MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ilaksh | 2025-06-11 05:30:20+00:00
Obviously there are going to be narrow tasks where fine tuning makes sense. But using leading models for agents is a completely different mindset and approach.

Because I have been working on replacing multiple humans handling complex business processes mostly end-to-end (with human in the loop somehow in there).

I find that I need the very best models to be able to handle a lot of instructions and make the best decisions about tool selection. And overall I just need the most intelligence possible to make fewer weird errors or misinterpretations of the instructions or situations/data.

I can see how fine tuning would help for some issues like some report formatting. But that output comes at the end of the whole process. And I can address formatting issues almost instantly by either just using a smarter model that follows instructions better, or adding a reminder instruction, or creating a simpler subtask. Sometimes the subtask can run on a cheaper model.

So it's kind of like the difference between building a traditional manufacturing line with very specific robot arms, tooling and and conveyor belts, versus plugging in just a few different humanoid robots with assembly manuals and access to more general purposes tools on their belt. You used to always have to build the full traditional line. In many cases that doesn't necessarily make sense anymore.
by kazinator | 2025-06-11 05:31:29+00:00
CPPFLAGS and CXXFLAGS are different. CPPFLAGS are for options for the C preprocessor, regardless of what language it is being used for. CXXFLAGS are for C++. The XX's are ++ rotated 45 degrees.

Don't be fooled by the convention used in some necks of the woods of a .cpp suffix for C++ files; CPPFLAGS have to do with the "cpp" program, not the .cpp suffix.

LDLIBS is sister to LDFLAGS. Both these variables hold options for the linker command line destructured into two groups: LDFLAGS are the early options that go before the object files. LDLIBS are the -l options that give libraries, like -lssl -ldl -lcrypto ... these go after the object files.

If you're writing a Makefile, with your own custom recipes for linking, be sure you interpolate both LDFLAGS and LDLIBS in the right places.
by lmm | 2025-06-11 05:32:33+00:00
> Imagine if the Sydney Opera House or Carnegie Hall looked "inoffensive" rather than majestic.

Doesn't sound like a big problem. Some of the best plays and operas I've seen have been in bland concrete boxes, portakabins, round the back of pubs.... Of course all else being equal I'd prefer a building to look good, but good stage visibility and acoustics beats a flashy building every time.
by zzo38computer | 2025-06-11 05:33:03+00:00
DOS does have the benefits mentioned in that article; modern computers do have too many complicated things that are too much required. However, I have some further comments.

> MS-DOS requires only 3 files to boot: IO.SYS, MSDOS.SYS, and COMMAND.COM.

Yes, although it is helpful to have other files, such as DEBUG. These are still smaller and faster files than a lot of modern ones, though.

> Run CPU opcodes natively

Other operating systems do too; most systems use native code. They mention the executable file format, which has to do with the operating system rather than how the CPU executes the program.

DOS has COM and EXE format. COM format is just the plain program code that runs, although there is still how the operating system is setting up the memory and stuff for running the program; it still isn't quite directly. EXE format is a more complicated format.

> Not to mention the fact that Linux is hard to fit in real mode because the kernel is so large. Getting it into 1 MB of memory is a trick. The MS-DOS kernel fits into a fraction of that space, with room to spare.

This is a benefit of DOS (it doesn't need a too large kernel), although there is also unreal mode, in case you want to be like real mode with more memory.
by sudomateo | 2025-06-11 05:34:01+00:00
The more I compare Material 3 Expressive to Liquid Glass the more I'm excited to switch back to a Pixel. I'm a fan of the use of color, motions, and different shapes versus transparency, minimal contrast, and little color.

I'm on a iPhone 13 Pro Max right now that's still doing well but starting to show battery capacity age. Plus, it's the only non-USB-C device I own so I'd be happy to get rid of it.
by necovek | 2025-06-11 05:34:44+00:00
It's mostly about your UEFI firmware coming with a set of trusted CAs to verify bootloader is built by one of the trusted parties like Microsoft or Canonical or Redhat or...

