MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by deaddodo | 2025-04-24 18:53:50+00:00
> - Register width: we somewhat maxed out at 512 bits, with Intel going back to 256 bits for non-server CPUs. I don't see larger widths on the horizon (even if SVE theoretically supports up to 2048 bits, I don't know any implementation with >256 bits). Larger bit widths are not beneficial for most applications and the few applications that are (e.g., some HPC codes) are nowadays served by GPUs.

Just to address this, it's pretty evident why scalar values have stabilized at 64-bit and vectors at ~512 (though there are larger implementations). Tell someone they only have 256 values to work with and they immediately see the limit, it's why old 8-bit code wasted so much time shuffling carries to compute larger values. Tell them you have 65536 values and it alleviates a large set of that problem, but you're still going to hit limits frequently. Now you have up to 4294967296 values and the limits are realistically only going to be hit in computational realms, so bump it up to 18446744073709551615. Now even most commodity computational limits are alleviated and the compiler will handle the data shuffling for larger ones.

There was naturally going to be a point where there was enough static computational power on integers that it didn't make sense to continue widening them (at least, not at the previous rate). The same goes for vectorization, but in even more niche and specific fields.
by calf | 2025-04-24 18:53:57+00:00
What precisely is meant by simulating the laws of physics? There's a common understanding pitfall there, in that a lot of lay people quickly end up talking about "is the universe a computer" or "infinite Turing machines have nothing to do with the real world" sort of confusing arguments.

I liked how this talk addressed the topic yet have questions about this talk's overarching argument. It's kind of an argument yet more like a philosophical position about CS--I know at least one paper that critiques the philosophical commitments made in something like the Church Turing thesis, etc., that paper called Aaronson the strong American style perspective or something, I forget, at any rate the issue is how transparent these philosophical premises are which those of us from computer science may take for granted.

I also liked-disliked those one slide proofs. I couldn't follow them, I know they are right (and are great exercises for a student to go over offline) and that they are in service of showing that modern understanding can do the results in one slide and so forth, but yet there's an accepted style of academic presentation that kind of misleadingly "performs" in a way that is cognitively impossible for the audience to actually follow unless they already know it, technical talks are kind of a backwards lie in that way. There was a recent popular book by a French mathematician who said as much, that 99.9% of the time we can hardly understand mathematics talks and books and it's kind of an open secret how professionals deal with this phenomenon.

Edit: I took undergrad CS theory but never "got" the exposure/fascination with Busy Beaver, but after this talk it became clearer to me that the reason for the Busy Beaver function is that it's a meta-function, it is a function about Turing machines, which is how the BBF gets the special properties/results that it does. Which immediately reminds me of Chaitin's constant which also tries to encode/talk about the properties of Turing machines, e.g. Kolmogorov style complexity which was not explicitly mentioned in the talk.
by SpaceNoodled | 2025-04-24 18:54:42+00:00
Agreed. Grabbing a pen and a post-it is faster for me than opening a text document, and a pad of paper allows me to format and diagram things freely.

The post-its can be sorted, stacked, moved, stuck to pertinent notebook pages, altered, and ultimately recycled when they are no longer relevant. It's much freer than a document on a phone or computer, where it can still be a pain to move information from one domain to another.
by o11c | 2025-04-24 18:55:55+00:00
I recently did a bit of programming exploration using tau exclusively instead of pi (and `sintau` instead of the new `sinpi` function etc.)

In almost every aspect this was far simpler, but there was the curious case of the constant `M_2_SQRTPI = 2 / sqrt(π)`. Even after looking up what weird formula that constant is used in, it wasn't at all clear to me where would be the most sensible place to put the constant.
by hirvi74 | 2025-04-24 18:56:31+00:00
> dream of faang and similar jobs thinking there is some respect to get there in 2025

Something that has bothered me in recent times is how much more concerned people are with where they work as opposed to what they work on. I honestly believe people would design software to kill puppies and kittens so long as they could tell people they work at a Big N company.

