MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jasonjmcghee | 2025-05-13 06:52:23+00:00
Everything else aside, unless you include which model you're using, writing about "ChatGPT" kind of loses its weight.

Is this 4o-mini, 4o, o4-mini, o4-mini-high, o3 (etc)?

No matter how strange their naming, they all vary dramatically in problems like that presented in the article.

Which one the experience was with is critical to drawing any kind of conclusions.
by eru | 2025-05-13 06:52:37+00:00
On net, we are radiating about as much energy into space as we are getting from the sun.

(Even the worst scenarios of global warming are rounding errors compared to the energy of the sun that hits the earth every day.)

In any case, 'closed system' specifically refers to matter. Energy is allowed in or out. Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolated_system and see the little graphic on the top right.
by yorwba | 2025-05-13 06:52:43+00:00
It is not a method to compress a Grouped-Query Attention model, but to expand it into an equivalent Multi-head Latent Attention model with the same key-value cache size but larger effective key/value vectors and a correspondingly larger number of trainable parameters. With additional training, you can then obtain a better model that only uses a little bit more memory.
by flohofwoe | 2025-05-13 06:52:48+00:00
> They learn a set of narrow workflows and never explore beyond.

And tbh, that's how it should be for a version control system. Before git with its byzantine workflows and a thousand ways to do the same thing, version control (e.g. svn) was a thing that's just humming along invisibly in the background, something that you never had to 'learn' or even think about, much like the filesystem.

I don't need to know how a filesystem works internally to be able to use it.

And having a centralized store and history helps a lot to keep a version control system conceptually simple.
by docdeek | 2025-05-13 06:53:03+00:00
That was my impression of the description of the bill, too. This part:

>> If passed by the House, state S.B. 715 would require all renewable projects — even existing ones — to buy backup power, largely from coal or gas plants.

If it compelled the renewable projects to buy from a coal plant, that might be an issue. But if the choice is buy from a coal plant OR invest in storage so that the amoutn of energy delivered can be consistent across the day, that’s probably a great outcome.
by MattPalmer1086 | 2025-05-13 06:53:36+00:00
I've always rejected the idea that time is entropy change.

First, in many local processes entropy moves from high to low (e.g. life). Nobody says that time is moving backwards for living things. It only increases if you consider the system it is embedded in as well. So this idea that entropy is time is something that only applies to the entire universe?

It's true that we don't see eggs unbreaking, or broken coffee cups flying off the floor and reassembling. This increase in entropy seems to give an "arrow" of time, but to my mind this view (ironically) confuses cause with effect.

If you have any causal system (cause preceding effects) then you will always see this type of entropic increase, by simple statistics. There are just many, many more ways for things to be scrambled and high entropy than ordered and low entropy.

So yes, entropy does tend to increase over time, but that's an effect of being in a causal system, not the system itself. At least, that's my view.
by Terr_ | 2025-05-13 06:53:54+00:00
> Tricia McLaughlin, Homeland Security assistant secretary, appeared to confirm that Piker was held for questioning but disputed any claims that political beliefs triggered his inspection.

Hmmm, normally a Homeland Security official would merit more default credibility than some Twitch streamer... But the year is 2025, and that exact official has been telling lies about victims they illegally kidnapped without trial and renditioned into a life-sentence in an El Salvador concentration camp.

[0] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-ad...
by floriangosse | 2025-05-13 06:55:00+00:00
I think it's actually an understandable strategical move from Mozilla. They might loose some income from Google and probably have to cut the staff. But to keep the development of Firefox running they want to involve more people from the community and GitHub is the tool that brings most visibility on the market right now and is known by many developers. So the hurdle getting involved is much lower.

I think you can dislike the general move to a service like GitHub instead of GitLab (or something else). But I think we all benefit from the fact that Firefox's development continues and that we have a competing engine on the market.
by romanhn | 2025-05-13 06:55:26+00:00
As a previous EM at a FAANG, I'm very conflicted by this post. On one hand, it is quite useful and representative of some of the behind-the-scenes shenanigans that I wish I was aware of at the time that would've made my life easier. On the other hand, it is representative of the time and effort wasted on political bullshit at big tech that could certainly have been put to better use. TL;DR: Thanks, I hate it.
by danpalmer | 2025-05-13 06:55:28+00:00
I don't know Hasan, but I've heard statements like "so and so endorses Hamas" used to summarise someone voicing concerns for civilian deaths in Gaza.

