MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cess11 | 2025-04-29 10:51:05+00:00
'"The adoption of these chatbots has been remarkably fast," Humlum told The Register. "Most workers in the exposed occupations have now adopted these chatbots. Employers are also shifting gears and actively encouraging it. But then when we look at the economic outcomes, it really has not moved the needle."'

So, as of yet, according to these researchers, the main effect is that of a data pump, certain corporations get a deep insight into people's and other corporation's inner life.
by diggan | 2025-04-29 10:51:27+00:00
> the fiber does not sync with the GPON anymore

Ouch, that sucks. Bet their technicians are on overtime already too :/ I'm guess you've already tried the true-and-tested "Turn off, wait five minutes, turn on again"?

Usually we've had lots of issues with our fiber from Vodafone (like random ~70% packet drops from time to time) but happy Vodafone seems to have recovered quickly in this case, no GPON issues here as far as I can tell.
by abe_m | 2025-04-29 10:52:59+00:00
At the time I'm writing this, there appears to be about equal (hydro + gas) = (solar + wind). It appears they are running a significant portion of the grid with high inertia generators.

In a control system when you have an actuator that is much more responsive than the load, you can get into instable operating regimes where. On a small scale, when you are setting up servo motors, there is an inertia matching ratio for stability. In some of the systems I set up it was 10:1 load inertia:motor inertia. If you exceed that, you end up with elasticity between the motor and load that the motor can locally be above set point, and the control tells the motor to slow down, while the load has not yet reached set point. The motor is then too slow, and the control tells it to go faster, and you get the motor oscillating around the speed of the load.

On the grid you can have similar elasticity. An inverter many km away can get too far ahead in the AC cycle, then when that signal reaches the local inverter, the local inverter slows down, but the remote inverter has already slowed down, and by the time that slower wave gets to the local inverter, it is already too slow, and so the local inverter starts to speed up. If you get the frequency "right" you can end up with a positive feedback loop. With a high inertia rotating generator, the system is damped and slow enough to respond you don't change set point faster than the signal can propagate.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-04-29 10:53:31+00:00
oh boy I had a smirk after reading this comment because its partially true.

When deepseek r1 came, it lit the markets on fire (atleast american) and then many thought it would be the best forever / for a long time.

Then came grok3 , then claude 3.7 , then gemini 2.5 pro.

Now people comment that gemini 2.5 pro is going to stay forever. When deepseek came, there were articles like this on HN: "Of course, open source is the future of AI" When Gemini 2.5 Pro came there were articles like this: "Of course, google build its own gpu's , and they had the deepnet which specialized in reinforced learning, Of course they were going to go to the Top"

We as humans are just trying to justify why certain company built something more powerful than other companies. But the fact is, that AI is still a black box, People were literally say for llama 4:

"I think llama 4 is going to be the best open source model, Zuck doesn't like to lose"

Nothing is forever, its all opinions and current benchmarks. We want the best thing in benchmark and then we want an even better thing, and we would justify why / how that better thing was built.

Every time, I saw a new model rise, people used to say it would be forever.

And every time, Something new beat to it and people forgot the last time somebody said something like forever.

So yea, deepseek r1 -> grok 3 -> claude 3.7 -> gemini 2.5 pro (Current state of the art?), each transition was just some weeks IIRC.

Your comment is a literal fact that people of AI forget.
by myfonj | 2025-04-29 10:53:32+00:00
Last time I used an Android (Galaxy) phone, to have a solid pitch-black background (which I thought made sense for modern phone displays energy-wise, besides looking pretty swell), I had to download — yes, D-O-W-N-L-O-A-D — some black image from some "Galaxy Store" thing or whatnot to achieve that. It was free, but it seemed like an exception there.

Something that should be a default option, or a single-tap switch in settings, turned into a chore consisting of a period of agonising disbelief, doubt, denial, search, and eventually bitter acceptance.
by Clubber | 2025-04-29 10:53:39+00:00
>The big difference for me is that what's actually fun (hard technical problems like e.g. writing an OS kernel, a db engine, a path tracer, an LLM from scratch...) is mentally challenging, and might progress your career, but it's not actually in any way sellable.

