MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by blackmat | 2025-05-22 08:21:00+00:00
Comparative benchmarks are a big task on their own, and usually the author's library wins in them. I have internal benchmarks in the repository, but they are not designed for comparison or for evaluation by outsiders. Maybe I'll get to that someday.

As for the SoA approach, here you can find a small and exaggerated example: https://luajit.org/ext_ffi.html
by aucisson_masque | 2025-05-22 08:21:19+00:00
> While Apple and Google have struggled to keep pace with AI innovations, many investors see the two companies—whose software runs nearly all the world’s smartphones—as the primary means through which billions of people will access AI tools and chatbots. Building a device is the only way OpenAI and other artificial-intelligence companies will be able to interact with consumers directly.

Openai is Microsoft, for the better and the worst, and Microsoft is windows computer.

They already kind of implemented chatgpt to billion of consumer with Microsoft recall and all the other ai feature in office, paint and so on.
by badmintonbaseba | 2025-05-22 08:22:12+00:00
I mostly use it as a replacement of a search engine and exploration, mostly for subjects that I'm learning from scratch, and I don't have a good grasp of the official documentation and good keywords yet. It competes with searching for guides in traditional search engines, but that's easy to beat with today's SEO infested web.

Its quality seems to vary wildly between various subjects, but annoyingly it presents itself with uniform confidence.
by bsaul | 2025-05-22 08:22:22+00:00
i could have written all of this myself. I use it exactly for the same purposes ( except i don't do undergrad physics, just maths) and with the same outcome.

It's also pretty useful for brainstorming : talking to AI helps you refine your thoughts. It probably won't give you any innovative idea, only a survey of mainstream ones, but it's a pretty good start for thinking about a problem.
by krisoft | 2025-05-22 08:22:32+00:00
Yeah. I bet in practice the liquid helium used to cool the trap is more dangerous than the actual antimater. It can cause cryogenic burns similar to frostbite, and if it suddenly boils off in a confined space (like inside a container or the back of a truck) it can displace oxygen and cause inert gas asphyxiation.

Of course both of these can be managed easily with appropriate procedures.

It is a bit like getting injured by pinching your hand in the hinge of the Velociraptor container in Jurrassic park. Not the first danger you would think of, but still present.
by impossiblefork | 2025-05-22 08:22:34+00:00
I am not sure.

In principle one would imagine that models of this type would have an advantage-- you can use information from both the left and right, etc. and in practice I've found LLaDA to be impressive considering its size and my assumption that they have had small training resources, but they are behind in perplexity, and I think this is unavoidable. They also become rather fixed early, so I don't believe fully in these hopes to be able to really correct text deeply (although they will of course be able to correct their partially completed texts to some degree, especially when it's just a word or two that are wrong, but I believe that the words that are wrong basically need to get masked simultaneously, so 1/masking_probability^2, and 1/masking_probability^3 for three and so on).

Despite this I've been happy with the practical results I've seen during my experimentation.
by severusdd | 2025-05-22 08:22:42+00:00
While I thoroughly enjoyed reading this piece of internet-rant, I've to argue that dB is still probably the best we have on this!

In RF engineering, expressing signal levels in dBm or gains in dB means you can add values instead of multiplying, which definitely appeared like a huge convenience for my college assignments! A filter with -3 dB loss and an amplifier with +20 dB gain? Just add. You can also use this short notation to represent a variety of things, such as power, gain, attenuation, SPL, etc.

I guess, engineers don’t use dB because they’re masochists (though many of them surely are). They use it because in the messy world of signals, it works. And because nobody knows anything that might work better!
by BrenBarn | 2025-05-22 08:22:42+00:00
> The ridiculously advanced technology required to produce only a few picograms of antimatter is truly impressive.

Also the persistence that is required because of the low "return on investment" is staggering. Another article linked from this one said:

> The authors had to mix 10 million positrons with 700 million antiprotons in order to get get 38 certifiable antihydrogen events.
by threeseed | 2025-05-22 08:23:56+00:00
Why you don't just quietly use SQL instead of condescending lecturing others about how compromised their tech choices are.

