MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ChessviaAI | 2025-04-29 02:05:13+00:00
It feels like we're watching the playbook for AI-native companies emerge in real time.

Duolingo’s approach, explicitly tying headcount to proof-of-automation limits, baking AI usage into performance reviews, and prioritizing AI-first systems over retrofitting old workflows, is a glimpse at how "AI-first" won’t just mean using LLMs as a tool, but rebuilding the entire operational model around them.

That said, it's a double-edged sword. Contract workers were crucial to Duolingo’s early scalability. Shifting to AI removes human bottlenecks, but also human nuance — and teaching language is deeply nuanced. It’ll be fascinating (and maybe a little uncomfortable) to see if mass AI content keeps Duolingo's educational quality high as they chase faster scaling.

AI-first might win on cost and speed. But will it still win on outcomes?
by aubanel | 2025-04-29 02:06:07+00:00
There's already a lot of info in there: model architecture and mechanics.

Using the model to generate synthetic data also allows to distil its reasoning power into other models that you train, which is very powerful.

On top of these, Qwen's technical reports follow model releases by some time, they're generally very information rich. For instance, check this report for Qwen Omni, it's really good: https://huggingface.co/papers/2503.20215
by wyldfire | 2025-04-29 02:06:33+00:00
For python, compilation means emitting some bytecode. And you could conceivably ship that bytecode *. But because it's so terribly dynamic of a language, virtually nothing is bound to anything until you execute this particular line. "What code does this function call resolve to?" -- we'll find out when we get there. "What type does this local use?" -- we'll find out when we get there.

Even type annotations would have to be anointed with semantics, which (IIUC) they have none today (w/CPython AFAIK). They are just annotations for use by static checkers.

Unless you can perform optimizations, the compilation can't make a whole bunch of progress beyond that bytecode.

* In fact, IIRC there was/is some "freeze" program that would do just that: compile your python program. Under the covers it would bundle libpython with your *.pyc bytecode.
by wtsnz | 2025-04-29 02:06:34+00:00
Elixir + Phoenix is amazing. It's one self-contained stack. Just Elixir processes (and Postgres) which takes care of everything other ecosystems farm out to extra services. Background jobs, real-time channels, and even hot-code deployments run natively within the same BEAM runtime.

Working with this with a small team with one simple stack is a breath of fresh air in today's world.
by mubou | 2025-04-29 02:06:35+00:00
The new map/diagram: https://www.mta.info/map/5256

The old map, which they're now calling the "geographic map": https://www.mta.info/map/36946

I like the old one better, personally. It's easy to dismiss opposition by saying "nobody likes change," but that's just ad hominem. If you're going to argue in favor of something, make an argument in favor of it and don't just attack people for "hating change."
by ChessviaAI | 2025-04-29 02:07:24+00:00
Really interesting breakdown.

What's striking is how much long-term leverage Google has by controlling its hardware stack. An 80% cost edge isn't just about short-term pricing — it compounds over time into faster iteration, more experimentation, and the ability to undercut competitors when needed.

Meanwhile, OpenAI is betting that ecosystem lock-in (via agents, tooling, and user workflows) will outweigh pure cost efficiency. It feels a bit like early iOS vs Android: closed ecosystem polish vs open interoperability.

The wildcard is how quickly OpenAI can develop its own silicon or renegotiate better terms. Otherwise, Google's advantage might not just be hardware — it could become cultural too (faster, cheaper, wider innovation cycles).
by natrys | 2025-04-29 02:07:43+00:00
My first try (omitting chain of thought for brevity):

When you remove the cup and the mirror, you will see tails. Here's the breakdown: Setup: The coin is inside an upside-down cup on a glass table. The cup blocks direct view of the coin from above and below (assuming the cup's base is opaque). Mirror Observation: A mirror is slid under the glass table, reflecting the underside of the coin (the side touching the table). If the mirror shows heads, this means the underside of the coin is heads. Coin Orientation: A coin has two sides: heads and tails. If the underside (facing the table) is heads, the top side (facing away from the table) must be tails. Result: Removing the cup reveals the coin on the table. Since the top side was tails all along, you will see tails. Key Insight: The mirror reveals the hidden underside of the coin, but the top side (visible after removing the cup) is its opposite. The mirror’s reflection does not alter the physical orientation of the coin’s sides—it simply reflects the existing state. Answer: Tails.
by nostrademons | 2025-04-29 02:08:04+00:00
Usually they pass when the local train is at the station. This doesn't take all that much space; speed delta is 80mph (125mph once they grade-separate everything). Everything is computer controlled.

