MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hbn | 2025-05-22 13:58:30+00:00
Jobs has been dead for almost 15 years, he's already had plenty of time to prove himself. By the time he left Apple he was known for his obsession with thinness at the cost of function (if not straight up ruining the product), such as that stupid keyboard design from the late 2010s that sucked to type on, had failure rates comparable to the Xbox 360's RRoD, and was somewhere in the ballpark of $700 to repair because the ridiculous thin construction didn't allow for individual keys to be replaced.
by braza | 2025-05-22 13:58:47+00:00
> Maybe it was all VC funded solutions looking for problems?

Remember, from 2020-2023 we had an entire movement to push a thing called "Modern data stack (MDS)" with big actors like a16z lecturing the market about it [1].

I am originally from Data. Never worked with anything out of the Data: DS, MLE, DE, MLOps and so on. One thing that I envy from other developer careers is to have bosses/leaders that had battle-tested knowledge around delivering things using pragmatic technologies.

Most of the "AI/Data Leaders" have at maximum 15-17 years of career dealing with those tools (and I am talking about some dinosaurs in a good sense that saw the DWH or Data Mining).

After 2018 we had an explosion of people working in PoCs or small projects at best, trying to mimic what the latest blog post from some big tech company pushed.

A lot of those guys are the bosses/leaders today, and worse, they were formed during a 0% interest environment, tons of hype around the technology, little to no scrutiny or business necessity for impact, upper management that did not understand really what those guys were doing, and in a space that wasn't easy for guys from other parts of tech to join easily and call it out (e.g., SRE, Backend, Design, Front-end, Systems Engineering, etc.).

In other words, it's quite simple to sell complexity or obscure technology for most of these people, and the current moment in tech is great because we have more guys from other disciplines chime in and share their knowledge on how to assess and implement technology.

[1] - https://a16z.com/emerging-architectures-for-modern-data-infr...
by dylan604 | 2025-05-22 13:58:51+00:00
Maybe you're not familiar with how long GOP encoding works with IPB frames? If all frames were I-frames, maybe what you're thinking might work. Everything you need is in the one frame to be able to describe every single pixel in that frame. Once you start using P-frames, you have to hold on to data from the I-frame to decode the P-frame. With B-frames, you might need data from frames not yet decoded as the are bi-direction references.
by zimpenfish | 2025-05-22 13:58:55+00:00
> codecs are basically designed to minimize the amount of 'work' being done from frame to frame

But to do that they have to keep state and do computations on that state. If you've got frame 47 being a P frame, that means you need frame 46 to decode it correctly. Or frame 47 might be a B frame in which case you need frame 46 and possibly also frame 48 - which means you're having to unpack frames "ahead" of yourself and then keep them around for the next decode.

I think that all counts as "dynamic state"?
by formerly_proven | 2025-05-22 13:59:16+00:00
Windows has 0-100 volume sliders if you like that better.

They are still some kind of faux-logarithmic*

*behavior depends on drivers/hardware.**

**for some hardware 50 in Windows will be neutral and 100 will be something like a +30 dB digital gain, that's probably in part because Windows is mapping the 0-100 range in some way to the USB audio control range, which is at most +-127 dB or something like that.***

***with some audio interfaces (the non-USB-Audio-class kind) the 0-100 actually becomes a linear factor of 0-1, making the windows controls very useless indeed, as 70% of the slider range does approximately nothing.
by 49pctber | 2025-05-22 13:59:22+00:00
The idea that helped make decibels click for me is that they're a way to quickly do both dimensional analysis and gain/attenuation calculations at the same time.

"Plain" decibels are simply (power) ratios. These can describe multiplicative changes in power. These are positive for gains (like in a power amplifier) or negative for attenuations (like path loss). They are unitless quantities.

Decibels add. A ten 10 dB gain (x10) followed by a 20 dB loss (x0.01) is -10 dB (x0.1).

"Flavored" decibels are in reference to some power quantity. For example, dBm uses one milliwatt as its reference. So 2 mW / 1 mW = 2 = 10^(3/10) = 3 dBm. These quantities have associated units, but they're still technically dimensionless.

Here's the key insight. You can only have one "flavored" decibel value per computation. Say you have some 3 dBm signal (2 mW). You can add as many regular decibel values as you want, but the unit is still dBm. 3dBm + 4 dB - 7 dB = 0 dBm. In linear units, 2 mW * 2.5 * 0.2 = 1 mW

If you were to do something like 3 dBm + 0 dBm, the linear units would be 2 mW * 1 mW = 2 mW^2, which is probably not what you want.

dBs are confusing. Different fields have slightly different conventions. People talk about any factor of 2 as a 3 dB change, when technically it should only be relative to power-like quantities. It's weird that some of these "units" can be added together, while others can't. The factors of 10 and 20 can be confusing.

