MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sudahtigabulan | 2025-04-21 01:20:56+00:00
> diverse panel of 12 real people of all ages, far removed from your peer group, around the world who will be able to give you an instant decision on your question 24/7. No commentary, just a verdict between two choices

If the userbase becomes equally-ish distributed around the world, for many questions, this wouldn't be very useful.

Especially when you only get a yes/no answer. People can give you the same answer for opposite reasons.

Should I invite 400 people to my wedding?

12xNo

1 from countries where this is too many, 11 from countries where this is too few.

(and it depends on who is up, timezones and all)

You were hoping for a No, because you can't afford 400 guests, and now you think the world agrees with you. Wrong.

With a well-crafted question, this can be mitigated. But I doubt the average user will be willing to put the effort.
by dissent | 2025-04-21 01:21:07+00:00
The article reiterates the facts about the notions of race and essentialism. The context is that the far right are leaning on historically harmful, scientifically inaccurate, and honestly, kind of absurd ideas about "race".

Having said that, is this not what the entire world has been doing recently? Does BLM not fall for exactly the same fallacy? Is "person of colour" not an egregiously bad phrase to define a person? As if we are white, unless somehow tainted? Is this not something that should concern us all whether it is done with good intentions or not?
by sargstuff | 2025-04-21 01:21:39+00:00
Side hobby insantities not limited to 'ee degree hobbies'! -> Many companies got started as 'side ventures' aka Facebook, MS Windows, Dell, Nerf and multitude of other companies.

Use VR / simuations to cut down on Milton Hershey[1] cost issues. Simulations can allow for 'timing the tarrifs'.

North American FPGA's may be a thing again! (once pi systems superceeds lambda systems as the multi-FPGA board connection theory of choice :-)

Save on robotic automation costs via software scripts!

Perhaps 3d printed circuit boards will now be a more realisitic alterntative than traditional outsourcing board production? [2][3][4]

Perhaps there'll be some motivation/inspiration for creating/combining standard programming logic/language/3d 'threaded' sock it programming by combining (2021) mathematics of knitting[5]; and more modern / inexpensive / upgraded 'general computational device' derived from apollo guidence computer[6] concept. aka instead of wasm, weave-em.

Do have to get over the 'stich in time, saves nine', since most modern computation 'saves in 8'. Easy to unravel program(s). Tight knit spreadsheets!

But, computational e-ink might scale better using DBOS concepts[7].

-------------------------------------------------------

[1] : https://hersheystory.org/milton-hershey-history/

[2] : https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/1ajll6s/3d_prin...

[3] : direct desk top printed circuits on paper flexible electronics : https://www.nature.com/articles/srep01786

[4] : 3d printed circuit board : https://all3dp.com/1/3d-printed-circuit-boards-pcb/

[5] : https://www.sciencenews.org/article/how-one-physicist-unrave...

[6] : https://nerdfighteria.info/v/f2ZCVnk-oRU/

[7] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBOS
by mc3301 | 2025-04-21 01:21:39+00:00
I don't know about "notoriously difficult to live as a foreigner in Japan." I mean, you DO need a visa (residence status), but it's easier to get than a lot of countries.

You don't legally need to even be a resident to buy a property here, so there's that.

And yes, beautiful homes in beautiful places can be found for quite cheap here. But what social media doesn't tell you is that most of those places need a lot of work, are very far away from anything, and there is no "growth" of any kind in those areas. If you have the cash, no kids, work remotely and are willing to learn the language/culture... totally doable.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-04-21 01:23:40+00:00
In a former job, I wrote a static PWA to do initial provisioning for robots. A tech would load the page, generate a QR code, and put it in front of the camera to program the robot.

When I looked into having this static page hosted on internal infra, it would have also needed minimum two dedicated oncalls, terraform, LB, containerization, security reviews, SLAs, etc.

