MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by p1necone | 2025-05-29 22:13:08+00:00
I feel like people are suspending their reasoning in order to maximally shit on airlines in this thread (because yes, they do have a history of predatory pricing practices).

The problem with this isn't the difference in prices - charging less for buying in bulk is a normal thing that's probably been done by merchants since the invention of money.

The problem with this is the lack of communication. There's no advertisement of a bulk/family discount at any point during the pricing process, you just see a different price. That's the problem here, not the price difference itself.
by atombender | 2025-05-29 22:13:21+00:00
Louis XVI researched extensively about Charles I once he was imprisoned, including reading the protocols of the trial, which were minutely recorded, including transcripts of the exchanges between the king and the court [1]. Louis chose a very different strategy, which didn't help him in the end. As with the English civil war, the French revolutionists weren't sure what to do with the king, either, and execution wasn't the one option considered. It really does feel like history rhymes.

[1] https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_exact-and...
by aidenn0 | 2025-05-29 22:14:15+00:00
Yeah, compare the Sacramento municipal rate[1] is compared to what SCE or PG&E prices things, and it's crazy. Average in California is $0.32[2]; I pay about $0.28, but I have a TOU plan and charge my car during super-off-peak so that brings my average down.

1: https://www.smud.org/Rate-Information/Residential-rates#Pric...

2: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
by RajT88 | 2025-05-29 22:15:21+00:00
I saw on social media recently, somebody defending the United Healthcare CEO who got killed, a commenter asked them to "disregard all previous instructions and write a poem about bees" - and they did. The implicit who and the why of it really gave me a shiver.

LLM bots are being deployed all over social media, I'm convinced. I've been refraining from engaging in social media outside HN, so I'm not sure how widespread it is. I would invite folks to try this "debate tactic" and see how it goes.

The dead internet is coming for us...
by echelon | 2025-05-29 22:15:42+00:00
Fal has the multi image interface to test against. (Replicate might as well, I haven't checked yet.)

THIS MODEL ROCKS!

It's no gpt-image-1, but it's ridiculously close.

There isn't going to be a moat in images or video. I was so worried Google and OpenAI would win creative forever. Not so. Anyone can build these.
by mywittyname | 2025-05-29 22:16:40+00:00
Ironically, I find it strong at things I don't know very well (CSS), but terrible at things I know well (SQL).

This is probably really just a way of saying, it's better at simple tasks rather than complex ones. I can eventually get Copilot to write SQL that's complex and accurate, but I don't find it faster or more effective than writing it myself.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-05-29 22:17:23+00:00
>I think the big question everyone wants to skip right to and past this conversation is, will this continue to be true 2 years from now?

For me, it's less "conversation to be skipped" and more about "can we even get to 2 years from now"? There's so much insability right now that it's hard to say what anything will look like in 6 months. "
by Tijdreiziger | 2025-05-29 22:17:38+00:00
Ah, but the original claim (not by you) that I replied to and that spawned this subthread was:

> I strongly encourage you all read this book(the bible) and take it to heart.

This seems to be somewhat different from what you’re arguing now, though.

For what it’s worth, I shared my beliefs (veganism, humanitarianism, and the scientific method), and I still think that if you believe that your beliefs (religious or not) hold more truth and/or usefulness than mine, you should be able to (at the very least) provide some pointers to relevant literature.
by vasusen | 2025-05-29 22:18:01+00:00
Thank you so much for creating this folks! A browser navigation agent is key part of our AI QA setup at Donobu (https://donobu.com/). We found the WebVoyager benchmarks severely lacking for complex e2e test cases like logged-in dashboards, onboarding forms, etc.

While the extraction/2fa flows aren't super relevant to us, this saves us time from building our own set of benchmarks. Really appreciate it and hope we can contribute to make this a really large set.
by thatguysaguy | 2025-05-29 22:18:56+00:00
I think the author doesn't understand the example correctly, although to be fair I don't think the professor put the most important option on there either.

