MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lhl | 2025-06-15 08:19:27+00:00
On the corp side you have FB w/ PyTorch, xformers (still pretty iffy on AMD support tbt) and MS w/ DeepSpeed. But let's see about some others:

Flash Attention: academia, 2y behind for AMD support

bitsandbytes: academia, 2y behind for AMD support

Marlin: academia, no AMD support

FlashInfer: acadedmia/startup, no AMD

ThunderKittens: academia, no AMD support

DeepGEMM, DeepEP, FlashMLA: ofc, nothing from China supports AMD

Without the long tail AMD will continue to always be in a position where they have to scramble to try to add second tier support years later themselves, while Nvidia continues to get all the latest and greatest for free.

This is just off the top of my head on the LLM side where I'm focused on, btw. Whenever I look at image/video it's even more grim.
by metalman | 2025-06-15 08:19:38+00:00
as to the large number of sperm required, it is note worthy that excess male germ cell's is the norm for many?, most?, all?, species, and that in a lot of cases there is a number of complications involved in transfering them to a female, and altogether improbable solutions, also the basic mechanisms for germ cells are conserved by plants and animals, "pollen" bieng tailess sperm.....except in the case of ginko trees, that have motile sperm so the real questions are around why did evolution produce, and stick to this mechanism, and not so much about our species rather mundane take on it.
by bubblyworld | 2025-06-15 08:21:34+00:00
Thanks, I'm on the same page. Where I'm still confused - so you add in an axiom representing w-consistency that says "for all P, if for all n there exists a proof of P(n) then there exists a proof of forall n . P(n)". But does this really mean the same thing as w-consistency? We still have no link between our provability predicate and truth. For instance there could be models where the witnessing proofs are non-standard.

So I'm not convinced this is enough to conclude "forall x . P(x)" within PA itself, which is what you need to prove Goodstein's. We can merely conclude that there exists a (possibly non-standard) n coding for that statement.
by roenxi | 2025-06-15 08:21:42+00:00
The company is valuing the relationship at <$3. In practice there can be no "relationship" with an entity that wilfully steals $3; even in the commercial sense. It is strictly transactional and they're signalling that on any transaction they're willing to cheat you.

You can keep using them if you want. But history has no meaning when dealing with that sort of company.
by voxl | 2025-06-15 08:25:13+00:00
In my opinion we need to elevate doctors and invest heavily into more nurse practitioners and the like. I don't think you need to see a doctor all the time, for procedures or surgery yes, or if you need someone to actually investigate something.

But there is no point in pretending doctors are going to surge, the current administration is trying to make being a doctor harder, not easier. Doctors also avoid certain fields because it doesn't pay enough. The supply is also artificially restricted. It's a system so fucked that it's better to ignore it and pump out PRNs
by aspenmayer | 2025-06-15 08:26:30+00:00
Simply amazing! Do you know what the limitations for WR builds are at this level? I am guessing there is some kind of advancement on the prop/rotor(?) side of things but I would assume that those are off the shelf, like many of the parts used in quadcopter builds? I guess what I’m asking if it’s primarily a design challenge, a production challenge, a logistics challenge or all of the above? I don’t mean to minimize any aspect of the process or anyone’s work, quite the opposite. It’s a neat challenge and different teams take different approaches with some overlapping design features to my untrained eye.
by bazoom42 | 2025-06-15 08:27:02+00:00
Stored procedures are actually great when used for bulk set-oriented data operations. Much simpler and more efficient than passing large datasets back and forth between servers.

The problems arise when processing data row-by-row using cursors or simular procedural approach, or with too much buisness logic in procedual form.

I guess the moral of the story is: use the right tool for the job instead of deciding on the “one true pattern”.
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by rickdangerous1 | 2025-06-15 08:28:42+00:00
I've built un.limited.mx, a free service that helps developers and QA engineers create and manage multiple email accounts for testing purposes. This came from watching my own software development and QA teams waste countless hours managing multiple test accounts, setting up temporary email services, and dealing with email verification flows.