NoSQL e.g. Cassandra, MongoDB and Microservices were invented to solve real-world problems which is why they are still so heavily used today. And the criticism of them is exactly the same that was levelled at SQL back in the day.

It's all just tools at the end of the day and there isn't one that works for all use cases.
by nthingtohide | 2025-05-22 08:24:15+00:00
8 Bit & '8 Bitish' Graphics-Outside the Box

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0

> In this GDC 2016 talk, Terrible Toybox's Mark Ferrari discusses and demonstrate some of his techniques for drawing 8 bit game graphics, including his celebrated methods for use of color cycling and pallet shifting to create complex and realistic background animation effects without frame-animation

The lost art of color cycling - Animating with color

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUbrzg21X9c

> Color cycling was born out of hardware restrictions but out of it came some beautiful artworks that characterized the 80s and 90s. In this video we will learn more about how this effect was produced and experience first hand the beautiful artwork created with it.
by guappa | 2025-05-22 08:24:38+00:00
Debian isn't a single person. A lot of patches are backport fixes for CVEs.

Then there's stuff like: "this project only compiles with an obsolete version of gcc" so the alternatives are dropping it or fixing it. Closely related are bugs that only manifest on certain architectures, because the developers only use amd64 and never compile or run it on anything else, so they make incorrect assumptions.

Then there's python that drops standard library modules every release, breaking stuff. So they get packaged separately outside of python.

There's also cherry picking of bugfixes from projects that haven't released yet.

Is there any reason you think debian developers are genetically more prone to making mistakes than anyone else? Considering that debian has an intensive test setup that most projects don't even have.
by wodenokoto | 2025-05-22 08:25:12+00:00
A really big part of a in-memory dataframe centric workflow is how easy it is to do one step at a time and inspect the result.

With a database it is difficult to run a query, look at the result and then run a query on the result. To me, that is what is missing in replacing pandas/dplyr/polars with DuckDB.
by adityaathalye | 2025-05-22 08:25:15+00:00
Getting Silurian Hypothesis vibes [1], thinking about subduction, glaciers, the rise and abatement of sea levels, and just plain ol' erosion and corrosion.

That something so incredibly ephemeral as footprints in dirt could survive longer than the rings of Saturn is breathtaking. Except Sharks. Sharks are not only breath-taking, they are forever [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silurian_hypothesis

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Astronomy/comments/dp7key/things_in...
by internet_points | 2025-05-22 08:26:01+00:00
Finnish would like a word. Take a random noun like kauppa "shop". It has at least 6000 forms: https://flammie.github.io/omorfi/genkau3.html and that's excluding compounds (written as one word in Finnish) like "bookshop" or "shop-manager" etc. etc. And then you have loan words and slang, derivations into other words classes; all of this is impossible to compactly represent in a full-form word list.

Now consider the many other languages of that family ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_languages ) – they also have this extreme potential for inflections, but next to no online resources to train language models on or even scrape decent wordlists from.
by cess11 | 2025-05-22 08:26:06+00:00
"It's so easy to spin up an example "write me a sample chat app" or whatever and be amazed how quickly and fully it realizes this idea, but it does kinda beg the question, now what?"

Which we already had, it's just a 'git clone https://github.com/whatevs/huh' away, or doing one of millions of tutorials on whatever topic. Pretty much everyone who can build something out of Elixir/Phoenix has a chat app, an e-commerce store and a scraping platform just laying around.
by em3rgent0rdr | 2025-05-22 08:27:15+00:00
> For some reason, the bel — again, what started as a sensible 10× increment — was soon deemed too big to use. I don’t quite know why: in other aspects of life, decimal notation suits us just fine.

