MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TheTaytay | 2025-05-21 22:20:52+00:00
Wow - Roast looks fantastic. You architected and put names and constraints on some things that I've been wrestling with for a while. I really like how you are blending the determinism and non-determinism. (One thing that is not obvious to me after reading the README a couple of times (quickly), is whether/how the LLM can orchestrate multiple tool calls if necessary and make decisions about which tools to call in which order. It seems like it does when you tell it to refactor, but I couldn't tell if this would be suitable for the task of "improve, then run tests. Repeat until done.")
by adastra22 | 2025-05-21 22:21:18+00:00
I don't think any of those are undefined behavior in the strict sense in which the term is defined in the C/C++ standards. Pointer casts are defined behavior. I believe the things you point to are either implementation-defined or unspecified, which is different from UB.

It may seem nitpicky, but the downside of relying on implementation defined or unspecified behavior is largely boxed and contained. E.g you might get a memory access error. UB is, in principle, completely unlimited in downside. And because of that, it often interacts badly with optimization passes, resulting in very strange bugs.
by gexla | 2025-05-21 22:21:40+00:00
Seeing these announcements make me nervous. I feel like I found some sort of cheat code by using AI Studio for free. Seeing them build it out, makes me wonder when they are going to start charging for it. Though Grok has been very generous as an alternate. I guess there's a lot of good options out there. I'm just used to hitting limits most places, and not as good models.
by profsummergig | 2025-05-21 22:22:07+00:00
Fascinating article. Learned a lot. Especially about Lynn Margulis. What a great scientist. And she married Carl Sagan to boot.

Here's the part I don't understand about Mitochondria.

- I have a love-hate relationship with alcohol. I love it, it hates me. Turns out that alcohol really messes with mitochondria. And could be blamed for the inflammation and obesity epidemic (via mitochondrial disregulation).

- But then I see pics of people at beaches and public squares in the 60's and 70's. They were drinking way more than we do now. And they look skinny as heck. (As heck!)

- And apparently, for hundreds (thousands?) of years in various parts of the world (especially the middle ages West, and ancient Egypt), people pretty much drank water mixed with alcohol all day (it was safer than raw water), and their food was a type of thick beer porridge.

- So it can't be all that simple now, can it?
by xp84 | 2025-05-21 22:22:20+00:00
> The definition for “planet” could change and Pluto could have been left alone, grandfathered in, in a way

This doesn't sound like a science way of doing things. The definition of planet would have to be literally changed to add "Or has to have been discovered before 19XX" in order to keep Pluto without becoming an unbounded set. If you're annoyed at all the pedants correcting kids or anyone else talking about the nine planets, I'd take it up with them for uselessly debating such a fine distinction, like a chemist arguing about the word "Sodium" on a Nutrition Facts label.

I would argue the colloquial definition has indeed been changed in the above way, in that most people would say that what Mars, Venus, and Pluto have in common is they're all planets, and only a few would remember the odd factoid that the dwarf planet designation was created.

It's okay for the colloquial definition to be different than the scientific one. There isn't any use case where that will harm anyone. It's not like we're chartering flights to "All Planets" where space tourists are going to be ripped off, limited to 8 planets by the technicality and missing out.
by Centigonal | 2025-05-21 22:22:31+00:00
Great comment in general, but I have a minor correction: Railway Mania was definitely a bubble. Valuations were overinflated, investors were irrationally exuberant, charlatans funneled up a bunch of dumb money, many rail lines were ultimately not built, and the unwinding of the bubble wiped out many smaller investors and railway companies.

The resulting infrastructure created a lot of value for the UK (similar to the 90s telecom bubble in the US and Canada), but there was definitely a crash that destroyed a lot of people's bank accounts and represented a big dip in the value of the market.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-21 22:23:21+00:00
MCAS is actually one of the trending diagnoses that has attracted a lot of misinformation and misdiagnosis.

Specialists who treat MCAS are overwhelmed by referrals and requests from patients who don’t meet the criteria or don’t have any basic lab work that suggests MCAS. Many of the diagnoses from primary care or self-diagnoses are from people who have been led to believe that it explains their vague symptoms. There are also a lot of people who believe they have MCAS despite negative labs, non-traditional symptoms and a non-response to medication, which is another way of saying they probably don’t have it.

So watch out. It’s trending among doctors who dabble in alternative medicine or who use it as a catch-all explanation for vague symptoms, but the social media version of MCAS has diverged from the medical definition.

Ehlers-Danlos is another self-diagnoses that is spreading in these communities. This one is so bad that actual Ehlers-Danlos specialists have difficulty sorting through referral requests because so many people and even doctors think it explains vague symptoms. It’s also trending heavily on TikTok.

