MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by caseyy | 2025-04-08 17:23:16+00:00
It's hopeful because AI has not devalued creative human labor but increased its worth. Similar to how if one were a skilled chef, they didn't start working for McDonald's when it came to be, but for a restaurant that pays significantly above McDonald's.

Most people's purchasing power being reduced is a separate matter, more related to the eroding middle class and greedflation. Many things can be said about it, but they are less related to the trend I highlighted. Even if, supposing the middle class erosion continues, the scenario you suggest may very well play out.
by astrobe_ | 2025-04-08 17:23:22+00:00
Or perhaps the solution that evolution selected to solve other problems (microsaccades? [1]) also solved this blind spot problem.

> Birds, on the other hand, have a disting evolutionary advantage in making their brains as small and light as possible.

I'm not sure about that. Not all birds are as clever as crows. Who knows if a few less grams of neurons is worth the "IQ" loss, and conversely who knows if a few more grams of neurons makes a difference in terms of survival? Not to mention that these animals must also have vestigial or ridiculously expensive organs or functions (e.g. peacock's feather), so maybe they are not so sensitive to weight or energy consumption. It is difficult to measure.

I've long been puzzled by the fact that if intelligence was such a big advantage - almost like cheating in our case - why is it not common? Well, for one thing we wouldn't have struggled a lot more to get to the top of the food chain. But Evolution is the process of adapting to an environment, and sometimes it selects what is "good enough". In a way flies are far more successful than us, because there are millions of flies for each one of us, and they are more likely to survive a planet-scale catastrophic event. Sometimes brute-force reproduction works better than more neurons.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsaccade
by apitman | 2025-04-08 17:23:31+00:00
Even if it could mean Tailscale enshittifies eventually, this is probably a good thing for the ecosystem. As one example, the bigger they get, the more likely operating systems will build better APIs to support what they do (for example maybe Apple will provide a way to do mDNS over Tailscale), and those APIs can be used by all.

There are plenty of open source alternatives cropping up[0]. I'm curious to see what Tailscale can do with a lot of resources.

[0]: https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling?tab=readme...
by btilly | 2025-04-08 17:23:46+00:00
I wonder how the compute power of a current high end smart phone compares with and IBM 360? I know the graphics chip is better.

A current high end smartphone has around 10 billion transistors.

From https://gunkies.org/wiki/IBM_System/360, IBM made 11-12 million SLT modules per year in the late 1960s, with less before that. Each individual SLT module contained a handful of transistors. Therefore, in transistor count alone, a single smartphone has more transistors than IBM produced through the 1960s. And this is before we consider the fact that clock speeds today are much higher than they were in the 1960s.

Your smartphone literally has enough hardware to outcompute the entire world circa 1970.

Isn't it amazing what over 50 years of Moore's Law can do?
by oersted | 2025-04-08 17:24:22+00:00
I particularly appreciated the concise and plain explanation of the data-structure, it really demystifies it.

> HNSW is a graph structure that consists of levels that are more sparsely populated at the top and more densely populated at the bottom. Nodes within a layer have connections to other nodes that are near them on the same level. When a node is inserted a random level is picked and the node is inserted there. It is also inserted into all levels beneath that level down to 0.

> When searches arrive they start at the top and search that level (following connections) until they find the closest node in the top level. The search then descends and keeps searching nearby nodes. As the search progresses the code keeps track of the K nearest nodes it has seen. Eventually it either finds the value OR it finds the closest value on level 0 and the K nearest nodes seen are returned.
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-04-08 17:24:23+00:00
The mention of nuclear in the article was weird:

> But [solar at 7%] remains eclipsed by wind, which grew to 8% last year, and nuclear to 9%.

Which is a bit mangled but seems to be suggesting nuclear grew to 9%.

