MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-04-29 13:14:12+00:00
> Quite the opposite. It's never been more true. I'm not saying using LLMs for search is better, but as it stands right now, SEO spammers have beat Google, since whatever you search for, the majority of results is AI slop.

It's actually sadder than that. Google appear to have realised that they make more money if they serve up ad infested scrapes of Stack Overflow rather than the original site. (And they're right, at least in the short term).
by willtemperley | 2025-04-29 13:14:21+00:00
It's a cherry picked, out-of-date counter-example. Swift isn't designed for building drivers.

In reality, a lot of Swift apps are delegating to C code. My own app (in development) does a lot of processing, almost none of which happens in Swift, despite the fact I spend the vast majority of my time writing Swift.

Swift an excellent C glue language, which Java isn't. This is why Swift will probably become an excellent game language eventually.
by ThinkBeat | 2025-04-29 13:15:47+00:00
I have not searched for a new job for a long time so I have little feel for what the job market it these days. I do know that many companies have let devs go for various excuses.

We had a year (1?,2?,3? ) when different companies tried to put people back in the office and the general sentiment was anger and and incredulity. Devs were entitled to work from home 100% if a company didnt offer it thye company would tank since all the devs would quit.

Has the job market now shifted as lot that enough that people accept restrictions on working from home?
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-04-29 13:15:53+00:00
The survey questions they asked are bad questions if you’re attempting to answer the question about future labor state. However they didn’t ask that, they asked existing employees how LLMs have changed their workplace.

This is the wrong question.

The question should be to hiring managers: Do you expect LLM based tools to increase or decrease your projected hiring of full time employees?

LLM workflows are already *displacing* entry-level labor because people are reaching for copilot/windsurf/CGPT instead of hiring a contract developer, researcher, BD person. I’m watching this happen across management in US startups.

It’s displacing job growth in entry level positions across primary writing copy, admin tasks or research.

You’re not going to find it in statistics immediately because it’s not a 1:1 replacement.

Much like the 1971 labor-productivity separation that everyone scratched their head about (answer: labor was outsourced and capital kept all value gains), we will see another asymptote to that labor productivity graph based on displacement not replacement.
by trollbridge | 2025-04-29 13:16:43+00:00
I generally view these moves as simply a soft layoff to cut down on costs.

Uber doesn't really have any way to grow. They can't exactly start charging more. They can't pay their drivers less, who already are paid poorly. The market for expensive taxi rides isn't going to expand, either.

So now they have to be in a cost-cutting mode. The app already exists, so they don't need a large staff of highly-paid technologists.
by arnaudsm | 2025-04-29 13:17:29+00:00
There are no benchmarks on the 8B & 14B models, the most popular on consumer hardware. Are they hiding something? Did anyone benchmark them?

And why did they hide the generalist benchmarks like MMLU-pro & TruthfulQA?

I wish we had proper public benchmarks that are up to date. LMarena was proven useless by the Llama4 scandal, and LiveBench is unrealistic and misses too many models.
by Bjartr | 2025-04-29 13:17:38+00:00
That's more or less how it works. Knowing what 50hz is and how out of sync a generator is is easy. AFAIK, the problem is one of inertia, both electrical and mechanical. A generator is a spinning mass, the more load on the generator, then the slower it turns. How fast it turns decides the frequency of power it generates. Say you get your generators running at 50hz at night, and then during the day it gets hot and thousands of AC units get turned on. Now your generators are running at 40hz.

It's not about getting the generator to spin at 50hz, it's about getting it to spin at 50hz under dynamic load. Most generators are mostly fixed speed I think for the sake of efficiency, so the mechanism the grid has to regulate the frequency of power is largely by controlling the number of generators running at any given time, and how much of the grid is connected to them. Ramping up and down based on the current observed frequency of the grid is exactly how this all works. However it's more complicated because what if two or more power stations see a low frequency grid and decide to ramp up more generators? Well now the grid frequency is too high. If they them respond to that by ramping down, it'll go too low. Rinse and repeat and you get undesirable frequency oscillation, so there needs to be more communication across the grid than just responding to the locally observed frequency.

