MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Gyarbij | 2025-04-04 19:17:41+00:00
We're launching Atlas-Core today, an open-source API built in Go that provides comprehensive country data and geographic insights through a clean, RESTful interface. Atlas-Core is the result of our work at DoROAD building travel technology. We found ourselves constantly needing reliable geographic data, and existing solutions were either unreliable, limited, or required piecing together multiple APIs. Key features:

Comprehensive country data (demographics, geography, currencies, languages) Flexible querying by name, codes, currency, language, capital, region Optimized field filtering to reduce payload size Built for AI integration with consistent data structures Fast and reliable (Go-powered)

We've made it available through multiple channels:

Self-host it yourself (MIT License) Use our managed API at api.doroad.dev (free tier available) Source code: https://github.com/DoROAD-AI/atlas-core

While the open-source version focuses on country data, Our full Atlas product adds airports, visa requirements, and more advanced features. We'd love feedback from the HN community on what you'd like to see in future versions!
by kjkjadksj | 2025-04-04 19:17:56+00:00
My 2012 macbook pro would have still been working today had an unfortunate water damage incident not happen a couple years ago. It was theseuses macbook in a way. Trackpad had been replaced. Microphone replaced. Battery replace. RAM upgraded to 16gb. SSD upgrade. Disk drive swapped out and replaced with hard drive caddy making use of that extra SATAIII. It was no slouch. Sure it was only a dual core but 2.5ghz is plenty for a lot of things and most software doesn’t even make much use of multithreading anyhow. Not anything I’d try and run on that computer at least. It could handle creative suite and that was enough. Older games like TF2 worked great too like 80 or 100fps with a little config wonking. I can’t even get my replacement m3 pro running TF2 that well albeit over wine because valve doesn’t like arm.
by ameliaquining | 2025-04-04 19:18:32+00:00
I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at. "Induced demand" isn't a policy paradigm; it's just the observation that if you make it easier for more people to get somewhere, then more people will go there. Without congestion pricing, the only equilibrium (until you exhaust all demand, which isn't going to happen in hot metro areas) is the one where the roads are congested enough to deter the next marginal person from using them. With congestion pricing, you can choose a different equilibrium without the deadweight loss of people stuck in traffic. The question of how much to invest in infrastructure, and what kinds, can then be addressed separately in whatever way makes sense given local conditions.
by throwaway389234 | 2025-04-04 19:18:41+00:00
Sure, that is what I said as an argument. Free speech being a right means there is no merit to it being a consequence.

Being in a car crash might be the consequence of driving a car. But if someone drives at high speed in the wrong lane and then crashes into you it is a consequence of them not respecting traffic laws and not of you just being in a car. That is why we have traffic laws, so you are able to be in a car without someone crashing into you.

You could never be in a car, and you could also never speak. But then you wouldn't need free speech. Free speech exist so you can speak. In the US without consequences from the government. If you then speak the consequences of that speech aren't a consequence of you speaking but of the government not respecting free speech. Because to not have consequences you would have to not speak and then you wouldn't have free speech.

Someone getting deported by the democrats once they get into power would now be a predictable consequence. They then equally can't say "Sure, we were assholes to the other 50% of the population, but your response is worse". So then you have no free speech.
by kittikitti | 2025-04-04 19:18:43+00:00
This is a great predictive piece, written in sci-fi narrative. I think a key part missing in all these predictions is neural architecture search. DeepSeek has shown that simply increasing compute capacity is not the only way to increase performance. AlexNet was also another case. While I do think more processing power is better, we will hit a wall where there is no more training data. I predict that in the near future we will have more processing power to train LLM's than the rate at which we produce data for the LLM. Synthetic data can only get you so far.

I also think that the future will not necessarily be better AI, but more accessible one's. There's an incredible amount of value in designing data centers that are more efficient. Historically, it's a good bet to assume that computing cost per FLOP will reduce as time goes on and this is also a safe bet as it relates to AI.

