MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-05-20 17:17:03+00:00
When you say ML, I assume you really mean LLMs?

Even with LLMs, there's no real mystery about why they work so well - they produce human-like input continuations (aka "answers") because they are trained to predict continuations of human-generated training data. Maybe we should be a bit surprised that the continuation signal is there in the first place, but given that it evidentially is, it's no mystery that LLMs are able to use it - just testimony to the power of the Transformer as a predictive architecture, and of course to gradient descent as a cold unthinking way of finding an error minimum.

Perhaps you meant how LLMs work, rather than why they work, but I'm not sure there's any real mystery there either - the transformer itself is all about key-based attention, and we now know that training a transformer seems to consistently cause it to leverage attention to learn "induction heads" (using pairs of adjacent attention heads) that are the main data finding/copying primitive they use to operate.

Of course knowing how an LLM works in broad strokes isn't the same as knowing specifically how it is working in any given case, how is it transforming a specific input layer by layer to create the given output, but that seems a bit like saying that because I can't describe - precisely - why you had pancakes for breakfast, that we don't know how the brains works.
by munificent | 2025-05-20 17:17:27+00:00
> some segments of American men really glorify their work.

What should they glorify instead?

Being valued by a community? Consumerism and mobility has fragmented communities such that most Americans aren't part of any meaningful social institutions anymore. Secularism (which I think is overall a good thing) has cut off church as another aspect of community.

Being a good friend? Again consumerism and mobility has led to a massive loneliness epidemic with many men reporting they have zero close friends.

Venturing into the unknown and discovering new resources to bring back home? The map is fully painted in. The exploring that's left to do is in the deep reaches of science that requires massive education investment in order to spend years in a lab making a tiny discovery.

Going off to war and protecting the innocent against violent invaders? The last arguably justifiable war was nearly a century ago.

It's hard world to find dignity and meaning in today, especially for men in the US, and especially for ones who by personality lean as much towards using their body as their mind. The US used to offer them form or factory jobs that were, yes, hard and dangerous, but (at least in our romanticized memory of it) enabled them to come home at the end of the day and feel they'd provided some value.
by iLoveOncall | 2025-05-20 17:19:08+00:00
> With its own one-click e-book and audiobook purchases in Android apps, Amazon doesn’t seem to be paying Google a fee. That gives Amazon a rare privilege among digital booksellers: It can turn a profit from selling e-books and audiobooks in a smartphone app.

So, an article entirely built on speculation.

Speculations refuted by Google: "Google said Amazon doesn’t have a special deal.".

What's more likely is that the share of users who buy books exclusively from the mobile Kindle app is extremely low, and that therefore it's worth selling at a loss or no profit for Amazon, to retain the customer experience.

It's also likely that Amazon doesn't have a special deal with Google, but has a special deal with book publishers, which means it's able to turn a profit even with the 30% app store cut.
by CSMastermind | 2025-05-20 17:19:28+00:00
In my testing with it anything that requires a bit of critical thought gets completely lost. It's about on par with a bad junior engineer at this point.

For instance I ask it to make a change and as part of the output it makes a bunch of value on the class nullable to get rid of compiler warnings.

This technically "works" in the sense that it made the change I asked for and the code compiles but it's clearly incorrect in the sense that we've lost data integrity. And there's a bunch of other examples like that I could give.

If you just let it run loose on a codebase without close supervision you'll devolve into a mess of technical debt pretty quickly.
by jayd16 | 2025-05-20 17:19:32+00:00
If you have any animations you're going to want to blend them. If you don't want to make a lot of animations you're probably going to want to use IK for procedural animation.

If you use an engine, you won't be forced to spend time and make it a defacto central feature (because you wont have time for other features). You'll just have access to it.

Evan a 2.5D platformer, a common indie genre, would want animation blending and foot IK without innovating on it.
by whstl | 2025-05-20 17:20:03+00:00
This is so cool and clever!

