MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by serjester | 2025-04-17 21:00:36+00:00
Just ran it on one of our internal PDF (3 pages, medium difficulty) to json benchmarks:

gemini-flash-2.0: 60 ish% accuracy 6,250 pages per dollar

gemini-2.5-flash-preview (no thinking): 80 ish% accuracy 1,700 pages per dollar

gemini-2.5-flash-preview (with thinking): 80 ish% accuracy (not sure what's going on here) 350 pages per dollar

gemini-flash-2.5: 90 ish% accuracy 150 pages per dollar

I do wish they separated the thinking variant from the regular one - it's incredibly confusing when a model parameter dramatically impacts pricing.
by Night_Thastus | 2025-04-17 21:00:36+00:00
Dishwashers, with rare exception, are much better at washing dishes than people are. They can use water temperatures that would burn skin, pressures that would bruise, and can keep going at it for HOURS without getting tired.

People are lazy. They only look for dirty spots and go for those. They intentionally or intentionally avoid cleaning some areas. Dishwashers don't care what 'looks' dirty - they just keep washing.

Even if you think it's clean by hand, chances are there's far more residual residue and bacteria you can't see that a dishwasher wouldn't have any trouble with.

99% of the problem with dishwashers are that people use them wrong:

* They don't clean the filter and spray arms regularly

* They use the shitty pods instead of powder, which is the most effective since it can have bleach

* They don't put some detergent in the pre-wash

* They have a unit that doesn't pre-heat the water and need to just run the faucet for a bit to get the water hot

* They don't use a rinse aid

If you can avoid those 5 mistakes, a dishwasher will always way out-perform hand-washing. Even dirt cheap basic units you see in low end apartments will do an amazing job if actually used correctly.
by braza | 2025-04-17 21:01:00+00:00
I’ve worked there, maybe my 2 cents: at the end of the day I have mouths to feed and honestly I used to be idealistic regarding employer moral compass and so on, but coming from the bottom in socio-economic terms I will exercise my right to be cynical about it.

I have some support to the Trust&Safety team at the same period of the whole debate about the section 230; and from what I can tell Snap has some flagging mechanisms quite good related with people selling firearms, drugs and especially puberty blockers.

The thing that I can say is that a lot of parents are sleeping at the wheel with teenagers and not following what is going on with their child.
by dynm | 2025-04-17 21:01:26+00:00
The amount of text in books is surprisingly finite. My best estimate was that there are ~10¹³ tokens available in all books (https://dynomight.net/scaling/#scaling-data), which is less than frontier models are already being trained on. On the other hand, book tokens are probably much "better" than random internet tokens. Wikipedia for example seems to get much higher weight than other sources, and it's only ~3×10¹⁰ tokens.
by andrewla | 2025-04-17 21:01:56+00:00
My point here more than anything else is that I find this formulation unsatisfying because it is "easy" to verify that we have a witness, but is exponential only because the size of the witness is exponential in size.

What I'd like as a minimum example for "give me something that is NP-hard but not NP-complete" Is a problem whose input size is O(N), whose witnesses are O(N), but which requires O(e^N) time to validate that the witness is correct. I don't actually know that this is possible.
by stefan_ | 2025-04-17 21:02:07+00:00
I don't know man, for months now people keep telling me on HN how "Google is winning", yet no normal person I ever asked knows what the fuck "Gemini" is. I don't know what they are winning, it might be internet points for all I know.

Actually, some of the people polled recalled the Google AI efforts by their expert system recommending glue on pizza and smoking in pregnancy. It's a big joke.
by mubou | 2025-04-17 21:02:25+00:00
> Anyone sensible switched over to macOS already, especially software developers

Well if sgt says so, then it must be true!

Except it isn't, sorry. Both Windows and Linux (if you total the distros) are more popular among developers according to last year's SO survey:

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#1-operating-...

I'm glad that you've found an OS that suits you, but please don't speak for the rest of us, or call everyone who has different opinions from you "unsensible". (Personally, I find Mac really frickin annoying, but that's just, like, my opinion, man.)
by ValveFan6969 | 2025-04-17 21:02:40+00:00
I have been having similar performance issues, I believe they intentionally made a worse model (Gemini 2.5) to get more money out of you. However, there is a way where you can make money off of Gemini 2.5.