I gave up after the second planning meeting and put it on my $5 VPS with a letsencrypt cert. That static page is still running today, having outlived not only the production line, but also the entire company.
by estebank | 2025-04-21 01:23:42+00:00
IMO the best chance Java has to close the gap on memory utilisation is Project Valhalla[1] which brings value types to the JVM, but the specifics will matter. If it requires backwards incompatible opt-in ceremony, the adoption in the Java ecosystem is going to be an uphill battle, so the wins will remain theoretical and be unrealised. If it is transparent, then it might reduce the memory pressure of Java applications overnight. Last I heard was that the project was ongoing, but production readiness remained far in the future. I hope they pull it off.

1: https://openjdk.org/projects/valhalla/
by makeitdouble | 2025-04-21 01:24:52+00:00
Couples using this method tend to be mostly fine with any "failure". They might want a child but not now, or are not completely sure but would do their best if it happens.

Couples who clearly don't want children typically have already discussed their stance in the couple and will be way more thorough about birth control. That's typically not the demographic that will YOLO it, so I guess you'd get much more pushback on that front ?
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-21 01:24:54+00:00
https://hellraiser.fandom.com/wiki/Coil

During the production of the first Hellraiser film, [the band Coil] were asked by director Clive Barker to compose the film's score. Their music was described by Barker as "bowel churning." The group completed nine tracks for the score, however the music was rejected by the producers, who wanted a more traditional, classical-based movie score.

https://www.discogs.com/release/197912-Coil-The-Unreleased-T...

Coil is the only group I’ve heard on disc whose records I’ve taken off because they made my bowels churn. -- Clive Barker

[Note: AStonesThrow met Clive Barker at San Diego Comic Con in the mid-1990s, and presented this very disc for his autograph, and he obligingly signed it with the Sharpie provided. Very nice guy in person. Yes: Coil's music is disgusting, reprehensible, vile, and usually unlistenable. Stay well away.]
by cs702 | 2025-04-21 01:25:17+00:00
The OP looks like good work, but it's definitely not a quick read. The authors claim theoretical breakthroughs that enable:

* a data-free LLM quantization method which they claim outperforms all prior data-free approaches, including NF4; and

* a method which they claim is optimal for finding non-uniform per-layer quantization levels which match a given compression constraint in the "medium bitwidth" regime.

They demonstrate improved accuracy-compression trade-offs on popular LLMs.

Thank you for sharing this on HN.
by harshreality | 2025-04-21 01:25:24+00:00
What's the mechanism for that? Maybe a few sperm are stuck in the sperm ducts past the point they were severed, but the ducts are cut and sealed, aren't they? Even if they weren't sealed, it would be Russian Roulette trying to get across the gap in what's effectively just body cavity space.

My expectation would be the first sample might have lower but significant sperm count, and each subsequent sample would decrease dramatically until any residual sperm died and the count was zero. You're talking about motility, not count, but it doesn't sound like you noticed a drastic decrease from sample to sample. That doesn't seem right according to my understanding.
by smcl | 2025-04-21 01:25:42+00:00
We have not taught apes sign language. They can learn and form crude signs and use them to respond to stimuli or for rewards (wanting an orange, for example) but they’re not meaningfully communicating. It’d be like me claiming I taught my dog English because he can press the little button that plays a sound of me saying “biscuit!” when he wants a treat (which you have to take away from him because he will just mash it, since dogs want dog biscuits).
by DaSexiestAlive | 2025-04-21 01:26:00+00:00
Single-thread could be a thing if it's like a full-stack all sitting in a web browser--like Dioxus is going toward..

If a web browser is in a glorified chromebook like a 2025 Macbook Air, indeed there's a lot of breathing room. A lot of ram. Processing power. Cores. It's nice. I get that.

And then you can do off-line first: meaning use the cached local storage available to WASM apps.

Then whatever needs to go to the mother ship, then call web apis in the cloud.

That would, in theory, basically giving power back from "net pc theory of things" back to "fat client"--if you ask the grey-haired nerds among you. And you would gain something.

