MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by grey-area | 2025-05-03 19:54:04+00:00
That’s funny, I guess everyone just ignores that, but legally it means AI should not be trained on it either since it requires attribution, I wonder was it always that way?

I think AI companies are just trying to ignore IP laws entirely, perhaps they’ll get away with it but there is bound to be a case where a small tool or game is 90% identical to a source reference at some point given the way these LLMs work.
by smpanaro | 2025-05-03 19:54:08+00:00
coremltools is the only way to run on ANE, so less of a trick and more of a requirement.

The tricks are more around optimizing for the hardware capabilities/constraints. For instance:

- conv2d is faster than linear (see Apple's post [0]) so you rewrite the model for that (example from the repo [1])

- inputs/outputs are static shapes, so KV cache requires some creativity (I wrote about that here [2])

- compute is float16 (not bfloat16) so occasionally you have to avoid activation overflows

[0]: https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/neural-engine-tra...

[1]: https://github.com/Anemll/Anemll/blob/4bfa0b08183a437e759798...

[2]: https://stephenpanaro.com/blog/kv-cache-for-neural-engine
by Tagbert | 2025-05-03 19:54:25+00:00
That’s why Grid Storage is a major topic in power generation and renewables. The technology and economics are evolving. A lot of people are working on finding a storage solution that is both durable and economical. One solution is probably not going to solve for all situations.

In the meantime, load sharing is used to distribute power across a power grid for cases where one area has more power and another area needs power. For instance, wind may die out in one area but over larger areas there are usually still areas with wind. It’s harder with solar, of course.
by austin-cheney | 2025-05-03 19:54:52+00:00
When I see articles and discussions about web + stack I can’t but ask “What problem are they actually solving”? The answer is always: put text on screen.

When your business goal is put text on screen the next logical step is to ask how much time and money does the tech stack really save? I have never found a developer that answer that question with a number. That’s a really big problem.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-05-03 19:55:09+00:00
On the other hand, mechanical devices are massively stronger than the strongest living animal. Metal and composite materials are wildly stronger than bone. Wheeled vehicles and planes move faster than the fastest cheetah or falcon. There are a small number of exceptions where biology-derived materials strictly outperform our best synthetic alternatives, but generally speaking we’ve outperformed in every other area. It wouldn’t surprise me if non-biological materials ultimately beat out biological neurons.
by zozbot234 | 2025-05-03 19:55:19+00:00
> It'll be very interesting to see how this space matures over the next several years, and whether the niche of specialized low-power NPUs survives in PCs or if NVIDIA's approach of only using the GPU wins out.

GPU's are gaining their own kinds of specialized blocks such as matrix/tensor compute units, or BVH acceleration for ray-tracing (that may or may not turn out to be useful for other stuff). So I'm not sure that there's any real distinction from that POV - a specialized low-power unit in an iGPU is going to be practically indistinguishable from a NPU, except that it will probably be easier to target from existing GPU API's.
by rsync | 2025-05-03 19:56:23+00:00
I read, and appreciated, your entire comment - thank you.

You describe a simple and elegant solution to some portions of these problems and what you are doing with your hot water "battery" is smart.

I am forced, however, to ask:

Where do you live and how large is your family ?

My suspicion is that you do not live in the United States and your family is relatively small ... ?

Modern, "first world" ("global north" ?) 21st century homes do not match your model in a number of different ways:

- Unlimited, temp stable hot water comes from a tankless water heater. People don't "run out" of hot water anymore.

- A family - even a relatively small family - runs a 30A dryer daily. Our family of five runs it 1-2x daily.

- Many, many people now have electric cars and some households have two of them.

- I agree that laptops and phones and personal electronics are a rounding error here but microwave ovens, toasters, coffee percolators, etc., are not - and people use them. I will note in passing that both our dishwasher and our microwave oven require 20A circuits.

I am optimistic that we (as a society) can satisfy these demands with solar power - I just want to make sure you appreciate just how much demand for electricity a modern US household has.