CCI was briefly popular as an explanation due to a few high profile influencers. For a few years everyone was demanding imaging and sending it to one of a few doctors who specialized in it. Unfortunately those doctors were found to be excessively quick to diagnose. There were a lot of people on forums who rushed into those surgeries with no improvement at all.

Be really careful on the forums. When people start claiming they have a long list of hard to diagnose conditions (MCAS, Ehlers-Danlos, CCI, etc) all at once it’s more likely that they’ve been either self-diagnosing with each trend or they have a doctor who will confirm any vague diagnosis they suggest. These things come in waves of popularity and you can tell when some of these people joined the social media circles by their list of self-diagnoses. Sadly, so much time has been wasted on chasing dead end diagnoses that spread via social media.
by heresie-dabord | 2025-05-21 22:24:31+00:00
Which models have you given them? Linux has been my computing best friend for more than a decade and I have also enjoyed using the Raspberry Pi 400.

But the Raspberry Pi 500 (keyboard model) is even better and (literally and figuratively) a cool design. You get 8GB RAM, boot from NVME, Debian with Wayland (labwc), and the R.Pi community.
Show HN: I made a tool to Quit Porn like a pro
by akshat8605 | 2025-05-21 22:24:49+00:00
It's not like any other app.

I have done months of research to my quit porn addiction.

This app plays with psychology where our main motive is to motivate and distract, motivate the user to stay on track and distract his mind from getting back to the addiction
by kouteiheika | 2025-05-21 22:25:56+00:00
> There is a 700 million monthly active users limit.

...so? Who cares? Why does it matter if big megacorporations cannot use it for free? I sure as hell don't care.

If you want to complain about the license a better target is the annoying advertising clause:

> i. If you distribute or make available the Llama Materials (or any derivative works thereof), or a product or service (including another AI model) that contains any of them, you shall (A) provide a copy of this Agreement with any such Llama Materials; and (B) prominently display “Built with Llama” on a related website, user interface, blogpost, about page, or product documentation. If you use the Llama Materials or any outputs or results of the Llama Materials to create, train, fine tune, or otherwise improve an AI model, which is distributed or made available, you shall also include “Llama” at the beginning of any such AI model name.
by h2zizzle | 2025-05-21 22:27:30+00:00
I have no illusions that one of the long-term goals of this doctrine is to start "shipping blacks back to Africa." That's why they've been hammering the "we're deporting criminals" rationale. They'll start (nominally) with the prison population and move on from there.

Just so you can't say you didn't see it coming.
by mmooss | 2025-05-21 22:27:55+00:00
I agree to a great extent, though I think it's a matter of misunderstanding between us:

We need to expend the networks from the beginning of that pipeline to the end, not just when Corp Z is hiring senior engineers. Colleges need to expand their networks. There's research showing that plenty of disadvantaged kids who could go to elite schools don't apply simply because they don't know what the value is or which schools to apply to. They go to the local college in town.

And you also have a good point: Kids don't go to bad local schools because of a social network, but because the schools are underresourced. We need to boost the resources of those schools.

And that is tough to do unless the people in those schools have political power (for two reasons: For leverage, and because only the locals understand what they need). So political representation needs to be boosted.

And the ideal that all these things will happen doesn't often work out, and we can't ask these kids to wait for this ideal world - it will soon be too late. So we need to provide some artificial help so they can have resources and power and improve those schools, get access to good colleges, etc. ...
by aseipp | 2025-05-21 22:27:56+00:00
Yes, that's basically the relationship between CoVE and ACE, from a quick glance. In this case, ACE is simply implementing a formally modeled and verified security monitor where the design has been extracted to Coq and the invariants proven.

It can work on P550 because CoVE supports several "Deployment strategies", the one ACE uses is referenced in the README: CoVE spec, Appendix D, "M-mode [Trusted Security Manager] based deployment model" https://github.com/riscv-non-isa/riscv-ap-tee/blob/main/src/... -- the other appendicies detail e.g. Smmtt based designs, and apparently there's a not-yet-written "Nested Virtualization" design in Appendix C.

They also note that the P550 isn't a "true" port due to the preliminary, non-ratified H extension, and it also misses another required extension called "Sstc" but they just emulate it. (Sstc is interesting; it seems to be a performance optimization for delivering timer interrupts directly to supervisors, but I can imagine in the case of CoVE timer interrupts going through M-mode could leak data, making it more of a security issue.)

Leveraging M-mode is basically how previous security monitors like keystone worked too, back on the original HiFive Unleashed. It just sorta treats M-mode as an analogue to the "secure world" in ARM parlance, though there is no requirement that M-mode has e.g. an encrypted memory controller and dedicated memory region, and I'm guessing other things (I'm not super familiar with TrustZone.)

