MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ToValueFunfetti | 2025-05-30 17:09:49+00:00
If that's the usage of supernatural then I reject it as a dismissal of the point. Plenty of things can be predicted without being explained. I'm more than 90% confident the S&P 500 will be up at least 70% in the next 10 years because it reliably behaves that way; if I could tell you which companies would drive the increase and when, I'd be a billionaire. I'm more than 99% confident the universe will increase in entropy until heat death, but the timeline for that just got revised down 1000 orders of magnitude. I don't like using a word that implies impossible physics to describe a prediction that an unpredictable chaotic system will land on an attractor state, but that's semantics.
Show HN: Blende – Simple, Shareable Photo Galleries
by pmilla1606 | 2025-05-30 17:10:03+00:00
Blende ("Aperture" in German) allows you to upload photos via web, Lightroom Classic or Google Photos and arrange them in - IMO - good looking galleries which can easily be shared with friends, family or clients.

I built this to fill a personal need: quickly create galleries directly from Lightroom Classic. I started by using the Lightroom Classic Web module but quickly realized it is a little clunky and not a great experience. I decided to write a Lightroom Plugin and platform to address my needs.

From there - of course - things spiraled a little and I added things like maps, feedback (comments) and a slew of other features.

You can check out some sample galleries (all photos mine) here: https://blende.io/blende/public/galleries

You can take a look at docs/guides here: https://blende.io/docs

I'd love any and all feedback. Thanks for looking!
by neilv | 2025-05-30 17:10:07+00:00
Long ago, some dotcom, founded by students who'd never worked, used their own idea at the time about what software development is about (i.e., Stanford first-year CS problem sets). And since that company had a lot of money (for different reasons), a lot of wannabe companies tried to mimic whatever they did.

Today, CS student's idea of an industry interview has turned into an extortion racket cottage industry, with people not only selling ritual prep books, but now also selling mock interview rituals with techbros who got into the best-paying companies.

Youse has a lovely career potential; its would be a shame if somethings was ta happen to your job interview.

What more does it take to realize this is very time-consuming and expensive theatre, and terrible metric for hiring good software engineers.

And if you're an employer who doesn't care that students spend many hundreds of hours rehearsing for the interview theatre, to the exclusion of getting more experience building things, and that your interviews aren't actually selecting for software engineer aptitude, what happens when the hire takes that same misaligned hoops-jumping mindset to their work.
by OskarS | 2025-05-30 17:11:28+00:00
> It’s probably best euphemismed by imagining that every atomic operation is just the normal operation wrapped in a mutex

Sort-of, but that's not quite right: if you imagine it as "taking a mutex on the memory", there's a possibility of starvation. Imagine two threads repeatedly "locking" the memory location to update it. With a mutex, it's possible that one of them get starved, never getting to update the location, stalling indefinitely.

At least x86 (and I'm sure ARM and RISC-V as well) make a much stronger progress guarantee than a mutex would: the operation is effectively wait-free. All threads are guaranteed to make progress in some finite amount of time, no one will be starved. At least, that's my understanding from reading much smarter people talking about the cache synchronization protocols of modern ISAs.

Given that, I think a better mental model is roughly something like the article describes: the operation might be slower under high contention, but not "blocking" slow, it is guaranteed to finish in a finite amount of time and atomically ("in one combined operation").
by throwawaymaths | 2025-05-30 17:11:39+00:00
what is there to improve? the transformer architecture is extremely simple. you gonna add another kv layer? you gonna tweak the nonlinearities? you gonna add 1 to one of the dimensions? you gonna inject a weird layer (which could have been in the weights anyways due to kolmogorov theorem)?

realistically the best you could do is evolve the prompt. maybe you could change input data preprocessing?

anyways the idea of current llm architectures self-improving via its own code seems silly as there are surprisingly few knobs to turn, and it's ~super expensive to train.

as a side note it's impressive how resistant the current architecture is to incremental RL away from results, since if even one "undesired input" result is multiple tokens, the coupling between the tokens is difficult to disentangle. (how do you separate jinping from jin-gitaxias for example)
by saltcured | 2025-05-30 17:12:25+00:00
There are people who think LLMs are the future and a sweeping change you must embrace or be left behind.