But outside of a glorified chromebook like a 2025 Macbook Air--we have to remember that we are working with all kinds of web devices--everything from crap phones to satellite servers with terabytes of ram--so the scalability story as we have it isn't entirely wrong.

I have been to U of Toronto, very smart people. But honestly this is a troll piece. Doesn't go into any depth and one-sided. Unhelpful. I think U of Toronto's reputation would be better served by something more sophisticated than this asinine blog entry.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-04-21 01:26:04+00:00
Appreciate the balanced take. An improvement to a technology can be good, or it can be harmful - and beyond a certain point, further amplification can destroy society and the commons which we all benefit from.

Coca leaves are a relatively benign part of daily life in Peru & a few other surrounding countries - they’re on the table in your hotel lobby, ready to be stirred into your tea. But cocaine - same base but made more intense with technology - causes many problems - and don’t even start about crack cocaine.

So when thinking of technology through the lens of what it amplifies we can consider traditional Internet research & writing contrasted vs. using AI - the latter gives instant answers and often an instant first draft.

Great for some; harmful for others. Where that point lies and what factors contribute is different for every individual.
by whatshisface | 2025-04-21 01:26:27+00:00
Has anyone ever tried answering the objections you listed with some form of compensation? My understanding of human nature is that people don't like to trust strangers and take what are for them risks if there's nothing to be gained from it and some (even if unlikely) potential loss.

Just imagine going to one of those meetings and asking everyone in the room to do a trust fall exercise. Even if the thought that you wouldn't catch them is totally unfounded, I bet you wouldn't be able to get a plurality. :-)
by sltkr | 2025-04-21 01:27:08+00:00
I'm not sure who this article is for, but I think it doesn't strike at the heart of the topic.

Half of the article is devoted to closures, but closures aren't essential for decorators. And the __closure__ attribute is an implementation detail that is really irrelevant. (For comparison, JavaScript has closures just like Python, but it doesn't expose the closed-over variables explicitly the way Python does.)

Decorators are simply higher order functions that are used to wrap functions. The syntax is a little funky, but all you need to know is that code like:

@foo @bar def baz(args): return quux(args)

Is essentially equivalent to:

baz = foo(bar(lambda args: quux(args))

...i.e. decorators are functions that take a callable argument and return a new callable (which typically does something and then calls the argument function--or not, as the case may be).

Then there are seemingly more complex expressions like:

@foo(42, 'blub') def bar(..): ...

This looks like a special kind of decorator that takes arguments, but it looks more complex than it really is. Just like `foo` was an expression referencing a function `foo(42, 'blub')` is just a regular Python function call expression. That function call should then itself return a function, which takes a function argument to wrap the function being decorated. Okay, I admit that sounds pretty complex when I write it out like that, but if you implement it, it's again pretty simple:

def foo(i, s): def decorator(f): def invoke(*args, **kwargs): print('decorator', i, s) f(*args, **kwargs) print('done') return invoke return decorator @foo(42, 'blub') def hello(): print('Hello, world!') hello() # prints: # decorator 42 blub # Hello, world! # done

This is an extra level of indirection but fundamentally still the same principle as without any arguments.

And yes, these examples use closures, which are very convenient when implementing decorators. But they aren't essential. It's perfectly possible to declare a decorator this way:

class Invoker: def __init__(self, f): self.f = f def __call__(self): print('before call') self.f() print('after call') def decorator(f): return Invoker(f) @decorator def hello(): print('Hello, world!') hello() # prints: # before call # Hello, world! # after call

It's the same thing but now there are no closures whatsoever involved.

