MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by refurb | 2025-06-27 23:47:58+00:00
That study is...not that rigorous, but I give them points for being clear about it.

"The downward step change was not apparent when the intervention point was moved back to the beginning of 1998."

"Despite the apparent benefits of the 1998 legislation, there continues to be a considerable number of deaths each year due to paracetamol poisoning"

"One limitation of this study was that we only used data for deaths for poisoning with paracetamol (with or without alcohol), in pure or compound form. We did not use data for deaths where paracetamol was consumed with other drugs."

They had to take the available data and massage it like a Thai masseuse to find what they were looking for.

Not to mention they estimate a decrease of 7 deaths per year, where the post-change level is 121 deaths per year. That's a 5% change, so it's not surprising they had to look at the data a number of ways to even find a change.
by godelski | 2025-06-27 23:48:00+00:00
As far as I'm aware, this is the largest Normalizing Flow that exists, and I think they undermined their work by not mentioning this...

Their ImageNet model (4_1024_8_8_0.05[0]) is ~820M while AFHQ is ~472M. Prior to that there is DenseFlow[1] and MaCow[2], which are both <200M parameters. For more comparison, that makes DenseFlow and MaCow smaller than iDDPM[3] (270M params) and ADM[4] (553M for 256 unconditional). And now, it isn't uncommon for modern diffusion models to have several billion parameters![5] (from this we get some numbers on ImageNet-256, which allows a direct comparison, making TarFlow closer to MaskDiT/2 and much smaller than SimpleDiffusion and VDM++, both of which are in billions. But note that this is 128 vs 256!)

Essentially, the argument here is that you can scale (Composable) Normalizing Flows just as well as diffusion models. There's a lot of extra benefits you get too in the latent space, but that's a much longer discussion. Honestly, the TarFlow method is simple and there's probably a lot of improvements that can be made. But don't take that as a knock on this paper! I actually really appreciated it and it really set out to show what they tried to show. The real thing is just no one trained flows at this scale before and this really needs to be highlighted.

The tldr: people have really just overlooked different model architectures

[0] Used a third party reproduction so might be different but their AFHQ-256 model matches at 472M params https://github.com/encoreus/GS-Jacobi_for_TarFlow

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.04627

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.04208

[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.09672

[4] https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.05233

[5] https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.11605

[Side note] Hey, if the TarFlow team is hiring, I'd love to work with you guys
by mjburgess | 2025-06-27 23:48:32+00:00
It cannot proceed for 30 days, in which time they can file a class action case -- and states which want to challenge this can still obtain state-wide injunctions. Neither has happened only because of the UI, not because the UI itself is required to challenge this.

And when this has a policy implementation it can be reviewed by the courts under the APA and that policy declated unconstitutional.

So no, this ruling says nothing about the executive order. An K's concurrence explains all the ways the order can still be challenged.
by etempleton | 2025-06-27 23:48:46+00:00
I assume it was just Apple blasting the ad to everyone because they have a big investment in the film, but it is in poor taste. Reminds me a bit of the U2 album showing up in everyone’s music library, though perhaps a bit less intrusive in a way.

Apple seems to lack focus right now. They keep distracting themselves with things that they shouldn’t bother with (the Apple car) and releasing products in half finished states. I am a bit worried about Liquid Glass. It feels half baked in a way I am not sure I have seen such shoddy design work from Apple before, even in a beta.
by gmueckl | 2025-06-27 23:49:11+00:00
The dissent on this court decision beautifully reasons why there is no practical recourse for the judicial branch to intervene after this decision. The effective power to do so is now solely with the Supreme Court. But the procedure is such the the Government can simply prevent any relevant cases from reaching that court because in order to get there, the Government would have to appeal and they can just consistently choose not to do it.
by derefr | 2025-06-27 23:49:34+00:00
But doesn’t this lead to the opposite problem: creating a model that can never learn to let go of an early-life mental model picked up from a skewed dataset?

By analogy to humans: if this model were raised in a cult, and then let out into the real world, it would be seemingly incapable of unlearning the cult’s indoctrination, despite the real-world data all contradicting it — as all of this real-world data would be too surprising for the model to accept.

