MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-05-20 19:00:08+00:00
Disclaimer: I work for a manufacturer of headphones and microphones. If you’re into Pro Audio, you have undoubtedly heard of or used our products, which are in widespread use throughout the industry. I spend my days in the lab with DSP engineers who are responsible for noise cancellation and other algorithms some of you may even be using right now, in fact. I myself work on plugins related to post-processing features to support our microphones, which are in wide use throughout the industry, on stage and in the studio, by amateurs and pros alike.

I found a lot wanting in this article. The emphasis on a lack of tooling seems very ill conceived. The #1 DSP tool in use in this industry is .. Matlab.

Yet, it’s not even mentioned.

Here’s how it goes: Matlab is used to model and test everything. Algorithms are developed, refined, tested and evaluated in Matlab, which has ample capabilities to do realtime audio with high performance. Once the algorithm has been demonstrated and proven, it is ported from Matlab to C, and then core parts are implemented in assembly.

This does not take years. It takes months and in some cases, with a great DSP team, even just weeks. Matlab has plenty of tools for doing this properly .. from visual tools, to optimization functions. There are very, very few professional DSP engineers who don’t work with Matlab in this way.

So this article really just felt a bit more like marketing copy designed to sell their product .. and as I got to the bottom of the article to see the mention of the JS event loop and the browser, I felt like the article was intentionally being disingenuous about the real issues. (The real issue with embedded DSP development is that hardware vendors are terrible compiler developers; but this has had the side effect of making great DSP guys into great assembly programmers. You absolutely must use assembly; but you must also absolutely use Matlab.)

And then, there is JUCE. JUCE is rapidly becoming THE tool to use for high performance audio - it dominates the desktop plugin market - but, as it matures, it has become more and more embeddable. There are devs out there who have made millions with JUCE plugins and are now porting their JUCE code to hardware and embedded platforms with a great deal of ease.

If you want to do embedded DSP properly, start with Matlab, get your ideas implemented, port to C++, integrate into JUCE, and then port your JUCE code to embedded, if your BOM budget supports a decent processor - or, port your processBlock() to assembly, if it doesn’t. This is the future of DSP platform development. Meanwhile, Matlab->C->Assembly is a very well refined workflow, and it is quite productive. One of the best reasons to keep those assembly language programming chops sharp.
Agentic AI Systems – Tools, System Design, and Resources for AI Agents
by alirezadeer | 2025-05-20 19:00:14+00:00
I recently put together this curated and hands-on repo focused on agentic AI systems and LLM agents. It includes: - System design patterns for agent architectures - A comprehensive OpenAI Agents SDK guide (with code) - Summaries of tools and design resources - A summary of the AI Engineering book by Chip Huyen - Hands-on code examples and projects - More frameworks and real-world projects coming soon
by palmotea | 2025-05-20 19:00:26+00:00
> You joke, but wars are won on logistics. Famously, the US military can deploy a Burger King anywhere on Earth within 24 hours.

But not only on logistics. If the "US military can deploy a Burger King anywhere on Earth within 24 hours," but little else, it's fucked. Right now its production base is so addled and weakened that it can't even sustain the wartime production really needed by Ukraine without cleaning out the cupboards. It has only enough missiles to last days in a high intensity conflict, and the lead time for more is years. It definitely can't win in a sustained conflict against China (who has 40-effing% of world manufacturing capacity.
by ramesh31 | 2025-05-20 19:00:35+00:00
Needs checkpointing. A full git commit is too much... commitment. Often you'll go down a bad path with agentic codegen that just falls apart, and you wont know where you wanted to return to until you're there. I'm very skeptical of the "automated PR" solutions at the moment. Too much time and money is lost to trust singleshot yet. And if you still need a human in the loop, best to do it in realtime with constant feedback, i.e. cybernetics not automata.
by janosch_123 | 2025-05-20 19:00:40+00:00
I build my own electric cars and a family friend asked me: Do electric cars still need a gearbox?