But if you consider the units from a dimensional analysis standpoint, decibels are much more sane and intuitive than they appear.
by jeroenhd | 2025-05-22 14:00:09+00:00
The debugger is proprietary but still works cross-platform. I don't know how Jetbrains does C# debugging in Rider exactly, but that shows that you don't have to use VS (Code) to do C# development if you don't want to.

Thanks to Samsung of all companies, there's an open source C# debugger on GitHub (https://github.com/Samsung/netcoredbg). That seems to be the basis of the open source C# extension's debugging capabilities: https://open-vsx.org/extension/muhammad-sammy/csharp

The VSCodium C# community wants Microsoft to open source their debugger instead of having to maintain an open source version themselves, but that doesn't mean you need to use Microsoft's open source version. If anything, this forceful separation makes it so that there never will be only one implementation (like there is for languages like Rust which have always been open and therefore only have one way of doing things).
by wpm | 2025-05-22 14:00:34+00:00
No, it doesn't.

I can go install Windows 10 on my Haswell mini-PC again if you'd like, show you a screencap of Defender eating 100% of the CPU if you'd like. Literally the only reason I commented was because I saw this behavior in real life, causing framedrops while playing video in Firefox. Am I a liar?
by eitanno | 2025-05-22 14:00:43+00:00
A bit of background: I built this after dealing with multiple flight delays myself and realizing how much compensation is left unclaimed because of bureaucracy and poor user experience. I’m not a lawyer, I just wanted something that worked without paperwork, call centers, or giving away 30% of the money. What makes FlightsRefund different from existing services: It’s AI-first and self-serve (you don’t hand off your case to us - we empower you to file it yourself). It charges a flat fee ($19), not a percentage of your payout. It’s designed to work globally, not just for EU flights. We’re not trying to become a full-blown legal firm. Our goal is to be a clean, automated layer that helps people enforce rights they already have. I’m especially interested in feedback on: The tone and flow of the product. Whether you’d trust it enough to use it. Thanks in advance, happy to answer anything.
by mdf | 2025-05-22 14:01:28+00:00
There's something about real optimization stories that I find fascinating – particularly the detailed ones including step-by-step improvements and profiling to show how numbers got better. In some way, they are satisfying to read.

Nicholas Nethercote's "How to speed up the Rust compiler" writings[1] fall into this same category for me.

Any others?

[1] https://nnethercote.github.io/
by angusturner | 2025-05-22 14:01:38+00:00
You assume that for small steps (I.e taking some noisy code and slightly denoising) you can make an independence assumption. (All tokens conditionally independent, given the current state).

Once you chain many steps you get a very flexible distribution that can model all the interdependencies.

A stats person could probably provide more nuance, although two interesting connection I’ve seen: There is some sense in which diffusion generalises autoregression, because you don’t have to pick an ordering when you factor the dependency graph.

(Or put otherwise, for some definitions of diffusion you can show autoregression to be a special case).
by kamranjon | 2025-05-22 14:02:09+00:00
I wonder if you could sidestep the inefficiencies of storing ID's for every character by using redis streams to store the characters with id's "represented as delta-compressed macro nodes that are linked together by a radix tree" where the ids are "monotonically incrementing and has two parts: <time>-<counter>. The time is in milliseconds and the counter increases for entries generated in the same milliseconds"

This would seem to avoid clashes and also compress the identifier storage in an efficient way.

https://antirez.com/news/128
by mgrant24601 | 2025-05-22 14:02:42+00:00
> Not even mentioning the millions of new LLM generated pages that are now polluting the web

yes because before 2022 the internet was a pristine landscape, unmarred by trash and nonsense.

look in all seriousness there are valid critiques of LLMs/AI (environmental, excessive short term optimism, intentional and unintentional misuse).

but pretending that this isn't a revolutionary change is profoundly blind. 'AI' can't do everything CIOs would like to promise their CEOs it can do, and it certainly can't do everything that non-IT executives think it might be able to do, but there is absolutely no doubt that it is already capable of saving MASSIVE amounts of time in multiple areas, some of the best of these are:

* Research

* Editing

* Translation

* Code generation

All of these require the user to not turn off their brain (which is a real risk with LLMs) to properly use AI, but assuming you are capable of using your brain they can save a great deal of time.
by IgorPartola | 2025-05-22 14:04:15+00:00
If you are doing something like a GIF or an MJPEG, sure. If you are doing forwards and backwards keyframes with a variable amount of deltas in between, with motion estimation, with grain generation, you start having a very dynamic amount of state. Granted, encoders are more complex than decoders in some of this. But still you might need to decode between 1 and N frames to get the frame you want, and you don't know how much memory it will consume once it is decoded unless you decode it into bitmaps (at 4k that would be over 8MB per frame which very quickly runs out of memory for you if you want any sort of frame buffer present).