FWIW, we are planning on going entirely off-grid, purely solar with lifepo batteries, in the next 18-24 months.
by hajile | 2025-05-03 19:57:08+00:00
I’m using it as a pejorative (not an ad hominem) for people who blindly trust unknown code because they don’t have any real understanding. It’s a shortcut for a whole, well-known and obvious argument about the danger of playing with things being your understanding.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/S/script-kiddies.html

If you are using AI to learn, understand, and verify what it spit out, by definition, you aren’t a script kiddy. My argument was about how you use AI rather than a commentary on if you should.
by froh | 2025-05-03 19:57:26+00:00
new languages are created to push the boundaries for manageable essential complexity, by reducing "accidental" complexity.

clojure's data structures for example enable simpler concurrent work on stupid enterprise data.

however.

I've seen favorite hot fancy XYZ bit rot in large enterprise code bases. the oh so bored original author long gone. boring architecture documentation missing. business critical underdocumented unmaintainable genius code. and I'll kneecap every greenhorn that tries to add such bored kid complexity in my vicinity.

get me right: rust and clojure and friends are great tools and you'll have my back if and where they are needed and add value. then we'll go all in. but no bored kid complexity. go and find yourselves some niche product companies, non enterprise, with hard tricky problems to solve and do genius programming there.
by jbarrow | 2025-05-03 19:57:28+00:00
Editing text in PDFs is _really_ hard compared to other document formats because most PDFs don't really encode the "physics" of the document. I.e. there isn't a notion of a "text block with word wrapping," it's more "glyphs inserted at location X with font Y."

If the PDF hasn't been made accessible, you have to do a lot of inferencing based on the layout about how things are grouped and how they should flow if you want to be able to make meaningful edits. Not impossible (Acrobat does it), but very challenging.

It's part of the legacy of PDF as a format for presentation and print jobs, rather than typesetting.
by bisby | 2025-05-03 19:58:45+00:00
There is also the caveat that some companies tried things that work now, but didn't work back then. I don't remember the specific company, but something like Uber was tried back then. and it just didn't work. "Internet is available" is not the same as "internet is ubiquitous" and some ideas require the ubiquity for it to work out, even if the execution was otherwise fine. "LLMs are pretty neat" is not the same as "AGI is ubiquitous." So there are some AI products that people will try, that will fail horrendously, and it won't be because it's a bad idea or executed poorly, but it's because the AI behind the idea isn't ready yet.
by manchmalscott | 2025-05-03 20:00:39+00:00
At this point, anything that even so much as _mentions_ AI, as a major selling point or not, is an immediate turn off and a reason for me to never use or stop using something. I don’t care about any arguments towards “well sometimes it can be helpful, as long as it’s done right” I am just So. Unbelievably. Burnt. Out. I don’t want to hear those two letters next to each other again for the rest of my life.

The complete oversaturation is driving me insane, honestly I preferred when everyone was desperately screaming about web3 and nfts and the metaverse, that was _significantly_ more tolerable than this AI barrage.
by humbledrone | 2025-05-03 20:00:50+00:00
I really like doing deep optimization work, so probably the GPU stuff was more fun from an engineering geek perspective. But the physics was also super fun, experimenting with how to model each object, and so on. The physics is a little more playful, since changing a tiny bit of simple math often does fun/weird things.

RE strings/air, I have thought about it, but only a little! Down the road I really want to explore more physics objects. It's very fun to think about how I'd integrate strings into the world, especially w.r.t. how they'd interact and connect with the masses. It seems like there could possibly be some very cool ways to do it.
by hn_acker | 2025-05-03 20:01:02+00:00
The article from Arcamax is a republished paywalled Baltimore Sun article [1]. I used the title from the Baltimore Sun article for this post, but the title from Arcamax is:

> Marco Rubio says he'll 'never tell' a judge if Trump requested Abrego Garcia's return

[1] https://www.baltimoresun.com/2025/04/30/marco-rubio-ill-neve...
by DontchaKnowit | 2025-05-03 20:01:07+00:00
Hes literally like, autistic or something. If you've ever watched the documentary on him he has a got a weird way about him. Hes got an obsessive knack for numbers and just got into the finance game where literally your job is to make as much money as possible. Its your fiduciary obligation. The rest os history.
by squigz | 2025-05-03 20:01:47+00:00
> The beauty of humanity is we're always changing and evolving because we only do things within the scope of our lifetime.