There are others wondering if this is another hype juggernaut like CORBA, J2EE, WSDL, XML, no-SQL, or who-knows-what. A way to do things that some people treated as the new One True Way, but others could completely bypass for their entire, successful career and look at it now in hindsight with a chuckle.
by jorams | 2025-05-30 17:12:50+00:00
The price you quote seems to be for 5 PiB of storage, not 5 TB. The $96,000 covers the first 400 TiB, and after that it seems to be, or at least start at, $20 / TiB per month. If I understand it correctly that means it costs roughly the same as the major cloud providers, except you also have to supply your own hardware. Very much not aimed at small business.
by acheong08 | 2025-05-30 17:13:21+00:00
I already see shadowsocks which is nice. I'm still forced to use V2ray and xray-core in some rejoins though so I route traffic from my device -> xray -> my server -> wireguard mullvad. Works for now I suppose. Also been experimenting with routing small amounts of traffic through the syncthing relay network since they have relays running locally which may be in less restrictive provinces
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-05-30 17:13:43+00:00
It's the second derivative.

Riess et al's findings showed that galaxies farther away are not just receding faster (as Hubble's Law already described), but that the rate of expansion itself is increasing over time. This discovery suggested the presence of a mysterious force, now called dark energy, driving this acceleration.

This was unexpected because most astronomers at the time thought the expansion should be slowing down due to gravitational attraction between galaxies.
by jijijijij | 2025-05-30 17:14:24+00:00
Sounds more similar to boofing.

Spoofing may be the act of pretending to blowing coke up someone's butt, but then "accidentally" snorting it yourself.

Samantha: Woah, easy now. It's my turn!

Dave: Alright, alright, I'll do it! [prepares straw; fakes choking, coughing]

Samantha: WTF, Dave?! Freeloading as always, now you fucking spoofed me???
by hoping1 | 2025-05-30 17:14:56+00:00
See cvoss's comment in another thread:

" What happens in the evaluator when you have

(\ a . a a) (\ x . \ y . x y)

Variables are uniquely named at parse time, but after one beta step, you have two distinct instances each of x and y, albeit in different scopes, and after a second beta step, you have two distinct variables named y in the same scope. "

This doesn't come up in most mainstream languages, but Zig and Jai are getting people excited about comptime evaluation, and dependent types need comptime evaluation as well. Uniqueness is fine until you're doing higher-order evaluation in your compilation pipeline like this, which will be more and more desirable in the future, at least if the current trends are any indication.
by ryandrake | 2025-05-30 17:16:31+00:00
This sounds right. It's not like girls are being deemed "the gold standard." Instead, there's an existing set of behavioral expectations, as you put it, and girls (for whatever reasons) just happen to have an easier time conforming to these expectations.

If societal expectations are things like: kindness, respect, agreeableness, calmness, paying attention, not talking back, not fighting, and so on... and girls tend to conform to these while boys tend not to, that doesn't necessarily indicate a conspiracy against boys.
by hinkley | 2025-05-30 17:17:07+00:00
There was a release of subversion back in the day that reduced the number of files that were opened during a repo action like pull, and the number of times any one file got opened. On Linux it ran about 2-3x faster. Very nice change.

On windows it was almost 10x faster. On the project where this change was released, my morning ritual was to come in, log on, run an svn pull command, lock my screen and go get coffee. I had at least ten minutes to kill after I got coffee, if the pot wasn’t empty when I got there.

Windows is hot garbage about fopen particularly when virus scanning is on.
by bee_rider | 2025-05-30 17:17:07+00:00
At the beginning of the post, they note a default implementation that uses some Google library. So maybe the assumption (which worked out for a while?) was that nobody would bother doing the “over the top” thing and try to beat Google’s library?