I'm not saying it's worthless by any means. I assume this would be the baseline. The benefit of making an actual sellable product is you learn how to finish, which is often a lesson not learned from hobbyists. It's fun to work on new tech, but if someone never learns how to make a product that can ship, their value in an organization is probably more limited than someone who can.

>Your effort would go mostly to the market analysis and your product would need more polish meaning that for a personal project,

It's the polish that's valuable, I couldn't care less about the business side of it, leave that to business people.

Let's use your example of working on the Linux Kernel. If Linus just made a kernel and said, "this is great!" we never would have had the GNU/Linux revolution. It was packaged and installers were created and distributions were made and it was eventually able to be installed pretty easily by anyone. That's making a viable product, that is finishing.

>To make something sellable, you usually have to make it not-so-technical and not-so-complex.

Sort of, you have to make a not-so-complex wrapper so other people can use it. The complexity is still there, but you have to abstract it so devs without that knowledge can use it. I feel that if no one else can use it, where's the value?

“The definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple.”

Another simplistic example is I'm working on making a custom domain specific model. Getting it to infer properly is great (getting there), but the value to the company is to make it fast, wrap it in a usable API, get it to log useful errors, and integrate it into our software. The first is the fun part, the second is finishing to make it useful. That's value.
by fhd2 | 2025-04-29 10:53:45+00:00
> The economists found for example that "AI chatbots have created new job tasks for 8.4 percent of workers, including some who do not use the tools themselves."

For me, the most interesting takeaway. It's easy to think about a task, break it down into parts, some of which can be automated, and count the savings. But it's more difficult to take into account any secondary consequences from the automation. Sometimes you save nothing because the bottleneck was already something else. Sometimes I guess you end up causing more work down the line by saving a bit of time at an earlier stage.

This can make automation a bit of a tragedy of the commons situation: It would be better for everyone collectively to not automate certain things, but it's better for some individually, so it happens.
by diggan | 2025-04-29 10:54:58+00:00
> the time you could actually meet people in places without having to constantly update one's position

Not sure I understand how that's different than today? You set a time and place, then you meet there, are people doing more than that today? Seems the youngsters understand this concept as well as older people, at least from the people I tend to meet like that.

> the practicality of just paying even for just coffee with my phone is just too big for me to care for it.

Interestingly enough, no matter if you had cash or card yesterday you couldn't get a coffee anywhere, as none of the coffee machines had power and even in the fancier places where they could have made the coffee without power, they didn't have electricity for the grinder itself, so no coffee even for them.
by fud101 | 2025-04-29 10:54:59+00:00
Oh how cute, estimates. 220-age is so accurate lol. Just a joke to even talk about this nonsense, it's completely unhelpful in all manner. I just set myself an arbitrary goal for the run (say 160bpm over an hour, which is something i'm working towards so i may be say averaging 165 currently) and try to attain that progresively each week. No idea what zone that is, don't care. If it's currently 'zone 4' so what? It will eventually become 'zone 2'. If i spend all my time doing 'zone 2' at worst i'll be wasting time, at best, i'll be spinning my wheels.
by lupusreal | 2025-04-29 10:55:12+00:00
The latter. SpaceX isn't an Amazon competitor if Amazon doesn't have their constellation in the first place, and the loss of a handful of launch contracts from Amazon isn't going to slow SpaceX down (while on the other hand, it would slow Amazon down considerably.)

