MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sam | 2025-05-09 13:11:14+00:00
We are careful to always specify what kind of “breakeven” or “gain” is being referred to on all graphs and statements about the performance of specific experiments in this paper.

Energy gain (in the general sense) is the ratio of fusion energy released to the incoming heating energy crossing some closed boundary.

The right question to ask is then: “what is the closed boundary across which the heating energy is being measured?” For scientific gain, this boundary is the vacuum vessel wall. For facility gain, it is the facility boundary.
by trelane | 2025-05-09 13:11:15+00:00
> If the facts support those allegations, then absolutely yes

See, here's the thing: almost everyone believes this about themselves.

There is always enough difference between any given pairing of cases that one can retain their belief in their own fairness. And there is no shortage of partisan coverage that will assist you in believing that the cases are different.

And it's not like there is an incentive for holding _your own side_ accountable when the other side is not being held accountable.
by KaiserPro | 2025-05-09 13:11:25+00:00
Firstly, this is an awesome website. I was looking for some high resolution stamp images a few weeks ago, these would have been perfect.

However the thing that really caught my interest is the font they are using. Yes its designed to look old, nothing new. But what is new is that the letters are not all at a fixed level, they move up and down minutely. Is that a product of the font, or something that is done in the rendering?
by esafak | 2025-05-09 13:11:32+00:00
In a preprint titled "Superintelligent Agents Pose Catastrophic Risks: Can Scientist AI Offer a Safer Path?" (https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.15657), Yoshua Bengio et al propose a safer alternative to AGI through "scientist AIs" that explain but do not have agency, which they define as: "Agents observe their environment and act in it in order to achieve goals".

I think non-agency is crucial to preventing catastrophes, but even without it models could induce humans to take action on their behalf, to similar ends.
by trollbridge | 2025-05-09 13:12:13+00:00
A confessional isn’t a counselling office and a penitent wouldn’t go in there to discuss future acts they plan to do.

The general idea is that confessors shouldn’t be civil agents (particularly in the confessional) conducting investigations on each person who comes in.

And no, priests aren’t treated like any other person. You or I (assuming neither of us are in some profession like teacher, police officer etc) don’t have to go “report” to the police if we think someone is in danger of repeating a crime.
by bluGill | 2025-05-09 13:12:19+00:00
Compare to a doctor who needs nearly a decade of special training. Or an engineer who needs a complex university training program.

Yes some are better than others. However there is still a vast gulf in skill between those people than engineers (much less doctors), while the gap between them and someone off the street is much less. (the article doesn't say how long it takes someone to get to that high skilled state or even if it is possible to train to that level - if someone can show me data on this I might change my mind on skill)
by maintainarmsx | 2025-05-09 13:12:29+00:00
Real life interaction is anything but strictly meticulous. Inside an application (in silicon without bugs, not being hit by stray cosmic rays, not having software logic bug) things may seem ideal, but the moment you try to move a pole on a motor 5 cm forward, and 5cm backward, every day at the same time, you'll notice that ideal will have dismantled itself off the mount within two weeks
by dirtyhippiefree | 2025-05-09 13:12:30+00:00
Billboard had to recalculate its charts because so many of us stopped paying for what is essentially extortion (Jammie Thomas, statutory damages of $1.92 million ($80,000 per song, within the allowed range of $750 to $150,000).

Streaming didn’t kill sales, and yes it was cheap…and not in dollars…
by Bender | 2025-05-09 13:13:19+00:00
Not all tech is political. People can discuss the non political tech here without issue. For the political issues related to tech one could spin up their own similar site to HN, a forum or Mastodon or some other platform of their choosing. It will get heated so put it behind a CDN and use a throw-away registrar, domain, bank, etc... If feeling really adventurous use one of the chan platforms to discourage identities. For more fun create a web-ring of sorts and link to each others experiments. A person could link to their site in their profile ideally with some warning.
by azalemeth | 2025-05-09 13:13:38+00:00
I've found AntennaPod [1] absolutely brilliant for android podcasts -- it _just works_, downloads the audio files, is robust, etc. Very high quality software. This looks a bit more like a long-term storage solution for podcasts though, rather than shorter term listening. And of course with excellent metadata integration.

