MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jwineinger | 2025-04-29 14:31:16+00:00
I was thinking of something similar during pruning season for my apple trees a few months ago. I even went so far as to take a scan of one of my trees with Luma and had it generate a 3D render of it. This worked surprisingly well, though it did take several days to get it rendered as it seemed their service was saturated.

My need/idea was to post that some where (r/backyardorchard probably) to get help in determining which limbs to prune. However, there didn't seem to be an easy way to share that sort of thing and time was of the essence, so I just forged ahead on my own.
by colah3 | 2025-04-29 14:31:28+00:00
A few comments on this thread:

Gwern is correct in his prior quote of how long these articles took. I think 50-200 hours is a pretty good range.

I expect AI assistants could help quite a bit with implementing the interactive diagrams, which was a significant fraction of this time. This is especially true for authors without a background in web development.

However, a huge amount of the editorial time went into other things. This article was a best case scenario for an article not written by the editors themselves. Gabriel is phenomenal and was a delight to work with. The editors didn't write any code for this article that I remember. But we still spent many tens of hours giving feedback on the text and diagrams. You can see some of this in github - e.g. https://github.com/distillpub/post--momentum/issues?q=is%3Ai...

More broadly, we struggled a lot with procedural issues. (We wrote a bit about this here: https://distill.pub/2021/distill-hiatus/ ) In retrospect, I deeply regret trying to run Distill with the expectations of a scientific journal, rather than the freedom of a blog, or wish I'd pushed back more on process. Not only did it occupy enormous amounts of time and energy, but it was just very de-energizing. I wanted to spend my time writing great articles and helping people great articles.

(I was recently reading Thompson & Klein's Abundance, and kept thinking back to my experiences with Distill.)
by xienze | 2025-04-29 14:31:54+00:00
> I wonder if they keep this after Trump's gone, especially for countries whose tariffs were high before Trump. I as a customer would prefer they did.

They won't. It's clearly meant to target Trump specifically. It's not as though there were absolutely no tariffs of any kind on various products before this year, so ask yourself why they're so concerned about showing tariffs NOW and not say, any time in the past.
by dfxm12 | 2025-04-29 14:31:55+00:00
AI can't replace jobs or hurt wages. AI doesn't make these decisions & wages have been suppressed for a very long time, well before general AI adoption. Managers make these decisions. Don't blame AI if you get laid off or if your wages aren't even keeping up with inflation, let alone your productivity. Blame your manager.

Be wary of people trying to deflect the away from the managerial class for these issues.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-04-29 14:32:15+00:00
Both wind and solar have deployed faster than nuclear ever did globally.

And that's in Wh terms, you specify capacity but I guess you'd be annoyed if I replied that renewables beat that capacity easily, like China deploying 80GW of wind just last year.

Here's an article looking at per capita increases show that France and Sweden did really well but renewables are accelerating past their records:

https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/solar-wind-nuclear...

The growth of renewables in France (!) over the last five years matches the best periods of nuclear rollout in Japan and the USA.
by JohnFen | 2025-04-29 14:32:25+00:00
Translation for convenience (please reply to parent):

Studies indicate that it takes about 50 hours of coexistence to turn an acquaintance into a casual friend, about 90 hours to become real friends, and more than 200 hours to reach a level of close friendship. Those hours count when they involve meaningful conversations, shared experiences, and quality time—not just being in the same room. It makes me think about remote work environments or friendships started online: how does this "counting hours" transform in these contexts?
by johnbellone | 2025-04-29 14:32:35+00:00
Productivity enhancements are one thing, but the full elimination of junior development roles is completely different. The dynamics also change with the size and scale of the team and company (components, services, multiple customers, etc).

The role will change and individuals will become more productive. These tools are impressive and moving in the right direction to your prediction. But, personally, I think it is naive to think that the need for junior roles will be entirely eliminated in 5 years.
by steamrolled | 2025-04-29 14:33:16+00:00
> It can’t replace a human for support

But it is replacing it. There's a rapidly-growing number of large, publicly-traded companies that replaced first-line support with LLMs. When I did my taxes, "talk to a person" was replaced with "talk to a chatbot". Airlines use them, telcos use them, social media platforms use them.

