MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jhj | 2025-04-25 20:45:23+00:00
This is just a consequence of the fact that bfloat16 has a very high dynamic range which is not all used. People like hyperparameters that look like 0.01 not 10^10, even though there is the same fractional precision available at each exponent and if you multiplied everything - hyperparameters, initialized weights, training data, etc in a network by 10^6 things will still work more or less the same since the upper range is hardly used (with the possible exception of some small number of special functions).

Typical entropy of bfloat16 values seen in weights (and activations) are about 10-12 bits (only 65-75% or so of the value range is used in practice). Sign and mantissa bits tend to be incompressible noise.

This has been exploited several times before in the context of both classical HPC and AI, with lossless compression work from Martin Burtscher's lab (https://userweb.cs.txstate.edu/~burtscher/), fpzip from LLNL (https://computing.llnl.gov/projects/fpzip) and my library dietgpu from 2021 (https://github.com/facebookresearch/dietgpu) which we used to speed training on a large GPU cluster by about 10% wall clock time overall by losslessly compressing all data prior to send and decompressing upon receive (e.g., gradients, weights from backup, etc), which is still computing the same thing as it did before as it is lossless.

Also, rANS is more efficient and easier to implement in SIMD-like instruction sets than Huffman coding. It would reduce the performance latency/throughput penalties as well with DFloat11 (since we have to decompress before we do the arithmetic).
by moffkalast | 2025-04-25 20:45:31+00:00
> a comprehensive active safety system that includes everything from automatic emergency braking with pedestrian detection to automatic high beams

No stereo, but luckily they still found space for a few DNN accelerators that will slam on the brakes randomly when getting false detections. Likely still has a 4G uplink and all the modern car cancer to make sure they can datamine their clients as much as possible and offset the subsidized purchase cost.

Worst of both worlds?
by nunez | 2025-04-25 20:45:33+00:00
so, on one hand, i am more than familiar with building super cross-functional teams that break through all sorts of process to get stuff deployed quickly into production. i did some of this in my cloud consulting days, and what DOGE is doing shares a lot of parallels with the kinds of shortcuts we took to "force" business outcomes. i.e. move fast; break things.

on the other hand, you can't outrun process at big orgs, and the USG is the biggest of them all. eventually, once the skunkworks project is done, you'll have to pay the piper and do everything the "right" way. that's why hearing things like RU IPs getting access to presumably-sensitive data within these departments is so concerning. what kinds of risks are being introduced from DOGE operating like this with data that effects people's lives?

on the other other hand, this database project existing, and it being SOLELY for improving deportation efficiency, is really friggin' terrifying.
by ajross | 2025-04-25 20:45:49+00:00
Hold up, all that stuff is completely unattested (and would have to be facts tried before a jury anyway). ICE does not have the power to decide on whether someone is a "domestic abuser" or whatever. They were just serving a warrant.

But more: What if the suspect was in court on an immigration concern? The judge would have been empowered to enjoin the deportation, no? You agree, right? That's what courts do? In which case, wouldn't the ICE agents be the ones guilty of "obstruction" here?

The point of the Rule of Law is that you don't empower individuals to make decisions about justice, ever. You try things before courts, and appeal, and eventually get to a resolution.

Trying to do anything else leads to exactly where we are here, where one arm of government is performatively arresting members of another for baldly partisan reasons.
by swyx | 2025-04-25 20:46:25+00:00
because its easily googlable.

counter point - people are going to use them, better to expose newbies early and often and then everyone is better off

shorthands will always be in demand. we used to say “horseless carriage”, then “automobile”, then “car”. would you rather use Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation or just “laser”s? etc

in the new york times? sure, spell out observability. but on HN? come on. the term is 7 years old and is used all over the site. it’s earned it
by roarkeful | 2025-04-25 20:46:29+00:00
Having quit nicotine, I can say that it's simply a matter of wanting to quit. I do love smoking still, and have a pipe or a cigar roughly every two weeks, but my half-a-tin of 12mg nicotine pouches a day habit is gone.

