MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by toomuchtodo | 2025-06-28 19:07:48+00:00
> This question assumes Europe is already better than America. That is still debatable, and need to be defined well. Better in what?

60 percent of Americans can't afford a basic quality of life [1] [2]. 770k are homeless [3]. 14 million children suffer from food insecurity [4]. ~4 million children suffer from homelessness [5]. 62% of bankruptcies are from medical debt [6]. ~48k people die every year due to lack of health insurance.

Europe is better for the human, objectively. If you're wealthy, desire to be wealthy, or want to cosplay being wealthy, certainly, the US is better.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cost-of-living-income-quality-o...

[2] https://lisep.org/mql

[3] https://usich.gov/guidance-reports-data/data-trends

[4] https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/child-hunge...

[5] https://www.ncsl.org/human-services/youth-homelessness-overv...

[6] https://www.amjmed.com/article/S0002-93430900525-7/fulltext
by sargstuff | 2025-06-28 19:08:00+00:00
Access/search for data within json blob is non-sequential/random, kinda defeating whole purpose of using database. Not efficent way to update json if json larger than original size aka cache coherency issues.

Essentially using a database as a file system[0].

[0] : postgres fuse file system : https://github.com/petere/postgresqlfs
by sh34r | 2025-06-28 19:08:03+00:00
That word, “healthier,” is doing a lot of lifting in the parent comment. I read it in the maximally-utilitarian viewpoint, in which all the individual harm is completely ignored, and all we’re talking about is the collective health of society.

Few people should want to live in a society which completely disregards the individual in favor of the collective. It is an inherently totalitarian worldview. It has inspired some of the worst atrocities in human history, including eugenics in the USA and Nazi Germany, and de-kulakization in Ukraine.

In discussing such things with authoritarians, I think bringing up your lived experience just triggers their impulse for cruelty. Instead, I’d point out that totalitarian societies that cover up macro and micro level human rights abuses have always underperformed more “liberal” (as in freedom, not politics) societies in the long run.

Ireland was a broken, impoverished backwater, backing in the days of the Magdalene laundries and Catholic theocracy. I’m talking mid-20th century, for those who are not familiar. Now it’s one of the richest countries in the world. It is not a coincidence that America’s least repressed, most godless city, San Francisco, is also its richest. There is a causal link between prosperity and not burying all the skeletons in your closet (individually and collectively).
by tucnak | 2025-06-28 19:08:06+00:00
Reminds me of PG-Strom[1] which is a Postgres extension for GPU-bound index access methods (most notably BRIN, select GIS functions) and the like; it relies on proprietary NVIDIA GPUDirect tech for peer-to-peer PCIe transactions between the GPU and NVMe devices. I'm not sure whether amdgpu kernel driver has this capability in the first place, and last I checked (~6 mo. ago) ROCm didn't have this in software.

However, I wonder whether the GPU's are a good fit for this to begin with.

Counterpoint: Xilinx side of the AMD shop has developed Alveo-series accelerators which used to be pretty basic SmartNIC platforms, but have since evolved to include A LOT more programmable logic and compute IP. You may have heard about these in video encoding applications, HFT, Blockchain stuff, what-have-you. A lot of it has to with AI stuff, see Versal[2]. Raw compute figures are often cited as "underwhelming," and it's unfortunate that so many pundits are mistaking the forest for the trees here. I don't think the AI tiles in these devices are really meant for end-to-end LLM inference, even though memory bandwidth in the high-end devices allows it.

The sauce is compute-in-network over fabrics.

Similarly to how PG-Strom would feed the GPU with relational data from disk, or network directly, many AI teams on the datacenter side are now experimenting with data movement, & intermediate computations (think K/V cache management) over 100/200/800+G fabrics. IMHO, compute-in-network is the MapReduce of this decade. Obviously, there's demand for it in the AI space, but a lot of it lends nicely to the more general-purpose applications, like databases. If you're into experimental networking like that, Corundum[3] by Alex Forencich is a great, perhaps the best, open source NIC design for up to 100G line rate. Some of the cards it supports also expose direct-attach NVMe's over MCIO for latency, and typically have as many as two, or four SFP28 ports for bandwidth.