Scott Bilas also documents doing something similar for Gabriel Knight 3, one of the “grandfathers” of data-driven engines and bit of an influence on ECS.

Instead of excel however it was comma-separated text files that shipped with the game. During development could edit the files locally and reload the data without recompiling.

Since we’re in a web heavy forum: An sql database and a web editor would also allow for a distributed workflow.
by MyPasswordSucks | 2025-05-20 17:20:30+00:00
> Any competent shipper facing a train issue will just put the load on semis instead for 3-10x the price.

Did you not see how the markets recently reacted to certain components merely doubling in cost due to tariffs? In what world do you live in where the agricultural margins are high enough that the cattle ranchers can just casually absorb a threefold cost increase? Clearly they're eating the loss, because if they passed those costs onwards in the chain there'd certainly be huge economic consequences, as I said, and you wouldn't have felt the need to try and correct my premise. Anyway, I'd like to visit this world of yours, though only if you'd be buying the meals.

> Freight rail mainly exists as an low cost bulk carrier of convenience these days.

This is what happens when one tries to create a narrative from DoT statistics.

The reason why rail freight tonnage is less than truck tonnage is long-haul vs short-haul. You deliver lumber from the timber yard to the finishing facility once. That's rail. You don't load up trucks with semi-finished logs on an industrial scale, you don't load them with coal, you don't load them with industrial quantities of gravel or sand or steel either.

Once you have the logs processed into boards, then you use trucks to carry those boards to various short-haul destinations, where some of the boards are further processed into fence pickets and bird houses and old-timey sign posts that Roadrunner can inadvertently spin around so Wile E ends up taking a completely wrong turn. All of that stuff then goes to storefronts and warehouses (also short-haul) and as a result, the short-haul tonnage can count twice, three times, or even more, depending on just how many steps are being taken between "tree" and "birdhouse".

> Ships outcompete rail for bulk goods along inland waterways

Which is great along inland waterways, but if you're not located along them, you're probably using rail to get the bulk goods to the shipyard.
by proc0 | 2025-05-20 17:20:33+00:00
I'm very skeptical on codex. Simple apps, sure. Even a little complexity? Probably full of issues that need to be checked and fixed.

This isn't about rate of progress anymore because we're not advancing in some of the most basic tasks (i.e. for me, image generators cannot generate a jar with a lid. Literally they just refuse to create an open jar. it's pretty hilarious). Therefore. it's hard to see how the new Codex will tackle even more complex coding tasks. The fundamental part of the technology has something seriously lacking but it's not always obvious.
by ada1981 | 2025-05-20 17:20:40+00:00
For the last few years, I've been "seeing maps" whenever I think about LLMs. It's always felt like the most natural way to understand what is going on.

It's also for this reason that I think new knowledge is discoverable from with in LLMs.

I imagine having a topographic map of some island that has only been explored partially by humans. But if I know the surrounding topography, I can make pretty accurate guesses about the areas I haven't been. And I think the same thing can be applied to certain areas of human knowledge, especially when represented as text or symbolically.
by thrance | 2025-05-20 17:21:01+00:00
Hum, sure. I would add too that all Wikipedia projects are still related to each other, with the English one being at the center of the graph.

A lot of articles in the French Wikipedia use translated paragraphs from the English one, and I would think it is a similar story for the other Wikipedias, although I don't speak any other languages well enough to verify that.

Similarly, I would think English Wikipedia benefits from articles or bits of articles ported to it from other languages. All that to say, Wikipedia is more connected that you may think.
by jfiadeiro | 2025-05-20 17:21:34+00:00
Agent Commerce Kit (ACK) provides vendor-neutral protocols, patterns, and open source components that enable AI agents to participate in commerce through:

- Verifiable AI identities with integrated compliance controls - Secure, automated payment processing across multiple payment rails - Auditable receipt verification - Intelligent human oversight for critical transactions

Built on open W3C Web Standards, ACK enables AI Agents to manage their own identities, operate their own accounts and wallets, access paid services through standardized paywalls, compensate humans for data contributions, and optimize costs across complex service chains.