Connect a stopped, or sufficiently out of phase generator to a full scale power grid and the puny thousands of pounds of metal that make up a generator are going to get ripped apart by the sheer inertia of the power grid forcing it to match speed and phase in an instant. This is also a problem when attempting to connect two isolated grids, of they're too out of phase with each other, catastrophic physical damage will occur.
by dingnuts | 2025-04-29 13:18:00+00:00
I'm like three days from my one year Duo streak. I've gone from understanding none of my wife's native language to being able to eavesdrop on phone conversations a bit, and to have short exchanges. I've probably spent half an hour daily on average. Sometimes a lot more.

I had no prior exposure. This website is weird, the comments never reflect reality for me on any topic.
by tallanvor | 2025-04-29 13:18:08+00:00
It seems likely your site had something detected as malware, or is still being detected as malware.

When I test sending a mail to my M365 account with your URL mentioned I find that it gets quarantined (same as if I try to send an email from my M365 account with that URL).

In your M365 test tenant, you should be able to go https://security.microsoft.com/quarantine and see that the emails are getting quarantined, with this information provided as to why:

Detection technologies: URL detonation reputation, Mixed analysis detection

Given that it says "URL detonation reputation" rather than just "URL detonation", that suggests it's using historical information rather than having performed a new test.

This is Microsoft Safe Links functionality - at the very least since you should be able to find the quarantined emails, the headers will contain a correlation ID support can use, although they might not have much power over safe links.
by Retric | 2025-04-29 13:18:14+00:00
At scale things look very different. A great deal of nighttime energy use occurs because electricity prices are cheaper at night. Panels to the east of you get sunlight earlier in the day and panels to the west of you get it later in the day. Tracking panels get sunlight across a larger fraction of the day.

Output from panels on a single home are highly correlated seeing large drop offs from an individual cloud, where solar farms across a wide geographic area experience different weather systems. It wouldn’t be cost effective but with absolutely zero storage the US could get 70+% of its electricity from solar. Add wind and hydro to the mix and you can get quite far without grid storage, but adding options lowers costs so there’s an optimal amount of grid storage for any given energy mix.
by Aurornis | 2025-04-29 13:18:30+00:00
Prices are always set by supply and demand.

The price will rise until it gets high enough that the product of sales * price falls.

It has always been that way. Businesses haven’t been selling goods and services out of the goodness of their hearts at an arbitrary price. It’s always supply and demand.

Tariffs are expected to reduced demand because they increase prices. This is why the stock market is down and nearly every economist is calling the tariffs a big problem. Companies won’t have room to raise prices infinitely because they feel like it, because consumers are about to be able to afford fewer things because the things they need are getting more expensive.
by tpm | 2025-04-29 13:18:44+00:00
> So have a pending table

With UUIDs there is absolutely no need for that.

> Keeping an actual transaction open for that long is asking for contention

Yes, which is why this is not an actual db transaction, it's a business transaction as mentioned.

> and the idea of having data hanging around ephemerally

The data is not ephemeral of course. But also the mapping between business transaction and model is not 1:1, so while there is some use for the transaction ID, it can't be used to identify a particular model.
by ryandrake | 2025-04-29 13:18:48+00:00
Most people’s (USA) taxes are not complex, and just require basic arithmetic to complete. Even topics like stock sales, IRA rollovers, HSAs, and rental income (which the vast majority of taxpayers don’t have) are straightforward if you just read the instructions on the forms and follow them. In 30 years of paying taxes, I’ve only had a tax professional do it once: as an experiment after I already did them myself to see if there was any difference in the output. I paid a tax professional $400 and the forms he handed me back were identical to the ones I filled out myself.
by yawgmoth | 2025-04-29 13:18:57+00:00
I don't mind the end of remote work, as long as the "cool office" actually comes back. Here in Ann Arbor it feels like the tech scene died with remote work and all the jobs are remote.

