MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by meindnoch | 2025-05-31 12:01:23+00:00
Which part do you not understand?

An implicit surface is defined by F(x,y,z) = 0. Implicit surfaces can be rendered by checking whether the camera ray going through pixel x,y intersects the surface or not. An axis-aligned bounding box (AABB) in 3D is the product of intervals [x_min, x_max]x[y_min, y_max]x[z_min, z_max]. The interval extension of F(x,y,z) gives you an interval [F_min, F_max] for such an AABB. If [F_min, F_max] doesn't contain 0, then you can discard the whole AABB for rendering purposes, because the surface is guaranteed to be not there. This can speed up rendering substantially.
by constantcrying | 2025-05-31 12:02:59+00:00
>I don't think you can ensure that with gradients though: if f and f' are computed in machine arithmetic, cancellation errors might pile up.

Yes, you can. You need to do automatic differentiation with interval arithmetic. This gives you a mathematically correct result for the derivative.

Always keep in mind with interval arithmetic that (-inf, inf) is also a mathematically correct result. Keeping intervals small is the challenge with interval arithmetic and means that every algorithm not specifically developed for it is likely going to lead to useless results.
by genatron | 2025-05-31 12:03:43+00:00
It has been full circle indeed. React is great for front-end development but with the need for having some pre-rendering (e.g. SEO) it's understandable why server-side re-entered the picture. However, with Next it has been slower build times and various twists and turns (a lot of the same things PHP was always bashed for). That's why for SPA apps we now default to Vite + react-router for a 10x speed up in build times on the same hardware.
by sunshine-o | 2025-05-31 12:03:45+00:00
Something I have been wondering for a few years now before the whole DOGE, USAID thing.

When the war in Ukraine started I heard Africa was relying on imports for food up to 85%.

There are no word to describe how horrifying this is. To this day I still cannot believe it. 50% would sound intolerable to me.

My question is: do we have reliable data on this ? flow of food to and within Africa?

Also, if this is true, how can we deny the absolute failure of the West but also Russian and Chinese development efforts in Africa over the last 50+ years. I do understand that wars can disrupt those efforts but the whole continent is not constantly at war.
by Attummm | 2025-05-31 12:04:33+00:00
A post like this hitting the HN front page feels like a monthly occurrence. Normally I think of commenting in your support but never post it.

While I agree with your technical points, the constant criticism seems less about the specifics and more rooted in either a tendency to go after the incredibly successful, or classic tall poppy syndrome [0].

While we can't control how others react, reframing these kinds of posts as an indirect acknowledgment of your work's significance might be a healthier approach.

P.S. Appreciate the LinkedIn connection.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-31 12:04:35+00:00
Some of them actually are left wing/progressive, most obviously Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht. Wagenknecht was actually an MP for The Left, whose politics are what you'd imagine. The CDU/CSU have spent years in coalition with the German left, also. The list appears to be simply any party that either opposes unlimited immigration, or the author suspects might not be fully in support of it, regardless of their other positions or history.
by noxer | 2025-05-31 12:05:28+00:00
This assumes that people involuntarily paid for the last 60 years or so but they didn't. USAID was paid for by money printing and more debt making not by taxes. If you want volunteer to chip in they would first need to pay of the debt causes by USAID over the last 60+ years.

Also lets be real here, no one in their right mind would donate to USAID. There are near unlimited way to donate money for good causes and very specific ones, where you can see results. If your goal is to have your money be efficiently used to help people you would never give it to the government. Any other organization that isn't straight up a scam, will be more efficient than the gov.
by yorwba | 2025-05-31 12:06:42+00:00
The suggested normalization procedure, even with the ad-hoc fix for gradient discontinuities, doesn't actually ensure that the resulting function is 1-Lipschitz unless the gradient of the gradient magnitude vanishes. The signed-distance functions considered in the article seem to have piecewise constant gradient magnitudes (so are L-Lipschitz, just with L > 1) except for inside the "r", but for less well-behaved functions, higher order derivatives might start to matter.
by perrygeo | 2025-05-31 12:08:06+00:00
I'm wondering if this statement might be definitionally self-evident. In other words, the entire reason we write software is that it has value to ourselves and other humans - so we have to be involved in its specification. Computers do things faster, more accurately, and in some cases more creatively than human could. But in the end, what a computer produces is still for the benefit of humans and subject to all the human constraints. Aggregate human behavior determines if software is a success or not.

If software is about meeting human demands, humans will always write its requirements, by definition. If we build another machine like LLMs, well the design of those LLMs is subject to human demands. There is no point at which we can demand perfection but not be involved in its definition.
by idiotsecant | 2025-05-31 12:08:24+00:00
What's your goal? Do you primarily want to help other people get gear cheaply or do you primarily want to be rewarded for your work?