The question is excellent, because many people think you can just skip the transmission altogether and drive the wheels directly from the motor, but that is not the best solution. A gas car will have five gears, a big truck maybe even ten. This is to match the speed and torque as good as possible. Too little torque and you stall. To low a gear and you can't go fast. Even though electric motors have a lot more torque than petrol engines, it still makes sense to have a reduction gear with them.

The reversal: You could build a big petrol engine that does not need a transmission and has all the torque ready to get the car moving, but that would be expensive, wasteful and costly, you would end up with tractor like engines sticking out of the bonnet of your car.

Much better to pair a much "smaller" (can still be a V6 or v12) engine with a gearbox reduction. This is what every auto manufacturer does, no matter if electric or not. The simplification with EVs is that you only need one gear, so it is not operated by the user anymore.
by colah3 | 2025-05-20 19:00:47+00:00
> True! I suppose I was thinking about a 'strong' form of linear representations, which is something like: features are represented by linear combinations of neurons that display the same repulsion-geometries as observed in Toy Models, but that's not what you're saying / that's me jumping a step too far.

Note this happens in "uniform superposition". In reality, we're almost certainly in very non-uniform superposition.

One key term to look for is "feature manifolds" or "multi-diemsnional features". Some discussion here: https://transformer-circuits.pub/2024/july-update/index.html...

(Note that the term "strong linear representation" is becoming a term of art in the literature referring to the idea that all features are linear, rather than just most or some.)

> I want to make sure I'm getting my terminology right -- why does superposition necessarily require the linear representation hypothesis? Or, to be more specific, does [individual neurons being used in combination with other neurons to represent more features than neurons] necessarily require [features are linear compositions of neurons]?

When you say "individual neurons being used in combination with other neurons to represent more features than neurons", that's a way one might _informally_ talk about superposition, but doesn't quite capture the technical nuance. So it's hard to know the full scope of what you intend. All kinds of crazy things are possible if you allow non-linear features, and it's not necessarily clear what a feature would mean.

Superposition, in the narrow technical sense of exploiting compressed sensing / high-dimensional spaces, requires linear representations and sparsity.
by nilram | 2025-05-20 19:02:02+00:00
>The solution is a non-national global reserve, calculated on a basket of national currencies. This was Keynes argument at Bretton Woods, but the US would not have it then, and does not want it now.

But what does the US want now? It's government's actions are making it more difficult for other countries to trust it for the global reserve currency. If it really wanted manufacturing to return to it's shores, there's other ways to accomplish that without rewiring the global economy: carrots, not sticks.
by krackers | 2025-05-20 19:02:19+00:00
What is "Per Layer Embeddings"? The only hit I can find for that term is the announcement blogpost.

And for that matter, what is

>mix’n’match capability in Gemma 3n to dynamically create submodels

It seems like mixture-of-experts taken to the extreme, where you actually create an entire submodel instead of routing per token?
by bruce511 | 2025-05-20 19:02:29+00:00
I feel like there's plenty of tech that has always been proprietary, and still is.

Yes, there's a lot of Open Source, and yes a lot of it is critical, but to see the current state as "open source " is not seeing the whole picture.

Google us not Open Source. Neither is Gmail, Google Maps etc. Then there's Windows, Office etc. What about AWS. Or iOS. Android is sorta open source, except for all the bits that actually make it useful.

And that's before we consider Facebook and friends. Or Netflix. Or Amazon shopping cart.

LLMs are following in the footsteps of pretty much every tech company, and every technology - it starts out life being proprietary. Maybe one day not just the software (llama) but the models will also be open source.

But no, it doesn't bother me at all. Most all Open Source is built on the ideas of proprietary software.
by badc0ffee | 2025-05-20 19:03:00+00:00
Electric third rail at 130 km/h? The LIRR does it, with standard gauge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Island_Rail_Road

I also don't know where you're getting 125kV from. Many trains throughout the world use 25kV, especially high-speed ones (actually high speed, like 200+km/h), but BART uses 1000V, which is closer to a typical subway system.
by godelski | 2025-05-20 19:03:01+00:00
Loved these posts and they inspired a lot of my research and directions during my PhDs.