The patterns support extensions for agent discovery, secure communication, micropayments, subscription management, refund management, outcome-based pricing, and cross-currency transactions, all while maintaining appropriate security, privacy, and compliance controls with humans in the loop.
by fwip | 2025-05-20 17:22:32+00:00
Sure it does. The death or major illness of a sitting president is impactful in a way that the death of an average retiree is not. The cost of performing the test is inconvenience (admittedly of a man whose time is very valuable), but the cost of missing a major health problem has geopolitical consequences. The health recommendations are definitely going to shift toward "better safe than sorry."
by rafram | 2025-05-20 17:23:45+00:00
> Lyria 2 can create new starting points, suggest harmonies, or draft longer arrangements. It helps musicians focus on their broader visions — or jump past writer’s block.

AI salespeople seem to imagine that there are tons of artists out there who just wish they didn't have to spend so much time making their art. Sorry, no. The people using this won't be artists, they'll be non-artists who need filler (basic theme music, hold music, elevator music, whatever) that they would've paid an artist for in the past. Those jobs are normally a steady livelihood for artists, even if they aren't that interesting. Now those would-be customers can just generate some slop on their computer and call it a day.

Nobody likes to confront the reality that their work will hurt people, but this absolutely will.
by TimTheTinker | 2025-05-20 17:23:56+00:00
Bun also supports this out of the box, and the overhead is likely a bit less (reportedly 30-40MB for a single `console.log` call with no further dependencies - I didn't verify that myself though).

https://bun.sh/docs/bundler/executables

I suspect a large portion of the executable size in both cases is for the ICU library for localization support (Note QuickJS has its own, much smaller l10n library.) It's possible to download a Node binary without ICU, which could trim ~30MB.
by mrguyorama | 2025-05-20 17:25:41+00:00
Linux on HN is always an example of https://xkcd.com/2501/

How many months can you use a Linux desktop to do daily externally mandated processes and not drop down to a bash shell at some point?

Average consumers and users do not want to use the unix utilities that Linux people love so much. Hell, developers barely want to use classic unix utilities to solve problems.

Users do not know what a "mount point" is. Users do not want a case sensitive file system. Users do not want an OOM killer that solves a poor design choice by randomly culling important applications at high utilization.

Users do not care for something that was designed in the 60s before we understood things like interface design and refuses to update or improve due to some weird insistence on unix purity.

Users do not care about ABI stability. They care about using the apps they need to use. That means your platform has to be very easy to support, Linux is not at all easy to support, and at least part of that is a weird entitlement Linux users feel and demonstrate in your support queue.

Hilariously, users DO WANT a centralized app repository for most day to day apps! Linux had this forever, though it had mediocre ergonomics and it was way too easy for an average computer user to manage to nuke their system as Linus Sebastian found out in a very unfortunate timing situation. Linux never managed to turn this potential victory into anything meaningful, because you often had to drop into a bash shell to fix, undo, modify, or whatever an install!
by cout | 2025-05-20 17:26:37+00:00
I had an idea the other day to use 64-bit character codes. Then each code can be interpreted as an 8x8 bitmap. Every character would be guaranteed to have a unique bitmap representation. The bitmaps wouldn't bet used for rendering, of course -- but they could be used as a fallback if your font does not define a character. Anyway this would somewhat avoid the problem you describe because two characters that look the same visually would have the same value. Nothing I'll ever implement of course, just a thought experiment.
by smarterclayton | 2025-05-20 17:27:14+00:00
That's a good example - I can at least answer about why it's a difference: different target user.

As I understand the Dynamo SDK it is about simplifying and helping someone get started with Dynamo on Kubernetes.