Nuclear did grow slightly in absolute terms, but in percentage terms it hit a 45 year low as the total grew faster and so the share shrunk.
by latexr | 2025-04-08 17:24:37+00:00
Text is short and clear enough that it warrants a full read, but for those who visit the comments first:

> If you look at a piece of plastic through a powerful microscope, you'll see alternating layers of hard material and soft material. […]

> [The researchers] discovered that the process [of forming microplastics] begins in the soft layers, which grow weaker over time due to environmental degradation and can break off even when the plastic is not under stress. By themselves, these soft pieces break down quickly in the environment. Problems arise when the failure of a soft layer allows hard layers to break off.
by geekodour | 2025-04-08 17:24:59+00:00
This paper, and solutions such as sqlcoder, and https://doris.apache.org/zh-CN/blog/Tencent-LLM etc. Which let you query DB via natural language etc.

But recently there has been a surge around MCPs being able to query databases provided the n-number of MCP servers popping up. An example: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTCoding/comments/1jd9lfa/lear...

So I was wondering of things like the Doris blogpost, this paper and sqlcoder are still relevant/what extra does this approach offer vs trying to build a over mcp?
by mycall | 2025-04-08 17:25:27+00:00
> I am finding myself surprised at how little use I have for this stuff

I think this will change as more practical use cases begin to emerge as this is all brand new. For example, the photos you take with your smartphone can tell a story or be annotated so you can see things in the photos you didn't think about but your profile thinks you might. Things will get more sophisticated soon.
by tudorgirba | 2025-04-08 17:25:35+00:00
I definitely do not want people to marry to tools. That does not sound like a good idea not even if the tool is glamorous :).

More seriously, thank you for sparring with me.

GT is free and open-source. It's extensive. It comes with documentation, too. We even document the practices and the process, too. With public case studies. With peered reviewed publications. And we even bet our own livelihood that it works for tackling hard problems in significant systems that others cannot tackle.

So, yes, we are not just claiming that the problem exists. We have seen it validated first-hand over a large period of time (15+ years) so we are reporting on it :).

This experience points to the idea that decreasing the cost of creating a tool is much more important than the tools that exist out of the box.

Regarding the support for other languages, it's true that we only have analysis support for a couple of dozen languages. But creating the support for a new one is often measured in days. For example, it took a couple of weeks to add COBOL to the set. I challenge you to find even one properly working open-source parser (we looked and could not really found one). In GT you can find a whole free and open-source infrastructure :).

GT is certainly not a panacea. It's a documentation of how the approach can work. I am not aware of any other environment in which tools can be built in minutes and in which thousands of them practically co-exists. If this appeals to people, and it does appeal to some, now they have a vehicle to practice with. And for those that choose to not do that, that's Ok as well :).
by Aurornis | 2025-04-08 17:25:40+00:00
Because it's a nonsensical reduction and false equivalence.

It's like if you saw a headline that some grocery stores were price fixing, so you decide it's only fair if you steal from your local grocery store. One bad behavior does not justify another in a different context. Both are wrong. It's also nonsensical to try to punish your local grocery store for perceived wrongs of other grocery stores.

That's why it's such a ridiculous claim: Two wrongs don't make a right and you don't even know if the people you're interviewing with are the same as the people doing the thing you don't like.
by amrocha | 2025-04-08 17:25:58+00:00
This feels like such a narrow view of the world. Not necessarily discriminatory, but on the path to get there.

So what if a candidate wants to look good? How you feel about your looks affects your confidence, and you want to be confident in an interview.

And like, if a candidate came in with a well groomed beard would you think “he probably spends too much time on his beard, he must be a bad programmer”? I bet you don’t.

I’m not trying to criticize you too much, but this just feels antithetical to everything that tech stands for. You get judged on your merits, not on anything else. This way of thinking is how you create an environment hostile to women and minorities.

Our industry in north america is known for lots its egotistical slobs, but I thought that was changing.
by yodsanklai | 2025-04-08 17:26:01+00:00
TBH I'm very surprised Yann Le Cun is still there. He looks to me like a free thinker and an independent person. I don't think he buys into the Trump agenda and US nationalistic anti-Europe speech like Zuck does. He may be giving Zuck the benefit of the doubt, and probably is grateful that Zuck gave him a chance when nobody else did.
by nullpoint420 | 2025-04-08 17:27:27+00:00
I've pretty much resigned myself to only use LLMs as a glorified search and summarization engine when doing research. Which they are excellent at in my opinion.