I think a common misconception with the future of AI is that it will be centralized with only a few companies or organization capable of operating them. Although tech like Apple Intelligence is half baked, we can already envision a future where the AI is running on our phones.
by 827a | 2025-04-04 19:18:44+00:00
I should have specified "nodejs", as that has been my most recent difficulty. The challenge, specifically, with that prompt is that Google has at least four nodejs libraries that are all seem at least reasonably capable of accessing text embedding models on vertex ai (@google-ai/generativelanguage, @google-cloud/vertexai, @google-cloud/aiplatform, and @google/genai), and they've also published breaking changes multiple times to all of them. So, in my experience, GPT not only will confuse methods from one of their libraries with the other, but will also sometimes hallucinate answers only applicable to older versions of the library, without understanding which version its giving code for. Once it has struggled enough, it'll sometimes just give up and tell you to use axios, but the APIs it recommends axios calls for are all their protobuf APIs; so I'm not even sure if that would work.

Search is totally reasonable, but in this case: Even Google's own documentation on these libraries is exceedingly bad. Nearly all the examples they give for them are for accessing the language models, not text embedding models; so GPT will also sometimes generate code that is perfectly correct for accessing one of the generative language models, but will swap e.g the "model: gemini-2.0" parameter for "model: text-embedding-005"; which also does not work.
by ComplexSystems | 2025-04-04 19:19:17+00:00
> They are much better at the thing they are good at, and there are some new capabilities that are big, but they are still fundamentally next-token predictors.

I don't really get this. Are you saying autoregressive LLMs won't qualify as AGI, by definition? What about diffusion models, like Mercury? Does it really matter how inference is done if the result is the same?
by coryrc | 2025-04-04 19:19:32+00:00
No, but it was a bad example because I was thinking only of the authorship point of view.

A better example would have been the complaint tablet to Ea-nāṣir. We're pretty sure it's real; there might still be people alive that remember it being discovered. But in a hundred years, people with gen AI have created museums of fake artifacts but plausible, can future people be sure? A good fraction of the US population today believes wildly untrue things about events happening in real time!
by EchoReflection | 2025-04-04 19:19:41+00:00
that was a waste of time to read. I'm glad it was short. "I'm bored of all the talk and conversation that other ppl find extremely interesting, new, revolutionary, mind-blowing, etc"...like... okay? Well no one is forcing him to do anything. He should go outside, go to the gym, go to a bar, go to a library, read a book, there is literally an infinite number of productive things he could have done instead of whine online about how he's "bored" of the (by everyone else's account) insane happenings in the world(s) of the things(s) that he so "cleverly" was able to describe without actually saying "its" name. Hopefully he has a change of attitude and retracts his pointless, bitter rant.
by hinkley | 2025-04-04 19:20:05+00:00
I’m talking to a group of people I assume to be substantially software developers, and the facts on the ground are that many of us are attracted to this field by logic, and we are all encouraged in college and for a few years after to invest every spare moment into CS and not any other endeavors. Don’t socialize without an agenda, don’t develope your EQ, just computers and logic all the time.

That consumes most of the years when your prefrontal cortex is still malleable.

Once you understand that, the consequences are everywhere you care to look.

And while it’s true we have twice the density of the general population of neurodivergent people, we nearly all of us make ourselves neurodivergent in the pursuit of this field, whether we are born with it or not. When we eventually find time for hobbies and charities we find out we don’t think like everyone else, and often not in a good way. We have “missed out” on experiences others take for granted.
by fnordpiglet | 2025-04-04 19:20:35+00:00
In almost a year and a half.

https://www.npr.org/2016/02/15/466848438/why-president-how-t...

The president as a title was meant as a diminutive relative to the Congress. The capitol building is at the precise center of Washington DC - literally and for a reason. The Supreme Court is across the street and for many years was inside the capitol.

The White House is in the middle of no where with a direct line of sight to Thomas Jefferson looking into the presidents bedroom. These are not accidents. Next time you’re there read what is written on the walls surrounding Jefferson and the architectural decisions made make a lot of sense and should be a warning to anyone sleeping in that bedroom.