[1] https://antennapod.org/
by blitzar | 2025-05-09 13:14:07+00:00
LLMs are a solution in search of a problem.

The first problem they have gained traction on is programming auto complete, and it is useful.

Generating summaries, pretty marginal benefit (personally I find it useless). Writing emails, quicker just to type "FYI" and press send than instruct the ai. More problems that needed solving will emerge, but it will take time.
EatDoSleep – AI Travel Planner with Free Membership
by eatdosleep | 2025-05-09 13:14:30+00:00
Hey HN, I’m excited to share EatDoSleep (https://www.eatdosleep.com), a micro-SaaS I’ve been working on to simplify travel planning with AI. It’s designed for solo travelers, groups, or anyone who wants a seamless way to plan trips without juggling endless tabs. I’d love your feedback to help make it better!

What It Does:

• AI-Powered Itineraries: Generate hour-by-hour travel plans with locations, photos, and curated details in seconds. • Save & Share: Save plans to your profile and share them with friends or the community. • Social Features: Follow other travelers, like/comment on plans, or co-plan with friends. • Book & Edit: Add hotel/tour bookings to your plan and edit anytime. • Inspiration: Discover trending plans from other users to spark ideas.

Tech Stack:

• Built with Next.js for a fast, server-rendered UI. • PostgreSQL for the database.

What’s Coming:

• Multi-City Trips: Based on user feedback, we’re working on multi-stop itineraries with transport options like trains and buses. • Expanded Destinations: Some users noted missing cities—we’re actively growing our database, adding more destinations daily. If you search for a spot and it’s not there, let me know which one, and I’ll prioritize it!

Challenges I’d Love Help With:

• Traction: Struggling with organic traffic. Any tips on growth for a travel SaaS (SEO, content, or low-budget marketing)? • Destination Coverage: How do you handle scaling location data for a global audience?

I built EatDoSleep because travel planning often feels like a chore—scattered tools, outdated info, and no easy way to collaborate. My goal is to make it as intuitive as chatting with a travel-savvy friend. Try it out (it’s free!), create a plan, and let me know what you think. I’d love to hear about it. Looking forward to your thoughts!
by soared | 2025-05-09 13:14:44+00:00
The high backed chair gif example is interesting - the way it’s animated it would completely fall apart and be unstable. But if you built it in reverse, it would work fine.

But it also shows the weirdness of the solution - in places where larger bricks make sense, multiple smaller bricks are used instead. In a section where a 2x6 should be repeated, in on instance of the repetition it uses tow 1x6s. It’s weird.

Cool idea.
by ajsisbdjxbx | 2025-05-09 13:14:54+00:00
No, but you can understand them if given time. And you can rely on them to be some degree of reliable approaching 100% (and when they fail it will likely be in a consistent way you can understand with sufficient time, and likely fix).

LLMs don’t have these properties. Randomness makes for a poor abstraction layer. We invent tools because humans suffer from this issue too.
by nabla9 | 2025-05-09 13:15:01+00:00
You read it wrong. Here is who it applies to:

>(a) When any member of the clergy, practitioner, county coroner or medical examiner, law enforcement officer, professional school personnel, registered or licensed nurse, social service counselor, psychologist, pharmacist, employee of the department of children, youth, and families, licensed or certified child care providers or their employees, employee of the department of social and health services, juvenile probation officer, diversion unit staff, placement and liaison specialist, responsible living skills program staff, HOPE center staff, state family and children's ombuds or any volunteer in the ombuds' office, or host home program has reasonable cause to believe that a child has suffered abuse or neglect, he or she shall report such incident, or cause a report to be made, to the proper law enforcement agency or to the department as provided ...

