MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tuckerman | 2025-05-09 19:49:36+00:00
Do you have a good example of someone doing that with an e2e model? (not that I think most factory robots should be using e2e models, a more traditional sense-plan-act system usually makes more sense in that domain)

We were working on e2e models for manipulation and motion for a long time at Google X and I was at Wayve working on e2e models for driving. From a science perspective, Tesla's FSD is very impressive accomplishment.

Edit: Sorry I think I now understand your comment. I mean FSD, not their factory robots. I don't know anything about Tesla's factories.
by gnfargbl | 2025-05-09 19:50:05+00:00
The rugpull on Optane was incredibly frustrating. Intel developed a technology which made really meaningful improvements to workloads in an industry that is full of sticky late adopters (RDBMSes). They kept investing until the point where they had unequivocally made their point and the late adopters were just about getting it... and then killed it!

It's hard to understand how they could have played that particular hand more badly. Even a few years on, I'm missing Optane drives because there is still no functional alternative. If they just held out a bit longer, they would have created a set of enterprise customers who would still be buying the things in 2040.
by sershe | 2025-05-09 19:50:13+00:00
I'm not doing that. I am equating on a spectrum not being able to, as a society, afford running water infrastructure to not being able to afford cars and infrastructure.

Note that this includes environmental arguments - saying that 8bil people cannot all live like people in Houston may be true but it's basically saying we cannot afford to have nice things.

But the thing is US, and especially major cities, currently can afford them!

Why would "rich people take public transit"? Except for extremely dense areas, driving is faster especially accounting for overhead; goes exactly where one needs, any time; and is way more comfortable. Only those who prefer extremely dense areas and also cannot live close to work/amenities (kind of the point of density) would want it.
by Nemi | 2025-05-09 19:52:39+00:00
This… is brilliant. Google and Facebook are highly lucrative because they designed a system where your profit margins (as a business) are largely sucked up by Google and Facebook by making you bid against your competitors at higher and higher values until someone is willing to give up almost all of their margins to be the top bidder for the favored “top spot”.

Hypothetically, if you make $1 in profit on your product, theory says that some competitor will bid up to $0.99 to secure that sale and if you don’t bid this amount also, your sales will suffer.

The end result is that Google and Facebook end up consuming all the profits for a large number of businesses online that have to survive by advertising, which explains Google’s immense profit margins.

Assuming what you say is true, this is truly a ballsy move by McMaster. Betting that their website is unassailable by their competition and thus such a value-add that they can forgo playing the losing game that Google and Facebook has setup is brilliant. I have such respect for that.
by tim333 | 2025-05-09 19:52:52+00:00
I was looking at the top HN comment on the cybertruck when it was announced

>A 6 seat truck with a 6.5 foot truck bed and a 3500 pound capacity for $40k is genuinely competitive with GM/ Ford... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21602437

and remember thinking it was cool. However $40k seems to have been wishful thinking.
by marchik | 2025-05-09 19:54:00+00:00
I wanted to read a book (around 300 pages), but it was only available as a PDF in English. I tried to find a tool to translate that many pages into my language without losing the original formatting, but most tools like DeepL either charge a lot for that feature or have strict limitations in their free versions. So I decided to create a free solution for this. Here’s a short demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJyefZYkaPM Right now, I’m trying to get a few signups before launch to see if people actually need a product like this. Here’s the link to sign up for early access: https://langflex.netlify.app/ I’d really appreciate it if someone registered and gave me feedback!
by yawaramin | 2025-05-09 19:54:13+00:00
> At that point, especially when you have many inputs like this, the amount of work one has to do with the HTMX JS API starts to look at lot like the script tag in your example

Not sure exactly what you're talking about w.r.t 'the amount of work one has to do with the HTMX JS API', but I've found that form validation with htmx and a backend server works really well with just a tiny bit of JS and a little care crafting the backend's validation error response: https://dev.to/yawaramin/handling-form-errors-in-htmx-3ncg
by dredmorbius | 2025-05-09 19:54:18+00:00
Profit motive's not doing much for great works of literature:

"The Big Five Publishers Have Killed Literary Fiction" (2024)

Serious readers must expand their tastes to the small presses.