I'm not saying your comments are in bad faith, I don't know (and encourage you to provide links to back up your statements), but these comments are reminiscent of frequently made bad faith comments, so the only way to differentiate is by providing that evidence with your statements.
Show HN: PlainInvoice – A minimal invoicing tool for freelancers and small teams
by 5balloons | 2025-05-13 06:55:41+00:00
Hi HN, I'm a freelance developer, and like many others, I used to manage invoices through clunky spreadsheets, reused templates, and endless email threads with my accountant.

To simplify that, I built PlainInvoice.com — a minimal invoicing tool designed for freelancers and small teams. It's clean, fast, and doesn't require sign-up to start.

Some features:

Generate invoices instantly (no login needed)

Save clients, track total billed and actual received (with multi-currency support)

Upload attachments (like receipts or contracts)

Add teammates or accountants with viewer-only access

Works well for solo folks who just want to stay organized without bloat

Here’s a short walkthrough video: https://youtu.be/b3ywvs-8nYM

It’s free to use for now. I built it for myself but figured it might help others too. Would love your feedback or suggestions!
by pndy | 2025-05-13 06:55:53+00:00
Considering image backlash they had over last year with: acquiring ad tech company created by former meta people, which in turn lead to introducing so-called "privacy preserving attribution" feature for ads tracking, changing ToS terms regarding data collection, firing CPO who was diagnosed with cancer. Then I do believe these all little changes are PR stunts with an attempt to regain trust of users who strongly criticised Mozilla in last year and earlier.

They should restructure instead, hire people who actually want to work on software and not use corporation and foundation around it as platform for their... peculiar "endeavours". But I doubt that's gonna happen - flow of Google cash and from all those naive people who think supporting Mozilla directly contributes to Firefox is too good it seems. But then it's understandable they do this - money from Google tap can get twisted.
by ronnieboy493 | 2025-05-13 06:55:58+00:00
If macOS still attached modals to windows I think this might be less of an issue [0]. Not fixed, but less bad. In the previous screenshot, the modal lays over the toolbar which really reads as "part of the application". Steve Jobs, when demoing Aqua, made a point of the pain that is detached modals[1].

But here we are, detached modals, because of Apple's weird fetish for mobile UI on everything.

---

[0] https://kagi.com/proxy/latest?c=LsHiRSPxhD29sXqLhdI0j1EsQ98n...

[1] https://youtu.be/6-fkYFV7rOY?t=242
by pointlessone | 2025-05-13 06:56:18+00:00
OK, no silicone. But we might be just fine after all. Just yesterday we had a story about Bismuth transistors that are better in every way than silicon ones. Maybe a tad more expensive. There are a plenty of other semiconductors out there too. We’ll have to adjust manufacturing but it will probably be just one upgrade cycle skip. Even with a complete mind wipe it’s still not that bad if only silicone is out.
by misja111 | 2025-05-13 06:56:52+00:00
I'm reading the original bill, I can't find anywhere where it says that solar plants have to buy backup power from gas or coal plants. It says they have to be able to operate for 24h above seasonal average, "when called upon". Using batteries for this is explicitly allowed.

I guess the reason for this bill is stability of the grid. I'm not saying if this makes this bill good or bad, I'm not enough of an expert into electrical grids.

The original bill: https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/89R/billtext/pdf/SB00715S....
by wesselbindt | 2025-05-13 06:57:58+00:00
> He even interviewed a known terrorist on his show

This is incorrect. The kid you're referring to is not a member of the Houthi tribe, and there's no evidence he's a terrorist aside from him saying some angry stuff on social media (and what teenage boy hasn't, especially one living right next to a country committing genocide). I'm sorry but that's just not enough to call someone a terrorist, and calling him one anyway is pretty shitty. Words have meaning, please try to treat them as such.
by eru | 2025-05-13 06:58:20+00:00
Ecosystems have _finite capacity_ to cope with what we throw at them (and still be useful to us in the broadest sense).