Either is fine, but it's important to have a least a few of the latter, a person has got to eat.

Also consider that it will feel like you're doing a good thing at first, but once you have some units get lost in the mail, users try to scam you for free units, etc it will feel a lot more like a job! You will have an obligation that all of a sudden you're not being paid for at all.
by larrled | 2025-05-31 12:08:58+00:00
Biden credited the inflation to Putin, claiming that 70% was due to Putin’s price hikes.

That was not entirely true.

Trump’s pandemic spending (lockdowns, vaccines…), and subsequently Biden’s, but most importantly the curiously named Inflation Reduction Act were obvious drivers. You can’t stimulate an already overheated economy to the tune of 2 trillion without getting Larry Summers a bit worked up.
by Simulacra | 2025-05-31 12:09:17+00:00
I don't think they are dishonest, I think that they have a worldview that is influenced by their friends and family and community, and they are not going to go against that. Trying to keep that out of their reporting can be really difficult, given this highly politicized environment that we are living in, and some may allow that to stray into acts of dishonesty.
by K0balt | 2025-05-31 12:09:41+00:00
Any business using commercial inference providers is potentially risking their value proposition. Everything you send to cloud inference will eventually be gleaned for training data.

Empirically we know that the data is the most valuable input to cloud services, and eventually it will be used, regardless of the user agreement. When the stored data becomes worth more than the company, it will be eaten and stripped by vulture capital. Law of the jungle, baby.
by Calwestjobs | 2025-05-31 12:10:00+00:00
99.9999% of people do not understand that point about inertia, you are one of them. and no it was not problem with spain, problem with spain was badly selected and configured inverters. if someone says otherwise he is liar.

" with old-school power plants, you don't need a lot of that stuff to stabilise the grid."

you just need proper sizing of renewables inverters + firmware update...... so no you do not need to have inertia of huge mass in turbines. also 99.999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% of all problems stem of peoples need to regulate grid to flat line for nonsensical reasons, IF you have slight artificially made "fluctuations in grid" which are generated by all inverter synchronized and planned ahead, there is no problem. grid has to have "pulse". THAT is decentralized / new grid. what you are describing is Stanley/Westinghouse grid. so mixing is resulting in nonsense.
by quuxplusone | 2025-05-31 12:11:05+00:00
questerzen (below) is correct: there are 25,309,575 solvable nonograms, not 24,976,511.

This is OEIS sequence A242876 — https://oeis.org/A242876

okayestjoel (below) wrote:

> My nonogram solver goes over every possible configuration for each row and column based on the clues, and either fills in squares that must be filled (all possibilities overlap) or marks squares that must be empty. So if the solver reaches a point where there is ambiguity about what the next move is, then it is deemed not solvable (without guessing).

It would be (mildly) interesting to see an example of one of the 333064 solvable 5x5 nonograms that cannot be solved by okayestjoel's solver's heuristics.
by UltraSane | 2025-05-31 12:11:10+00:00
Sigh. Storing nuclear waste is actually pretty cheap. After being removed from the reactor it is put into a pool for a while until it isn't so radioactive and then it is put into dry cask storage. Long term it can and should be stored in a deep geological repository like Finland is doing. A surcharge of 0.1 cent per KWh is applied to all nuclear power to pay for the decommissioning of reactors.
by al_borland | 2025-05-31 12:11:19+00:00
Thinking back to when I was in school, taking notes during class didn’t do anything for me. I would never read them, and the focus on trying to get it all down meant that I wasn’t really listening, simply transcribing.

That said, I didn’t really know how to study. This was fine in high school, I didn’t need to, but in college this hit me hard. I found that if I went through the book and hand wrote a cheat sheet, even for classes that didn’t allow them, the act of making that sheet meant I remembered nearly all of it, so that turned into my study method. Though I’d only spent about 1-2 hours doing this the day before an exam, so I’m not the model of good study habits. I still don’t really know how to study, but writing helped, just not in the context of a classroom during a lecture. I did much better by simply listening. That’s all I did in high school, no notes or home studying. My grades weren’t as good as yours, but decent enough where it wasn’t a problem.
Show HN: Local LLM AIME benchmarking tool
by belluxx | 2025-05-31 12:11:21+00:00
I made this simple tool to compare local LLMs. Any provider that supports OpenAI-like APIs can be used (LMStudio, Llama.cpp, Ollama) but you can also use Openrouter/OpenAI if you change the base URL accordingly.

In my opinion it is not particularly useful for comparing different models from different companies since some models are optimized heavily on math or even trained on AIME problems.

However it is really useful for testing different quantizations of the same model or the same quantization from different providers.

Let me know what you think about it!

Also check the README to see some examples of the results you will get from it.
by mousethatroared | 2025-05-31 12:11:22+00:00
Arguments by aesthetics fare poorly in forums where a large portion of the folks would replace humans with AI.