You can turn it off, or make it into trust-once and sign your own bootloader, and avoid the risk of bootkit getting installed ever, except with exploits like these.
by throwaway290 | 2025-06-11 05:35:33+00:00
> for human eyes only - anyone who lets any AI train on, or even consider, any text in these ranges goes straight to jail. Fnord, "that doesn't look like anything to me".

Won't work because on day 0 someone will write a conversion library and apparently if you are big enough and have enough lawyers you can just ignore the jail threat (all popular LLMs just scrape internet and skip licensing any text or code. Show me one that isn't)
by Teever | 2025-06-11 05:35:45+00:00
> There are other self-reinforcing loops at play. The economic value creation has started a flywheel of compounding infrastructure buildout to run these increasingly-powerful AI systems. And robots that can build other robots (and in some sense, datacenters that can build other datacenters) aren’t that far off.

> If we have to make the first million humanoid robots the old-fashioned way, but then they can operate the entire supply chain—digging and refining minerals, driving trucks, running factories, etc.—to build more robots, which can build more chip fabrication facilities, data centers, etc, then the rate of progress will obviously be quite different.

It's really cool to hear a public figure seriously talk about self-replicating machines. To me this is the key to unlocking human potential and ending material scarcity.

If you owned a pair of robots that with sufficient spare parts could repair each other and do other useful work you could effectively do anything by using them to do all the things necessary to build copies of themselves.

Once we as a species have exponential growth on that we can do anything. Clean energy, Carbon sequestration, Von Neumann probes, asteroid mining, O'Neill Cylinders, it's all possible.
by torginus | 2025-06-11 05:36:35+00:00
Just slept on this article and realized something.

There are two wildly popular management methodologies in IT (and probably other places), which can be grouped into constraint-based like agile, scrum, where the focus is not on individual deadlines, but getting a consistent performance out of employees, and goal-based, with project managers and deadlines.

I wouldn't exactly say either style is uncontroversially popular, and depends on the needs of the project, with greenfield projects requiring a goal-based approach, and maintenance/feature dev of existing ones leaning more towards agile (there's a lot more of the latter, that's why agile's popular).

For what works for you, well that's up to you. I'm a wildly inconsistent person by nature, whether playing to my strengths or covering my weaknesses is a better approach, that's once again not an easy question to answer.
by Nevermark | 2025-06-11 05:38:06+00:00
It would be very interesting to fine tune a model for a narrow task, while tracking its performance on every original training sample from the pre-tuning baseline.

I expect it would greatly help characterize what was lost, at the expense of a great deal of extra computation. But with enough experiments might shed some more general light.

I suspect the smaller the tuning dataset, the faster and worse the overwriting will be, since the new optimization surface will be so much simpler to navigate than the much bigger datasets optimization surface.

Then a question might be, what percentage of the original training data, randomly retained, might slow general degradation.
by dang | 2025-06-11 05:39:48+00:00
We're going to stop using X to refer to Spring, but I haven't figured out how to do that in the standard title format yet, so I'm punting till next year.

I wonder if we should just change the format to "YC YY", e.g. "YC 25" for 2025, and stop including a letter for the batch.

"(YC Spring 2025)" is too long for HN titles!
by rednafi | 2025-06-11 05:40:08+00:00
Python is basically the only language that’s used to train the models.

Sure, the libs are mostly written in C/C++, but all of them have first-class support for Python and oftentimes Python only. Serving the model is a different story and you can use whatever language to do so.

As someone who has worked in the DS realm for an extended period of time, I can tell you Python has practically zero competition when it comes to data wrangling and training models. There are plenty of contenders when it comes to serving the models or building “agents.”

As for type checking, yeah, it sucks big time. TS is a much better type system than the bolted-on hints in Python. But it’s still JS at the end of the day. All the power of V8, a zillion other runtimes, and TS gets marred by a terribly designed language.
by dennis_jeeves2 | 2025-06-11 05:40:08+00:00
Replying to your previous message since it's grayed out and responding is not possible.

>I have never been more pessimistic about the future of cancer treatment. >We had a great run over the past few decades.