From my perspective, wages have increased faster elsewhere, and there are far more remote jobs than local ones. The whole reason I moved to Ann Arbor for work was because UMich had created a little startup scene that I could aspire to. I expected the scene to grow, not fade. It really seemed like the beers on tap, foosball table tech job fantasy for a few years there.
by Helmut10001 | 2025-04-29 13:19:12+00:00
According to [1], 3/4 came from renewables during the re-startup. Most of today's inverters are black-start ready. That is, they don't require external energy to startup, unlike nuclear, which is heavy, costly, and slow. German readers may find fefe interesting here [2]. He debunks many of these myths.

[1]: https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/stromversorgung-in-spani...

[2]: https://blog.fefe.de/?ts=96ee73ea
by snoman | 2025-04-29 13:19:25+00:00
A big part of my job is building proofs of concept for some technologies and that usually means some webpage to visualize that the underlying tech is working as expected. It’s not hard, doesn’t have to look good at all, and will never be maintained. I throw it away a few weeks later.

It used take me an hr or two to get it all done up properly. Now it’s literal seconds. It’s a handy tool.
by sixtyj | 2025-04-29 13:19:41+00:00
Check for updates every 5 minutes is a bug itself ;)

It is sort of fun (for $8,000) as it was “just” a screenshotter, but imagine this with bank app or any other heavily installed app.

All cloud providers should have alerts for excessive use of network by default. And they should ask developers if they really want to turn alerts off.

I remember Mapbox app that cost much more, just because provider did charge by months… and it was a great dispute who’s fault it was…
by sundarurfriend | 2025-04-29 13:19:51+00:00
> Amazing that it's the first search engine I've seen that lets me do something as obvious as customizing ranking for certain websites. And, of course, the ability to block websites from search results entirely.

Brave goggles also allow you to customize the rankings to your preference. You can boost sites to varying levels (1-10 I believe), downrank them, or discard (block) them entirely.
by mabster | 2025-04-29 13:20:20+00:00
I'm not knocking indie development, the scene is very very vibrant. But indies don't typically push the hardware to its limits the same way.

And Java was a perfectly good choice of language for Notch for the same reasons.

I don't play Minecraft so I guess I'm outta touch. I knew about Bedrock and I've heard kids call Java the "old one". I didn't realise there's still an active community. Thanks for the correction :)
by eugenekaliisa | 2025-04-29 13:21:15+00:00
Hey HN, We're launching the beta for Piper, a dashboard for managing credentials (API keys, tokens) for AI agents, LLM tools, and MCPs.

The problem: API keys end up scattered, hardcoded, or manually managed, which is insecure and doesn't scale, especially when users need to grant access to third-parties.

We provide a centralized vault where users store their credentials and a OAuth 2.0 based authorization layer: Store - User stores their API key/token with us. Authenticate - The agent authenticates using standard OAuth flows to request access to a specific user credential it needs for a task. Grant - The user is prompted to explicitly grant or deny this specific agent access to that specific credential (optionally for a limited time). Temporary credentials - If approved, Piper uses Google Cloud's STS to generate short-lived, temporary credentials. The agent uses this temporary credential to access only the specifically approved secret/token for the duration of the credential's validity.

This flow keeps the agent from ever seeing the user's long-lived keys and enforces user consent + least privilege via STS. You can use the same key for multiple agents without ever sharing it and you can easily revoke an agent’s access to the key because you just have to stop issuing short-lived credentials to it.

We think this pattern offers significant security benefits, but we're keen on your feedback

Any better ways to handle the user consent step, especially integrating with LLM interactions or protocols like MCP?
by graylien | 2025-04-29 13:21:33+00:00
Hey, to clarify it's about the user experience of IDEs - how it feels to jump from one to the other, how the UI prompts you to add more credits (so you can end up spending a lot if you're not careful with prompts).