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I built this after seeing my teams: - Waste time creating and managing multiple Gmail accounts - Struggle with temporary email services that were unreliable - Spend hours debugging email verification flows - Deal with email service rate limits during testing - Get blocked by spam filters when testing email flows

This is a simpler alternative that focuses specifically on the needs of developers and QA engineers, born from real-world pain points I've witnessed in software development teams.

Try it out at https://www.un.limited.mx

Would love to hear your feedback and suggestions for improvement!
by thomassmith65 | 2025-06-15 08:30:03+00:00
I'm tempted to take apart that list of American evils, one by one, because in the cases with which I am familiar, it is Chomsky-level reductive, but that would take a few pages of writing. Again, there is a problem with this sort of discussion:

This debate could continue forever since there's no single measure by which one can quantify how evil a nation is.

I wrestled over what I'm about to say, because it's condescending, but: it's one thing to read about the past, and it's another to live through it.

So many things feel real to me that might not if I were younger.

I grew up... surrounded by adults who lived through WWII, ...hoping for tens of millions suffering under Apartheid to be free, ...hoping for the Wall to come down and free hundreds of millions from Soviet oppression (not for ideological reasons, but because it was at North Korean levels), ...rooting for the Chinese protest movement to win. And so much more.

Thankfully, for the first half of my life, the world kept inching toward progress (and what I would give for young people to live through the 1990s!).

Then we had 9/11, and America embraced its worst side. That America is the only America young people know. That's a shame, because many of them now, politically, are sprinting straight towards the propeller-blades.
by WhyIsItAlwaysHN | 2025-06-15 08:31:12+00:00
Some groups will be more disadvantaged than others by being investigated. For example for welfare, I expect fraudsters to have more money to support themselves or less people to support (unless the criteria for welfare is something unexpected). So I'd say that there also needs to be more protections than just providing money.

Nevertheless the idea of giving money is still good imo, because it also incentivizes the fraud detection becoming more efficient, since mistakes now cost more. Unfortunately I have a feeling people might game that to get more money by triggering false investigations.
by sirwhinesalot | 2025-06-15 08:31:21+00:00
A SAT solver without any preprocessing won't be competitive with SoTA SAT solver.

CDCL is core to the problem, but it is not sufficient. You even have SAT solvers like CryptoMiniSAT that try to detect clauses that encode xor gates so they can use Gaussian Elimination.

This is also true of ILP solvers. Simplex + Branch & Cut is elegant. But that's not how you get to the top.
by jaggirs | 2025-06-15 08:35:09+00:00
I haven't read the paper, maybe their benchmark is flawed as you say, and there are a lot of ways for it to be flawed. But assuming it is not, I see no problem with using the word superhuman.

Out of curiosity, would you agree with me if I said 'Calculators have superhuman capabilities'? (Not just talking about speed here, since you can easily construct complex enough equations that a human wouldn't be able to solve in their lifetime but the calculator could within minutes).
by hanspeter | 2025-06-15 08:35:50+00:00
With per-per-minute sharing cars having existed in many cities in Europe 10+ years, this concept is not new.

People will adapt to the level of cleanliness in the car the get into, so it's a slippery slope. Users will behave respectfully in the early days (maybe because they are first-movers), and then it deteriorates long term.

My own experience is that people used to not even leave an empty soda bottle in the cars and now I see remains from take-out in the floor, coffee cups, chewing gum left around the dashboard etc. You can report this to the car service, but they won't be able to take any meaningful action on it.
by JdeBP | 2025-06-15 08:36:56+00:00
Yes, it is; as I explained back in 2018. It's documented in the IA manuals, and indeed in the AMD manuals. The segment descriptors start off in unreal mode, which is changed at the first far jump that loads CS.