Decimal notation can be a tad cumbersome to write and speak. Meanwhile, decibel usage commonly results in nice simple numbers that range between 0 and 100, with the fractional digits often being too insignificant to say out loud. For instance, the dynamic range of 16-bit audio (which is generally all the range that our ears care about) is 96 dB, while volume increments smaller than 1 dB aren't really noticeable, so decibel makes it easy to communicate volume levels without saying "point" or writing a "." or breaking out exponential notation. Even in fields other than audio the common ranges also conveniently will be around 1 dB for being on the verge of significance to around 100 dB or 200 dB for the upper range. (Also the whole power vs root-power caveat is simply something users of dB have to be cognizant of because we need to stick with one or the other to make consistent comparisons, and at the end of the day physical things hapen with power.) So while decibels may seem ridiculous, they actually are quite convenient for dealing with logarithmically-varying numbers in convient range from 1 dB to around 100 dB or so in many engineering fields.
by IsTom | 2025-05-22 08:27:18+00:00
One one hand yes, on the other there might be some problems that are inherently difficult to parallelize (alternating machine PTIME is the same as deterministic PSPACE) where space doesn't buy you much. The jump from paper from t/log t to sqrt(t log t) is huge, but it still might be that unbounded parallelism doesn't buy you much more.
by kiselitza | 2025-05-22 08:27:20+00:00
Try https://voiden.md/

As per your needs it's: - Markdown (everything in markdown, including testing and specing APIs) - Let's you write your docs in markdown around the API you're designing/testing - Git-based (in-app terminal) - Code samples supported throug markdown

Plus offline, no login, no lock in, no telemetry.

It's early days so a tad rough around the edges still, but feels like the most natural way of handling APIs I ever used till date.
by aragilar | 2025-05-22 08:27:58+00:00
I mean, it would depend on what the patch is? If you're adding a missing manpage, I'm not sure what can go wrong? Is changing the build options (e.g. enabling or disabling features) a patch, or an expected change (and if such a config option is bad, what blame should be put on upstream for providing it)? What about default config files (which could both make the software more secure or less, such as what cyphers to use with TLS or SSH)?
by atoav | 2025-05-22 08:28:24+00:00
Yes but my conclusion would not be that Decibels are ridiculous, but that "People don't understand Decibels".

Decibels are okay. They are useful. They work. The problem is that people use referenced decibel values without adding anything that would allow us to understand which reference was used.

Maybe one could have come up with a better numeric way of doing the same thing (I am missing a proposal for this in the blog post), but then you'd have the XKCD-yet-another-standard problem. Everything uses dB for ages now, so dB it is or you need to convert between one and another all the time.

As an audio engineer I have no issue with dB as a unit. It is much better than using raw amplitude numbers.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-05-22 08:28:35+00:00
Well that's just plain incompetent on the part of your vendor.

23.10 is not an LTS version and Ubuntu only provide updates for a short period of time (6 months or so after the next version is released), so the vendor should have upgraded it to 24.04 which IS an LTS version.

It's like you're complaining to Microsoft about a vendor giving you an old XP machine and that you can't update it.
by nusl | 2025-05-22 08:29:30+00:00
Perhaps a Bitwarden issue. I had them in 1Password and used them without any problems, then moved them out and into my Apple Keychain to separate those concerns a bit better. Both solutions work pretty well.

Having to pull my phone out or go and find/fetch it to grab a pin is pretty annoying for me, since I also don't keep them in my password manager.

I did for a long time but figured that if my password manager was compromised I would be royally screwed since they'd have my 2FA there to, meaning the password manager is actually a weak point.
by sshine | 2025-05-22 08:30:14+00:00
This policy is missing from nixpkgs, although there is a similar policy for the build process for technical reasons.

So I can add spotify or signal-desktop to NixOS via nixpkgs, and they won’t succeed at updating themselves. But they might try, which would be a violation of Debian’s guidelines.

It’s a tough line — I like modern, commercial software that depends on some service architecture. And I can be sure it will be sort of broken in 10-15 years because the company went bust or changed the terms of using their service. So I appreciate the principles upheld by less easily excited people who care about the long term health of the package system.
by khazhoux | 2025-05-22 08:30:15+00:00
Others aren't kidding themselves. You haven't found the use yet.

I was up extremely late last night writing a project-status email. I could tell my paragraphs were not tight. I told Cursor: rewrite this 15% smaller. I didn't use the output verbatim, but it gave me several perfect rewrite ideas and the result was a crisp email.