<https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-big-five-publishers-h...>

I've some direct exposure to this in my role of keeping a visually-deprived friend in books, going through a very large national library's collection of 300k+ audiobooks. Their tastes tend to run through mid-20th-century literary works, largely European authors. We've at least sampled some 2k--4k titles (it's difficult to get a precise count through the tools I'm using though I think I might be able to squeeze that out).

I've had to get immensely creative with searches (something I've many decades of experience with myself), and trust me, lists of recognised literary awards have been squeezed for all they're worth. There's simply little published since 1970 that's of remote interest.

I'll allow that some of that is due to frustratingly narrow tastes. But seeing articles such as I've linked above rather reinforces my view.

There is a lot of popular and some mid-list work. But Great Fiction? If it's being produced, it's also getting buried by sludge.
by fifilura | 2025-05-09 19:55:41+00:00
The problem as I see it is that Americans define socialists as "anyone that is not MAGA". A lot thanks to a successful campaign by the orange man.

Socialism as in Soviet, East Europe and 20th century China was most things bad. Including racists and whatever.

Socialists as you define them are mostly just like a big chunk of regular europeans.
by serf | 2025-05-09 19:56:12+00:00
as I have thought with the other numerous "boiled earth" comparisons i've read in the past few weeks : who cares? In what case is this a useful way to describe something to anyone? since when does a laymen comprehend the size of the earth in any meaningful way?

aside : it's funny how many wordy multi-step unit conversion comparisons have flooded the discussion space post-LLM... I'm sure that's unrelated.
by nickpsecurity | 2025-05-09 19:57:30+00:00
While I support cuts and reforms, I'm a bit saddened and worried by cuts at NSF. Most of the best work I've shared here was funded by NSF. The private sector largely wasn't doing it. If they did, the deliverables weren't free but sometimes were when NSF funded. I'd hate to see those types of grants go.

That said, there is an ideological difference driving this on at least two points (if ignoring DEI etc).

One, taxes are taken from individuals to be spent on the government's priorities. Good, evil, or just wasteful... you have no say. If private donations, then you can fund the people and efforts you value most with your money. Conservatives say your money should be yours as much as possible which requires cutting NSF, etc.

Second, private individuals and businesses decide most of what happens in the markets. The problems in the markets are really their responsibility. If it needs NSF funding, the private parties are probably already failing to make that decision or see it as a bad one. Private, market theory says it's better to let markets run themselves with government interventions mostly blocking harmful behaviors. Ex: If nobody funds or buys secure systems, let them have the consequences of the insecure systems they want so much. Don't fund projects that nobody is buying or selling.

Those are two, large drivers in conservative policy that will exist regardless of other, political beliefs. Those arguing against it are saying the people running the government are more trustworthy with our money. Yet, they're crying out against what the current government is doing. Do they really trust them and want all those resources controlled by the latest administration? Or retain control of their own money to back, as liberals, what they belief in?
by snickerbockers | 2025-05-09 19:57:58+00:00
Is it even viable to run for pope as a priest who spent his whole life in a first-world country? I can't imagine somebody who has spent a significant portion of his life doing charity work or spreading the church to some new population losing out to some guy who spends his whole career preaching to a crowd of predominantly-white bourgeois Americans in a boring midwestern suburb where the biggest problem is either too many DEI programs in local schools or not enough DEI programs in local schools.
Ask HN: How expensive are LLMs to query, really?
by teach | 2025-05-09 19:58:32+00:00
I'm starting to see things pop-up from well-meaning people worried about the environmental cost of large language models. Just yesterday I saw a meme on social media that suggested that "ChatGPT uses 1-3 bottles of water for cooling for every query you put into it."

This seems unlikely to me, but what is the truth?

