MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by p_l | 2025-05-29 10:55:06+00:00
Funnily enough, my first "personal" machine was a 486DX2, with a 15" "multimedia" monitor (meaning it had crappy speakers built-in and pretty much useless microphone).

I don't really count it as "first PC" because by that time PCs have been in house for several years, but it meant I could goof off in games or Logo without asking for a turn ;)
by tomp | 2025-05-29 10:56:33+00:00
You simply have no idea how AI works.

The key ingredient is data - the bitter lesson. It's not about better algorithms, but simply about algorithms that can process more data efficiently (e.g. transformers).

Tesla is one of the few companies that have a data flywheel - a fleet of (non-self-driving) cars collecting real-world data worldwide all the time at massive scale!

Now that is an insourmountable lead. (Along with good engineering, which, believe it or not, is still a competitive advantage - see e.g. German car companies unable to launch a single useful on-board computer, let alone a software-defined self-driving car.)

Google is one of the few companies that could compete, even without Waymo, because of YouTube.
by pdpi | 2025-05-29 10:56:45+00:00
> The result becomes less weird when you realize that that almost all functions from string -> boolean are not expressible as a program.

I think this is one of those cases where a maths background makes computer science much easier. It only takes enough calculus to get you to entry level differential equations before you’re confronted with the fact that most functions ℝ → ℝ aren’t elementary functions (or admit any closed-form expression at all). In a certain sense, “program” is really just a weird word for “closed-form expression”.
by K0balt | 2025-05-29 10:57:52+00:00
You are misinformed.

Amplitude, spectral, and timing are all integrated into a positional / distance probability mapping. Humans can estimate the vector of a sound by about 2 degrees horizontal and 4 degrees vertical. Distance is also pretty accurate, especially in a room where direct and reflected sounds will arrive at different times, creating interference patterns.

The brain processes audio in a way not too dissimilar from the way that medical imaging scanners can use a small number of sensors to develop a detailed 3d image.

In a perfectly dark room, you can feel large objects by the void they make in the acoustic space of ambient noise and reflected sounds from your own body.

Interestingly, the shape of the ear is such that different phase shifts occur for front and rear positions of reflected and conducted sounds, further improving localization.

We often underestimate the information richness of the sonic sensome, as most live in a culture that deeply favors the visual environment, but some subcultures and also indigenous cultures have learned to more fully explore those sensory spaces.

People of the extreme northern latitudes may spend a much larger percentage of their waking hours in darkness or overwhelming white environments and learn to rely more on sound to sense their surroundings.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-05-29 10:58:21+00:00
I agree with you on the moat side. Tesla is very late to this market. But, I would also argue that Waymo's moat isn't that wide either. Waymo is probably behind their Chinese counterparts that are already operating at a larger scale. More rides. Larger cities. And more of them.

Waymo isn't the only player in the market and unlike Tesla and their Chinese competitors, they aren't really structured as a manufacturing operation. They are modifying consumer cars made by others, probably at great cost. That raises the question about how they are going to scale. Waymo is so far not a scalable operation. They can manage thousands of cars. But can they handle millions? Or make a profit.

Chinese manufacturers, like Tesla, have a ready answer to that by virtue of their proven manufacturing skills. And it seems they so far don't need Waymo's software to get their cars to drive themselves. Tesla is late. But they can build cars at scale. So, I'm not ready to claim they are too late yet.

I think Waymo might have a bright future ahead licensing their platform to manufacturers that are, so far, not showing many signs of having their own version of this.

As for whether this is technically possible or not, I think it's hard to argue that it's not from the back of a self driving taxi. I've not had that pleasure yet (none around near where I live) but I've seen enough to not be that foolish.
by tracnar | 2025-05-29 10:58:44+00:00
I was also thinking about this use case when reading the announcement. Let's say you have a bunch of parquet files already (on local FS, HTTPS, S3, ...) that you can assume are immutable (or maybe append-only). It would be great if you could attach them to the DuckLake without copying them! From the design doc, it seems it should essentially work, you would read those parquet files to compute the metadata, and insert a reference to the parquet file instead of copying them to the storage you manage. Basically you want to create the catalog independently from the underlying data.
by short_sells_poo | 2025-05-29 10:59:49+00:00
I think we have crossed some wires. People care about living in and around London, that much is clear. People want to live in cities for many reasons, economic ones are just one of them. What this thread - and my posts - are about, is people caring about doing a good job, whatever that job may be.

And this is where the crux lies: you'll get paid better for your work in London, but unless you become truly rich, you'll still not earn enough to afford your own roof over your head. All your money will go on transport, rent and living expenses. The amenities afforded by a city, restaurants, cinemas, etc - these all cost money and are more expensive than outside of London. So you end up paying through the nose for the reasons why you actually moved to the city.