Broadly speaking this reminds me as a kind of a evolution/combination of Microsoft's Komodo (formally verified, but was only for e.g. SGX-style enclaves) and existing M-mode TEE systems like Keystone -- but upgraded to support "Confidental Computing" virtual machines. So that's quite nice.
by peakskill | 2025-05-21 22:28:13+00:00
The story of mitochondria is one of input mismatches. You get no UV, yet are warm. You see blue light, yet it’s night time. It’s day time, yet there is no NIR. You eat CHO heavy meals in the winter, yet nothing would grow at that latitude with the limited UV yield.

I could go into everything that goes into redox status, non-visual opsins, leptin and melanin, pgc1a, DHA, lack of cofactors (esp minerals), deuterium, and the list goes on… but nothing matters. All you need is to respect nature, wear blue light blockers at night, go outside, expose yourself to the elements, move, eat what you would have access to given the current UV yield, and supplement with tryspike.store’s MB-0.1 (due to soil depletion).
by keybored | 2025-05-21 22:28:41+00:00
> Except we do care about those things. We used to get tons of PSAs for carbon footprint. Turn off the lights when you leave a room, turn off your computer overnight, turn off the faucet when you're washing your hands. That type of thing.

“We care”. Because British Petroleum told us to care.[1] Now the new scapegoat grift is how many prompts you use to make your “creative” wedding invitations. Nevermind industrial use though. We’ll just hammer every little API or just endpoint, slurp up the data, then do the same thing tomorrow because why cache? Keep it simple. It’s not our cost.[2] No one will scold us (that can get to us).

Public service announcement huh. Let’s just fall for it again.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44046315

[2] https://drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externali...
by surgical_fire | 2025-05-21 22:28:41+00:00
This conversation is never going to get anywhere, because we have fundamentally irreconcilable views of the world.

In my view what lifted people from abject poverty was a measure of technological progress and industrialization. The places where people were mostly lifted out of poverty do not embrace the completely unregulated free market fantasy of Friedman.

I believe in government as a strong regulator to rein in corporations, because corporations are optimized to generate profits even when they cause harm to society in their profit-seeking mandate. Obviously you will disagree with this, because government icky, and you seem to embrace the fantasy that once free of the shackles of icky government, the benevolent capital holders will benefit the world somehow.

You advocate for something very extreme, and it is clear we won't find middle ground at this point.

Have a great evening, and feel free to have the last word.
by palata | 2025-05-21 22:29:49+00:00
> Would be a huge win for open source!

Not sure.

I don't want people who want Windows to come to Linux because Windows has become a spyware. The result will be a bunch of entitled users asking for Linux to look more like Windows.

Anyone who has maintained an open source project knows how consumers of open source suck. "Your free project that you develop in your free time sucks" or "I won't make you the honour to use your project if you don't spend 2 weeks adding this feature I want". A mass influx of Windows people who want Windows-without-the-spyware would probably make this worse for Linux.
by sargstuff | 2025-05-21 22:30:14+00:00
From project intro page description (5/21/25):

"Click is a Python package for creating beautiful command line interfaces in a composable way with as little code as necessary. It’s the “Command Line Interface Creation Kit”. It’s highly configurable but comes with sensible defaults out of the box. It aims to make the process of writing command line tools quick and fun while also preventing any frustration caused by the inability to implement an intended CLI API. Click in three points: arbitrary nesting of commands automatic help page generation supports lazy loading of subcommands at runtime "
by Animats | 2025-05-21 22:30:40+00:00
The form factor that suggests is an AR headset. Google, Meta, and others have those. They're all flops. Too bulky.

Carmack has said that for VR/AR to get any traction, the headgear needs to come down to swim goggle size, and to go mainstream, it has to come down to eyeglass size. He's probably right. Ive would be the kind of guy to push in that direction.
by nirui | 2025-05-21 22:30:45+00:00
I recently, meaning hours ago, had this delightful experience watching the Eric of Google, which everybody love, including he's extra curricular girl friend and wife, talking about AI. He seemed to believe AI is under-hyped after tried it out himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id4YRO7G0wE

He also said in the video:

> I brought a rocket company because it was like interesting. And it's an area that I'm not an expert in and I wanted to be a expert. So I'm using Deep Research (TM). And these systems are spending 10 minutes writing Deep Papers (TM) that's true for most of them. (Them he starts to talk about computation and "it typically speaks English language", very cohesively, then stopped the thread abruptly) (Timestamp 02:09)

Let me quote out the important in what he said: "it's an area that I'm not an expert in".