Congress ceded power over time to the executive proactively as presidents subsequent to Washington emulated his integrity.

They have the ability to remove all of the power of the president, whose role, officially, is to merely preside. All you say? Crazy. But they’re the only body that can pass amendments to the constitution.

So, we don’t need to wait for the next presidential election if we don’t choose to. It’s up to we the people to choose.
by nickysielicki | 2025-04-04 19:20:42+00:00
You can create metrics for whatever you want! Go ahead!

But cuda is not a black box math accelerator. You can stupidly treat it as such, but that doesn’t make it that. It’s an entire ecosystem with drivers and contexts and lifecycles. If everything you’re doing is synchronous and/or you don’t mind if your metrics include totally unrelated costs, then time.time() is fine, sure. But if that’s the case, you’ve got bigger problems.
by archagon | 2025-04-04 19:20:43+00:00
First, what is a "fact"? For example, is climate change a fact? Prominent members of the current administration do not seem to think so; they're basically a step removed from labeling it woke and DEI.

As for things that aren't "facts," but are nonetheless extensively studied and have wide consensus: should universities, for example, teach that the Civil War was actually about states' rights and that slaves benefitted from slavery? There is no historical evidence for these claims, yet a large percentage of the public believes them due to punditry, party loyalty, and other truth-distorting forces.

> In 2023, Florida banned DEI initiatives in its public university system. The ban resulted in changes to the state’s African American history curriculum, including a reinterpretation of the effects of chattel slavery to include that enslaved people gained beneficial skills.

Should universities fall in line with this kind of thinking, or is there a moral imperative for educators and academics to push back against propaganda? I think it's clearly the latter. Otherwise, the university system just becomes a Soviet-style state organ, good for only certain kinds of STEM.

Second, you said:

> As to what universities should have done, the answer is “just dribble.” Universities should be places that are just as eager to research effective approaches to mass deportations as all the DEI stuff they do.

That sounds like you're saying that universities should be blank slates, essentially devoid of values. But they should also kowtow to the values and ideology of the public...? So which is it?

In my opinion, given that academia is (by definition) the vanguard of knowledge, it must hold to its own set of internal values and principles, not ones delivered by outside forces. Pursuit of knowledge should be the primary driving force and not, for example, commercial pressure to bolster "clean coal" at the expense of sustainable energy.

Third, I should remind you that, in all likelihood, at least 50% of the population believes that universities today are pursuing activities consistent with their values and ideology. They pay taxes, too — perhaps even more taxes than conservatives. In a democracy, the plurality should not have dictatorial control over things like university policy; it's tantamount to taxation without representation. These things must be decided by consensus-building, not royal decree.

Also, as an aside, I suspect that when affirmative action was first introduced, a majority of the public still opposed civil rights and desegregation. Was that "DEI"? Barring direct state intervention, should universities have acquiesced to the masses? I stand by what I said: popularity is a poor barometer for educational value and policy.
by squeaky-clean | 2025-04-04 19:20:57+00:00
Isn't the main announcement of the article CuTile? Which has not been released yet.

Also the cuda-core JIT stuff has nothing to do with Python's new JIT, it's referring to integrating nvJitLink with python, which you can see an example of in cuda_core/examples/jit_lto_fractal.py
by apersona | 2025-04-04 19:21:13+00:00
> We have millions of teachers going above and beyond expectations. We have mothers and caregivers. We have comedians crafting jokes for comedy and they have no ability to protect those jokes. We have brilliant chefs creating recipes after years of work, experience, and effort and they too don't have protections.

I agree with this, but why is your proposed solution to remove protections from everyone instead of giving everyone else protections? People who put in work should be rewarded.
by gwern | 2025-04-04 19:21:15+00:00
Preprint: https://www.celiamoore.com/uploads/9/3/2/1/9321973/wakeman_y...