This is a bit naive way to think about it, but it would have to do!

Postgres is not typically considered to "scale well," but oftentimes this is a statement about its tablespaces more than anything; it has foreign data[4] API, which is how you extend Postgres as single point-of-consumption, foregoing some transactional guarantees in the process. This is how pg_analytics[5] brings DuckDB to Postgres, or how Steampipe[6] similarly exposes many Cloud and SaaS applications. Depending on where you stand on this, the so-called alternative SQL engines may seem like moving in the wrong direction. Shrug.

[1] https://heterodb.github.io/pg-strom/

[2] https://xilinx.github.io/AVED/latest/AVED%2BOverview.html

[3] https://github.com/corundum/corundum

[4] https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Foreign_data_wrappers

[5] https://github.com/paradedb/pg_analytics

[6] https://hub.steampipe.io/#plugins
by DeathRay2K | 2025-06-28 19:08:06+00:00
The author doesn’t suggest it, but the implicit solution is public funding for social goods.

That could be through a robust grant process, providing funding for social media that is not supported other ways.

Alternately, it could be through a UBI, giving people basic cash flow that could be allocated to paid social media platforms rather than everyone relying on ad-supported social media.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-28 19:08:14+00:00
> idea that the injustice & domination should continue because there is no clear cut solution is pure evil

It’s prioritisation. There are multiple horrible civil wars, rebellions and displacements happening around the world right now. Every person doesn’t need to have a position on each one; there is an argument that’s counterproductive. (Exhibit A: the Columbia protests.)
by Voultapher | 2025-06-28 19:08:16+00:00
If Russia were to win the war and a Ukrainian underground would launch "guerrilla attacks" against Russia, they would be lauded as heros. Now here we have a somewhat similar story, of a foreign invader that displaced the local people not too long ago and a remaining native opposition. There is no version of this that will end up with the Palestinians getting a fair outcome. I've calling this a genocide quite early on, sadly it looks like I was right and there is probably many condemning details we aren't yet aware of.
by johncole | 2025-06-28 19:08:36+00:00
> While some people might worry about an AI apocalypse,

Wait, so if you’re worried about an ai apocalypse, you’re not using it. What does that solve?

> Steffen and Wells found that most non-users are more concerned with issues like trusting the results, missing the human touch or feeling unsure if GenAI is ethical to use.

Are the ethical users avoiding LLMs entirely? Or only for certain use cases?
by lazyeye | 2025-06-28 19:08:46+00:00
It's more than this.

You may think your job's not at risk because you're a plumber. But you're not realising that you will be competing with millions of new plumbers fleeing AI-decimated industries pushing down wages dramatically.

And what if China wins on AI and now Huawei can produce tech gear that is dramatically superior/cheaper to global competitors. So now Chinese tech dominates the globe giving enormous power and control to the the CCP.
by bwfan123 | 2025-06-28 19:09:23+00:00
> I’m curious if the author would consider that these lofty caveats may be more plausible today than they were when the text was written.

What is missed by many and highlighted in the article is the following: that there is no way to be "precise" with natural languages. The "operational definition" of precision involves formalism. For example, I could describe to you in english how an algorithm works, and maybe you understand it. But for you to precisely run that algorithm requires some formal definition of a machine model and steps involved to program it.

The machine model for english is undefined ! and this could be considered a feature and not a bug. ie, It allows a rich world of human meaning to be communicated. Whereas, formalism limits what can be done and communicated in that framework.
by originalvichy | 2025-06-28 19:10:01+00:00
The term ”mowing the lawn”[1] has been used to describe their long term strategy, so I can ”excuse” someone for thinking that they can’t control the situation, but it’s been a tactic for a long time.

