MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by piva00 | 2025-04-08 17:06:24+00:00
It's really hard to model unknown unknowns, most models for photovoltaic 20 years ago never predicted the current state but here we are.

Current grid storage technology is a few breakthroughs away, we just don't know when it will happen but given the amount poured into R&D for it, the willingness of governments, and technological hurdles that are orders of magnitude lower than fusion I don't see why we can't expect it to become reality in the next 10 years.

As I said, it's lagging the curve of solar adoption, China has invested a lot in solar for their own power needs as an oil-poor country, their options are renewables and uranium, with the EV industry booming in China, solar being widely adopted, I don't see why they couldn't be at the forefront of grid storage as well in a few years (5-10).
by raj7desai | 2025-04-08 17:06:47+00:00
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by klik99 | 2025-04-08 17:07:28+00:00
I’ve seen a few YouTube thumbnail generation examples on Reddit (I’m on vacation so not gonna search for a link) that show multimodal with inline text giving specific instructions. It’s impressed me in a way that I haven’t been with LLMs for 2 years, IE it’s not just getting better at what it already does, but a totally new and intuitive way of working with generative AI.

My understanding is it’s a meta-LLM approach, using multiple models and having them interact. I feel like it’s also evidence that OpenAI is not seriously pursuing AGI (just my opinion, I know there’s some on here who would aggressively disagree), but rather market use cases. It feels like an acceptance that any given model, at least now, has its own limitations but can get more useful in combination.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-04-08 17:07:32+00:00
That's true. On the other hand I have tried ChatGPT to review programming concepts or language features and I have found it very convenient and more useful than Googling.

For instance if you want to prepare for a C dev interview and would like to review what 'static' means and does (one of the super usual interview questions) you can just ask and immediately get a pretty much perfect explanation without noise. It's not cheating, it's just a better tool.
by Aldipower | 2025-04-08 17:07:43+00:00
So, I cannot tell you more either. As I am not related to Lidl, also not Aldi, despite my nickname. :-)

But I think, also the EU customers and businesses reaching for such a cloud product are also responsible to make it work. So if you are working for a bigger company, why not find a solution together with the service providers based in the EU. Otherwise we get a hen and egg problem here.
by mullingitover | 2025-04-08 17:07:44+00:00
> Part of this extreme reckless tariff push is definitely protectionism for the fossil fuel industry.

Indeed, it's becoming very obvious that the US is slowly turning into a resource curse nation. Sad.

Of course US tariffs are only going to make those Chinese panels cheaper for the EU and the rest of the world, which will then be less reliant on US-sourced fossil fuels. In the long run, putting up a wall in front of the your beachfront property is not going to protect your house when the tide comes in.
by bananapub | 2025-04-08 17:07:55+00:00
it is a nice that they're a bit embarrassed about it and spend much of the post explaining why they took more money.

overall, they still seem to have their heads screwed on straight and have an actual business model, that is also pretty fair - charge enterprises per seat to solve their network identity problems.

anyway, keep up the good work, Avery and co.
by SamBam | 2025-04-08 17:08:01+00:00
I had the same thought, but agree with others that it's the core part of the game.

I've played about a dozen of these now, and very often I can see what one of the big outer clues is way before I've worked out the inner clues.

If I just solve the big outer clue, the game is done in 20 seconds or so, and I'm not sure I'd keep coming back.

Rather, the challenge is to use what I've understood to work out the inner clues. This is tricky because I've got to keep more in my head at the same time, Towers of Hanoi-style. Or I sometimes write it out.

I have my notes in an open notepad from yesterday, so I can reproduce my thinking without spoiling today's:

[scold, with "at"]: hmmm, no idea.

[something golfers' apparently [scold, with "at"]]: not sure...

["there[something golfers' apparently [scold, with "at"]]]: Ah, ok, got it: [there[X]] has to be "therefore." So I see [something golfers' apparently [X]] is going to be "fore."