I suspect what you're missing here is that LLMs here aren't replacing some Platonic ideal of CS. Even bad customer support is very expensive. Chatbots are still a lot cheaper than hundreds of outsourced call center people following a rigid script. And frankly, they probably make fewer mistakes.

> and it will blow up like NFTs

We're probably in a valuation bubble, but it's pretty unlikely that the correct price is zero.
by chollida1 | 2025-04-29 14:33:36+00:00
> Standard GDP might overstate. Maybe you need a 50% haircut on government spending in the calculation

Well you have to also see the counter point which is sometimes companies spend a $1B and go bankrupt like pets.com.

And sometimes the government spends money to backstop the financial system like in 2008 and literally save the entire US financial system and on top of that the government makes money off the bail out.

In this case the government spending was infinitely more valuable than the private spending.
by cogman10 | 2025-04-29 14:33:47+00:00
I think it's historic reasons.

KDE used to be the "bloated" desktop way back when (I know, pretty silly and laughable now given the current state of things).

That cemented Gnome/Mate into a lot of major distros as the primary DME. Ubuntu being the most famous.

The QT licensing situation is also a bit of a bizarre quagmire. There are certainly people that don't like KDE for more ideological reasons.

Personally, none of this bothers me and it's what I use for my personal computer. KDE is just so close to exactly how I'm used to interacting with computers anyways growing up through the Win95 era. It is so close to the Windows experience you want to have.
Writing Your Own Code Considered Harmful
by mayas_ | 2025-04-29 14:33:50+00:00
In modern, well-structured codebases with decent linting and tests, human-written code is often the weakest link.

Tools like Cursor, properly configured, consistently produce higher-quality code than humans—cleaner, faster, and bug-free. We’ve moved past the age of hero coders and into the era of high-leverage guidance.

The best engineers don’t write code—they steer it.

They shape context, define intent, and curate constraints.

Coding has become a meta-skill: less typing, more thinking.

Your job is to describe problems clearly, not solve them line by line.

Cursor doesn’t replace you—it promotes you.

Welcome to the age of the micro product manager.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-04-29 14:34:34+00:00
This article explains some issues with underground high tension cables [0]:

> Laying a 380-kV high-voltage line underground poses a number of risks. The electrical behaviour of underground cables differs from that of overhead high-voltage lines. This results in a loss of transmission capacity. To compensate for this loss, additional devices (e.g. coils) have to be installed at various points along the route.

> The combination of cables and coils creates resonance similar to a radio where multiple jammers continuously change frequency. Cables and coils can cause disruption locally, jeopardising the stability of the entire grid. In addition, it is easier for Elia to identify faults and carry out maintenance on overhead lines.

[0] https://www.elia.be/en/infrastructure-and-projects/infrastru...
by _aavaa_ | 2025-04-29 14:34:40+00:00
I don't agree with the distinction you're trying to make. Google also tries to customize your results for you, but does not offer you any control (don't know about ddg). I think of it as the same thing with Kagi, expect I have explicit input into the results.

Some of these changes are subjective. E.g. I have blocked all of Pinterest since it just clutters my results, but other people explicitly want Pinterest in their results. (not I don't know who would want the seo'd programming sites, but that's a different matter).
by ethbr1 | 2025-04-29 14:34:51+00:00
Most relevant in modern global economies: lack of available alternatives.

One of the primary reasons for combination in low-margin markets is to gain pricing power. And even if there are 2-5 entities in a given market, informal price collusion is far from unheard of.

If OP wants an intro to the determinants of price elasticity, starting here would be a good idea: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand
by krisoft | 2025-04-29 14:34:52+00:00
> Try to speak holistically.

That sounds very much like "Just believe me." or even more "The rules were that you guys weren’t gonna fact-check"

> I have no idea what you're trying to argue.

Presumably you know what you are trying to argue. That is what the questions were about.