I have it summarize my sloppy notes after interviewing someone, into full sentences. I double-check it for completeness and correctness, of course. But it saves me an hour of sweating the language.

I used it to get a better explanation to a polynomial problem with my child.

I use it to generate Google Spreadsheet formulas that I would never want to spend time figuring out on my own ("give me a formula that extracts the leading number from each cell, and treats blank cells as zero").

Part of the magic is finding a new use case that shaves another hour here and there.
by adityaathalye | 2025-05-22 08:30:16+00:00
"Lisping at the JPL" is one of my favourite stories (all-time favourite, not just computery favourite).

https://flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html

> Debugging a program running on a $100M piece of hardware that is 100 million miles away is an interesting experience. Having a read-eval-print loop running on the spacecraft proved invaluable in finding and fixing the problem. The story of the Remote Agent bug is an interesting one in and of itself.
by blixt | 2025-05-22 08:31:28+00:00
I think it's in human nature to force any topic to be all "good" or "bad". I agree with most criticisms this author has about the performance of AI -- it _is_ very bad at writing essays, and dare I say most things (including code), based on a single prompt. But to say it is a gimmick and compare it with technologies that died or are dying seems to me like a visceral response, perhaps after experiencing the overflow of AI-generated homework (a use of AI that ultimately just wastes everyone's time).

I think most people in here know at least a few ways they can use AI that is genuinely useful to them. I suppose if you're _very_ positive about AI, then it's good to have a polarized negative article to make us remember all the ways AI is being overpromised. I'm definitely very excited about finding new ways to apply AI, and that explorative phase can come off as trying to sell snake oil. We have to be realistic and acknowledge this is a technology that can produce content faster than we can consume it. Content that takes effort to distinguish useful vs. not.

All that said I disagree with the idea that the only way "to help students break out of their prisons, at least for an hour, so they can see and enhance the beauty of their own minds" is via teaching and not via technologies such as AI. The education system certainly failed me and I found a lot of joy in technology instead. For me it was the start of the internet, but I can only imagine for many today it will be the start of AI.
by adityaathalye | 2025-05-22 08:31:36+00:00
Tells one of my all-time favourite stories.

> 1994-1999 - Remote Agent

> Debugging a program running on a $100M piece of hardware that is 100 million miles away is an interesting experience. Having a read-eval-print loop running on the spacecraft proved invaluable in finding and fixing the problem. The story of the Remote Agent bug is an interesting one in and of itself.
by pishpash | 2025-05-22 08:31:51+00:00
You're over-representing the usefulness here. On topics where traditional search reaches a dead end, you will find the AI citations to be the same ones you might have found, except that upon checking, they were clearly misread or misrepresented. Dangerous and a waste of time.

It's much more helpful on popular topics where summarization itself is already high quality and sufficient.
by brynne8 | 2025-05-22 08:31:55+00:00
Neovim is getting a new glob pattern matcher based on Peglob (see the paper: https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202504.1786/v1), specifically replacing the vim.glob.to_lpeg() function. This means better Language Server Protocol (LSP) support, as it's now stricter, more accurate, and faster by closely following the LSP 3.17 specification. The enhancements aim for improved consistency and correctness, and these refinements are designed to integrate smoothly without disrupting common usage patterns.
by tux3 | 2025-05-22 08:32:23+00:00
And there's more where that came from. This particular sausage is made with tragically messed up incentives, and people will naturally always optimize the framework you put them in.

Thankfully the scientific process is incredibly resilient to nonsense, because a bad result will eventually screw up someone's future work when they come to rely on it. But it's not pretty.
by liamwire | 2025-05-22 08:32:34+00:00
Is that what I did, though? I disagree.

Rather, what I hoped to articulate was a sense that being able to viscerally feel that an author holds a very obvious position from the outset of an article, and then not seeing them make even the faintest attempt to proactively argue their point against the most obvious—the easiest—criticisms, comes across lazy.

