MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by earthnail | 2025-04-08 16:41:59+00:00
A 2s spinning circle may indeed be better than a 500ms flashing reload. Try it on your mom (“waaah why did it flash??”).

I also dislike SPAs but there is business value in this slow spinner that you shouldn’t discount.

Luckily, turbo or htmx solve this just as well. And maybe even more importantly, I can’t think of a modern browser that still flickers.
by jajko | 2025-04-08 16:42:06+00:00
Come on, US is rich, even compared to Europe. Sure, its just pure money and not happiness, health, safety, high quality education or healthcare availability but raw numbers are there.

It will get poorer economically in upcoming years thanks to gov moves, the wheels have been set in motion. Maybe dollar will tank so that my first sentence won't be valid anymore. Not sure it will be balanced with rest above though.
by NobodyNada | 2025-04-08 16:42:49+00:00
As soon as I saw "second rock from the", I knew the top-level answer was going to be "Venus". At first I felt frustrated that it wouldn't let me enter the solution, but if it had accepted that then I would have missed out on the rest of the puzzle. In retrospect, I felt like having to work backwards from "Venus" and "sun" to figure out the lower-level clues was much more interesting then if it had just let me skip those clues.
by hcarvalhoalves | 2025-04-08 16:44:29+00:00
Correcting the blatant misinformation about the topic:

- PIX project started in 2016, public launch in 2020

- It was not "launched" by any President; the Brazilian Central Bank is an independent authority, with it own mandate, not a branch of the executive power

- PIX was co-developed with institutions of the financial sector

- It's a protocol that participants must implement, not an app. The specification is even on GitHub. I don't know what you mean by "its code is nowhere to be found".

- The Brazilian Central Bank is acknowledged as a benchmark, rather than "proverbially incompetent public work force"
by nathan_compton | 2025-04-08 16:44:38+00:00
I think he is referring to the fact that the photograph is actually a photo of the real motorcycle with the photo I meant to post behind it, at a museum.

"On display in the Midwest Dream Car Collection museum" reads the caption."

I can't find the original, but here is another photo he took at the time:

https://static.wixstatic.com/media/103e0a_ac1383d327534f359c...
by bko | 2025-04-08 16:44:54+00:00
I think Meta sees AI and VR/AR as a platform. They got left behind on the mobile platform and forever have to contend with Apple semi-monopoly. They have no control and little influence over the ecosystem. It's an existential threat to them.

They have vowed not to make that mistake again so are pushing for an open future that won't be dominated by a few companies that could arbitrarily hurt Meta's business.

That's the stated rationale at least and I think it more or less makes sense
by abfan1127 | 2025-04-08 16:45:26+00:00
For OTR trucks, you have to factor in the battery degradation. A OTR truck easily gets to 1 million miles on an engine. Often times significantly more, and then its only a rebuild, not a replacement. While electricity is much cheaper than diesel, battery replacement cost amortization is a real thing to include in the accounting. I haven't done an OTR, but I did do amortization for a Ford Lightning. While a "battery fill up" is $2-3. The replacement battery is $30k iirc. That's $3000/yr in costs assuming 10 year lifetime. At that rate, its $62/wk in battery amortization. So, you're really spending $62+3/wk in "energy". That's still less than a tank ($90-100 at current prices), but the savings is significantly less than originally anticipated.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-04-08 16:46:00+00:00
>There are always trade-offs.

This is pseudo-science and a common misconception. There is no genetic reason or support for mandatory detrimental tradeoffs.

Historic breeding programs often allow side effects as a practical matter, but that doesn't mean they are detrimental or required.

Sometimes genetic difference is all upside just like a mutation can be all downside.
by pydry | 2025-04-08 16:46:58+00:00
Maybe look at some data before FUDding.

This model posits 97% carbon free generation in Australia with 5 hours of storage using actual real world weather data:

https://reneweconomy.com.au/a-near-100-per-cent-renewables-g...

>You can have many days or weeks

Maybe cite actual data.

>alternatives like gas peakers or perhaps nuclear.

Nuclear isnt a peaker. Or rather, it can theoretically be used as a peaker but burning literal $100 notes may be more cost effective in the long run than using it as a peaker.