I understand that _training_ an LLM is very very expensive. (Although so is spinning up a fab for a new CPU.) But it seems to me the incremental costs to query a model should be relatively low.

I'd love to see your back-of-the-envelope calculations for how much water and especially how much electricity it takes to "answer a single query" from, say, ChatGPT, Claude-3.7-Sonnet or Gemini Flash. Bonus points if you compare it to watching five minutes of a YouTube video or doing a Google search.

Links to sources would also be appreciated.
by everdrive | 2025-05-09 19:58:57+00:00
That may have been a very poorly (and rudely) formatted comment, however the actual historicity of Exodus is doubted by scholars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Exodus

"Most mainstream scholars do not accept the biblical Exodus account as historical for a number of reasons. It is generally agreed that the Exodus stories were written centuries after the apparent setting of the stories."

"However, a majority of scholars believe that the story has an historical core,[12][13] though disagreeing widely about what that historical kernel might have been."

I am not a scholar, however given just how many tribes Egyptians subjugated, and just how syncretic much of the early Israelite religion was, it's certainly not unreasonable to think that there was at least some group of people which had a "fleeing from Egypt" story which did later get subsumed into the Israelite religion.
by eternityforest | 2025-05-09 19:59:58+00:00
I usually find most of the learning happens a year later when I see if my approach is maintainable and handles new requirements.

When I'm actually coding, I'm usually not learning as much, because I'm generally intentionally choosing boring tech everyone already knows.

Most of the learning is less about deeply internalizing concepts and more about things like new features in the Python stdlib.
by worik | 2025-05-09 20:02:01+00:00
> The US's authoritarian tendencies are not in remotely the same league as China

They are different. In the same league

* Iraq

* Vietnam

* Cuba

* Panama

* Grenada

* Gaza

That is just recent times, and I missed quite a few

The USA is a big bully, destroying lives and livelihoods all over the world since the genocide of American Indians stopped in their own backyard

Trump is making plain what every body with any brain worked out in 1962: The USA is a rouge nation
by greenavocado | 2025-05-09 20:02:05+00:00
I find multiples of the amount of energy needed to vaporize our oceans a useful unit of energy because 8.5 x 10^27 joules is too abstract.

It's just like 1 AU being the average Sun-Earth distance. It is easier to comprehend than 149,597,870,700 m when talking about large distances.

Many discussions recently have centered around processes which require tremendous amounts of energy and the vaporized oceans unit provides some more tangible if absurd perspective.
by gamblor956 | 2025-05-09 20:02:34+00:00
They are clearly the front runner in L2+ ADAS

No, not clear at all actually. Every day I see Teslas swerving dangerously while their "drivers" are using their phones instead of driving the car. When I used to commute past the SpaceX HQ in Hawthorne, I'd see at least one Tesla accident a day.
by onei | 2025-05-09 20:02:36+00:00
If you want emails from some random internal machine, you can use one of the HPE SMTP servers. There was one for internal email, another for external iirc although I'm not sure there was a difference in practice. Those SMTP servers would do a DNS lookup before accepting the email.

When I set this sort of thing up, I'd get myself a hostname on an internal subdomain. But that was a truly miserable experience. It was a multi-stage form submission on a server I imagine to be the closest possible relation to an actual potato. It was soul-destroyingly slow. Alternatively, you could just pretend your machine was hpe.com - the hostname was valid, even if the IP was totally wrong, and the SMTP server would accept it.

My guess is that there was a bunch of stuff that pre-dated the HP/HPE split and they took the quick and dirty option whenever the old internal domain name got yanked during the changeover. And if your process runs as root, you get root@hpe.com and hope there's something in the subject/body to identify the specific machine.
by RetroTechie | 2025-05-09 20:02:41+00:00
Recurring pattern: miners flood some place that has cheap electricity.

At first, they're welcome for the $$ they bring, high tech business, build-out of local infrastructure & whatnot.

Then, power grid problems, locals get angry, there's a crackdown & the miners move elsewhere. Rinse & repeat.

Next stop: Ethiopia?