Or, for a maybe-more-likely situation you might encounter in e.g. incremental model re-training of old models for chronologically-newer info: a model trained this way would “stubbornly” refuse to accept any major shift in scientific consensus on a topic.

The human cognitive architecture seems to solve this problem by 1. buffering this rejected-for-being-too-out-there info in a way where it can at least be pattern-recognized; and then 2. noticing when a lot of different, seemingly independent, seemingly trustworthy sources begin matching on the rejected pattern. At that point, the human brain seems to swing the other way — experiencing a “crisis of faith” per se.
by throw10920 | 2025-06-27 23:50:05+00:00
> The core premise of your racist rant

As someone who has reading comprehension above the high-school level, it's blindingly obvious that there was no racism in GP's post. Your accusation is factually incorrect, logically fallacious, emotionally manipulative, and actively degrades the quality of HN (and, obviously, badly breaks the guidelines). Either your logical reasoning skills are deeply lacking, or you're aware that your claim false and maliciously making it anyway to deceive others, which is deeply immoral and disgusting. Regardless of which of those this is, never do this.
by mjburgess | 2025-06-27 23:51:37+00:00
The executive was being constrained by district court judges, hundres of them -- many, as we've seen, can be themselves a little crazy.

You don't want your country being run by the craziest common denominator amongst the judiciary. This is about as far away from democracy as you can imagine, and allowed to run rampent, would lead to massive a democractic backfire.

Imagine the political upheval of a democrat president being unable to act because of trump-apointee crazys in florida. The court has just prevented a decade of mass protests and political insability
by Rendello | 2025-06-27 23:52:25+00:00
The trading firm Jane Street is the big OCaml shop, they have a great podcast about all their tech. Each episode is someone from a team talking about the tool they've built, and their whole ecosystem is pretty much bespoke OCaml tooling.

- https://signalsandthreads.com/

(It's one of three programming podcasts I consistently listen to these days, the others being On The Metal and Developer Voices.)
by ChuckMcM | 2025-06-27 23:53:20+00:00
This is an interesting paper. I had read about recycling cow urine in dairies[1] and I wonder if the yeast would be able to make hydroxypatite out of it. At the time I came across this paper I was looking at people creating financial incentives to produce ammonia (and ammonium nitrate) at scale for farming. We import a bunch of it[2] and making it locally would be a win/win.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B97801...

[2] https://wits.worldbank.org/trade/comtrade/en/country/USA/yea...
by lelandbatey | 2025-06-27 23:53:24+00:00
Neither you nor that heritage foundation (an incredibly biased and anti-immagrant organization) have read the supreme court decision which I linked to. To save you time, I will quote the relevant commentary by the justice:

> [T]he Fourteenth Amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory, in the allegiance and under the protection of the country, including all children here born of resident aliens, with the exceptions or qualifications (as old as the rule itself) of children of foreign sovereigns or their ministers, or born on foreign public ships, or of enemies within and during a hostile occupation of part of our territory, and with the single additional exception of children of members of the Indian tribes owing direct allegiance to their several tribes. The Amendment, in clear words and in manifest intent, includes the children born, within the territory of the United States, of all other persons, of whatever race or color, domiciled within the United States.
by godelski | 2025-06-27 23:53:39+00:00
You have a few minor errors and I hope I can help out.

> Diffusion: generate a lot of noise then try to clean it up

You could say this about Flows too. The history of them is shared with diffusion and goes back to the Whitening Transform. Flows work by a coordinate transform so we have an isomorphism where diffusion works through, for easier understanding, a hierarchical mixture of gaussians. Which is a lossy process (more confusing when we get into latent diffusion models, which are the primary type used). The goal of a Normalizing Flow is to turn your sampling distribution, which you don't have an explicit representation of, into a probability distribution (typically Normal Noise/Gaussian). So in effect, there are a lot of similarities here. I'd highly suggest learning about Flows if you want to better understand Diffusion Models.