Bezos didn't want to launch with SpaceX because SpaceX is a Blue Origin competitor. Shareholders sued over this, saying that Amazon was putting Bezos' personal interests before Amazon's own.
by tremon | 2025-04-29 10:55:34+00:00
But computers are not actually counting array elements, it's more accurate to compare array indexing with distance measurement. The pointer (memory address) puts you at the start of the array, so the first element is right there under your feet (i.e. index 0). The other elements are found by measuring how far away from the start they are:

element_position = start + index*element_size
by ghusto | 2025-04-29 10:55:44+00:00
> There really needs to be some kind of global Digital Bill of Rights which provides legal recourse from these giant sclerotic algo-run oligopolies

Agreed. I think the problem is mainly that communicating what is wrong in a way that politicians can understand is difficult, and the people who governments hire to make them understand, are not incentivised to do so here (they're typically corporate types, good at ticking boxes, not so good at technology).

Making the EU understand issues such as why Apple's monopoly is a bad thing is easy in comparison, because everybody has a phone and everybody understands "shops". Even so, I'm impressed that went the way it did. I don't have much hope for politicians understanding what MS et al. are doing to mail though.
by hocuspocus | 2025-04-29 10:55:50+00:00
Oracle has specifically reworked its license to make terms clear after the bad press around the initial release of Oracle JDK 17:

https://blogs.oracle.com/java/post/free-java-license

Any company using Java should be willing to read and understand Oracle's terms, whether they use third party OpenJDK distributions or Oracle's builds.

If you're leaving significant performance gains on the table because you can't read, that's on you.
by rspoerri | 2025-04-29 10:56:02+00:00
All the jobs (11) they looked at are at least medium level complexity and task delegating. They are the ones giving out time-consuming, low level jobs to cheap labour (assistants etc.) . They can save time and money by directly doing it using AI assistants instead of waiting to have an assistant available.

I am 100% convinced that Ai will and already has destroyed lots of Jobs. We will likely encounter world order disrupting changes in the coming decades when computer get another 1000 times faster and powerful in the coming 10 years.

The jobs described might get lost (obsolete or replaced) as well in the longer term if AI gets better than them. For example just now another article was mentioned in HN: "Gen Z grads say their college degrees were a waste of time and money as AI infiltrates the workplace" which would make teachers obsolete.
by pjc50 | 2025-04-29 10:56:37+00:00
You're right, but: the renewables "debate" is a massive tar-pit of bad faith arguments. People are tired of rehashing that. The best solution is not to slow the rollout of renewables but to accelerate the rollout of battery storage.

(also we're a bit early for a proper postmortem, but that's an inevitable reality of social media, got to get the talking points in before the facts)
by Noumenon72 | 2025-04-29 10:56:51+00:00
What kind of person fakes illness expressly so they don't have to help out during an actual disaster when their skills are needed? "Whenever I hear there's a fire, I tell my firefighter friends to take the battery out of their pager so they won't have to go fight the fire." I agree we owe these people better treatment than just mandating they work heroic hours, but this only makes things worse on those who comply with the mandate.
by TazeTSchnitzel | 2025-04-29 10:56:55+00:00
Marcan is an injured party! If you go to great lengths to build a legally clean open-source project on top of a foundation of supposedly legally clean open-source libraries — absolutely critical libraries that have no currently existing alternative — and then discover that their supposed cleanness was a lie all along, it's not just an abstract insult and betrayal, it's a realisation that the immature actions of others have put an entire scene in legal jeopardy.
by dimava | 2025-04-29 10:57:09+00:00
Hue is a cyclic value, so it has to be in degrees

Chroma cap is dependent on Lightness and Hue, so it has to be unsized to preserve "equal delta leads to equal color distinction" concept

In color spaces you just don't have any math that can be done without following its structure

You may check https://oklch.com/ on how the color space looks like
Show HN: Ranger – EV Route Planner
by jonkan | 2025-04-29 10:57:48+00:00
I just released my app Ranger – EV Route Planner.

Most route planners pick charging stops that don’t really suit me – too few chargers, bad food options, not enough margin, wrong networks, you name it. I often want to choose myself.

Ranger shows a simple, color-coded line, so you can easily see your estimated battery level along your route. It also highlights charging locations based on how many chargers there are – so you can avoid lonely two-stall stations.

