MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rdtsc | 2025-04-29 14:45:10+00:00
> The best solution is not to slow the rollout of renewables but to accelerate the rollout of battery storage.

I agree as well. And I think the gp (or the ggp?) post noticed that there is a lack of "spinning mass" to do frequency damping would have agreed as well. They could be merely suggesting to add just spinning mass synchronizers. These could be independent units, doing just that or maybe even convert some old power plants: "just" decouple the turbine from the generator.
by pjc50 | 2025-04-29 14:45:10+00:00
> we have, fundamentally and quite deliberately, become worse at generating [nuclear] energy

Yes. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...

Nuclear has a negative learning curve: it gets more expensive over time. Solar gets (spectacularly) cheaper over time. You might not like it but that's what the built infrastructure and its invoices tell us.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-29 14:45:25+00:00
> take it under the table

Yes, well, I choose not to participate in shady shit like that. Is that OK that I prefer to make transactions as laid out by their employer and not every random guy?

> happy to help them out with a smile

So you choose to be knowingly complicit in tax-avoidance schemes. That's fine; you do you, but some of us steer clear of shady shit, just on principle, you know? Perhaps the company deserves their cut as well -- they get paid so little already, amirite?

Also if there was nothing unusual about their choice of payment, then why must they regale me with these shitty sob stories? Am I supposed to be moved to tears at their hardship and heroism at making it to my door, that I must promptly cover their expenses? They are not panhandlers, they are service providers.

No, I ordered a service and I pay for the value of the service, according to the Company's rates. The cab company was clear about it: either I pay how I want to or I don't owe them. Nobody's arresting me for refusing to fork over cash. That's a scam.

That's not the only time I was cash-scammed by a cab driver. They will pull every trick in the book, and surely they compare and trade notes on their marks.

It gets even worse: my simple insistence on transacting with the cab company earned me fake receipts. Yes, they faked every receipt that they sent me in email. The totals were all fudged down to be much smaller than what I paid, including a $0 tip. It was very very obvious, especially when the rides booked in the app were generating duplicates showing different calculations. I reported it twice to their backend developers and they said that there were some coding errors in device drivers; please stand by for a fix. LOL!

That's a scam to ensure that taxpayers can't get reimbursed for out-of-pocket medical expenses. Most/all cab companies provide NEMT services as well, and they can't stand when people go outside of insurance companies. So they falsified my receipts.

And again, that's why I trust Waymo.
by 9rx | 2025-04-29 14:45:31+00:00
> His expertise is in lying, pompousness, fraud, and exemplifying the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Yeah, but that is precisely why he is asked such questions. He gives a more engaging to the Average Joe response than an expert does. It doesn't matter if the response is out to lunch.

The question you responded to was trying to figure out where his expertise didn't overlap with the intent of the people questioning him.
Show HN: I built an app to automate launching SaaS apps with AI
by virgildotcodes | 2025-04-29 14:45:59+00:00
Hey guys, so the goal with this project was to see how much of the process of launching new SaaS apps could be automated with AI.

The idealized vision of this would be something that can discover new business opportunities, you pick one you like, it does the market research to figure out if there are already competitors in the space, how to improve on their offerings, if there's any demand for this, suggested pricing, and then it helps you launch an MVP. The goal would be to some day be able to click an idea you like, make a couple decisions, and have an MVP launched for you within a couple hours.

What I've got right now is something that does the following:

- It scrapes a handful of social media feeds every few hours, including HN, Reddit, and X, (more to come soon) looking for inspiration for new business ideas.

- It sends these ideas through a quick validation step, attempting to gauge their viability across a handful of metrics.

- If you like an idea, you can submit it for a Deep Dive analysis, which attempts to get a sense of the market around this idea. It’s looking for competitors, scraping their sites to find their feature sets and pricing, looking for user discussions of these products to gauge sentiment towards these competitors and look to identify strengths, weaknesses, gaps in the market, potential opportunities, etc. The point is to generate a report that can give you a sense of what the landscape is like and whether it’s something you want to pursue.

- If so, you can move to launch prep, which will help you with the basics like come up with a name for your product, find available domains, refine your product’s pitch and MVP feature set. Then, it will generate a detailed implementation plan for your MVP on the tech stack you choose, which gives you exportable markdown or pdf files that you can feed into something like Cursor to produce the actual MVP.

- Finally, it generates a social media launch plan, suggesting a dozen or so places to announce your launch, alongside a suggested posting schedule and copy to get you started.

I just launched this a couple days ago, and went live on Product Hunt today - https://www.producthunt.com/posts/saas-brainstorm

Right now you can make a free account and get unlimited access to the idea stream, the rest of the features require payment as they’re pretty expensive for me to provide.