HN readers can recognize the tactic in other parts of our world too. It’s the strategy of people in power who believe they can control the chaos. When chaos in one group is a benefit to the other, chaos becomes a worthy status quo. When your military is infinitely more powerful, any uprising can eventually be exhausted, and you get automatic casus belli. The Cold War was full of this destabilizing politics, where superpowers tried their best to turn functioning socities into hellholes, in the hopes that it would spread in the enemy’s region. The same works for Israel. The less legitimacy Gaza and the West Bank Palestinians have, the longer they can keep building settlements. If they ever gain independence, it will cause another war, which has been planned for, because settlements have been overwhelmingly built on higher ground. Illegal settlers will not give up easily, and will likely gain military assistance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mowing_the_grass
by bc569a80a344f9c | 2025-06-28 19:10:07+00:00
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250628599766/en/HPE...

Press release.

It’s interesting that this requires HPE to divest from Instant On, which is their SMB brand. It’s unclear how that alone maintains a competitive landscape for enterprise customers that largely would have chosen Aruba’s more traditional offering.

That said, it’ll be interesting to see what use cases for data centers they come up with. Mist is one of very few infrastructure providers I’ve seen where AI/ML features actually improve operations. Surprisingly often in ways that I’m puzzled competitors have not been able to duplicate: something as simple as sending all access point logs through outlier detection and automated triage to proactively send RMAs for broken hardware before the customer even complains.
by dcminter | 2025-06-28 19:10:58+00:00
Oh, well that's super interesting, thanks; I guess some side effect of the high degree of parallelism? Anyway, I guess I need to do a bit more than dabble.

> I think if you're a programmer or not matters less, more about understanding how the LLMs actually work in order to understand that.

Sounds like I need to understand them better then as I merely had different misaprehensions than those. More reading for me...
by inoshy | 2025-06-28 19:12:49+00:00
Available on Microsoft Store: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9P129QZVMSHF

Hi, maker of Rose Player here. I was growing tired of VLC and KM Player (it got infested with ads recently). My problem with VLC was the lacking of thumbnail preview. and their fix step seek, the after-seek effect felt laggy for some videos, and i generally did not like the clutter (albeit bearable for a free software).

KM Player was a very good player for me, it was fast and repeated seek felt better, but after the original author sold it, it was infested with ads. KM Player did not have the thumbnail preview as well.

Then I found MPC-HC. it's under developed and archived in 2017, but man it was so insanely well engineered, saying this as a marketshare competitor does not make me ashamed. It did right most things, but I did not like the UX, I had to hold down arrow button significant amount of time for repeated seeking. MPC has thumbnail preview, but I did not like how they did it, it has a weird debounce that makes me pull my hair when i do hovering.

I then decided to make Rose Player. I was hesitant whether I should make it cross-platform, but I thought I should focus on solving the pain points first, all the problems I faced with former video players. I made it with C++, with WinUI 3. I am proud to say Rose Player has a very refreshing UX, no-lag seeking and shows instant thumbnail preview. Its light, weighs under 3mb. Get it on Microsoft Store and see if you like it :) It has 2 weeks free trial.

If you have tried it, and have feedback, positive or negative, please share in the comments. As a token of appreciation, I will give a free coupon for Rose Player for first ten feedback :)
by alexeldeib | 2025-06-28 19:12:57+00:00
The "first" link (after the home button) on bbchallenge is the header bar link to https://bbchallenge.org/story which cites Aaronson in the first sentence (double first!). I would not describe it like OP for someone trying to find the actual link ;)

"One Collatz Coincidence", the 2nd story on the blog, also mentions Aaronson
by tialaramex | 2025-06-28 19:13:01+00:00
One of the reasons I like the use of the number line in schools is that on the line it's more obvious when you're shown addition and multiplication and then later exponeniation that this is a pattern. With the number line, two natural questions arise and, hopefully by the time you're taught exponentiation the Math teacher knows enough math to confidently affirm the answer to both. Yes, it keeps going like this forever, that's called Hyperoperation. And yes, we did (probably) skip one, it's known as Successor-of and you were probably not explicitly shown this operator but it's the near end of that infinite succession.

When arithmetic is introduced just as a way to, for example, count money, it's more directly practical in the moment, but you're not seeing the larger pattern.
by kerng | 2025-06-28 19:13:08+00:00
When I read about MCP the first time and saw that it requires a "tools/list" API reminded me of COM/DCOM/ActiveX from Microsoft, it had things like QueryInterface and IDispatch. And I'm sure that wasn't the first time someone came up with dynamic runtime discovery of APIs a server offers.