Not to mention, I think a vast majority of the products and services that come out of these Big N companies have increasingly started to reflect this mentality each passing year and have so for the past decade or more.
by dheera | 2025-04-24 18:57:02+00:00
I mean, part of the problem is I didn't own a pen at the time.

I have multiple computers and phones, I thought that was the interface to the post-2000 world.

I do have paint, but that's a little clumsy.

I grudgingly own a box of BIC pens now, but ... It's like requiring people to own a horse to do something these days. And in past experience during school days, those goddamn BIC pens all go bad (ink dries up or something), before I use even 5% of one of them.

I realize this all probably sounds very silly to someone born before 1980 but ... yeah it's just the reality of the world, I don't normally need pens to do anything, and am used to pens being provided in the rare occasions I need to sign a receipt or something, and usually I just end up drawing a cat on the signature line.
by Arnavion | 2025-04-24 18:57:09+00:00
I actually run Waydroid on my Linux phone because of 2FA. All my personal 2FAs are just TOTPs in a keepassxc DB synced between my phone and my PCs (accessed via gnome-secrets on the phone). But my $dayjob requires MS Authenticator in the "here's a 2-digit number, open MS Authenticator on your phone and type them in to approve" mode, so I have to run that in waydroid.
by yamazakiwi | 2025-04-24 18:57:18+00:00
I guess we would define these companies differently right?

They're definitely classified as small businesses but they're on a different track. That being said I think both "tracks" could learn from each other despite having different problems. They can even share goals.

You might not need customers initially if you raise 200 Million for your AI startup, but eventually you will, unless you maintain escape velocity or sell. I think it's more likely that chasing word-of-mouth marketing is an excellent goal for all companies and thinking you're above that will increase your risk.
by byearthithatius | 2025-04-24 18:57:54+00:00
We want the distribution to be varied and expansive enough that it has samples of answering when possible and samples of clarifying with additional questions or simply saying "I don't know" when applicable. That can be trained by altering the distribution in RLHF. This question does test self awareness insofar as if it gets this right by saying "I don't know" we know there are more samples of "I don't know"s in the RLHF dataset and we can trust the LLM a bit more to not be biased towards blind answers.

Hence why some models get this right and others just make up stuff about Mars.
by sarah-brussels | 2025-04-24 18:58:12+00:00
Fristly, a big thank you for trying out JuryNow and for your feedback! It's very valuable to me! I can promise you it was 16 years since I had the idea. I wasn't working on the app itself for 16 years, but I was working on the idea, the way the game would function and HOW to get an app with no budget (and no tech/coding skillset). indeed, the app has been in test mode for 4 months, testing it with a modest number of friends and family during timed trials. But the scalability was in place for larger numbers. Saturday was a big test, and tbh there were a heavy number of trolls posting hate speech etc which I was prepared for, but not in that quantity! So I just wanted to point out that JuryNow has been worked on for 16 years!
by alephnerd | 2025-04-24 18:58:25+00:00
But you're paying a rich Australian (Murdoch) who is trying to manipulate Anglo democracies and directly enabled the election of a President who has dramatically undermined Australia's foreign policy.

Australia has the 2nd most concentrated media industry in the world - only China is even more concentrated [0]

Like everything else, morals are for chumps. It's oligarchs fighting each other.

[0] - https://gmicp.org/communications-media-and-internet-concentr...
by MOARDONGZPLZ | 2025-04-24 18:58:25+00:00
> BUT remember that what you see is driven by the people you follow, mostly. Don’t like what they say or their political persuasion? Unfollow.

It would be nice if this were true, but I did an experiment where I created a new account on a VM with a new IP not previously connected to me and it almost immediately started serving me right wing slop regardless of who I followed. It seems obvious to me from this anecdote that it’s not as simple as following or unfollowing.
by aengelke | 2025-04-24 18:58:34+00:00
> Also there are processors with larger vector length

How do these fare in terms of absolute performance? The NEC TSUBASA is not a CPU.

> Do you have more examples of this?