We're the end stage of utilitarianism: getting rid of centuries old C3 energy producers of alkanes because the grove is "inefficient" and loudly extolling the beauty of pieces of black glass.

The solutions to the energy problems are largely solved and have been since the 70s, conservation.

Meanwhile, guys like Gates have been bemoaning cow's rectal emissions while AI (ie Microsoft, of which he is a major shareholder) is becoming the larger consumer of energy to train AI.
by atq2119 | 2025-05-31 12:14:00+00:00
To be fair, there's a reason for the pattern with init methods you're describing.

C++ constructors can't return values. If construction is fallible, the only way to communicate the error is via C++ exceptions. If you're in a code base that embraces exceptions, that's fine. But (C++) exceptions kind of suck, so many code bases don't, and then you have to find some alternatives.

Over the years, I've increasingly adopted a pattern where the constructor is private in this case and the object construction can be done with static methods - which is a bit more like Rust, actually.
by dist-epoch | 2025-05-31 12:14:46+00:00
You mean how Finland is planning on doing. It's still not doing it.

> In March, Finland successfully completed the first test of its encapsulation plant, which, if finished, will become the world's first permanent underground storage facility for radioactive waste.

https://www.wired.com/story/finland-is-developing-a-permanen...

So far, after 70 years of nuclear power, not even 1 country is doing this.
by bgwalter | 2025-05-31 12:14:55+00:00
That's one of the factors. In Europe at least the other factor is high energy prices after the broken turbine theater and subsequent destruction of Nord Stream.

Prices and unemployment really started to rise after that. The EU buys overpriced LNG from the US, so the US is somewhat isolated from that. But the US is not isolated against the general economic downturn worldwide.

Politicians do not care. Merz, with barely 25% approval of the German population, continues the policies outlined by Hegseth during his visit to the EU. Trump still plays theater to appease his MAGA base, but Senators Rubio and Graham increasingly start holding the reins.
by threeducks | 2025-05-31 12:14:58+00:00
I ran their matrix multiplication code from GitHub (https://github.com/ScalingIntelligence/good-kernels/blob/mai...) and got a mean squared error of approximately 0.056 for two 4096x4096 matrices containing random values between 0 and 1.

I think this error is large enough that referring to it as FP32 is misleading.

Also, the performance gains do not translate to my RTX 3060M GPU (3.8 GFLOPS vs PyTorch's 5.3), presumably because it lacks the optimized hardware for half precision.

But on the plus side, the single file was very easy to adapt and the code is quite readable. I have seen much uglier kernels.
by pfdietz | 2025-05-31 12:15:35+00:00
Those other industries are such that accidents can be tolerated and experience with them used to guide the regulation. Nuclear isn't like that: meltdowns have such large scale impact that they simply cannot be allowed to happen. Financially, this is reflected in the government assuming the accident risk, unlike with (say) chemical plants or airliners. Having assumed the risk, the government in return demands compliance with risk-reducing regulation.

Those proposing to reduce the regulatory burden on nuclear are in fact proposing moving nuclear to this regime where we learn from meltdowns.
by IshKebab | 2025-05-31 12:16:53+00:00
What about the winter? I have solar on my house in the UK and it generates enough power to be off-grid from about March to October, but November - February it would be impossible. There are way too many cloudy days. There was a whole week in February where it didn't generate more than 2 kWh on any day.

At more equatorial latitudes you could definitely rely on it more. And it's not really an issue for grid solar yet because we're far from the point where there's more solar power than we need, even in the middle of summer. But eventually winter will be an issue.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-05-31 12:17:06+00:00
> we're focusing heavily on making MCP Defender easy to setup in less than a minute and then forgetting about it as it runs in the background

an admirable goal!

given the fallibility of LLMs, are you sure it's a good idea that they forget about it?

that seems like it has the same risks as having no security (perhaps worse, lulling people into a false sense of security)

are you sure the LLM doing security can't be tricked/attacked using any of the usual methods?
by kassner | 2025-05-31 12:17:08+00:00
Offtopic, but huge respect for this[1]:

> Lots of people don’t want to read about AI.

> I respect that.

> But I’m currently steeped in the world of AI, for better or for worse, and I want to blog about it. So I’ve split this blog in half.

> The normal blog, which you are reading, is now AI-free.

> There’s another, at /ai that contains only AI posts. It has its own RSS feed.

Thank you. It (non-AI) definitely goes to my RSS reader.