It occurs to me that this might be why they've chosen those particular areas. Sunnyvale, Redwood City, Hillsdale, Millbrae, and South San Francisco (just south of Brisbane) are all baby bullet stops, where all of the local, limited, and express trains stop, and so you can reliably count on every Caltrain stopping there and letting a HSR train pass. Cal Ave is the odd one out, but it still has local + limited service.
by sci_prog | 2025-04-29 02:08:29+00:00
I am building a service to make accessing AI as easy as sending email called ThreadWise

https://threadwise.app

You can email prompts directly to your ThreadWise address and get instant AI-powered responses, essentially an always available co-worker. Another great feature is the ability to schedule recurring tasks and since the AI has web access, you can get things like:

Daily mortgage rates or airfare price monitoring

Weather and news summaries

Sport scores, jokes, quote of the day

Pull data from public APIs (and more)

So you can essentially use it as a personal newsletter, crafted to your taste.

The free tier will let you test this out for free! I am looking for some feedback/criticism, testing, and additional ideas and I am open for collaboration if you have experience with sales. Also open to hearing which scheduled tasks people would find most useful.

Why I built it: I noticed a trend online, as well as with family/friends, that people would like to have a quick access to AI in instances where they couldn't always install apps or use browser-based tools (such as in remote/low bandwidth environments). This is when it him me, email clients already have all the features needed to interact with an AI (text + attachments) and I quickly got to work.

Some of the advantages are also that since there are no new apps, or browser tabs needed, the tool is ideal for companies who don't have the bandwidth to setup full fledged AI solutions on their own. The companies can choose either between public LLMs (e.g. OpenAI) or host everything on-premise with locally run models, so no data ever leaves the premises.

Eager to hear what you all think!
by ddr123 | 2025-04-29 02:09:25+00:00
This sounds the most legit to me out of any comment so far. I think there's a tendency to want to either 1.) innovate our way out of this with a novel solution, or 2.) be really passive like "this happening to me and it's hopeless." I think the way out is less profound, less complicated, and ultimately more fulfilling and efficacious than people imagine. Virtually everyone who is researching/writing in the friendship space talks about finding common interest groups, regularly occurring interactions, consistent effort (supposedly 200 hours to form a close friend), candid conversations to strengthen commitment, etc. Honestly, it's all the same stuff that a romantic relationships requires, just with a couple significant variations ;)

A helpful corollary (from writer Shasta Nelson author of "Frientimacy") is that we all understand that working out requires some amount of pain and struggle (also fun, enjoyment, accomplishment, etc...) in order to get a great bod. We would do well to expect the same experience in friendship. It's not a question of access to people, like Facebook, or even Bumble BFF would have us believe. Again from Shasta "We don't need better friends, we need better friendships."
by jacobolus | 2025-04-29 02:09:26+00:00
For purposes like graphic design or color grading it's usually more useful to first focus on lightness contrast, then pick hue and chroma afterward. Having uniform steps of ΔE is not really important, and using that as a primary criterion will usually make for worse choices. Color is multidimensional and trying to simplify it to a single distance function is substantially misleading for this context.