I ported some numeric simulation kernel to the A64Fx some time ago, fixing the vector width gave a 2x improvement. Compilers probably/hopefully have gotten better in the mean time and I haven't redone the experiments since then, but I'd be surprised if this changed drastically. Spilling is sometimes unavoidable, e.g. due to function calls.

> Anyway, I know of one comparison between NEON and SVE: https://solidpixel.github.io/astcenc_meets_sve

I was specifically referring to dynamic vector sizes. This experiment uses sizes fixed at compile-time, from the article:

> For the astcenc implementation of SVE I decided to implement a fixed-width 256-bit implementation, where the vector length is known at compile time.
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-04-24 18:58:39+00:00
It’s “poorly thought out” to want there to exist truly public infrastructure that’s of the rough shape of Twitter?

I personally would love not having every viable tool of propaganda owned by private interests totally free of any Constitutional obligations.

A public utility Twitter would surely be inferior in many ways, but IMO would be a useful counterbalance to have in the mix of platform options.

Your comment makes sense if the social value of Twitter was exclusively posting links from other actual sources of truth, but it’s not. That’s not even the primary source of social value in a free society (it’s the dialogue).
by RetroTechie | 2025-04-24 18:58:42+00:00
> When young people don’t date or marry or start families, that’s the bottleneck coming for the most basic human institutions of all.

Missing the mark spectacularly:

Humans are not going through a bottleneck, or in danger of extinction (for the foreseeable future, at least).

It's every other creature facing this. And their extinction is already ongoing.

TLDR; article discusses demographics, cultural & economic changes. Not bottlenecks or extinction. Alarmist / misleading title.
by self_awareness | 2025-04-24 18:59:03+00:00
If the sender requests GPLv2, he should receive GPL version 2.

If the sender requests GPL, I find it natural for him to receive version 3, because it's the latest version. At the time of receiving the license, he gains knowledge about the existence of version 3 (the header on the print says the GPL he received is version 3).

If the sender has a notice about GPLv2, it means that there's a high chance that there's also GPLv1. This should be a sufficient hint that requesting only "GPL" is not sufficient, because the sender should be aware of the risk of receiving GPLv1 if he won't mention the "v2".
by lenova | 2025-04-24 18:59:03+00:00
I have no doubt that journald is slower, and I have no real preference for it. The request for journald support goes back to it being the default on most distros these days. I have to interact with a variety of different servers in different environments, most of which are not managed by myself, and hence I have to interact with was previously setup... which is usually the default config provided by the distro.
Show HN: Open-Source AI-Native Email Client for Gmail and Outlook
by bobdaren76 | 2025-04-24 18:59:36+00:00
Email is long overdue for a rethink. I’ve been building an AI-native email client designed from the ground up to streamline your inbox. Most tools only support Gmail — we just rolled out Outlook integration too.

You can turn emails into actionable tasks, draft replies, and a lot more — all powered by AI.
by miki123211 | 2025-04-24 18:59:56+00:00
I think hedging risks is a better example.

Imagine you're a software company in India, and you want to sign a 5-year contract with an American retailer. The retailer wants to know exactly how many Dollars they'll have to pay you for the software. You want to know exactly how many Rupees you will get to pay your employees.

Without futures, those two goals are incompatible, and the contract does not happen. With futures, the Indian company can decide to accept $1m, and buy a financial instrument that lets them exchange it in 5 years at current Rupee prices. They have to pay somebody for that privilege, but they know exactly how much they're paying, versus having an unbounded risk of currency fluctuations.

You can do the same with oil. Maybe you have no use for crude oil, but you expect your profits to fall as oil prices rise (maybe you're a transportation company locked into a long-term contract). You can hedge that risk by buying futures; if prices rise, you'll lose money on the contract, but you will make it up by selling the (now much more expensive) futures.
by apitman | 2025-04-24 19:00:30+00:00
You're right, in default configurations ActivityPub definitely has an advantage here, since HTTPsigs are tied to users, not instances, which gives finer grained blocking. I'm not aware of anything like this for Webmention.

I suspect this is because WM is used far less than AP. It also grew out of a community (IndieWeb) where having your own domain is a core tenet.