One option could be to just open up, like, 10 slots instead, right? Most folks might use this implementation (since it has been posted anyway). That way coming second place in the race isn’t so bad…
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-05-30 17:18:31+00:00
1. True. When I was younger we all went to XYZ coffee shop in large part to see who we ran into there, catch up on gossip, let people know where to come hang that night. With social media you don't have/need that.

3. When I was younger we did item 1 above, but at Denny's late at night after everything shut down. The fact it was a chain didn't seem to impact the hang potential.

4. I grew up in Santa Cruz and it was always an insane asylum and had a homeless problem before having a homeless problem was cool, but it was also always a city full of people hanging out (don't know anymore was forced to move away).
by vel0city | 2025-05-30 17:19:04+00:00
My $300 laptop is a few years old. It has a Ryzen 3 3200U CPU, it has a 14" 1080p display, backlit keyboard. It came with 8GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD, I upgraded to 16GB from RAM acquired by a dumpster dive and a 256GB SSD for like $10 on clearance at Microcenter. I upgraded the WiFi to an Intel AX210 6e for about another $10 off Amazon. It gets 6-8 hours of battery life doing browsing and texting editing kind of workloads.

The only thing that is itching me to get a new machine is it needs a 19V power supply. Luckily it's a pretty common barrel size, I already had several power cables laying around that work just fine. I'd prefer to just have all my portable devices to run off USB-C though.
by marojejian | 2025-05-30 17:19:49+00:00
Meta comment - [update: oh, I see they changed the link to the paper too. i guess that makes it more defensible. but the original FT story covering the paper did add value, and now it is more lost ]

It's curious someone changed the title of this, and I'm of two minds about it:

Pro change:

- Yes, the original title "Pollution causes CEOs: study"is baity.

- Yes, the new title is the actual title of the underlying study, which is less baity.

In general, this is the kind of thing I love about HN.

Con change:

- The original title is the literal title of the FT article, whch is what the post is on, and it does provide commentary (some snarky) on top of the paper.

- The original title does more elegantly and effectively convey the conclusion of the research, whereas the paper title does not convey this at all. It's more crappy intellectualized science writing.

I think this is one case where the more engaging title is also the more effective one.
by dylan604 | 2025-05-30 17:20:11+00:00
Having hesitancy of any new theory that directly conflicts with the known/accepted theories is not a bad thing. Telling someone that their theory is so different than what everyone else thinks that they might want to go back and double/triple check just in case someone forgot to carry a one or something else simple/embarrassing is just a CYA bit of advice. Other quotes like "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" would also be apropos.
by ATechGuy | 2025-05-30 17:20:12+00:00
Congrats on launching! Booting VMs in milliseconds is certainly important, but it can also be achieved with CloudHypervisor/Firecracker. Where Containers beat VMs is runtime perf. The overhead in case of VMs stems from emulation of IO devices. I believe the overhead will become noticeable for AI agentic use cases. Any plans to address perf issues?
by throwawaymaths | 2025-05-30 17:21:24+00:00
> Although, there's a surprising number of people claiming it's already here now.

why is that surprising? nobody really agrees on what the threshold for AGI is, and if you break it down:

is it artificial? yes.

is it general? yes. you can ask it questions across almost any domain.

is it intelligent? yes. like people say things like "my dog is intelligent" (rightly so). well is chatgpt more intelligent than a dog? yeah. hell it might give many undergrads a run for their money.

a literal reading suggests agi is here. any claim to the negative is either homocentrism or just vibes.
by nis0s | 2025-05-30 17:21:50+00:00
This article…the kind of technology described herein, and other places which gets cast in a suspicious light, is actually quite useful.

The problem with the information such technology affords, however, is that any primitive-minded human may misuse or abuse what they get out of it.