However, any non-trivial coding problem I've tried always ends in disaster. I can imagine if I was working in a strongly typed language or pushing protobufs between microservices they would fare better.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-08 17:27:43+00:00
~50GW was imported with the expectation of tariffs [1]. That is a bit under 1 year of US deployment reserve.

Solar is about to get hit with tariffs, but stockpiles give buyers opportunities - https://electrek.co/2025/04/08/solar-hit-tariffs-but-stockpi... - April 8th, 2025

Domestic supply chain looks like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42790553 (courtesy u/jax)

> According to [1], the USA in January 2025 has almost 50GW/yr module manufacturing capacity. But to make modules you need polysilicon (25GW/yr manufacturing capacity in the US), ingots (0GW/yr), wafers (0GW/yr), and cells (0GW/yr). Hence the USA is seemingly entirely dependent on imports, probably from China which has 95%+ of the global wafer manufacturing capacity.

> Even when accounting for announced capacity expansion, the USA is currently on target to remain a very small player in the global market with announced capacity of 33GW/yr polysilicon, 13GW/yr ingots, 24GW/yr wafers, 49GW/yr cells and 83GW/yr modules (13GW/yr sovereign supply chain limitation).

> In 2024, China completed sovereign manufacturing of ~540GW of modules[2] including all precursor polysilicon, ingots, wafers and cells. China also produced and exported polysilicon, ingots, wagers and cells that were surplus to domestic demand. Many factories in China's production chain are operating at half their maximum production capacity due to global demand being less than half of global manufacturing capacity.[3]

(citations in their comment)
by berkes | 2025-04-08 17:27:53+00:00
I've never liked it, but

> Move fast and break things

is really a bad concept in this space, where you get limited shots at releasing something that generates interest.

> Employees are encouraged to ship half-baked features

And this is why I never liked that motto and have always pushed back at startups where I was hired that embraced this line of thought. Quality matters. It's context-dependent, so sometimes it matters a lot, and sometimes hardly. But "moving fast and breaking things" should be a deliberate choice, made for every feature, module, sprint, story all over again, IMO. If at all.
by autoexec | 2025-04-08 17:28:12+00:00
> People love to make things seem harder than they are.

In my experience people tend to underestimate or downplay how difficult something will be or how complex it is. This happens in people who know only a little about something, but also in people who are highly experienced because it becomes normal and easy for them and they can quickly evaluate a situation and know which considerations don't apply.
by jeffbee | 2025-04-08 17:28:34+00:00
> Battery storage is entirely speculative so far.

Battery systems installed in the last 5 years in America are 15 times more powerful than all the fission reactors built in the same time. Meanwhile, US reactor capacity is now lower than it was in 1990. One of these power sources is "speculative" and the other is a rapidly-growing, practical and economical way to store and distribute energy.
by thwarted | 2025-04-08 17:29:03+00:00
We have alt text for images, you want alt images for text.

You can see other people's interpretation of Zaphod's two heads by watching the BBC HHGTTG show (Mark Wing-Davey) or the movie (Sam Rockwell), among other renditions, which offer completely different interpretations, none of them canonical (not the least of which is because there was no canonical version of HHGTTG according to DA). I'm sure there are multitudes of fan art for HHGTTG on deviantart. Having AI generate an image doesn't offer any more "official" visualization.

Zaphod's second head is mentioned just as much is warranted. If a character has a limp or a crazy haircut it is not mentioned every time, because it has nothing to do with what is going on. And the book mentions that one head is often distracted/asleep, so it sounds like you do have a good visual of what his two heads are like.

While I understand that people think differently and some people are more visual thinkers, a good portion of the concepts expressed through writing are meant to be mindfucks that are difficult to express visually. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but the meat of writing is usually not the visual representation of its concepts. That's a great thing about writing: you can fill in the visuals yourself and it's fodder for fans to discuss.

