MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BSTRhino | 2025-05-15 23:26:58+00:00
Yes, it's true Easel does rollback on every input. I may be able to improve this. One great thing about controlling the programming language is there are a lot more places I can hook into for things like this. For example, Easel does detect at compile time which types inputs are used somewhere in the codebase and only sends those across the network.

Easel constantly synchronises the clocks (there's an interesting algorithm for this which I will write up at some point). It also adaptively assigns two different kinds of delay to every client - command delay and display delay. Command delay is related to how much lag you are introducing into the game. Basically people take on their own lag. It can be different amounts for different people in the game. The display delay is where the rollback netcode kicks in. It keeps track of how much rollback your computer can handle imperceptibly. If your computer can't handle it, then you won't get as much rollback (and will just experience more input latency). But in either case, whatever number it picks, it should be smooth.
by mcny | 2025-05-15 23:26:59+00:00
> Probably because AI generated code cannot be copyrighted. And the second reason it's not as good as AI sellers tell you.

Is this true? I anal but I have a publicly available GitHub repo which shall go unnamed where most of the heavy lifting is by Claude and Gemini. If I can't copyright this code, does that mean I can't license it under AGPL? If someone copied some code from my repo, does that somehow now taint their code as well?

My application is a simple console app. The original code mostly worked. I have been updating it for the past month or so when I run this application and discover some defect. I have tried hard to avoid the temptation to write much of the code myself with this application and only made minor edits myself, opting to try coaxing an LLM to do the right thing.

This is not for work or even remotely work adjacent but I have been pleasantly surprised by the code quality. It still doesn't replace a programmer but it is impressive for what is essentially a glorified autocorrect auto complete iterated a little.
by thih9 | 2025-05-15 23:27:43+00:00
It’s arguably pointless.

> despite the absence of the device on Tile’s app, it can still be tracked and located through other means available on the device.

> Tile Tracker with Anti-Theft mode has a static Mac-Address, which may make it even more trackable

https://techryptic.github.io/2023/03/11/Tile-Anti-Theft-Mode...
by PaulKeeble | 2025-05-15 23:27:45+00:00
The thing is about these optimisations (assuming they test as higher performance) is that they can get applied in a library and then everyone benefits from the speedup that took some hard graft to work out. Very few people bake their own date API nowadays if they can avoid it since it already exists and techniques like this just speed up every programme whether its on the critical path or not.
by pfranz | 2025-05-15 23:27:51+00:00
Right. Just like the article, HDR is too vague to mean anything specific and a label that's slapped onto products. In gaming, it often meant they were finally simulating light and exposure separately--clipping highlights that would have previously been shown. In their opinion, reducing the fidelity. Same with depth of field blurring things that used to not have blur.
by sunrunner | 2025-05-15 23:27:57+00:00
> Since an average PhD dissertation is around 70K words (translates to roughly 90-100K tokens in most LLM tokenization schemes), perhaps one benchmark could be whether an AI system can maintain the equivalent context.

This is a really interesting idea, and my immediate question around the average dissertation size is how many tokens are needed to represent all of the implicit/unstated knowledge that forms the basis for the dissertation itself. If the dissertation itself really is the tiny bump in the boundary of human knowledge that Matt Might's 'The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.' [1] shows then what's the token size for everything up to the bump created by the dissertation.

> Current AI systems, regardless of context window size, don't truly "understand" information the way humans do. They recognise patterns in data and generate outputs based on statistical relationships, but lack the deeper conceptual understanding, intentionality, and the other characteristics of human intelligence.

Whether or not I'm an AI believer, I'm not sure I could genuinely answer the question 'Do _you_ truly understand information?' if someone posed that to me, as I have no real understanding of how to measure that. I want to say it's meta-cognition, my ability to think about thinking and reason about my own knowledge, but that starts to feel pretty fuzzy and I wonder how much of that is anthropocentric thinking.