> The diffusion approach that is the baseline for sota is Flow Matching from Meta

To be clear, Flow Matching is a Normalizing Flow. Specifically, it is a Continuous and Conditional Normalizing Flow. If you want to get into the nitty gritty, Ricky has a really good tutorial on the stuff[0]

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06264
by deadbabe | 2025-06-27 23:54:37+00:00
And imagine that the only reason, the ONLY reason, they haven’t completely blown us away, is because our planet happens to be one of the very rare planets where the ratio of the size of our moon and earth is in such a way that you can witness a total solar eclipse as a black hole in the sky once a year, and they would like to witness this event someday.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-06-27 23:54:42+00:00
This is an insightful post, and I think maybe highlights the gap between AI proponents and me (very skeptical about AI claims). I don't have any applications where I'm willing to accept 90% as good enough. I want my tools to work 100% of the time or damn close to it, and even 90% simply is not acceptable in my book. It seems like maybe the people who are optimistic about AI simply are willing to accept a higher rate of imperfections than I am.
by refurb | 2025-06-27 23:54:45+00:00
True.

The US system has power more fragmented than most. In Europe, the Senate often doesn't wield any power (it rubber stamps anything the legislature approves). The executive is a part of the legislative.

In parliamentary system, individual MPs are "whipped" into voting with the party, and can basically be pushed out of power if they don't go along with it. If the party in power has a large majority, there is nothing but the courts to stop them from passing whatever they want.
by ggreer | 2025-06-27 23:54:54+00:00
You quoted me saying, "There's not much point in launching a datacenter into space if you can power it on the ground 24/7 with solar + batteries." and suggested, "...that the price of batteries is already cheap enough for terrestrial data centers to make more economic sense than launching a datacenter." So I replied with some napkin calculations estimating the cost of powering a datacenter 24/7 with current solar + batteries. You could assume those solar panels and batteries are on the grid, allowing excess capacity to be sold to others, but then you need another $20 million for backup generators.

I assumed the battery + solar setup would need to provide 40MW because while datacenters usually do run below capacity, you'd also want some extra capacity to account for cooling systems, battery/panel degradation, and the fact that for some tasks (such as AI training), you actually do get close to 100% capacity for long periods of time. Feel free to cut my numbers by 20%, but I don't think that would change the bottom line: off-grid datacenters could be cost competitive in some regions, but the upfront costs don't make them worthwhile right now. If battery costs go down (as I hope they will), that will likely change.

An orbital datacenter would not need significant batteries because it would be placed in a dawn-dusk sun-synchronous orbit. The panels would only be occluded during solar eclipses, which in low earth orbit last a few seconds. Starcloud is betting that launch costs will plummet but battery costs will not, and that they'll be able to cheaply solve space-specific issues related to cooling, maintenance, and reliability.

If you look at my other comments in this thread, you'll see I predict they will fail. A lot of people are coming to the same conclusion, but for mistaken reasons (eg: thinking that space-based datacenters would need as many batteries as ones on the ground). I'm just trying to correct that.
by pcollins123 | 2025-06-27 23:56:45+00:00
You could summarize that data using some form of machine learning. A good new skill to develop. Then you don’t need to share the exact details, just a count per category. E.g. personal incident (32), late take off duty to X (23), passenger medical incident (15). Hopefully in aggregate form that data is less of a privacy issue and less of a commercial risk for your company.
by bigyabai | 2025-06-27 23:58:54+00:00
> YouTube can kill a video for having the wrong medical take.

YouTube can kill a video for looking at it funny. It's a private platform and they're not beholden to hosting your content if they don't want to.

This is the problem and you're not going to solve it with crypto. People don't want to deal with ownership of their content, they want to live in a fantasy land where "throw it over the fence" information distribution exists. Someone has to host it for other people to access it, and if your contents are sufficiently insane then people won't want anything to do with you. Case in point: IPFS, lbry, rumble, etc.
by VinLucero | 2025-06-27 23:59:48+00:00
@futurisold, would love to collaborate with your team on running experiments. We have $300k of GPU credits to burn in the next 2 months.

