MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by meindnoch | 2025-06-25 11:17:59+00:00
In "Appendix A: Supporting proofs for approximations" the author justifies the approximation of 1-x with e^(-x) by computing lim_{x→0} (1-x)/e^(-x) = 1.

This is wrong. Consider how this criteria is also satisfied by 1-100000x, since lim_{x→0} (1-x)/(1-100000x) = 1. But this is clearly not a good first-order approximation for 1-x around 0.

The proper justification for replacing 1-x with e^-x around 0 is done by examining the first 2 terms of their Taylor expansions, in other words, the functions' value at 0 and their first derivative at 0. Since these match for 1-x and e^-x, they are good first-order approximations of each other around 0.
by 627467 | 2025-06-25 11:18:38+00:00
I'm not questioning that PhD programmes infuse skills/knowledge useful in big tech but I wonder if here we're are also looking at useless grade/degree inflation. Surely if there's surplus of "overqualified individuals" it becomes cheaper to hire them. Is it net cost effective for all that this is the case? Do you really gain so much by wasting(?) 3 to 5 years in a PhD programme?
by moomin | 2025-06-25 11:19:22+00:00
There’s two whole paragraphs under a dedicated heading. I don’t think the problem is with the article here. Paragraphs reproduced below:

AI can be remarkably effective at discovering a broad range of vulnerabilities—but the real challenge isn’t always detection, It’s precision. Automation has long struggled with false positives, and nowhere is this more evident than in vulnerability scanning. Tools that flag dozens of irrelevant issues often create more work than they save. When AI enters the equation, the stakes grow even higher: models can generalize well, but verifying technical edge cases is a different game entirely.

To ensure accuracy, we developed the concept of validators, automated peer reviewers that confirm each vulnerability XBOW uncovers. Sometimes this process leverages a large language model; in other cases, we build custom programmatic checks. For example, to validate Cross-Site Scripting findings, a headless browser visits the target site to verify that the JavaScript payload was truly executed. (don’t miss Brendan Dolan-Gavitt’s BlackHat presentation on AI agents for Offsec)
by hexaga | 2025-06-25 11:19:42+00:00
Model weights are significantly larger than cache in almost all cases. Even an 8B parameter model is ~16G in half precision. The caches are not large enough to actually cache that.

Every weight has to be touched for every forward pass, meaning you have to wait for 16G to transfer from VRAM -> SRAM -> registers. That's not even close to 100ns: on a 4090 with ~1TB/s memory bandwidth that's 16 milliseconds. PCIe latency to launch kernels or move 20 integers or whatever is functionally irrelevant on this scale.

The real reason for batching is it lets you re-use that gigantic VRAM->SRAM transfer across the batch & sequence dimensions. Instead of paying a 16ms memory tax for each token, you pay it once for the whole batched forward pass.
by gadilif | 2025-06-25 11:20:05+00:00
The specific composition of this specific mountain range in Fordow made it almost ideal for this purpose. It's not only the depth, but also the rock type, the fact that the rock layers were compressed, and overall accessibility - all of these limit the selection space for 'deep holes in the ground for building a nuclear facility'. Also, you need to take into account an important fact: It is in Iran... There may be other, better locations on Earth, but having sovereignty on the land is key:)
by Anthony-G | 2025-06-25 11:21:16+00:00
Very cool project that I would have figured to be impossible to do in real-time.

I thought I'd let you know that the web page is rotated to the right on my desktop monitor so I have to tilt my head or drag the browser window to the landscape-oriented monitor. I'm guessing that this is an optimisation for mobile devices but I doubt I'm the only one with a portrait-oriented monitor (viewport dimensions are currently 1200×1779).
by mjburgess | 2025-06-25 11:21:49+00:00
The mountain itself is ~80m to base, and the 20m comes from assuming that trucks are just driving down into it (so a gradient down to -20m on the road). If you had deeper, you'd need to then have more complex transport mechanisms underneath the mountain.

The assumption is that they haven't done that -- but it's not implausible to add some multiple of 10m on to the estimate.

