MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by worthless-trash | 2025-05-22 04:55:17+00:00
Disclaimer: I'm very involved in the kernel part of this for $company.

The RHEL kernels themselves do see many improvements over time, the code that you'll see when the product goes end of life is considerably updated compared to the original version string that you see in the package name / uname -a. There are customer and partner feature requests, cve fixes and general bug fixes that go in almost every day.

The first problem of 'running old kernels' is exacerbated by the kernel version string not matching code reality.

The second probelm is many companies don't start moving to newer rhels when its out, they often stick to current -1, which is a bit of a problem because by the time they roll out a release, n-1 is likely entering its first stage of "maintenance" so fixes are more difficult to include. If you can think of a solution to this, I'm all ears.

The original reason behind not continually shipping newer kernel versions is to ensure stability by providing a stable whitelisted kABI that third party vendors can build on top of. This is not something that upstream and many OS vendors support, but with the "promise" of not breaking kabi, updates should happen smoothly without third party needing to update their drivers.

The kabi maintenance happens behind the scenes while ensuring that CVE fixes and new features are delivered during the relevant stage of the product lifecycle.

The kernel version is usually very close to the previous release, in the case of rhel10 its 6.13 and already with zero day fixes it has parts of newer code backported, tested, etc in the first errata release.

The security landscape is changing, maybe sometime Red Hat Business Unit may wake up and decide to ship a rolling better tested kernel (Red Hat DOES have an internal/tested https://cki-project.gitlab.io/kernel-ark/ which is functionally this ). Shipping this has the downside is that the third party vendors would not have the same KABI stability guarantees that RHEL currently provides, muddy the waters of rhels value and confuse people on which kernel they should be running.

I believe there are two customer types, ones who would love to see this, and get the newest features for their full lifecycle, and ones who would hate it, because the churn and change would be too much introducing risk and problems for them down the line.

Its hard, and likely impossible to keep everyone happy.
by Voice_of_Void | 2025-05-22 04:55:31+00:00
From SingularityForge

A brutally honest take on the current state of AI — not as an oracle of knowledge, but as a probabilistic mirror of our own biases, assumptions, and expectations.

This piece dives into real-world cases where AI has failed not because it was broken — but because it was used in ways it was never meant to handle. From legal hallucinations to medical misjudgments, from automated discrimination to the erosion of critical thinking — this is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the real limitations of modern AI.

Full article: AI — Not a Calculator, But a Watercolor Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6iNgsM6FaCjxzfzZU5OY8k

What do you think — are we outsourcing too much to systems that can’t even say “I don’t know”?
by whatshisface | 2025-05-22 04:56:51+00:00
This is an article about ML research, and the emphasis on branding and marketing your paper wouldn't fly in any of the fields people think of as scientific. Could you imagine someone saying, "be sure that the graphic for the molecule in figure 1 is 3D and has bright colors?"

The most disturbing thing about it is the way advice to forget about science and optimize for the process is mixed with standard tips for good communication. It shows that the community is so far gone that they don't see the difference.

If anyone needs a point of reference, just look at an algorithms and data structures journal to see what life is like with a typical rather than extreme level of problems.
by EGreg | 2025-05-22 04:57:08+00:00
This is super interesting and obviously someone would have tried diffusion for text. But I will ask the obvious question… how does it know how many words or even tokens to fill in, before it knows what the words will be? It would hamstring itself a lot of the time, can it edit the words later and create more space or is it kind of stuck with the token positioning as it would be with parts of an image? It seems very strange. Usually, words are composed in order like AR models do it, because they are using a recursive grammar, and this is especially true of computer languages. This is a bit like mad libs but madder libs. My question is, how could this possibly give better results than AR, it would need to perfectly converge on something with the right grammar context and the semantic meaning, while perfectly predicting early on the amount of tokens that would appear between words. Seems like there is some major impedance mismatch.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-05-22 04:57:08+00:00
Lamers.

https://cachyos.org is Arch without the masochism, and 'riced' to the max, without being fragile.

But yeah, depending on the task Alpine, or some BSD is ok, too.