For anyone interested in these may I also suggest learning about normalizing flows? (They are the broader class to flow matching) They are learnable networks that learn coordinate changes. So the connection to geometry/topology is much more obvious. Of course the down side of flows is you're stuck with a constant dimension (well... sorta) but I still think they can help you understand a lot more of what's going on because you are working in a more interpretable environment
by okanat | 2025-05-20 19:03:13+00:00
Then you cannot claim that Linux works out of the box. It doesn't if you need to select hardware for it. However, I already know that since I actually used Linux for 15 years. Both on the consumer side as a normal user for 15 years and now I am actually an embedded Linux developer. The underlying architecture of GNU/Linux distros is heavily server biased which often is the polar opposite of a consumer system.

Except for Apple (and maybe Framework), all laptops are designed by contract original design manufacturers (ODMs) Taiwan, Korea and China. Your usual Linux laptop OEMs like System76 and Tuxedo just buy better combinations of the whitelabel stuff. They are inferior to actual big OEMs designs which contain more sophisticated sensors and power management and extra UEFI features. This includes business laptops Dell Latitudes, HP Elitebooks and Lenovo Thinkpads. None of those manufacturers actually do Linux-based driver development. All the device development, manufacturing and testing is done under Windows and only for Windows. The laptops are booted with Windows to do functional tests at factory not Linux.

Linux is an afterthought for all OEMs. After Windows parts are released and tested, the kernel changes to Linux is added. They are rudimentary support which doesn't include 100% of the featureset. Many drivers today have quite proprietary user-space side. You'll get none of that from any laptop manufacturer. You may say you don't care about those and you're okay with 10 - 20% power loss. That's not the definition of out-of-the box for me.
by profsummergig | 2025-05-20 19:03:48+00:00
I remember reading this one in the late nineties. Never been able to find it again. It was probably in one of his books:

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

pointy haired boss making making a presentation: "research shows that customers want high-quality products at low-prices.

but we make low-quality products.

so we are going to sell them at high-prices and call it a strategy"

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

If anyone has a link to the original comic, please share it, I would like to see it again. It captures so many themes succinctly, and was very very astute for the late nineties when corps were doing crazy things and calling it a "strategy".
by bithive123 | 2025-05-20 19:04:37+00:00
You talk as though a company exists in its own right independent of the humans. This is a fictional way of thinking. This attitude of "if you want me to stop acting poorly, make me" is an abdication of all responsibility.

It's the idea that individuals and institutions must somehow fix society from the top down or the outside in, which history has shown doesn't work. No one is going to come along and make you be sensitive or intelligent, either you see the predicament we're all in and act, or you rationalize your selfish actions and make them someone else's problem.
by javchz | 2025-05-20 19:05:01+00:00
I think open source still has an important advantage in the pro environment despite being less convenient, and it's the possibility of adding things in between the generation process like control net, and custom loras with new concepts or characters.

Plus in local generation you're not limited by the platform moderation that can be too strict and arbitrary and fail with the false positives.

Yes comfy UI can be intimidating at first vs an easy to use chatgpt-like ui, but the lack of control make me feel these tools will still not being used in professional productions in the short term, but more in small YouTube channels and smaller productions.
by Ancapistani | 2025-05-20 19:05:24+00:00
> Then soon enough they no longer want to put in the effort. Why, when an LLM can do it perfectly right now?

Assuming we get to the point where the output of these models is adequate for the task, I don't think that's a problem.

Sure, we'll end up with many fewer poets, playwrights, songwriters, photographers, and the like - but those we do have will be doing it because they're passionate about it. They'll be doing it in spite of the economics, not because of them.