I suspect the future of video compression will also include frame generation, like what is currently being done for video games. Essentially you have let's say 12 fps video but your video card can fill in the intermediate frames via what is basically generative AI so you get 120 fps output with smooth motion. I imagine that will never be something that WUFFS is best suited for.
Show HN: I made an AI-powered checklist management web app
by regnull | 2025-05-22 14:04:41+00:00
I've found that I increasingly use simple checklists to keep track of what I need to do. Although there are lots of checklist apps out there, I couldn't quite find the one that does all the stuff I need, so I made a new one. It allows you to do things such as:

- create templates and then create multiple checklists from them (for example, morning routine template) - use LLM to auto-populate the checklist items by name and descriptions (best historical fiction books to read, etc) - auto-expand the checklist and item descriptions

The app is completely free, including the AI features. Try it out and let me know what you think.
by thyristan | 2025-05-22 14:05:09+00:00
You can always manipulate your client into making a connection interceptable by installing your own trusted root CA that can then do MitM. That possibility has always been there and didn't go away with TLS1.3.

It's just that many are too lazy to take control of their clients like that. Or they want to do surveillance on clients that aren't theirs to control.
by elbuildersclub | 2025-05-22 14:05:15+00:00
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by chithanh | 2025-05-22 14:05:18+00:00
I think the more apt (pun not intended) comparison would be to macOS? Trying to install macOS High Sierra from the Internet without hackery will lead to "the recovery server could not be contacted" error message, because certificates have expired. Like if your Mac came with High Sierra and you want to do a factory reset.

Windows from that era still updates. Though up next will be expiration of Windows UEFI CA 2011 which will certainly lead to boot problems for some.
by senfiaj | 2025-05-22 14:05:29+00:00
I always thought that the "reverse" relationship between the time and the space requirements is explained by the simple fact that when you have a set of algorithms with certain time and space requirements and you constrain one of these parameters, the other parameter will not be necessarily (in practice oftentimes not) the most optimal. But it doesn't necessarily mean that the faster algorithm will require less memory or vice versa.

This "reverse" relationship works with other parameters. Such as in sorting algorithms, where besides time and space requirements you have stability requirement. If you constrain the sorting algorithms by stability, you won't have any advantage (will likely to have some disadvantage) in performance over non constrained algorithms. And wee see that the known stable sorting algorithms are either slower or require more memory. Nobody has yet invented a stable sorting algorithm that has comparable performance (both time and space) to non stable sorting algorithms. That's it.
by dsr_ | 2025-05-22 14:05:58+00:00
The ongoing problem with popcon is that it's known not to be accurate, but since it's the data that's available, people make decisions based on it.

popcon is least likely to be turned on by:

- organizations with any kind of sensible privacy policy (which includes almost everyone running more than a handful of machines)

- individuals concerned about privacy

popcon is most likely to be turned on by Debian developers, and people new to Debian who have just installed it for the first time.
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-22 14:06:19+00:00
The testicle speaks for itself [1]. He has held a serious political grudge against VC way over a decade back [2], the earliest mention of the JWZ testicles appearing on HN that I could find is over 9 years old [3].

[1] NSFW https://imgur.com/32R3qLv

[2] (Redirects to NSFW, so open in incognito or you'll get the testicles) https://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/11/watch-a-vc-use-my-name-to-s...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10804953
by etskinner | 2025-05-22 14:06:32+00:00
Here's another related one that always bothers me: When you say something's loudness in decibels, you also need to specify a measurement distance.

The author of this article even accidentally makes this omission:

> It’s 94 dB, roughly the loudness of a gas-powered lawnmower

And that distance is very important; the actual sound pressure measured is proportional to distance^2. So for a lawnmower measuring 94dB, let's say we assume that we're measuring at 1m. At 2m away, the sound is actually 91dB.

And don't get me started about the fact that a halving in power is 3dB, that's just wacky. I wish we used base 2.
by angusturner | 2025-05-22 14:06:47+00:00
One under appreciated / misunderstood aspect of these models is they use more compute than an equivalent sized autoregressive model.

It’s just that for N tokens, autoregressive model has to make N sequential steps.

Where diffusion does K x N, with the N being done in parallel. And for K << N.

This makes me wonder how well they will scale to many users, since batching requests would presumably saturate the accelerators much faster?

Although I guess it depends on the exact usage patterns.

Anyway, very cool demo nonetheless.
by CompeyDev | 2025-05-22 14:06:57+00:00
Hey! Yet another long-term contributor to Lune, and this is something I've experimented with for a while, but it wasn't possible due to our heavy reliance on Tokio for async I/O for a while. That has recently changed though, so I'm curious if that has changed much. I might try again and report back here.

