MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by int_19h | 2025-05-22 02:16:47+00:00
To chime back in, my contention is that we should be churning out at least enough to keep Ukraine fully supplied without the need to ration, and the fact that we still aren't there 3+ years into this war is not a good sign.

Speaking more broadly, I think that the proper amount of war-related industry should depend not just on whether the war is ongoing or not, but on how likely it is. Right now I believe that a major war that US will likely need to participate in sooner or later is more likely than not by 2050.
by mindslight | 2025-05-22 02:16:54+00:00
It's a bit of a stretch to call this juxtaposition of topics, with absolutely zero analysis of how they're connected, honest:

> we tax hardworking Americans mightily to finance global security. On the financial side, the reserve function of the dollar has caused persistent currency distortions and contributed, along with other countries’ unfair barriers to trade, to unsustainable trade deficits.

Money is fungible between these two concerns. The excess demand for USD is a source of revenue for our economic empire, realized by the continual monetary inflation without nearly as much corresponding price inflation. Some of that monetary inflation has been used by the government (~"deficit spending"), but the sheer majority has been getting dumped into the financial industry to bid up existing assets as a handout to the rich. That is what has left the American worker high and dry - near complete inability for the US government to use that already-centralized revenue to help wider society, due to a political movement based around fake austerity.

The article continues on using the passive voice to describe multiple things that the US government could have put a stop to any time it wanted, framed as if they were being done to us by other countries. For example:

> in the years running up to the 2008 crash, China along with many foreign financial institutions, increased their holdings of U.S. mortgage debt, which helped fuel the housing bubble, forcing hundreds of billions of dollars of credit into the housing sector without regard as to whether the investments made sense

Obviously if the government had set interest rates higher rather than lower, there would have been fewer mortgage bonds to buy and the dollars would have had to go elsewhere. I don't know if this pattern is deliberate or just an inevitable result of the bizzarro framing where having the world reserve currency is asserted to be a liability, but either way it is most certainly not honest.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-05-22 02:17:15+00:00
Trying to see if Rust and Tokio have the same problem. I don't know enough about cgroups to be sure. Tokio at this line [1] ends up delegating to `std::thread::available_parallelism` [2] which says

> It may overcount the amount of parallelism available when limited by a process-wide affinity mask or cgroup quotas and sched_getaffinity() or cgroup fs can’t be queried, e.g. due to sandboxing.

[1] https://docs.rs/tokio/1.45.0/src/tokio/loom/std/mod.rs.html#...

[2] https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/std/thread/fn.available_par...
by godelski | 2025-05-22 02:18:27+00:00
> funding for Tor came from the Navy

Notably they want it more widely used because it's really not useful if the only people that connect to Tor are spies. Makes finding spies super easy ("X connected to Tor. Okay, let's go arrest X"). How do you prevent that? Doesn't take a genius to figure that out...

Similarly, CIA/Navy/whatever doesn't want their tools to have zero-days. You might think "zero-days for me, but not for thee" but come on... we all know that doesn't work. If there's an exploit, the exploit works for anyone. You may have an edge in knowing where to look, but you're not going to maintain that edge for long. Worse, good luck finding out if someone else finds out. How do you prevent adversaries from exploiting your tools? Doesn't take a genius to figure that out...

I really hate these conspiracies. Like come on. Yeah, we should be highly critical of US spy agencies and apply a lot of scrutiny. But not everything they touch results in a landmine. They aren't all powerful gods. And they're up against some serious adversaries like China, Russia, and yes, Israel, and the most important one of them all... themselves! Spooks are spooks. They don't trust their neighbors, they don't trust themselves.

And if they were omniscient, surely they'd know the very first rule of security: if there's a backdoor, somebody will find it at the least conveniently possible time.
by BugheadTorpeda6 | 2025-05-22 02:18:43+00:00
If people doing that truly wasn't a consideration before going ahead with this then the people that made the call are just as dumb as if they hadn't. Fwiw I don't think anybody is being driven "insane". More like humiliated and frustrated.