This is just simply not true. For thousands of years, humans have done things that are meant to endure beyond our lifetimes - from building monuments like the the pyramids to conducting scientific research to creating art. Our ability to look beyond the here and now is actually one of the defining characteristics of humanity.
by godelski | 2025-05-03 20:01:58+00:00
Honestly I don't think his point even stands. We were using English to communicate and English doesn't have the strict rules of mathematics. That's literally why we created math (which I'll gladly call "a class of languages"). He's right, "is" maps to "equivalent" but he's also wrong because "is" also maps to "subset" and several other things. "Is" is a surjection.

The problem here all comes down to seadan83 acting in bad faith and using an intentional misinterpretation of my words in order to fit them to their conclusion. I'm not going to entertain them more because I won't play such a pointless game. The ambiguity of written and spoken language always allows for such abuse. So either they are a bad faith actor "having fun" (trolling) finding intentional misinterpretations to frustrate those who wish to act in good faith or they are dumb. Personally, I don't think they're dumb.
by n_ary | 2025-05-03 20:02:14+00:00
> Its a very old claim that the next technology will lead to a utopia where we don't have to work, or we work drastically less often. Time and again we prove that we don't actually want that.

It actually does but due to wrong distribution of reward gained from that tech(automation) it does not work for the common folks.

Lets take a simple example, you, me and 8 other HN users work in Bezos’ warehouse. We each work 8h/day. Suddenly a new tech comes in which can now do the same task we do and each unit of that machine can do 2-4 of our work alone. If Bezos buys 4 of the units and setting each unit to work at x2 capacity, then 8 of us now have 8h/day x 5 days x 4 weeks = 160h leisure.

Problem is, now 8 of us still need money to survive(food, rent, utilities, healthcare etc). So, according to tech utopians, 8 of us now can use 160h of free time to focus on more important and rewarding works.(See in context of all the AI peddlers, how using AI will free us to do more important and rewarding works!). But to survive my rewarding work is to do gig work or something of same effort or more hours.

So in theory, the owner controlling the automation gets more free time to attend interviews and political/social events. The people getting automated away fall downward and has to work harder to maintain their survivality. Of course, I hope our over enthusiastic brethren who are paying LLM provider for the priviledge of training their own replacements figure the equation soon and don’t get sold by the “free time to do more meaningful work” same way the Bezos warehouse gave some of us some leisure while the automation were coming online and needed some failsafe for a while. :)
by pjerem | 2025-05-03 20:02:19+00:00
Unironically, if you want something as mature as Rails, with batteries included, and static typing, the closest in my mind is aspnet core.

It’s honestly a really underrated framework, smartly designed, with probably the best ORM that exists and a great ecosystem.

Unfortunately, the documentation is painfully bad and the Getting Started guides are really boring compared to Rails or Django.

There may also be Laravel but I can’t say anything about it since I never tried it.
by briandw | 2025-05-03 20:02:43+00:00
I asked O3 for an analysis on how much battery power would have been needed to prevent this from happening again. The TLDR is: 1. The grid went dark because 15 GW of generation vanished in five seconds. 2. Need to bridge for 10mins -> 2.5GWh needed, with margin 3-4GWh 3. Need a 6C system, 15 GW / 3 GWh 4. Cost ≈€3 B all‑in, or €55 per Iberian resident

However the lead time is going to be an issue: Need 7500 Tesla Megapacks and thats 4‑5 months of combined annual capacity for Tesla. Currently there is a 18 to 24 month backlog. Then there is 6-9 month installation time.

So 3 years to fix this, min.