The human mind has not wholly updated beyond family or tribe level self-preservation, but I guess some results have yielded from prior waves of cultural evolution. The only practical advice is that one should try to build in safeguards against abuse and misuse.
by hoping1 | 2025-05-30 17:21:59+00:00
This and the other comment under this seem to be talking about the work the computer is doing at runtime. I believe the point is about the developer's work in implementing this. (For example, renaming potentially conflicting variables is clearly _less_ work than renaming only the actually conflicting variables, in this framing.) This kind of work is important for (1) compilers whose bugs are potentially very financially expensive, and (2) compilers with very intentionally-portable implementations (including but not limited to educational implementations)
by notorious_pgb | 2025-05-30 17:22:22+00:00
Truly appreciate the thoughtful response.

First off: you're absolutely correct, and in ways which pain me to admit, because I do want to create correct analogies, as opposed to ones which mislead or half-inform.

I racked my brain, during the writing of this post, to figure out how to resolve these inconsistencies without sacrificing the goal of the post, which was basically to "unlock" an understanding of:

"The things you think are magic are actually just well-designed systems which you can, and should, reason about."

I think most programmers who use threads but don't know what they are have likely primarily had threads explained to them via analogies which teach their effects, not their nature. While this makes a lot of sense, and this instruction is certainly necessary and very valuable, it also has the unfortunate effect of mystifying and deifying such systems.

I also think most programmers would have no trouble accepting, or perhaps stating, that a thread is a data structure. But the nature of that data structure -- what goes inside it? -- has, in my experience, not been well understood.

And I truly think the core thing one has to do to demystify threads is explain what a thread holds -- a snapshot of CPU state -- because it links together the two most important things:

1. What would a thread structure even contain? 2. What features of a processor would even enable threads to function?

And with that as my primary motivation, I will defend the usefulness of this analogy. While the exact "state" being swapped is very different (which certainly demands explanation in any rigorous instruction), the fact that "it's simply state being swapped around, by code you can read, at an interval combined with conditions" is what I truly believe is the missing keystone -- and I do think this way of demonstrating it is useful to that degree.

But I am planning a part 3 which goes into fine detail on all of the disanalogies in part 2.

(Finally, I think my biggest sin of this whole thing is using the term "RTOS" in the title. That was stupid. This is not an RTOS at all. I didn't even use the term anywhere in the blog post itself, so why use it in the HN title? I regret this.)
by eej71 | 2025-05-30 17:22:45+00:00
I think this is a misunderstanding of the underlying issue.

It isn't about protection from straying from some level of orthodoxy. It's about people who are incredibly brilliant in one area of their life - and yet be incredibly dumb in another. I've always seen Linus Pauling as an interesting example of this. Brilliant in some ways, but going all in on Vitamin C is just weird.

I see the basic claim as - sometimes these prizes - well intentioned as they are - may lift critical guard rails that unintentionally let them drive off into their weeds. They go deeper and harder into the weeds because the prestige that comes with these prizes creates a halo effect that blunts or hides critical criticism that can no longer reach them.
by sinisterMage | 2025-05-30 17:23:23+00:00
Yep, W++ lambdas are statement-level on purpose My high school teacher once told me lambdas are “university-level,” so I made them the default function syntax in W++. It’s my way of saying: “nah, these aren’t scary — they belong in scripting too.”

That said, I totally agree that full anonymous functions would be useful (especially for more complex logic). Might explore adding those later, but I love the message the current model sends.
by mrguyorama | 2025-05-30 17:23:25+00:00
>A lot of male conversation is silent.

No it isn't! Men need to talk about their feelings just as much as women! There isn't some major difference in how we handle emotions!

We are all human, and humans are emotional creatures.

So many men need to Grow the Fuck Up and realize that being vulnerable is not the same as being weak. You need to be talking to your friends or confidants about your feelings.

>To feel otherwise is not "masculine"

Wrong. If you need to project a constant air of competence and stoicism and power, you are insecure and emotionally stunted.

I blame media honestly. Watch what women protagonists in American media do compared to male protagonists. Watch how male characters just do not talk through their feelings and emotions to other men, except as essentially a crisis point. Watch as women characters are much more likely to talk about how they felt about something.

Meanwhile, outside the US, male characters are allowed to have feelings. The Doctor is an insanely emotional man, full of complicated feelings that he is constantly having to face, and yet is portrayed as a man of immense power and prestige.