So you do the grind for 10 years, say you are actually quite good and have a bit of luck and you are now earning 5x the salary you could earn in some bumfuck village in the country, but you still can't afford to own anything, you are permanently feeding rent seekers on everything. Once this realisation hits, it's difficult to care about doing a good job. You realize that you could do a shit job, put the minimum effort and still get 80% of your "peak" salary, and this marginal decrease won't affect you in any material way. Perhaps you have to cut back on eating out, or maybe lease a 2 year old car instead of a brand new one. But you realize that this marginal 20% increase in salary won't get you anything that'd be worth all the extra stress coming from caring about your job.

You'd need to sacrifice all your social life, your energy and free time, put in a hardcore grind, save every last penny you can, and then after 10-15 years you can buy a tiny rowhouse on a mortgage with a postage stamp sized garden - if you are lucky. And then you realize you spent the prime years of your young adulthood but instead of a landlord you are now beholden to a bank and an interest rate. You are terminally burnt out and haven't been able to properly enjoy life in any way up till now, and the grind isn't over. Instead of paying rent, you now have to fund the mortgage payments for another 10-20 years.
by skissane | 2025-05-29 11:00:18+00:00
Right, but I think other people here may be making the opposite mistake-“according to my interpretation of the statute what the Trump admin has done isn’t allowed”-ultimately your or my interpretation doesn’t count, it is the courts

And I haven’t been arguing that the Trump admin is going to win-only that people are underestimating their chances. And even if I’m right about that, they still might lose anyway, and that fact in itself wouldn’t prove that I was wrong.

The fact that the attempt to introduce tariffs using one statute was overturned by this court, doesn’t mean the same court is automatically going to overturn those tariffs under a different statute - different texts, different tests, both the same outcome and the opposite outcome are entirely plausible

And as I said, I don’t actually think these tariffs are a good idea from a policy viewpoint - but that’s largely orthogonal to the question of what courts are going to do to them
by munksbeer | 2025-05-29 11:01:35+00:00
Disclaimer: I feel that your post is overly angry and reactive, but I would like to have meaningful discourse about it, and not just talk past each-other with downvotes.

So with that said, what if we started from a position where I accept you are correct about the exploitation stuff, and went from there?

Do you see a way back from where we are now? I don't. The genie is out the bottle, and depending on your view, that means "big tech" has won again. So what do we do? Do you think LLMs are useless, or are they not useless? Will they be useless in the future? Do you think they will be an empowering tool, or one that disempowers?

> Can a machine translate prose?

Maybe not now, but can it in the future? I'm going to guess yes. So of what use is arguing that it is rubbish because it can't translate prose now?
by chvid | 2025-05-29 11:01:37+00:00
A couple of things:

I wasn't trying to invent anything. Just describing what you would obviously have to do if you were to take a "scientific" or "objective" approach: Sound experiments, reproducible, free of financial incentives.

As far as I can tell, no one is doing that at a significant scale. Everything is buried in hype and marketing.

Now for that broad set of benchmarks (PRs to GitHub, Putnam, Zelda). There is something to that, but it depends on the model. A lot of what is out there are “mixtures of experts" either by implicit or explicit design. So there is a mechanism that looks at the problem and then picks the subsystem to delegate it to. Is it a game of chess - boot up the chess program? Is it poetry? Boot up the poetry generator.

That sort of thing is not showing broad intelligence anymore than a person both knowing a chess player and a poet is having broad intelligence.

Deepseek is, as far as I can tell, the leading open-source model; and in some way, that makes it the leading model. I don't think you can fairly compare a model that you can run locally with something that is running behind a server-side API - because who knows what is really going on behind the API.

Deepseek being Chinese makes it political and even harder to have a sane conversation about; but I am sure that had it been China that did mostly closed models and the US that did open ones; we would hold that against them, big time.
by dboreham | 2025-05-29 11:01:39+00:00
It will turn out there isn't a linear relationship between data volumes and successful self driving. There will be a wall somewhere that prevents it from being achieved regardless of data (assuming current AI techniques and hardware available in the foreseeable future). So what will happen is Musk and co will demand that roads be redesigned to accommodate their tech (e.g. cars network and human drivers are banned from major highways).
by prepend | 2025-05-29 11:03:20+00:00
They were sued, and lost, for capturing and analyzing data off all the WiFi networks they drove by. [0] I assume they are recording all the metadata and data that they can to stay compliant with this.

My guess is they have a list of every MAC address of every device they can find, geolocated. And then they match that to data from all those apps that ask to discover devices on my local network. Now they know how old my tv and lightbulbs are, etc etc

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joffe_v._Google,_Inc.
by quotemstr | 2025-05-29 11:03:29+00:00
Amazing and hilarious.