(BTW, Hotblack Desiato's ship would just be black. Your eyes couldn't focus on it. Even the controls were black labels on a black background. There is nothing here to visualize other than, well, blackness).
by mywittyname | 2025-04-08 17:29:11+00:00
Because interviewers don't care. I have tons of code on my personal github page and even thought it's listed on my resume/linkedin, no interviewer has ever looked at it. This includes contributions to a widely used OSS project.

YMMV, but all the high paying jobs I've received were due to knowing the tech stack they used and being able to walk through the projects that I've done in detail.

Admittedly, the last time I changed jobs was 2024, so things might be different now.
by dwater | 2025-04-08 17:29:16+00:00
I've always found Wright's work beautiful and was a fan for some time, but after reading more about his life and work, and happening to visit Fallingwater on a very rainy day, my opinion has changed. His buildings are beautiful art pieces but they are not good homes. He was too cantankerous and self-righteous to accommodate the reality that a home needs to be maintained and changed over the years if it will continue to be functional.
by Pxtl | 2025-04-08 17:29:18+00:00
Honestly I'm surprised MS hasn't done more with the great dockable interface UI tech they built for for Visual Studio a few decades ago, and also gradually adopted by Adobe Photoshop and every other productivity application. I don't know if MS invented it but they definitely mastered it well in oldschool VS.

Let me dock/add-to-tabbed-pane/split-dock-into-multiple-panes and have the autohide/pin toggle for any window attached to any any edge of the screen, and make the Taskbar and the Quicklaunch and the Start Button just another set of Pane Windows, just with enforcement that (where appropriate) they cannot be closed or otherwise removed from the active screens, with a redundant always-accessible explorer rclick-context entry just in case you've somehow completely lost them.

Then make "maximize" mean "join the central pane as a new tab".
by exe34 | 2025-04-08 17:29:49+00:00
> shared improperly with third-party companies. For example, if they’re using Grok to analyze text, there’s potentially a huge conflict of interest if any of the communications being analyzed involves regulation of Musk’s companies or the various lawsuits he’s part of.

I don't think this is a problem anymore - hasn't he already cancelled anybody who was investigating him? I assume anybody who wants to keep their job knows to look the other way at this point.
by Chinjut | 2025-04-08 17:29:54+00:00
Re: many comments: The puzzle (as I think of it) is NOT to get the top-level answer. The puzzle is to get all the answers. If you figure out an outer answer earlier, that acts as a clue for an inner answer, just as inner answers act as clues for outer answers. A crossword isn't speedrun by just filling in the bottom-rightmost word.
by Aurornis | 2025-04-08 17:30:23+00:00
There are levels to this. Most people will at least prepare a resume and visit the company's website. That's interview prep.

You have to match the level of prep to the jobs you're pursuing. You don't need to grind LeetCode to have a SWE career. Most people never do that.

However if you're trying to get the more competitive jobs then some prep is necessary, as you already discovered with your Google interview.

The reason so many people do interview prep is that the ROI can be extremely high. Spending 100 hours grinding LeetCode sounds like hell to most people. Spending 100 hours doing practice problems to get a $100K raise for a job where you stay for 3 years suddenly becomes a $3000/hour career booster. That high paying job opens doors for more high paying jobs in the future, so the real number is even higher.

That's why people do it. You don't have to do it and it's not guaranteed to get you the high paying job by itself, but for people in the position to take advantage of it, the ROI is huge.
by aforwardslash | 2025-04-08 17:30:32+00:00
The questions dont require google; but what do you do when you don't know a specific thing? You search for it.

The notion that a candidate must remember the name of a thing or a specific algorithm is just ridiculous. When was the last time you implemented some fancy sorting or tree traversal algorithm from memory?

and if a guy thinks he's able to parse that amount of information in less than a minute, why should I refuse it? The end goal is to hire problem solvers, people with analytical thinking and capable of learning autonomously.

