MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by irthomasthomas | 2025-04-29 19:38:02+00:00
https://github.com/irthomasthomas/llm-consortium

also, you aren't limited to cli. When you save a consortium it creates a model. You can then interact with a consortium as if it where a normal model (albeit slower and higher quality). You can then serve your custom models on an openai endpoint and use them with any chat client that supports custom openai endpoints.

The default behaviour is to output just the final synthesis, and this should conform to your user prompt. I recently added the ability to continue conversations with a consortium. In this case it only includes your user prompt and final synthesis in the conversation, so it mimics a normal chat, unlike running multiple iterations in the consortium, where full iteration history and arbiter responses are included.

UV tool install llm

llm install llm-consortium

llm install llm-model-gateway

llm consortium save qwen-gem-sonnet -m qwen3-32b -n 2 -m sonnet-3.7 -m gemini-2.5-pro --arbiter gemini-2.5-flash --confidence-threshold 95 --max-iterations 3

llm serve qwen-gem-sonnet

In this example I used -n 2 on the qwen model since it's so cheap we can include multiple instances of it in a consortium

Gemini flash works well as the arbiter for most prompts. However if your prompt has complex formatting requirements, then embedding that within an already complex consortium prompt often confuses it. In that case use gemini-2.5-pro for the arbiter. .
by jajko | 2025-04-29 19:38:13+00:00
My father when young (60s, eastern Europe) was working as a student on road and airport runway construction, working with hot tarmac material. Used heavily-ladden asbestos clothing and gloves. Luckily no mesothelioma till now so he got lucky.

It was really in many places due to its great thermal properties. But plastic permeated everything these days, thats on another few orders of magnitudes higher level.
by jasonlotito | 2025-04-29 19:38:14+00:00
One of the rules is banning the use of third-party software or scripts.

Any LLM attempting to play will lose because of that rule. So, if you know the rules, and you strictly adhere to them (as you seem to be doing) than no need to click on the link. You already know it's not playing buy GeoGuesser rules.

That being said, if you are running a test, you are free to set the rules as you see fit and explain so, and under the conditions set by the person running the test, these are the results.

> Did we just stop caring?

We stopped caring about pedantry. Especially when the person being pedantic seems to cherry pick to make their point.
by hnthrow90348765 | 2025-04-29 19:38:39+00:00
>When someone smugly says "micro-optimisations don't matter, networks are great, CPUs fast and memory plentiful", proceeds to make an app one degree more complicated than Hello World use 4 GB of RAM and drain half my battery, I'm having dark thoughts.

TBH I don't think those are the same person. Lots of apps glued together by developers who never think about micro-optimizations, maybe under severe time crunches without QA teams or PMs who don't care and managers who chose to go with the lowest bidder, but sure, let's blame the developer.

I look at video game forums and subreddits and see the same logic when they don't like something; like, you honestly don't know how software or games are built if you are solely blaming the devs at this point.
by crashtestdev | 2025-04-29 19:38:50+00:00
Although to be honest, it's original 80 AH lead acid battery got the same speed and range as my 1st generation Pure Air e-scooter that I used to commute to work every day in 2022, that's nearly 40 years newer technology, I think it ultimately failed because the market for city bound electric assisted vehicles just didn't exist yet.
by mrguyorama | 2025-04-29 19:38:55+00:00
The US has done literal concentration camps at least twice, has a literal torture camp we rent in Cuba explicitly to get around the "inalienable" rights of people in the US, and the current admin has literally sent people to an active concentration camp in El Salvador, and has joked about sending "homegrown" people to this camp and that El Salvador will have to build more as they blatantly ignore the courts telling them to bring people back.

This is asinine Dang. Making references to REALITY as it exists right now is not "flamewar".

The HN guidelines have never required people to ignore reality.

Discussing concentration camps in the context of the US has never been "flamewar" territory. This is like when Google bans your account for showing historical footage of atrocities. Whitewashing reality like this is gross.
by Brybry | 2025-04-29 19:39:12+00:00
That article doesn't confirm an Indian government WhatsApp backdoor?

