MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by watwut | 2025-05-23 08:01:34+00:00
Trump won, because he and project 2025 represent what conservative Christians want and because republican party want it. And people forever blaming anyone else are just enablers. This has nothing to do with what democrats do or signal. That is utterly irrelevant.

Republicans are the ones bringing up gender, trans issues etc into discussion again and again. Not democrats.

> They can’t afford rent or groceries. Medical and dental care are a distant dream.

No, because vote for Trump and republicans is vote for higher prices, more expensive healthcare and tax cuts for rich. Every single time. This is not about how economy is doing in reality. It is not about what democrats signal. Republicans will lie, fox news will like and media will both side it.

> And I do believe in DEI, inclusivity and women’s rights. But if the working class are struggling, it is tragically comic not to address their primary concerns first.

Women are working class and struggling. And working class economical concerns are not addressed by republicans at all ... and democrats were not running on dei.
by pja | 2025-05-23 08:04:18+00:00
Oh sure, RLHF instruction tuning was what turned an model of mostly academic interest into a global phenomenon.

But it also compromised model accuracy & performance at the same time: The more you tune to eliminate or reinforce specific behaviours, the more you affect the overall performance of the model.

Hence my speculation that Anthropic is using a chain-of-thought model that has not been alignment tuned to improve performance. This would then explain why you don’t get to see its output without signing up to special agreements. Those agreements presumably explain all this to counter-parties that Anthropic trusts will cope with non-aligned outputs in the chain-of-thought.
by danielraffel | 2025-05-23 08:06:45+00:00
I stopped using Pocket a long time ago when they started ruining the experience. When Omnivore shut down, I switched over to Raindrop.io. I now use it for bookmarking and built a simple cloud function to easily post links with a specific tag to a Daring Fireball-style link blog I host on Ghost. While Raindrop isn’t open source, it does offer useful browser extensions with features like highlights, notes, and tags—making it a handy tool for quickly blogging and / or bookmarking things I stumble across. I open sourced the cloud function.

https://github.com/danielraffel/raindrop-to-ghost-sync
by southernplaces7 | 2025-05-23 08:07:04+00:00
>there will always be a loud contingent of Americans spouting counter-arguments based in American Exceptionalism, claiming that everyone else somehow, magically, has the US to thank for its standard of living.

The entire second part of your comment shores up exactly this notion that everyone else has the US to thank for its standard of living and that the country is exceptional.

Underlying all the things you list: the post-WWII order, the Pax Americana, the military hegemony, the position of the dollar as the World's reserve currency and so forth all underscore exactly the fact that the US is or at least has been exceptional and that the rest of the world has been heavily benefited by it.

That some of these people then took this and spun it into idiocy about cutting off "freeloaders" without being aware that this means having to take a hit to the country's exceptional position doesn't change the truth of the U.S being exceptional and many countries having many indirect benefits to thank it for
by nayuki | 2025-05-23 08:07:18+00:00
> An interesting metric, used by noone in the Universe except you for the sake of this discussion.

The speed of cryptographic function such as ciphers and hashes are quoted in cycles per byte. This is because in the pure numeric code, without worrying about memory transfer speed, the speed of the crypto algorithm is directly proportional to the CPU clock speed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encryption_software#Performanc... . Random example: https://bench.cr.yp.to/results-hash/amd64-hertz.html

> if the actual CPU speed is 838,860,800Hz, how many bytes does it process in 1 second?

If the CPU is 800 MiHz (never heard of that term, lol), then it processes 800 MiB in 1 second. Stated differently, 839 MHz --> 839 MB.

> Remarkable circular reasoning

No, I'm pointed out that the industry has already splintered into two. Your "16 GB" of RAM is a different measure than "16 GB" of HDD or SSD.

> It is thus not a part of metric system so SI has zero business regulating information storage.

If a byte is not derived from fundamental SI units, then it should not take on SI prefixes.

Otherwise, if it takes on prefixes, it should respect the SI definition and not abusively have its own contradictory definition.

