MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sunray2 | 2025-04-28 22:30:40+00:00
Very interesting!

What's the fundamental physical limits here? Namely, timing precision, latency and jitter? How fast could PyXL bytecode react to an input?

For info, there is ARTIQ: vaguely similar thing that effectively executes Python code with 'embedded level' performance:

https://m-labs.hk/experiment-control/artiq/

ARTIQ is quite common in quantum physics labs. For that you need very precise and determining timing. Imagine you're interfering two photons as they reach a piece of glass, so that they can interact. It doesn't get faster than photons! That typically means nanosecond timing, sub-microsecond latency.

How ARTIQ does it is also interesting. The Python code is separate from the FPGA which actually executes the logic you want to do. In a hand-wavy way, you're then 'as fast' as the FPGA. How, though? The catch is, you have to get the Python code and FPGA gateware talking to each other, and that's technically difficult and has many gotchas. In comparison, although PyXL isn't as performant, if it makes it simpler for the user, that's a huge win for everyone.

Congrats once again!
by LeafItAlone | 2025-04-28 22:31:12+00:00
I’m not exactly sure what point you are trying to make. The specs to which you refer are also specs which the component are _rated_ at. But that’s still only a (very high) % of components. Issues do arise with individual components. Unless it is wide spread, it is not a scandal. I have worked in the industry as well as do it as a hobby. You have a very rose colored view of it.

Lemon phones make it into the hands of consumers. I had one myself a few years ago where it overheated and shut down. One offs don’t make the news because you bring it in and it’s swapped out.
by elktown | 2025-04-28 22:32:15+00:00
This is goes for a lot of things in tech unfortunately. For example, being stuck in a SRE/devops amusement park can be incredibly frustrating and surprisingly resource intense.

Sometimes it feels like we could use some kind of a temperance movement, because if one can just manage to walk the line one can often reap great rewards. But the incentives seem to be pointing in the opposite direction.
by em-bee | 2025-04-28 22:33:08+00:00
I just want to note that asking people with severe autistic symptoms may be as pointless as asking a person with alzheimer

well that is the ethical question, isn't it? i mean for severe symptoms that cause obvious problems, sure. but what about lesser symptoms? where do we draw the line? the affected person should have a say in that, and, what i find much more important, outsiders need to be neutral. while those affected obviously can't be neutral about it, those outside often aren't either. we define what is normal, and we try to explain every deviation from normal as a problem that needs to be fixed.

i am not diagnosed, but i do have behaviors that i think are not normal. they are not getting in the way of my life, so i don't need them fixed, nor do i want to fix them, but if i were to be diagnosed then there sure is someone who would insist that all those diagnosed should be fixed whether they want it or not.

and even worse those that want to take away my autonomy because they believe that anyone diagnosed is not capable of leading a normal life and should not be allowed to do certain things, such as raising children.

did you see the movie "i am sam"? sam is one of those with severe autism who as you say don't have a frame of reference for their own disability. regardless of whether sam could be cured, or whether he should be cured, it should be possible to create an environment where he can live together with his daughter. who gets custody should not even matter. you don't separate siblings either just because one sibling is not able to care for the other. so why separate sam and his daughter? it's done in the belief that children better be raised by normal people and that the bond they have with their own less capable parents doesn't matter.

the point i am trying to make is, cure or not, first of all, as a society we need to make accommodations for those who are ill or disabled. we do it for those using wheelchairs or for blind or deaf people, so why not for autistic people as well?

instead of changing every individual to conform to society, i believe society should adapt to accommodate all individuals so each one can live a dignified life.
by ggm | 2025-04-28 22:33:50+00:00
> The efficiency over an entire storage cycle is slightly lower than that of a conventional pumped storage power plant, at 75 to 80 percent. This calculation is based on a storage park with six spheres, a total power capacity of 30 megawatts, and a capacity of 120 megawatt-hours, with 520 storage cycles per year. StEnSea spherical storage is particularly suitable for two business models: for arbitrage, i.e., buying electricity at low and selling at high market prices, and for providing ancillary services to stabilize power grids.