> Proving the example is correct doesn't really get us anywhere

You would have solid foundations to build your premise from. That is what it would get us.

First we check the bricks (the individual facts), then we check if they were correctly built into a wall (do the arguments add up? are the conclusions supported by the reasoning and the facts?). And then we marvel at the beautiful edifice you have built from it (the premise). Going the other way around is ass-backwards.

> you're not really formulating any argument or contrary view yourself.

I don't know what viewpoint namaria has. I know that "Sparta and Athens [..] couldn't possibly have been further apart" is ahistorical. They were very similar in many regards. If you think they were that different you have watched too many modern retellings, instead of reading actual history books. That's my contrary view.

> For instance Chimps have intricate little societies that at their peak have reached upwards of 200 chimps.

Here the question is what do we believe to be "societies". The researchers indeed documented hundreds of chimps visiting the same human made feeding station. Is that a society now? I don't think so, but maybe you think otherwise. What makes the Chimps' behaviour a society as opposed to just a bunch of chimps at the same place?
by cryptonym | 2025-04-29 14:35:03+00:00
My first job was exactly that, selling windows app in Delphi. I joined the new team working on .net windows apps and we had an army of people clicking on UI all day long. They maintained their "test plan" on a custom software where they could report failures.

TBH, that was well done for what it was but really called for automation and lacked unit-testing.
by RajT88 | 2025-04-29 14:35:31+00:00
Not always. It's up to their installer. And the installer doesn't have to ask (it can just do it).

The situation is better these days, with windows store apps. Still, I developed the habit of just never using the desktop in the XP days when things were really bad.

There was a war over your eyeballs, which had shady software vendors warring over desktop space, start menu space, taskbar space, even fucking file associations. I recall for a little RealPlayer and Windows Media Player used to yank back and forth file associations each time they ran, even if you tried to make them stop.
by akshaybhalotia | 2025-04-29 14:35:37+00:00
I humbly disagree. I've seen team members and sometimes entire teams being laid off because of AI. It's also not just layoffs, the hiring processes and demand have been affected as well.

As an example, many companies have recently shifted their support to "AI first" models. As a result, even if the team or certain team members haven't been fired, the general trend of hiring for support is pretty much down (anecdotal).

I agree that some automation is better for the humans to do their jobs better, but this isn't one of those. When you're looking for support, something has clearly went wrong. Speaking or typing to an AI which responds with random unrelated articles or "sorry I didn't quite get that" is just evading responsibility in the name of "progress", "development", "modernization", "futuristic", "technology", <insert term of choice>, etc.
by CobaltFire | 2025-04-29 14:35:38+00:00
Interestingly I’ve seen the exact opposite happen and cause major problems.

In Japan the US Military buys fuel and sets the price at its on base stations according to what they purchase it for. On several occasions when I lived there this resulted in the Base CO having to address everyone and tell them if they don’t buy the fuel (that is now significantly cheaper outside the gate) then the Exchange cannot buy new fuel, and they may have to shut the station down permanently.

It never came to that; everyone just went and paid the higher price for a tank and the issue was resolved.

My point is that trying to price a commodity that moves prices like that by a lagging indicator is a great way to capture business on one side and a great way to go bankrupt on the other.
by cbsmith | 2025-04-29 14:35:39+00:00
> This is rates at DCFC. You're paying for far more than just the price of electricity. Those chargers and dispensers aren't free, they're often empty, they need to recoup costs in a few year horizon.

I'm very aware you pay a premium for DCFC. Presumably Texas' regulatory structure would help with all of that.

> Charging at home it costs me about $0.135/kWh.

So you're paying more than I pay to charge at home with my municipally owned and operated power company in California.
by klaussilveira | 2025-04-29 14:35:57+00:00
Oh, sorry about that! This is D3 with shadow mapping:

https://i.imgur.com/TvnFuDG.jpeg

You can only notice it is not stencil when you get up close:

https://i.imgur.com/WtWojG2.jpeg

https://i.imgur.com/4dniMOT.jpeg

In Carmack's experimental renderer, peter panning was quite high:

https://i.imgur.com/u2ZZJTR.jpeg

This is my version with tweaks and poisson sampling:

https://i.imgur.com/nPI6H5a.jpeg
by bwfan123 | 2025-04-29 14:36:18+00:00
LLMs have mesmerized us, because, they are able to communicate meaning to us.