> On the other hand you can't buy a computer that does not address memory in anything other than powers of two.

So what? I can use that same logic to argue that all RAM sizes should be quoted in base-2, so I'm buying 1_0000_0000_0000_0000 (base-2) bytes of RAM, right? Clearly base-10 notation is a poor fit, so why not go all the way to base-2?

> Nor you could ever buy a 1000 million bytes RAM chip

It is certainly feasible. You can just cut a bunch of rows at the end. I know how binary decoder gates work.

Also, if you have a computer and put in a 4 GiB stick of RAM and a 2 GiB stick, then you have 6 GiB of addressable memory, which is clearly not a power of 2.
by pjmlp | 2025-05-23 08:07:34+00:00
This has been an idea since UNCOL was discussed as idea back in 1958.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNCOL

There are countless bytecode based platforms since 1958, including all famous Xerox PARC systems (the CPUs were microcoded and loaded the related translation code on boot), yet WASM is doing it first keeps being brought up.

Do you know what I call WASI containers running on a Kubernetes cluster, or serverless cloud vendors?

Application Server, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_server
by MrScruff | 2025-05-23 08:08:05+00:00
It's always a treat to watch a Carmack lecture or read anything he writes, and his notes here are no exception. He writes as an engineer, for engineers and documents all his thought processes and misteps in the exact detailed yet concise way you'd want a colleague to who was handing off some work.

One question I would have about the research direction is the emphasis on realtime. If I understand correctly he's doing online learning in realtime. Obviously makes for a cool demo and pulls on his optimisation background, and no doubt some great innovations will be required to make this work. But I guess the bitter lesson and recent history also tell us that some solutions may only emerge at compute levels beyond what is currently possible for realtime inference let alone learning. And the only example we have of entities solving Atari games is the human brain, of which we don't have a clear understanding of the compute capacity. In which case, why wouldn't it be better to focus purely on learning efficiency and relax the realtime requirement for now?

That's a genuine question by the way, definitely not an expert here and I'm sure there's a bunch of value to working within these constraints. I mean, jumping spiders solve reasonably complex problems with 100k neurons, so who knows.
by jacobwg | 2025-05-23 08:08:20+00:00
We also do GitHub Actions runners as a service, so a very high volume of differently-sized ephemeral VMs. We’ve experimented with .metal hosts, however they represent a bin-packing optimization problem, in that you will always be running some amount of spare compute / trying to fit the incoming build requests to physical hosts as tightly as possible.

Eventually you realize, IMO, that doing the bin packing yourself is just competing with AWS, that’s what they do when you launch a non-metal EC2 instance and it’s best to let them do what they’re good at. Hence why we’ve focused on optimization of that launch type, rather than trying to take over the virtualization.

There’s other security and performance reasons too: AWS is better at workload isolation than we can be, both that the isolation boundary is very strong, and that preventing noisy neighbors is difficult. Especially with things like disk, the strategies for ensuring fair access to the physical hardware (rate-limiting I/O) themselves have CPU overhead that slows everything down and prevents perfect bin-packing.
by aa-jv | 2025-05-23 08:10:22+00:00
The USA of course. Who else is committing war crimes, crimes against humanity and insane human rights abuses at the same scale, this century? No other nation has given itself carte blanche to mass murder as fervently as the USA and its minion states in the 5-eyes coalition of the 'willing'.

As for giving a shit, those who allow themselves to be wilfully ruled by war criminals always become their final victim, so you should give a little more than a shit, yo.
by eviks | 2025-05-23 08:10:44+00:00
Because you've put so much emphasis on this stat and imbued it with value without justification, so it makes it very easy to refute (also, the refutation of your central claim isn't a nitpick - this one is)

And you're doing it in this comment again. No, it's not impressive without some actual knowledge on what the changes are about their value. It may very well be that people are heavily pushed to make changes for the sake of making changes, and most of them are not that useful. Or it may be that, as is common with overworked people, they make a lot of mistakes that require further changes to correct them (ok, not the types of mistakes that affect reliability stat much, but then that's not the only category). Or they experiment way too much with those experiments leading nowhere, so it's just wasted effort. Or...