I miss it, and I didn't want to quit, but it was financially a little silly and that much nicotine causes health effects. You can desire to stop something but also not want to. It seems fair to allow both to be true.
by cmurf | 2025-04-25 20:46:58+00:00
The President of the United States of America is at war with the Constitution and the rule of law. - J. Michael Luttig, former Fourth Circuit judge, April 14, 2025.

https://abovethelaw.com/2025/04/conservative-judge-doesnt-pu...

---

This — the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s arrest today of a sitting judge — against the backdrop that the President of the United States is, at this same moment, defying an April 10 Order of the Supreme Court of the United States ... - April 25, 2025

(thread continues)

https://bsky.app/profile/judgeluttig.bsky.social/post/3lnnzb...

---

To read the Criminal Complaint and attached FBI Affidavit that gave rise to Wisconsin State Judge Hannah Dugan’s federal criminal arrest today for obstructing or impeding a proceeding before a department or agency of the United States and concealing an individual to prevent his discovery and arrest is at once to know to a certainty that neither the state courts nor the federal courts could ever even hope to administer justice if the spectacle that took place in Judge Dugan’s courthouse last Friday April 18 took place in the courthouses across the country. - April 25, 2025

(thread continues)

https://bsky.app/profile/judgeluttig.bsky.social/post/3lnnxq...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Michael_Luttig
by johnea | 2025-04-25 20:47:12+00:00
If it's this bad in BC, I can't imagine how bad it is in Japan.

The addresses there are notoriously local-centric, with knowledge of the area required, to find a physical location from the address.

All that being said, I wonder how long it will take people to get the memo: Don't use Goggle! For anything! Unless you like being surveilled (there's a fetish for everything, I guess)

I've used osmand on a (community build) android phone for about 8 years. It works great offline, all maps and the nav algorithm are in the phone, and it's gotten me to where I was going.

I'm hoping to migrate full time to a linux phone this year. The mega-corps have contributed to the long wait for this tech, but it does seem on the verge of finally breaking out of the lab.
by SimbaOnSteroids | 2025-04-25 20:47:12+00:00
No my argument is stop using the word criminal because it makes the yokels think you're talking about some sicario or some jobless person living on the government doll.

You can tell this because when you poll americans what they think about deporting undocumented immigrants that belong to specific subgroups, their overwhelmingly against it. The kicker is that the subgroups listed cover nearly all undocumented immigrants.

> The survey also asked about whether other groups of immigrants in the country illegally should be deported. Relatively few Americans support deporting these immigrants if they have a job (15%), are parents of children born in the U.S. (14%), came to the U.S. as children (9%) or are married to a U.S. citizen (5%).

https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2025/03/26/vi...
by cogman10 | 2025-04-25 20:47:15+00:00
This is a flaw of capitalism.

The flaw being that cost is everything. And, in particular, the initial cost matters a lot more than the true cost. This is why people don't install solar panels or energy efficient appliances.

When it comes to scientific research, proposing you do a higher cost study to avoid false results/data manipulation will be seen as a bug. Bad data/results that make a flashy journal paper (room temp superconductivity, for example) bring in more eyeballs and prestige to the institute vs a well-done study which shows negative results.

It's the same reason the public/private cooperation is often a broken model for government spending. A government agency will happily pick a road builder that puts out the lowest bid and will later eat the cost when that builder ultimately needs more money because the initial bid was a fantasy.

Making costs more visible is a good goal, I just don't know how you accomplish that when surfacing those costs will be seen as a negative for anyone in charge of the budget.

> for example, in funding experiments chasing after worthless science

This is tricky. It's basically impossible to know when an experiment will be worthless. Further, a large portion of experiments will be worthless (like 90% of them).

An example of this is superglue. It was originally supposed to be a replacement glass for jet fighters. While running refractory experiments on it and other compounds, the glue destroyed the machine. Funnily, it was known to be highly adhesive even before the experiment but putting the "maybe we can sell this as a glue" thought to it didn't happen until after the machine was destroyed.