The qualification in parens is just there to take care of the objection that no matter how hard we try, we won't be able to eradicate all life on earth with current technology. But we can make life pretty miserable for humans with current technology.

The benefit to us doesn't have to be in any monetary sense. Just the satisfaction of knowing there's a beautiful forest would count.
by firesteelrain | 2025-05-13 06:59:33+00:00
Recently there was a Spain/Portugal outage that caused loss of 60% of those countries overall power needs and those countries relied on solar. The high penetration of renewables without adequate storage or backup solutions made the grid more susceptible to frequency fluctuations. Texas has harsh weather and in recent years there has been issues with the resiliency of their power grid. Texas has issues with hail storms that damage the solar panel grid.

Due to several factors such as surging demand from AI data centers and manufacturers operating at full capacity, there is a natural gas turbine shortage. Without a natural gas turbine, you can’t add a solar farm to the grid. AND, without enough new gas turbines, Texas may be reluctant to add large, predominant scale solar because they can't guarantee reliability during low solar output.

So adding a battery backup requirement or use of natural gas for example may seem counter intuitive but Texas has a duty to provide reliable and redundant power to its customers
by cornholio | 2025-05-13 07:00:13+00:00
As a rule of thumb, 1 square meter receives about 1 kW of peak raw solar power when the sun is perpendicular. This should give you at least a rough magnitude of the problem instead of trusting the hallucinations of your AI.

Since you want to produce power all day, you would take about 20% of that to account for tilt variations and day night cycles, and another 20% to factor in cell efficiency.

So with adequate storage, one square meter of solar can generate an average of 40W of continuous electrical power, 24h per day. Let's round that down to 25W to take into consideration outages and maintenance, bad weather, spacing between panels for personnel access etc.

And there you have it 1GW/25W is about 40 square km with quite generous safety factors, an order of magnitude less than your AI figures. This is still a lot of land if you replace farmland with it, but still totally negligible compared with the millions of square km of hot desert the world has available for this use.

For example, scaling this 400x, to cover for the entire US electrical consumption, is still "only" 16000 sq.km , or 3% of the area of the Great Basins desert in the US, which is one of the smallish deserts of the world compared with Sahara, Ghobi, Kalahari, Australia, Arabia etc. Of course, there is little economic sense to build such a mega-solar farm and pay the cost of energy transport. In practice, we are seeing distributed production taking the cheapest available land nearby.
by writebetterc | 2025-05-13 07:00:49+00:00
You don't need to learn how git works internally to be able to use it. You need to know a lot about filesystems in order to use them: Folders, files, symbolic links, copy, cut, paste, how folders can exist on different devices, etc. There's just a tonne of assumed knowledge regarding them, and it's very obvious when you meet someone that doesn't have it (regular people often don't have all it).

Subversion also isn't some thing humming along invisibly in the background, it has its own quirks that you need to learn or you'll get stung.
by abc-1 | 2025-05-13 07:01:18+00:00
The most annoying thing about Hasan or any other streamer on any point in the political axis is their constant need to have “the right opinion” instead of bringing about any sort of actual change or reduction of suffering. They sit in a room, have all their meals delivered, and spout “the right opinion” to whoever their target audience is. Honestly, I don’t know how they don’t get bored of it. Probably all the money and attention helps, and some fake rationalization on how they’re the voice of reason and light in the world.
by ragequittah | 2025-05-13 07:01:30+00:00
I'll admit that I stopped looking at reddit for most game content lately (last year or 2) so my opinion might be outdated. But I do remember the new Assassin's Creed getting quite a lot of hate for gross reasons. It becomes oddly political much like many subs for TV shows and movies. Misogyny and racism are rampant.