I think something like Mastodon could work with WM though, since all URLs hang off of user URLs, so you could block by URL prefix, ie "block https://example.com/user1/*".
by hakanshehu | 2025-04-24 19:01:25+00:00
Hi, thanks for the question! I haven’t used Huly extensively to provide a detailed comparison, but from a quick look (and a test I did some time ago) it seems to take a more opinionated approach: features such as issues, projects, and overall layout are pre-defined. Colanode, by contrast, works like Notion, giving you flexible building blocks so you can model your own workflows and knowledge structures. Huly may be quicker to get started with, while Colanode offers greater adaptability over time (this comes down to personal preference). Another key distinction is tech architecture: Colanode is built around a local-first design, providing full offline support with background syncing. I haven’t found equivalent offline capabilities documented for Huly, even though they may have them.
by averageRoyalty | 2025-04-24 19:01:28+00:00
> This type of online content — hyperpartisan and often veering into misinformation — has become a staple in the Facebook and Instagram feeds of Canadians as the country heads toward a crucial federal election on April 28

> Amid the news void, Canada Proud and dozens of other partisan pages are rising in popularity on Facebook and Instagram before the election. At the same time, cryptocurrency scams and ads that mimic legitimate news sources have proliferated on the platforms.

> Canada Proud, which also has hundreds of thousands of followers on X and TikTok

> Canada Proud has also bought more than $250,000 in ads on Facebook and Instagram since January, according to Facebook’s ad tracker

I don't see anything whatsoever that shows a potential different outcome had Meta not blocked news sites (2 years ago). This right wing campaign group still would have bought ads, they clearly resonate with many voters (hence their high numbers on other platforms with news) and I'm unconvinced Meta would have shown "legitimate news sources" algorithmically instead.

It's in Meta's best interest to show what creates the most engagement, which is likely whatever infuriates you or you passionately agree with. My guess is Facebook users would have been seeing very similar to what they're currently seeing anyway.
by zoogeny | 2025-04-24 19:02:55+00:00
It is a bit chilling because of the compound interest that this kind of policy incentivizes. Once you have a handful of powerful X accounts, you have the ability to generate more. So not only can you work to silence others, you can work to increase your capacity to silence others by promoting like-minded allies.

We are at the early stages of this, so we are watching the capture of influence. There is some discussion that influence is the new capital. And we are replicating the systems that allow for the accumulation of capital in this new digital age.
by janalsncm | 2025-04-24 19:02:59+00:00
Jake Paul is a social influencer. His posts show up from organic engagement.

Elon Musk owns the platform. He directly dictates how it works. He ordered engineers to boost his posts by a factor of 1000.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets...

Whether some people like EM’s posts is beside the point. It’s manufactured.
by perrygeo | 2025-04-24 19:03:13+00:00
The whole model of RDBMS is based on mutable tuples; soft deletes don't make much sense as an intrinsic part of that model. If you want soft deletes, you create an application layer or use a different data model.

Most of the time if you want "soft deletes", you really want an immutable log so that you time travel to any point in the history. XTDB and Datomic are worth looking at if you want to solve the problem at the data model level.
by hirvi74 | 2025-04-24 19:03:14+00:00
> Even Paul admits, he was torn between going into Engineering or Music. But, when he saw his classmate giving virtuoso performance, he thought "I am never going to as great as this." So, he chose engineering.

Coincidentally, I had a very similar experience, and made a similar decision to switch to software engineering. However, the irony is that I am also just a bad, if not worse, at software engineering. Oh well, not a day goes by that I regret my decision.
by ty6853 | 2025-04-24 19:03:35+00:00
I think it's in reference to pre-internet 1A 'protection' even when using publicly available private property.

>See Marsh v. Alabama for this -- a company town was prohibited from barring picketing and pamphleting on private sidewalks. [user?id=rabite]

>https://www.oyez.org/cases/1940-1955/326us501
by Workaccount2 | 2025-04-24 19:03:44+00:00
The inaccuracies are that it is called "Marathon Valley" (not crater) and that it was photographed in April 2015 (from the rim) or that in July 2015 actually entered. The other stuff is correct.