I doubt that - barring few cancers I hear that most of the so called progress is primarily because early detection - resulting in artificially bolstering the 'survival' rate.

> IMHO, were customized therapeutic vaccines to target the unique mixture of mutations in a tumor

I doubt that. Cancer is a _systemic_ disease akin to ageing ( infact one could argue that cancer is one of the symptoms of aging ). While some conventional techniques may show short term promise, I doubt if it will ever be a long term solution. Long term solutions may involve similar intervention that will also work in stopping ageing.
by kelnos | 2025-06-11 05:40:55+00:00
This seems kinda silly? And some of the examples are not really true?

> MS-DOS requires only 3 files to boot

You can do it in two for Linux. The kernel image itself (packaged as a bootable EFI program if you want to keep it simple and avoid a bootloader), and then an initramfs (built into the kernel image) that has busybox in it. Ok, I guess the 'sh' symlink you'll need to boot into is technically a third file. So it's a tie.

Yes, this Linux setup will be very limited and annoying to use, but so will a DOS setup that only has the three DOS boot files mentioned.

> Boot in under 5 seconds

The setup I describe above will boot in much less than 5 seconds. DOS may still boot faster, but the difference will likely be imperceptible, especially if you compile a Linux kernel that has hardware support capabilities similar to the bare-minimum three-file DOS setup.

> Use commands without spaces [...] This is a big deal, even if it might not seem like it.

I don't see this as a big deal, and I'm not sure why this is all that useful or important. If someone really wanted to, they could write a shell or a shell wrapper that could allow you to do stuff like this, but it's telling that no one has bothered.

> Run CPU opcodes natively

I'm again not sure why this is useful enough to be necessary, but sure, let's just say I lack imagination here and give this point to DOS.

I'm sure if I wanted I could write a kernel module or maybe even a binfmt_misc setup that would make this work, though presumably at the expense of the default behavior, which treats non-ELF (or otherwise unsupported) files as shell scripts. Again, it's telling that no one has bothered.

I'll also note that, while yes, DOS will run .COM files, which are basically just a list of machine instructions, most software distributed for DOS, at least in its later years, used the MZ/.EXE format. Certainly that doesn't make it so DOS can't run machine code directly anymore, but, again, it's telling that the more "complicated" format ended up being used more commonly. Maybe that means there's something useful about it. Like its ability to be larger thank 64KiB.

> Linux generally doesn't run in real mode.

Which is fine, and good. The author's justification for why it's better/useful that DOS allows this sounds like the usual elitist "programmers should just be perfect and make sure they never write programs that have any memory-safety bugs" nonsense that I hear some people use to justify writing C code when there are suitable alternatives that are safer.

Regarding getting the Linux kernel to fit in real mode, I imagine if you are setting up a Linux computer so it can do a similar level of things that DOS can do, you can probably disable a lot of kernel options and get it down far enough in size.

DOS was a great OS. I used it a ton in the '80s, and even when we were able to get a copy of Windows 3.0, I still mostly used DOS. It had its place in history, but trying to compare it to Linux is about as apples-and-oranges as it gets.
by zevv | 2025-06-11 05:41:56+00:00
This article is partly wrong, and partly nonsense. Apples and oranges. But still:

> Work with only 3 files [...] Boot in under 5 seconds [...] Use commands without spaces [...] Run CPU opcodes natively [...] Be real

I have a little PCB here on my desk that runs linux with 2 files: vmlinux and busybox. It boots in about two seconds and yes, it runs CPU opcodes natively.

I'm not sure how being able to use commands without spaces or running in real mode is considered better or worse than the alternatives.
by kazinator | 2025-06-11 05:42:17+00:00
Real mode is "bad" because it emulates a crappy processor from 1976 with a weird 16 bit segmented model in which a segment address is multiplied by 16 and added to the offset address, leading to 4096 ways of expressing the same pointer.

