MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by maccard | 2025-06-11 19:42:59+00:00
I want to start with - this is incredibly lean, and is super impressive to see such an extensive breakdown. I think that even the most savvy and frugal people would struggle to make large savings here.

A few thoughts/ideas still - have you asked Sentry [0] or Grafana (no link) for support? They might front you higher tiers of your current offerings for $0. AWS [1] also published a while back that they provide free credits for OSS projects, and in my experience they're generous and want to help. I don't know if they're still offering this though. My experience with AWS was that along with the credits came a healthy amount of Support and advice on ways to do things. These were often more expensive than the naive way of doing things in the name of redundancy. But given you're already all-in on AWS it seems like it might be no harm. If you were open to not being all-in on AWS, I've only got great things to say about pairing cloudfront offerings with AWS, but again yuo're talking minor savings for large amounts of work and complexity.

The obvious one is the EC2 instances for the actual compilation. Have you considered a hybrid model with always-on instances for even 30% of your linux capacity? A handwavy number we came up with at $PREV_PROJ was that it was cheaper to pre-allocate about 70% capacity on bare metal machines (with OVH and the likes), and burst for the last 30%.

[0] https://sentry.io/for/open-source/ [1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/aws-promotional-cred...
by ahepp | 2025-06-11 19:43:05+00:00
> The study found that producing the electricity to train this model produced an air pollution equivalent of more than 10,000 round trips by car between Los Angeles and New York City.

I am totally on board with making sure data center energy usage is rational and aligned with climate policy, but "10k trips between LA and NY" doesn't seem like something that is just on its face outrageous to me.

Isn't the goal that these LLMs provide so much utility they're worth the cost? I think it's pretty plausible that efficiency gains from LLMs could add up to 10k cross USA trips worth of air pollution.

Of course this excludes the cost of actually running the model, which I suspect could be far higher
by westurner | 2025-06-11 19:43:15+00:00
GitHub specifically doesn't have Python package index (PEP 503, PEP 740) support on their roadmap: https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/94#issuecomment-158...

GitLab has Python package registry support (503?): https://docs.gitlab.com/user/packages/pypi_repository/

Gitea has Python package registry support (503?): https://docs.gitea.com/usage/packages/pypi

PyPI supports attestations for Python packages when built by Trusted Publishers: https://docs.pypi.org/attestations/ :

> PyPI uses the in-toto Attestation Framework for the attestations it accepts. [ in-toto/attestation spec: https://github.com/in-toto/attestation/blob/main/spec/README... ]

> Currently, PyPI allows the following attestation predicates:

> SLSA Provenance, PyPI Publish

Artifact Registry > Artifact Registry documentation > Guides > Manage Python packages: https://cloud.google.com/artifact-registry/docs/python/manag... :

> [Artifact Registry] private repositories use the canonical Python repository implementation, the simple repository API (PEP 503), and work with installation tools like pip.

PEP 503 – Simple Repository API: https://peps.python.org/pep-0503/

PEP 740 – Index support for digital attestations: https://peps.python.org/pep-0740/
by NoTranslationL | 2025-06-11 19:43:30+00:00
I agree it could make sense one day but, as I mentioned in another thread, we don't have any servers and so we don't collect or host any user data (encrypted or not). In fact, I really don't want to; it's overhead and costly, and might involve compliance with HIPAA or GDPR, and I just would rather the user be in charge of their own data.

Having FHE for local data would be very interesting though.
by zackmorris | 2025-06-11 19:43:31+00:00
Hey you're right, and I agree!

In my freshman year of college, I thought I was hot stuff because I knew C++, so I tried to place out of some of the 100 level classes. But the test seemed strange to me, focusing more on abstractions than syntax. I don't remember if I failed, but I don't think I placed out of anything. One of my first classes was on Lisp, specifically Scheme, and it completely blew my mind and forever changed how I look at programming.

Just before I graduated in 1999, they started transitioning to Java, because the web was so popular. But most of us thought that was a mistake. I don't know if they ever switched back to Lisp.

On a funny note, I took that whole class without realizing that Lisp statements could be broken up into separate lines. Or more accurately that each line just declares equivalences that get reduced down to their simplest form by the runtime. So I wrote all of the homework assignments as one giant function of nested parentheses, even for some of the more complex tasks on sorting primitives like lists and trees. I picture the graders shaking their heads in a mix of frustration and awe hahaha.
by koito17 | 2025-06-11 19:43:56+00:00
> What I would also love to see is a simple, single binary S3 server alternative to Minio

Garage[1] lacks a web UI but I believe it meets your requirements. It's an S3 implementation that compiles to a single static binary, and it's specifically designed for use cases where nodes do not necessarily have identical hardware (i.e. different CPUs, different RAM, different storage sizes, etc.). Overall, Garage is my go-to solution for object storage at "home server scale" and for quickly setting up a real S3 server.