Remember, Microsoft publicized that they would be doing this and wanted to make sure everybody knew.
by 0x000xca0xfe | 2025-05-22 02:19:46+00:00
RISC-V software ecosystem is really good already. It feels like everybody is just waiting for high performance CPU cores now. Sadly silicon cannot be built and released within seconds like software...

Better to buy a SBC for now (I can recommend the OrangePi RV2 - it's fantastic!) and wait until actually desktop/laptop-class hardware is ready :)
by gus_massa | 2025-05-22 02:20:22+00:00
> to see if I'm someone who's legitimate

For other professions, the website doesn't matter. But if you want to raise capital, you shoud hire a wed designer or at least start with a professional template.

Each link should be a photo with a big title and a small description. It's a nightmare for me to present my work visually, but I think in your work that is easy and you have plenty of photos in instagram and the other sites.

The icon in the link to instagram is weird. Use the standard one.

The icon in the link to likedin is weird. Use the standard one. I see only a loginwall. Is it possible to link to your short visible profile?

> I have a preference for minimalism.

Scratch that. People like photos, specially for social validation.
by bruce511 | 2025-05-22 02:20:37+00:00
Personally, I'd put the ads back in, and then your $5 a month version can be to not see ads. Either way you make a little bit. Although I'm not sure that you get much for ads with so few users...

But you're learning that when you give people something for free, they're happy to use it for free. And for something as simple as "tracking expenses", it's really hard to add enough value to get people to pay. I mean, I can do it in notepad, or with a pencil and paper...
by Arnavion | 2025-05-22 02:21:45+00:00
It's for the sake of providing a &mut [u8] to the initialized region for callers that cannot work with &mut [MaybeUninit<u8>] for whatever reason, eg if they wanted to use this with a std::io::Read impl. In particlar, Read impls are discouraged but not prohibited from reading the content of the [u8] given to them, so calling them with a [MaybeUninit<u8>] transmuted into a [u8] is not generally safe.
by tomhow | 2025-05-22 02:22:19+00:00
It's not about the size of the number or improvement; we do the same thing when the number is "10,000%", which is not unusual in the titles we see here.

The problem with these kinds of titles – and this is no comment on this particular article (I haven't checked, because it's irrelevant) – is that sometimes writers will put a figure in the title that was achieved in a one-off result under very specific/unusual conditions, whereas the realistic improvement under more normal conditions is like 20% or 50% – still great, just not what the title claimed.

Then when that happens, the discussion becomes dominated by comments pointing that out and debating the validity of the tests and results – even if the article does a good job of revealing those details.

We've found we can reduce that effect by taking the numbers out of the title altogether.
by jodrellblank | 2025-05-22 02:22:43+00:00
Reminds me of when I imagined brute-forcing every possible small picture as simply 256 shades of gray for each pixel x (640 x 480 = 307200 pixels) = 78 million possible pictures.

Actually I don't have any intuition for why that's wrong, except that if we catenate the rows into one long row then the picture can be considered as a number 307200 digits long in base 256, and then I see that it could represent 256^307200 possible different values. Which is a lot: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=256%5E307200
by BugheadTorpeda6 | 2025-05-22 02:22:57+00:00
I think it did, then they built up a most that made it very hard to turn momentum the other direction. It's turned now but it happened very slowly. Who knows if it ever falls of a cliff, all I know is that moats are only broken when momentum is going in the wrong direction and so they are certainly more vulnerable now than they would otherwise have been if they hadn't pissed so many people off about their products.

At one point, their desktop user experience was actually pretty good. And that was all their products back then. They definitely didn't get to where they are now by selling products that were bad. You could make the argument that some of them were bad but they were cheap, but if price is a big aspect of what makes a product good in the eyes of the consumer at the time and nobody else is competing on price, then that isn't "bad" in the sense I'm using the word.