However, I should mention that there is another Luau runtime called cart which has the sole goal of being heavily portable across environments -- and it supports running within WASM! You can even interact with JS APIs and mutate the DOM to write websites with it, if you wanted to.

cart: https://github.com/crossapprt/cart
by fcatalan | 2025-05-22 14:07:02+00:00
Oh I didn't mind it, the response is in fact right: it's not very realistic to extrapolate early diet results, and people come up with all kinds of potentially harmful crazy diets, so better to add the warning. I just wanted to emphasise that I deliberately avoided to drop any early clues about the nature of the numbers as I just wanted the (very probably wrong) results without any further comments, and it was interesting (maybe not really surprising) that the LLM would still easily guess what they were about when prompted
by perlgeek | 2025-05-22 14:07:49+00:00
> A bit like when people tell you to learn Morse code, not to learn it letter by letter.

Fun fact, during WW2 there were lots of encrypted transmissions over Morse code, and lots of folk (often women, in the UK at least) had the job to transcribe them. They would then be passed on to the cryptoanalytics specialists in Bletchley Park. I guess other countries had similar arrangements.

So they would sit 8h+ a day and transcribe what looked like garbage to them.
by duxup | 2025-05-22 14:07:53+00:00
>The product will be capable of being fully aware of a user’s surroundings and life, will be unobtrusive, able to rest in one’s pocket or on one’s desk, and would be a third core device a person would put on their desk after a MacBook Pro and an iPhone.

We're all comfortable with phones with all sorts of sensors, but most of those are on or off in a way we understand.

I'm not a fan of the idea that someone else around me brings a device that is perpetually "fully aware of a user’s surroundings and life" around me and then now my privacy is gone ...
by palmotea | 2025-05-22 14:08:00+00:00
>> These “AI is a gimmick that does nothing” articles mostly just communicate to me that most people lack imagination.

> Either that or different people have different views on life, tech, &c.

Most definitely. When stable diffusion came out, I recall AI enthusiasts gushing and saying things like it was "creating the most beautiful art they've ever seen," which just made me scratch my head and wonder what they were smoking.

> If you're not going through life as some sort of minmax rpg not using LLM to "optimise" every single aspects of your life is perfectly fine. I don't need a LLM to summarise an article, I want to read it during my 15 min coffee time in the morning.

Exactly. Some people want to actually understand stuff, in their own minds, and some people seem to be fine teetering on top of an output machine they don't really understand.

On that summarization thing specifically, pre-LLM there were services that did that (my manager subscribed me to one once), and it never clicked with me. Why would I waste my time consuming such shallow stuff? I never felt it had any impact, it felt like fluff to make it feel like you were learning something when you weren't. Which is ironic, because the people who seem enthusiastic about that stuff are under the false impression that everything is like three bullet points wrapped in fluff.

> I don't need an LLM to tell me how my text should be rewritten to look like the statistical average of a good text...

Especially since I roll my eyes at ChatGPT-ese.
by lmm | 2025-05-22 14:08:07+00:00
> On the other hand it exposed that OpenSSL was depending on Undefined Behavior always working predictably. Something as simple as a GCC update could have had the same effect across far more systems than just Debian, with no patch to OpenSSL itself.

No it wasn't. It was reading (and xoring into the randomness that would become the key being generated) uninitialised char values from an array whose address was taken, that results in unspecified values not undefined behaviour.
by timerol | 2025-05-22 14:09:46+00:00
> 2 mW / 1 mW = 2 = 10^(3/10) = 3 dBm

It's worth noting that this is wrong, in exactly the way that makes decibels confusing. 3 dBm is an absolute power figure (about 2 mW). 2 mW / 1 mW is a ratio of 2 (about 3 dB).

2 mW / 1 mW = 2 = 10^(3/10) = 3 dB.

2 mW = 2 * 1 mW = 10^(3/10) * 1 mW = 3 dB (1 mW) = 3 dBm.
by pc86 | 2025-05-22 14:10:08+00:00
This isn't software, it's a blog article. Different things are different.

Can you imagine a book with a page in the front that says "you may use text for graduate course study at an accredited university, but not for undergraduate study or autodidactic reading?" People would read it (maybe) then then go "huh that's weird" and continue doing whatever they were going to do with it. It's the same with this article.
by vrighter | 2025-05-22 14:10:26+00:00
No, I don't. Because it doesn't need to. But not running as root already provides all the protection I want. System files are not my data. My data lives in my home. I want my apps to have access to my stuff, not the whole system. But more importantly, I do want them to be able to talk to each other and effortlessly open files written by one another. "Isolating" them from each other is pointless if I then proceed to punch holes in everything just so it can work.

"This thing isn't working ... "Oh... it turns out it was missing a permission, should I give it that permission? What's it for? Fuck if I know..."

Or the other way round:

"This app seems like it's working properly, but can I restrict this particular permission for it? Fuck if I know. I'll just try and see if anything is broken"

Or I can just run the application normally and have everything always work.