This has often drawn similarities to a slot machine, the way it is not deterministic what code will come out, and what changes to which files will be made.
by gitfan86 | 2025-04-29 13:22:07+00:00
Most but not all companies are bottlenecked by organizatial issues not speed of completing a jira ticket. A lot of those companies have moats or sales issues that prevent competitors from easily taking market share.

So instead of seeing mass drop in job openings you will see companies that are not bottlenecked by org issues start to move very fast. In general that will create new markets and have a positive effect on kobs
by conductr | 2025-04-29 13:22:09+00:00
There’s a million reasons besides tariffs a cost may increase. Sellers with no tariffs will just increase prices to pad profits if they’re given an opportunity to let Amazon pin it on tariffs. There is a lot of evidence supporting the theory that this type of manufactured inflation is what drove the recent pandemic era inflation. Corporate profits alone are the best indicator of this occurring. They raised prices by a lot more than their cost increased because they could hand wave broadly at inflation.
by kokada | 2025-04-29 13:22:13+00:00
Not really, but one thing that bothers me is how unreproducible GraalVM is. AFAIK every distro that has binaries for it just repacks the binaries released from Oracle, and the last time I searched I couldn't find instructions on how to build from scratch (I was the maintainer of GraalVM in nixpkgs, not anymore because I just got fed-up with it).
by ta20240528 | 2025-04-29 13:22:14+00:00
"No one is talking about disarming the US."

You should peruse the obligations the USA signed up to in Article VI of the NNTP.

The ICJ (the UN one the US congress ratfied) ruled waaay back in 1996 that article VI of the NNPT implies "There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control."

International rule of law and all that.
by 9rx | 2025-04-29 13:22:50+00:00
> They will have to go back to training

Why? When we've seen a sector collapse, the new jobs that rush in to fill the void are new, never seen before, and thus don't have training. You just jump in and figure things out along the way like everyone else.

The problem, though, is that people usually seek out jobs that they like. When that collapses they are left reeling and aren't apt to want to embrace something new. That mental hurdle is hard to overcome.
by zmgsabst | 2025-04-29 13:22:57+00:00
I actually think that would backfire:

I see two items for $5, but when I add the imported one, suddenly it costs more — and Amazon didn’t tell me that ahead of time or give me any way to choose the one without tariffs on the grid/list view.

This makes tariffs more effective because they can’t bump the domestic price to match — while giving customers a negative chock each time they choose an importer for a product.
by RajT88 | 2025-04-29 13:23:39+00:00
I too prefer a solid color.

However, I've noticed, there's not much point in changing it. Showing the desktop is a waste of screen real estate because of the generations of abuse of desktop shortcuts. Even if you are careful, it becomes a cluttered wasteland (on Windows anyways). I just learned to never use the desktop for anything and always have windows up on various monitors.
by iterance | 2025-04-29 13:24:14+00:00
Supply and demand is one driver of economic pricing, but not the only driver. Efficient pricing is a complex topic and not as black-and-white as it seems. As demand falls, the price may be expected to fall, but there is an inelastic limit set by material, labor, transport, and taxation cost. A company may elect to decrease their profit margin per sale to offset increased costs, but there is only so much margin to eat.

In the current circumstances, though, companies do not have a choice to lower prices. The basic cost of taking an item into inventory from these suppliers has risen significantly, in most cases well above 2024 margins.

The net effect is that, despite the market's best effort to correct prices to within an affordable range, costs may rise considerably and availability may still fall regardless. Under severe shock to the system, the usual maxims that account for nominal shifts in day to day trading no longer apply.
by Aurornis | 2025-04-29 13:24:22+00:00
Grocery stores have famously low margins. Everyone thinks they’re cash cows, but they have some of the thinnest profit margins of common consumer businesses.

Stores often sell common staples like bananas, generic milk, and other basics at close to cost. They’re the things that get people in the door. They make their profit on things like cereal, deli meats, packaged goods, and other non-staple items that people also buy once they’re inside.