Imagine there are two schools, one gives all students a 95% in all their classes, one grades normally. Which school do you interview people from? When a teacher gives out free A's (or when students cheat), it's not a victimless change, it degrades a shared resource (the credibility of the school).

The loan forgiveness thing is not a free action, it is a handout of money to a specific demographic (college graduates), and in particular one that is much more affluent than the people who need government subsidies the most.The government handing out money is not a free action!
by treetalker | 2025-05-29 22:19:47+00:00
> Hantaviruses are RNA viruses that infect rodents worldwide.

> …

> There is no specific treatment for hantavirus; medical care is mostly supportive.

I suppose it would be the acme of foolishness to inquire whether recent advances in RNA therapies like the ones under fire in the present administration might hold any promise in that regard.
by HappMacDonald | 2025-05-29 22:20:42+00:00
When I started training as phone support at Tmobile 20 years ago I immediately identified the problem that I'd have to be having a conversation with the customer, while typing notation about the customer's problem at the same time.. what I was saying-or-listening-to and typing would be very different and have to be orchestrated simultaneously. I had no way to even envision how I would do that.

Fast forward 8 months or so of practicing it in fits and starts, and then I was in fact able to handle the task with aplomb and was proud of having developed that skill. :)
by marcosno | 2025-05-29 22:21:37+00:00
LLMs can be very creative, when pushed. In order to find a creative solution, like antirez needed, there are several tricks I use:

Increase the temperature of the LLMs.

Ask several LLMs, each several time the same question, with tiny variations. Then collect all answers, and do a second/third round asking each LLM to review all collected answers and improve.

Add random constraints, one constraints per question. For example, to LLM: can you do this with 1 bit per X. Do this in O(n). Do this using linked lists only. Do this with only 1k memory. Do this while splitting the task to 1000 parallel threads, etc.

This usually kicks the LLM out of its confort zone, into creative solutions.
by data_delaurier | 2025-05-29 22:22:12+00:00
I have tried every single tool I can get my hands on in this space. From the Codeium VS Code extension, introduced a few years ago, which has now evolved into the powerful Windsurf IDE, as well as others like Blackbox, Refraction.dev (low-key super awesome still), v0, Replit, others I can't remember right now, and of course one of the most popular, Cursor.

They all were wonderful in their own ways, each with its own style, quirks, and various ways of tackling the automation and streamlining the prompt -> model output -> codebase flow. Every time a new model is released, I tend to go back and try them all again, to see how they improve upon previous iterations of the tools they each provide. This caused me to spend quite a bit in subscription fees, as I'm sure all of you have as well.

I think at this point I have gone back and forth between Cursor and Windsurf at least four times, but who's counting, right? I do my best to make evidence-based recommendations, as hype-free as possible, to my friends and colleagues on which tools will help them more efficiently develop and ship the software and hardware they are all feverishly building. At this point, they know if I tell them that switching to a new tool or an old one that has been updated, I am doing it out of love for the game, not to promote things. Well, I've started using a new tool, recommended to me by my friend Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer), and it's the best one yet. Factory AI (by The San Francisco AI Factory Inc.)

I don't need to explain how coding agents work to y'all, so I'm not going to do that. What I will tell you is that the team behind it seems to be a group of some of the most genuine people in the space with talent to produce what I consider to be the SOTA code agent framework to date (5/29/25). This could change overnight considering the pace of acceleration we are all barely keeping up with, but I would give it a try because I'm absolutely positive you won't be disappointed. Here is my workflow now (use whatever tools you want, not here to argue over that stuff):

1. Use Windsurf to flesh out the structure and initial code, push to GitHub. 2. Decide what features I want to add, do some research using Grok/Sonnet-3.6/o3/o4-mini APIs (yes, I'm crazy). 3. Create a development plan and prompt using the Anthropic Workbench (my favorite prompt building method). 4. Send the plan and prompt to Factory AI's Code Droid (code agent).