It's available for iOS and it's completely free. Check it out!
by lillecarl | 2025-04-29 10:58:14+00:00
You tried to nerdsnipe someone without mentioning L2 is effectively dead within datacenters since VXLAN became hardware accelerated in both Broadcom and "NVIDIA"(Mellanox) gear. And for those that don't need/care about L2 they don't even bother and run L3 all the way.

EVPN uses BGP to advertise MAC addresses in VXLAN networks which solves looping without magic packets, scales better and is easier to introspect.

And we didn't even get into the provider side which has been using MPLS for decades.

A problem with high bandwidth networking over fiber is that since light refracts within the fiber some light will take a longer path than other, if the widow is too short and you have too much scattering you will drop packets.

So hopefully someone doesn't bend your 100G fiber too much, if that isn't finicky idk what is, DAC cables with twinax solve it short-range for cheaper however.
by diggan | 2025-04-29 10:58:51+00:00
> From what I could tell from the radio reporting, handheld radios and batteries were rather quickly sold out.

Indeed, visited the local hardware store and some bigger stores like Decathlon, and they were out of all batteries, gas-powered stoves and anything else related. Seems they ran out of it just hours after the power was cut too.

> I've got to give massive props to Antena 1 too

RNE did a great job, and together with the response of the previous crisis of Covid, I feel relatively safe as a Spain resident during a crisis. People around you are so caring as well, like when I tried to figure out how to open my garage door without power, a young guy stopped while passing by to ask if I needed help. Simple stuff, but gives a larger feeling of that we'll survive together no matter what.
by virtualritz | 2025-04-29 10:58:56+00:00
AFAIK gl.SRGB8_ALPHA8 will only make sure the filtering of the lookup happens in linear sRGB (because filtering involves multiplications).

But values returned from the texture lookup must also be linear for any calculations afterwards to make sense.

AFAIK you'd need to set internal format to SRGB8_ALPHA8 and the format to RGBA. Then the returned color is also linear.

However, according to [1], this combination is only allowed if the result type is requested UNSIGNED_BYTE, i.e. as 8bit/channel. That would mean you will get banding on gradients because 8bit/channel is not nearly enough to represent linear color.

I.e. the type should be at least HALF_FLOAT or FLOAT but the table suggest WebGL 2.0 does not support this. I'm not a realtime graphics person, so I may be missing something. And obviously, there must be some workaround for WebGL.

Furthermore, the final linear->non linear sRGB conversion must be done, too. I.e. before displaying the result. AFAIK the sRGB framebuffer GL extension can take care of this. But again, not sure.

The whole topic of color spaces (vs color models, i.e. RGB is a color model, not a color space) and gamma is not trivial.

Almost everyone starting out with any kind of computer graphics involving display/manipulation of colors gets this wrong first time because they do not know about this/assume this is trivial.

Don't be discouraged. A good read is [2]. While it specifically addresses color pipelines in VFX/film, all in there applies equally to a simple non-linear sRGB image (a typical JPG, e.g.) being manipulated and then displayed or saved out as 8bit/channel again.

[1] https://registry.khronos.org/webgl/specs/latest/2.0/#TEXTURE...

[2] https://www.imageworks.com/sites/default/files/2023-10/Cinem...
by whytevuhuni | 2025-04-29 10:58:57+00:00
It depends on the kind of game you’re making.

If it’s a really logic-intensive game like Factorio (C++), or RollerCoaster Tycoon (Assembly), then I don’t think you can get away with something like Unity.

For simpler things that have a lot of content, I don’t think you can get away with Rust, until its ecosystem grows to match the usual game engines of today.
by WhyNotHugo | 2025-04-29 10:59:23+00:00
> > The lower levels are buggy and have a lot of churn > > The stack I use is Rend3/Egui/Winit/Wgpu/Vulkan

The same is true if you try to make GUI applications in Rust. All the toolkits have lots of quirky bugs and broken features.

The barrier to contributing to toolkits is usually also pretty high too: most of them focus on supporting a variety of open source and proprietary platforms. If you want to improve on something which requires some API change, you need to understand the details of all the other platforms — you can't just make a change for a single one.