TianoCore does a near jump after a couple of NOPs, because there's a whole 64KiB of space for unreal mode code to do the setup for entering the SEC phase, and it does a modicum of setup in unreal mode finding the boot firmware volume and indeed the SEC phase code.

u-boot does not take as much advantage of the available space, changing directly from unreal mode to flat model 32-bit protected mode within a few instructions of the initial near jump.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18166292

* https://github.com/tianocore/edk2/blob/master/UefiCpuPkg/Sec...

* https://github.com/tianocore/edk2/blob/master/UefiCpuPkg/Res...

* https://github.com/u-boot/u-boot/blob/master/arch/x86/cpu/st...
by masklinn | 2025-06-15 08:37:48+00:00
As far as I understand this only replaces the retouching phase. A human needs to do that in place in order to color and pattern match (and it's already hard enough that way). And I do not know but would assume the retouching paints can be removed without affecting the isolation layer if the conservator realises they went in the wrong direction earlier and can’t easily recover.
by mofeien | 2025-06-15 08:37:54+00:00
> We accomplish this by forming concepts such as "ledge", "step", "person", "gravity", etc., as we experience them until they exist in our mind as purely rational concepts we can use to reason about new experiences.

So we receive inputs from the environment and cluster them into observations about concepts, and form a collection of truth statements about them. Some of them may be wrong, or apply conditionally. These are probabilistic beliefs learned a posteriori from our experiences. Then we can do some a priori thinking about them with our eyes and ears closed with minimal further input from the environment. We may generate some new truth statements that we have not thought about before (e. g. "stepping over the ledge might not cause us to fall because gravity might stop at the ledge") and assign subjective probabilities to them.

This makes the a priori seem to always depend on previous a posterioris, and simply mark the cutoff from when you stop taking environmental input into account for your reasoning within a "thinking session". Actually, you might even change your mind mid-reasoning process based on the outcome of a thought experiment you perform which you use to update your internal facts collection. This would give the a priori reasing you're currently doing an even stronger a posteriori character. To me, these observations above basically dissolve the concept of a priori thinking.

And this makes it seem like we are very much working from probabilistic models, all the time. To answer how we can know anything: If a statement's subjective probability becomes high enough, we qualify it as a fact (and may be wrong about it sometimes). But this allows us to justify other statements (validly, in ~ 1-sometimes of cases). Hopefully our world model map converges towards a useful part of the territory!
by coderatlarge | 2025-06-15 08:39:34+00:00
“In March, the journal Nature published the discoveries of two paradigm-breaking antimicrobial compounds in as many weeks: a polyene macrolide antifungal called mandimycin and a lasso peptide antibiotic called lariocidin. Both these compounds, which use never-before-seen antimicrobial mechanisms, were found using techniques that let researchers look deep into the chemical diversity of microbes—much deeper than a typical antibiotic or antifungal screen might go.”
by loehnsberg | 2025-06-15 08:39:35+00:00
I would argue that not spending money on it and showing to upper mgmt that the folks they hired can actually get the job done often contributes to an external contractor not getting hired.

You might want to question, why didn‘t you ask the guys for money before starting to work for them. True, but I guess they were of the kind, show me results and then maybe we move on. On the other side, a 30-40k pilot project in this area is not difficult to negotiate if you‘re patient.

It takes so much more to running a business than lower cost with clever math that this step often comes at a later stage when larger companies look for ways to stay competitive, which is when they start to take a look at their accounts and figure that certain cost really stack up. Then you come in. The only real power you would have gotten over that company would have been for those guys getting fired and replaced by a vendor - ideally that‘s you!
by zelphirkalt | 2025-06-15 08:40:50+00:00
It's just a theory, nothing more. A single human brain is vastly more complex than the whole web, in terms of nodes and connections between them. We don't even understand enough about the brain to explain how we think. We don't fully understand how a brain makes its output, before sending it onto the web. Projecting, that models will be able to create any useful training data themselves after web scale is just a guess. Such training data may never be of the same quality as a human thought. It may just be regurgitating stuff and not furthering the learning or the model quality at all. Calling that idea an "insight" is a bit too optimistic.
by reactordev | 2025-06-15 08:41:52+00:00
As someone who has some experience in observability at scale, the issue with SigNoz, Prom, etc is that they can only operate on the data that is exposed by the underlying infrastructure where the IaaS has all the information to provide a better experience. Hence CloudWatch.