The daily goal is just as artificial. There should be little impediments to implement valuable changes, not to do something daily
by kqr | 2025-05-23 08:11:54+00:00
The matchesSum check is constant in the length of the input list. The filter adds an iteration over all results of (combinations n xs). If the complexity of (combinations n) is T(n) in xs, then by analogy of its recursive definition we have two recursive calls that are T(n-1), we have an fmap that is O(1) and a concatenation that is O(1). That sets up the recurrence T(n) = 2T(n-1) making the (combinations n) function O(n) in xs.

Thus the whole thing is O(n²). It's not like this is particularly hard for Haskell. If anything, it's often easier because we can set up the recurrence by analogy with the definition.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-05-23 08:12:44+00:00
>Is your lecture style and content appropriate for people from various backgrounds? For example, if all of your material relates back to local anecdotes, are foreign students going to perform well? Does your use of sarcasm and idioms make your content inaccessible to students who do not speak English as a first language, or who do not readily recognize sarcasm?

As someone who has twice had to completely switch their life from one country to another, entirely different one, I'd say that for one, you should give people more credit for being able to adapt and still get the gist of what's being communicated even if it's done through local cultural color, and secondly, that adapting is exactly what these people should have to do if they came to this new country and its schools.

One can appreciate and respect the foreign cultural roots of immigrant students (in this example) without having to bend over backwards to change one's own to suit their notions of the world.

Asking otherwise is no less absurd than having an American attend a school in China and expect local teachers to communicate with him in English, using humor and anecdotes of an expressly American sort.
by abc-1 | 2025-05-23 08:12:55+00:00
Right, we have not even solved games in the non-real time environment, so why bother adding additional constraints like “on real hardware in real time”. This is exactly like Tesla trying to switch from LIDAR to cameras before self driving is even solved. It’s avoiding the real harder challenge and going off on inane tangents. John is essentially bike shedding.

In this case, John is going off on this inane tangent because of his prior experience with hardware and video games instead of challenging himself to solve the actual hard and open problems.

I’m going to predict how this plays out for the inevitable screenshot in one to two years. John picks some existing RL algo and optimizes it to run in real time on real hardware. While he’s doing this the field moves on to better and new algorithms and architectures. John finally achieves his goal and posts a vid of some (now ancient) RL algo playing some Atari game in real time. Everyone says “neat” and moves on. John gets to feel validated yet all his work is completely useless.
by bitwize | 2025-05-23 08:13:37+00:00
This comment by hoppityboppity pretty much changed my whole perspective on things and made me realize I've pretty much wasted my professional life:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33452920

It rings more true than ever. The really important computing nowadays is all done on the GPU; the CPU is little more than a front-end processor. Furthermore, with AI and LLMs we're rapidly converging on a future where programming won't even resemble programming as we know it. If you're young and talented, the time to get ahead of the game is NOW. I am no longer young, so I will probably be one of the ones left behind.
by iamevn | 2025-05-23 08:13:52+00:00
with N as the length of the subsets and X as the length of input, `combinations n xs` basically walks through list xs and at each element, conses that element onto each combination of size n-1 of later elements in the list then appends those resulting lists together. this is on the order of N * nCr(X, N) aka O(NX!/(N!(X-N)!)) which dominates the overall runtime. the final filter walks through each combination and does O(N) work at each element to find the ones that sum to the desired amount, again O(NX!/(N!(X-N)!))
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-05-23 08:14:39+00:00
On my worst stretch the bike ride was never a cure, it was only proof I still existed. Choose anything that small for yourself: step outside, rinse one plate. Mark it as done and let it be enough. When the fog wins, write “still here” in a notebook; that counts too. Tell your therapist exactly how stuck you feel and ask about approaches like behavioural work or a different medication mix, but remember your value is not up for debate. You are already enough, fog and all, and every tiny action is just a daily reminder of that truth, not the measure of it.
by dcminter | 2025-05-23 08:14:57+00:00
I'm not specifically recommending them as I haven't been (and I often find museum exhibitions lacklustre) but these are on my list to check out next time I'm in the UK in the appropriate areas:

Manchester is where the important early computer development in the UK occurred; Turing spent a lot of time working with the Manchester Baby: https://www.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/whats-on/meet-ba...