I don't think I'd have called them out for always making terrible products all the way through till about Windows 7. I had no major complaints about that release, cloud was in its infancy, no pushing 365 etc. After that, quality started to go downhill. To the point that I'd argue with a straight face that most major community supported Linux DEs provide an objectively better and more stable user experience for both technical and non technical users.
by int_19h | 2025-05-22 02:23:08+00:00
Pattern matching shouldn't be hard to translate, really. It would not be a 1:1 mapping to the existing IEnumerable methods, but it's a straightforward translation to a single Select that returns a Nullable<ValueTuple> (to indicate match success/failure and pass the data in the former case) followed by a Where that would remove failures. Better yet, they could always add a new extension method to IEnumerable for this, and then translate to that.

One feature I'd like to see is integration with foreach so that you don't have to repeat the variable and come up with a different name to work around shadowing rules. I.e. instead of:

foreach (var x in from x0 ...)

it would be nice to be able to write simply:

foreach (from x in ...)

and have it "just work", including more complicated cases with multiple nested from-clauses, let etc (effectively extending the scope of all of those into the body of foreach).
by jwr | 2025-05-22 02:24:13+00:00
I use qwen3:30b-a3b-q4_K_M for coding support and spam filtering, qwen2.5vl:32b-q4_K_M for image recognition/tagging/describing and sometimes gemma3:27b-it-qat for writing. All through Ollama, as that provides a unified interface, and then accessed from Emacs, command-line llm tool or my Clojure programs.

There is no single "best" model yet, it seems.

That's on an M4 Max with 64GB of RAM. I wish I had gotten the 128GB model, though — given that I run large docker containers that consume ~24GB of my RAM, things can get tight.
by qntmfred | 2025-05-22 02:25:57+00:00
I told ChatGPT my mom's name the day my account got persistent memory, last april. I also told it to figure out my dad's name. Once a month or so I would ask it my mom and dad's name. By november it had figured out my dad's name.

https://x.com/kenwarner/status/1859637611595214888
by HocusLocus | 2025-05-22 02:26:02+00:00
Tinitus is misfiring nerves firing along the path somewhere from ear cochlea to cortex. From your description there is pain and discomfort for high frequencies also, it's not just a pure ringing that might even favor 1 ear? I did some research for a novel ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtxgpaXp9vA&t=4697s ) and learned that hearing is not too hard to understand, but it's mysterious in its perfection and a Job Well Done in evolution, the most complicated thing that comes already hard-wired.

Some 30,000 nerves along the path from ear to cortex in 4 neuronal stages. An awful lot. That would make pain and discomfort after hearing damage (and slowness of healing) a sort of canary that there might be some systemic problem with myelin or nutrition. (try "Key Nutrients for Myelin Support") and try to binge on those items if you are ready to try anything.)

I've had temporary damage with effects lasting a week. I was a sound guy and have at times troubleshooted crossover networks that peaked around 3kHz and it wasbad, but the very worst was dropping a 60lb steel theater weight onto a pile of other weights. Didn't even hear the sound but hearing went silent for 5 minutes and took a week to all come back! Also ultrasonics that were felt as pressure not sound. I recovered completely and have a rolloff beyond 13k that is probably age. But it's scary, I hope you heal!

This greg.technology gent is not just any ear blaster, he brought us Sonic Garbage ( https://sonicgarbage.greg.technology/ ) that has been featured here on HN. And check out his cheerleading offer at ( https://blog.greg.technology/ ). It looks like a good deal because I've exchanged emails with him and he is a plain spoken cheerful guy... the offer is not satire in any way.
by rstuart4133 | 2025-05-22 02:26:10+00:00
> But they’re not getting much smarter because they can only be as smart as us and each other,

That doesn't look to be true in general. AlphaGoZero didn't learn off smarter humans or smarter AI's (at all - it only trained against itself), yet it became better at playing some games than any existing AI or human.