>(b) When any person, in his or her official supervisory capacity with a nonprofit or for-profit organization, has reasonable cause to believe that a child has suffered abuse or neglect caused by a person over whom he or she regularly exercises supervisory authority, he or she shall report such incident, or cause a report to be made, to the proper law enforcement agency, provided that the person alleged to have caused the abuse or neglect is employed by, contracted by, or volunteers with the organization and coaches, trains, educates, or counsels a child or children or regularly has unsupervised access to a child or children as part of the employment, contract, or voluntary service. ....
by lazyhummingbird | 2025-05-09 13:15:06+00:00
I know a few of the leaders designing and developing Microsoft’s AI applications for the Gates Foundation.

I think you’re on the right track, and, alongside the scale of service (reaching more people and more topics with an average level of advice or recognition), there’s a second component to it: scale of analysis. The newly possible solutions that AI advances have created include more than those famous models that answer broad prompts with art, copy, or code.

They also include focused, sometimes incomprehensible tasks which can only be done at an impactful scale due to the creation of deep learning and advances in compute-inexpensive language understanding, computer vision, and audio analysis:

A network of affordable, durable, solar powered, LoRa meshed audio sensors analyzed by a model to diagnose changes in the biodiversity of the Amazon and other rainforests (via ambient bird and animal calls across thousands of species). Visual analysis done on a cheap camera network estimates herd sizes of larger, silent animals.

A model that analyzes satellite imagery to evaluate major shifts in the industrial use of land, including tracking the national development of solar farms to evaluate nations receiving new energy grants.

A social analysis bot that tracks the rapid introduction of propaganda narratives or intentional agitation by foreign state actors (Russian bot farms), including building a map of associated IPs. Sadly, the social networks basically shrugged when given this data, so Msft gave it to LEAs.

These things are being done at a scale that would be incomprehensible to an organization of people.

Scale of analysis tasks are still, IMO the smartest use of AI today, despite the fashionable trend of GPT and the promise of AGI. A few models to spark ideas:

Recognition tasks with a dictionary too deep for human experts to grok when scaled up - like identifying thousands of wildlife

Recognition tasks with a timescale too rapid or sudden for human attention - Amazon Prime Vision predicting a QB sack in a football game before it happens

Recognition tasks when human vigilance or sensitivity would miss an occasional or slight occurrence - measuring eccentricities in electrical signals, vibrations, etc. to predict the failure of industrial equipment
by Calwestjobs | 2025-05-09 13:15:30+00:00
this is manipulative

coal power plant needs to have 100 or so rail cars worth of material brought every single day. so you are simplifying too much.

every person doing anything with power generation should put into spreadsheet, what quantities of material is needed to provide power capacity for entire grid.

and you need people, infrastructure to bring, prepare, load that material. which adds COST OF LOCKING PEOPLE, locking workforce for nonsensical jobs. so if someone drives train supplying coal plant with coal he can not do programming job, job in services etc... labor/workforce "opportunity cost"

with PV + battery you bring material once per 10-15 years. and it is not in quantities as in fossil. and one coal plant worth of personnel can manage higher amount of generating capacity in PV/battery

Nuclear plant of ANY KIND will have to have even bigger workforce than whole coal plant, just to do NONTRIVIAL maintenance. just simple microcontroller, sensor.... used in nuclear power plant has to be made available for duration of plant lifetime 30-40 years. you can use any inverter, solar panel in pv, you can interchange them, mix them, this is not as simple with nuclear plant.

people involved in providing energy services and citizens drawing energy from grid, should start think like producers AND consumer, not only like consumers. that way a lot of "grid problem" will be easier to deal with.
by wat10000 | 2025-05-09 13:16:00+00:00
Why would innocent people confess to child abuse?