Interestingly, ActiveX was quite the security nightmare for very similar reasons actually, and we had to deal with infamous "DLL Hell". So, history repeats itself.
by TimorousBestie | 2025-06-28 19:13:18+00:00
Work kind of guilt-tripped me into giving it a shot and my experience with Claude was such a time-waster that I’ve kinda been ignoring it and continuing to do my own thing.

Maybe other people are better at prompting or designing VSCode integrations but what I’ve experienced so far has been a mess. Utterly nonsensical design decisions, it doesn’t seem to understand basic linear algebra or the LAPACK API. (I tried adding the Fortran or C source to its context to no avail.) I asked it to rewrite a well-documented scalar function using AVX intrinsics and. . . woof. No good.

Hopefully the field either improves dramatically in a couple years or goes back into hibernation for the next AI winter.
by bruce511 | 2025-06-28 19:13:33+00:00
Simplistically yes, because many see copyright as the thing that protects corporate interest from the social hacker.

The reality of course is more complicated. Without copyright there's no GPL. Which I guess is fine if you're in the OSS camp more than the FSF camp. MIT and BSD licenses basically (functionally) give up copyright.

Copyright is also what allows for hybrids like the BSL which protect "little guys" from large cloud providers like AWS etc.

Copyright allows VC startups to at least start out life as Open Source (before pivoting later.)

Of course thus is all in the context of software copyright. Other copyrights (music, books etc) are equally nuanced.

And there are other forms of IP protections as well (patents, trademarks) which are distinct from the copyright concept.

So no, I don't think most people here are against copyright (patents are a different story.)
by gpm | 2025-06-28 19:13:40+00:00
Even at temperature != 0 it's trivial to just use a fixed seed in the RNG... it's just a computer being used in a naive, not even multi threaded (i.e. with race conditions), way.

I wouldn't be surprised to find out different stacks multiple fp16s slightly differently or something. Getting determinism across machines might take some work... but there's really nothing magic going on here.
by bmacho | 2025-06-28 19:14:22+00:00
Let S be a statement. S is called semidecidible (also: Turing recognizable, most commonly "recursively enumerable", abbreviated as "r.e.", but I hate that one) if there is a Turing machine that halts if and only if S is true.

With this definition, we can say that "ZFC is inconsistent" is semidecidible: you run a program that searches for a contradiction.

The question BB(748) =/= 1000 is similarly semidecidable. You can run a program that will rule out 1000 if it is not BB(748).

So they are in the same "category", at least regarding their undecidability.

Also, if you turn "ZFC is consistent" into a number: {1 if ZFC is consistent; 0 if ZFC is inconsistent}, you will see, that BB(748) is not very much different, both are defined (well, equivalently) using the halting of Turing machines, or, the result of an infinite search.
by rShergold | 2025-06-28 19:15:34+00:00
Back in the early 2000s lots of websites had an unauthenticated "guestbook" feature where visitors could leave a message. As soon as Google and page rank became a thing bots would drive by and leave links to the website they were promoting. The idea was to increase the number of backlinks and thus improve your Google rank.

The fix to this was shockingly simple. Add an input box with a standard name like "title" and then hide it with CSS. The bots would always provide a value for every input. If you saw a value for your hidden input you returned 200 but never added the post to your website.
by notjoemama | 2025-06-28 19:15:45+00:00
I've noticed this too. I wonder if it is the difference in experience levels. It feels odd seeing excitement at rediscovering a (what you and I think of as well-known) solution. To be fair, I was that kid at one time too. Still, it feels a bit like these more simple things ought to be taught at university so new grads can focus more on solving domain problems.

I suppose, combine this with pressure from public or private investment, and the way to get ahead is to package anything into a prospect of revenue generation. I'm sure that's part of it too. Everything has to monetize because some business school graduate hasn't "made it" until they have a yacht like their ivy league friends.

Eh, probably comes across as curmudgeonly or "who moved my cheese". But if there is an area that can improve this longstanding problem in tech, my guess is teaching the right skills and concepts at the collegiate level. And that's not a simple thing either.