That said, if you own your infrastructure, I’d build out a signoz cluster in a heartbeat. Otel is awesome but once you set down a path for your org, it’s going to be extremely painful to switch. Choose otel if you’re a hybrid cloud or you have on premises stuff. If you’re on AWS, CloudWatch is a better option simply because they have the data. Dead simple tracing.
by rahen | 2025-06-15 08:43:25+00:00
I would have thought the same, but EXO Labs showed otherwise by getting a 300K-parameter LLM to run on a Pentium II with only 128 MB of RAM at about 50 tokens per second. The X-MP was in the same ballpark, with the added benefit of native vector processing (not just some extension bolted onto a scalar CPU) which performs very well on matmul.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

John Carmack was also hinting at this: we might have had AI decades earlier, obviously not large GPT-4 models but useful language reasoning at a small scale was possible. The hardware wasn't that far off. The software and incentives were.

https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1911872001507016826
by henrikschroder | 2025-06-15 08:43:41+00:00
> A database that's accessed by multiple applications, regardless of the number of languages, is a really bad smell.

Except that really was the original model back in the 90's. All "good" databases had an extensive roles and permissions system, and a point of pride was the number of ODBC connectors for different languages and environments.

You were supposed to have The Database, looked after and controlled by the hallowed DBAs, who had their own hardware budget, their own organization, and who controlled access to The Database, giving trusted applications access to it, but only after they had vetted the schema and queries that those dirty developers wanted to run against it. Trusted users could get SELECT access, but only to the tables they needed to run their custom reports and queries.

It was a whole ass thing that's fallen completely to the wayside as database software went from underpinning Larry's latest mega-yacht, to free as in beer, and we learned how to clone and shard the data instead.
by saghm | 2025-06-15 08:45:25+00:00
I don't think they did need to; the author mentioned this in one of the footnotes:

> I'm a little surprised that the source code was included as opposed to precompiled .class files to further obfuscate what's going on, but then again by this point, with the GPG encryption and all, I don't imagine the module team was focused on preventing me from meddling around as much as they were focused on getting a module out of the door
by snickerbockers | 2025-06-15 08:48:32+00:00
There's this fascinating phenomenon called "micro chimerism"where somehow they've found that some of the cells in women's bodies are actually descendents of cells from past sexual partners, and they can be found in places far removed from the reproductive tract. the relation to your comment is that the tonsils and throat are known to be susceptible to this.

Fun rabbit hole, in since cases they think it's the result of cells from offspring winding up in the wrong side of the umbilical but there are also cases where there was never a pregnancy in which case it has to be wayward sperm but that's absolutely bizarre and far too orthogonal to the sperms primary objective.

And AFAIK they don't have any idea of why this is beneficial to the woman or even to the man who created the invasive cells.
by noosphr | 2025-06-15 08:49:08+00:00
>What's wrong with that? If it quacks like a duck... it's just a complex pile of organic chemistry, ducks aren't real because the concept of "a duck" is wrong.

To simulate a biological neuron you need a 1m parameter neural network.

The sota models that we know the size of are ~650m parameters.

That's the equivalent of a round worm.

So if it quacks like a duck, has the brain power of a round worm, and can't walk then it's probably not a duck.
by qingcharles | 2025-06-15 08:50:35+00:00
In 2013 I'd just built a new top-spec PC. I looked up the performance and then back-calculated using the TOP500† and I believe it would have been the most powerful supercomputer in the world in about 1993. If you back-calculated further, I think around 1980 it became more powerful than every computer on the planet combined.