To me it looks like the same thing has happened for LLM's in the one area they are truly good at: natural language processing. Admittedly they only learned to mimic human language by begin fed lots of human language, but they look at least as good at parsing and writing as any human now, and much, much faster at it. And admittedly they have plateaued at natural language processing. But that's not because of any inherent limitation in the level of intelligence an AI can achieve. It's because unlike playing Go there is a natural limit on good how you can get at mimicking anything, which is "indistinguishable".

The other things LLM's seem to be good at a lossy compression of all the text they have been trained on. I was floored when I ran a 16GB locally, and it could tell me things about my childhood town (pop: under 1000, miles away from anywhere). It didn't know a lot, but there isn't a lot out there about it on the internet, and it still astounds me it could compress the major points of everything it read on the internet down to 16GB. The information it regurgitated was sometimes wrong of course, but then you only expect to get a overview of a scene from a highly compressed JPEG. The details will be blurry or downright misleading.

What they are attempting to tack onto that is connecting the facts the LLM knows into a chain of thought. LLM aren't very good at that, and the improvements over the past few years look to be marginal, yet that is what is being hyped with the current models.

None of that detracts from your main point, which I think boils down to the rapid advancements in proprietary models have stalled. Their open source competitors aren't far behind, and if they have really stalled open source will catch up.

But that's only true for the natural language processing side. The shear compute required to keep a model up to date with the latest information in the internet means the model with the most resources behind it will regurgitate the most accurate information about what's on the internet today. Open source will always lose that race.
by anthergogler89 | 2025-05-22 02:26:44+00:00
I am preparing for a new job in big tech and one common theme is using an event-driven architecture in system design interviews in basically almost everything, even for some things like a chat application where this feels highly (un)intutive. For me using rpc/grpc and mapping user_id to ip address like a DNS server is a more intuitive approach? Thoughts?

My approach: Each active chat participant will have a web socket connection opened to a server in the closest geographical region to it. We store the mapping from user ID to the server IP address in an memory replicated state store(hello redis, Kafka, DNS)

For sending the first message in a session from user1 will query state store and cache the address of all its active peers

For any future messages, you just have a RPC from web socket server of user 1 to peers and the last server can send the notification since it has a websocket connection to the peer.

During server or client restarts you assign the client to a new server and (eventually) the state store is updated. Other peers wait for a while and (eventually) updates the restarted peers address when the state store is eventually updated. The missed messages during restarts can be handled pretty easily by having a short term persistence layer.
by mdaniel | 2025-05-22 02:29:54+00:00
> and there was zero help from the tooling

That's mostly my experience with ruby, too: you can type anything, don't worry about it!

I wanted to mention that Gradle since I think about version 7 supports mostly static typing via Kotlin but regrettably it's lipstick on a pig since almost inevitably one needs to interact with the Groovy side of the house and then all bets are off
by eru | 2025-05-22 02:31:31+00:00
Some corporations maximise profit. Shareholders can have their corporation pursue any objective they feel like. And in practice, managers tend to run the show. And principle-agent problems crop up all over the place.

However, even for the most eccentric shareholders or self-serving managers, it's hard to sustain a corporation if it keeps bleeding red ink. So only companies that at least break even tend to stick around.

Now add a market that's at least reasonably competitive, and your typical corporation barely earns the cost of capital.

Being so close to the edge, means that the minimal goal of 'break even (after cost of capital)' can look very much like 'maximise profit' in practice.

Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence
by 404mm | 2025-05-22 02:31:41+00:00
Maybe not as old. I deployed a few racks of HP Alpha DS25s in 2007-2008 before they were replaced with Itanium based Blades (running OpenVMS 8.4). I do not miss working with OpenVMS one bit. It was rock stable (basically an on/off appliance) but the user experience left me wanting (coming from Linux).

I can see how they may be still stuck on Alphas because unless they can somehow simply recompile for x86-64 OpenVMS, it’s a complete rewrite from scratch.
by randomgoogler1 | 2025-05-22 02:32:32+00:00
(Disc: Googler but don't have any specific knowledge of this architecture)

My understanding of Groq is that the reason it is fast is that all the weights are kept in SRAM and since the SRAM <-> Compute bandwidth is much faster than HBM <-> Compute bandwidth, you can generate tokens faster (During generation the main bottleneck is just bringing in the weights + KV caches into compute).