Genuine technological innovation in adaptation to low oxygen. Nay-sayers say it does nothing. Guys climb Everest in a week using said innovation. You can't argue with results, so they switch to:

"Himal Gautam, the director of Nepal’s tourism department, which is responsible for regulating expeditions on the nation’s mountains, said in an interview that using the gas was “against climbing ethics,” and that it would hurt the country’s tourism industry and the Sherpas who help climbers by reducing their time on the mountain."

and

"From a medical point of view, off-label use without a scientific basis and with unknown health risks must be rejected"

So it simultaneously does nothing and is unethical, and it doesn't matter whether it works anyway, because even if it did, it'd be against made-up "medical" rules.

I've never seen a stronger case for telling very serious people to go fuck themselves.
by mrkeen | 2025-05-29 11:04:33+00:00
> you likely sacrifice real-time isolation guarantees to maintain your write availability and throughput

No worries there, in all likelihood isolation has probably been killed twice already. Once by running the DB on READ COMMITTED, and a second time by using an ORM like EF to read data into your application, fiddle with it in-RAM, and write the new (unrelated-to-what-was-read) data back to the DB.

In other words, we throw out all that performant 2010-2020 NoSQL & eventual consistency tech, and go back to good old fashioned SQL & ACID, because everyone knows SQL, and ACID is amazing. Then we use LINQ/EF instead because it turns out that no-one actually wants to touch SQL, and full isolation is too slow so that gets axed too.
by ageitgey | 2025-05-29 11:05:07+00:00
If you are burned out on AI, web, and SaaS, there's never been a better or more exciting time to get into using 3D printing, other types of home manufacturing, and embedded electronics to build real, physical devices.

Hardware is no longer "scary" - it's almost as easy as web dev now. 3D CAD software like Autodesk Fusion is quick and relatively easy to learn. 3D printers have fully transitioned from crazy nerd toys to affordable, reliable, easy-to-use devices for building real products. Laser cutters, CNC machines, etc., have gotten more accessible than ever. Embedded electronics platforms like ESP32s make it cheap and easy to build real products with modern features even if you don't know any electronics.

You can literally go on Amazon, order a fully self-contained ESP32 dev board with an embedded screen, wifi, usb-c, etc, for $15, design and 3D print an enclosure for it, and use ChatGPT to write a skeleton application for it in seconds. Without pulling out a soldering iron, you can have a GUI-driven custom device for tens of dollars. And if you don't have a 3D printer already, you can get a great one now for sub-$300. All in for $350 and a weekend or two of learning, you can be building custom hardware.

If you are feeling tired of programming but have always thought of hardware as something too far outside of your comfort zone or too much work to mess with, it really has changed. It's a lot of fun. Check it out!
by kouteiheika | 2025-05-29 11:05:24+00:00
> Math is deterministic.

The point is none of these models are trained with pure "math". It doesn't matter that you can describe a theoretical training process using a set of deterministic equations, because in practice it doesn't work that way. Your claim that "the training process is fully deterministic" is objectively wrong in this case because none of the non-toy models use (nor they practically can use) such a deterministic process. There is a training process which is deterministic, but no one uses it (for good reasons).

If you had infinite budget, exactly the same code, the same training data, and even the same hardware you would not be able to reproduce the weights of Deepseek R1, because it wasn't trained using a deterministic process.
by aspenmayer | 2025-05-29 11:05:24+00:00
> I assume they're capturing more than just images, does anyone know for a fact?

I'm not sure what they're doing now, but I assume that they're fingerprinting everything by MAC addresses and SSIDs and other identifiers, but for their sake I hope they have stopped intercepting unencrypted wifi traffic, which is apparently a thing that was proven at court that Google Street View cars did do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joffe_v._Google,_Inc%2E

> Joffe v. Google, Inc. is a federal lawsuit between Ben Joffe and Google, Inc. Joffe claimed that Google broke one of the Wiretap Act segments when they intruded on the seemingly "public" wireless networks of private homes through their Street View application. Although Google tried to appeal their case multiple times, the courts favored Joffe's argument. Ultimately the Supreme Court declined to take the case, affirming the decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that the Wiretap Act covers the interception of unencrypted Wi-Fi communications.
by donatj | 2025-05-29 11:05:54+00:00
Hah, yes! Whereas most of my developer friends have long ago moved to off-the-shelf Hugo or Jekyll templates for their personal sites, I stubbornly maintain my blog with entirely bespoke css and a backend only a parent could love.

For me, the joy is not in having a website, the joy is in building the website. Why would I want to hand off the joyful part?

It's like maintaining a classic car. You can buy a reliable decent looking car, but that's not fun. If your goal is just to get somewhere, sure, but my goal is to have fun.

I work on websites all day where I get less and less say in the design and functionality. Why would I not want total control over my own?
by fennecfoxy | 2025-05-29 11:06:45+00:00
Hmmm interesting that they so deftly brand all the images in their article even though images of those GPUs have been available for weeks at least and the information they provide in the article has also been known for weeks at least.