So it's workable, it's 10 percentage points or so less efficient than land based pumped hydro, it works optimally at around 600m-800m of water depth. It's main function is arbitrage and time shifting for stability of service. Which means, coupled to wind sources, or solar, where for some reason land batteries or land pumped hydro in dams is not feasible.

Land based pumped hydro is somewhat invasive. It has big upfront costs. This rig may be more expensive per unit energy but is less intrusive and has incremental deployment capabilities.

Nothing under water is easy. Maintenance of any pumping component underwater is a burden. And, the life down there is also probably adversely affected although this may be less than the alternatives.

I was disappointed manufactured giant sea-vent tubes with wind turbines up top didn't happen at scale. Felt mechanistically much less burdensome, exploits the tidal energy we have. The kind of thing you can do anywhere with consistent tide patterns and a cliff face. Maybe this system can couple with it.
by philipov | 2025-04-28 22:34:25+00:00
The problem with revolutions is that when the prevailing power structure is turned upside down, it allows the most ruthless people to rise to the top, from where they unleash waves of terror to eliminate opposition, consolidating control in their bid to forge a new power structure.

This is what happened in France, what happened in Russia, and what has happened in many other cases. It is not an ideological phenomenon, has nothing to do with communism, and it happens because a society refuses to reform for so long that the system collapses under its own corruption. We are heading down that same path by refusing to institute moderate reforms while we still have the option to do so.

And of course, the chaos of revolution is not the only way for a vicious tyrant to gain power and institute a reign of terror...
by georgeecollins | 2025-04-28 22:35:13+00:00
I remember when BART was first built and San Mateo county opted out of BART. You couldn't take BART to SFO or even South San Francisco. Now they are talking about extending it to San Jose? This may sound very Californian, but I always support trains because once you have it it doesn't go away and eventually you get more that makes the train even more useful.
by maccard | 2025-04-28 22:36:31+00:00
Disagree on both points. Anyone who has shipped a game in unity has dealt with object pooling, flipping to structs instead of classes, string interpolation, and replacing idiomatic APIs with out parameters of reused collections.

Similarly, anyone who has shipped a game in unreal will know that memory issues are absolutely rampant during development.

But, the cure rust presents to solve these for games is worse than the disease it seems. I don’t have a magic bullet either..
by Spooky23 | 2025-04-28 22:37:00+00:00
Sure it does. You just haven’t seen it.

Download OtterAI. Or run voice memos all day, load it into NotebookLM and it about your day. Hell, setup whisper on your MacBook and you can chug away at pretty significant quantities of audio.

I’ve seen solutions that process audio from hundreds of multi-party meetings and can do all sorts of analysis. In one case, it can do realtime sentiment analysis and alert security when an encounter is getting tense.
by socalgal2 | 2025-04-28 22:37:19+00:00
I thought they were unclear if LA-Bakerfield is even possible.

My understanding comes from a podcast that wasn't about the rail at all, it was about how to make decisions. In the podcast they gave the example that if you decide to have a music box and a dancing monkey at a fair to make money, which do you do first, make the music box or train the monkey. The answer is, train the monkey, because if you can't train the monkey there is no point in making the music box (something you know can be made).

Her point was people delude themselves into thinking they're making progress on a project by starting with the easy stuff. But the easy stuff is pointless if the hard stuff is impossible.

She gave the example of the California high-speed rail. They're building the flat easy part first but engineers have not figured out how they're going to build the train between Bakersfield and Los Angeles through the Tehachapi Mountains. Until they've figured that out the flat part is a waste of time and a false example of progress.
by nicksergeant | 2025-04-28 22:37:24+00:00
I'm building a platform for small-city business directories called TownWire: https://townwire.com

We launched our first location last week and have had a great response so far from business owners and residents alike: https://canandaigua.com With the current tech climate of AI and big tech, things have gotten so impersonal for the majority of actual people. I'm betting on communities and the small businesses that serve those communities in the medium and long term.
by bccdee | 2025-04-28 22:37:54+00:00
> AI is scaling the creation side of knowledge work at an exponential rate

Why do people keep saying things like this? "Exponential rate"? That's just not true. So far the benefits are marginal at best and limited to relatively simple tasks. It's a truism at this point, even among fans of AI, that the benefits of AI are much more pronounced at junior-level tasks. For complex work, I'm not convinced that AI has "scaled the creation side of knowledge work" at all. I don't think it's particularly useful for the kind of non-trivial tasks that actually take up our time.