So if "fore" = "Something golfers apparently [X]" and X is [scold, with "at"], I can see that innermost one must be "yell."
by CRConrad | 2025-04-08 17:08:05+00:00
> Nobody should be planning on steady stock market gains for their retirement income.

At least in the Nordic countries, utterly uncontroversial conventional wisdom says something like:

* In your youth save almost-only in stocks; via some index fund, if you don't feel like being an active investor, following the market every day;

* Start with (funds that specialise in) high-growth (= high-risk) stocks; then, as you near middle age, slowly move over to lower-risk (= lower-growth) stocks (or funds specialised therein);

* In middle age, move over to having some part in state bonds;

* As you near retirement age, eliminate high-growth/risk stocks/funds altogether, and draw down the proportion of stocks/funds as a whole, going to an increasing proportion state bonds.

* As you retire, possibly move all-out of stocks / stock index funds and all-in on bonds... Except put some in an ordinary old bank account.
by tomhow | 2025-04-08 17:08:07+00:00
In the past week there have been:

7 submissions with "Trump" in the title, and over 100 comments in the thread:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=tru...

9 submissions with "Tariff" in the title, and over 100 comments in the thread:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=tru...

Apart from perhaps LLMs, no other topic has had anywhere near as much discussion, and the stories and comment threads are full of criticism.

You may not be seeing them because because they often get pushed down the rankings due to the flamewar detector, user flags and software penalties that are applied to submissions about politics and mainstream news.

If those mechanisms weren't in place, the front page would be dominated by flame wars about U.S. politics every day, which is not what the majority of the HN audience wants.

The intention of HN is to be a place to discover and discuss different topics that engage intellectual curiosity.

But the stories, discussions and criticisms are definitely there, and are getting plenty of exposure on the front page.
by aforwardslash | 2025-04-08 17:08:17+00:00
I've conducted interviews where the candidate asked if he could use google to try to get an answer. I often say "sure". If a guy can read an explanation out of context, understand it in a way he can explain it using his own words, and reason about corner cases in a couple of minutes, he's hired. The same goes with AI; canned responses work when you ask canned questions, not so much on open-ended ones.
by beeflet | 2025-04-08 17:08:33+00:00
Does this constitute a "real economy"? Where are the goods and services being traded? It's all just speculation and worthless "web3" stuff like NFTs. It's not any more a real economy than the counter-strike skins economy or the baseball cards economy.

There was a "real crypto economy" back in the days of the silk road. So I would say that the real cryptocurrency economy has been tried, and it was doing alright until they got busted by the feds. But the reason we don't have a crypto economy today is that drug dealers got drowned out by the more popular get-rich-quick schemers.
by bityard | 2025-04-08 17:08:42+00:00
For your partner's sake I hope you're right but is z/OS as a platform actually continuing to grow, or are they just having a hard time filling seats because it's hard to see a long and profitable future working on (what some might call) "legacy" systems?

When I was growing up (decades ago, mind), my dad kept trying to convince me to get into machining. Lathes, mills, tool and die making, etc. In his line of work, he saw lots of machining companies basically paying all education and training expenses for new hires because their experienced old timers were retiring faster than they could be replaced. (He also thought computers were a fad...) I'm sure it was a good opportunity at the time. But nearly all of those companies eventually closed up because offshore manual labor was and still is way cheaper. If I'd had taken his advice, I'm pretty sure I would have had to reboot into another career at least once by this point.
by ignoramous | 2025-04-08 17:08:51+00:00
Ahmad al-Dahle, who leads "Gen AI" at Meta, wrote this on Twitter:

... We're also hearing some reports of mixed quality across different services ... We've also heard claims that we trained on test sets -- that's simply not true and we would never do that. Our best understanding is that the variable quality people are seeing is due to needing to stabilize implementations. We believe the Llama 4 models are a significant advancement and we're looking forward to working with the community to unlock their value.