> Due to WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption, messages sent between two users are only readable by them; even the service provider cannot decrypt the contents of the messages. This prevents any third party, including service providers (WhatsApp, Telegram), from accessing the messages

> no verified evidence to suggest that the government is directly accessing private WhatsApp chats

> WhatsApp itself does not store message content, and it explicitly states that it cannot and does not produce the contents of user messages in response to any government request

Reading between the lines, it sounds like they're getting encrypted chat content directly from the phones (and also metadata from providers).
by asadotzler | 2025-04-29 19:39:13+00:00
I keep seeing these "my output is 10X with LLMs" but I'm not seeing any increase in quality or decrease in price for any of the very many tech products I've updated or upgraded in the last couple of years.

We're coming up in 3 years of ChatGPT and well over a year since I started seeing the proliferation of these 10X claims, and yet LLM users seem to be bearing none of the fruit one might expect from a 10X increase in productivity.

I'm beginning to think that this 10X thing is overstated.
by steveharman | 2025-04-29 19:39:22+00:00
There a quite a few "Memex is similar to" Cursor, Claude Code, Trae etc etc here. But I couldn't find "Memex is better than...because..."

What's the elevator pitch for why a vibe coder should use Memex rather than Roo, Cline, Trae, Cursor, Windsurf and the countless others that I've already forgotten about

Thanks
by leeab | 2025-04-29 19:39:28+00:00
We have considered this and may go down this route in the future. One thing we asked ourselves was what open sourcing provides. Usually it's a desire for privacy or cost in the form of self-hosting, among other reasons.

Currently, our free version is self-hosted and monitors clusters with up to 64 GPUs. We feel this will work for many use cases, especially just to try it out. Monitoring GPUs typically requires you to deploy something where your GPUs live. Since you’re already installing software on your cluster, you might as well keep your data there too.
by vntok | 2025-04-29 19:39:57+00:00
Having a smart-but-no-smartass intern by my side, that is always eager to help, that is at the very least superficially knowledgeable about most things, that autonomously gets better at absolutely everything non-physical (yet), that is loyal yet immediately replaceable should I get bored with it or should a better intern pop up overnight (literally happened yesterday with qwen3), that never tires or gets annoyed at me.... well that's pretty exciting.
by eru | 2025-04-29 19:40:41+00:00
Yes, but I choose to interpret that as a good thing. It is good that progress is so swift and steady that we can afford to keep moving the goalposts.

Take cars as a random example: progress there isn't fast enough that we keep moving the goalposts for eg fuel economy. (At least not nearly as much.) A car with great fuel economy 20 years ago is today considered at least still good in terms of fuel economy.
by throwanem | 2025-04-29 19:40:49+00:00
Because that hero image is exactly the graphite sketch (touched with white and gold paint markers) of a PCB the writer wanted, and it took five seconds and five cents to produce, and it is worth more than that to no one including the human artist who did not draw it, because it is only here so people don't assume this stock website layout is broken for its absence.

That the human artist still deserves and requires paying I enthusiastically agree. I would rather that happen in a way which will demean their skills less than having to subsist on makework like this garbage would.
by zitterbewegung | 2025-04-29 19:41:11+00:00
I think that incrementally adding features (how OpenAI and their competitors) is a much better release strategy than a monolithic one by windows 11 and macOS and that’s a big part of negative feedback. Also Microsoft and Google never should have kept renaming their products multiple times such as ditching Cortana which has the largest brand recognition of any AI system. (Saying it was Cortana plus like Alexa is now is best ).

I’ve used many features of Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini and they have made me more productive after I have learned how to use them. Generally you get more complainers on a new product then people who use it. Being in the HN bubble doesn’t help either IMHO.
by bunderbunder | 2025-04-29 19:42:12+00:00
The thing is, the input hypothesis all by itself is not enough. It's arguably close to where the modern paradigm of second language acquisition started, but it's not where we still are nearly 50 years later.

For example, one big thing that Duolingo's method completely misses out on is the importance of a rich communicative context. This was implicitly there in Krashen's original monitor model, but wasn't fully appreciated until closer to the turn of the century.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-04-29 19:42:36+00:00
For me it is the financial system as a whole.