A failed experiment that led to a useful product.

How does someone budget for that? How would you start to surface that sort of cost?

That's where I think the current US grant system isn't a terrible way to do things, provided more guidelines are put in place to enforce reproducibility.
by Qem | 2025-04-25 20:47:51+00:00
Nice find. I had no idea South America was a likely cradle for ants. Perhaps that explains why the anteater evolved in South America as well. If there's a lot of individuals from a given species in some area, something is likely to evolve to eat them.

Obligatory XKCD: https://what-if.xkcd.com/123/
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-25 20:47:53+00:00
So a period of 25 years to go all the way from "weird fringe theory that fixes some issues we've been grappling with for a long time now" to "got it all figured out". The start of that period aligns very closely with the initial invention of radio. And a variable effect due to the hydrogen line can potentially be observed by anyone operating a radio in the relevant band.

The only way this doesn't work is if the aliens who retrieve the plaque from deep space somehow stabilize in the long term at a point where they've developed rocketry and general space travel but not radio or an understanding of quantum mechanics.

However the above would seem to imply that they don't do radio astronomy, don't have a very good understanding of light (since it's all photons), and don't have high frequency electronic circuits (since designing those requires accounting for RF interference). I guess their understanding of optics is also lacking and their understanding of chemistry is rudimentary and stagnant over the long term.

In other words, aliens permanently stuck at a late 1800s technology level that have nonetheless developed the ability to travel across interstellar distances. And spotted voyager (a very small cold object in deep space). And retrieved it intact.

That's undoubtedly a very cool premise for a scifi story but as far as real life goes I think your time would be better spent worrying that voyager might be eaten by a species of space fairing wale.
by cmeacham98 | 2025-04-25 20:48:24+00:00
This is again, wrong. EULA is just another word for "contract", and I'm not aware of any countries that have banned contracts.

Of course, specific EULAs may not be enforceable in some countries because they contain terms prohibited by law. But the concept of EULAs - a contract where you agree to certain terms in exchange for license to use software is enforceable in basically all countries.
by asoneth | 2025-04-25 20:48:36+00:00
Between Slate and Telo[1] it seems like there's finally some new ideas for small electric trucks.

I totally get that some people's use-cases necessitate 300+ mile range, touchscreens, infotainment, DIN slots, four passengers plus a bunch of sheets of plywood, whatever. But why complain about the existence of a truck that doesn't meet your requirements if so many existing electric trucks already meet all of those requirements? Isn't it OK if other people want something different?

[1] https://www.telotrucks.com
by sixdimensional | 2025-04-25 20:48:41+00:00
This is a fair concern, I imagine. If it is highly user serviceable, maybe that isn't a concern.

That said, I think you raise a bigger issue - I'd like to see MORE things like Framework, Fairphone or Slate - user serviceable, customizable - maybe low initial cost.

To me, this feels futuristic, exciting, optimistic and positive.. we need more like this, so how can we make these kinds of businesses more likely to succeed, resilient, etc?
by throw16180339 | 2025-04-25 20:50:20+00:00
There's ample evidence of incompetence from DoGE, including obvious coding security holes, firing people who ensure the safety of our nuclear arsenal, and other mistakes that you would expect from an unmotivated intern.

This is supporting evidence that they were picked for ideological reasons - namely, being young white supremacists who wouldn't ask any questions. That's why Marko Elez was rehired. Musk, Trump, and Vance all share his views, he was just dumb enough to express them in public.
by hinkley | 2025-04-25 20:50:58+00:00
> You couldn't use a forward floor shifter unless you want to shift between the legs of the person in the middle.

I’ve been in one of those. And I may or may not have been the child stuck sitting there. Mercifully only a couple times, because I was horrified. It felt like a child had the power to get us into an accident. 0/10 would not recommend.
by nine_k | 2025-04-25 20:51:00+00:00
First of all, the SSID and password should be unique. Then, you can have a QR code printed in the owner's manual, and inside the glove compartment, or something. There's a standard for QR codes for connecting to wifi, so you don't have to type in the long and cryptic password.