I'm in my 40s, and very much a software engineer at this point. I don't want to do anything else professionally if I can help it. Yet, I have a Fujifilm X-Pro3 sitting on my desk right now. I've got about $5k in lenses in my bag, and still love photography. I've done it professionally. I know with certainty that I can sustain my family on it as a career, and I know how much work that is. I'm not interested.

Instead, I'm mostly the "official photographer" for my wife's side businesses. I take on jobs here and there for friends and acquaintances when they seem fun and interesting. I do just enough to keep my name out there in the community, so I can fall back to it if my "real job" goes away unexpectedly -- which is always a possibility working for startups!

Basically, I do think creative fields will shrink significantly. I agree that we'll see AI-generated art used more and more frequently. The quality will improve - though, honestly, there is already a market of almost unlimited size that wasn't being served by humans because the expected value of those works didn't justify their creation.

In fact, that's also a good point: a rise in AI-generated art usage does not necessarily mean a fall in human-created art. I think it will mean less human art and fewer human artists in time, but that may not be the case. It very well could be the case that most brands use AI, but those that want to set themselves apart as particularly high quality or luxury will lean more heavily on human artists than ever before.
Show HN: A Social Media Feed for Busy B2B SaaS Founders
by Mredfox | 2025-05-20 19:05:29+00:00
DUDE I LOVE HN SO MUCH!!!

We’ve all been at a place where you open Reddit, typing “I can’t sleep,” and replying with your sleep tracking app's link. Then open Twitter, Quora, Facebook.. Time waste bra.

So I built a platform that listens all 12 major social platforms in one place. You enter a keyword, AI filters the most important posts of the day that's relevant to your product, and drafts ready-to-send replies so you can reach out in one click at the time that they need you the most.

Apprecciate the upvote bra
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-05-20 19:06:06+00:00
https://ai.google.dev/gemma/docs/gemma-3n#parameters

> Gemma 3n models are listed with parameter counts, such as E2B and E4B, that are lower than the total number of parameters contained in the models. The E prefix indicates these models can operate with a reduced set of Effective parameters. This reduced parameter operation can be achieved using the flexible parameter technology built into Gemma 3n models to help them run efficiently on lower resource devices.

> The parameters in Gemma 3n models are divided into 4 main groups: text, visual, audio, and per-layer embedding (PLE) parameters. With standard execution of the E2B model, over 5 billion parameters are loaded when executing the model. However, using parameter skipping and PLE caching techniques, this model can be operated with an effective memory load of just under 2 billion (1.91B) parameters, as illustrated in Figure 1.
by Timon3 | 2025-05-20 19:06:11+00:00
It's a review of multiple studies. They literally say that the radiation can't really be the cause, yet there is the measurable increase in childhood leukemia.

Do you just want to deny reality when it doesn't suit your preconceived notions? Though:

> Fascinating, given that I grew up near Burlington, Kansas, I just must be glowing at night?

doesn't give me much hope you're engaging seriously with this topic.
by trod1234 | 2025-05-20 19:06:12+00:00
> I don't like a future where I have to pay for every token just to write a program...

You don't really need to worry then. There is no future like that in the long run. No future at all.

If you think a little, you'll realize AI breaks a number of pillars holding society in a working state.

The thing forces the labor value of time to zero while simultaneously eliminating economic calculation in the factor markets, and eliminating capital formation.

There is a saying, businesses sometimes win so much that they lose. This is one of those times. All that lay ahead is a maelstrom of mathematical chaos, and the only ones that will survive are those not in it.
by aaronbaugher | 2025-05-20 19:06:20+00:00
And that's not large. Grok says budget bills over the past 25 years have averaged between 1500-2000 pages, and the big omnibus budget bills get closer to 5000 pages.

On top of that, if you actually try to read a bill, you'll see many references to previous legislation, like, "US Code 123.45 section A is hereby amended to read 'blah blah blah....'" So you have to go read a bunch of other legislation to know what each line item is really about.