I'd imagine they studied bunker buster arms in the design, and very probably concluded, that there wasn't much need to go very deep. Demolishing 80m of granite alone is a nuclear-sized problem, +20m and maybe 10m of specialised concrete, i'd imagine is fine.

It's also highly likely that the design of the installation is robust against collapse, eg., designed so that small areas can collapse independently. So even with arms which could penetrate that deep, you'd need a large number.

I think it's plausible that the entire supply of bunker busters the US currently has could do the job, but I highly doubt the US would risk depleting its capacity on a "maybe" of this kind.

The whole operation was a performance to try a carrot rather than stick approach with israel
Exploring Synergies Around StartupXPO Dubai
by maebskie | 2025-06-25 11:22:48+00:00
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by hyperman1 | 2025-06-25 11:23:30+00:00
I noticed a similar thing as an European with COVID. Noise from a new disease came from China, so everybody is a bit scared and does nothing. Then Italy got the full blast of it, overloaded hospitals and all. This somehow made it real. People in our ingroup were suffering. At that point, governements got actively involved.

The Microsoft vs ICC situation seems similar. IT independence is now taken serious at governemental organisations. Our ingroup got a problem.
by Hendrikto | 2025-06-25 11:24:36+00:00
> Momentum built, and additional parties became interested. […] we had representation from […] Adobe, Apple, BBC, Comcast / NBCUniversal, Google, MovieLabs, and […] W3C

> Many […] programs […] already support the new PNG spec: Chrome, Safari, Firefox, iOS/macOS, Photoshop, DaVinci Resolve, Avid Media Composer...

> Plus, you saw some broadcast companies in that list above. Behind the scenes, hardware and tooling are being updated to support the new PNG spec.
Show HN: SuperDesign.Dev – first Open-source Design Agent lives inside IDE
by jzdesign1993 | 2025-06-25 11:25:03+00:00
The 1st Open-source design agent that lives directly inside Cursor, Windsurf, or your favorite IDE.

V0.005 is an extension with custom Paralle Claude Code agents and infinite canva UX that allows you to iterate design directly in your IDE.

It can:

- Generate lots of designs in Paralle (Product Mocks / UI components / Wireframes)

- Fork and iterate specific designs

- Deeply integrate into your IDE workflow

We think design might be the killer use case for Paralle agents, and we thought the best way is to build and validate—so here we are!

The V0.005 only generates static HTML pages so we can ship fast, but next we will:

1. Support full stack web apps (by worktree/sandbox), so you can iterate UI of existing apps

2. Much better, faster & cheaper agentic design flow (Claude Code SDK is quite expensive & slow)

3. Mobile stack

4. ...You tell us or contribute!

This might be the first public Claude Code SDK product too? (Not too sure!)

Here are some direct links to parts of the project you may find interesting:

Website (https://superdesign.dev)

Github (https://github.com/superdesigndev/superdesign)

Twitter (https://x.com/SuperDesignDev)

---

Built by Jason (https://x.com/jasonzhou1993) & Jack (https://x.com/jackjack_eth)
by muzani | 2025-06-25 11:25:28+00:00
Growth is metamorphosis. You'll have to let go of who you were and become someone new. You don't lose the past, you digest it. Whether you're going from single to married, IC to manager, you have to fully embrace the role you take.

Sometimes it feels like a step downwards - divorces, lost family members, career changes. Some have kids and can't do the things they once did. And in time, you'll pick up injuries and health problems. If you plan to fight and resist change, do so, but if you can't, then accept the new roles.
by graemep | 2025-06-25 11:26:47+00:00
> So, why is even HN getting a lot of those non-original sources, many times even behind a paywall, on the front page?

They are still a minority of sources, many of the newsy ones have non-paywalled articles. I may not notice some paywalls because I usually have JS off so a lot of paywalls do not work.

They are also a pick of the most interesting articles. its a very small proportion of what is available.

> Who reads the original news might have a better understanding of the topic, might be a better, clearer writer, can add context that makes sense for their audience

Might! If you want original sources read Reuters - non-paywalled BTW.