Batteries and pumped storage are cost effective peakers. I find it's better when modeling renewable energy generation scenarios to try not to pretend they dont exist.
by danudey | 2025-04-08 16:47:05+00:00
I, too, like them a lot, and I worry that eventually they're going to be "the internet" in the same way that Twitter became "the communication platform" or AWS became "the infrastructure".

We're going to see days when something goes wrong on Cloudflare's end and disrupts their whole CDN, and 2/3 the internet is going to break.

Still, at this point they're absolutely a net positive, and seem like a good steward. They even once replied to one of my e-mails saying "Based on what you've said about your use case, you should just use our free plan which you can sign up for on our website".
by boscillator | 2025-04-08 16:47:21+00:00
I'm still mad at IBM for giving me one of those tests for an internship after 4 years. It required a lot of fast mental arithmetic, which is, medically speaking, not my strong suit. I thought the job was programming computers, not being the computer, but the test suggests otherwise.

I probably should have figured out how to request an ADA accommodation... oh well.
by nathan_compton | 2025-04-08 16:47:31+00:00
I'm an indie game developer and its a domain where I find AI to be most useless - too much of what a game is interactive, spatial, and about game-feel. The AI just can't do it. Even GPT's latest models really struggled to write reasonable 3d transformations, which is unsurprising, since they live in text world, not 3d world.
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-08 16:47:40+00:00
(1) Maybe I'm just a little too young but my impression was that the 360 and it's successors were not that big in scientific computing, certainly there were some big academic installations but I saw a lot more DEC machines (PDP-8 in the experimental lab, PDP-10, PDP-11 and VAX elsewhere) and by the time I went to college circa 1990 you were likely to see Motorola 68k-based "workstations" that were quickly replaced by RISC architectures like SPARC and PA-RISC which in turn failed to compete with the PC.

Cornell had one of very few IBM 3090s with a vector unit (to compete with the Cray) just before I showed up, but when I did IBM had donated a message-passing based supercomputer based on the Power PC architecture. I only saw a 3090 (no vector unit) at New Hampshire Insurance which I got to use as a Computer Explorer.

(2) I was taught in grad school in the 1990s to use floats if at all possible to reduce the memory requirements of scientific codes if not actually speed up the computation. (In the 1990s floats were twice as fast as doubles on most architectures but not the x86). I really enjoyed taking a course on numerics from Saul Teukolsky, what stood out in the class as opposed my reading to the Numerical Recipes book which he was a co-author of, was the part about the numerical stability of discretizing and integrating partial differential equations. If you did it wrong, unphysical artifacts of the discretization would wreck your calculation. Depending on how you did things rounding errors can be made better or worse, Foreman Action's Numerical Methods that Work and later Real Computing Made Real reveal techniques for managing these errors that let you accomplish a lot with floats and some would point out that going to doubles doesn't win you that much slack to do things wrong.
by skrebbel | 2025-04-08 16:48:02+00:00
The golden rule is "will I need to make a dummy commit to test this?" and if yes, find a different way to do it. All good rules in sibling comments here derive from this rule.

You not want to ever need to make dummy commits to debug something in CI, it's awful. As a bonus, following this rule also means better access to debugging tools, local logs, "works on CI but not here" issues, etc. Finally if you ever want to move away from GitHub to somewhere else, it'll be easy.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-04-08 16:48:27+00:00
Fittest means best fitted to the prevailing environment, but of course the fitness being tested is ability to survive and reproduce (i.e. keep on playing the game of evolution).

It's almost a circular/tautological description ("survival of the survivors"), but "fittest" does at least allude to why some survive better than others (better adapted to prevailing environment), as well as the fact ("fitt-EST" vs "fit") that it's a competition for limited resources. Fitness is a matter of degree.
by westurner | 2025-04-08 16:48:50+00:00
To write an unbiased systematic review, there are procedures.

In context to the scientific method, isn't RAG also wrong?

Generate a bad argument and then source support for it with RAG or by only searching for confirmation biased support.

I suppose I make this mistake too; I don't prepare systematic reviews, so my research meta-procedure has always been inadequate.