There’s only so many cat videos my Agentic AI Army can create:

https://youtu.be/upVY1QioDeY?si=H566-_JIm7FmW4u0
by Ao7bei3s | 2025-06-28 00:01:07+00:00
I have had a question for a long time, and this may be my one chance to ask someone who actually knows how these things work.

When you were working on this, have you considered playing music that (and please don't take this the wrong way; this may be exaggerated but maybe you will understand what I mean) pre-retirement non-musicians would listen to, where the composer is still alive, and that hasn't been played in the same venue a hundred times? Looking at the Gewandhauses schedule right now, there's absolutely nothing for me.

The San Francisco Symphony plays a top-tier movie (Top Gun, Titanic, Lord of the Rings, etc.) with the film music performed live by the orchestra every few months, and I go to many of these. I got tickets for the Game of Thrones series finale concert (different venue). I absolutely loved Video Games Live, which actually has been in Leipzig too, but in the Arena, and well over a decade ago. I went to a Lindsey Stirling concert, who I knew from YouTube.

So my question is: Why can't the Gewandhaus do something like that regularly? Why can these events only be available in large cities like San Francisco? It's actually frustratingly difficult to find such events in smaller cities. Is it licensing/artist fees? Not interesting for the local musicians? Events like this reliably book out large venues several times in a row, so can it really be lack of demand? Maybe only from the wrong customers?
by layoric | 2025-06-28 00:01:41+00:00
It does have negative prices as well as interconnects between most states, but it is risky for consumers (average household) to be exposed to these price swings. I don't like retailers, but they do shield the average consumer to wild swings in prices that could 50x their daily cost.

In 2022, a lot of retailers nearly went under due to the max price of $14.4k per MWh ($14.4 per kWh, which is usually ~$0.25 for households) being sustained for a longer period cause a few producers had the market over a barrel. The federal government needed to step in and restrict the maximum price for gas (despite Australia exporting >10x more than in produces, we still have to buy it at international market rates), which flowed down to gas peakers which during times of lower than expected energy production act as short term stablisers. In this case we had multiple coal plant failures due to their age/poor upkeep, and likely some manipulation by producers.

Your average household doesn't want to have their energy consumption behaviours dictated by a market. We have a national battery program that creates a VPPs (Virtual Power Plant) and other mechanisms to enable households to somewhat benefit from these market prices and theoretically provide stability to the grid, but it is all quite complicated, and suffers from being able to be gamed. There isn't a simple solution when a market is involved because you have a group of people acting in bad faith to extract the most value for a shared resource that relies on shared infrastructure.

If the network and producers were publicly managed (like the electricity networks use to be and still are in some states), the incentives are a lot better aligned with a stable grid that is affordable for the most number of consumers. It still would be complicated, but a bunch of problems would be simplified, likely traded off for other issues.
by mjburgess | 2025-06-28 00:01:53+00:00
> misogynist

? I'm entirely unaware of your sex. I imagine many of the hysterical people in this thread are men.

> That's not how the Constitution is supposed to work.

Correct, the SC is supposed to resolve that. And in this judgement, they affirm that they will.

> What's the point of the changing the statute

If the SC wanted to make bribery constitutionally permissible, they would not have made the ruling statutory. By making a ruling on statutory interpretation they are explicitly inviting congress to over-turn their ruling by amending the law. That's deliberate.

> So if the president conspires with the AG to illegally prosecute a political enemy...

No, this is illegal and prosecutable. A "political enemy" of the person of the president (eg., trump) is a private action. You can read the decision, it has nothing to do with allowing the person-who-happens-to-be-president to do whatever they want. A very wide class of criminal actions of this person are still criminal, this is explicitly there in the judgement.

They even clearly imply many of the things trump has done are prosecutable, and iirc, this is raised in oral arguments.

I don't know where you're getting your information, but it has little to do with these SC judgments or their reasoning. The constitutional powers afforded to the president (, congress, courts) are the very foundation of the constitution. All "immunity" here means is that insofar as these powers are concerned, *obviously*, they can only be changed via a constitutional amendment.