Reading was Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)'s centre in the UK. While it was an American company they had a huge estate here. I have a soft spot for their machines so I'm curious to see what this small museum managed to pull together - I know they reached out in some of the relevant Facebook groups for personal stories of DEC and their machines: https://www.readingmuseum.org.uk/whats-on/reading%E2%80%99s-...
by RicDan | 2025-05-23 08:15:35+00:00
Definitely agree. I blame educational institutions (I know, they can't do much without enough freedom + budget) for not advocating enough to our democratic responsabilities. I do wish we adapted some stuff from early history (Athens to be precise) - democratic participants got a very low base salary, and they also could vote to ban people from democratic participation (and hence the city) whenever they got too power hungry. Seems like a loss of responsibility allows too much incompetence to prevail.
by phiphi92 | 2025-05-23 08:15:44+00:00
Social started feeling loud and performative, even with close friends. I missed the quieter stuff.

So I made something simple: once a day, at a random time, you get a ping. You have 5 minutes to write whatever’s on your mind. Just text. No photos.

After you post, you see what your friends wrote too. That’s it.

It’s been weirdly grounding. One small honest moment each day. Posting here in case it resonates.
by ivape | 2025-05-23 08:15:47+00:00
This kind of exists with things like RocketBook and Neo smartpens. They require special books for the latter:

https://shop.neosmartpen.com/collections/journals-notebooks/...

LLMs are good enough that if you can stand up a small video capturing app on your iphone, then you can live transcribe. I believe the LLMs are good enough that if you just write legibly, then you can give it ad-hoc commands in any way you want (e.g "Add this to iCal").

A cheap document reader gets your half way there:

https://www.amazon.com/Kitchbai-Document-Visualiser-Micropho...

I'm expecting something like this to be part of the suite of devices OpenAI will release. Shifting away from tapping things into phones all the time to leveraging all of the mechanical things we do outside of phones.

The product would be an aesthetic document scanner with a mic, so you can make comprehensive notes with additional voice transcribing. Seems like an ideal thing to have on a scratchpad desk for quick notes, because eink note-takes are actually really good now days (just overpriced).
by cluckindan | 2025-05-23 08:17:07+00:00
The forces acting on the wind turbine tower are mostly perpendicular, i.e. the wind hitting the blades and the structure. Ideally, the blades have maximum wind resistance (up to a point).

The construction crane rarely experiences that kind of wind load, because the truss structure is hollow and allows air to pass through. Ideally, the structure has zero wind resistance (down to a point).
by boudin | 2025-05-23 08:17:23+00:00
Flatpak is more of a set of tools and framework. I wouldn't consider it as a store but a distribution system. Flathub is a repository, Fedora has its own repository and anybody can creates its own repo (I wouldn't call it store as there is no concept of monetisation).

I wouldn't consider flatpak as a gatekeeper as there is no "team" going through some arbitrary process to allow/disallow an app.

I also disagree with the fact that macos and windows did the right thing, what I found in my experience managing laptops in a company that is roughly 1/3 windows, 1/3 linux, 1/3 macos is that: - What windows is teaching users is to download random stuff and bypass the warning screens if something is not signed. Unless there is a company policy and a third party software to update what is installed, by default things installed are a mix of up to date and not update to date software. - Macos user do not install operating system and software updates unless a third party software is installed and force them too - Linux users have things up to date, only distribution version updates (e.g. fedora 41 to fedora 42) are inconsistent.