https://x.com/Ahmad_Al_Dahle/status/1909302532306092107 / https://archive.vn/JzONp
by luisrudge | 2025-04-08 17:10:11+00:00
It helps to prevent scams because you know who the money is going to (not foolproof, of course). CPF in Brazil is not as fragile or sensitive as the SSN in the US. You can't easily wreck someone's life just because you know their name and CPF. CPF numbers are shared pretty much everywhere since it's a unique identification code for a single person. All businesses ask for it when they're generating invoices/receipts etc. You basically use your CPF everywhere and there's virtually no risk in sharing it. That's not to say that identity theft is not a thing in Brazil. It definitely is, however the damage is usually not as bad as the stories you hear in the US and the blame is usually put on the banks / service providers for not doing the proper KYC to verify the documents. It'll be a headache for the person, but usually something that is quickly fixed.
by indoordin0saur | 2025-04-08 17:10:12+00:00
This article is an example of why the gender-neutral use of pronouns makes things a pain to read. If you're already changing the interviewees' names then IDK why you couldn't just pick an arbitrary he/she pronoun to stick to for one character.

> Francis says their understanding of the AI-pusher’s outlook is that they see the entire game-making process as a problem, one that AI tech companies alone think they can solve. This is a sentiment they do not agree with.
by dennis_jeeves2 | 2025-04-08 17:10:34+00:00
>The issue is lying about your experiences

Side note, as far as a job requirements goes the bigger issue is asking for impossibly diverse experience and asking for things that can be easily learnt. This promotes lying because the liars are the ones that are rewarded with an initial interview. I was talking to a fresh graduate with some volunteer experience who was having difficulty getting a job, and all I could hesitatingly recommenced was to tell him lie on his resume so that his resume could get past the screening.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-04-08 17:11:05+00:00
To be fair, everybody who takes a thermodynamics course owes 90% of it to the 'steam science' pioneers. Understanding what determines and limits the efficiency of heat engines was as big a deal in its day as the WWW is in ours, but unlike our own era, a lot of brand-new science and math had to be discovered by those engineers.

Steam tech is much, much more interesting than it appears at first.
by Tijdreiziger | 2025-04-08 17:11:18+00:00
Wow, that’s quite surprising!

In Europe, it’s quite common to see machines like these in buildings: https://www.seeberger-professional.de/wp-content/uploads/202... (left to right: hot drink, snack, and cold drink machines).

Smaller ones are also common: https://www.observantonline.nl/Portals/0/OpenContent/Files/1... (there you can also see the disposable cups that the hot drinks are dispensed in).

Is that why Starbucks is popular in America - no hot drink machines?
by derelicta | 2025-04-08 17:11:29+00:00
I think the last point is the easiest to address for me for now:

Yes, the allegations of genocide against the Uyghur were fabricated. Pure CIA fiction. After all, neither Muslim nations nor the UN are denouncing or investigating Chinese anti terrorist policies as genocidal, unlike a certain totalitarian dictatorship that likes to portray itself as the Hebrew state and who happens to livecam and brag about its demonic acts on TV.
by ARandumGuy | 2025-04-08 17:11:41+00:00
I've seen stuff that echoes this sentiment before, and I have to say I don't understand this desire at all. Why would I need a computer to show me what something in a book looks like? I already have an imagination for that!

Books are fundamentally a collaborative artform between the author and the reader. The author provides the blueprint, but it's up to the reader to construct the scene in their own head. And every reader is going to have slightly different interpretations based on how they imagine the events of a book. This act of imagination and re-interpertation is one of the things I love about reading books.

Having a computer do the visualization for you completely destroys what makes books engaging and interesting. If you don't want to visualize the book yourself, I have to wonder why the hell you're reading a book in the first place.

If you need that visual component, just watch a movie or read a comic book or something. This isn't a slight against movies or comics! They're fantastic mediums and are able to utilize their visual element to communicate ideas in ways that books can struggle with. And these visuals will form a much more cohesive artistic vision then whatever an AI outputs, since they're an integrated and intentional part of the work.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-04-08 17:11:42+00:00
But I just want the software I use to not be bad.