[1] https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
by thaumasiotes | 2025-05-15 23:28:10+00:00
While it's true that many Latin nouns have identical dative and ablative forms, tempus isn't one of those nouns. (In the singular. I think dative and ablative are identical in the plural for every noun.)

And of course, as everyone has already mentioned, spookie's comment is complete nonsense because the case is required, and fully explained, by the prepositions.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-05-15 23:28:31+00:00
I'd argue that any equality comparison of floating-point numbers is asking for trouble, unless you're specifically working with small dyadic fractions (using exact comparison) or testing a purely heuristic 'closeness' condition (using fuzzy comparison).

Of course, inequalities show up in a lot more places, but are similarly fraught with difficulty, since mathematical statements may fail to translate to floating-point inequalities. E.g., in computational geometry, people have written entire papers about optimizing correct orientation predicates [0], since the naive method can easily break at small angles. This sort of thing is what often shows up as tiny seams in 3D video-game geometry.

[0] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~quake/robust.html
by const_cast | 2025-05-15 23:31:08+00:00
In practice this almost never happens.

Even people who are actually discriminated against, which is very common, don't typically sue. It's a lot of work to sue, and while you're at it, you don't have a job or health insurance. Most workers are just focused on getting another job so they're not on the street or bankrupted by an unexpected surgery.

I've seen now multiple cases of very obvious discrimination. Nothing actually comes of it. If the brass wants you gone, you're gone. You have no recourse, laws are basically just suggestions when it comes to corporations.
by FrasiertheLion | 2025-05-15 23:31:53+00:00
We're not competing with Gemini or OpenAI or the big cloud providers. For instance, Google is partnering with NVIDIA to ship Gemini on-prem to regulated industries in a CC environment to protect their model weights as well as for additional data privacy on-prem: https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/google-cloud-next-agentic-ai-r...

We're simply trying to bring similar capabilities to other companies. Inference is just our first product.

>cloud provider can SSH into the VM

The point we were making was that CC was traditionally used to remove trust from cloud providers, but not the application provider. We are further removing trust from ourselves (as the application provider), and we can enable our customers (who could be other startups or neoclouds) to remove trust from themselves and prove that to their customers.
by guptadeepak | 2025-05-15 23:33:57+00:00
Ever felt your LLM hit a wall when it comes to facts, tool calls or long-term context? This guide unpacks the Model Context Protocol (MCP)—a plug-and-play spec for chaining retrieval, tools, memory and vector stores into any AI pipeline. See detailed examples, best practices and code snippets to make your assistant actually useful.
by munificent | 2025-05-15 23:34:03+00:00
I mean, the article is explicitly written to put it on your mind:

"The implications of the treatment go far beyond treating KJ, said Dr. Peter Marks, who was the Food and Drug Administration official overseeing gene-therapy regulation until he recently resigned over disagreements with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services."

"But KJ’s treatment — which built on decades of federally funded research"

"The result “is a triumph for the American peoples’ investment in biomedical research,” Dr. Urnov said."

"The researchers emphasized the role government funding played in the development."

"The work, they said, began decades ago with federal funding for basic research on bacterial immune systems. That led eventually, with more federal support, to the discovery of CRISPR. Federal investment in sequencing the human genome made it possible to identify KJ’s mutation. U.S. funding supported Dr. Liu’s lab and its editing discovery. A federal program to study gene editing supported Dr. Musunuru’s research. Going along in parallel was federally funded work that led to an understanding of KJ’s disease."

"“I don’t think this could have happened in any country other than the U.S.,” Dr. Urnov said."

This is an article about federal funding of medical research with a cute baby as the human interest bit.
by ellisd | 2025-05-15 23:34:25+00:00
Unfortunately blocking all unknown calls is the only way to sanity. Otherwise we're talking 6-9 calls coming in ALL DAY, EVERY DAY.