If you set the thinking parameter lower and lower, you can make the model spew absolute nonsense for the first response. It costs 10 cents per input / output, and sometimes you get a response that was just so bad your clients will ask for more and more corrections.
by zoogeny | 2025-04-17 21:02:49+00:00
Google making Gemini 2.5 Pro (Experimental) free was a big deal. I haven't tried the more expensive OpenAI models so I can't even compare, only to the free models I have used of theirs in the past.

Gemini 2.5 Pro is so much of a step up (IME) that I've become sold on Google's models in general. It not only is smarter than me on most of the subjects I engage with it, it also isn't completely obsequious. The model pushes back on me rather than contorting itself to find a way to agree.

100% of my casual AI usage is now in Gemini and I look forward to asking it questions on deep topics because it consistently provides me with insight. I am building new tools with the mind to optimize my usage to increase it's value to me.
by gs17 | 2025-04-17 21:02:56+00:00
That's my case. My old place had a brand new one and it did everything perfectly. My new place has one that's pretty old and not only does it need a pre-rinse, it doesn't even dry things (and unlike my old one, it needs a rinse aid)! And if it breaks, I'm sure the landlord will replace it with an empty area under the counter.
by Patryk27 | 2025-04-17 21:03:06+00:00
I've redacted that part (https://github.com/Patryk27/website/commit/818c27967d7e6332c...), since it doesn't quite make sense if you think about it for longer than a couple seconds; it's 23:02 for me at the moment, maybe the night will bring me a new joke!
by ValveFan6969 | 2025-04-17 21:04:12+00:00
I'm an Atheist, and I would like to know if AI models have the ability to detect sarcasm? Is there a way to make them understand that? Or maybe just give context in parentheses of something sarcastic I'm about to say? If I wanted to, can I just tell the AI that everything I am about to say is sarcastic? Maybe put quotation marks over the things I am about to say so that the AI comprehends the context?

If anyone has done this and made success, I'd really like to know how you did it and if there's any tricks to accomplishing that.
by zulban | 2025-04-17 21:04:32+00:00
I have three choices:

1) full-time in-person education, quitting my CS job

2) full-time online education, quitting my CS job

3) full-time CS job and doing a part-time master's online

Option #3 is the best for my CS education and growth. Period. Don't pretend the only choices are #1 and #2 because you're arguing in favour of #1.

Plus, it's not like I can (or want to) move to the USA just for studies. I have family in Montreal. Montreal has great universities for CS and AI but they have almost nothing for supercomputing or quantum computing.

I was a teacher for 4 years. I get it. There's magic to in-person education. But millions of people think online is the better choice for them and they're not all wrong.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-17 21:05:03+00:00
Actually yeah if someone stating their views in a context that doesn't directly impact you leaves you "distraught" I'd say you have an emotional issue on your end. That said, in the real world people commonly have those and avoiding the situations that trigger them is perfectly reasonable.

Let's just be clear that something can be commonplace while also being a personal issue.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-04-17 21:05:42+00:00
I frankly am in doubt of future office products. In the last month I have ditched two separate excel productivity templates in favor of bespoke wrappers on sqlite databases, written by Claude and Gemini. Easier to use and probably 10x as fast.

You don't need a 50 function swiss army knife when your pocket can just generate the exact tool you need.
by kllrnohj | 2025-04-17 21:06:04+00:00
No, it literally isn't. It's literally doing the opposite, it increases the display brightness in order to show the HDR content. The SDR content is dimmed proportional to the increase such that SDR has the same emitted brightness before & after the change.

SDR brightness is not reduced to "add contrast". The blog post doesn't seem to say that anywhere, either, but if it does it's simply wrong. As a general note it seems wrong about a lot of aspects, like saying that Apple does this on non-HDR displays. They don't. It then also conflates EDR with whether or not HDR is used. EDR is simply the representation of content between apps & the compositor. It's a working space not entirely unlike scRGB where 0.0-1.0 is simply the SDR range, and it can go beyond that. But going beyond the maximum reported EDR range, which can be as low as 1.0, the result is simply clipped. So they are not "simulating" HDR on a non-HDR display.
by prepend | 2025-04-17 21:07:09+00:00
I live in a unique town name in the US, pretend it’s “Foo.”