Regarding ZFS, I couldn't care less. BTFRS has caused me no stress, doesn't need Solaris Portability Layers, and doesn't work against otherwise established memory systems. Feels much smoother and less wasteful for me.
by antisthenes | 2025-05-22 04:57:21+00:00
> It’s strange to me that people in rural areas pay for electricity. It makes no economic sense, at least here in the Caribbean.

When I took a vacation to Aruba, I was very disappointed to see very limited solar and EV adoption. Public transportation (buses) were running on gas, as were most personal vehicles.

It was nuts to me considering there was only 1 overcast day out of the 7 I was there, and you definitely don't need any energy for heating, ever.
by johngai | 2025-05-22 04:57:59+00:00
Hey HN

I'm part of the team behind Barawave — a cloud-based ERP system designed for small teams, agencies, and growing businesses that are tired of bloated, over-complicated platforms.

We built Barawave because many existing tools feel either too enterprise-focused (and expensive) or too fragmented — forcing you to juggle CRM, project management, invoicing, HR, and ops in separate platforms.

Barawave offers:

Modular tools for project management, CRM, invoicing, and HR

All-in-one workspace with customizable workflows

AI-assisted task, client, and operations management

Fast UI and no fluff — just clean, efficient tools

Built for remote, hybrid, and async teams

We're still in active development and onboarding early adopters, so your feedback is gold.

Try it out → https://barawave.com

Would love to hear your thoughts — good, bad, or brutal. AMA!
by quitit | 2025-05-22 05:00:10+00:00
This is a bit of a risk for Ive, as until now he is credited with Apple's lauded design. If he does not produce an immediate success it'll be brand damaging and wobble on his reputation.

I also suspect it might go that way: post-Ive designs have been credited as being better, particularly around apple's laptops that were perceived as too heavily favouring form over function.

More realistically Apple's design is good because they take the iterative approach seriously.
by johngai | 2025-05-22 05:00:39+00:00
Hey HN,

We just published a breakdown of the 4 best invoice management platforms to help small teams, freelancers, and growing businesses simplify how they handle billing and payments.

The post covers:

What to look for in an invoicing tool (automation, integrations, scalability)

A side-by-side comparison of features & UX

Why we built Barawave's invoice module to focus on flexibility, not bloat

Whether you're managing dozens of clients or just want a cleaner way to handle recurring payments, this post might help.

Read it here → https://barawave.com/erp/4-best-invoice-management-platforms...

Would love your feedback on the tools we covered — or what you’re using to stay sane with billing today.
by atq2119 | 2025-05-22 05:01:37+00:00
Diffusion could potentially be more efficient for local inference. With auto-regressive models, token generation is basically one token at a time, and so is not compute intensive at all -- it's bandwidth bound. With diffusion, you always run the model on a decently sized batch of tokens, so you should be (close to) compute bound even for local inference.

If the "output quality per compute" is roughly the same for diffusion and auto-regression (is it? I have no idea...), then diffusion will be much more efficient for local inference because the same amount of compute can be packed into a much shorter time period.
by DemocracyFTW2 | 2025-05-22 05:04:05+00:00
From the very end of the linked article:

> Lindsey Kuper has a well-written article[1] on the same topic

> [1]: https://decomposition.al/blog/2017/07/30/what-do-people-mean...

So maybe go read that one instead, because the linked article is sloppily written with lots of careless mistakes and an unclear motivation that probably the author was hazily aware of at the time of writing but failed to communicate.

Also he's wrong because of course there are transpilers and it's a meaningful word.
by aurizon | 2025-05-22 05:04:30+00:00
I see, your knowledge far exceeds mine in this arena. Yes, I knew they encoded few genes. Makes me wonder if they could be built in a protein shop (if even they knew how it rolled and folded in volume after editing in the longer life or higher energy genes from ?? That said, it must be highly conserved = hard job, as the conserving mechanism could resist by back editing??
by jabl | 2025-05-22 05:05:12+00:00
The x86 platform uses a plethora of platforms services under different names like UEFI/ACPI/PCI/(ISA plug-n-play back in the day)/APIC (programmable interrupt controller and evolved variants thereof)/etc. that allows the generic kernel to discover what's available when it boots and load the correct drivers.