> because there is still added value in some journalism (true journalism, we might call it?).

Good journalism is a rarity. It is, and has always, been far less common than sloppy, inaccurate, and sensationalist repporting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
by jddddam | 2025-06-25 11:27:19+00:00
Israel has already obliterated Iranian air defense and flattened the surroundings.

Can someone tell me why the US or Israel can’t just fly in a Seal Team that goes into the facility, plants a bunch of C4 and calls it a day? They can surely ringfence and defend the area by putting fighter jets and a couple hundred drones in the air while the operation is ongoing.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-06-25 11:28:04+00:00
Munich switched to Linux in 2012. But they switched back to Microsoft in 2020 because they never could get it to work completely. At least not to the level of comfort in the old system. Open source has its advantages, but MS dominates the business world because of its tech support that is truly second to none on that scale. If Europe wants independence, they need to support local businesses and not just technology.
by graemep | 2025-06-25 11:28:50+00:00
I agree with keeping up with things that might affect you, but that is a tiny sliver of the news.

> a European who knows everything about US primaries but doesn't know the name of the EU president...

Very common. A lot of political argument in the UK seems to take place from an American perspective - people talk as though our problems and possible solutions are exactly the same as in the US.
by roland35 | 2025-06-25 11:29:07+00:00
Don't exercise too hard! I just injured my knee by ignoring pain and assuming it was tendonitis when in reality it was a cartilage tear.

Get those joint pains checked out by a doctor! It is easier to fix if you catch it early!

Some people get way too intense when in reality you just need to be active to be healthy. It's a lot harder to exercise at all if you blow out a knee or shoulder!
by potato3732842 | 2025-06-25 11:30:18+00:00
>this is going to escalate the conflict.

Sure, if by "this" you mean media and a segment of the population harping on how the strike did little or nothing.

After the strike and before this reporting Israel could justify deescalation by saying the nuclear program was crippled and Iran could justify deescalation by acting like it was no big deal and they lobbed counter strikes to great effect (lol) and the US could justify deescalation with the usual "look what happens to brown foreigners who cross us and our buddies" schtick and from there the matter could be quietly dropped, at least as much as such things can be.

That may all still happen, but all this rhetoric about how the strikes were ineffective is driving things toward escalation.
by ben_w | 2025-06-25 11:30:23+00:00
That's the point of language, to abstract a complex thing to what is often as little as a single word or sentence. It's not like the idea represented by the words "simulated evolution" is itself as simple as those two words anyway.

That it takes nature "billions of years" for natural evolution isn't even important here, because it's not like simulations have to run in real-time.

If you run simulated evolution with mechanical parts and the reward function of things that function like clocks, you get the (design of) a thing that functions like a clock, and if you run the physics simulation of the design, you can tell the time with it. Do it with electronics and things that act like a radio, you get a radio. Do it with a CAD design and the goal of strength for minimum mass, you end up with something that looks bone-like.

We also do it with AI, why should we expect it not to produce things in the general category of "minds"? Not necessarily human minds, even the biggest by parameter count are much smaller structures than our brains, but the general category.
by nisegami | 2025-06-25 11:31:04+00:00
We use an outdated on-premise version of Azure DevOps (nee. Team Foundation Server) for our sorry excuse of task management. We also use some horrible plugin for time tracking so our bosses can be sure we're keeping the seat warm for the correct amount of time.

I forked [this existing MCP server for azure devops](https://github.com/Tiberriver256/mcp-server-azure-devops) but I had to make a lot of changes to have it work on our env and I also added some tools for working with that shitty time tracking plugin.
by tauntz | 2025-06-25 11:31:21+00:00
The spec for machine readable travel documents is sadly not the most concise but if you're interested in the nitty-gritty details of how to validate documents, how to read data from them, etc then jump into ICAO 9303:

https://www.icao.int/publications/documents/9303_p10_cons_en...

https://www.icao.int/publications/documents/9303_p11_cons_en...