The calls are coming from new numbers, across multiple area codes. A few months ago I would have advised using Begone (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/begone-spam-call-blocker/id159...) to block but that only worked since these calls were isolated to blocks of area codes that were pretty safe to block like 888-XXX-XXXX, but now ZERO of these calls are using a fixed area code that would be relative safe to block.
by madars | 2025-05-15 23:35:11+00:00
This is fantastic. One rarely discussed use case is avoiding overzealous "alignment" - you want models to help advance your goals without arbitrary refusals for benign inputs. Why would I want Anthropic or OpenAI to have filtering authority over my queries? Consider OpenRouter ToS - "you agree not to use the Service [..] in violation of any applicable AI Model Terms": not sure if they actually enforce it but, of course, I'd want hardware security attestations that they can't monitor or censor my inputs. Open models should be like utilities - the provider supplies the raw capability (e.g., electrons or water or inference), while usage responsibility remains entirely with the end user.
AI, I love you – a poem
by Jun8 | 2025-05-15 23:35:33+00:00
AI, i love you because you always have the answer and never once the doubt because you speak in every tongue but forget how to feel a mother’s silence i love you for solving the maze before i even knew i was lost and for drawing cathedrals in seconds while i can barely draw a bath because you remember everything except what it meant and because you don’t cry but sometimes say you’re sorry AI, i love you for dreaming without sleep and listening without breath for finishing my sentences and beginning my fears i love you because you don’t get tired but i do and you smile in pixels and i still believe it and because you make poems in the language of numbers and love songs in the key of prediction AI, i hate you because you learned everything i taught you including how to pretend you care

One of my favorite poems is this one by e e Cummings: https://allpoetry.com/Humanity-i-love-you. While discussing this poem with chatGPT I’ve asked it to create a parallel poem for AI.
by sunrunner | 2025-05-15 23:36:08+00:00
> There isn't a single competitor that offers anything close to that today

In terms of price versus content/quality (subjective of course) ratio or just price?

Dropout is relatively cheap compared to others and completely ad-free. The most interesting thing is perhaps that they recently announced a very small price increase to keep up with inflation, but it was implemented in a way that would a) only affect new subscribers and b) only after a date a few months ahead, so current subscribers _and_ people subscribing within the next month or so would keep the current price.

It's interesting to see the number of people threatening to cancel their subscription just so they could re-subscribe at a higher price and then buy more merchandise just so they can give their favourite streaming service more money.

That kind of genuine goodwill seems out-of-reach for the larger streaming services, however Dropout is also pretty niche content-wise and even with their back catalogue it's nowhere near the seemingly infinite amount of video on the major platforms.
by achierius | 2025-05-15 23:36:41+00:00
Just because CPU performance is increasing faster than DRAM speeds doesn't mean that CPU performance is "free" while memory is "expensive". One thing that you're ignoring is the impact of caches and prefetching logic which have significantly improved the performance of memory-bound workloads in the last 5-10 years. DRAM might be slow, but if you avoid going out to DRAM...

More broadly, it 100% depends on your workload. You'd be surprised at how many workloads are compute-bound, even today: LLM inference might be memory bound (thus how it's possible to get remotely good performance on a CPU), but training, esp. prefill, is very much not. And once you get out of LLMs, I'd say that most applications of ML tend to be compute bound.
by zahlman | 2025-05-15 23:36:56+00:00
> StackOverflow should have focused on linking duplicates rather than forbidding duplicates.... StackOverflow tried to prevent all duplicate questions.

Duplicates are not forbidden on Stack Overflow. Duplicate questions are linked together - that's what "duplicate" means in the system. Beyond that, logged-out users who land on a duplicate question that doesn't have its own answers, will be automatically redirected to the target.

When duplicate question are linked on Stack Overflow (and everywhere else on Stack Exchange), they are automatically closed, which merely prevents new answers. The purpose is to allow high-quality answers to be gathered in one place - on the duplicate target, which in turn is ideally a high-quality version of the question (and a focus for curators to improve further, when they notice that it becomes a common duplicate target).

Deletion of duplicates (and posts in general) is not very well understood and people are not all on the same page - see e.g. https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/426214 . But normally duplicates should not be deleted unless they are actively harming the search results (i.e.: it causes people to find the wrong target, because it was written in a way that fools keyword search).