Usually I just [...] but a more scientific procedure would be [...].
by myrmidon | 2025-04-08 16:49:30+00:00
Gas peaker plants are not "the alternative" to nuclear power, they are exactly what nuclear power needs, too, because regulating nuclear plants down is not what you wanna do after investing billions into it-- you need those plants running on full tilt for like 90% of the time, and even then its gonna take decades to pay back the investment.

Meanwhile, 1kW of solar with 1kWh of storage can be had for $1k on Amazon, yields 1-2MWh per year and pays for itself within the decade, with costs still trending down. Yes, fully getting rid of fossil gas is an ongoing challenge, but a much easier one than ramping up nuclear reactor build rates by a factor of 1000 or so...
by acc_297 | 2025-04-08 16:49:32+00:00
I believe that the installation in that picture and a number of other installations in the Taizhou region are built over a river system or some kind of tidal water reservoir I was unable to find the exact area but [1] is a nearby installation.

Land use is a large contributing factor to climate change but this particular image seems to be the best case scenario for large solar installation the ecosystem (marshland?) appears to be relatively undisturbed (also considering it is centrally located in a city of 4 million people solar panels or not it seems pretty lush). And I'll parrot an often cited statistic: "the entire U.S. could be powered by utility-scale solar occupying just 0.6% of the nation’s land mass" this (imo) makes a good case for solar PV as a relatively large chunk of installed grid capacity it just seems like a better compromise than the alternatives.

If utility scale battery storage ever pans out (that or UHV transmission or both) then we could see renewable sources like solar+wind actually work as base-load capacity.

Others also comment on this thread that converted agricultural land (i.e. field to pasture) meshes well with solar PV installation the plants typically do not need full sun. I would guess that a small percentage of installed solar required any kind of land shaping or clearing although it does happen [2].

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/china-invests-546...

[2] https://www.cmigroupinc.ca/solar-farm-environmental-impact-b...
Show HN: Coroot – eBPF-based, open source observability with actionable insights
by openWrangler | 2025-04-08 16:49:40+00:00
A common open source approach to observability will begin with databases and visualizations for telemetry - Grafana, Prometheus, Jaeger. But observability doesn’t begin and end here: these tools require configuration, dashboard customization, and may not actually pinpoint the data you need to mitigate system risks.

Coroot was designed to solve the problem of manual, time-consuming observability analysis: it handles the full observability journey — from collecting telemetry to turning it into actionable insights. We also strongly believe that simple observability should be an innovation everyone can benefit from: which is why our software is open source.

Features:

- Cost monitoring to track and minimise your cloud expenses (AWS, GCP, Azure.)

- SLO tracking with alerts to detect anomalies and compare them to your system’s baseline behaviour.

- 1-click application profiling: see the exact line of code that caused an anomaly.

- Mapped timeframes (stop digging through Grafana to find when the incident occurred.)

- eBPF automatically gathers logs, metrics, traces, and profiles for you.

- Service map to grasp a complete at-a-glance picture of your system.

- Automatic discovery and monitoring of every application deployment in your kubernetes cluster.

We welcome any feedback and hope the tool can improve your workflow!
by yieldcrv | 2025-04-08 16:49:48+00:00
Given that every evolutionary outcome is about which genes survived long enough to produce viable offspring that have some of those same genes

A) at all

B) more than others

C) happened to pass on

this makes more sense, since its about sex

every other use of the same skill is happenstance

for example with C), in humans, cancer occurs mostly after sexual reproductive periods, so there is no way for that to have been weeded out of the population. Demonstrating that many non beneficial traits pass on alongside beneficial ones and its all happenstance.
by zambachi | 2025-04-08 16:50:10+00:00
I disagree on the advantages of wisdom as these days I’m thinking the opposite:

1) Lack of wisdom leads to reinvention of the wheel. How many programming languages are there only now doing things the same way as 30 years ago? What is novel versus an unnecessary re-invention?

I started studying Tcl code from back in the late ‘90’s and honestly was surprised. Hell, many people don’t even know what macports is even though homebrew isn’t much but an attempt to reinvent macports with a “cool” spin.