Nothing on prices, release dates, whether b60 and b60 dual will be able to be bought separately (although this can be assumed given board partners have apparently been given much freedom by Intel).

Quite excited for these though - obviously they will be great cards for local AI with all that vram stuffed into them, but if Intel can also start to compete in raw compute too then we may see another golden age of GPUs a la 1k series so long as Intel does not get greedy.

B60 dual seems super rad tho as even just one card, 48gb vram to work with, layers split between the 2 gpus. Also amazing for data science in general, may be able to pick a few of these up in lieu of expensive Nvidia enterprise stuff given Intel seems to maybe possibly perhaps be straddling enterprise/consumer markets with these cards.
by K0balt | 2025-05-29 11:08:28+00:00
When I was a kid I used to spend hours exploring the surface of windowed ICs with my field microscope. I have a weird association of microchip architecture and the depictions of the surface of the “Death Star” in Star Wars. I think I used to imagine I was flying over the surface of the chip lol. I was slightly saddened by the electron microscopy of smaller node sizes as time went on, the features became more globby and a little less beautiful.
by motorest | 2025-05-29 11:09:40+00:00
> I’d say anything except long running processes or scripts that take 5+ second to complete.

I don't think you're presenting a valid scenario. I mean, the dotnet run file.cs workflow is suited for one-off runs, but even if you're somehow assuming that these hypothetical cold start times are impossible to optimize (big, unrealistic if) then it seems you're missing the fact that this feature also allows you to build the app and generate a stand-alone binary.

So exactly what's the problem?
by code_biologist | 2025-05-29 11:09:53+00:00
I don't see how being forced to upgrade all consumers is a good thing.

It forces implementers of broad or disruptive API or technical changes to be responsible for the full consequences of those decisions, rather than the consumers of those changes who likely don't have context. People make better choices when they have to deal with the consequences themselves.

It also forces the consequences to be incurred now as opposed to 6 months later when a consumer of the old library tries to upgrade, realizes they can't easily, but they need a capability only in the new version, and the guy who made the API change has left the company for a pay raise elsewhere.

As a plus, these properties enable gigantic changes and migrations with confidence knowing there aren't any code or infrastructure bits you missed, and you're not leaving timebombs for a different project's secret repo that wasn't included in the gigantic migration.

Bluntly, if you can't see why many people like it (even if you disagree), you probably haven't worked in an environment or technical context where mono vs poly truly matters.
by hbarka | 2025-05-29 11:10:38+00:00
My mailbox is full of junk mail and it’s hard to make them stop. It’s not even addressed to me, just the mailbox location. The design pattern to “unsubscribe” or block the junk sender is also useless. Surely there must be a strong political lobby in the US who don’t want to prevent junk mail. It’s so wasteful and ridiculous (literally tons of paper) and I’ve resigned to this fact of life in my country.
Reverse engineering Twitter's new WASM-based "X-XP-Forwarded-For" antibot header
by dsekz | 2025-05-29 11:10:40+00:00
Twitter/X recently added a new header called X-XP-Forwarded-For, generated and encrypted by their own WASM-based fingerprinting system. This repo breaks down the entire flow: https://github.com/dsekz/twitter-x-xp-forwarded-for-header
by mattmanser | 2025-05-29 11:11:50+00:00
For me, every time I have to use python it's the package handling that leaves my head spinning. It still feels like the bad old days of npm.

I think it's a popular language with scientists despite that because they don't have to care about portability, reproducability or needing your replacement to be able to run it without ever speaking to you.

I use python infrequently enough that every time it's a pain point.
by int_19h | 2025-05-29 11:12:45+00:00
Capitalism is not "designed", for starters. It is an economic formation that emerged through natural forces. And if there's anything that process optimized for, it's allowing cynical, cruel, unscrupulous and deceitful people (who, as you rightly note, existed before) to take advantage of the new technological advancements like industrialization, which the previous arrangement was not particularly good at.
by tomp | 2025-05-29 11:12:49+00:00
Massive amount of "world" data - enough for Google to successfully train Veo3, a "video generation" model that is extremely good, and evidently includes a decent "world model" i.e. a model that can generate or, more accurately, predict the (short-term) "future" - like "what happens if you let go of an apple" (it falls down) etc.

This kind of "world models" that can understand physics enough to be able to predict short term future (like humans can) are crucial for any kind of real-world AI (i.e. robotics, including self-driving), because they constitute what could be termed as "physical common sense" (that humans have, but also animals, to some degree).

Is it enough for self-driving? No, you also need to understand road rules, communicate with humans (pedestrians and fellow drivers), etc. but it's a good, possibly necessary, step - it allows you to better handle many unpredictable (tail of distribution) situations:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1g75ftb/wa...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tJH8hED11I