In most companies, the development process is collaborative - spikes, code reviews, informal meetings; why would you evaluate a candidate for such a team solely on what narrow knowledge he brings to the table when the power is down?
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-04-08 17:30:40+00:00
All my music cover images are AI generated. At the same time I refuse to listen to AI music. We're all going to sink alone on this one.

What's frustrating me is if I tell the Youtube algo 'don't recommend' to AI music video channels it stops giving me any music video channels. That's not what I want, I just don't want the AI. They need to seperate the two. But of course they need to not do that with AI cover images because otherwise it would harm me. :)
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-08 17:30:58+00:00
https://thedriven.io/2025/03/25/byd-leads-unstoppable-charge... ("In 2024, 3,100 GWh of fully commissioned battery-cell manufacturing capacity was online, more than 2.5x that of annual demand. This has driven massive demand growth for EVs and stationary energy storage (BESS) systems globally, with China continuing to dominate.")

Global BESS deployments soared 53% in 2024 - https://www.energy-storage.news/global-bess-deployments-soar... - January 14, 2025 ("Storage installations in 2024 beat expectations with 205GWh installed globally, a staggering y-o-y increase of 53%. The grid market has once again been the driver of growth, with more than 160GWh deployed globally, of which 98% was lithium-ion.")

China’s Batteries Are Now Cheap Enough to Power Huge Shifts - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-07-09/china-... | https://archive.today/DklaA - July 9, 2024

China Already Makes as Many Batteries as the Entire World Wants - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-12/china-... | https://archive.today/8Dy4D - April 12, 2024

Global BESS deployments to exceed 400GWh annually by 2030, says Rystad Energy - https://www.energy-storage.news/global-bess-deployments-to-e... - June 15, 2023
by didericis | 2025-04-08 17:31:01+00:00
The current international situation as understood by a lot of people in republican circles is outline in detail here:

https://youtu.be/vDBZeHhx3YE

> The US reliably enforces international order and global trade now

Yes, which is why many believe now is the time to revamp our industrial capacity while we still have strategic dominance.

The war in Ukraine has illustrated the importance of mass drone production, and we currently lack a lot of the direct capacity to make them. A lot of our military supply chains are also based too heavily on components assembled and manufactured in China and in parts of east Asia that could easily be disrupted and cripple our ability to project power and play the role we currently play.
by linacica | 2025-04-08 17:31:48+00:00
Depends on content, sometimes i use GPT to find stuff im lazy for and i know google would waste my time more likely, but generally i still use google, there are a lot of miscellaneous searches where an LLM would do worse than a search engine (currency exchange rate, stock price, quick facts etc..) tho I wish google had an option to block some sites from showing up, some searches are just filled with garbage - and i would like to block the whole domain from ever showing up
by zelon88 | 2025-04-08 17:31:48+00:00
As a matter of personal policy, I always try to avoid uploading (or allowing access to) sensitive documents to unknown third parties and their unknown supply chains.

I would like to see something that adds confidence for the user. Where is your Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, and Data Retention policies? What does the source code look like? I found in the FAQ the following passage; "Yes, your data is completely safe. All file conversion processing is done on Google's side, and Docs to PDF has no direct access to your files."

This doesn't really placate me. I would like to see a written policy, like a "WISP" of sorts, that is not going to change and is going to notify me when it does change.

My own background on this topic; I created HRConvert2, an open-source and self-hosted file conversion server that supports over 400 file formats in 13 languages. HRConvert2 would perform this conversion locally on user-supplied hardware.
by mjr00 | 2025-04-08 17:32:48+00:00
Short answer: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/revenu...

Long answer: There's no movement among major businesses to move off cloud providers, only putting more stuff onto. Every "we moved our stuff back on-prem and saved tons of money!" post I see on HN is from companies with miniscule (<$10k/month) cloud spend anyway.

For transparency, I have some bias since I worked at AWS. But the biggest competitors we saw while I was there were other cloud providers, not people moving back on-prem.