I don't want to start a company, find funding money, hire developers, develop a go-to-market strategy, A/B test, pivot, pivot again, and eventually maybe release a product or maybe just get bought out.

I just want to be able to right-click and/or highlight some text in my child's school's communications app.
by burningion | 2025-04-08 17:12:20+00:00
Tailscale is a great. I think of it as a swiss army knife for easier routing and connectivity.

I use it in projects to stream internet / connectivity from my phone to the NVIDIA Jetson line, making my robotics projects easily accessible / debuggable:

https://github.com/burningion/bicyclist-defense-jetson?tab=r...
by sapiogram | 2025-04-08 17:12:39+00:00
I appreciate the link, but Australia is an almost entirely tropical/subtropical country, with Sidney being as far from the equator as Northern Africa. I don't believe that analysis can tell you anything about Northern Europe.

This means that solar power output is much more seasonal, and most critically, power consumption in Northern Europe is highest during the winter months. I expect this is not the case for Australia.
by genewitch | 2025-04-08 17:12:55+00:00
All the stable diffusion software I've used names the files after some form of the prompt, and probably because SD weights the first tokens higher than the last tokens, probably as a side effect of the way the CLIP/BLIP works.

I doubt any of these companies have rolled their own interface to stable diffusion / transformers. It's copy and paste from huggingface all the way down.

I'm still waiting for a confirmed Diffusion Language Model to be released as gguf that works with llama.cpp
by anonymousiam | 2025-04-08 17:13:07+00:00
Interesting. I never used much IBM hardware, and always assumed that their terminals used EBCDIC and not ASCII.

The HP 2648A terminal also had a "block mode", and the RTE screen editor used it. It was one of the first screen editors I ever used (in 1984). (I had used WordStar on CP/M as early as 1979.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC

https://terminals-wiki.org/wiki/index.php/HP_2648A

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/hp/1000/RTE-A/92077-90039_RTE-A...
by brazzy | 2025-04-08 17:13:07+00:00
Not everything that grows quickly is exponential. What evidence specifically do you have that the growth is proportional to the already existing capacity? Or even that it will continue to accelerate?

A counterpoint: the recent quick growth has been fueled by panels getting cheaper. They used to be the majority of the cost. But that's not true anymore. The cost will soon be mainly installation (i.e. labor) and space. Neither are amenable to drastic further decreases.

Fortunately we've already reached the point where it's the cheapest option, so that it will continue to replace other power sources even if it does get much cheaper anymore.
by Empact | 2025-04-08 17:13:12+00:00
Creative labor is not entitled to the work parent comment is describing. We employ labor because it is beneficial to us, not merely because it exists as an option. Creative labor’s responsibility is to adapt to a changing world and find roles where their labor is not simply produced / exceeded by a computer system.

Practically speaking, the work described would most likely never have been done, rather than been done by an artist if that were the only option - it’s uncommon to employ artists to help with incidental tasks relative to side projects, etc.
by kees99 | 2025-04-08 17:13:27+00:00
I guess GP meant that online shops, mechanics, government bodies and schools were meant to move along?

Not exactly clear where to, though. We don't have another messaging system with quite as wide reach (a.k.a. high value, in terms of Metcalfe's law) as email.

Texts(SMS), maybe? But those are not without their own problems - see "green text bubble stigma".
by mrexroad | 2025-04-08 17:13:38+00:00
> radicalized youth

Two of my teenage sons play sports and at times it feels like all content consumption roads eventually lead to “manfluencers”[0]. If they’re watching content on lifting techniques, sports discussions, or gaming—not uncommon topics for teenagers—the recommendations are riddled with rabbit holes into the so called manosphere.

[0] https://www.psypost.org/rejected-and-radicalized-study-links...
by asoneth | 2025-04-08 17:13:53+00:00
> These don't have anywhere to shift to.