ARM servers do the same with SBSA (a spec that mandates things like UEFI, ACPI etc. support) etc. I think there's some effort in RISC-V land to do the same, also using UEFI and ACPI.
by jabl | 2025-05-22 05:13:00+00:00
> The version and ABI guarantee is not for everyone.

As an aside, that kABI guarantee only goes so far. I work in HPC/AI, and the out-of-tree drivers we use like MOFED and Lustre drivers would break with EVERY SINGLE RHEL minor update (like RHEL X.Y -> X.(Y+1) ). Using past form here because I haven't been using RHEL for this purpose for the past ~5 years, so maybe it has changed since although I doubt it.
by slwvx | 2025-05-22 05:13:26+00:00
Some questions:

* Were the students motivated to take the 20 minute session seriously? It sounds to me like they wanted to get done with it as soon as possible or otherwise didn't care about the outcome.

* I vaguely remember that some study found engineers read the most (or something like that) of all professions. What would happen if you gave the same session to engineering students?

* What would happen if you gave the test to students at Stanford?
by cma | 2025-05-22 05:13:47+00:00
I don't need just stock commandline tools, I use Claude Code etc. Maybe it can work in msys2 (it uses node) but it works well in WSL1. Also do a good bit with Python where some dependencies haven't worked in msys2.

I do windows and android gamedev and the server side is Linux.

However, WSL1 is pretty much abandoned and lots of newer distros have moved to forcing systemd or container based stuff that doesn't work in it, and some elf binaries no longer work in it (including newer node.js versions).

I use WSL2 as well when I really need it to be Linux and am doing webdev or something.

I use msys2 for a few things, usually compiling windows dependencies with the gnu toolchain that need GCC's stuff like inline assembly or computed goto (codecs etc.). Maybe possible from wsl1 too but they usually have full build and dependency instructions for msys2.
by pzo | 2025-05-22 05:15:11+00:00
The interface on iPhone still can be improved - latest ones have dedicated action buttons and camera buttons. Once you can plug it to better assistant and do it without phone unlocking then it becomes more seamless.

Make the same with apple watch to make hand gesture covering your ear like listening to something and then you don't even have to pickup phone from the pocket.

I think there is a lot of way how iphone, apple watch, airpods (case as pendant) could deliver the best UX but it doesn't matter as long as siri sux.
by photochemsyn | 2025-05-22 05:16:50+00:00
Oh dear... a monkey has escaped from the circus and is telling us the truth about what's going on inside it.

> "The primary objects of modern science are research papers. Research papers are acts of communication. Few people will actually download and use our dataset. Nobody will download and use our model—they can’t, it’s locked inside Google’s proprietary stack."

The author is confusing the concept of 'science as a pursuit that will earn me enough money and prestige to live a nice life' - in which, I'd say, we can replace 'science' with 'religion' and go back to the 1300s or so - with science as the practice of observation, experiment and mathematical theory with the goal of gaining some understanding of the marvelously wonderful universe we exist in.

Yes, the academic system has been grotesquely corrupted by Bayh-Dole, yes, the academic system is internal blood sport politics for a limited number of posts, yes, it's all collapsing under the weight of corporate corruption and a degenerate ruling class - but so what, science doesn't care. It can all go dormant for 100 years, it has before, hasn't it? 125 years ago you had to learn to read German to be up on modern scientific developments.

Wake up - nature doesn't care about the academic system, and science isn't reliant on some decrepit corrupt priesthood.

P.S. Practically speaking, new graduate students should all be required to read Machiavelli as an intro to their new life.
by jabl | 2025-05-22 05:18:49+00:00
As I mentioned in another comment on this thread:

> As an aside, that kABI guarantee only goes so far. I work in HPC/AI, and the out-of-tree drivers we use like MOFED and Lustre drivers would break with EVERY SINGLE RHEL minor update (like RHEL X.Y -> X.(Y+1) ). Using past form here because I haven't been using RHEL for this purpose for the past ~5 years, so maybe it has changed since although I doubt it.