But please keep in mind that this is just the spec for how it's supposed to be implemented. Real world implementations of it have lots of creative interpretations of the spec in addition to straight bugs in their implementations, so if you're going to write software that has to work with various different documents issued by various governments, you'll have many fun debugging sessions :)
by AlienRobot | 2025-06-25 11:31:28+00:00
That makes no sense as a default assumption. It's like saying FSD is like a human driver. If it's a person, why doesn't it represent itself in court? What wages is it being paid? What are the labor rights of AI? How is it that the AI is only human-like when it's legally convenient?

What makes far more sense is saying that someone, a human being, took copyrighted data and fed it into a program that produces variations of the data it was fed. This is no different from a photoshop filter, and nobody would ever need to argue in court that a photoshop filter is not a human being.
by scarface_74 | 2025-06-25 11:32:19+00:00
I learn what I can at work and I keep 9-12 months savings in the bank outside of retirement to give me enough of a runway to prepare for my next job if I’m unexpectedly laid off.

There are a million things I would rather think about after getting off work than software development.

At work, more important than software engineering skills, I make sure that I never become a ticket taker and make sure I’m doing something with larger scope, impact and “ambiguity”.

https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html
by T3OU-736 | 2025-06-25 11:32:32+00:00
> If you stop making progress, start back at step 1 because iCloud Drive frequently gets stalled for some reason or another

It feels utterly wrong that there is not an Event Log entry (I am not an iCloud user, so cannot easily check) or some other, better log in place.

The snide cynic in me wants to reach for the whole "Apple does not expose this sort of detailed data to the user", but for backups, that seems important enough for that to not be the case?
by phoronixrly | 2025-06-25 11:32:39+00:00
The main camera still sucks, and they seem to keep with the misleading messaging. It's not a 50mp camera if the sensor is 50mp but each pixel in the final photos is averaged from 4 pixels of the sensor...

Yes, the closed-source camera app that does not work on Lineage OS and other alternative firmwares has a 50MP switch, however the quality of the 50MP photo is as poor if not worse than the processed 13MP photo...
by x187463 | 2025-06-25 11:33:34+00:00
run script

"missing x..."

pip install x

run script

"missing y..."

pip install y

> y not found

google y to find package name

pip install ypackage

> conflict with other package

realize I forgot a venv and have contaminated my system python

check pip help output to remember how to uninstall a package

clean up system python

create venv at cwd

start over

...

</end of time>
by kirushik | 2025-06-25 11:36:52+00:00
Well, Minich's return to MS tech oddly coincides with MS Germany moving their HQ there (and the ruling party change in the city); it's of course hard to explicitly call backroom deals on this (even though ex-mayor seems to be doing exactly that: https://www.linux-magazin.de/ausgaben/2019/10/interview-2/), but it might be that the decision wasn't fully technical.
by rept0id-2 | 2025-06-25 11:37:08+00:00
The functionality of this library is to calculate compounded interest... but the real purpose is to test Matt Godbolt's suggestions from "Correct by Construction: APIs That Are Easy to Use and Hard to Misuse - Matt Godbolt - C++ on sea" on a high-level language.

Matt gives us the example of a stocks trading API that is implemented in C++. Because we wanted to test what we saw there on a high-level language, we picked Python.
by throwaway74354 | 2025-06-25 11:37:13+00:00
Security is a policy-driven spectrum of considerations and solutions. GrapheneOS targets very specific threat models, which is not possible with Fairphone hardware/BSP. Whether it makes it not secure for your own use cases, it's up to you to decide.

Case in point: re-lockable bootloader requirement. Not everyone is a target for an evil maid types of physical attacks or possible state actor pressure. But when you actually need it, it's not negotiable.
by skywhopper | 2025-06-25 11:37:23+00:00
I’m not sure about this. B2s were heavily used in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as well, so Iran is well aware of their range. To me, I think this mission just demonstrates how little we get out of all that money. The small number of B2s, the extreme mission time, the relatively low payload, and the ultimate lack of clarity of success for this mission don’t make me feel like the US is particularly powerful or is spending its money well.
by DrinkyBird | 2025-06-25 11:37:33+00:00
> It just works without any faffing around as Windows, MacOS, etc has done since the mid 1990's.