Ultimately, cross-platform toolkits always offer a lowest common denominator (or "the worst of all worlds"), so I think that this common focus in the Rust ecosystem of "make everything run everywhere" ends up being a burden for the ecosystem.

> > Back-references are difficult > > A owns B, and B can find A, is a frequently needed pattern, and one that's hard to do in Rust. It can be done with Rc and Arc, but it's a bit unwieldy to set up and adds run-time overhead.

When I code Rust, I'm always hesitant to use an Arc because it adds an overhead. But if I then go and code in Python, Java or C#, pretty much all objects have the overhead of an Arc. It's just implicit so we forget about it.

We really need to be more liberal in our usage of Arc and stop seeing it as "it has overhead". Any higher level language has the same overhead, it's just not declared explicitly.
by Tor3 | 2025-04-29 11:00:42+00:00
I did not at all in any way mean to say that learning a language should be from a source language towards a target language. Quite the opposite really. I completely agree with the statement ".. embodying that language - ie. it is not an intellectual task". That matches my own anecdotal experiences, at least.

What I wanted to say was that even though babies can hear and differentiate between all the sounds of every language on earth (and yes they can), and young children too - what then happens is that the brain will after a time simply keep what's needed for the child's language and discard the rest. Which is why adults will have problems hearing certain sounds of a target language, unless those sounds already exist in that person's language(s). That takes time. Native English speakers, for example, are in my experience generally unable to hear the difference between certain vowels in my native language even though said vowels are as different as night and day for me. It seems to take up to two years for that to get fixed, depending on the person and also age. And in the meantime the pronunciation will be wrong and the person is unable to hear it and thus can't fix it. And later it's so hard that it won't, as a rule, get fixed.

My wife can't hear the difference between certain consonants in my language even though she's fully fluent otherwise. She has to watch my lips. After all these years. The reason is simply that those differences don't exist in her native language. On the other hand, very young people can easily do it and will get the pronunciation right at first try.
by roenxi | 2025-04-29 11:00:55+00:00
Based on the speed most companies operate at - no surprises here. The internet also didn't have most of its impact in the first decade. And as is fairly well understood, most of the current generation of AI models are a bit dicey in practice. There isn't much of a question that this early phase where AI is likely to create new jobs and opportunities. The real question is what happens when AI is reliably intellectually superior to humans in all domains and it has been proven to everyone's satisfaction, which is still some uncertain time away.

It is like expecting cars to replace horses before anyone starts investing in the road network and getting international petroleum supply chains set up - large capital investment is an understatement when talking about how long it takes to bring in transformative tech and bed it in optimally. Nonetheless, time passed and workhorses are rare beasts.
by loxs | 2025-04-29 11:00:56+00:00
I have several apps in production. I employ sqlx, axum, async_graphql, React frontend.

So far I don't know any better way of doing it and I have tried all the classic ways like PHP, Django etc. This is way superior. The only downside is that I am the only one who can touch the backend, but I guess if some of the projects grows enough, there will be enough incentives to find another Rust programmer besides me.
by immibis | 2025-04-29 11:01:16+00:00
That's the point though? The generator can't be lower or higher frequency than the grid. It can be applying its maximum power into a grid that is still short of power, which is probably a better situation than if it was not doing that. Tripping a generator that is supplying power into a grid with too much power (frequency too high) at least makes logical sense. Shutting down generators on a grid with too little power (too low frequency) makes no sense, unless the generator itself risks damage. Loads should be tripped offline when there's too little power, not generators.
by chii | 2025-04-29 11:01:58+00:00
> you end up causing more work down the line by saving a bit of time at an earlier stage

in this case, the total cost would've gone up, and thus, eventually the stakeholder (aka, the person who pays) is going to not want to pay when the "old" way was cheaper/faster/better.

> It would be better for everyone collectively to not automate certain things, but it's better for some individually, so it happens.

not really, as long as the precondition i mentioned above (the total cost dropping) is true.