Fundamentally, we (the recipient of llm output) are generating the meaning from the words given. ie, llms are great when the recipient of their output is a human.

But, when their recipient is a machine, the model breaks down, because, machine to machine requires deterministic interactions. this is the weakness I see - regardless of all the hype about llm agents. fundamentally, the llms are not deterministic machines.

LLMs lack a fundamental human capability of deterministic symbolization - which is to create NEW symbols with associated rules which can deterministically model worlds we interact with. They have a long way to go on this.
by bee_rider | 2025-04-29 14:36:28+00:00
They could compare against the baseline, I guess.

In the grand scheme of things, $8k is not much money for a business, right? Like we can be pretty sure nobody at Google said “a-ha, if we don’t notify the users, we will be able sneak $8k out of their wallets at a time.” I think it is more likely that they don’t really care that much about this market, other than generally creating an environment where their products are well known.
by M3L0NM4N | 2025-04-29 14:36:47+00:00
As one of Elon's ex-fan's (or at least had a generally positive opinion of him) like I suspect many of us here once were, it is astonishing how consistently wrong and ignorant he has been, and it has gotten worse year over year. I think there is a legitimate possibility he fried/is frying his brain on Ketamine.
by jfengel | 2025-04-29 14:36:59+00:00
That would certainly be remarkable.

We don't know much about Anne, but what we do know suggests that they didn't much like each other. Their daughter was born only a few months after their wedding; it's pretty clear that this was a forced marriage. Shakespeare published a book of sonnets, many of them about love, and none of them about her.

We know a fair bit about Shakespeare's life in London, and pretty much nothing about his life at home. The whole "second best bed" thing is weird (as much as historians try to put a positive spin on it).

None of this directly influences my work as an actor and director. The plays are the text, as it comes to me, and I practically never look at the author himself to find the connections between that text and the audience I'm performing for.

Still... I suppose I always have that in the back of my mind, somewhere. Thinking about the author a little differently (even if only as a hypothetical) surely influences me. If nothing else, Shakespeare's relationships with women are, uh, fraught. Sometimes he seems really cynical and misogynist. Sometimes, he's writing great female characters and giving them real agency.

As I said, it's up to me to see the words and figure out what effect they'll have in performance. But it will probably end up influencing my options nonetheless.
by ave_b_2011 | 2025-04-29 14:37:14+00:00
Productivity in what sense? Education is literally a long term investment. As you stated, a local school district which may mean Pre-K through 12th grade (in the US) means that the children won’t be participating “productively” in the economy for potentially decades.

I cannot even fathom how hard the economy would crash if large swaths of the workforce were illiterate.
by xienze | 2025-04-29 14:37:20+00:00
But do they have the same kind of state and local sales tax rules that we do? Again, _you can't know the price to display if you don't know where exactly in the country the package is going_. It is not possible to display the "final price" in US online stores ahead of checkout unless the user is already logged in AND the shipping address is the same as where the user lives.

The juice is not worth the squeeze for online retailers. Users are used to seeing the final amount at checkout and you know, it's really not that hard to mentally estimate <price of thing I'm buying plus 10%> (which is actually usually an overestimate).
by UncleMeat | 2025-04-29 14:37:25+00:00
If you want to start arguing about a more abstract worth of that $1 then you should do it for everything, and then you are certainly doomed.

Is a gazillion dollars spent on an NFT "productive" in the way that spending money on building a house is productive? What multiple should you be using. Is a dollar spent on medical treatment for somebody on medicaid worth less than a dollar somebody spends on some fireworks to blow up on the 4th? These calculations become impossible.