That said I suppose if good moderators filter the rabble out there's bound to be some good communities. I just find that if you love a game it's usually best to steer well clear of the subreddit for it.
by forgotoldacc | 2025-05-13 07:01:40+00:00
People have really shot themselves with "boy who cried wolf" situations these past few years. Anyone who remotely disagrees with anything or has any concerns is instantly labeled as supporting (bad extremist thing). And there have been two major consequences of this: innocent people being labeled as extremists, and actual extremists being given a free pass because people just stopped caring about the endless finger pointing long ago.

I also don't know the guy beyond seeing his name a few times online. Don't know a single thing he said. But I've also reached a point where I don't care because I've seen so many people simply ask "what's the point of this?" and end up being called terrorist sympathizers.

Maybe he's bad. Maybe he's good. But there are so many efforts out there to build up absolute databases of random quotes people say to frame them as evil that I don't even want to contribute to either side by taking a stance. Because it's only a matter of time until some new thing becomes The Big Evil and some dumb thing I've said gets me labeled a terrorist.
by mdp2021 | 2025-05-13 07:02:23+00:00
Your rhetoric is improductive. And do avoid attributing intentions to others - especially that twisted, and through obscure (non-)arguments.

I simply factually suggested that it could be of interest to (re-)read the Rerum Novarum.

If you want to raise points, do that clearly and logically. Avoid sarcasm in general, because you must not know this world if you thought that there are not people around which do believe or just claim any statement in ⊥ - anything you could state somebody else could state convinced and persuaded, so we cannot know if you are joking. And your jokes must be clear to have a reason to be here.
by antalis | 2025-05-13 07:02:36+00:00
Firefox Mobile (Fenix) had just moved to Mozilla's Mercurial mozilla-central repository after using GitHub including for issues. https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/firefox-android/wiki#upcom...

Now, both the desktop and the mobile version will be on Github, and the "issues" will stay on Bugzilla.

This will take advantage of both GitHub's good search and source browsing and Git's familiar system.

As a former Firefox and Thunderbird contributor, I have to say that I used local search instead of trying to find something on the mozilla-central website.

Of course, when you're actively developing software, you search inside your IDE, but allowing to find things easily on the website makes it more welcoming for potential new contributors.
by masfoobar | 2025-05-13 07:03:10+00:00
As a Free software supporter, its just a matter of time before we lose out on our freedoms. Honestly, once Linus retires I do think Linux will continue to thrive with a good team but Linux, the kernel, will either have to adapt to current times (whatever that can be in the future) or something else will replace it and, likely, some AI aspect on top.

It wont be free software and, likely, it will be Microsoft.
by medv | 2025-05-13 07:03:43+00:00
Hello Hacker News.

I'm the author of a fx tool. In the last month I've been hard working on a new version of a fx. It brings a lot of improvements, general refactoring and a lot of fixes.

Please check them out I hope you gonna like it.

PS In Go `string` takes less space than `[]byte`! This can be substantial.
by dijit | 2025-05-13 07:04:08+00:00
> Everything surrounding code: issues, CICD, etc, is obviously another story. But it's not a story that is answered by distributed git either. (though I would love a good issue tracking system that is done entirely inside git)

Embrace, Extend..

(largely this is unfair, as plain git leaves much to be desired- but you can’t deny that the things surrounding git on github are very sticky).
by willvarfar | 2025-05-13 07:04:42+00:00
It is sad that being an engineering manager in the vast majority of tech companies is about politics not about engineering. A lot of engineers who opt for the management root learn this the very hard way.

The big persuasion missing from the list is persuading, both upwards and downwards, who should work on what.

It sounds super cynical but it is important to park the unproductive people on the unimportant work else nothing works. It is usually counterproductive to actually release people (the EM is rewarded for number of reports above all else) etc so you have to put the good people on what is important and somehow lend the bad people to the projects and competing teams to hamper them etc.

Sad but super true.
by eru | 2025-05-13 07:04:51+00:00
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_laws_in_Germany#Drinki...

It actually starts at age 14 for some stuff. And if you are with your parents (and not in a restaurant), I think it's up on them to decide, even if you are younger than 14. At least in practice.

Where I grew up, it's a fairly common tradition to let even primary school kids have a sip of Eierlikör (German Egg Liqueur) for New Year's Eve.