This is the second SaaS I’ve ever tried to launch, with my first being an AI headshot generator about 2 years late to the party, which might give you a sense of why I felt a need to develop a product to give me better ideas in the first place.

You can access it here - https://saasbrainstorm.com

Thanks for reading, looking forward to any feedback and happy to answer any questions!
Show HN: Realistic Synthetic Conversations for Testing LLMs
by otterk10 | 2025-04-29 14:46:50+00:00
Testing multi-turn conversational AI is tough, especially when you lack large volumes of real user data. Existing synthetic data tools often generate conversations that lack diversity and are not statistically representative, leading models to overfit synthetic patterns.

To help with this problem, I'm open-sourcing a synthetic conversation generation library. This library generates more realistic multi-conversations than other synthetic data libraries by using the following techniques:

1. Decoupling Persona & Conversation Generation: This library first create diverse user personas, ensuring each new persona differs from the last. This builds a wide range of user types before generating conversations, tackling bias and improving coverage. 2. Modeling Realistic Stopping Points: Instead of arbitrary turn limits, the library dynamically assesses if the user's goal is met or if they're frustrated, ending conversations naturally like real users would.

You can generate user personas tailored to your AI's specs and then simulate user messages using those personas. The library calls your AI endpoint (via a configurable HTTP definition) for responses during the simulation.

I built this because I needed a better way to test conversational agents for my clients, and found existing tools lacking in generating high-fidelity dialogues. Would love to hear your feedback and any suggestions!
by mdaniel | 2025-04-29 14:47:16+00:00
Thankfully because it loads so much JS I was able to click before it navigated back to the homepage. These are the two examples they link to:

https://app.getflowcode.io/playground/cc12cce1-265f-4c2a-b17...

https://app.getflowcode.io/playground/cc52f949-ec8d-408a-b54...
by mitch292 | 2025-04-29 14:47:21+00:00
Definitely agree, not a fan of the permissions.

The broad permissions were required from a usability standpoint. Granting permission on every site for this extension would just be a 1 to 1 replacement of clicking reject on the banner or pop up for every site.

I would hope that before Chrome approves an extension to be added to the store that they are auditing the content of package.
by mark_mcnally_je | 2025-04-29 14:47:25+00:00
I'm working on Monitor Monkey[1]

It's attempting to be the easiest and nicest way to monitor Linux servers. I'm currently implementing 0 config custom alerting. All you will have to do is write a file to a home directory with some json in it e.g event_name:blah,interval:1m,data=10 - no server side config at all!

So should be quite suitable for big deployments :)

[1]: https://monitormonkey.io
by thesuperbigfrog | 2025-04-29 14:48:14+00:00
>> In modern, well-structured codebases with decent linting and tests, human-written code is often the weakest link.

I call BS.

If a human has never written the code, how will AI generate it?

If a human does not know how to verify that code works correctly, how can the code (regardless of who writes it) be verified?

Do you trust AI to write the code that controls the airplane you fly in?

Would you trust your life (literally) to AI-generated code?
by phkahler | 2025-04-29 14:48:19+00:00
>> Let’s be honest this is the kind of thing that can happen to anyone.

I didn't say I'm immune to doing this myself, nor did I condemn anything about the particular scenario in the blog. My pain is in trying to articulate why some ways are better when any code that works is in some sense just fine.

>> We all like to think we have picked up habits that immunize us from certain kinds of error but large software systems are complex and bugs happen.

We sure do, although "immunize" is too strong. We try to minimize the likelyhood of these kinds of things. Experience is valuable and sometimes it's hard to articulate why.
by K0balt | 2025-04-29 14:48:25+00:00
For those rare companies that are trying to create a market out of nothing for a truly innovative product where there are no competitors or self identified customers, I can sympathize with the hollow allure of firehose marketing - but not only is this kind of startup vanishingly rare (and extremely risky), it’s also the wrong approach even for them.

If you are trying to build stairs into thin air, you need to have a constantly evolving “customer hypothesis” until you can nail down who your customer is. The only way to do that is with founder-led personal marketing, preferably F2F and on-premises. You must meet your customers at the place and time of need. If you are truly solving an unsolved problem, literally no one will know how to solve that problem with your product except you, or maybe even why the problem needs to be solved.

This is more market research than business development.

Depending on your market, moat, and vertical alignment with your customers, it -may- also be important to build brand awareness or “buzz” aside from customer contact, and this often will be non-personalized. For this, as well, firehose approaches like email are ineffective or even counterproductive. Keep in mind, this is marketing adjacent PR, not marketing. Don’t get carried away.