A useful concept here is the 'incompleteness of contracts' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incomplete_contracts): essentially, even for the simplest contract, it is impossible to write down an unambiguous set of rules or contract terms covering every possible outcome or disagreement. Contracts can only be starting points. This is similar to the failure of GOFAI to turn the world into symbolic rules: it may be possible in theory, but not in practice. Anytime a principle hires an agent, they have to leave a lot up to the agent, which is why we have principle-agent problems. So what does that imply for any 'rule'? Well, that it has to be wrong and destructive some of the time. (See also: "work-to-rule strike" or sabotage.) This will be especially true for rules imposed from the outside: if it's impossible for individuals or organizations given a free hand to make perfect rules that should always be followed, how on earth is some third party, like the dead hand of a regulation from a century ago, going to do so? So you want your agents to break the rules... but only, of course, when it's a good thing to break the rules. How do you know that? Well, if it was easy to do so cheaply, you probably wouldn't have the rule in the first place! So in practice, a lot of what happens is just this: if your agent breaks the rules periodically and nothing bad happens, then they probably were doing the right thing; and if your organization encourages the right amount of rulebreaking, it will slightly tend to do better than the ones which don't.

Of course, sometimes your agents weren't doing the right wrong things, just the wrong wrong things, and you just normalized their deviance which is going to explode in someone's face eventually. That is of course true. But if you cherrypick just a few sensational cases and treat them as if that was what supervisors were trying to encourage, you implicitly are denying that the lubricant of the world is often well-chosen rule-breaking.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-04-04 19:22:13+00:00
> I'd love to sign up to opt out of receiving any social security or medicaid benefits permanently for the rest of my life in exchange for a small tax credit or deduction, smaller than the amount I'd expect to receive out of these programs.

And if you go broke and end up starving on the street, everyone else just needs to bear that cost either through watching you starve to death or by paying to feed you?

It turns out that in practice, the number of people who think they can achieve your proposed outcome is far, far higher than the number that actually does achieve it.

> I'd prefer to be part of the solution to the deficit, but me leaving the country only exacerbates the problem, given that I pay in close to an order of magnitude more than I get back in return.

Sure but you're not leaving the country because, like GP, you are aware you get far more value from your taxes in indirect services.

> shouldn't I be allowed to stay and express policy preference for less defense spending

Sure can! Vote.
by Vegenoid | 2025-04-04 19:22:24+00:00
> Moore's law is exponential, which is where the "simulate a brain" predictions have come from.

To address only one thing out of your comment, Moore's law is not a law, it is a trend. It just gets called a law because it is fun. We know that there are physical limits to Moore's law. This gets into somewhat shaky territory, but it seems that current approaches to compute can't reach the density of compute power present in a human brain (or other creatures' brains). Moore's law won't get chips to be able to simulate a human brain, with the same amount of space and energy as a human brain. A new approach will be needed to go beyond simply packing more transistors onto a chip - this is analogous to my view that current AI technology is insufficient to do what human brains do, even when taken to their limit (which is significantly beyond where they're currently at).
by wfn | 2025-04-04 19:22:31+00:00
I have found that a general pattern of setting up a memory arena or anything of that kind does help, especially of course if one anticipates more frequent / heavier usage of heap. Helps with performance (e.g.: faster allocations), memory fragmentation (which itself also helps with performance indirectly of course) and other things. Can be very simple.[1]

Or more complicated (if anticipating a lot of allocation work for very varying buffer sizes) - e.g. slab allocators. memcached is an example where this is used, a couple pictures explain the gist.[2]

[1]: note: can be even simpler of course, but quick example of structs used:

```

typedef struct char *memory; size_t size; size_t used; } memory_arena_t; typedef struct { memory_arena_t *arenas; size_t arena_count; size_t max_arenas; size_t arena_size; size_t total_size; size_t total_used; } memory_allocator_t;

```

[2]: https://siemens.blog/posts/memcached-memory-model/ - I'm sure that when heap is visualised, it would show how this helps keeping fragmentation at bay as well (this helps wasting fewer memory pages, too).
by acureau | 2025-04-04 19:22:51+00:00
This is exactly what makes this scenario so absurd to me. The authors don't even attempt to describe how any of this could realistically play out. They describe sequence models and RLAIF, then claim this approach "pays off" in 2026. The paper they link to is from 2022. RLAIF also does not expand the information encoded in the model, it is used to align the output with a set of guidelines. How could this lead to meaningful improvement in a model's ability to do bleeding-edge AI research? Why wouldn't that have happened already?