The main purpose of ΔE is specifying error tolerances for specified colors / measuring small differences between nearby colors, so that e.g. if you hire someone to paint a car or print a magazine you can check that their output matches expectation sufficiently. For colors that are significantly different ΔE isn't that helpful a practical tool.
by tveita | 2025-04-29 02:09:38+00:00
This is very relevant for compiler optimization and video codecs as well - both involve testing changes on lots of small benchmarks. Almost any change will hurt some benchmarks and help others. Maybe one benchmark improves a lot while causing a small slowdown on many others. The overall improvement for any one change can be minuscule, less than one percent. And yet if you keep doing these small improvements it adds up, hopefully to the point of improving every benchmark over time.
by ModernMech | 2025-04-29 02:10:22+00:00
> Your position seems to be

No my position is that you've created a tautology, and so the phrase "profoundly autistic" doesn't mean anything. You're profoundly autistic if you can't function, and if you can't function you're profoundly autistic. So what?

How does one measure "functional ability" -- functioning how and where and when? In a capitalist context? Academic context? social context? Where is the line? What's the cut off? Who is doing the assessing? Who is coming up with the criteria?

> But conspiracy theories about death camps are not one of my concerns.

I understand you don't think it's likely and don't care to discuss such matters, but you're not going to convince me these people are looking out for the best interests of autistic people. They're looking to be "right" about vaccines, and they're going to use autistic people however they can to get the answers they want.
by bionhoward | 2025-04-29 02:10:41+00:00
Personally, I don’t think of it as fighting, more like “compiler assistance” —

you want to make some change, so you adjust a struct or a function signature, and then your IDE highlights all the places where changes are necessary with red squigglies.

Once you’re done playing whack-a-mole with the red squigglies, and tests pass, you know there’s no weird random crash hiding somewhere
by ChessviaAI | 2025-04-29 02:12:01+00:00
This really captures a tension that's becoming harder to ignore:

AI isn't "creating" bad practices, it's removing the barriers that used to slow down bad practices.

Vibe coding existed long before LLMs, but now someone can ship fast without knowing (or caring) how fragile their implementation is. And because demos look good and investors want speed, it's easy to mistake velocity for progress.

What worries me most isn't the code itself; it's the cultural signal it sends. If early-stage success gets decoupled from technical soundness, then short-term incentives will dominate, and we’ll lose the developers who understand how to build lasting systems.

The best teams will be the ones who don't fight AI, but who also don't let AI drive them straight into a wall.
by hxtk | 2025-04-29 02:12:38+00:00
Yes, in fact, one construction of the AEAD primitive is to use AES-CTR with HMAC to "bolt on" authentication after the fact (AES-CTR on its own is an unauthenticated stream cipher).

You can find an implementation of AES-CTR-HMAC (at a high level where AES-CTR and HMAC are both given) here: https://github.com/tink-crypto/tink-go/blob/main/aead/aesctr...
by stubish | 2025-04-29 02:13:00+00:00
Your $1500 includes all the overheads that a storage provider amortizes over their entire customer base. At scale, the cost comes down to the cost of the hard drives, plugging them in, keeping them on, and bandwidth. The margins are really thin, so you need to reduce costs further by doing things like powering down drives that are not in use, or leaving failed drives in racks until they can be replaced in bulk. And importantly, if you offer something unlimited, make sure that it is actually limited. In Backblaze's case, the only 'unlimited' offering is only for their custom backup software that only backs up a single PC, and more recently allows limited backup of external drives. You can only keep multiple TB in it if you have multiple TB powered up in your PC and keep your external drives attached enough so their backups don't get wiped. It is impractical for archiving and abuse. And if it was a problem, they just need to tweak the terms of service to disallow abuse as is traditional.
by kazinator | 2025-04-29 02:13:06+00:00
The TL;DR of this seems to be: the plaintext metadata accompanying ciphertext ("associated data") is mixed into the ciphertext's encryption (essentially as an initial vector). Thereby, if the plain-text data is altered, the ciphertext cannot be correctly decrypted. The ciphertext is both a secret message, and a signature of the unencrypted data, so a separate HMAC is not required.

We can imagine, e.g. in the context of e-mail, if the DKIM header signature were combined a PGP-encrypted body as one operation. I'm ducking under the table now, though.
by the__alchemist | 2025-04-29 02:13:13+00:00
Great write-up. I do the array indexing, and get runtime errors by misindexing these more often than I'd like to admit!