During my use of AI (yeah, I don't hate AI), I found that the current generative (I call them pattern reconstruction) systems has this great ability to Impress An Idiot. If you have no knowledge in the field, you maybe thinking the generated content is smart, until you've gained some depth enough to make you realize the slops hidden in it.

If you work at the front line, like those guys from Microsoft, of course you know exactly what should be done, but, the company leadership maybe consists of idiots like Eric who got impressed by AI's ability to choose smart sounding words without actually knowing if the words are correct.

I guess maybe one day the generative tech could actually write some code that is correct and optimal, but right now it seems that day is far from now.
by alkonaut | 2025-05-21 22:31:16+00:00
Apps take screenshots all the time, e.g for crash reporting. Then they phone home with them. Most apps obviously ask politely when this happens but I’m sure there are exceptions. Not to mention malicious apps. There is no real security or isolation for screenshots that I’m aware of so app one will happily snap a picture of app two, without needing special permissions. That other app can be your password manager or baking browser tab. So apps explicitly opting into being in the picture is perhaps not such a bad idea.
by whall6 | 2025-05-21 22:31:22+00:00
Agree that housing was a missed bubble, but disagree that fracking shouldn’t be considered a bubble.

Fracking certainly is a technology, but the author is using the word to describe the very real market bubble that popped in 2016-2017. It wasn’t as apparent in the public markets (and it is no surprise why you may not have noticed it) but several private operators spent far in excess of generated cash flow, ran out of cash and defaulted. In turn, many of their private equity sponsors blew up or left the space.
by formerly_proven | 2025-05-21 22:31:42+00:00
This is probably going to save quadrillions of CPU cycles by making an untold number of deployed Go applications a bit more CPU efficient. Since Go is the "lingua franca" of containers, many ops people assume the Go runtime is container-aware - it's not (well not in any released version, yet).

If they'd now also make the GC respect memory cgroup limits (i.e. automatic GOMEMLIMIT), we'd probably be freeing up a couple petabytes of memory across the globe.

Java has been doing these things for a while, even OpenJDK 8 has had those patches since probably before covid.
by chowells | 2025-05-21 22:31:59+00:00
Given that you completely ignored what I said I wanted to do and gave an answer for some other question, I'm pretty sure it's more complicated than you think.

I want to write a method that takes a block and distinguishes between next and break, exactly like the methods of enumeration do. It's obviously possible because a super common interface does it.

Last time I looked, that interface does it by being written in native code that interfaces with the interpreter. That is, it's not part of the language semantics. It's a special case with weird rules unlike what anything else gets to do.

Or at least it was. Maybe the language has actually made it accessible since then, but I'm not optimistic. That's not the ruby way.
by orbital-decay | 2025-05-21 22:32:43+00:00
Probabilistic nature means nothing on its own. LLM that can solve your deterministic task will easily assign 100% to the correct answer (or 99%, the noise floor can be truncated with a sampler). If it doesn't do that and your reply is unstable, it cannot solve it confidently. Which happens to all LLMs on a sufficiently complex task, but it's not related to their probabilistic nature.

Of course that still doesn't mean that you should do that. If you want to maximize model's performance, offload as much distracting stuff as possible to the code.
by epistasis | 2025-05-21 22:32:58+00:00
Big batteries are actually very easy, and getting cheap enough that they account for a significant chunk of new grid assets when there are enough renewables.

Take the Texas ERCOT market, which is the closest thing to a free electricity market that exists in the US. A huge chunk of new grid assets are batteries, becuase they are one of the most profitable things to install right now (see the map at the bottom of the page)

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=64586

Additionally, many people are now buying EVs, and an EV stores 2-5 days worth of electricity. If big batteries on wheels are commonplace, then simpler and cheaper immobile batteries are pretty easy too.
by naikrovek | 2025-05-21 22:33:10+00:00
You’re probably right, but I still think there’s room for things like this.

What’s a “moon” versus a “planet”? Earth is a moon of Sol, is it not? Why is having a lot of planets a problem in the first place? Why do we have to restrict the definition at all? If 2-3 stars are at the center of a star system, are the planets in that star system planets, or something else? What if they’re small?

This whole scene is ripe for people who want to put their stamp of opinion on something to go nuts arbitrarily.
by timoth3y | 2025-05-21 22:33:12+00:00
Marlowe's "The Life and Death of Dr. Faustus" was written 300 years before Goethe's version.

In Marlowe's version Faust goes to hell.

I always found Goethe's ending to be unsatisfying, and prefer Marlowe's where Faust not only accepts, but embraces his fate to be a far better resolution.