I don't understand how anyone takes this seriously. Speculation like this is not only useless, but disingenuous. Especially when it's sold as "informed by trend extrapolations, wargames, expert feedback, experience at OpenAI, and previous forecasting successes". This is complete fiction which, at best, is "inspired by" the real world. I question the motives of the authors.
by freedomben | 2025-04-04 19:23:07+00:00
For Vim/Neovim users, there is one built in that is pretty good, and once you've added frequent custom words to the dictionary it is great. You can turn it on with `:set spell` or off with `:set nospell`. Add custom words by pressing `zg` on the target word:

I have this in my vimrc file so it's on by default for certain file types:

" Turn on spellcheck for certain filetypes and word completion. " words can be added to the dict by pressing 'zg' with cursor on word. autocmd Filetype markdown setlocal spell autocmd Filetype gitcommit setlocal spell set complete+=kspell " Don't highlight in red an underscore (_) in markdown " https://vi.stackexchange.com/q/18471/17441 autocmd Filetype markdown syn match markdownIgnore "\v\w_\w"

Custom additions to the dictionary will go to a simple text file (one word per line) in `~/.vim/spell/en.utf-8.add` (depending on your settings) where it is easy to edit or backup.
by ustad | 2025-04-04 19:23:33+00:00
Well, you know, I see what you’re saying about Yoko - she’s not the kind of artist that makes your jaw drop or blows your mind with technique. But, to me, it’s not really about that. It’s about the journey, not the destination, right? Art’s all about the path you take, the experiences you collect, and the way you view the world. Yoko, for all the criticisms, has certainly led an interesting life, no doubt. She’s been a trailblazer, or maybe just a wild spirit, pushing boundaries and breaking norms. She’s had her share of ups and downs, but it’s the living that matters. And through it all, she’s remained true to herself. That’s something to admire, even if you don’t agree with everything she does. The destination, the fame, the recognition - that’s all fleeting. But the journey, man, that’s where the real magic happens.
by drdaeman | 2025-04-04 19:23:37+00:00
Looks nice on the first glance, congrats on the launch! May I ask a few questions, please?

- Does it support durable tasks that should be essentially ran forever and produce an endless "stream" of events, self-healing in case of intermittent failures? Or would those be a better fit for some different kind of orchestrator?

- Where and how task inputs and outputs are stored? Are there any conveniences to make passing "weird" (that is, not some simple and reasonably-small JSON-encoded objects) things around easier (like Dagster's I/O managers) or is it all out of scope for Hatchet?

- Assuming that I can get ballpark estimates for the desirable number of tasks, their average input and output sizes, and my PostgreSQL instance's size and I/O metrics, can I somehow make a reasonable guesstimate on how many tasks per second the whole system can put through safely?

I'm currently in search of the Holy Grail (haha), evaluating all sorts of tools (Temporal, Dagster, Prefect, Faust, now looking at Hatchet) to find something that I would like the most. My project is a synchronization+processing system that has a bunch of dynamically-defined workflows that continuously work with external services (stores), look for updates (determine new, updated, or deleted products) and spawn product-level workflows to process those updates (standardize store-specific data into an unified shape, match against the canonical product catalog, etc etc). Surely, this kind of a pipeline can be built on nearly anything - I'm just trying to get a gist of how each of those system feels like to work with, what it's actually good at and what are the gotchas and limitations, and which tool would allow me to have least amount of boilerplate.

Thanks!