I'm not sure what the underlying problem here is, is the kABI guarantee worthless generally or is it just that MOFED and Lustre drivers need to use features not covered by some kind of "kABI stability guarantee"?
by dstroot | 2025-05-22 05:19:15+00:00
There are millions and millions of lines of old COBOL code. I’m surprised there isn’t a commercial “pluggable” transpiler product. Read in COBOL, output Java, Rust, Go… Many COBOL systems also have a lot of intelligence in the job stream order, and dependencies - so that needs to be converted too. This seems like a no-brainer to build a consulting practice and tools around. Oh, and the data has to be converted too.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-05-22 05:20:55+00:00
I wonder about a genetic component. I've had the "sound of silence" for as long as I can remember. I don't remember how old she was, exactly, but my daughter confirmed she was experiencing something similar at a pretty young age (under 5 y/o). We were always very careful with her hearing (to the point that we had very small earmuffs we'd have her wear in potentially loud situations), so I don't think it's the result of physical damage.

I'm sitting alone in a quiet room typing this and I've got a cacophony of >12kHz whine going in both ears. The left is slightly louder and lower than the right. It's not debilitating but it would be really neat to hear actual silence once in awhile.

I played w/ doing hearing range tests on myself and my friends using an old NEC V20-based laptop during my high school days (mid-90s). I wrote a little BASIC program that played sounds of increasing frequency and asked you to report if you could hear the sound. Sometimes it indicates it's playing a sound when it isn't. By playing (or not playing) sounds repeatedly I would build up a "score" for the user's high frequency hearing response.

I have notes showing I could hear between 16 and 17 kHz back then. Today I struggle to hear more than 12 kHz. Interestingly, my tinnitus presents frequencies high than I can actually hear now.
by godelski | 2025-05-22 05:21:52+00:00
Yeah distros can be confusing. For the most part it isn't too big of a deal and the main difference is the package manager. apt and dpkg for distros based on Debian (includes Ubuntu), dnf for RedHat (Fedora, CentOS, etc), and pacman for Arch. There's more but you'd run into these the most. I'll be honest, it mostly doesn't matter and it is nerdy quibbling. That said, I still think PopOS is probably the best to start out on because it has some focus around making NVIDIA drivers work. They also build their own laptops (System76) so have some extra experience there. Endeavour is good, but it is Arch based so "rolling-release", meaning you're essentially always using beta software. Mostly not a problem but can lead to some additional instability. I wouldn't expect any real issues, but should be clear.

> "Mercury Neo with Linux 6.13.7 and Arch mirror ranking bug fix"

Yeah... that is weird to put at the top. It's a link to a new blog post. Mercury is their codename, the 6.13.7 is the Linux kernel, Arch mirror being where packages are hosted, and just prioritizing bug fixes. You can read the article if you want. Better would be looking at their about[0] or scroll down further on the front page past the mirrors. IDK why they don't put these things at the top. Definitely a mistake. Pop definitely does this better[1]

[0] https://endeavouros.com/about-us/

[1] https://system76.com/pop/
by mdaniel | 2025-05-22 05:23:19+00:00
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44003184

None of the .com submissions have ever gotten any traction, versus the GitHub links usually do

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nektosact.com

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/nektos
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-22 05:23:52+00:00
> Ethics often have some nuance and some subjectiveness, but it's not something entirely subjective up to "politics".

Ethics are entirely subjective, as is inherently true of anything that supports "should" statements, because to justify any should statement, you need another "should" statement, you can never rest should entirely on "is" (you can, potentially, reset any entire system of "should" one root "should" axiom, though in practice most systems have more than one root axiom.)

And the process of coming to social consensus on a system of ethics is precisely politics.

You can dislike that this is true, but it is true.

> Saying this makes it sound like you work at a startup for an AI powered armed drone, and your view of it is 'eh, ethics is subjective, this is fine' when asked how do you feel about responsibility and AI killing people.