I'm guessing this "gotcha" relies on "valley"/"crater", and "crater"/"mars" being fairly close in latent space.

ETA: Marathon Valley also exists on the rim of Endeavour crater. Just to make it even more confusing.
by jwilber | 2025-04-24 19:03:53+00:00
Amazing work. Motherduck and the duckdb ecosystem have done a great job of gathering talented engineers with great taste. Craftsmanship may be the word I’m looking for - I always look forward to their releases.

I spent the first two quarters of 2024 working on observability for a build-the-plane-as-you-fly-it style project. I can’t express how useful the cte preview would have been for debugging.
by cmdli | 2025-04-24 19:04:05+00:00
In the few days following the election, there was a flood of conservative posters all over the place. After about a week, they all disappeared and Reddit returned to its usual politics. I think the difference you are seeing is an atypical amount of conservatism, not the other way around. Most people who voted for Harris still do not think that the lack of a primary was the issue.
by ethagknight | 2025-04-24 19:04:55+00:00
Manufactured consensus is literally the name of the game for the big news networks. News is/was paid vast sums by the government to tell a certain story. That is Manufactured Consensus. Some countries do a better job making the news seem like a separate arm from the government. The entire point is to direct the populace. That is not the core focus of X, even though it is entirely susceptible to it, and will be encountered on any such platform. yes Reddit is horrible, but I would say Wikipedia is even more dangerous because it presents as basic facts. Reddit at least you know it's some obscene username giving geopolitical strategy rants.

Important to note, I first saw this specific chart and claim of Musk's heavy handed influence via X. Also, I see plenty of dissenting opinions (in a general sense on Trump, Tariffs, Musk, DOGE, etc) on X. Alternative views definitely have reach.

Also important to note, my posts, where I am very knowledgeable in my domain and will spend an unreasonable amount of time authoring posts to make various points, will garner mere double digit views, so when someone cries about no longer have millions of views for their uneducated hot takes... spare the tears.
Ask HN: Video showing LLM assitent coding on big code base
by CopyOnWrite | 2025-04-24 19:05:06+00:00
As a experienced software developer I read a lot about how AI tools make coding faster and speed up development of software.

In my personal experience, LLMs help with:

- answering questions

- generating simple code/scaffolding in a vacuum

At the same time I don't have much success using LLMs to generate code in a simple CRUD application (around 20K LOC).

What I am looking for, is a video showing w/o time lapses/breaks, how an experienced prompt engineer uses an LLM to add a non trivial feature to a code base with at least 20K LOC.

What I am looking for:

- It must be used to add a feature on a bigger code base (>= 20 LOC)

- The added feature cannot be a leaf feature (means it must integrate with the rest of the system at multiple points)

- The prompting has to be less effort/faster than to type the solution in the programming language

- Any programming language/framework is fair game

- Any LLM is fair game

- The code base can be a bigger open source project (since I assume all LLMs were trained on open source projects, this should make it easier for LLMs to perform)
by freehorse | 2025-04-24 19:05:06+00:00
Yeah I also hoped that the article had some more backing for these arguments. The nytimes article, which is cited and from which the first graph is from, is more interesting, as it also includes a couple more cases:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/04/23/business/elon...

or from webarchive

https://web.archive.org/web/20250423093911/https://www.nytim...
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-04-24 19:05:14+00:00
>Social media did not naturally evolve into what it is today...resulted from purposeful business strategic decisions

I disagree about the actual mechanism at play. It is a cart before the horse situation. Yes, it was driven by business, but that business was being driven by Web 2.0, which was being driven by the natural evolution of communication technology.
by yamazakiwi | 2025-04-24 19:05:15+00:00
I think they would agree with you and were mostly drawing attention to this distinction, be it cheekily.

You're definitely right about the difference and thank you for mentioning it.

I do think that the point of the article can still be applied to both types of business. The point I take from the article is more about not missing out on your identity or thinking your britches are too big, which could be applied to startups as well.