A real mode that provides a sane 32 or 64 bit address space, with the MMU disabled, would be totally cool.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-06-11 05:43:57+00:00
I’m tempted to emulate a conventional SIMD solution and go with a small lookup table:

uint8_t classify(uint8_t c) { return c - (0x5F45452B2B210000ULL >> ((c & 0x70) >> 1)); }

The AND-then-shift sequence on the right is annoying and it feels like one should be able to avoid it, but I don’t see how. Overall, this is more expensive than it looks—neither a full 64-bit constant nor a variable 64-bit shift are exactly free. So I’m probably missing something here.
by rashunain | 2025-06-11 05:44:13+00:00
Daily current affairs updates are available in English, including news headlines, GK questions, and answers. Overall, the Current Affairs 11 June 2025 covers a range of topics, including national and international news, sports, education, and daily current affairs quizzes. It is essential to stay updated with the latest news and developments to remain informed and prepared for competitive exams and other challenges.
by atmosx | 2025-06-11 05:46:09+00:00
In many cases, people are satisfied with responses that are almost or somewhat correct. That's a valid approach - that's exactly how prometheus monitoring works (pull-based metrics): we don't see the details of that spike, just the big picture and that's good enough and cheap in a sea of datapoints where pods come and go...

It feels like another example of regression toward the mean in our society. At the same time, this creates a valuable opportunity for diligent, detail-oriented professionals to truly stand out.
by TowerTall | 2025-06-11 05:46:36+00:00
< In MS-DOS, you can type a command like "cd.." to move up a level, and it will work fine. In Linux, it will not; you need to type "cd ..". The different is the space in between.

That little detail is what I find most annoying when switching from Windows to Linux while having a life time of windows muscle memory in your fingers.
by DaSexiestAlive | 2025-06-11 05:47:27+00:00
I often get puzzled when I hear that the firmware on Nikon cameras are essentially DOS programs, I guess from checking out this list I get why.

Perhaps there would be advantages to having DOS got re-written in Rust? No more hand-crafted machine language or c/C++... I wonder if the world is ready for DOS everywhere :)
by wqaatwt | 2025-06-11 05:47:56+00:00
Well if the constitution does not explicitly grant a certain right it can’t just appear out of nowhere? At this point it’s about the “spirit” of the constitution not what is in the document itself since there is no mention of presidential immunity.

On the other hand it does grant the members of congress immunity under certain circumstances so it’s unlikely they just forgot about the president when writing it.
by Mehuleo | 2025-06-11 05:48:19+00:00
This is definitely bad. But on a different note, I think this was inevitable, as the new generation's attention span keeps dropping rapidly with all the TikTok and Instagram shorts. I believe publishers will need to figure out shorter written content formats as well. Until then, Google and others that offer alternatives will have an edge. I'm not saying this is the only way forward—just part of the evolution. I believe publishers will evolve to adapt to this too.
by Tor3 | 2025-06-11 05:49:09+00:00
On the other hand, when Linux was new (I switched to Linux in early 1992), you could install it all on a floppy and boot in a few seconds. Not much difference really. Just way more flexible with a Linux floppy than a DOS one.. I kept a Linux floppy around for doing various stuff with problematic PCs.

It's way more important (or was, at the time) that MS-DOS could run on 8088/8086 and '286, unlike regular Linux.
by leakycap | 2025-06-11 05:49:22+00:00
There was a recently discovered issue with the tape layer (IIRC) on many lithium ion batteries across dozens of battery manufacturers.

I think this was about 3 years ago now; batteries from any device manufactured more recently than that likely has the tape layer issue resolved and no longer will balloon up again.

Be sure you do something like an outlet timer to let the battery discharge to at least 40% once a week, even keeping a device at 80% constantly is not great.
by 1659447091 | 2025-06-11 05:49:53+00:00
> Adding an iphone into the package is not increasing costs ridiculously.

I'm hoping this was some sort of sarcasm; its amusing at least.

Adding an iphone "into the package" like these extremely violent cartels who will steal another cartels group of migrants, demand a ransom, and then execute them when the ransom is refused for being more than the group is worth to them -- is going to "throw in" an iphone with the, I guess, deluxe package? Many are trafficked into indentured servitude to pay off that fee, no one is throwing in an iphone. just wow.