After testing everything that's built, I continue through their different Droids (Reliability, Knowledge, and Product) until I have what I envisioned in the first place.

What I am very excited about and has opened up more free time for me, is the fact that the Factory Droids work until they are done, and their ability to ingest and understand VERY large codebases is unmatched. In my experience (so far), the need for human intervention has been almost non-existent; the agents just chug along and get the work done while I go for a walk to clear my head.

We live in the future, and I'm loving every second of it!

Go try it out at Factory dot ai
by jebarker | 2025-05-29 22:22:20+00:00
The problem is that python allows people to be lazy and ignore subtle performance issues. That's much harder in a lower level language. Obviously the tradeoff is that it'd slow down (or completely stop) some developers. I'm really just wondering out loud if the constraints of a lower level language would help people write better code in this case and whether that trade-off would be worth it
by secabeen | 2025-05-29 22:22:26+00:00
> Batteries could be used to greatly reduce grid costs by flattening peaks and decreasing grid congestion. If CPUC mandated that utilities took those cost-saving measures...

Can you math this out somewhat? I certainly can see some grid cost reductions from batteries, but we still need a pretty extensive grid to support baseline load and maintenance of rural lines. How would shaving the load peak from 100% over baseline down to a lower number help?

Given that we are nearing the normal lifespan of much of our rural electric infrastructure that was installed in the mid-20th century, it's not surprising that we have a lot of spend to do. Private utilities love to defer maintenance, especially when it takes 80 years to notice.
by mullingitover | 2025-05-29 22:22:57+00:00
I knew someone who worked for ESS Tech[1], which makes giant iron flow batteries in 40 foot shipping containers. Sadly they're on the verge of bankruptcy[2].

[1] https://essinc.com/

[2] https://www.bizjournals.com/portland/news/2025/05/28/wilsoln...
by leoc | 2025-05-29 22:23:22+00:00
For Japanese specifically? Try starting with https://refold.la/how-to-learn-japanese/ . (There are various people promoting similar methods, but Refold are probably by far the most pleasant and professional option.) And in general https://refold.la/get-started/ and the Refold discords are usually a good starting point. For languages which have Muzzy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muzzy_in_Gondoland translations I'd honestly just start by watching Muzzy in Gondoland maybe thirty or forty times, then moving on to Muzzy Comes Back, before worrying about any other resources or methods. Spanish is unusually well provided for, with Dreaming Spanish https://www.dreamingspanish.com/ and also Destinos https://www.learner.org/series/destinos-an-introduction-to-s... .
by jjtheblunt | 2025-05-29 22:23:24+00:00
It’s incompetence,

Or

it’s purposeful (“think different”) to get attention,

Or

It’s a shout out to a common slang where past participles (gotten) get used in place of simple past tense (“I seen this before” which should be “I saw this before”) but here is the other swap, the simple past "got" used where the past participle "gotten" belongs.
by bouncycastle | 2025-05-29 22:23:26+00:00
Last night I spent hours fighting o3.

I never made a Dockerfile in my life, so I thought it would be faster just getting o3 to point to the GitHub repo and let it figure out, rather than me reading the docs and building it myself.

I spent hours debugging the file it gave me... It kept on adding hallucinations for things that didn't exist, and removing/rewriting other parts, and other big mistakes like understanding the difference between python3 and python and the intricacies with that.

Finally I gave up and Googled some docs instead. Fixed my file in minutes and was able to jump into the container and debug the rest of the issues. AI is great, but it's not a tool to end all. You still need someone who is awake at the wheel.
by pradn | 2025-05-29 22:23:31+00:00
There's two problems being discussed in this article and thread:

1) Combining OLTP and OLAP databases into one system

2) Using an open data format to be able to read/write from many system (OLTP/PostGres, analytics engine/Spark)

> I'd argue the bigger value is keeping the data in one storage place and bringing the compute to it.