I also hear you on the winit/wgpu/egui breaking changes. I appreciate that the ecosystem is evolving, but keeping up is a pain. Especially when making them work together across versions.
by nodox | 2025-04-29 02:14:14+00:00
Yes please open source. I tried something similar based one your checkboxes game! I never worked with websockets so I’m curious how you designed for scale and stopped spammers. I game was click the button 10M times and of course the script kiddies started immediately which is fun! But not my server keeps getting hammered with requests long after the initial interest. I did not know how to rate limit bots without blocking whole IP ranges.
by subramanya1997 | 2025-04-29 02:14:24+00:00
As AI agents become critical actors in digital ecosystems, we need standardized ways to represent and verify their identities. To address this, I’ve proposed OpenID Connect for Agents (OIDC-A) 1.0 — an extension of OpenID Connect Core 1.0 specifically for agent-driven interactions.

OIDC-A defines:

1. Standardized agent identity claims (model, provider, version, instance ID) 2. Delegation chains for authority tracking across agents 3. Cryptographic attestations to validate agent integrity 4. Capability discovery mechanisms to evaluate trust and permissions

The goal is to enable secure, verifiable, and interoperable identity for agents operating independently on behalf of users or systems.

Would love feedback from the security, identity, and AI communities.

Proposal here: https://subramanya.ai/2025/04/28/oidc-a-proposal/
by dylan604 | 2025-04-29 02:14:28+00:00
I bought a Drobo with the same intent of it being my online redundant array type storage while the original copies were on external HDDs that were placed back in their original retail packaging. The Drobo itself was only connected to computer when necessary but left plugged in to mains when one day it was needed and multiple drives failed to mount--more than could be recovered.

I used to really be into all of the hardware stuff like that building 64 disk arrays and maintaining multiples for edit bays. Now, I'm so sick of it. I just want a plug-n-pray system that works out of the box and does not need maintaining. But of course I know that's not how gear works. So make it someone else's problem and throw money at that problem. $99/year sounds like an excellent bargain. apparently, too excellent
by ddr123 | 2025-04-29 02:16:03+00:00
>Do you feel that politically "extreme" movements are a reaction to that and actually mostly about community and community interaction?

Yes. Great writing on this from Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind), Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone) and Ezra Klein (Why We're Polarized) and Vivek Murthy (Together). Haven't read these, but I've read about them. One of their main ideas is that when people lose trust in institutions and feel disconnected, they’re more likely to embrace extreme ideologies or groups that promise belonging.
by ryao | 2025-04-29 02:18:09+00:00
Nice catch. I had goofed by omitting optimization when checking this from an iPad.

That said, this brings me to my original reason for checking this, which is to say that it did not use a cmov instruction to eliminate unnecessary branching from the loop, so it is probably slower than a binary search that does:

https://en.algorithmica.org/hpc/data-structures/binary-searc...

That had been the entire motivation behind this commit to OpenZFS:

https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/commit/677c6f8457943fe5b56d7a...

It should be possible to adapt this to benchmark both the inlined bsearch() against an implementation designed to encourage the compiler to emit a conditional move to skip a branch to see which is faster:

https://github.com/scandum/binary_search

My guess is the cmov version will win. I assume merits a bug report, although I suspect improving this is a low priority much like my last report in this area:

https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=110001
by jmye | 2025-04-29 02:18:18+00:00
As usual, I’m not sure what would’ve been done differently if this entire administration were compromised by foreign states.

I suppose the argument could be made that they would’ve gained access to everything competently and secretly, but I suppose it’s also possible Putin/Xi/etc. would’ve been smart enough to realize how dumb the average American voter is and how little they care about anything that isn’t immediately affecting the contents of their wallet (and thus how little doing anything with more than minimal effort was a waste of time).
by goranmoomin | 2025-04-29 02:19:42+00:00
Not related to the project in any way, but I would say that if the hardware is running on CPython bytecode, I’d say that’s as far as it can get for executing Python directly – AFAIK running python code with the `python3` executable also compiles Python code into bytecode `*.pyc` files before it runs it. I don’t think anyone claims that CPython is not running Python code directly…
by sanex | 2025-04-29 02:20:12+00:00
I learned to code professionally in Ruby but wrote C# .Net for almost 10 years. I've probably forgotten more about .Net than I ever learned about Ruby at this point so take what I say with a grain of salt.