Advertising spend is elastic, even for consumer products. Companies don't commit to a certain level of advertising regardless of cost, they carefully evaluate the ROI of each advertising buy. The primary purpose of the proposal to increase the cost of ads is to reduce the ROI of advertising and therefore reduce the amount of ads across the board.

For example, Coca-Cola has competitors that spend significantly less on advertisements, which is a major reason store brand cola often costs less. Same with Dove, I see far fewer ads for store brand soap or brands like Dr Bronners. Same with fast-food chains like McDonalds which spends about an order of magnitude more on ads than many of their competitors.

Brands that advertise heavily typically charge a premium to cover the cost of their advertisements and many customers are willing to pay more for heavily-advertised products. But consumer preference for advertised brands is not unbounded. If Dove soap costs 10x more than store brand soap to cover the increasing cost of their advertising budget then more consumers will switch to store brand soap no matter how many Dove commercials they see. Therefore, Dove must calibrate their advertising budget to balance the cost of advertisements against the expected premium they can charge over their less-advertised competitors.

(Whereas something like a tariff on raw materials would affect companies more broadly -- it's a lot easier for a car company to run half as many ads than to make a car with half as much aluminum.)

> the main effect would be to lower advertising prices, not reduce advertising space.

Edited to note that the prices charged by advertising platforms cannot go lower than the cost to deliver the ad. It costs money to run a search engine, create TV shows, or construct a billboard, so if it the price a company is willing to pay for an ad on that platform goes below a certain point then the advertisement is no longer economically viable and does in fact disappear. Possibly forcing the ad-supported service to adapt (e.g. paid video) or disappear entirely (e.g. billboards).
by bluGill | 2025-04-08 17:13:54+00:00
> There is no genetic reason or support for mandatory detrimental tradeoffs.

That isn't always true. We know in humans there are genes that depending on which variation you have, you will either be more social or have better memory. According to AI I'm thinking of BDNF (Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor), but digging deeper doesn't indicate that is correct. Either way there often are trade offs in genetics.

Though of course genetics is only one factor. How your are raised/taught also makes a difference.
by throwaway25251 | 2025-04-08 17:13:59+00:00
I don't know about Llama 4. Competition is intense in this field so you can't expect everybody to be number 1. However, I think the performance culture at Meta is counterproductive. Incentives are misaligned, I hope leadership will try to improve it.

Employees are encouraged to ship half-baked features and move to another project. Quality isn't rewarded at all. The recent layoffs have made things even worse. Skilled people were fired, slowing down teams. I assume the goal was to push remaining employees to work even more, but I doubt this is working.

I haven't worked in enough companies of this size to be able to tell if alternatives are better, but it's very clear to me that Meta doesn't get the best from their employees.
by caseyy | 2025-04-08 17:14:47+00:00
AI is the latest "overwhelmingly negative" games industry fad, affecting game developers. It's one of many. Most are because nine out of ten companies make games for the wrong reason. They don't make them as interactive art, as something the developers would like to play, or to perfect the craft. They make them to make publishers and businessmen rich.

That business model hasn't been going so well in recent years[0], and it's already been proclaimed dead in some corners of the industry[1]. Many industry legends have started their own studios (H. Kojima, J. Solomon, R. Colantonio, ...), producing games for the right reasons. When these games are inevitably mainstream hits, that will be the inflection point where the old industry will significantly decline. Or that's what I think, anwyay.

[0] https://www.matthewball.co/all/stateofvideogaming2025

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tJdLsQzfWg
by nancyminusone | 2025-04-08 17:14:53+00:00
Sure they do, it's just called fluid dynamics and thermodynamics. Enough to fill up about 1/3 of a mechanical engineering degree, if you're really into it (most aren't).

Not that there's a lot of historical context to things as far as which people did what - most of that sort live on in names of techniques and methods (Rankine cycle, de Laval turbine, Carnot efficiency, etc.)