From the user set we work with (large inference deployers) that is not a high priority - they already have mature deployment opinions or a set of tools that would not compose well with something like the Dynamo SDK. Their comfort level with Kubernetes is moderate to high - either they use Kubernetes for high scale training and batch, or they are deploying to many different providers in order to get enough capacity and need a standard orchestration solution.

llm-d focuses on helping achieve efficiency dynamically at runtime based on changing traffic or workload on Kubernetes - some of the things the Dynamo SDK encodes are static and upfront and would conflict with that objective. Also, large deployers with serving typically have significant batch and training and they are looking to maximize capacity use without impacting their prod serving. That requires the orchestrator to know about both workloads at some level - which Dynamo SDK would make more difficult.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-05-20 17:27:19+00:00
Oh if you're saying you're 2-3x faster at using notes that's reasonable.

But an extra minute 20 times a day to reach the right section in notepad is still only 20 minutes.

If you're comparing against someone that doesn't do all the saving and automation you do at all, that's not a matter of what program they use.
by elcapitan | 2025-05-20 17:27:25+00:00
I found "Specifying Systems" by Lamport, and the examples it gives, to be an excellent introduction and a stricter companion to https://learntla.com.

It has some chapters that give very precise definitions of how things work in TLA (both on a language level as well as model checking), which answered some questions I often had along the way in more informal introductions.
by hbn | 2025-05-20 17:28:16+00:00
Hey I recognize that game, great work!

I've had my Playdate for a couple years but it was only this past weekend I finally got inspired to start playing around with the SDK like I've been telling myself I would since I bought the thing.

I had never used Lua prior to now so that's also part of the learning experience. I'd really like some strong typing and some other language safety features, but it's good for what it needs to do. So far all I've made is a little tech demo of text that rotates around in fake 3D space in relation to the crank, like the iOS options picker. Clip here:

https://bsky.app/profile/haydenblai.se/post/3lpgnya4cqk2a

The other thing I learned from this project is I forgot more trigonometry skills than I thought in my years of CRUD/webapp development.

One of the best things about developing for Playdate is how freeing it is to have a fixed canvas that you're drawing to. I'm so used to having to make all my UIs responsive, I love being able to just position something at a pixel value and know it'll work on everyone's device.
by xg15 | 2025-05-20 17:29:48+00:00
I think I get what he is trying to say and there is some substance to it - but it would have been a better article if he had included some concrete examples of his methodology.

The analogy that came to my mind was that of a forest fire: You can spend lots if time finding out the exact cause of a wildfire (was it an out-of control campfire? An electrical fault? Arson?? etc etc) but it will not help you much preventing future fires. In the worst case, you'd spend an endless amount of resources playing whack-a-mole against increasingly random and hard to avoid causes: No campfires, no smoking, no transparent water bottles (?), no glasses (??), no power lines (???) and even then you get random lightning strikes that no human was in any way involved with.

A more productive question would be how those banal and mostly random events have the ability to balloon into something catastrophic like a wildfire - or rather under which circumstances they do and under which they don't.

This brings you to questions such as the general health of your forest, accumulating underbrush, dryness and eventually even climate. It also would change the objective from avoiding sources of fire to changing the forest in such a way that individual fires cannot spread.
by hirenj | 2025-05-20 17:29:57+00:00
Not my subject area, but at least one other group looked at ABCA1, and judging from this abstract, it has been linked via GWAS already, and furthermore concludes it doesn’t play a role (I haven’t looked at the data though).

I don’t know, but if we were to reframe this as some software to take a hit from a GWAS, look up the small molecule inhibitor/activator for it, and then do some RNA-seq on it, I doubt it would gain any interest.

https://iovs.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2788418
I spent 15 years developing a tool to make sense of software version numbers
by a1tern | 2025-05-20 17:30:07+00:00
Over 15 years ago, I had a strange idea: what if software version numbers weren’t just arbitrary labels, but followed deeper patterns - almost like coordinates in a space?

I noticed some hidden rules behind how version numbers evolve, and that led me to build something I call CodeCompath: a tool for generating and visualizing software versions based on those rules. It’s a quiet project, not flashy - but to me, it represents a long, slow unfolding of an idea I couldn’t let go of.