But I don't see much incentive to produce a fake wifi AP for me to connect to with my car diagnostics. I'm not going to punch my bank account and password into it anyway. If I'm misled to alter the battery charging settings for someone else's car, or for a pretend mockup of the car controller, I don't see what the perpetrator could gain from it.

Then there must be a button on the car dashboard, or near, which I should press to activate the AC (it does not need to be up all the time), and press again to switch it off. This can serve as an easy way to check if there's doubt. The interface may have a function like headlights on / off as a simple way to check that the connection works.
by iAMkenough | 2025-04-25 20:51:02+00:00
Unless Iowa City can become self-sufficient and stop relying on State and Federal dollars, I believe we're watching the beginning of the end.

The U.S. Department of State notified the University of Iowa International Writing Program on Feb. 26 that its grants through the department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs were being terminated, stating that the awards “no longer effectuate agency priorities,” nor align “with agency priorities and national interest.”

Iowa City's property tax growth has also been capped by the State Legislature, at a rate that won't keep up with inflation.
by ceejayoz | 2025-04-25 20:51:26+00:00
Just one additional note in skimming https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/FOIA/DF-2015-00044%20(Do...

Page 36 indicates "General information or assessments regarding the military plans, intentions, capabilities, or activities of the US, its allies, coalition partners or foreign adversaries" would be classified CONFIDENTIAL, "Specific information" as SECRET, and "Information providing indication or advance warning that the US or its allies are preparing an attack" as TOP SECRET.

These texts included the location (Yemen), the equipment (F-18s, Tomahawks, MQ-9s), and down-to-the-minute timing, in advance. That would very clearly fall under TS for the DNI, and that's pretty solid evidence it'd be TS for the DOD.
by krick | 2025-04-25 20:52:03+00:00
I would like if you could refer me to that reading as well. I really know nothing about, uh, any of that, so I cannot judge. But your description strikes me as rather weird: "dedicating his life" seems a bit dramatic, since Principia is a pretty early work of his. He was active for 50-60 more years since he must have been "driven insane", as you say. Most of his famous works were written after that. Also, all of famous results of Gödel were after Russell finished with Principia. Not that he ever finished, but given the fact Second Edition was 15 years after the First one, and mostly contained relatively minor fixes… it seems only logical to conclude that he wasn't pursuing the topic after the first publication, basically, ever since realizing how big of a task would it be to try and formalize all of math like that.
by Spooky23 | 2025-04-25 20:52:25+00:00
That’s the excuse that is used for agriculture. They sell a vision of a Fisher Price toy farm, but make policy for giant Midwest farms.

The proverbial blue collar truck owner is already screwed. Random surburban dude should be paying through the nose for his F-250. Create demand for fuel efficiency, and you’ll have cars like my dad’s 1993 Escort Wagon, that got 45mpg.
by pfannkuchen | 2025-04-25 20:52:29+00:00
I just can’t even talk to people on the internet anymore.

I am speaking in general. Banishment was applied to commoners since forever. Did they crime in the area anymore? No, they aren’t there anymore.

Is there a special case for banishing political leaders, where the dynamics are different? Sure, probably. Does that apply here? No, obviously not.
by mrguyorama | 2025-04-25 20:52:30+00:00
>attempts to conceal, harbor, or shield from detection, such alien

Does that cover "Hey, this door is closer to where we are going"? It's going to rest on convincing a jury that the only possible reason the suspect would go out that door would be the judge explicitly trying to help them evade arrest.

IMO that should be impossible to prove but we have never taken "Beyond a reasonable doubt" seriously.