It's a shame that these renewable energy transitions are managed so poorly. This was a predictable outcome and it's negligence that they went ahead with switching so much of the grid to renewable without accounting for the needed for stability. It hurts the mission of switching to renewable energy.
by hyperman1 | 2025-05-03 20:02:44+00:00
I've seen a few articles of The Conversation/Europe on HN, and it seems an interesting news source. Wikipedia also gives some insight. I've just subscribed.

Does HN know about their agenda's, biases, blind spots. Not necessarily to shoot them down, just to be aware of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conversation_(website)
by milkshakes | 2025-05-03 20:03:02+00:00
this isn't a comments section for an article, it's a reverse job posting by a human. you appear to be taking pot shots at the commenter with a stated goal of exposing their lack of depth in one of the technologies they listed in their posting. you don't appear to be making a good faith attempt to hire or interview this person. in the context of a "Who is hiring" post, this is antisocial behavior and rude. additionally, nowhere in the post was any sort of claim made that the author is an expert in anything.
by speerer | 2025-05-03 20:03:44+00:00
Nice work. I've been building something lately to manipulate PDFs in the browser for privacy, although it's quite a different use case.

I think I see you're using pdf-lib and jspdf - both great libraries, and I'm using both, but:

(1) Have you seen the recent WASM compilation of MuPDF? I am also using it for some functions and find it really excellent with accessible APIs and highly functional. Worth an try!

(2) We chose different forks of the (unmaintained) pdf-lib - is there a reason you went with `pdf-lib-plus-encrypt`? I chose the cantoo fork, which seemed well-maintained to me - but I didn't research many others so would be interested to know if there is a good reason.
by peterlk | 2025-05-03 20:03:45+00:00
I think you’re fixating on the specific example that I cited rather than imagining the possibilities of the technology. We now have: zero-shot classification capabilities for basically any task, performance that is consistent enough for independent LLMs to collaboratively produce robust long-form responses, the ability to produce almost any web UI element on command with functional hookups to an API. And that’s just LLMs. SAM2 has good performance for realtime object detection in video.

Perhaps a more fruitful line of inquiry could be: what would the internet look like if every web application implemented support for A2A?
by littlecranky67 | 2025-05-03 20:04:40+00:00
I wonder why there is a debate Next.js vs. SSR. Nextjs is a hybrid and performs quite well. Contrasting with other SPA frameworks, Nextjs produces prerendered html output for fast first loads, efficient js chunks, config switches to eagerly-load those chunks (ie. when hovering over a link or preloading all n+1 links after page render) and efficient image (pre-)loading depending on breakpoint (usually the achilles heel when comparing to a pure SsR solution).

I would really be interested in real world performance metrics comparing load times etc. on a stock nextjs app using defaults vs. rails and co.
by shafyy | 2025-05-03 20:04:48+00:00
Even if what you are saying is true, a significant part of a developer's time is not writing code, but doing other things like thinking about how to best solve a problem, thinking about the architecture, communicating with coworkers, and so on.

So, even if AI helps you write code twice as fast, it does not mean that it makes you twice as productive in your job.

Then again, maybe you really have a shitty job at a ticket factory where you just write boilerplate code all day. In which case, I'm sorry!
by unsnap_biceps | 2025-05-03 20:05:09+00:00
The study I linked to showing the effectiveness of Ivermectin was only done subcutaneously. I did not find a study on the effectiveness of non-subcutaneous Ivermectin treatments on screw worms.

Given one of the areas they focused on the study is the scrotal area post castration, I don't expect that a pour on would cover that area well enough to be an effective treatment. Happy to read other studies if you have them showing otherwise.
by dahart | 2025-05-03 20:06:04+00:00
You asked what the capital is, and the government assets reserved for well connected people is the “capital” in this case.

You can call capital equity or remuneration, but that seems slightly weird even though there’s overlap of concepts. Either way, I don’t think that’s what the phrase @plotics used was referring to. The “capital” in that case was referring to the money, goods, and other means of production used to finance the project before any remuneration occurs. Capital is the leverage by which the well connected people assert the rights to the future profits. Workers not having equity is indeed what not having access to the full value means, which keeps workers from building capital.