Amdahl's Law comes into play. If using AI gives you 200% efficiency on trivial tasks, but trivial tasks only take 10% of your time, then you've realized a whopping 5.3% productivity boost. I do not actually spend much time on boilerplate. I spend time debugging half-baked code, i.e. the stuff that LLMs spit out.

I realize I'm complaining about the third sentence of the article, but I refuse to keep letting people make claims like this as if they're obviously true. The whole article is based on false premises.
by waleedlatif1 | 2025-04-28 22:38:25+00:00
thanks! this would actually trigger three separate workflow executions, and the messages would be processed in parallel by each execution. by default, within the workflow all the blocks execute once their dependencies are resolved, and for the workflow itself they are also executed in parallel. if three messages are sent by the same user, it is also executed as separate workflow executions. curious to hear about your usecase though, are you looking to process the messages in batches?
by yuriks | 2025-04-28 22:38:38+00:00
Which part of that architecture is impossible in Rust? Actually an honest question, I'm wondering if I'm missing something.

From what I remember from my Unity days (which granted, were a long time ago), GameObjects had their own lifecycle system separate from the C# runtime and had to be created and deleted using Destroy and Create calls in the Unity API. Similarly, components and references to them had to be created and retrieved using the GetComponent calls, which internally used handles, rather than being raw GC pointers. Runtime allocation of objects frequently caused GC issues, so you were practically required to pre-allocate them in an object pool anyway.

I don't see how any of those things would be impossible or even difficult to implement in Rust. In fact, this model is almost exactly what I used to see evangelized all the time for C++ engines (using safe handles and allocator pools) in GDC presentations back then.

In my view, as someone who has not really interacted or explored Rust gamedev much, the issue is more that Bevy has been attempting to present an overtly ambitious API, as opposed to focusing on a simpler, less idealistic one, and since it is the poster child for Rust game engines, people keep tripping over those problems.
by worldsayshi | 2025-04-28 22:39:18+00:00
Thinking about this makes me wonder how all real world power plants aren't designed to survive a grid outage? Why would you ever need to black start a real power plant? Like, can't you design it so that it disengages from the grid rather than shutting down in a catastrophic outage like this? Or make it only take on a fraction of the load or something?
by bityard | 2025-04-28 22:39:44+00:00
> Ultimately people tend to have a fairly personal relationship with their local mechanic.

This is the money line. And it goes for all skilled trade work. Mechanics, plumbers, building contractors, roofers. Most of the people doing this work are just surprisingly bad at it, especially for how much they charge for it. It takes a LOT of time and effort to find someone good. I'd even lump doctors and dentists into this.

I don't want a marketplace to tell me who's the cheapest, I want a marketplace to tell me who's the best. And unfortunately there's no way to build that. (Why is a long story, but the short version is: because there's no way to build the correct incentives into it.)
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-28 22:40:08+00:00
> Thin out the middle and leave thick edges to avoid pain.

Ok but if you do that then what is the point of the exercise? I thought fancy flatware was thin because of the appearance. If the edges are thick doesn't that defeat the purpose?

The equivalent thickness being something like 5x stronger is of course the benefit here.

I don't think price is an issue for high end home use items. Rich people buy far weirder and more expensive things.
by jleyank | 2025-04-28 22:40:11+00:00
If they end up taking few(er) women, readiness will take a hit as I don't recall news stories about turning away people wanting to join. And if they really don't want women in the service, guess they're going to have to rent contractor medical people?