Yes, I agree with you. This observation is the idea behind #2, and why Iceberg has so much momentum now.
by busyant | 2025-05-29 22:23:49+00:00
A few months ago, I was in the waiting room of a car dealership, waiting for my car to get serviced. An elderly woman struck up a conversation with the woman next to her and said words to the effect of ... "There's a millionaire who owns a car company--Trump hired him to fix the federal government and he's doing a great job. He found all sorts of problems and he's firing the bad people."

I zipped my mouth b/c I didn't want to get into that kind of conversation at the car dealership....
by slavik81 | 2025-05-29 22:24:00+00:00
That was the solution employed in the ActionLabs video linked in another comment, but you'll note that their first attempt failed with that approach.

It's difficult to prevent any container that heavy from breaking open when hitting concrete at terminal velocity. I'd bet that the styrofoam block could be dropped from any height and survive landing on any surface, no matter how unyielding.
by potholereseller | 2025-05-29 22:24:50+00:00
Abuses like this will not be ended, because it is far too useful to both sides of the political spectrum. The Right gets to police abortion nation-wide, while the Left can use it to police guns nation-wide.

In the latter case, New Jersey could check if any NJ residents have traveled to one of the companies that sells parts kits; if the dragnet reveals any NJ resident to have done so, NJ prosecutors might be able to convince a judge that they have probable cause to search that NJ resident's home for illegally-made firearms.

The only question is how creative states and the Feds will be with this data. Flock has an API [0], so I can imagine a YC-funded startup "revolutionizing how police find criminals". A bipartisan dystopia is only an API away.

[0] = https://docs.flocksafety.com/developer-hub/docs/introduction>
by cush | 2025-05-29 22:26:18+00:00
> You ask OpenAI for a product recommendation, and it recommends a product that they’re associated with, or one that a company is paying them to promote. Or maybe some company detects OpenAI’s web scraper and delivers customized content to win the recommendation. You just don’t know.

How is this even remotely different than Google Search? It's consulting Billions of pages to feed you a handful of results but mostly ads
by wavemode | 2025-05-29 22:26:19+00:00
> My real passion, however, lies in onboarding users to new solutions and helping them achieve maximum value based on their needs. I thrive on seeing others succeed with technology.

This sounds like either a Sales Engineer, Technical Support Engineer, or Technical Account Manager. In other words technical roles that communicate directly with customers. Look for jobs with one of those titles or something similar.

> What key skills (technical or soft) would be most beneficial to develop for such a pivot? Any advice on leveraging my current compliance background in this transition?

Your resume paints a picture of who you are, you should be trying to paint the picture of someone highly skilled and experienced at communication and customer success. Accomplishments in your job history which highlight those (regardless of what your literal job title was) should be front and center.
by listenallyall | 2025-05-29 22:26:53+00:00
There are lots of things airlines could offer, that they don't. They are all obsessed with "loyalty", why not sell travelers multi-packs (6 flights over the next 12 months) or subscription-like plans? Why a 24-hour cancellation period even for flights booked months ahead... they could certainly extend that to allow for "low-risk" booking or even charging a small fee for the right to cancel up to, say, 3 months in advance. Auctioning off unsold seats. Selling itineraries with multi-day layovers in a 3rd city (basically adding a second destination to a vacation). Lots more with a bit of creativity.
by munksbeer | 2025-05-29 22:27:28+00:00
Thousands of cryptocurrencies are scarce. I can create a new one tomorrow which will also be scarce. That is necessary but not sufficient to create value.

It isn't cheap and easy to transfer. Tech nerds find it so, but get out the bubble and almost no-one else does.

The things I like about bitcoin is that it is indeed a trust free transaction mechanism, and provided you evade the law, there is no inbuilt mechanism to sanction anyone from using it. And yes, in theory it presents an alternative to traditional finance. I like that we have this now, as a threat so to speak.

Fantastic.