2) Societal language and general problem solving skills are deteriorating. Language, and mathematics evolve ever so slowly, and yet emphasis on their importance is reduced in favor of the whims of technological advancement.

I would rather hire someone with the slow-developing, traditional skills, than the new-age fads.

In addition, with the advances in AI the only people worth hiring will be the ones with traditional education—and the wise, classically trained among our elders will be evermore important.
by nathan_compton | 2025-04-08 16:50:22+00:00
I've posted recently about a dichotomy which I have had in my head for years as a technical person: there are two kinds of tools; the first lets you do the right thing more easily and the second lets you do the wrong thing more quickly and for longer before you have to pay for it. AI/LLMs can definitely be the latter kind of tool, especially in a context where short term incentives swamp long term ones.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-04-08 16:50:29+00:00
> Would it be a whole lot of fun to complete the game in one guess?

I would say yes. It would feel great, like you are outsmarting the game. Kind of like when you discover a good build in an RPG that helps you get ahead - even though it's often intended by the designer, you feel like you pulled a fast one on the game and it feels awesome.
by filoleg | 2025-04-08 16:51:24+00:00
100% agreed. I’ve seen way more than enough people in poorly-fitting expensive suits to last me a lifetime, and it is just painful to watch.

The main benefit of a suit is that it can be easily tailored to fit a person perfectly, which isn’t the case with tshirts/hoodies/jeans/etc. I mean, you can tailor those, i guess, but that’s very uncommon.

For non-suits, the pro-tip is to just focus on finding ones that fit your shape the best (or changing your shape; unless you are one of the unlucky few who has a non-conforming shape, e.g very tall), and that’s their main downside.

Well fitting casual clothing > poorly fitting suits any time. Beyond that, it is situational.
by lm28469 | 2025-04-08 16:51:24+00:00
> Per capita

I have another question then, does the planet care about "per capita" or about "total" emissions ?

Every few years they come up with the same fucking graph were the solid line goes straight up until "now" and the dotted line magically decreases in the close future and reach 0 in 50+ years, when none of us will be alive and accountable. meanwhile: https://climatanthropocene.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/co...
by jmclnx | 2025-04-08 16:51:46+00:00
Very cool.

As a kid in Boston, a couple of Subway Stops and an interesting Escalator. They where a bit wider then this one, but had wooden "stairs". But the "stairs" were slanted downward. When wet, you had to be careful. I wish I had taken pictures of them.

They were ripped out in the 70s. I wish they had kept one of them as an historical oddity.

FWIW I have not been there for a while, maybe one I was not aware of still exists :)
by glenstein | 2025-04-08 16:51:50+00:00
Yes, and perhaps a different way of saying the same thing, but traveling long distances to capture prey and, at times, return to the nest to feed the young, may invite a proclivity for abstract thinking.

It's perhaps not a coincidence that humans have at least something in common with birds in terms of evolutionary heritage that predisposed us to covering vast amounts of terrain.
by tjpnz | 2025-04-08 16:51:59+00:00
Asset flips (half arsed rubbish made with store bought assets) were a big problem in the games industry not so long ago. They're less prevalent now because gamers instinctively avoid such titles. I'm sure they'll wise up to generative slop too, I've personally seen enough examples to get a general feel for it. Not fun, derivative, soulless, buggy as hell.
by NickC25 | 2025-04-08 16:52:00+00:00
is it securities fraud? sort of.

If Mark, both through Meta and through his own resources, has the capital to hire and retain the best AI researchers / teams, and claims he's doing so, but puts out a model that sucks, he's liable. It's probably not directly fraud, but if he claims he's trying to compete with Google or Microsoft or Apple or whoever, yet doesn't adequately deploy a comparable amount of resources, capital, people, whatever, and doesn't explain why, it could (stretch) be securities fraud....I think.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-04-08 16:52:06+00:00
A LiFePo4 battery gets > 750,000 miles. That's what people are going to be putting into high mileage trucks.