Or are they limiting it to the grunts at the pointy end of the spear? Last time I checked, people seem to prefer the higher-paying, higher-employable military jobs - officers, pilots, IT/communications, engineering...
by CooCooCaCha | 2025-04-28 22:40:25+00:00
My experience is the opposite. Plenty of intellectual stimulation comes from actually making the game. Designing and refining gameplay mechanics, level design, writing shaders, etc.

What really drags you down in games is iteration speed. It can be fun making your own game engine at first but after awhile you just want the damn thing to work so you can try out new ideas.
by neonsunset | 2025-04-28 22:41:26+00:00
> 3. In contrast to .NET and NuGet ecosystem, non-Rust dependencies typically don't ship with precompiled binaries, meaning you basically have to have fun getting the right C++ compilers, CMake, sometimes even external SDKs and manually setting up your environment variables to get them to build.

Depending on your scenario, you may want either one or another. Shipping pre-compiled binaries carries its own risks and you are at the mercy of the library author making sure to include the one for your platform. I found wiring up MSBuild to be more painful than the way it is done in Rust with cc crate, often I would prefer for the package to also build its other-language components for my specific platform, with extra optimization flags I passed in.

But yes, in .NET it creates sort of an impedance mismatch since all the managed code assemblies you get from your dependencies are portable and debuggable, and if you want to publish an application for a specific new target, with those it just works, be it FreeBSD or WASM. At the same time, when it works - it's nicer than having to build everything from scratch.
by geraneum | 2025-04-28 22:41:55+00:00
> The model definitely iteratively built up (useful and correct even) text that wasn't directly in the training data

The text is highly likely in training data, as it’s textbook arithmetic instructions. It’s the number that is probably not there. Simple arithmetic is one of the verifiable operation types (truths) with a straightforward reward function used to train CoT models. In your example, what’s interesting to me is improving LLM inference with RL that can result in such wonderful outcomes, but that’s perhaps a different question.
by polishdude20 | 2025-04-28 22:42:03+00:00
I'm making a hymn presentation website for my dad. He's an organist at the local church and they've got TV's at the front showing everyone the words to the hymns. He switches the pages using a foot pedal while he plays and sings.

The software he currently uses is too complicated and he gets lost easily with all the buttons and features. My website is basically the same thing but only the buttons he needs, only his hymns and is completely controlled by me so I can fix things to suite him.
by cyberax | 2025-04-28 22:42:04+00:00
> Electricity markets and electricity networks are designed by the regulator.

Not quite. They are _influenced_ by the regulators.

And Europe has been incentivizing trash-tier low-quality solar and wind power, by making it easy to sell energy (purely on a per-Joule basis) on the pan-European market.

Meanwhile, there is no centralized capacity market or centralized incentives for black start and grid forming functionality.
by amluto | 2025-04-28 22:42:56+00:00
Nickel-free (e.g. 18/0) flatware is just fine from an engineering perspective, and it’s cheap, and it sticks to magnets, which is fun. It’s even available as fairly nice, decorative name-brand products.

And I found some studies suggesting that 304 and 316 stainless steel leach very little nickel when in contact with food. It’s the cheaper nickel-containing stainless steel that’s a problem.
by james2doyle | 2025-04-28 22:43:33+00:00
Yep. Luau has an LSP so you should be able to get all that.

There is no support for Luau in Love2D though. You would have to author your code in Teal (typed lua to lua compiler) and then compile that to Lua to be run in Love: https://github.com/teal-language/tl

You can get the Lua LSP working in Love2D with full completion support by the way. The Lua LSP has 3rd party libraries included in it. You can see all the preinstalled ones here: https://github.com/LuaLS/lua-language-server/tree/master/3rd

Support for them as built-ins will be removed at some point though. But you can always add them yourself: https://github.com/LuaLS/lua-language-server/wiki/Settings#w... using the files from here: https://github.com/LuaCATS/love2d/

It looks like the easiest way to support them is using a `.luarc.json` file though: https://github.com/LuaLS/lua-language-server/wiki/Configurat...