The actions of the president, to form the executive, constitute his presidental power. Just as, eg., writing a court opinion is the power of a judge. A judge cannot "make illegal" constitutional actions of the president, just as the president cannot arrest a judge for a judgement.

Presidental immunity in this case has nothing to do with immunity of the person of the president from criminal action taken to further his private interests, that is explicitly illegal in the ruling
by ceejayoz | 2025-06-28 00:02:14+00:00
I’m not sure why this is downvoted. It’s entirely accurate.

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

> In April 2025, the second Trump administration proposed to cut funding for Roman again as part of its FY2026 budget draft. This was part of wider proposed cuts to NASA's science budget, down to US$3.9 billion from its FY2025 budget of US$7.5 billion. On April 25, 2025, the White House Office of Management and Budget announced a plan to cancel dozens of space missions, including the Roman Space Telescope, as part of the cuts.
by bloaf | 2025-06-28 00:02:34+00:00
This is great. For a long time I've had a gut feeling that there must exist a synthesis between pure functional, array, and data-oriented programming that gives you the best of all worlds:

Type safety, concise-to-the-point-of-terse code (with the types helping humans read it), and very high performance.

And this feels like a step in the right direction.
by kragen | 2025-06-28 00:03:11+00:00
Here's a quicksort in 20 lines of ARM assembly, sorting an array of integers in memory starting at [r0] and ending at [r1] (i.e., inclusive bounds):

quirks: push {r4, r5, r6, lr} 4: subs r2, r0, r1 bhs 3f @ Exit if carry set (no borrow). mov r5, r1 @ This frees up r1 as a temp. mov r6, r0 ldr r3, [r5] 1: ldr r4, [r5, r2] cmp r4, r3 @ Is element at r2 ≤ pivot? bgt 2f @ If so, swap elements at r2 and r6, ldr r1, [r6] @ Load previously first element in > side, str r4, [r6], #4 @ and postincrement r6, str r1, [r5, r2] @ and save previous element at end of > side. 2: adds r2, #4 @ Increment offset. Reached the end (>0)? ble 1b @ Loop if ≤ 0 (either N && !V && !C, or !N && V && C) subs r1, r6, #8 bl quirks @ Recursively sort left partition. mov r0, r6 mov r1, r5 b 4b @ Tail-recursively sort right partition. 3: pop {r4, r5, r6, pc}

Fully commented source with Makefile and test C program at http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/quicksort.S.
by bigyabai | 2025-06-28 00:03:27+00:00
> I cannot see on what basis my comment is wrong.

Paul Graham made a useful chart for judging whether or not your rhetoric is actually aimed downrange: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer)#/medi...

You could have started with a refutation of the point if you wanted to impress us. Instead we're 40 comments deep in a flagged comment chain because you wanted to put your ad-hominem foot forward. When you editorialize your language like that, you dilute the point to something anyone could argue over.
by NetRunnerSu | 2025-06-28 00:04:04+00:00
That's a brilliant and crucial point. You've pinpointed the central dialectic of this architecture: the trade-off between stability (resisting catastrophic forgetting) and plasticity (updating core beliefs).

You are absolutely right that a poorly configured model could become "dogmatic," incapable of escaping an early "cult" indoctrination. This cognitive rigidity, however, is not a hardcoded flaw but a tunable personality trait .

This is where the remaining hyperparameters come into play. We still define:

1. The initial `learning_rate`, setting its baseline openness.

2. The `sigma_threshold` for the surprise EMA, which defines its "trust window." (This can be adjusted at any time! It does not affect any past training progression. For generative models, such as LLMs, you can even try to let them specify themselves)

A narrow sigma creates a conservative, "skeptical" model, while a wider sigma creates a more "open-minded" one that is more willing to entertain paradigm shifts. So, the paradigm shift is this: we are no longer micromanaging how the model learns moment-to-moment. Instead, we are defining its cognitive temperament or learning style. Your "crisis of faith" mechanism is the logical next step—a meta-learning process we are actively exploring. Thank you for the incredibly sharp insight.