Nobody is going to put a $30K battery into a Ford Lightning. After 10 years that battery is probably $3K. If it isn't and you're unhappy with the ~80% battery capacity it has after 10 years of usage, you sell it on to somebody who is happy with ~80%. You don't spend more than the truck is worth replacing the battery.
by reverendsteveii | 2025-04-08 16:53:45+00:00
>If we agree with this point, this probably means bankers are much more intelligent than engineers, considering the former profession has to communicate with hundreds, maybe thousands of clients throughout their career life, while engineers mostly communicate with machines -- they do communicate with their colleagues but you can see the vast gap between the two.

I don't think anything I said about social vs asocial species applies to two members of a a single social species. I feel like this is one of those intuitive leaps that serves as a great reminder that intuitive leaps aren't usually good science.
by milanove | 2025-04-08 16:54:10+00:00
Unless I'm doing something simple like writing out some basic shell script or python program, it's often easier to just do something myself than take the time to explain what I want to an LLM. There's something to be said about taking the time to formulate your plan in clear steps ahead of time, but for many problems it just doesn't feel like it's worth the time to write it all out.
by kees99 | 2025-04-08 16:54:19+00:00
DigitalOcean, or more precisely - some of their customers are the source of quite a few spam tsunamis, at least according to spamtrap data I'm collecting on my mail server. So from that perspective, a big "thank-you" goes out to DO for firewalling off outbound port-25 traffic by default.

That said - reading "Even if SMTP were available" and "recommend using SendGrid", it sounds like there is no opt-out from this. Even for customers who would want to self-host a mail server that never sends in bulk. Now that, is reprehensible, and adds yet another brick in the already tall wall that mail duopoly+ (gmail, outlook, and handful others) enjoy.
by diggan | 2025-04-08 16:54:26+00:00
Borderline conspiracy theory with an ounce of truth:

None of the models Meta put out are actually open source (by any measure), and everyone who are redistributing Llama models or any derivatives, or use Llama models for their business, are on the hook of getting sued in the future based on the terms and conditions people been explicitly/implicitly agreeing to when they use/redistribute these models.

If you start depending on these Llama models which have unfavorable proprietary terms today but Meta don't act on them, doesn't mean they won't act on it in the future. Maybe this has all been a play to get people into this position, so Meta can in the future start charging for them or something else.
by charlie0 | 2025-04-08 16:54:44+00:00
This seems like a case of not managing expectations. The following should be clear: 1. We fire fast. 2. We don't want to fire people and will do our best to help you succeed. 3. Here are the bars you need to clear in order to stay with us. (They should be reasonable.) 4. We will provide frequent feedback to let you know where you are.

Not sure about everyone else, but to me it's often obvious who wasn't going to make the cut within the first 1-2 months of their employment.
by EGG_CREAM | 2025-04-08 16:54:50+00:00
Where is “racist” even factoring into it? I see this argument all the time, mostly about North Korea or china. There is nothing racist about suspecting someone from a specific country because you don’t trust that country’s government. That is not racist and what’s more I think you know that. It think these arguments are extremely bad faith. Here’s the test: is it about race? If not, then it’s not racist. For example, if I don’t trust Chinese nationals to work at my company because I think they will steal secrets, but I absolutely don’t have that same fear about people who are ethnically Chinese but born in my country, that’s not racist. If you want to call it xenophobic, sure, I’ll buy that. But racist? You are conflating nation and race on purpose.
by jsnell | 2025-04-08 16:55:19+00:00
There are almost certainly ways to fine-tune the model in ways that make it perform better on the Arena, but perform worse in other benchmarks or in practice. Usually that's not a good trade-off. What's being suggested here is that Meta is running such a fine-tuned version on the Arena (and reporting those numbers) while running models with different fine-tuning on other benchmarks (and reporting those numbers), while giving the appearance that those are actually the same models.
by furyofantares | 2025-04-08 16:55:20+00:00
The thing that bugged me was that I also knew a BUNCH of intermediate steps. I wished I could enter them and get feedback instead of "Incorrect answer". I don't mind having to do all the pieces.

I think what might work is just if it says "Too early" and makes a list of stuff below the puzzle that you've solved too early and just put a checkmark next to it once it's ready and let you click it to enter it.

Right now it's giving negative feedback, I think it should be a positive to recognize pieces of the puzzle early, even if you still need to do the whole puzzle.