It’s similar to how many gas stations compete on cost of gas to get people there, but hope that you’ll stop inside and get a $6 drink or some $5 packaged snacks.

Then you have to consider all of the other things that go into a store are also tariffed. The parts for the trucks that transport the bananas have tariffs. Many of their cleaning supplies. Parts for the checkout registers. The light bulbs they have to replace. Many of those tariffs could be well over 100%. They have to make up that price in the cost of bananas and everything else.
by sgarland | 2025-04-29 13:24:25+00:00
Thanks for the links, I appreciate it.

The GScholar link had many studies, yes. I found some conflicting opinions.

Institute of Transportation Studies, UC California [0]:

“There is, however, no empirical study that demonstrates that the 85th percentile rule optimizes safety.”

Hilda Ofori-Addo, University of Louisiana [1]:

“85th percentile speeds of vehicles are greatly affected by roadway characteristics. Therefore, roadway characteristics should be considered as equally important…”

I’ll note that this also had the lowest rate of crashes when vehicle speeds were <= 1 MPH from the 85th percentile, but there was also a confusing (to me) multi-modal distribution after that, with a 7 MPH delta having strikingly higher rate than anything else. I suspect, as the author admits, this may be due to other factors such as area type, road traffic volume, etc.

[0]: https://escholarship.org/content/qt5hg5m6sm/qt5hg5m6sm.pdf

[1]: https://media.proquest.com/media/hms/PFT/2/gUjrJ?_s=mHpv4T4%...
by aeonik | 2025-04-29 13:24:39+00:00
Engineers aren't shy about eviscerating each other's work when mistakes are made—sometimes too eager, frankly.

Whole courses are built around forensically dissecting every error in major systems. Entire advanced fields are written in blood.

You probably don't hear about it often because the analysis is too dense and technical to go viral.

At the same time, there's a serious cultural problem: technical expertise is often missing from positions of authority, and even the experts we do have are often too narrow to bridge the levels of complexity modern systems demand.
by dfxm12 | 2025-04-29 13:24:44+00:00
Duolingo is free and convenient. That alone makes it better than a lot of tools. With a few months long streak in Italian, I could get by on vacation & get the gist of some sports blogs. I think it's fine if people aren't motivated to go beyond this point.

It really did help with vocab. No, duolingo didn't teach the finer points of grammar, but it's not like native speakers speak like Dante wrote anyway... These experiences have also motivated me to explore other ways of learning Italian. That wouldn't have happened without a free and convenient tool like duolingo.
by bruckie | 2025-04-29 13:25:40+00:00
As an American, I've never seen that spelling, and I can't find much evidence that it's an accepted spelling. I'm curious how you came to that conclusion.

"Stymy" doesn't appear in Merriam-Webster [0] nor the OED [1]. Wiktionary [2] and Dictionary.com [3] do list it as "variant" or "alternative" spellings, but with no indication that it's an American spelling.

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stymy

[1] https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?q=stymy

[2] https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/stymy

[3] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/stymy
Ask HN: Is hardware-based digital signing the solution to deep fakes?
by ryandvm | 2025-04-29 13:25:40+00:00
To the extent that AI generated videos are already a fake news problem and that fake videos and images are expected to become even more commonplace, why isn't hardware-based digital signing being pushed heavily as a solution?

Obviously this would only work for future media, but it would be almost trivial for camera makers to add hardware-based cryptographic digital signatures to the metadata of every output file or embedded in an invisible watermark (though this raises privacy concerns).

Why isn't this being pursued in the marketplace?
by frank_nitti | 2025-04-29 13:25:40+00:00
I wonder how a nontechnical PM would ever be able to evaluate the outputs well enough for their business to deploy model-generated code into production where end users’ safety/privacy/etc are at stake.

If the answer would be related to extensive testing, who verifies the model-generated tests?

Given that a nontechnical PM would neither be able to inspect the system code nor its tests, this is the part that does not add up for me. It seems at least one person still has to really understand the “hard part” of computing as it relates to their domain.