What male role model to American men have that portrays emotional development as a good and important thing?
by ToValueFunfetti | 2025-05-30 17:23:37+00:00
I believe we can mostly elide that here. For any "it", if we have it, machines can have it too. For any useful "it", if a system is trying to become more useful, it's likely they'll get it. So the only questions are "do we have it?" and "is it useful?". I'm sure there are philosophers defining self-awareness in a way that excludes humans, and we'll have to set those aside. And definitions will have varying usefulness, but I think it's safe to broadly (certainly not exhaustively!) assume that if evolution put work into giving us something, it's useful.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-05-30 17:23:40+00:00
Reversing stolen crypto transactions in practice is done the same way you reverse stolen cash transactions.

You find the criminal, and the cash and give back the cash to the wronged party. With cash, the criminal can hide the cash in some random location, and nobody can say if they spent it or they lost it. With crypto, everyone knows where the money is. You just have to figure out the passwords to the wallet in some way.
by notorious_pgb | 2025-05-30 17:23:44+00:00
I appreciate your humility in assuming that the term is correct, and your understanding must be off.

As a matter of fact, the truth is that this is not an RTOS, and I'm embarrassed that I put that term in the title. It wasn't intentionally malicious -- in the moment I felt it fit -- but it was clouded by the bias of wanting to create an interesting HN title.
by pama | 2025-05-30 17:24:00+00:00
What exact attempt with which Tokenmonster vocab do you refer to? Sometimes it is hard to conclude much from these efforts. For example, having a smaller vocabulary is typically only useful for small models where the compute cost of the softmax layer at the end of the decoder may still factor into the equation for the performance. Fixing the size of the vocabulary while increasing the rest of the model makes this inefficiency disappear.
by LocalH | 2025-05-30 17:24:03+00:00
One thing I see in this article is a very common blunder in dealing with images from these types of retro systems - non-integer vertical scaling. For accurate reproduction of these types of CRT raster images from an aspect ratio perspective, integer vertical scaling should always be done, followed by interpolated horizontal scaling to reach the correct aspect ratio.

Why? The original display method never blended across scanlines (except in the PAL world, where chroma only would blend across two otherwise discrete scanlines), but the analog nature of the scanning process provided a natural horizontal blending.
by guerrilla | 2025-05-30 17:24:44+00:00
(\ a#0 . a#0 a#0) (\ x#1 . \ y#2 . x#1 y#2)

-->

(\ x#3 . \ y#4 . x#3 y#4)(\ x#5 . \ y#6 . x#5 y#6)
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-05-30 17:24:46+00:00
In the US homeless people might sit on park benches and be seen so benches are sloped to be uncomfortable for more than short periods. Benches are intended as a temporary rest for those that need it as they walk, not a place to just sit and chill.

My area's solution is we don't have parks, we have public land trusts that are actually private property and can ban people. They're pretty nice for those of us allowed.
by mr_mitm | 2025-05-30 17:25:36+00:00
Yes, but the article is indeed unclear about this. In particular this line:

>The farther away that galaxies were, the faster they were receding.

This is already the case in Hubble's law, which says that the velocity is proportional to the distance. Hubble's constant is the proportionality constant and thus the expansion rate.

Riess found that the Hubble constant is not constant. Instead, the expansion rate is increasing over time.
by jlarkson | 2025-05-30 17:25:41+00:00
For those working with or evaluating offshore teams, I recently published a post breaking down technical and process-related pitfalls in outsourcing software development—things like unclear requirements, lack of architecture planning, poor QA practices, and misaligned delivery models.

It also outlines actionable strategies we use (like setting up collaborative QA pipelines early, enforcing architecture reviews, and hybrid agile contracts) to reduce risk and improve long-term outcomes.

Here’s the link for those interested: https://nexadevs.com/mistakes-in-outsourcing-software-develo... I would be interested to hear how others structure outsourced dev processes—especially around managing technical debt and scaling teams.