If you just need validation to feel “real”, stick to cheap office swag. It makes great memorabilia for the inevitable swag graveyard that successful founders usually create on their way to becoming successful founders. It also helps to combat hubris if you keep the graveyard on subtle display in your office.
by guerby | 2025-04-29 14:48:53+00:00
"With inverter-based power storage, generation, and transmission, the grid can now react incredibly quickly. This is good when they do the right thing, but can be very bad when they do the wrong thing."

I'm wondering if this will be like the 2016 South Australian blackout

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_South_Australian_blackout

"AEMO identified software settings in the wind farms that prevented repeated restarts once voltage or frequency events occurred too often. "

Grid operators are currently mostly against renewable and so they impose "blunt" disconnect rules on inverters behind renewable sources, and this comes to bite the grid when the proverbial shit hits the fan.

May be in the end this will be a good thing and grid operators will start to treat inverters and renewable as a strength and modify grid regulations as needed.
by belter | 2025-04-29 14:49:28+00:00
Reactance is such a beautiful French word...It just reminds you of some frustrated romantic attempts in a Paris scenario. :-)

But your electrical supplier will charge you for it. Had a electrical power teacher with a past employment at a power supplier, who sadly loved to brag how he used to terrorize small farms when their own power generators had a cos φ below 0.98. I think the rule for Portugal is cos φ above 0.97 and for Spain 0.95 also known as el coseno de phi...

"Cos-phi compensation" - https://fortop.co.uk/knowledge/white-papers/cos-phi-compensa...
by bunderbunder | 2025-04-29 14:50:00+00:00
Not a game dev, but based on what I do know of it, some of this sounds to me like it's just a severe mismatch between Rust's memory model and the needs of games.

Individually managing the lifetime of every single item you allocate on the heap and fine-grained tracking of ownership of everything on both the heap and the stack makes a lot of sense to me for more typical "line of business" tools that have kind of random and unpredictable workloads that may or may not involve generating arbitrarily complex reference graphs.

But everything I've seen & read of best practices for game development, going all the way back to when I kept a heavily dogeared copy of Michael Abrash's Black Book close at hand while I made games for fun back in the days when you basically had to write your own 3D engine, tells me that's not what a game engine wants. What a game engine wants, if anything, is something more like an arena allocator. Because fine-grained per-item lifetime management is not where you want to be spending your innovation tokens when the reality is that you're juggling 500 megabyte lumps of data that all have functionally the same lifetime.
by rekenaut | 2025-04-29 14:50:42+00:00
Space junk is real but much less of an issue at the low altitudes at which these newer constellations usually operate (very low in low Earth orbit). Without expending propellant to boost orbits, atmospheric drag causes them to naturally deorbit in months or a few years at most. Space junk and orbital debris are much bigger issues for higher altitudes where atmospheric drag is much weaker, but none of these satellites are that high.
by throwaway743 | 2025-04-29 14:50:45+00:00
My favorite test is "Build an MTG Arena Deck in historic format around <strategy_and_or_cards> in <these_colors>. It must be exactly 60 cards and all cards must be from Arena only. Search all sets/cards currently availble on Arena, new and old".

Many times they’ll include cards that are only available in paper and/or go over the limit, and when asked to correct a mistake they'll continue to make mistakes. But recently I found that Claude is pretty damn good now at fixing its mistakes and building/optimizing decks for Arena. Asked it to make a deck based on insights it gained from my current decklist, and what it came up with was interesting and pretty fun to play.
by colinmorelli | 2025-04-29 14:51:08+00:00
> "Hallucination" implies that the LLM holds some relationship to truth. Output from an LLM is not a hallucination, it's bullshit[0].

I understand your perspective, but the intention was to use a term we've all heard to reflect the thing we're all thinking about. Whether or not this is the right term to use for scenarios where the LLM emits incorrect information is not relevant to this post in particular.

> No we don't. It's really complicated. That's why diets are popular and real dietitians are expensive.

No, this is not why real dietitians are expensive. Real dietitians are expensive because they go through extensive training on a topic and are a licensed (and thus supply constrained) group. That doesn't mean they're operating without a grounding fact base.

Dietitians are not making up nutritional evidence and guidance as they go. They're operating on studies that have been done over decades of time and millions of people to understand in general what foods are linked to what outcomes. Yes, the field evolves. Yes, it requires changes over time. But to suggest we "don't know" is inconsistent with the fact that we're able to teach dietitians how to construct diets in the first place.

There are absolutely cases in which the confounding factors for a patient are unique enough such that novel human thought will be required to construct a reasonable diet plan or treatment pathway for someone. That will continue to be true in law, health, finances, etc. But there are also many, many cases where that is absolutely not the case, the presentation of the case is quite simple, and the next step actions are highly procedural.