I think we’re probably in agreement. And even though there’s an analogy to capital, Bluey wasn’t a capitalist operation so definitely not clear Marxist ideas apply here.
by timewizard | 2025-05-03 20:06:04+00:00
The best approach is to use both. Which is why I never understood the pure server side or the pure "reactive" approach. Having to manage rendering in server side code is pure pain, and having to return DOM markup from inside a function is likewise just madness. They both break the separation of concerns.

The first framework I ever got to use was GTK with Glade and QT with designer shortly there after. These, I think, show the correct way to arrange your applications anywhere, but also it works great on the web.

Use HTML and CSS to create the basis of your page. Use the <template> and <slot> mechanisms to make reusable components or created widgets directly in your HTML. Anything that gets rendered should exist here. There should be very few places where you dynamically create and then add elements to your page.

Use javascript to add event handlers, receive them, and just run native functions on the DOM to manage the page. The dataset on all elements is very powerful and WeakMaps exist for when that's not sufficient. You have everything you need right in the standard environment.

If your application is API driven then you're effectively just doing Model-View-Controller in a modern way. It's exceptionally pleasant when approached like this. I have no idea why people torture themselves with weird opinionated wrappers around this functionality, or in the face of an explosion of choices, decide to regress all the way back to server side rendering.
by nullc | 2025-05-03 20:07:05+00:00
Fountain code is decoded by essentially the same mechanism, it's called peeling. It's quite fun to implement. Though a plain fountain code has similar bandwidth inefficiencies... also the implementations that exist only correct erasures (though you can turn errors into erasures using a checksum/mac).

You can see the fountain code as a very sparse linear system that is usually solvable through a fairly simple greedy algorithm. You an augment the sparse linear system with a dense one like a RS code, which is solved by gauss-seidel which is also fun if less braindead simple.

This github user has a whole host of different competently implemented very high performance erasure codes:

https://github.com/catid/wirehair https://github.com/catid/leopard https://github.com/catid/fecal https://github.com/catid/siamese

As far as direct error codes. There is a competent BCH code implementation in the Linux kernel, but it only works over small fields so it doesn't support many independent blocks/packets.

Then there is https://github.com/bitcoin-core/minisketch which I am a coauthor of, which is a set corrector like IBLT which achieves perfect communications efficiency (at a trade off of cubic decode performance instead of linear but with good constant factors). I mention it mostly because it contains fast implementations of the relevant and tricky number theory algorithms needed for a fast RS error correcting code over big fields (any size up to 2^64 at least)... but I'm not actually aware of a performant large field RS error correcting implementation. (IIRC there is a RS error corrector in gnuradio but again small field).

(Mostly the small field stuff doesn't work for bigger fields because they use a chien search to find the roots of a polynomial, which is linear in the field size. Minisketch finds roots by factoring in log(|field|) time. Root finding is needed in algebraic error codes because it's how you find where the errors are. IIRC the linux kernel BCH implementation uses factoring like we do but is constructed to use a log table to turn multiplications into xors.)
by adamcharnock | 2025-05-03 20:07:14+00:00
I just spent 6 years living off-grid, running 5kw of solar, and 14kWh of storage. I setup a fixed array that I welded together myself. I could certainly see that tracking wasn't worth it even then.

However, in the off grid-setting I did discover some nuance. Sometimes you could really do with some power around sunset or sunrise. In the winter, being able to more reliably run my air-source heat pump at sun-up would have been very handy. Or likewise, some extra power to run the AC (which is the same device) in the early evening in the summer would have also been handy.

There were plenty of cold mornings when I was keeping an eye on the solar grafana dashboard, waiting for that hockey-stick moment when the sun swung into the right place!

I did consider the possibility of setting up an additional east or wast facing array to capture sun at the extremes of the day. Unfortunately that would have required its own MPTT charge controller, and would have just been more complexity in general.