"knowing or in reckless disregard"

Funny, nobody ever arrests any of the employers choosing not to verify the documents of their employees.
by julik | 2025-04-25 20:54:02+00:00
Ok so: there is a blogging/content publishing engine, which is somewhat of a darling of the startup scene. There is a cloud hosting company with a variety of products, which is an even dearer darling of the startup scene. Something is posted on the blobbing/content publishing engine that clearly reveals that

* The product provided for blogging/content publishing did a shitty job of configuring WAF rules for its use cases (the utility of a "magic WAF that will just solve all your problems" being out of the picture for now) * The WAF product provided by the cloud platform clearly has shitty, overreaching rules doing arbitrary filtering on arbitrary strings. That filtering absolutely can (and will) break unrelated content if the application behind the WAF is developed with a modicum of security-mindedness. You don't `fopen()` a string input (no, I will not be surprised - yes, sometimes you do `fopen()` a string input - when you are using software that is badly written).

So I am wondering:

1. Was this sent to Substack as a bug - they charge money for their platform, and the inability to store $arbitrary_string on a page you pay for, as a user, is actually a malfunction and disfunction"? It might not be the case "it got once enshittified by a CIO who mandated a WAF of some description to tick a box", it might be the case "we grabbed a WAF from our cloud vendor and haven't reviewed the rules because we had no time". I don't think it would be very difficult for me, as an owner/manager at the blogging platform, to realise that enabling a rule filtering "anything that resembles a Unix system file path or a SQL query" is absolutely stupid for a blogging platform - and go and turn it the hell off at the first user complaint.

2. Similarly - does the cloud vendor know that their WAF refuses requests with such strings in them, and do they have a checkbox for "Kill requests which have any character an Average Joe does not type more frequently than once a week"? There should be a setting for that, and - thinking about the cloud vendor in question - I can't imagine the skill level there would be so low as to not have a config option to turn it off.

So - yes, that's a case of "we enabled a WAF for some compliance/external reasons/big customer who wants a 'my vendor uses a WAF' on their checklist", but also the case of "we enabled a WAF but it's either buggy or we haven't bothered to configure it properly".

To me it feels like this would be 2 emails first ("look, your thing <X> that I pay you money for clearly and blatantly does <shitty thing>, either let me turn it off or turn it off yourself or review it please") - and a blog post about it second.
by gwbas1c | 2025-04-25 20:54:15+00:00
I think there's a lot to be said for people going to college for the wrong reasons. Likewise, there's a lot to be said for people who show up at the wrong college, and end up with a lot of debt but no degree.

But, your (aprilthird2021's) sentiment is right. College is (generally) worth it. A lot of the lessons are more than what comes from a book and self-directed teaching.
by BoorishBears | 2025-04-25 20:54:29+00:00
If you're trying to really snarkily refer to the article on Dynamic Quants 2.0 and how carefully developed they were, they're comparing their quants to the methodology 99.99% quants out there use.

The problem is not that people are making quants "haphazardly", it's that people keep parroting that various quants are "practically lossless" when they actually have absolutely no clue how lossy they are given how application specific the concept is for something as multidimensional as an LLM.

The moment anyone tries a little harder to quantify how lossy they are, we repeatedly find that the answer is "not any reasonably definition of lossless". Even in their example where Q4 is <1% away in MMLU 5-shot is probably massively helped by a calibration dataset that maps to MMLU-style tasks really well, just like constantly using WikiText massively helps models that were trained on... tons of text from Wikipedia.

So unless you're doing your own calibrated quantization with your own dataset (which is not impossible, but also not near common), even their "non-haphazard" method could have a noticeable impact on performance.
by jamiejones1 | 2025-04-25 20:54:51+00:00
Not really. If HiddenLayer sold its own models for commercial use, then sure, but it doesn't. It only sells security.

So, it's more like a window glass company advertising its windows are unsmashable, and another company comes along and runs a commercial easily smashing those windows (and offers a solution on how to augment those windows to make them unsmashable).
by julik | 2025-04-25 20:55:11+00:00
This is what surprises me in this story. I could not, at first glance, assume that either Substack people or Cloudflare people were incompetent.

Oh: I resisted tooth and nail about turning on a WAF at one of my gigs (there was no strict requirement for it, just cargo cult). Turns out - I was right.