So my take is that, even if things on not perfect with flatpak, rpm/dnf, fwupdmgr and package manager, this is much better than having to pay for third party tools in macos and windows because of the lack of a good way to distribute and maintain apps at the operating system level.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-23 08:17:32+00:00
Look, no illusions or exaggerations here; APT is an imperfect tool and it's intricate, complex and unwieldy sometimes. But please consider the status quo ante. I've run Minix-286, OpenBSD, NetBSD, SunOS, HP/UX, and Linux, and in the years between 1990-2003, there were zero package managers in use.

Like literally APT did not exist, no predecessor existed, there was absolutely no package management for those systems. Or if there was, it was by script or some bespoke framework that came with the app you downloaded. There was 100% no system-wide management of what was installed on my computers.

I've been in states of recompiling the kernel from source. I've run those "./configure" scripts that came with GNU. I've fiddled with custom kernel configuration files and Tripwire databases that tried to keep track of everything there. I've applied patches issued by Sun Microsystems.

Absolutely none of that above jumble can hold a candle to the way we use APT today. I'm sorry you suffered nightmares and needed 3rd-party stuff. But it was a dream come true to type out a one-liner and have the system upgrade itself, accounting for all dependencies, replacing all necessary files, being aware of all config updates, leaving audit trails and versioned files. Simply like falling off a log at this point.

Who would ever go back? What can be simpler? It was simply the degrading of this unified control and the loss of a singular point of management that has begun to dismay us.
by Herring | 2025-05-23 08:18:33+00:00
Vote for republicans => get red state policies.

Trump won the popular vote. America is trying very hard to become one big red state.

Red states have had the worst outcomes for generations but they keep going back to republicans. The reasons escape me. The Civil War was basically southerners strongly preferring to use slaves instead of modernizing.

Maybe China will motivate them to get their act together.
by thyristan | 2025-05-23 08:18:40+00:00
Ubuntu basically ate their lunch for the desktop case. It used to be that commercial software required SuSE or RedHat on the desktop to get support. But especially RedHat always suffered from the curse of being ancient compared to other desktop distros. When Ubuntu became big enough for commercial software to target, people chose that because Ubuntu was just more recent.

Also, several releases ago, RedHat already started to wind down their desktop efforts, just leaving server/container/cloud as the primary use case for RHEL, with desktops just as "this could also work". That latest decision to drop a lot of desktop related stuff is just a logical continuation of this policy.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-05-23 08:19:25+00:00
People voting for Hitler wasn't a problem either way.. Enough of them never voted for him under the German electoral system of the time that he never won enough of a majority to become president of his country.

Instead he then used backroom deals with useful idiots and cynics who thought they could use him in favor of their careers, to get himself appointed to a position (chancellor) from which he could become dictator.

The more valid criticism based on the above comparison isn't quite so much against American voters as it is against the cynics, spineless opponents and useful idiots inside the federal political system, who have the power to curtail what Trump is attempting as president, but don't for different reasons of their own.

I particularly note the other republicans in his party here, who could actually stop Trump's more deranged nonsense but are letting centuries of restrained, relatively democratic and lawful political tradition go to shit for the sake of their own short-sighted ambitious idiocies.
by whizzter | 2025-05-23 08:19:25+00:00
Yjit is based on Maxime's basic block vesioning PHD work (a JS JIT), the approach both has taken is very dynamic-type-focused, it's a clever way to basically propagate type-info as the code is built. The main benefit is that you get a sane JIT fairly quickly and it should behave well in most dynamic typing scenarios.

They're pivoting (successfully?) to a more traditional way, letting the interpreter first profile the code (to figure out the types) and THEN produce entire methods with heavier optimizations that can do better register allocation.

The BBV approach is sane out of the box but kinda unfamiliar for many compiler writers (problems hiring?) and probably has some performance ceilings without much complexity.

The major question as to what method will win out depends on this question, how "monomorphic" or "polymorphic" is Ruby code in real life?

Monomorphic basically means that only one "real type"(from the compilers point of view) will ever pass a codepath (and thus extra machinery to allow multiple types won't bring much benefit).