The key point in all these examples is that functions in Python are first-class objects that can be referenced by value, invoked dynamically, passed as arguments to functions, and returned from functions. Once you understand that, it's pretty clear that a decorator is simply a wrapper that takes a function argument and returns a new function to replace it, usually adding some behavior around the original function.
by mc3301 | 2025-04-21 01:27:13+00:00
Do what Bhutan does: "impose a daily sustainable development fee of US$100 a day on all nationals" that don't have an official residence status nor Japanese citizenship. Special applications for special exemptions could exist, too. Japan loves paperwork.

Do this for just one year, amass a huge fund[0]. The next year, remove it, and see even more renewed interest to come.

[0]Likely would be gobbled up by the fund managers going to hostess bars.
by II2II | 2025-04-21 01:28:33+00:00
> Sometimes I wonder why there isn't more enthusiasm around theming.

My guess: because it is difficult to develop software that can be themed and it is difficult to create themes that look good. Not only is it high effort, but it has relatively low returns. Themes mostly affect how things look and, ideally, have very little impact on functionality. I say ideally since, when there is an impact on functionality it is usually a negative one (e.g. buggy behaviour). Contrast that to a window manager or compositor: while it won't affect the functionality of individual applications (ideally), it does have a fairly significant impact upon how one interacts with the desktop as a whole.
by esperent | 2025-04-21 01:28:40+00:00
> Just because we rely on vision to interface with computer software doesn't mean it's optimal for AI models

This is true but AGI means "Artificial General Intelligence". Perhaps it would be even more efficient with certain interfaces, but to be general it would have to at least work with the same ones as humans.

Here's some things that I think a true AGI would need to be able to do:

* Control a general purpose robot and use vision to do housework, gardening etc.

* Be able to drive a car - equivalent interfaces to humans might be service motor controlled inputs.

* Use standard computer inputs to do standard computer tasks

And this list could easily be extended.

If we have to be very specific in the choice of interfaces and tasks that we give it, it's not a general AI.

At the same time, we have to be careful at moving the goalposts too much. But current AI are limited to what can be returned in a small number of interfaces (prompt with text/image/video & return text/image/video data). This is amazing, they can sound very intelligent while doing so. But it's important not to lose sight of what they still can't do well which is basically everything else.

Outside of this area, when you do hear of an AI doing something well (self driving, for example) it's usually a separate specialized model rather than a contribution towards AGI.
by schneems | 2025-04-21 01:30:04+00:00
> They can’t even identify the key elements of their problem.

I wrote the original comment. I also went to therapy where my provider introduced me to a framework called Non-Violent Communication. It’s a four part process and the last is an explicit request. And a valid request is always “help me figure out how to ask a better question.”

Stack overflow culture sucks, but believe it or not it’s better than what came before.

I’m glad that you’re getting help on discord. To me the ultimate goal of writing questions is to never need to post them. In that: once you can craft the perfect question … then the answer becomes self evident. Usually the more effort I put into a question, the more help I get out of an answer. And I feel that’s a good thing.

I feel that you lose that introspection and self iteration when getting help via chat. When I give someone a debugging suggestion (I teach college, elementary school, and have worked in a support role for over a decade) I never want the person to simply tell me what happened. I.e. I don’t want to remote pair program where they run commands and tell me the results. I’m always aiming to teach them via a hypothesis. I want them to take the new evidence and give me their analysis. So I can possibly correct their misunderstandings and get a glimpse into their thought process. While that process can happen in chat. It’s more suited to people who respond quickly rather than those who are looking for maximum depth. You’re also limited to only the people online at that exact moment.

I think there is value in getting help from chat. Developers also need to learn how to deeply inspect and debug complicated issues. I developed those skills as a byproduct of async forum culture and years of self study. I feel we need to find a way to train devs for some of these accidental skills that old timers picked up accidentally.
by MisterTea | 2025-04-21 01:37:03+00:00
Define "loose".