This is not the same as saying dietitians are useless, or physicians are useless, or attorneys are useless. It is to say that, due to the supply constraints of these professions, there are always going to be fundamental limits to the amount they can produce. But there is a credible argument to be made that if we can bolster their ability to deliver the common scenarios much more effectively, we might be able to unlock some of the capacity to reach more people.
by davidvgilmore | 2025-04-29 14:51:10+00:00
thanks - great feedback

on (1) re: multi tasking ... that's a known UX limitation. You can "command+click" the logo in the top left to open a new window, then just keep the convos open. That's the way to multi-task with it today. We definitely want to clean this up in a future version.

(2) noted - yeah, a global git diff is a good feature request

on (3) in the settings (wrench icon) there's a toggle for "Manual" code execution. To be clear - you also want to be able to approve file edits, not just command execution?

(4) doh - that's a good point

(5) we actually run a shadow git repo that commits on every turn the agent takes. It's aware of your .gitignore too. We only expose checkpoints on user messages right now, but we're planning on doing more on this front.
by bionhoward | 2025-04-29 14:51:28+00:00
Damn this looks cool but it’s got a customer noncompete, “you will not (and will not enable others to) use the AI Features: (e) for the development of any service or other offering that competes with or replicates the Services.”

That’s real bad since they also write “ Memex may generate aggregate, deidentified data from your use of the Services and Subscriber Data ("Usage Data") and use it to operate, improve and support the Services”

AKA “we can learn from your codebase and you aren’t allowed to compete with us”

Basically, it’s a brain-rape machine for idiots who don’t read the fine print. Sad
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-04-29 14:51:29+00:00
"I'm generally an AI skeptic, but it seems awfully early to make this call."

What call. Maybe some readers miss the (perhaps subtle) difference between "Generative AI is not ..." and "Generative Ai is not going to ..."

Then first can be based on fact, e.g., what has happened so far. The second is based on pure speculation. No one knows what will happen in the future. HN is continually being flooded with speculation, marketing, hype.

In contrast, this article, i.e., the paper it discusses, is is based on what has happened so far. There is no "call" being made. Only an examination of what has heppened so far. Facts not opinions.
by abirch | 2025-04-29 14:51:30+00:00
Yes, Amazon is denying it though it would make sense.

“The team that runs our ultra low cost Amazon Haul store has considered the idea of listing import charges on certain products,” the company said in a statement. “Teams discuss ideas all the time. This was never a consideration for the main Amazon site and nothing has been implemented on any Amazon properties.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-29/white-hou...
by Vox_Leone | 2025-04-29 14:51:57+00:00
>>Can this be mitigated by putting the cables under ground?

Yes, it can (apparently), since these are mostly indirect effects of atmospheric vibrations (aka 'wind'). The vibration itself isn't usually the root cause of a blackout — but it sets off a chain reaction that leads to one (line contact/short circuit; conductor breakage; overcurrent & load shedding; protection system malfunction or overreaction, etc.)
by tarentel | 2025-04-29 14:52:00+00:00
I'm an ok French speaker, technically my second language although I "learned" Spanish in high school. At some point in a conversation people will realize I am not a native speaker but I can get by. I used a variety of things, including Duolingo for a while and Babbel for a bit, both of which I started on. Based on my experience, neither will get you very far for speaking. You'd be better off getting a real teacher or taking a class.
by addoo | 2025-04-29 14:52:24+00:00
> Humans

Please describe in more specific terms. Are we talking non-technical, intern, junior, or senior experienced humans?

Literally just yesterday I was diverted to help someone who is a senior developer, but a novice in Python itself, figure out why code that AI helped them write was completely busted. They were extra perplexed because most of the code was identical to a block of logic we use today (and works), but in this new context didn’t work at all. Turns out whatever the AI did, it didn’t have a concept of method overloads, so the types being passed around were suddenly wrong.

AI works well for people who know nothing (it can do things for them that work well enough), or people who know ‘everything’ (it can get them 95% of the way, they can use their experience to find and fill the remaining 5%). It’s absolutely terrible for people with middling experience.
by alkonaut | 2025-04-29 14:52:26+00:00
There are numerous examples of people who appear to be intelligent, witty. Maybe they hid their darker sides (be it some authoritarian, populist, racist or otherwise objectively bad tendency). But they did hide them. But then something seems to change and they quite quickly descend into being very unlikeable. And it's not just always "ideas". It seems to permeate their entire being. The transformation includes going from being "likeable" in a broad sense, to very abrasive personalities even when you factor out their views. It's really scary and depressing. We only notice this in some really high profile cases (Musk, Notch, a few politicians...), but I'm sure there are thousands of less visible people who have done this transformation without anyone noticing but their close friends and family. While I might sound like RFK Jr: I'd really like for someone to go to the bottom of what causes it.