Edit: the simple fact that there's a growing list of places/countries where crypto miners aren't welcome any more, should tell you something about the nature of this business.
by hackyhacky | 2025-05-09 20:02:56+00:00
> I'll add the people that promoted it often said that amongst themselves while more publicly just talking about "diversity." They usually believed in imtersectionality, redistribution of wealth/power, etc. Their fix is systematic discrimination against specific groups to redistribute power to achieve the outcomes. And, if other groups become dominant, they still favor them over white people.

You say this without any evidence at all. As I describe in my comment above, DEI hiring practices do not promote discrimination against anyone.

The right opposes DEI because they genuinely can't understand that someone would want a fair, diverse workplace, so, as you aptly demonstrate, they insert all kinds of imaginary (and obviously false) conspiracy theories in an attempt to show that DEI is actually a disguised attempt to win power for certain favored classes. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

> We've seen that these ideologies are conflict-oriented, racist, and less effective.

You say "we've seen" as if it were established fact, but it isn't. You might as well as "I heard once" or "I saw on Facebook that", insofar as you're attempting to provide a factual basis for your opinions.

> Now, a different group favoring no racism, equal opportunity, and generosity to all groups based on need is reversing the prior group's work. Everyone who had been discriminated against will appreciate ending that discrimination.

No, the current administration is favoring a return to racism by shutting down hiring practices that would have allowed for a diverse hiring pool. Moreover, the administration is transparently also cracking down on viewpoints it doesn't like, by punishing, for example, law firms and universities that are known to to oppose the administration's cause du jour.
by brewmarche | 2025-05-09 20:03:04+00:00
You need to be a bit careful with terminology, IPv4-compatible and IPv4-mapped are different, i.e. ::/96 vs. ::ffff:0:0/96.

The former (compatible) are not in use anymore, they were specified in an old tunnelling RFC. The latter (mapped) are used for sockets that bind to both IPv4 and IPv6.

There are even more ways to include IPv4 addresses in IPv6 ones (NAT64, 6to4, ...)
by hinkley | 2025-05-09 20:03:08+00:00
I’ve seen some pretty wacky structures that involve mechanically forcing permanent magnets together at different orientations to create assymetric magnetic fields that are strongest where they need to be or weak where they would cause problems. Like eddy currents in electric motor housing, or insufficient hold for chef’s knives.

I know motor windings have gotten pretty funky of late to do a little bit of this, but do they do multi tesla magnetic fields that use several different windings to create the same sorts of bias in field strength? The ITER windings seem to be an extremely mild form of this.
by serendipty01 | 2025-05-09 20:04:01+00:00
Some links:

https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/carbon-footprint-c...

https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversa...

(discussion on lobste.rs - https://lobste.rs/s/bxixuu/cheat_sheet_for_why_using_chatgpt...)

(discussion on HN, 320 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42745847)
by vanviegen | 2025-05-09 20:05:11+00:00
That looks cool!

I think it would be pretty easy to transpile this (or something like it) to code Aberdeen can consume. In fact, it would probably be a lot easier than transpiling for React, as Aberdeen uses immediate mode the `for` problem in your comment below wouldn't be a problem at all, so no return values to worry about.

I'd use something like this myself for larger projects, I think. But asking other developers to use a different programming language just to use your library usually doesn't fly well. :-) Coming to think of it, I find it actually kind of surprising that JSX succeeded.
by chowells | 2025-05-09 20:05:22+00:00
That's not exactly true. It's a non-trivial but not exactly difficult task to design a fair shuffling cryptographic protocol that every participant can validate after the fact.

On the other hand, that still doesn't prevent cheating in the form of the server providing information to some participants via a different channel. There's nothing cryptography can say about out-of-band communications.

So maybe fair shuffling is cute but ultimately pointless.
by transpute | 2025-05-09 20:05:31+00:00
Thanks to OpenCompute and the Open Source Firmware Conference (OSFC), there has been some progress in servers towards open firmware and open silicon RoT (OpenTitan, Caliptra). The primary beneficiaries have been cloud hyperscalers who buy large quantities of customized OCP servers from ODMs like Quanta.