If the diffusion models just do multiple unmasked forward passes through a transformer, then the activation * weights computation + (attention computation) will be the bottleneck which will make each denoising step compute bound and there won't be any advantage in storing the weights in SRAM since you can overlap the HBM -> compute transfer with compute itself.

But my knowledge of diffusion is non-existent, so take this with a truck of salt.
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-22 02:33:25+00:00
Sure, but the capital and one-time cost of acquiring and shifting to the modern server would be non-zero, and it would entail some risk. (While OpenVMS is maintained and runs on newer systems, that doesn't mean the software that matters on the existing cluster would run without modification.)

It probably would save operating costs, and probably over a reasonably short window, if it was done successfully, though.
by K0balt | 2025-05-22 02:34:44+00:00
All underground infrastructure or in concrete utility huts. Powerplant is concrete, no flooding issues due to excellent drainage of the area.

We can run on generator to charge the batteries for about 2 weeks on the fuel we keep. Other than that, we rebuild what isn’t broken and later buy more panels. Most of our mounts should be good to about 150mph, but trees also fly so?

Good news is we can buy panels here about $120 for a 500 watt panel.

Also we have some geographic protection from the full brunt of a storm , as we are in a mountainous eddy zone that typically sees about 30 percent of the coastal and mountaintop wind speed when a cyclone passes nearby as they frequently do.
by jameslk | 2025-05-22 02:35:09+00:00
This present issue has been caused by decades of bad fiscal policy by both parties:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S

Here for example, the Congressional Budget Office, forecasted federal debt as a percent of GDP would continue to rise unchecked, back in 2023: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/59014

The only presidential politician who sounded the alarm was Ross Perot, all the way back in the 90s.

Lyn Alden has been talking about this for a long time. If you want a good intro to the problem, I’d recommend this article of hers:

https://www.lynalden.com/september-2024-newsletter/
by Zambyte | 2025-05-22 02:35:19+00:00
Quotes are cute, and I prefer them over uncited negative claims. Can you link somewhere he actually said that? Because from a quick search I find him saying:

> It should be handled on a case-by-case basis. For some syscalls, EINVAL should be unreachable because it can only mean something like an invalid pointer address being passed to the kernel, or invalid flags.

> However, as you pointed out, some kernel APIs unfortunately have decided to dual-purpose this error code to mean other things, in which case we must to handle the ambiguity by mapping it to an error code. We had to make this change with EBADF recently for some syscalls, for example.

> I do want to keep the error sets clean, however, so I am opposed to a blanket modification of all EINVAL code sites without cause.

Source: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/6925#issuecomment-7214...
by neilv | 2025-05-22 02:35:32+00:00
This would be fun to work on.

But, as an over-30 on HN, I'd be afraid that having the word "mainframe" on my resume would alienate a 20-something co-founder or hiring manager. :)

OK, OK, I did once do a little bit of mainframe-related work. It was reverse-engineering a small part of a certain domain-specific mainframe network protocol, with the goal of replacing at least one of the companies' mainframes with... 21st century Linux servers running... Lisp. (IMHO, the HN karma should at least balance out there by using Lisp, like the post did by using Rust.)
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-22 02:35:36+00:00
You know, when we upgraded to USB-C I thought they were mostly nifty. Reversible, quite universal, fully embraced by everyone.

But over 7 years of using them, I've come to resent some of their differences with past USB connectors. Very small, insecure friction grip, reversible, more delicate.

Also it seems that device designers think that a newer generation of USB needs fewer ports? My Lenovo ThinkPad had 2x USB-A and 2x USB-C in 2018. Now I've got a Pixel with 1x USB-C and a Chromebook with 1x USB-A and 2x USB-C; on each of those devices you need one port for charging. So if USB is more versatile and compatible than ever, why am I not allowed to plug in all my stuff at once?