I am an ex-scientist and an engineer and had a look at the books of my son who studies finance in the best finance school in the world (I am saying this to highlight that he will be one of the perpetrators, possibly with influence, of this mess)

The things in there are crazy. There are whole blocks that are obvious but made to sound complicated. I spent some time on a graph just to realize that they ultimately talk about solving a set of two linear equations (midfle school level).

Some pieces were not comprehensible because they did not make sense.

And then bam! A random differential equation and explanation as it was the answer to the universe. With an incorrect interpretation.

And then there are statistics that would make "sociology science" blush. Yes, they are so bad that even the, ahem, experts who do stats in sociology would be ashamed (no hate for sociology, everyone needs to eat, it is just that I was several times reviewer of thesises there and I have trauma afterwards).

The fact that finance works is because we have some kind of magical "local minimum of finance energy" from which the Trumps of this world somehow did not maybe to break from (fingers crossed) by disrupting the world too much.
by idiotsecant | 2025-04-29 19:42:39+00:00
There are undeniably ways in which the command economy is simply more efficient. The party can decide that in 10 years they will be world leader in this or that, put resources toward it, and accomplish that goal. That doesn't mean the Chinese way is best for everyone, and there are certainly humanitarian issues, there are inefficiencies typical of a command economy, and there are unintended consequences, (tofu dreg, etc) but it's undeniable that they're currently getting stuff done.
by foxandmouse | 2025-04-29 19:42:42+00:00
National Sovereignty? I know a lot of Canadians who were lifelong liberals who were planning on voting conservative this election... until trump opened his mouth.

I wanted change—but the choice was between someone who ignores the cost of living crisis and someone who would actively make everything worse. Poilievre couldn’t even pass a security clearance. I didn’t support all of Trudeau’s policies, but Carney isn’t Trudeau—and pretending they’re interchangeable is just lazy politics.
by dainesy | 2025-04-29 19:42:46+00:00
How Wind Turbines Generate Electricity

1. Mechanical to Electrical Energy Conversion • Wind Energy Capture: The wind pushes against the blades of the wind turbine, causing them to rotate. These blades are attached to a central hub, which turns a low-speed shaft. • Gearbox (in many turbines): This shaft is connected to a gearbox, which increases the rotation speed. The gearbox drives a high-speed shaft connected to the generator. • Generator: The high-speed shaft turns the rotor inside a generator. As the rotor spins inside a magnetic field, it induces a flow of electricity—typically alternating current (AC)—using electromagnetic induction.

Some turbines use direct-drive generators (no gearbox), especially in offshore installations, which reduce maintenance.

2. Power Conditioning and Grid Integration • Variable Speed Generation: Wind speed varies, so the output frequency and voltage can fluctuate. Wind turbines typically use power electronics (converters and inverters) to stabilize the electricity before it’s sent to the grid. • Inverter Role: Converts variable-frequency AC or DC from the generator into grid-compatible AC (usually 50 Hz or 60 Hz depending on the region).

3. Phase Angle and Synchronization

What Is Phase Angle? • The phase angle represents the timing difference between the voltage waveform of the turbine’s output and the grid’s voltage waveform. • For a generator to supply power effectively, it must match the phase, frequency, and voltage of the grid. • If the phase angle is off, power cannot flow efficiently and may even cause instability or damage.

Synchronization Process • Before a wind turbine connects to the grid, its inverter adjusts the output so that: • Frequency = Grid frequency (e.g., 60 Hz) • Voltage = Grid voltage • Phase angle = Aligned with grid phase • Once synchronized, the turbine can export power.

4. Ancillary Services Provided by Wind Turbines

Ancillary services are support functions that maintain the stability and reliability of the power grid. Modern wind turbines, especially with advanced inverters and control systems, can provide several key services:

A. Frequency Regulation • Wind turbines can rapidly adjust output to help balance supply and demand. • This is called primary frequency response, essential when there’s a sudden change in load or generation.

B. Reactive Power Support / Voltage Control • Inverters can produce or absorb reactive power, which helps maintain voltage levels on the grid. • This is important for power factor correction and avoiding voltage collapse.