I tried to buy ads for “Foo photography” as people in my town literally type that in. And my budget wasn’t enough to buy all instances of that search.

I didn’t need geotargeting for my local business.

Comically google kept trying to geotarget. Every time it did this I would get people all over the place who searched “photography” and a large percentage was burned. I kept trying to turn off geotargeting.
by ALLTaken | 2025-04-17 21:07:14+00:00
Here's how you do that in CSS4!

For an image or video:

- https://github.com/ccameron-chromium/hdr-headroom-limit/blob...

- https://drafts.csswg.org/css-color-hdr/#controlling-dynamic-...

For a canvas element:

- https://github.com/w3c/ColorWeb-CG/blob/hdr_canvas_r2/hdr_ht...

Resource: https://www.w3.org/TR/mediaqueries-5/#dynamic-range
by benlivengood | 2025-04-17 21:07:17+00:00
Frankly, unless 25 and 30 year old systems are being continually updated to adhere to newer TLS standards then they are not getting many benefits from TLS.

Practically, the solution is virtual machines with the compatible software you'll need to manage those older devices 10 years in the future, or run a secure proxy for them.

Internet routers are definitely one of the worst offenders because originating a root of trust between disparate devices is actually a hard problem, especially over a public channel like wifi. Generally, I'd say the correct answer to this is that wifi router manufacturers need to maintain secure infrastructure for enrolling their devices. If manufacturers can't bother to maintain this kind of infrastructure then they almost certainly won't be providing security updates in firmware either, so they're a poor choice for an Internet router.
by Saris | 2025-04-17 21:07:41+00:00
Yeah I figure most of them work fine, otherwise I'd find more similar stories.

We have about 10 of the M12 batteries, about half are the 3 cell ones and half the 6 cell larger capacity ones. And every single one has gone completely out of balance within 2 years of use.

I plug them into a balancer and they last another solid 6 months or so.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-04-17 21:07:44+00:00
This is a great stance to have if consequences have zero value.

Every time we shrug and say "let the parents decide," we gamble with the most vulnerable: the kids who don’t yet know how to refuse a cigarette, who don’t yet grasp the weight of a loaded weapon, who don’t yet understand that porn isn’t a harmless curiosity. We gamble with the soul of childhood—and when we lose, those children don’t get a second chance. They leave behind empty chairs at dinner tables, empty beds in houses that echo with what might have been. That’s the true cost of unfettered "parental freedom," and it’s a price that's easy to pay with someone else's life. But hey, Fuck those kids, right?
by rainsford | 2025-04-17 21:08:17+00:00
I think the most crucial factor is that the initial pre-rinse cycle is usually relatively short, so pre-heating the water means that cycle is done with hot water. My dishwasher at least starts out rinsing for maybe 15-20 minutes before draining and refilling the tub. I also think there is likely some effect in that the main cleaning cycle will at least start out with hot tap water.
by minimaxir | 2025-04-17 21:08:22+00:00
One hidden note from Gemini 2.5 Flash when diving deep into the documentation: for image inputs, not only can the model be instructed to generated 2D bounding boxes of relevant subjects, but it can also create segmentation masks! https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/image-understanding#se...

At this price point with the Flash model, creating segmentation masks is pretty nifty.

The segmentation masks are a bit of a galaxy brain implementation by generating a b64 string representing the mask: https://colab.research.google.com/github/google-gemini/cookb...

I am trying to test it in AI Studio but it sometimes errors out, likely because it tries to decode the b64 lol.
by jsnell | 2025-04-17 21:08:38+00:00
The free-with-small-rate-limits designator was "experimental", not "preview".

I think the distinction between preview and full release is that the preview models have no guarantees on how long they'll be available, the full release comes with a pre-set discontinuation date. So if want the stability for a production app, you wouldn't want to use a preview model.
by mmaunder | 2025-04-17 21:09:12+00:00
Try uploading a bunch of PDF bank statements to notebooklm and ask it questions. Or the results of blood work. It's jaw dropping. e.g. uploaded 7 brokerage account statements as PDFs in a mess of formats and asked it to generate table summary data which it nailed, and then asked it to generate actual trades to go from current position to a new position in shortest path, and it nailed that too.