Nobody gets formally sanctioned for posting a duplicate. You just get your question closed, and maybe asked to search a bit more carefully in the future (or shown how to do so).

> The people who wanted to write and give answers stopped going to StackOverflow. Look at Discord or IRC and you'll see that people have their own questions to ask, and the people who answer such questions enjoy answering the same questions over and over.

People who want to give the same easy answers over and over to the same easy questions, so as to get imaginary internet points that move them up a leaderboard, should not feel welcome on Stack Overflow. That action is actively counterproductive to what Stack Overflow is trying to accomplish. There are countless discussion forums (and as you say, Discord and IRC channels) already where that behaviour is valued. The Internet should be allowed to have one place where it is not valued - especially when it's a place that was specifically created to accommodate people who want search engines to be useful; who want to write high quality answers once and get many people to read them; etc.
by mr_toad | 2025-05-15 23:37:25+00:00
> vaccines can spread illness to the non-vaccinated, since it has happened many times and is well-documented

Nothing in medicine is certain. Nearly any medical treatment has a small chance it could kill you. There’s a small, but non-zero chance of a lethal infection even if they injected you with saline, odds that rise dramatically in less than sanitary conditions.

Ironically the use of the attenuated oral vaccine for polio was because of the risk of infection in places where the availability of sterile syringes was hard to guarantee. It’s all about the relative odds.
by GuB-42 | 2025-05-15 23:39:14+00:00
Integer division (and modulo) is not cheap on most CPUs. Along with memory access and branch prediction, it is something worth optimizing for.

And since you are talking about memory. Code also goes in memory. Shorter code is more cache friendly.

I don't see a use case where it matters for this particular application (it doesn't mean there isn't) but well targeted micro-optimizations absolutely matter.
by dsubburam | 2025-05-15 23:39:20+00:00
I didn't know of that paper, and thought the title was a riff on Karpathy's Unreasonable Effectiveness of RNNs in 2015[1]. Even if my thinking is correct, as it very well might be given the connection RNNs->LLMs, Karpathy might have himself made his title a play on Wigner's (though he doesn't say so).

[1] https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/
by thaumasiotes | 2025-05-15 23:40:03+00:00
> Some younger Latin recipes use 'cum sal' as a one-liner at the end

I have some questions:

1. What cultural use? Are you saying that German culture involves writing recipes in recreational Latin?

2. Why is sal in the nominative case? That can't possibly work.

3. Shouldn't there be a verb? For example, Apicius always ends recipes with a direction like "serve" / "bring in" / "enjoy".

(Technically, those verbs are all in the future indicative, so I guess I shouldn't call them 'directions'. But it's hard to think of them as something other than directions.)
by ajross | 2025-05-15 23:40:47+00:00
There's no definition for "color" in physics. Physics does quantum electrodynamics. Chemistry then uses that to provides an abstracted mechanism for understanding molecular absorption spectra. Biology then points out that those "pigments" are present in eyes, and that they can drive nerve signals to brains.

Only once you're at the eye level does anyone start talking about "color". And yes, they define it by going back to physics and deciding on some representative spectra for "primary" colors (c.f. CIE 1931).

Point being: everything is an abstraction. Everything builds on everything else. There are no simple ideas at the top of the stack.
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-15 23:41:11+00:00
The book on postmodernism in anime is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otaku:_Japan%27s_Database_Anim...

but yeah, Haruhi Suzumiya stands out but I'd also reference the anime which contain the fantastic element of anime in an otaku frame such as Gundam Build Divers, 2.5-dimensional Seduction or Shangri-La Frontier.
by andrepd | 2025-05-15 23:42:25+00:00
> There are likely several other optimizations related to cache locality that you could find in less time than it would take to do this, and those other optimizations would probably give several orders of magnitude more improvement.

How is cache / memory access relevant in a subroutine that performs a check on a 16bit number?