1: https://commaok.xyz/post/blog-schism/
by leftbit | 2025-05-31 12:17:31+00:00
Had. Now we have the "Merit Order Principle". Cheap energy (i.e. renewables) are used first but the price is determined by the most expensive energy source running. (See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merit-Order)

So if you're running a solar park you have production costs of about 5ct/kWh. But if there's also a gas plant running you get maybe 20ct/kWh. Instaprofit.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stromgestehungskosten
by jmclnx | 2025-05-31 12:18:24+00:00
You should watch Full Metal Jacket :)

If I understood the article, many of these people were bullied in when young. So you suggest they join the military to get more bullying ? Granted, I do not know what basic training these days is like, 40 or so years ago, depending on the service, it could have been brutal.

Yes, the draft was ended but there were many reasons for that to have occurred. Some conservatives have wanted to being it back, but they never followed through because even they know there are/were many selection issues.

For example: gay vs non-gay, draft women. These two items alone could cause tons of law suits. Never mind the fact kids of the rich had ways of avoiding getting selected.

With all that said, I have seen military service help many kids, plus I knew a few who it really made this situation much worse. So like everything else "it depends".
by palata | 2025-05-31 12:19:04+00:00
Say the user has two devices and hence two copies of the same passkey, let's call them A and B. They have a shared signCount.

Say an attacker manages to make a copy C of A. They have the signCount as part of it, right? So they can immediately connect to the server. The server will increment signCount and sync it with A and B, but C is already in and C knows that the signCount is probably lastSignCount+1.

The only way I could imagine signCount to be useful is if somehow the server synchronises it between A and B in a way that C - who got access for a while - cannot access. It would mean that C has access until A or B connects, and after that the next time C connects, it will be out of sync. This does not sound super useful, and it assumes that C cannot access the sync process even though it has unlimited access to the passkey (until A or B is used).

What am I missing? To me signCount doesn't bring anything here...
by msgodel | 2025-05-31 12:19:07+00:00
You don't need to. You could just let it go and forget about it. But if you want it you're going to have to figure out how to convince the public it benefits them. You've been doing the opposite and openly attacking half the country for years.

If I wrote an email to the executive team or board of directors at my employer every Monday telling them they have no future at the company and I hope they get replaced how much longer do you think I'd have a job? That's what all these institutions have been doing.
by hsbauauvhabzb | 2025-05-31 12:19:34+00:00
But also she made an estimated 2,000m from her recent tour, so this is equivalent to me buying a childhood video game from the bargain bin at the local game shop because I liked it as a kid.

Her PR game is on point though. Saying she bought it for ‘emotional reasons’ is a fairly standard explanation from her PR spin. It’s not impossible that she genuinely has emotional attachment to it, but I wouldn’t assume that’s anything more than an afterthought to the real reason she bought it.

I have the greatest respect for her. She is probably one of the most underrated business people of all time, while also being the Marilyn Monroe of the 21st century and being an uncompromising exemplary role model to women.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-05-31 12:19:51+00:00
Microcenter is a surviving personal computer retailer from the DOS days.

Seemed like they were intentionally flexible enough at the beginning so they would be able to go forward with any and all manufacturers that might turn out to prevail, back when nobody knew for sure.

Whether the future would more strongly include Apple, IBM compatibles, or any other alternatives which have come & went.

It was a "superstore" by design, decades before Walmart got there through its unavoidable momentum.

The vast majority of items do need to fly off the shelf, but it's best not to purge too much of everything else. The smartest operators can actually stock a larger number of slower-moving items too.

Also I have seen some affordable stock pulled from the shelves and online like smaller capacity SATA SSDs, after higher-capacity or more modern units naturally replace them as technology progresses. Looks like they mark down the less-modern units, or they won't move at all, and those can then end up at the point where further markdown would be below cost. All remaining stock disappears to a liquidator, which are more common than ever these days. Just when you thought it was really going to get good. It used to be easier to browse for "stragglers" that were too expensive when first released, if you waited a year or two those prices could be really slashed when more modern versions took over the mainstream, if you could find any stock remaining.

I drive right by the one in Houston almost every week where you can see the store conveniently a block away from the freeway, only sometimes for that same reason the traffic can get so bad that it's a 20 minute ordeal getting back out of the parking lot, down that block, and back on the freeway :\

So sometimes I'll wait a few weeks before just dropping in, but it's also always been good to have when you need something right away.

Except recently when I knew exactly what I wanted, a 2TB SATA laptop HDD, not an SSD for this particular PC. I still had a 1TB NIB in my storage unit from a few years ago when I picked up a couple but only used one at the time.

Well, these days they had nothing. Except a few items of one SKU that was your typical modern garbagey SMR HDD, which modern SMR is miserably sluggish (you know, like a snail without a shell) by comparison to regular HDDs from previous decades (which were all conventional CMR until some SMR bozo came along). SMR is very frustrating even for long-term storage, and completely useless in a laptop. Give me a break.

Had to then go to the storage unit and dig out the 1TB one I already had.

Nobody's fault but mine for shopping and trying to be a consumer when it's not absolutely necessary :\