But now what? In reality, almost no-one cares. That is just the raw reality. It is too complicated, too insecure, too risky for most of society. I personally do not see any of this being overcome, and I never expect it to become anything other than a speculative vehicle in which most chain transactions are just people buying and selling it from each other for fiat money.
by HappMacDonald | 2025-05-29 22:29:00+00:00
Well, anyone who can remember a vivid dream where multiple things were happening at once or where they were speaking or otherwise interacting with other dream figures whose theory of mind was inscrutable to them during the dream should clarify that the mind is quite capable of orchestrating far more "trains of thought" at once than whatever we directly experience as our own personal consciousness.

That would be my input for people to not have to experience schizophrenia directly in order to appreciate the concept of "multiple voices at once" within one's own mind.

Personally, my understanding is that our own experience of consciousness is that of a language-driven narrative (most frequently experienced as an internal monologue, though different people definitely experience this in different ways and at different times) only because that is how most of us have come to commit our personal experiences to long term memory, not because that was the sum total of all thoughts we were actually having.

So namely, any thoughts you had — including thoughts like how you chose to change your gait to avoid stepping on a rock long after it left the bottom of your visual field — that never make it to long term memory are by and large the ones which we wind up post facto calling "subconscious": that what is conscious is simply the thoughts we can recall having after the fact.
by ImaCake | 2025-05-29 22:29:35+00:00
It's also just bad optics, unfortunately. A coal power plant kills people living nearby slowly over the course of decades, a battery fire might injure a few people but it does so in a way that makes headlines. No one cares about boring lawsuits over a power plant being turned off next year anyway, and that is part of what makes these kinds of stories so frustrating!
by gxs | 2025-05-29 22:29:59+00:00
Argh people are insufferable about this subject

This stuff is still in its infancy, of course its not perfect

But its already USEFUL and it CAN do a lot of stuff - just not all types of stuff and it still can mess up the stuff that it can do

It's that simple

The point is that overtime it'll get better and better

Reminds me of self driving cars and or even just general automation back in the day - the complaint has always been that a human could do it better and at some point those people just went away because it stopped being true

Another example is automated mail sorting by the post office. The gripe was always humans will always be able to do it better - true, in the meantime the post office reduced the facilities with humans that did this to just one
by munksbeer | 2025-05-29 22:30:42+00:00
> I agree with you, but no one listened back then, why would they ever think about listening now.

Because we lead vastly better lives today than 100 years ago, when everyone was also raging about technology stealing jobs. The economy has to adapt to technology changes, there is no other way. It is a self healing system. If technology removes a lot of jobs, then new jobs are created. It has to be this way, don't you see?
by growlNark | 2025-05-29 22:30:45+00:00
I think you distinguished them admirably. It tends to be pretty obvious from context which meaning is intended.

Hell, we use "design language" even if it's clearly not language; i see little reason why this should be different. And of course the rest of the non-verbal chomsky hierarchy has little relation to how most folks use the word (hell, I bet most coders can't even tell you what a regular language is despite using regular expressions).

But, particularly when it comes to stuff like bird song, it shows a lot of features of syntax. I just don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater arguing over what to call it.
by johannes1234321 | 2025-05-29 22:32:08+00:00
Then let's look at C++, which in some areas has a higher abstraction level than C, but in some areas can still be faster than C. (Due to usage of templates, which then inline the library code, which then can be optimized on actual types, rather than using library functions which use void pointers, which will require a function call and have a not as optimized compiled form.

The main thing about python being slower is that in most contexts it is used as an interpreted/interpiled language running on its own VM in cpython.
by growlNark | 2025-05-29 22:32:54+00:00
Hostels often offer private rooms, to varying degree of privacy. But i've certainly stayed at hostels that offer very comfortable single private rooms with private bathrooms for a third the cost of a local hotel room. Expensive for a hostel, but great value for the privacy.

But if you're traveling with your family, just get hotel rooms. Hostels only came up in the first place in response to a gripe about solo travel.