Biggest issue we have when using notebooklm is a lack of ambition when it comes to the questions we're asking. And the pro version supports up to 300 documements.

Hell, we uploaded the entire Euro Cyber Resilience Act and asked the same questions we were going to ask our big name legal firm, and it nailed every one.

But you actually make a fair point, which I'm seeing too and I find quite exciting. And it's that even among my early adopter and technology minded friends, adoption of the most powerful AI tools is very low. e.g. many of them don't even know that notebookLM exists. My interpretation on this is that it's VERY early days, which is suuuuuper exciting for us builders and innovators here on HN.
by p0w3n3d | 2025-04-17 21:09:19+00:00
This Crownland you have linked is a madness of an excellent developer's work, mostly quirks (I guess). According to my knowledge such a fast horizontal scrolling and colourful background is impossible in standard Atari with standard coding.

And it seems those are Polish guys (https://www.atari.org.pl/forum/viewtopic.php?id=4520)

-- EDIT --

I found it: only version for Atari 130XE (i.e. 128KB RAM - this is not the standard, I guess it could run with cartdrige on 65 XL/XE maybe?), year 2006/2007 (fresh :) )
by sebastiennight | 2025-04-17 21:09:44+00:00
Here's a quick example:

First 20 comments of "John Carmack: writing Rust code feels wholesome"

Here is the rendered mp3 : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yG1mwD70ZteXtdh8Jk_sXUXS_sQ...

The thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19126795

First 30 comments of a recent thread, "AGI is still 30 years away": https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YbgRXBv1LC3IdMl8Xb4i9y98S2T...

The thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43719280
by olyjohn | 2025-04-17 21:10:17+00:00
My dad took away my PC when I got bad grades and put it in his room.

I took the mobo, CPU, RAM, hard drive and PSU out of the case, put them in my backpack and went to my friends house. He never noticed.

That said, I still couldn't use the PC when I was at home. Physically taking away the machine wasn't really the punishment.

This would apply to cell phones and such too. Sure they might figure out some workaround that works sometimes, but it won't be the same.
by kbolino | 2025-04-17 21:10:35+00:00
There are some alternatives.

Certificate pinning is probably the most widely known way to get a certificate out there without relying on live PKI. However, certificate pinning just shifts the burden of trust from runtime to install time, and puts an expiration date on every build of the program. It also doesn't work for any software that is meant to access more than a small handful of pre-determined sites.

Web-of-trust is a theoretical possibility, and is used for PGP-signed e-mail, but it's also a total mess that doesn't scale. Heck, the best way to check the PGP keys for a lot of signed mail is to go to an HTTPS website and thus rely on the CAs.

DNSSEC could be the basis for a CA-free world, but it hasn't achieved wide use. Also, if used in this way, it would just shift the burden of trust from CAs to DNS operators, and I'm not sure people really like those much better.
by ValveFan6969 | 2025-04-17 21:10:39+00:00
I don't have any interest in HDR. HDR is a very new technology that is just a gimmick. The human eye is barely able to perceive more than a few colors. Therefore anything above 16.7 million colors is not useful. And even that is overkill, 250-300 shades of a single color is more than enough for anybody.
by bradac56 | 2025-04-17 21:11:04+00:00
"In the US, at least. Europe, Germany in particular, was probably a different story."

Not really I was in the army back then stationed in Germany and had a buddy that was clinically insane over his Amiga's. Yes I agree the graphics was forking amazing at least a decade maybe two ahead of it's time but you couldn't play Warlord or Wizardry on it so he used my beige PC clone running Dr. Doss

They had the same problem in Europe not enough sales but the owners was bat-shit crazy and wrote a lot of crazy little programs to make them semi-functional.

Amiga died When Commodore bought it for the Lorraine/Sage IV code base.
by AlexandrB | 2025-04-17 21:11:15+00:00
You're moving the goalposts. Being cancelled doesn't mean you literally stop existing or can't ever get work again. But it often does mean curtailed career opportunities or losing x years of your life while people forget and lawsuits work their way through the system.

It's like saying jail isn't real because some ex-convicts have successful careers.