Britain has some interesting rules, too. I think their legal drinking age for beer in a pub is lower, if you are also having a meal with your beer.
by midnightclubbed | 2025-05-13 07:05:14+00:00
EA not making sports games for Dreamcast wasn’t a bad decision for EA. It cost Sega a huge amount of money to produce and license their own sports games exclusively for Dreamcast, not having EA sports was a huge blow.

And while NBA 2k destroyed NBA Live it took until 2009 for that to start happening (long after Sega ownership), mainly down to sliding standards in EA’s NBA Live titles and eventually some disastrous EA launches.
by johnduhart | 2025-05-13 07:06:33+00:00
> Yes it is. But the the 1st amendment does not say that any speech can have zero consequences for you.

The Government taking action against a citizen for voicing opinions it does not agree with falls pretty clearly into what the 1st amendment covers. This is not a "yelling fire in a crowded theater" type scenario where speech is being restricted for the benefit of many.
by thezoq2 | 2025-05-13 07:06:39+00:00
Ah right, I didn't know hardcaml has a simulator

> wrangling hand written modules with enormous I/O, stitching IP together

This is something where I'm confident a good type system can help significantly, part of the problem imo is that the module interfaces are often communicated with prefixes on variable names. The Spade type system bundles them together as one interface, and with methods on that interface you can start to transform things in a predictable way

Generating memory maps is also an obvious problem to solve with a language that attaches more semantics to things. I haven't looked into it with Spade, but I believe the Clash people are working on something there
by flohofwoe | 2025-05-13 07:06:57+00:00
In a centralized version control system with a single history, branching and merging is also much less important.

In git, working on your own branch is essential to not step on other people's feet and to get a clean history on a single main/dev branch (and tbf, git makes this easy for devs and text files). With a centralized version control system, both problems don't even exist in the first place.

When we did game development with a team of about 100 peeps (about 80 of those non-devs, and about 99% of the data under version control being in binary files) we had a very simple rule:

(1) do an update in the morning when you come to work, and (2) in the evening before you leave do a commit.

Everybody was working on the main branch all the time. The only times this broke was when the SVN server in the corner was running full and we either had to delete chunks of history (also very simple with svn), or get more memory and a bigger hard drive for the server.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-05-13 07:08:51+00:00
On one hand, centralization at a commercial provider isn't great.

On the other hand, the plethora of different self-hosted platforms with limited feature sets is a huge pain. Just finding the repo is often a frustrating exercise, and then trying to view, or worse, search the code without checking it out is often even more frustrating or straight out impossible.
by pinkmuffinere | 2025-05-13 07:09:01+00:00
Can you share a link about the podcast? I’d be interested to learn more.

From the Wikipedia page, it does indeed appear that the “whistleblower“ is no hero. He was whistleblowing over-scrutiny-of-military-personnel. He wasn’t whistleblowing the _murders_, but almost the opposite! Horrible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_McBride_(whistleblower)
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-13 07:09:27+00:00
Within the past few months, some brightly-colored stickers with high production values began appearing on lamp-posts in my neighborhood. And of course they feature QR codes.

At first I thought they were simply some sort of gang-related territory tag, and probably a fictitious "business" or "entity" and that the QR code would be nothing but misdirection. (It is not uncommon for gangs to tag using stickers that readily adhere to a surface; in the past we would often spot standard-issue "HELLO MY NAME IS" tags with custom Magic Marker "calligraphy".)

But I can also certainly entertain ideas of it being a rather obvious cannabis-delivery operation, especially considering the decriminalization of the stuff around these parts.
by wezdog1 | 2025-05-13 07:09:50+00:00
I take your point but simply throwing silicone at the problem doesn't make things all of a sudden better. Wind data can already be uplinked to aircraft through ACARS anyway. The problem is aviation is very dynamic. You can't fly the plane and get a bing bong message cleared to land and not be distracted by it. Voice comms are flawed but one of the benefits is you can hear them and monitor the aircraft state. ATC have systems which add another layer of protection for a misidentified runway for example.