> won't see them with iPhones unless/until it helps them get into the US

The above aside, not sure how or why they would want a tracking device on them and how that is suppose to help them sneak in. Paper is so much easier & cheaper
by Mashimo | 2025-06-11 05:50:23+00:00
Most of the shelf 3D printers just read g-code: https://all3dp.com/2/3d-printer-g-code-commands-list-tutoria...

Simplified they just get thousands of commands from which position to which position to move a toolhead, at what speed and how much plastic to extrude.

They would have to re-create the 3d model from those commands and compare them to banned ones? But then the firmware is often open source or at least can be flashed. And also how would the printer know if it's a toy gun or a real gun? Or just a part for a gun.

Paper printers / copiers refuse to copy money because the government controls the source, the paper money. They add small dots on them.

The government can't add those dots to self made 3d models.
by yeahforsureman | 2025-06-11 05:50:24+00:00
Yeah, accents, dialects, preserving history and mutual intelligibility by retaining old or original forms of spelling or otherwise... Lots of reasons for being conservative here.

What's your accent btw? In "standard" English, 'the' has a voiced consonant, whereas 'thing' is unvoiced.

EDIT: Sorry, I now see you already told about your regional accent.
by jacobsenscott | 2025-06-11 05:51:01+00:00
The problem with LLMs is the answer always sounds right, no matter if it is or isn't. If you already know the answer to a question it is kind of fun to see an LLM get lucky and cobble together a correct answer. But they are otherwise useless - you need to do all the same work you would do anyway to check the LLM's "answer".
by elric | 2025-06-11 05:52:28+00:00
Great that treatment options are improving. But there are still serious bottlenecks in medicine. It seems to be a universal truth that getting a CT/MRI comes with a long wait time. General Practitioners often wait too long to order imaging as a result, and they are often unwilling to even consider cancer in younger people.

We need better (earlier) detection and faster access to it.
by 3036e4 | 2025-06-11 05:53:04+00:00
I agree with much, but not everything. Some of it was a bit silly.

One thing that I would add is that you fully configure MS-DOS using just a few lines of text in AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS. And that includes setting up many applications and the user's shell.

There was also no mention of FreeDOS. That would be a better OS to bring up if we are comparing to Linux. It has been around since 1994, but maybe that article is old enough that FreeDOS had not yet became the de-facto standard DOS yet.
by pabs3 | 2025-06-11 05:55:05+00:00
From the post:

This is a strategic public disclosure of a zero-click iMessage exploit chain that was discovered live on iOS 18.2 and remained unpatched through iOS 18.4. It enabled Secure Enclave key theft, wormable remote code execution, and undetectable crypto wallet exfiltration. Despite responsible disclosure, the research was suppressed by the vendor. Apple issued a silent fix in iOS 18.4.1 (April 2025) without public acknowledgment or credit.
by agumonkey | 2025-06-11 05:56:52+00:00
https://archive.is/ibUdx just in case

also, recently ferroptosis made the news as general mechanism to kill metastases https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08974-4

seems like a new path too, the more the better :)

ps: apparently cancer drug resistance is linked with tumor adaptability which relies on iron and copper, and these researchers leverage this as a weapon against itself, very clever
by rurban | 2025-06-11 05:56:58+00:00
They completely forget the startup-time in the query-time, which dominates by a factor of 1000.

Some PHF's can be pre-compiled, while most needs to be deserialized at run-time. I worked on a pre-compiled pthash variant, but got struck by C++ bugs.

There's a huge overhead for ordered variants in some, to check for false positives.

For small n gperf is still the fastest by far. And it is pre-compiled only.
by graemep | 2025-06-11 06:00:24+00:00
British supermarkets mostly require the use of their app to self-scan. You need to either use your phone or use your app to start the scanner. Once you have done that it works OK. A bit error prone.

The other problem is that, like self checkout, it often requires human intervention (buying alcohol or high value items, for examples) still requires human intervention. This can require a long wait at the end. I once got so sick of waiting that I left my shopping and walked away and went somewhere else.