Here is a project that is already set up with a config file that you should be able to just copy: https://github.com/jonasgeiler/love2d-joystick-tester/blob/m...
by runarberg | 2025-04-28 22:43:56+00:00
> WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN REGULATION FAILS?

I expect better regulations and/or enforcement.

I am speaking around it because it seems obvious. If we have good regulation and enforcement of these regulations there is no need for self-regulation. While we don‘t have good regulation, or a regulator unwilling to enforce existing regulation, the go-to action is not to amass self-regulation (because it will not work) but to demand better regulation, and to demand the regulator does their job. That is at least how you would expect things to work in a democracy.
by feoren | 2025-04-28 22:44:07+00:00
> Why not pick 10^180 or something as the highest number/states then?

Because then we have to find all sorts of limits to all of our proofs, and qualify everything, and waste time proving that our results are under this limit? If we prove something about an algorithm parameterized by some N, and we rely on a Turing Machine in our proof, then we'd also have to figure out which N hits our limit of 10^180 states on the tape, so we can qualify the limits of our proof. This could be very difficult, since the translation to a Turing machine model can be arbitrarily complex. Why bother? It doesn't help anyone.

> To understand a finite computation, we (some amount of scientists and mathematicians) must understand at least ZFC?

Turing machines are for proving things about the nature of computation itself. You seem to be imagining that you need to understand Turing machines before you'll be allowed to make statements about some specific computation. That's simply not true. If Turing machines help you prove something, use them; if not, ignore them. Putting an arbitrary limit on them only makes them worse at proving things.

I'm not really sure why you're so focused on ZFC. On one hand, the vast majority of math proofs (and therefore CS proofs that are based on them) assume ZFC, usually without even bothering to mention it. On the other hand, the axiom of choice seems completely irrelevant for Turing machines. Although the tape is infinite, it's almost always implicitly assumed that the state is finite at every step (the rest of the tape is 0). You'd have to initialize the tape with some infinite pattern to get around this, and that's definitely out of the ordinary. It's probably better to think of the state as "arbitrarily large" rather than infinite. I suspect you could get away with assuming Peano arithmetic for most CS proofs anyone cares about.

But also, yes, some number of scientists and mathematicians are expected to understand the basic axioms of math if they're going to prove mathematical theorems.
by drbig | 2025-04-28 22:46:07+00:00
> If I understand correctly, the critique here is that is that LLMs cannot generate new knowledge, and/or that they cannot remember it.

> The former is false, and the latter is kind of true -- the network does not update itself yet, unfortunately, but we work around it with careful manipulation of the context.

Any and all examples of where an LLM generated "new knowledge" will be greatly appreciated. And the quotes are because I'm willing to start with the lowest bar of what "new" and "knowledge" mean when combined.
by nchmy | 2025-04-28 22:46:28+00:00
What I'm getting at is that even wikipedia is not useful for communities who completely lack education (and perhaps even reading ability), technology, and economic stability. They need, more than anything, to get sanitation, clean air, nutrition, larger crop yields from healthier soil and better practices, etc... Wikipedia doesn't have any of that info. Even Appropedia doesn't really - its too superficial (and not translated) to be actionable, especially for these groups of people.

Once those issues are sorted out via more appropriate teaching and logistical methods, solidarity, etc... they'll have health, time, and money with which academics and anything else can be pursued.

Its just basic Maslow's hierarchy of needs...

All of the people who are working on these sorts of offline education projects are completely out of touch.
by nine_k | 2025-04-28 22:47:47+00:00
> Introducing the ‘packed’ data format, a binary format that allows using data as it is, without the need for a deserialisation step. A notable perk of this format is that traversals on packed trees is proven to be faster than on ‘unpacked’ trees: as the fields of data structures are inlines, there are no pointer jumps, thus making the most of the L1 cache.

That is, a "memory dump -> zero-copy memory read" of a subgraph of Haskell objects, allowing to pass such trees / subgraphs directly over a network. Slightly reminiscent of Cap'n Proto.