Edit, to add: years ago a lot of people kept pigeons in rooftop coops around NYC. As a kid there was an older guy near by who you'd see on his roof waving around a cloth that sort of directed the birds as they flew in a big flock. Now I'm imagining that but a flock of crows bringing back loot to some gangster on a rooftop.
by lumost | 2025-04-21 01:37:39+00:00
My honest take? Vibe coding makes a senior engineer 2-4x more productive depending on the project. Very large projects see diminishing returns down to 0% productivity gain or negative. I can probably supervise 10 concurrent vibe coding sessions with a little thought on how to structure the tasks and code. This is like giving each of your top engineers their own staff.

The AI coders are different from human coders in what they can and can’t do, they are both profoundly dumb - and extremely technically proficient *at the same time*.
by gwern | 2025-04-21 01:40:42+00:00
> Why choose a format that resembles a published article instead?

...It is in a format that resembles a published article because it is going to be a published article? "This is a preprint of a chapter that will appear in the book Designing an Intelligence, published by MIT Press." on the first page.

> As for the graph, it’s too generic

A history of RL from DQN to AlphaProof/LLM computer use in Gemini is not 'generic', and could not be.

> it doesn’t provide any real value

It provides value to people who were not around then and not familiar with how RL attention peaks and crests, and a similar chart about TD-Gammon and Deep Blue, say, would likewise be useful for the many people who did not actually live through those eras, and helps contextualize material from back then. (I did, and maybe you did, and so it's not useful to us, but there exist other, younger people in the world, who are not us{{citation needed}}.) And the fact that these cycles exist is something worth reflecting on - Karpathy and others have reflected on how there were expectations of DRL leading to AGI in the 2015-2020 period, which wound up being swamped by self-supervised learning and DRL relegated to a backwater (and contributed very directly to many major events like how OA and DM became like they are now - and why Sutton is at Keen rather than DM with Silver), but now suddenly becoming super-relevant again.
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-21 01:40:43+00:00
Timothy Snyder also recorded a 15 minute talk about oligarchy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biZVrh821RA

I believe Lawrence Lessig also, in all but direct language, explained how citizens united was a revolution against the constitution that literally turned us into a plutocracy, a government where money votes for candidates. Once people with money choose candidates, those people can vote for candidates that let them consolidate power and make more money, which gives them more political power until power is centralized enough a few major players that own media and intelligence companies can rival the states ability to communicate information or perform "intelligence" tasks.

The purpose of intelligence could be said to find terrorists, but to someone like Peter Thiel, a journalist is a terrorist, so intelligence capabilities in private hands work against anyone fighting power held by private individuals.

If an intelligence apparatus is a function of state, then privatized intelligence is unfortunately indicative of private individuals with state like capabilities.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-21 01:40:45+00:00
Presume that a majority of women of reproductive age per generation al cohort do not want children, and intend to exit those fertility years childfree. What then?

I see no crisis, only total fertility rates reaching a neutral rate based on women empowered to make the best choice for themselves.

https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/adults-no-children-why-pew-...

https://www.dw.com/en/why-south-korean-women-arent-having-ba...

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240918-chile-birth-r...
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-04-21 01:42:15+00:00
I don’t really think that’s true with AI in the mix. Yes, they won’t be watching those specific movies, but AI will be trained on them and even use them as context. You could generate a new updated movie set between ANH and ESB with AI versions of the original actors when they were young and alive. Cinema could start to get really interesting, and anything new is just a remix of the old anyways (we just build on what we have done much faster and more cheaply).
by vikrantrathore | 2025-04-21 01:42:46+00:00
FramePack

Diffuse thousands of frames at full fps-30 with 13B models using 6GB laptop GPU memory. Finetune 13B video model at batch size 64 on a single 8xA100/H100 node for personal/lab experiments. Personal RTX 4090 generates at speed 2.5 seconds/frame (unoptimized) or 1.5 seconds/frame (teacache). No timestep distillation. Video diffusion, but feels like image diffusion.

Paper link: https://lllyasviel.github.io/frame_pack_gitpage/pack.pdf

Website link: https://lllyasviel.github.io/frame_pack_gitpage/