before PIX bank transfers required a person's full name, full CPF number, full account and branch numbers so arguably PIX is helping to improve privacy a little bit.

However the big issue is when people register their phone numbers as PIX keys because it means strangers can easily get full names from phone numbers.
by sandos | 2025-04-08 22:15:12+00:00
I have never heard a single person complaining about BankID really. The only downside is the huge risks, especially for older people. We basically took control of an elderly family members bankid to avoid them being scammed.

This is something they really need to work on, just add an optional extra layer or cool-down, to slow everything down. You dont necessarily HAVE to have your transactions be immediate, waiting a few days would have been fine in our cases.
by supernewton | 2025-04-08 22:15:45+00:00
Dan and Lisa's answers agree on all but problems 6 and 9, and Dan got two more correct than Lisa. So Dan is correct on both 6 and 9. Therefore, Mary is incorrect on 6 and 9. So she got seven of the other eight correct, and Dan got three of the other eight correct. But on those eight problems, Mary and Dan disagree on only problems 2, 3, 5, and 10, therefore Mary got all four of those correct. Then Mary got three of problems 1, 4, 7, 8 correct, but everyone answered the same way on those, so Colin got three right on those problems as well. Then read off the deduced answer key for the other six problems to get Colin's final score.
by sir0010010 | 2025-04-08 22:15:51+00:00
Hamas filmed the rapes using GoPro cameras. Families of the murdered women don't approve their publication. I recommend reading the UK October 7 Parliamentary Commision Report [1]. A relevant passage on page 131 states:

> The United Nations Report on Sexual Violence found that there were reasonable grounds to believe that “sexual violence occurred in Kibbutz Re’im, including rape.” The rape of women happened on Route 232, “outside of a bomb shelter at the entrance of Kibbutz Re’im, which was corroborated by witness testimonies and digital material.

[1] https://www.7octparliamentarycommission.co.uk/?s=09
by c7b | 2025-04-08 22:16:29+00:00
> Other than the EU and UK, which other major CB is considering CBDCs alone?

The ones I mentioned, eg, Canada [0], China [1]. But it's really most of them [2], the US is rather the exception.

[0] https://www.bankofcanada.ca/digitaldollar/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_renminbi

[2] https://cbdctracker.org/
by simonbw | 2025-04-08 22:17:40+00:00
I use Kagi to search, but I usually use it with the a "?" at the end which triggers an LLM response in addition to search results. It gives me the answer I want like 95% of the time, and I don't feel the need to dig into the search results. For me this tends to be way better than just searching or just using ChatGPT.
by alephnerd | 2025-04-08 22:17:42+00:00
China has backed UnionPay since the mid-2000s - the backbone is similar to that for UPI and Pix.

And most of the countries on that list are either implementing their own payment infra or leveraging India, Brazil, Russia, or China's.

It doesn't hurt to have a CBDC - it gives you a seat at the table when norms and global regulations are made.