Edit > reading a bit more, this focuses on chat applications and seems to be a decent caching implementation tailored to that domain, of which, I'm guessing will allow AT&T and Verizon to save money on their gobsmackingly horrible AI chat bot in their mobile app. As an individual, it's unclear how this benefits me though. I don't think it does. ME: asks chat bot question about insurance coverage, CHATBOT: immediately serves canned response in no time about how that's covered in my individual insurance plan which I read more about on their website (pro-tip: no, I can't, those details are actually never on the website)
by originalvichy | 2025-06-28 19:15:49+00:00
For as long as countries like Israel stand against giving Palestinians a legitimate state, militias and terror groups will continue to rise. The US showed that it was possible to fight an insurgency as an occupying force without resorting to literally levelling cities. It was not easy, it took more lives than they hoped, but they did it anyway, because they at least acted like war crimes out in the open was off limits.
by mrweasel | 2025-06-28 19:16:55+00:00
I'd go on further, we cannot have advertising as a business model, targeted or not. It worked previously, classic Google was a good example, but mixed with shareholders, it doesn't work, incentives screw up any attempt of providing a better product, because the product become the ad space.

Throwing Musk in there is strange. To my knowledge he doesn't really profit of ads, X probably have ad revenue, but that's not really his business model. Tesla stock however, that's a completely different addiction, mostly not relevant to consumers, but that stuff is immune to any type of common sense and traders can't seem to get enough of it.
by yongjik | 2025-06-28 19:17:14+00:00
WTF, Yoonies? In my HN?

For anyone who wants a quick recap: South Korea's previous president Yoon had a brain fart and declared martial law last December, citing (among other things) a baseless conspiracy theory that said Chinese agents infiltrated Korean voting system to make the liberal Democratic Party win the previous legislative election.

Thankfully, the lawmakers literally jumped the wall to gather and declare the martial law void, so it was overthrown in hours, and long story short, the constitutional court universally agreed that Yoon committed treason, he was kicked out, we had an election, and (to no one's surprise) we got a new president from the Democratic Party, president Lee Jae-Myung.

There are still a handful of idiots who believe in Yoon's baseless election conspiracy theories. Last time I heard, they were reporting politicians, actors, singers, or basically everyone who came out against the martial law to CIA, for the crime of aiding China.

For some inexplicable reason, CIA isn't launching an immediate intervention to restore Yoon in power. I wonder why.
by somat | 2025-06-28 19:18:48+00:00
For myself I just spool up a galene instance when I want to video chat someone, (honestly almost never, so not really a great recommendation ). but it is pretty easy to get running on my obsd vps.

https://galene.org/

The theory is that instead of sitting on some third party centralized video chat service, I can sit on my own, and if anybody wants to talk they can "call" me by joining in. I theory I would "call" them by joining their instance, but... yeah, you can stop laughing now. but yeah, it does turn out that I am only one in my small circle of friends and family who likes running a server.
by pico303 | 2025-06-28 19:19:34+00:00
I’m a dev working with AI to build tools for others, but I don’t use them personally. Why? Because they make your writing sound like everyone else, they produce shoddy and broken code (unless you’re doing something really commonplace), and they dull your own creativity. If you’re relying on someone else to do your work, you’re going to lose the ability to think for yourself.

AI is built essentially on averages. It’s the summary of the most common approach to everything. All the art, writing, podcasts, and code look the same. Is that the bland, unimaginative world we’re looking for?

I love the bit in the study about the “fear” of AI. I’m not “afraid” it’ll produce bad code. I know it will; I’ve seen it do it 100 times. AI is fine as one tool to help you learn and think about things, but don’t use it as a replacement for thinking and learning in the first place.
by tromp | 2025-06-28 19:20:18+00:00
What makes BB(748) independent of ZFC is not its value, but the fact that one of the 748-state machines (call it TM_ZFC_INC) looks for an inconsistency (proof of FALSE) in ZFC and only halts upon finding one.

Thus, any proof that BB(748) = N must either show that TM_ZF_INC halts within N steps or never halts. By Gödel's famous results, neither of those cases is possible if ZFC is assumed to be consistent.