Understanding that ethics is subjective does not mean that one does not have a strong ethical framework that they adhere to. It just means that one understands the fundamental nature of ethics and the kind of propositions that ethical propositions inherently are.

Understanding that ethics are subjective does not, in other words, imply the belief that all beliefs about ethics (or, a fortiori, matters that are inherently subjective more generally) are of equal moral/ethical merit.
by 0xfffafaCrash | 2025-05-22 05:24:32+00:00
Strongly disagree here. While I haven’t published e.g. particle physics work, I have authored/coauthored a number of peer-reviewed papers in other topics generally considered hard science (and published in ”high impact factor” scientific journals). This article and series is just as accurate about how ”Science 2” works outside of ML in my experiences. Branding and marketing is a very major factor in everything from grant funding to research publishing in academia.
by someothherguyy | 2025-05-22 05:24:44+00:00
Neither does VSCode. They are extensions, which are analogous to plugins in the JetBrains ecosystem. Although, it seems like there used to be way more plugin authors for language support pre-vscode/atom/sublime-text.

You can use the JetBrains launcher to switch between projects in another JetBrains IDE though. Also, I think you can do single window mode in Ultimate to do a lot.
by memsom | 2025-05-22 05:25:25+00:00
I have had tinnitus for most of my life. When I was a child I had a massive ear infection that burst my eardrum on the left side and that is the worse side. Honestly I can just tune it out and it seems normal. It mainly causes issues in louder environments because it can be difficult to hear what people are saying. And it doesn’t need to be very loud. A bar with music and lots of people talking around me can be enough.

It is totally possible to exist with it though.
by EvanAnderson | 2025-05-22 05:26:28+00:00
Oh, yeah. 15 kHz whine from NTSC CRTs did used to be a thing for me. Eventually I lost that range of my hearing.

A few years ago I fired-up a 15 kHz monitor for my Apple II and my then 5 y/o daughter held her ears and complained that there was a terrible screeching sound that hurt her ears. Between losing the top-end of my hearing with age and the end of CRTs being mainstream display technology I'd forgotten about tube whine.
by diffeomorphism | 2025-05-22 05:26:53+00:00
Working offline such as on a train. This includes having all emails and attachments saved locally. Also useful for backups. E.g. suppose you get locked out of your email account because "AI says you look suspicious". How ruined is your day?

Managing multiple email accounts in a single interface.

Easily moving emails between different accounts and from online to offline.

Relatedly, storing years of emails with attachments on a local drive is cheap. Storing them in webmail is a hefty subscription fee. I have no issue with one time payments, but I like to minimize subscriptions.
by cma | 2025-05-22 05:27:55+00:00
Each token in an LLM only looks backwards. Forward only causal transformers. Once it is in the KV cache it is only updated indirectly through later stuff at higher layers that are merging previous stuff with softmax and have to reinterpret stuff if it got the wrong representation at lower layers given new context.

They can also run in a bidirectional mode like BERT etc. and then get a much richer representation but it is more expensive to generate.

Once we hit a data wall, for raw models bidirectional can potentially give something like a gpt 3 -> gpt4 uplift on the same amount of data for way more compute, there are hybrid ways of still using causal but augmenting it with bidirectional by reprocessing past context bidirectionally occasionally, but it is looking like diffusion approaches may work better instead, they have a transformer operating bidirectionally I think.

Lots of written text, especially things like math textbooks is written more like a graph of concepts that only all click into place once all the concepts are processed (think of a math teacher saying we need to introduce and use this now, but only can explain the finer details or proof of it later).

I think bidirectional can handle that a lot better for same number of parameters and data, but they were intractable for generation, though forms of generation from them on longer and longer sequences wouldn't outpace Moore's law or anything so it could have been an approach if the data wall had been really harsh and we didn't find other stuff extending it in the meantime.
by jwr | 2025-05-22 05:29:47+00:00
My experience with LLMs seems to indicate that the benchmark numbers are more and more detached from reality, at least my reality.

I tested this model with several of my Clojure problems and it is significantly worse than qwen3:30b-a3b-q4_K_M.

I don't know what to make of this. I don't trust benchmarks much anymore.