C. Inertia and Synthetic Inertia • Traditional turbines (like in coal or gas plants) provide rotational inertia, helping to resist sudden changes in frequency. • Wind turbines, being decoupled from the grid by power electronics, don’t naturally provide inertia. • However, some advanced systems provide synthetic inertia by rapidly adjusting power output in response to frequency changes.

D. Black Start Capability • Some wind turbines can assist in black start procedures (restarting the grid after a blackout), but this is still limited and evolving.
by refulgentis | 2025-04-29 19:42:59+00:00
A stirring polemic but ultimately sophomoric - made up[1] a story to valiantly declare support, for something no one doesn't support, and disdain for those who do not support it.

If you have a 2 GB phone (2018 era) and expect it to fit a multitasking OS, and every web page to work always, bless.

(how do we know "Aw, snap!" means your phone is too old and/or out of RAM and if it does, its the sites fault?)

[1] "I made that up.", beginning of ¶2
by nostrademons | 2025-04-29 19:43:00+00:00
They are running multiple trains. SF to LA non-stop trains won't even stop at stations like Gilroy or Madeira. The all-stop trains will preference commute hours. The seats are non-rivalrous: Central Valley commuters aren't even going to be on the same train as a SF to LA business traveler. It seems reasonable that fares would differ, and that traveling just 1-2 stops from SJ to the Central Valley will be a lot cheaper than going from SF to LA.

https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/2024-BP-Servic...
by jimmySixDOF | 2025-04-29 19:43:01+00:00
Varjo are good at whatever they do but also check out @gracia_vr [1] they focus on Spalts in XR and playcanvas has supersplat which lets you view immersive mode for 3DGS [2].

[1] https://www.gracia.ai/ [2] https://github.com/playcanvas/supersplat
by Ne02ptzero | 2025-04-29 19:43:10+00:00
> You can guarantee that you and someone else are listening to the same thing even across an ocean.

How can you guarantee that? NTP fails to guarantee that all clocks are synced inside a datacenter, let alone across an ocean (Did not read the code yet)

EDIT: The wording got me. "Guarantee" & "Perfect" in the post title, and "Millisecond-accurate synchronization" in the README. Cool project!
by beloch | 2025-04-29 19:43:11+00:00
> "Secondly, there is an insane amount of money tied up in AI."

Money attracts attention, both passively and actively. People see OpenAI, etc. spending billions on training and figure there must be something to it. OpenAI and others also probably spend quite a bit on marketing and social media bombing too, and a lot of that will likely be done by humans. If you can spend billions on training, what's a few million more on social media?

It doesn't matter what AI can actually do now. If companies like OpenAI can attract enough investment and customers to stay afloat long enough, then they may yet become indispensable in the future.

The line between bubble and self-fulfilling prophecy is thin.
by yojo | 2025-04-29 19:43:31+00:00
I’m not excusing this bug. There are several poor decisions that went into this issue, but my contention is that using electron (with the resulting 250mb bundle) is not one of them.

You should probably not roll your own auto-updater.

If you do, checking every 5 minutes for updates is waaaay too often (and likely hurts battery life by triggering the radio).

And triggering a download without a user-prompt also feels hostile to me.

The app size compounds the problem here, but the core issue is bad choices around auto-updating
by chinchilla2020 | 2025-04-29 19:43:31+00:00
"A single line of code caused <BUG>"

Yes, a single line of code is in the stack trace every time a bug happens. Why does every headline have to push this clickbait?

All errors occur at a single line in the program - and every single line is interconnected to the rest of the program, so it's an irrelevant statement.
by philipkglass | 2025-04-29 19:44:07+00:00
I didn't try original BERT at all because I didn't get good results from any LLMs on small document excerpts, so I assumed that a substantial context was necessary for good results. Traditional BERT only accepts up to 512 tokens, while ModernBERT goes up to 8192. I ended up using a 2048 token limit.
by epolanski | 2025-04-29 19:44:08+00:00
My experience as a dev is that it's not devs not wanting to fix those issues it's decision makers that can't sell it upwards.