No, it's not hard to imagine those kinds of laws, but that doesn't mean this law has to be bad as well. You have to look at the content of a law, not just its shape, to judge it. The only difference between a law making it illegal to punch someone in the nose and a law making it illegal to make the sign of the cross is the details of the arm movements.
by ricokatayama | 2025-05-09 13:16:23+00:00
What's going on with Figma? After the recent announcements and a shift towards a less professional audience, I feel the product is becoming increasingly bloated, confusing, and complex. This is quite the opposite of what made me switch from Sketch to Figma: a straightforward app with good collaboration features. Now, Figma offers too many options, has a confusing pricing structure, and an approach that slightly repels me. After canceling the Adobe deal, it seems they want to create the Figma Suite themselves to craft an appealing story for the IPO.

The issue is that nobody uses the Adobe Suite. At its core, it gives a poor and unfocused experience.

After that, I revisited the Sketch website to see how our old friends are positioning themselves these days. The message still resonates.
by swiftcoder | 2025-05-09 13:16:30+00:00
They are a fringe movement that landed on the incredible PR machine that was "mommy bloggers", parlayed that over into wellness influencers on tiktok/instagram, and figured out how to tie themselves into the web of other conspiracy theories that all fringe wackos believe...

Ever met a flat earther, a Qanon, or a chemtrails guy? I'll put good money they also believe that vaccines cause autism
by Piskvorrr | 2025-05-09 13:17:12+00:00
I have been trying. As I may not have been entirely clear the first time:

It's not that hard to wrap your python/java/whatever app in a polyglot executable that will run on your Linux box, on your Mac, and on your Windows box. Here's a much harder target: "I would like to take this to any of such boxes, of reasonably vanilla config, and get it to run there, or at least crawl. 'Start and catch fire' doesn't count, 'exit randomly' doesn't count." The least problematic way to do this is "assume Java", and even that is wildly unsuccessful (versions and configs and JVMs, oh my!). The second least problematic is "webpage" (unless you are trying to interact with any hardware).

The differences in boxes within an OS are often as large as differences across OSes. Docker was supposed to help with this by "we'll ship your box then," and while the idea works great, the assumption "there's already a working Docker, and/or you can just drop a working Docker" is...not great: you just push everything up a level of abstraction, yet end up with the original problem unsolved and unchanged. (There's an actual solution "ship the whole box, hardware and everything," but the downsides are obvious)
by zahlman | 2025-05-09 13:17:32+00:00
To "show a concrete example" I would need a question ID. (As I've explained in other posts, deletion is probably not a problem; deletion on Stack Overflow is normally "soft", and I have the reputation needed to see those posts.)

I'm not familiar with Gradle (I think that's a Java build system?), but if I saw what actually happened, I could probably understand well enough.
by michaelt | 2025-05-09 13:17:53+00:00
The warehouse automation industry has long had problems with scaling systems up.

A system that works well with 15 robots will often fall apart if scaled up to 150 or 1500 robots. Reliability, planning algorithm complexity, radio performance, all sorts of issues start to come up.

That’s why Hatteland patented the autostore tech in ~1995 and by the time the patents expired they only supported ~100 robots.

It’s not always easy to appreciate, because everyone publicises when they install a new automation system, but nobody publicises it if they scrap it 18 months later. Being discreet about it is better for the share price.

Of course there’s still a perfectly good market for less scalable automation; grocery just has crazy financials.
by akimbostrawman | 2025-05-09 13:17:54+00:00
>You created a strawman from a position I didn't imply or stated, since I was merely responding to your claim.

I said privacy and anonymity is important to prevent bad people robbing people, you said that criminals can use it too, I said so can anything good too but is no argument against using them. You should look up what strawman actually means before using it as gotcha

>What does "safe" and "stable" countries mean here? These aren't concrete words to be using if you're not going to back it up by examples.

Needing an example for bad coutries or environments existing??? You know what you are right there does not exist such countries, my bad it was just a strawman because we live in heaven on earth.

>And it's fine to advocate for privacy due safety but you cannot proclaim there's no consequences of this and implying then that it's "better" because of this is naïve at best.

Never said there wasn't. literally anything has consequences, i just choose freedom with "risks" above controlling tyranny that tracks, surveils and controls every transactions that claim safety.

>Using that quote outside of the context it was meant to address is a bit cheesy

It is very fitting against anti freedom and privacy rhetoric fueled by fear.