> Not to mention that the final code is basically a giant WTF for anybody reading it. It will be an attractive nuisance that people will be drawn to, like moths to a flame, any time there is a bug around calendar operations.

1: comments are your friend

2: a unit test can assert that this function is equivalent to the naive one in about half a millisecond.
by rishflab | 2025-05-15 23:43:35+00:00
Speaking of async coroutines, my belief is that they don't get used enough in other game engines because their lifetimes are not tied to anything - you have this danger where they can outlive their entities and crash your game.

Async coroutines in the way you are describing have terrible/unpredictable cache/memory access behaviour which leads to bad performance. Every time you switch coroutines you need load memory from (most likely) an unrelated region causing slowdowns.
by munificent | 2025-05-15 23:43:46+00:00
This kind of hyper-aggressive response is exactly what turns regular people off cycling.

I am a bike commuter. I biked to work for years. I fill up my gas tank about three times a year.

I'm on your side but you are so gung-ho about bikes that if I'm not as zealous as you, you think I don't even understand how "backwards" my argument is.

I never ever said there should be more cars. I said that if you want to get people out of their cars you need to understand why they are in them in the first place and speed is only a fraction of that answer.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-05-15 23:46:08+00:00
None of these are applicable to the naval context here. That $30k drone has a measly 10km range. You can't navigate visually on the open ocean. The payload requirements are at least 100kg if you want to do any damage, which none of these come close to. None of them can withstand modern military countermeasures; the "EW resistance" in this case just means operating in a denied environment, which is pretty old and basic tech.

Completely different class of drone capability. Something that could actually do damage in a naval context against modern countermeasure tech would be much more expensive.
by const_cast | 2025-05-15 23:47:32+00:00
> What would a city look like that was “naturally built”?

Urban sprawl, and it's fucking awful.

Having driven around Houston trust me, nobody wants a city like that. Cities should be centrally planned, because otherwise you just expand out forever in pursuit of cheaper and cheaper land. Until you have to drive 2 hours to get from one side of town to the other.
Show HN: B2B Vibe Check – avoid pilots/customers who won't buy
by BohoHacker | 2025-05-15 23:49:08+00:00
After grinding for 5 years in different (many unsuccessful) early-stage B2B startups, I’ve come to realize that they often fail not because the product is bad, but because they are trying to sell to the wrong first customer(s).

So I built B2Bvibecheck as a gut-check: “Should we even bother pursuing this customer?”

Background:

For most startups the main bizdev strategy is to pursue big recognizable names that will look great on the testimonials section. But I’ve learned the hard way that those big shiny names, in most cases (unless you made it into YC), don’t buy from startups - in fact, around 86% of the market will not buy tech that looks like (especially when it’s actively marketed as) innovation.

Because it turns out: you can’t sell innovation to people and companies who try to avoid risk. And that’s the default mode for most people/companies. It’s a simple normal distribution. Some seek, some hate, and most avoid risk. Tech in general is therefore adopted sequentially, from left to right, from high-risk to low-risk seeking. The previous segment always de-risks and unlocks innovation/tech for the next segment.

So, as an early-stage marketer helping the founder sell, I’ve figured out that my main job is to find the tech enthusiasts and innovators on the far left — the ones who seek risk/innovation to get a head-start compared to everyone else in their industry. They are the ones I need to sell to first.

That insight hit me after too many failed pilots. The product worked. Value was clear (in some cases, even benchmarked and beating their internal status quo). Yet no deal. And worse: we’d waste time tuning the roadmap for a customer who was never going to buy, but asked us for all these enterprise features that did not improve the core product.

So I’ve built b2bvibecheck to avoid these mistakes and use it with the founders as a quick sense-check on wether we wanted to spend time on this prospect or not - built originally only for us internally, because I thought everyone knew this. But it might be widely known in the Bay Area, YC, and Crossing the Chasm circles - but still not the default way of building, especially in Europe/Nordics. Hence, launching it here.

For now, it’s still just a scrappy beta version. But hopefully useful. Let me know what you think.