"We spent x weeks working so users with low memory space can update" is like unsellable and will get you laughs as a response.

On top of that, reality is that this effort is rarely deemed worth it in money terms. How many users are gonna change bank for that?

And don't get me started on QA.

Software is complicated and it's good and complex as the organizations making it, we devs are just one part of the problem.
Ask HN: Is anyone else finding it impossible to use SMS in new apps?
by jvergeldedios | 2025-04-29 19:44:09+00:00
I'm trying to prototype an app that uses SMS as a channel for inviting other users to events (similar experience to Partiful). This is what the experience has looked like so far:

I signed up for Twilio and got a local number

I build my Twilio integration and in testing I find that my messages are getting blocked until I submit a campaign for "10 DLC" compliance

I paid $15 to submit a campaign for 10 DLC compliance

Two weeks later my campaign was rejected and I had to resubmit and pay another $15

One week later my campaign was "approved" and I could start sending SMS

Messages start working, but some of them are getting filtered with a vague "Your message content was flagged as going against carrier guidelines" error

I reach out to support and a few days later they suggest some changes to my messages to comply with carrier guidelines

I make the changes and I'm still getting the same error

And now I'm kind of dead in the water. The prototype has been code-complete for about 4 weeks now and I'd love to get some users in to test it. I could fall back to email but since this is going to be targeted largely at mobile users SMS would be the best experience. I just didn't anticipate this level of friction to even just send SMS to myself to test.

Is anyone else having this experience? Are there any alternatives out there that I'm overlooking? Or is this just the state of things now?
by bityard | 2025-04-29 19:44:24+00:00
How about I try a metaphor: Imagine you work in a building. Inside the building, there are multiple rooms. Each room has a different project going on inside it. In one room, you are building a canoe. In another, you are restoring a motorcycle. Another is a music production studio. And so on. Every day, you enter this hypothetical building to get some work done in one or more of the rooms.

Now imagine every night while you're asleep, a cleaning crew comes into your building and tidies up. But they don't just sweep the floor and take out the garbage, they also put away all the tools, pick up any open books and put them back on the bookshelf, re-assemble the motorcycle, and put the music equipment back in its retail boxes.

When you come back in the morning, you have to dedicate minutes to hours just getting things back to where they were when you left. And because you're ADHD as fuck, you probably don't remember exactly where you left off and frequently end up skipping some major step or accidentally redoing work that you did before.

That is what my life feels like without tab groups.
by scarface_74 | 2025-04-29 19:44:39+00:00
(yes I’m throwing up in my mouth while responding)

From the thousand-foot view, I actually saw a dynamic environment where operating within a matrixed organization and aligning cross-functional stakeholders were essential levers for driving scalable outcomes. While enterprise-level ecosystems inevitably present change management challenges, I found that viewing the experience through a lens of strategic growth and operational optimization made it incredibly rewarding.
by bertramus | 2025-04-29 19:44:57+00:00
The most charitable interpretation of your comment is that it is based on perceived power due to the party that controls the executive office, and that you came into adulthood at or near the beginning of the Obama administration (of course, that still means you grew up with Bush, Clinton x2, Bush x2).

Or you came into adulthood during or near the Biden administration - which would still mean you are aware of 2016)

That still leaves Republicans controlling the Presidency 1/4 of that time. Further, you, like many Americans, mistake control of the Executive Branch as controlling the government, but "control" involved the legislature, and Republicans, or Republicans and West Virginia Democrats, have controlled both houses in much more of my recent memory.
by caseyy | 2025-04-29 19:44:59+00:00
I tried something similar when Llama2 came out, pitting two assistants, who each believed the other is the user, against each other. Ultimately, it was the same model talking with itself. The system prompts for both had various instructions to disagree and criticise the opinion of the user. I provided the first message to get things started. Usually, it’s be along the lines of “nuclear proliferation is harmful to humanity”.

After 15 or so iterations, both assistants would keep repeating the same things and find agreement anyway. Sometimes, the chat became unhinged and useless, but 95/100 times, it was agreement.

Happy someone else made it work.