I expect arguing in good faith, and this wasn’t that.
by jrflowers | 2025-05-22 08:32:41+00:00
> It makes me wonder whether everyone else is kidding themselves, or if I'm just holding it wrong.

It is the former.

When LLMs blew up a few years ago I was pretty excited about the novelty of the software, and that excitement was driven by what they might do rather than what they did do.

Now, years and many iterations later, the most vocal proponents of this stuff still pitch what it might do with a volume loud enough to drown out almost any discussion of what it does. What little discussion of what it does for individuals usually boils down to some variation of “it gives me answers to the questions for which I do not care about the answers”, but, —how ridiculous, wasteful, and contrary to the basic ideas of knowledge and reasoning that statement is aside— even that is usually given with a wink and a nod to suggest that maybe one day it will give answers to questions that matter.
by exe34 | 2025-05-22 08:32:50+00:00
From my experience so far, most "AI skeptics" seem to be trying to catch the LLM in an error of reasoning or asking it to turn a vague description into a polished product in one shot. To make the latter worse, they often try to add context after the first wrong answer, which tends to make the LLM continue to be wrong - stop thinking about the pink elephant. No, I said don't think about the pink elephant! Why do you keep mentioning the pink elephant? I said I don't want a pink elephant in the text!
by JdeBP | 2025-05-22 08:32:58+00:00
The point about manual pages has always seemed to me to be one of the points where the system fails us. There are a fair number of manual pages that the world at large would benefit from having in the original softwares, that are instead stuck buried in a patches subdirectory in a Debian git repository, and have been for years.

This is not to say that Debian is the sole example of this. The FreeBSD/NetBSD packages/ports systems have their share of globally useful stuff that is squirrelled away as a local patch. The point is not that Debian is a problem, but that it too systematizes the idea that (specifically) manual pages for external stuff go primarily into an operating system's own source control, instead of that being the last resort.
by rkagerer | 2025-05-22 08:33:31+00:00
In TLS 1.3, the server’s certificate is encrypted, which means the firewall can’t do this anymore. ... The firewall will open a second connection and do a TLS 1.2 handshake to retrieve the certificate in plaintext. If the rules allow the connection, the firewall then allow the connection to proceed.

Sounds like a cat & mouse game. How long before we get servers that respond with different certificates based on who"s asking or other cues from the connection, in efforts to bypass the firewall restrictions.
by rusk | 2025-05-22 08:34:03+00:00
dB for sound in particular aligns with human experience. The (10 -) 1-10 on a volume knob typically aligns with a logarithmic scale because we hear differences in loudness at an order of magnitude.

A linear volume knob would be frustratingly useless as you would have to crank it many many many times the higher up you want to go. Presumably hundreds of times. A traditional pot couldn’t do that of course but maybe you could satisfy your curiosity with a rotary encoder?
by mort96 | 2025-05-22 08:35:10+00:00
> I think most people in here know at least a few ways they can use AI that is genuinely useful to them

The only thing that really comes to mind is making something in a domain where I have almost no prior expertise.

But then ChatGPT is so frequently wrong, and so frequently repeatedly wrong when it tries to "correct" problems when pointed out, that even then I always have to go and read relevant documentation and re-write the thing regardless. Maybe there's some slight usefulness here in giving me a starting point, but it's marginal.
by INTPenis | 2025-05-22 08:35:23+00:00
This is one of the reasons I switched to RHEL 10+ years ago.

I actually prefer the RHEL policy of leaving packages the way upstream packaged them, it means upstream docs are more accurate, I don't have to learn how my OS moves things around.

One example that sticks out in memory is postgres, RHEL made no attempt to link its binaries into PATH, I can do that myself with ansible.

Another annoying example that sticks out in Debian was how they create admin accounts in mysql, or how apt replaces one server software with another just because they both use the same port.

I want more control over what happens, Debian takes away control and attempts to think for me which is not appreciated in server context.

It swings both ways too, right now Fedora is annoying me with its nano-default-editor package. Meaning I have to first uninstall this meta package and then install vim, or it'll be a package conflict. Don't try and think for me what editor I want to use.