"I dunno, I bet government spending is only worth half of what they pay so I'll just pick 50%" is not a reasonable approach here.
by sjsdaiuasgdia | 2025-04-29 14:37:28+00:00
Yeah, about that...

https://www.fmi.org/our-research/food-industry-facts/grocery...

Interesting how grocery profits went higher than the prior 30 year trend when covid supply chain impacts happened, and have continued to stay on a higher trend in the high inflation years following covid.

Yes, the retailers are greedy and increasing prices beyond inflation, and they're quite successful at it.
by ty6853 | 2025-04-29 14:37:35+00:00
As far as I know US prices are the lowest ones available to Africans for satellite internet. Is it cheaper to launch in Africa?

If you think it's cheaper to launch rockets and use engineers in Sudan or something you have outsmarted Bezos. He is such a greedy bastard, I have 0 doubt whatsoever that if it were possible and cheaper he would do it instead.

Even though this may seem backwards, it is buy low sell high. They are getting engineering and telecom services far cheaper than they can provide in their own country, and the cost to provide terrestrial in their own (OP's stated alternative) would be phenomenal.
by fuoqi | 2025-04-29 14:38:48+00:00
While I can't say that Musk is right, I also can't say he is completely wrong here.

The private sector can also spend on dumb and inefficient things and we are fine in counting it in the GDP metric, the difference between private sector and the government is the source of revenue. The private sector has to produce something for the economy before spending (it may be done indirectly through debt, but it's not important here), while the latter forces the economy to share it's productive capacity (using violence if necessary) while not producing anything itself (well, technically it does, but it's usually a tiny amount of the total revenue). It's still fine, since it's just a form of re-distribution from one private entities to others. It can be grossly inefficient, but so can be the private spending.

The problem is when a significant portion of the government revenue is fueled by debt which can not be paid by the future economy growth. The government quickly engineers negative real interest rates either by forcing commercial banks and pension funds to buy it with regulations, or by outright money printing, which is easy to do in a fiat system. Such debt-fueled GDP growth is not a sign of strength, but instead a sign of weakness, and ideally it should be heavily discounted.
by _fat_santa | 2025-04-29 14:38:52+00:00
I used Duolingo for about a year to learn Portuguese but I recently switched to just taking a course I bought on Udemy.

First let me say that Duolingo is great for learning vocabulary but unfortunately that's it's only strength. The problem I realized after starting the Udemy course is that Duolingo teaches you the words but they seldom teach sentence structure or the "glue" between all those words you learn. So you get to a place where you know a ton of words but can't hold a conversation because you don't know how to form sentences.

With that said I would still recommend Duolingo strictly for their vocabulary. I would suggest a course to supplement learning though, not to mention it's much cheaper, the entire course cost me less than a month of Duolingo Super.
by coldpie | 2025-04-29 14:38:58+00:00
I use the EasyList ones, though I don't have any particular reason for that other than it is also the default "Ads" list chosen upon installation.

> Also, how's that compare to Consent-O-Matic in terms of effectiveness,safety (i.e. that it doesn't mangle the wrong thing on the site) and performance?

Dunno. I've never had any problems with it. All it does is hide the cookie banner DOM elements.
by kmeisthax | 2025-04-29 14:39:19+00:00
> Why didn't Amazon do this when the Biden administration hiked inflation to the highest level in 40 years?

Because the inflation under Biden was itself an accident. Trump is doing this on purpose.

Furthermore, if you buy the idea that the inflation was caused solely by handing out stimulus checks during a pandemic, then it's at least partially Trump's fault, too. Remember that Trump's the one who pushed for all this stimulus, because he was worried about his re-election prospects in 2020.

If you want a real criticism of this policy, it's that Bezos was spending $$$ to be at the Trump inauguration just a few months ago. Big Tech put their muscle behind Trump despite being the industry most reliant on foreign immigration and trade - the things Trump desperately wants to shut down. They did this because they're so shit scared of antitrust legislation that they're willing to break up America before America can break up them.

Of course, it turns out Amazon needs a host country to survive after all, and Bezos didn't realize this. So instead of owning a broken-up business empire he's going to own no empire at all. Welcome to the bust-out.