On top of that, once it passes and is sent out to the various bureaucracies it applies to, they will put their own interpretation on it, sometimes giving it an expansive interpretation and in other cases dragging their feet, so the actual result can be very different from what you took away from poring over thousands of pages.

You could almost come to the conclusion that the whole legislative thing is just for show, and the real power has been diffused elsewhere.
by mikestew | 2025-05-20 19:06:34+00:00
From TFA:

"The property, once a premier address in the city, was afflicted with 'vagrants sleeping in hallways of vacant office floors.' They were 'starting fires in stairwells, smoking fentanyl and defecating in common areas,' according to papers the company filed in a lease-termination lawsuit."

Where is building security in all of this? Card keys, visitor check-in, all the stuff that I thought was standard-issue these days? If entire floors are vacant, why do the elevators open on those floors? Stairwell doors should already be card-keyed; it's been years since I've been in a building that doesn't do that. Other than sheer neglect (and that is certainly a a reasonable hypothesis), I am at a loss as to how this would continue for long.
by naikrovek | 2025-05-20 19:06:53+00:00
I guess I don't understand why running a command in multiple places at once is preferable to running a shell script in four places in sequence.

maybe it's me! there is approximately zero chance that running the same script on four of my machines would result in four cleanly run scripts. one or more would fail, and if more than one failed, they would each fail for a different reason.
by ecshafer | 2025-05-20 19:07:15+00:00
I used to work at Vanguard, which has significantly more assets under management than Coinbase. Vanguard had special categories for people with a lot of assets, high net worth, ultra-high net worth, etc for people that had over $10M and $100M (iirc) in assets under management at Vanguard. Because its a traditional finance company all of the client information was stored (name, phone, address, email, etc). Now it was basically impossible for any employee to get access to this information without needing it. Even working in the tech side I could not just log into the DB and run a query for people's information, make trades, etc. Everything was logged, everything was tracked, and access was very specifically restricted to limit issues.

My point here is that Coinbase (blaming this on a "overseas" employee) and the TechCrunch founder are missing that traditional finance companies have already solved these issues. They are just immature and not serious companies.
by colah3 | 2025-05-20 19:07:35+00:00
I guess I'll plug my hobby horse:

The whole discourse of "stochastic parrots" and "do models understand" and so on is deeply unhealthy because it should be scientific questions about mechanism, and people don't have a vocabulary for discussing the range of mechanisms which might exist inside a neural network. So instead we have lots of arguments where people project meaning onto very fuzzy ideas and the argument doesn't ground out to scientific, empirical claims.

Our recent paper reverse engineers the computation neural networks use to answer in a number of interesting cases (https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/bio... ). We find computation that one might informally describe as "multi-step inference", "planning", and so on. I think it's maybe clarifying for this, because it grounds out to very specific empirical claims about mechanism (which we test by intervention experiments).

Of course, one can disagree with the informal language we use. I'm happy for people to use whatever language they want! I think in an ideal world, we'd move more towards talking about concrete mechanism, and we need to develop ways to talk about these informally.

There was previous discussion of our paper here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43505748
by goldemerald | 2025-05-20 19:07:39+00:00
That is addressing the incomprehensibility of PCA and applying a transformation to the entire latent space. I've never found PCA to be meaningful for deep learning. As far as I can tell, polysemous issue with neurons cannot be addressed with a single linear transformation. There is no sparse analysis (via linear probes or SAEs) and hence the unaddressed issue.
by avital | 2025-05-20 19:08:28+00:00
Easily 5-10x or even more in certain special cases (when it'd take me a lot of upfront effort to get context on some problem domain). And it can do all the "P2"s that I'd realistically never get to. There was a day where I landed 7 small-to-medium-size pull requests before lunch.

There are also cases where it fails to do what I wanted, and then I just stop trying after a few iterations. But I've learned what to expect it to do well in and I am mostly calibrated now.

The biggest difference is that I can have agents working on 3-4 parallel tasks at any given point.