Here’s a short demo: https://youtu.be/leL6y5uHXEg

And here’s a longer explanation if you're curious about the thought process: https://youtu.be/8R0HMyHwm-c

I know this is a niche topic, but I’ve put a lot of myself into it over the years. If you’re someone who cares about versioning, patterns, or systems thinking - I’d love to hear your thoughts.
by zamadatix | 2025-05-20 17:30:22+00:00
> reportedly 30-40MB for a single `console.log` call with no further dependencies - I didn't verify that myself though

I got a 110 MB exe for "console.log('test')" in "test.ts" using "bun build .\test.ts --compile --outfile test.exe". Pretty compressible though, on the order of 1/4th the size pretty easily. Considering it has zstd compression for sourcemaps that'd be an interesting option to add in.
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-05-20 17:30:31+00:00
I'm talking about in the startup/tech scene in Austin.

I'm well aware of the general principle and it's origins, I am from a larger market than Austin originally but moved here because my startup received funding over a decade ago.

So perhaps I wasn't clear enough that I was asking OP about the specific community this individual was involved in in Austin.

Austin gets a lot of people from outlying regions and small towns that aren't aspirational and just want a day job, they usually don't actually live in the urban core though and they usually aren't part of the "tech scene".

For example, I've yet to meet a single person that moved here from Lubbock, TX that has a growth/opportunity seeking mentality, but I also haven't met anyone from Lubbock that lives downtown either, they usually don't make it south of 51st.
by adrianmav | 2025-05-20 17:30:43+00:00
Secria-to-Secria messages are end-to-end encrypted using PQC.

Instead of traditional public key export, we built a simplified system where users can verify each other by exchanging a short code. Under the hood, that code represents a secure identity binding. Effectively a user-friendly way to share public keys and establish trust.

For messages leaving Secria, we fall back to SMTP over TLS, since most of the email world isn’t PQC-ready yet.

We do plan to add traditional public key export as an option for users who want to integrate with other systems but the core trust model is already live via our code-swap mechanism.
by Arwill | 2025-05-20 17:32:23+00:00
The problem with GUI settings is that the result is not apparent, and there might be side effects. I do not find spending half day on trying out setting combinations as productive work.

I have looked into SRP and i do still consider that as an option, and also replacing the shaders. But i have doubts regarding the SRP, for example i have looked at the code that sorts lights in Forward+. The individual light calculations are not much, but its still done trough the job system. I imagine if there are hundreds of lights, then that would make sense, but for 2-5 lights, it seems like a waste. So it might be optimised to scale, but not for my case.

Is the effort of replacing the SRP worth it, and is the performance comparable to putting together/reusing an engine in C++? It is also a bigger commitment, as it needs to be coded on a different level and in a way very specific to the engine. Better than having to reverse asset file formats, but still very specific to the engine.
by rollcat | 2025-05-20 17:32:58+00:00
Mostly the prebuilt binary packages, "casks". Out of 13 casks I currently have installed, only 6 are in nixpkgs. Some are built for Linux (e.g. Ungoogled Chromium), but not for Mac.

I've also cherry-picked a couple non-cask packages that I would dearly miss: dark-notify, ddcctl, displayplacer, the kinda stuff you need to "fix" macOS.
by benl | 2025-05-20 17:33:42+00:00
Your explanation of finding a surface to separate good reasoning traces from bad reasoning traces in a high dimensional space worked as a great framing of the problem. It seems though that the surface will be fractal - the distance between a good trace and a bad trace could be arbitrarily small. If so then the work required to find and compute better and better surfaces will grow arbitrarily large. I wonder if there is a rigorous way to determine if the surface is fractal or not.
by elcritch | 2025-05-20 17:34:27+00:00
We already have a precise and accurate theory for protein folding. What we don’t have is the computational power to do true precise simulations at a scale and speed we’d like.

In many aspects a huge tangled barely documented code base written by inexperienced grad students of quantum shortcuts, err, perturbative methods isn’t that much more or less intelligible than an AI model learning those same methods.