>And also extremely prone to support criminals/government seeking to destabilize/promote abuse and victims of said economic abuse/scams have far less protection.

And also extremely prone to support good individuals against these very same things and a lot more. Your fear mongering works in the other direction too. And to quote yourself "these aren't concrete words to be using if you're not going to back it up by examples"
by globnomulous | 2025-05-09 13:19:03+00:00
This is really surprising.

One of the first things I learned when I started shipping APIs and software packages is that the behavior you expose and the interface you provide for it have to be written in stone. The alternative is to break code and other packages that depend on it. Your package's changes are always somebody else's bugs. Compile-time errors and static analysis provide helpful guarantees and reduce suffering, but that doesn't change the fact that when you introduce changes you're still throwing Legos on the floor of someone's bedroom while they sleep.

Major-version revisions by definition allow for breaking changes, but a breaking change needs strong justification: either you know nobody or few users are using what you've changed, or there's broad consensus that there's a bug (but one that didn't need to be fixed with a minor-version update, so it's probably a design problem, not a code bug), or the people using it broadly agree on the need for or benefit of the change.
by boomskats | 2025-05-09 13:19:20+00:00
I really like the UX of this. Very usable on a Wacom enabled android tablet.

Don't know if your spline editing mechanism (i.e. the ability to drag the line around from an aribtrary point rather than tweaking the individual handles) is something you came up with yourself or borrowed from elsewhere, but I really really like it.

Only thing I noticed is that touch scrolling doesn't work on the tree on the left. Otherwise it's very smooth.

Have you implemented any keyboard shortcuts?
by zozbot234 | 2025-05-09 13:19:55+00:00
> Awesome! Reminds me of the good old days of QuickBasic and SCREEN 13, when you could write very small programs with fullscreen graphics.

That's a very inefficient approach nowadays. Modern hardware uses accelerated graphics throughout, including for simple 2D rendering the sort of which you would've written in QuickBasic back in the day. Even more complex 2D (where the 3D-render pipeline doesn't help as much) is generally best achieved by resorting to GPU-side compute, as seen e.g. in the Linebender Vello project. This is especially relevant at higher resolutions, color depths and frame rates, where the approach of pushing pixels via the CPU becomes even more clearly an unworkable one.
by harperhuang | 2025-05-09 13:20:47+00:00
Thank you for your comment and concern.

I'd like to clarify a few points about this project:

1. Ghiblio Net is not exclusively designed for Ghibli styles, but rather offers over 30 different artistic styles to choose from, with Ghibli being just one of them.

2. These style capabilities are actually based on ChatGPT 4o's existing drawing functions - I've simply created a more user-friendly interface to access these capabilities.

3. The website includes many non-studio creative and fun styles, aiming to provide users with diverse artistic expression options.

4. My intention was to let more people experience the joy of AI artistic creation, not to specifically replicate the work of any particular studio.
Ask HN: Mobile devs – what do you hate about current mobile ad networks?
by alc90 | 2025-05-09 13:20:51+00:00
I’ve been talking to a number of indie app developers recently, and one thing that keeps coming up is frustration with current ad networks—low transparency, poor UX control, limited payouts, privacy issues, and unclear pricing.

On iOS, many devs lean toward subscriptions and paid apps, while Android has historically relied more on ads for free apps—but in both cases, there’s often a desire for better options when ads are part of the mix.

If you’ve ever used mobile ads in your app (or avoided them on purpose), I’d love to hear:

What matters most to you when integrating ads into your app? What’s your biggest pain point with existing solutions like AdMob, Unity Ads, etc.? Are there features or improvements you wish existed in an ad platform? What role do privacy, design control, and pricing transparency play in your decision-making?

I’m exploring an idea called CapinoAds - a lightweight, privacy-first alternative to traditional ad networks - and I’d much rather shape it based on real developer needs than assumptions. Would love to hear your perspective.

If you’ve got thoughts or experiences, I’d really appreciate anything you’re willing to share.