For businesses buying smaller quantities, HPE servers have made a small step towards open firmware, enabling customer-configured OpenBMC as an alternative to iLO, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21kiLA1DVSU
by simonbw | 2025-05-09 20:05:49+00:00
Inkscape is a vector editor that can export to SVG, but that's a bit different than an editor specifically for the SVG file type.

I've often found myself wanting to edit SVG code directly while viewing the result. This maybe not the most common approach, but sometimes you want to be be dealing with specifics that relate to the fact that you're working with an actual SVG file, and not just a vector image.
by jajuuka | 2025-05-09 20:05:54+00:00
Detroit is an odd example. You have the cornerstone industry up and leaving the area, followed by race riots which led to white flight and the middle class leaving the city. This led to a vacuum in support and jobs leaving the new majority black population and poor to fend for themselves. Two historically oppressed groups now yolked to a dying city.

It's more an example of how racism and reliance on singular industry can quickly create pits that are largely insurmountable. Similar cases can be found in coal country in Appalachia. The lesson isn't to prop up local industry to maintain job and economic stability. The lesson is to stage out disruption. ILA recently took this on with automation in shipping. The goal isn't to prevent automation but to not give companies a blank check to mass fire workers and replace them with automation.
by dang | 2025-05-09 20:06:42+00:00
Related. Others?

Why 536 was 'the worst year to be alive' (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34209313 - Jan 2023 (113 comments)

What Was the Single Worst Year in Human History? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32118341 - July 2022 (1 comment)

Volcanoes, plague, famine and endless winter: Welcome to 536 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30621640 - March 2022 (39 comments)

Skies went dark: Historians pinpoint the 'worst year' ever to be alive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26786838 - April 2021 (117 comments)

Extreme weather events of 535–536 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26598570 - March 2021 (86 comments)

536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23565762 - June 2020 (356 comments)

Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18469891 - Nov 2018 (4 comments)
by vlovich123 | 2025-05-09 20:06:59+00:00
There's also a lot of open questions about how stars and galaxies form and our current models are known to be extremely incomplete based on the JWST data and our knowledge of the upper bound of how old the universe is from repeated measurements of the CMB & other data. So there's definitely a lot unknown about the state of stars in the early universe and how everyday elements we know & love actually came to be in the quantities they did.
by ttfkam | 2025-05-09 20:08:48+00:00
Okay, I stand corrected. Now my question to you is how are you generating all these terabytes over the internet? And would data transfer costs really be a significant portion of your bill at that scale regardless of cloud provider? Not video transcoding resources, AI capacity, GPU capacity, etc.?

You're talking about the equivalent of completely saturating a gigabit Internet connection for over two hours per terabyte. A high def video stream from Netflix is only about 5 megabits/sec. 4K is 15 megabits.

67+ simultaneous 4K streams for two hours. Or 200+ simultaneous high def streams. Or a metric fuck-ton of web resources.

And you think you're going to find a provider that will allow you to send those kinds of volumes for $10/TB or less AND have relatively few outages AND stick around because their business model is sound?

By all means, point out who these unicorns are. Sign me up!
by dismalaf | 2025-05-09 20:10:31+00:00
> The lack of proper typechecking is one of the main reasons I would not use Ruby, especially in larger teams.

Cool. I'm using Ruby for a startup because it's 10x more productive for building a webapp versus a compiled language and because I'm solo.

And when I want typing I use something like C++ because I don't want to lose productivity without a major performance boost.
by vanviegen | 2025-05-09 20:10:42+00:00
While in a rendering scope, `getParentElement()` will get you access to the raw DOM element. As long as you don't detach/move it, you'll be fine letting third-party code loose on it.

Aberdeen has one life cycle callback: `clean`, which is called right before rerunning or destroying a scope.

I think that's enough for just about anything you'd want to do.. ?