† https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500
by Daub | 2025-06-15 08:51:02+00:00
> I wonder whether it's still worthwhile to replaced a yellowed varnish varnish on old painting, just to be sure that it doesn't degrade further (with the assumption that historical varnish are somewhat lesser than modern one, which I really don't know if it's the case).

I would say that we should just live with the difference. There is a near guarantee that our experience of paintings as they exist today will always be significantly different to how they would have been experienced when they had been made, regardless of what we do. The factors are:

- Yellowing of oil/pigment/varnish. This is pretty much inevitable, even in modern paints.

- Fugitive colors. Most high-color pigments tended to fade significantly over time. Degas was once seen crying in front of a Delacroix, upset at how badly the colors had faded, even in his lifetime (It might have been Manet... can't locate the relevant anecdote online).

- Excessive varnishing. It used to be so that paintings received regular varnishing by their owners. Over time, the layers of varnish would build up to a ridiculous degree.

- Lighting. For me this is probably the most annoying factor. A general rule is that paintings should be lighted in the same light that they were painted. The values go to hell if a painting is lighted too brightly. There are many so-called hanging experts, who always light too strongly, even in respected national collections.

Semi-related anecdote: The first time I went to the Rodin museum I was struck by how badly one of the busts had been lighted. Whilst the guards were not looking, I moved it to a more agreeable position. I came back one year later to find it was still in that position.

As for using modern varnishes... I am not expert, but AFAIK one factor that accounts for the amazing longevity of old paintings was the compatibility between their many layers. The canvas, the primer, the paint and the medium were all derived from the same plant: flax. On top of that would sometimes be laid stand oil, again derived from flax. If this continuity is broken, all manner of problems might arise, most of which would be long term issues such as cracking and flaking.
by metalman | 2025-06-15 08:53:19+00:00
saftey third, which in Canada is actualy written into our constitution, but not followed, in that we have a constitutional right to "take our own risks", and therefor must be allowed a means to switch off any automatic alerts and alarms I just leave the fucking thing behind, and would realy like one that has no gps or gyro's, and physical switch on the radio transmitter/reciever to turn it into a local only device, ie: camera, screen, tunes, notes.
by tanelpoder | 2025-06-15 08:53:21+00:00
The reluctance of using stored procedures where they’d be valuable is also a skill + will issue. I do get the non-database-developer view that if 98% of your app is gonna be written in some other language anyway, why complicate your app layers by adding a bit of PL/SQL code + testing infra here and there.

But for processing (and validating) various data loads and incoming data streams, by looking up matching values in existing reference tables, stored procedures can increase performance/efficiency and reduce complexity (of having to maintain connection pools and caching layers just for validating incoming record batches).

As far as the unwillingness to even evaluate stored procedures issue goes, I sometimes joke that maybe the DB vendors should start calling stored procedures as “database lambdas” instead…
by grumpy-de-sre | 2025-06-15 08:53:24+00:00
Whats interesting to me is that along with the autosomes (chr1-22) the sperm contributes either an X or Y sex chromosome. The X chromosome is large and carries a lot of important genes. The Y chromosome on the other-hand is much smaller and carries very few functional genes (primarily just SRY).

So If you think about it girls get ~5% more genetic material from their father than boys.
by t43562 | 2025-06-15 08:53:43+00:00
On the other hand...... if you look at software as a thing that is mostly about people's heads rather than code.

I mean that in a way I think it's more important to have a team that understands the problem domain fully than to have the code itself. Obviously the business might not think so but as a software process, the costly thing to do IMO is get a group of people to a point of common understanding where they can work productively.

When your developers didn't write the code they're unlikely to understand all the reasons why it is the way it is. How do you get them trained up to that level again? One way is a rewrite. The end result may be no better or even worse but now you have people who know the system, the business and they can look after it efficiently....until they all leave and you start again.

This is my devil's advocate answer to my own feeling that one should never rewrite.