.Net has tons of configuration and boilerplate so I can't say that it's exactly the same in that sense, but the more meta theme is that just as there is a Rails way to do things, there is a Microsoft way to do things. Unlike Java where you're relying on lots of third party packages that while well maintained, aren't owned by the same company that does the language, framework, ORM, database, cloud provider, IDE and so on. Having a solid well documented default option that will work for 99% of use cases takes a lot of the load of decision making off your shoulders and also means you'll have plenty of solid documentation and examples you can follow. I've been in JVM land for the past couple years and it just can't compare.

I know Java people will come fight with me after this but I just don't think they know any better.
by ModernMech | 2025-04-29 02:20:55+00:00
This entire term so far has been one ratchet after another of "they will never do that" followed promptly by "wow, they just did that, nothing we can do about it now except deal with the fallout!"

On the one hand they've proposed the autism database.

On the other hand they've proposed the "wellness farms" for drug addicts.

All that's left is for the right hand to start picking up what the left hand is putting down and we are there.

Moreover, they have been demonstrating that they're willing to torture those they consider "subhuman". Look at how they are treating immigrants.

Autistic people are used to being abused in awful ways, so when we see those immigrants being abused and abducted by the Trump administration, it's not very hard to see they would be willing to do this to autistic people. It doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to recognize they're all awful people who are currently unrestrained by the law and general decency.

The conspiracy theory, such as it is, is this: these people look like Nazis, they sound like Nazis, and they act like Nazis, so their proposals related to autism are to be taken with a giant Nazi sized grain of salt.
by rcxdude | 2025-04-29 02:21:42+00:00
flywheels don't really work synchronously, though. Or at least, if so, they're not very useful as storage. Inverters can simulate inertia just fine, in fact they can simulate a much larger inertia than the corresponding power of spinning generation, leading to greater grid stability (whether connected to batteries or solar/wind, though without batteries its a little 'brittle' if you run near 100% output, as the power needed may suddenly disappear, so this is probably not good practice for the system as a whole. And you still need some give in your inertia so the grid can actually communicate about supply and demand)
by jayd16 | 2025-04-29 02:22:38+00:00
You can't do possibly-erroneous pointer math on a C# object reference. You don't need to deal with the game life cycle AND the memory life cycle with a GC. In Unity they free the native memory when a game object calls Destroy() but the C# data is handled by the GC. Same with any plain C# objects.

To say it's the same as using array indices is just not true.
by ddr123 | 2025-04-29 02:24:36+00:00
What would happen if your friend relationships had a lot more similarities to romantic relationships? Scheduled outings, regular discussions about what is pissing you off, regular apologies, mundane/unscheduled time together, discussions about hopes and dreams, declarations of affection. Probably less physical touch...

Anyway, I feel like people think they can let friendships develop by osmosis. I don't think ANY deeply fulfilling relationship can just happen without real relationship work.
by i_v | 2025-04-29 02:24:41+00:00
I think until we solve the knowledge supplementation problem (i.e., libraries providing extensive examples and LLMs being capable of ingesting, referencing, and incorporating it quickly) we’ll be headed for a tech monoculture—one framework or library for every solution. There’s been some talk about this already with some developers preferring to use older libraries or sticking within the confines of what their LLM of choice was trained on.

Actually, I had a hardware project where I found myself gravitating toward the microcontrollers and sensors ChatGPT was already familiar with. In this case, I cared more about my project working than about actually learning/mastering my understanding of the hardware. There’s still time for that but I’ve been able to get something working quickly rather than letting my notebook of ideas fill with even more pages of guilt and unfinished dreams…