If you want a name: an interesting, recent example is Gina Carano because she's actually suing her former employer (Disney) for going along with a cancellation. We'll see what the court thinks her cancellation was worth.
by steveklabnik | 2025-04-17 21:11:15+00:00
> I bet we'll get one in Rust eventually. Maybe from Oxide computer company?

Crucible is our storage service: https://github.com/oxidecomputer/crucible

RFD 60, linked in the README, contains a bit of info about Ceph, which we did evaluate: https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0060
by ValveFan6969 | 2025-04-17 21:11:36+00:00
This is a lot of technical mumbo jumbo for a simple thing like brightness. HDR is a gimmick like 3D TVs. The best image quality is not the one with the most colors, which is entirely pointless, but instead a simple image, with no fancy features that only serve to distract the eye.

Like in the famous case of the Apple logo in the 1990s. Steve Jobs, when asked why he uses a black and white Apple logo instead of a color one, said - "color will only distract the eye from what's important".
by KaiserPro | 2025-04-17 21:11:45+00:00
When a corner shop sells cigarettes to minors, who's breaking the law?

When a TV channel broadcast porn, who gets fined?

These are accepted laws that protect kids from "harm", which are relatively uncontroversial.

Now, the privacy angle is very much the right question. But as Discord are the one that are going to get fined, they totally need to make sure kids aren't being exposed to shit they shouldn't be seeing until they are old enough. In the same way the corner shop needs to make sure they don't sell booze to 16 year olds.

Now, what is the mechanism that Discord should/could use? that's the bigger question.

Can government provide fool proof, secure, private and scalable proof of age services? How can private industry do it? (Hint: they wont because its a really good source of profile information for advertising.)
by seadan83 | 2025-04-17 21:11:53+00:00
> You point out that it's perfectly possible to live a "simple" rural life.

Indeed, more the point though is that many people still live these lives. The propagation of technology is not uniform, slow, ongoing, and not necessarily even a good thing. My point is that technological progress and the feeling of living in a very advanced age is actually a veneer. The second point is how are we going to get massive adoption of technology that is decades away, when we still haven't fully adopted the technologies of the last two centuries?

> You mean poor, uneducated and without any real prospects of anything like a career?

A lot of those rural towns had large farms, which had people far richer than software engineers. I think there is a lot of complexity when characterizing 'rural' america (which is a lot closer to a lot people than I think they otherwise know).

I don't quite share those value judgements. I think it's varied and complicated. My point instead is really more about the propagation of technology. Another example is all of the US compared to say Japanese smart phones. I was told the USA is about 15 years behind in generalized smart phone tech. A podcast I was listening to recently talked about the deep integration of technology in Chinese Uber equivalents, something that is only recent in US offices where you can go into a room and 'cast' something onto a screen. Apparently in China, for a while, being able to play a movie on a screen in the back of an Uber has been a seemless and integrated experience for a long time. Another good example is credit card technology. The oldest is to do a carbon copy of the embossed phone numbers, to the magnetic strip, to the chip, to tap. Europe had chips used in all of their credit cards while some places in the US were still doing carbon copy, and even the "advanced places" were doing magnetic strip only. Canada has been ahead of the US for a while for point-of-payment systems, virtually every restaurant brings a card reader to you instead of (as is in the US) this dance where you give someone a credit card so they can go to the register where there is a wired machine where they swipe the card.

So, I suppose my biggest point is that technology spreads a lot slower than we tend to think. It's not a process of years, but decades and centuries. I'm really pushing back on this technophile sentiment that we're already living in a super advanced age with a strong society that is robust, that instead these are veneers with very uneven and slow moving advancement. This is not going to change overnight (or in the next century) just because someone creates an humanoid AI robot thing that can lift bails of hay and stack them in the right place. Given the lack of adoption of various technologies that we already see, I take that as evidence that nothing will change too quickly, 30 years or even more, just because we get a bit better with robotics.
by quantified | 2025-04-17 21:12:38+00:00
> When I asked his view on the AI newsletter economy, Ed Zitron — writer, PR man and scourge of slop — was characteristically excoriating. “It’s content built for people who don’t really read or listen or know stuff . . . It’s propaganda under a different name,” he said.

Sounds a lot like US political information too.