Unless you like your applications to save your window positions. I like Firefox to be on my left monitor, and if I use Wayland I have to manually drag it there every time I start it, because Wayland, in the year 2025, still lacks this basic feature that Windows, macOS, and X11 have had for like 40 years now.

(unless I use XWayland, which magically returns all of the missing functionality, though with a tendency to break other things)
by cschmidt | 2025-06-25 11:37:47+00:00
I suppose it is. There is a lot to tokenization - pre-tokenization, how to handle digits, the tokenization training approach - that is about adding cleverness. In the long run, the bitter lesson would be to just get rid of it all and learn from more data. Many people would love to do it. But I think for the case of BLT, digits will still be an issue. There is no way an autoregressive entropy model will be able to split numbers sensibly, since it has no idea how many digits are coming. It seems like it will struggle more with arithmetic. Perhaps you could reverse all the digits in a number, then it has a chance. So 12334 becomes 43321, and it gets to start from the ones digit. This has been suggested as an approach for LLM's.
by dinfinity | 2025-06-25 11:38:01+00:00
> You can damage the entrances, take out the aerials, and cut off communication to a command bunker with hits in the right places. In military terms, it might as well be a crater, even if the occupants are unharmed.

This seems like nonsense. Rebuilding an entire facility from a crater is so much work that you may just as well build it elsewhere.

Fixing entrances and aerials seems trivial in comparison.

> Hypersonics are missiles which travel through the atmosphere at speeds in excess of Mach 5. Equipped with tungsten penetrators, they could act as “rods from God,” punching through layered concrete like an armor-piercing bullet. With no explosive warhead, such weapons do damage through kinetic energy alone.

Then what, though? Underground installations are not like bodies; you can't just expect to take one out by shooting through the brain, heart or lungs (which is hard enough to do as it is). Unless you're launching 100 non-explosive hypersonic missiles, you're probably not going to do much damage.

Maybe the hypersonic missile can be used to create a path for a normal warhead to penetrate to where the explosive can do the required amount of damage. That's going to require some pretty precise needle-threading, though.

Alternatively, the hypersonic missiles could have a core of extremely radioactive material.
by ProtsenkoAlex | 2025-06-25 11:39:29+00:00
We just launched the private beta of PostSam, an AI tool we built after struggling to stay consistent on social media while building our products.

It creates, writes, and schedules content for you—based on your product and audience. You literally spend 3 minutes setting it up, and get a full content calendar that runs itself (with full control to edit or approve posts).

If you're a solo founder, indie maker, or part of a small team without a marketing department, this was made for you.

We’re sharing early access with a few beta codes: R19071 R14E70 R1A788 R16F83 R15AFD

Use any of these at postsam.ai

Would love your feedback — what you’d change, what’s missing, or what would make this truly useful for you.

Happy to answer questions in the thread!
by dkjaudyeqooe | 2025-06-25 11:39:37+00:00
The large carriers, created through mergers that should never have been allowed, have the most popular routes locked up through ownership of landing/takeoff slots and similar. On those routes, fares have substantially increased due to a lack of competition.

The low cost carriers business model is to fly new routes (to secondary airports if required) at low prices, often creating new demand (Breeze is a classic example of this).

The math is very straight forward if you consider what each group is doing in the market.
by b112 | 2025-06-25 11:40:57+00:00
Note for those not clicking, the failure had absolutely nothing to do with resistance from Iran, or anything Iran did. It had to do with operational issues, including 3 failed helicopters out of the 8. Upon Carter accepting recommendations to abort, a 4th crashed resulting in the 8 soldiers lost.

This happened 45 years ago, with different gear, and a lot of operations between now and then. It should have zero impact on any decision to go into Iran or not.

Of course, whether the US would go in is still a valid question, including other aspects of risk.