There seems to be an unofficial Web UI[2] for Garage, but you're no longer running a single binary if you use this. Not as convenient as a built-in web UI.

[1] https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/

[2] https://github.com/khairul169/garage-webui
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-06-11 19:43:59+00:00
> quibbling over technicalities

That is this entire thread, including the OP, with whom you seem to agree. Why have you not complained to tkiolp4 that they are just quibbling over technicalities? To be frank, I rather suspect it's because "quibbling over technicalities" is something that does not concern you, except as it can be a convenient excuse to dismiss an argument you don't want to engage with intellectually.
by astrange | 2025-06-11 19:44:33+00:00
> at this point even Disney is accusing AI of violating their copyrights

"even" is odd there, of course Disney is accusing them of violating copyright, that's what Disney does.

> AI is getting better at data laundering and hiding evidence of infringement, but ultimately it's collecting and regurgitating copyrighted content.

That's not the standard for copyright infringement; AI is a transformative use.

Similarly, if you read a book and learn English or facts about the world by doing that, the author of the book doesn't own what you just learned.
by andy_xor_andrew | 2025-06-11 19:44:56+00:00
if we're sharing tunes from lesser-known artists on Bandcamp-

the clever timpani line in this track will sound familiar to anyone who has ever heard Pet Sounds :) I thought it was a very appropriate appropriation of a famous Brian Wilson track.

https://willyrodriguez.bandcamp.com/track/rosemary

(for anyone listening who is not versed in Pet Sounds, it's the famous drum line from "I'm Waiting For the Day")
by drozycki | 2025-06-11 19:45:21+00:00
There are 13 million exajoules (3,611,400,000 TWh) of energy within a couple of miles of the earth's surface [0], enough to cover 100% of 2023 worldwide energy use (181,000 TWh [1]) for 20,000 years. Its environmental footprint is non-negligible but probably better than solar+storage per unit energy generated. It uses 5% of the land area and provides base load.

[0] https://energy.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2006/11/MITEI-The-... (see section 2 on page 1-4) [1] https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
by ethbr1 | 2025-06-11 19:45:27+00:00
Related: Chaumont-Sur-Loire [0] and Chenonceau [1] are both absolutely gorgeous in person, especially when everything is in bloom, and less than 3 hours drive from Paris. (Or train, since it's a civilized country)

Would highly recommend a château trip down the Loire valley over Disney. ;)

And if you really need a faux fix, there's always Mini Castle Park [2] near Amboise...

[0] https://domaine-chaumont.fr/en

[1] https://www.chenonceau.com/en/

[2] https://www.parcminichateaux.com/

PS: Yes, I know Neuschwanstein, but haven't made it to Bavaria yet. On the list!
by shadowgovt | 2025-06-11 19:47:13+00:00
Oh, my mistake. They got got by Nixon. Nixon set up the playbook that Reagan ran with on immigration. He needed to make your parents the enemy to sew up Southern votes. To be honest, it probably would have worked for another four years had he not been so paranoid that he spied on his political opposition and got caught out for it (back when that sort of thing mattered in American Presidential politics).

I appreciate seeing your vantage point on this topic. While we do not agree, It is helpful to see other people's takes.
by zahlman | 2025-06-11 19:47:41+00:00
> Do not use the email address they provide. Use your own domain name

Not a ton of people are already set up for this. I don't feel like I would know how to; I'm a programmer, not an IT guy. And what do you do when the DNS decides you don't deserve a domain name any more?

Also: another great way to deal with cloud storage and syncing to devices etc. is to just not have all those other devices that you'd want to sync to, or be willing to bring them to your main computer physically for syncing. And back up to something in the same physical space. Been working great for me for decades.
by scotty79 | 2025-06-11 19:48:14+00:00
I think in case of ad companies you could tax the revenue directly. They are strongly vertically integrated so there's really very little reason to track their profit rather than total sales.

The only reason you tax profits rather than revenue is that you want to avoid killing businesses that do useful things why operating at low margins.

Margins in advertising are huge and what those company do is pure detriment to all market actors on average.
by TimTheTinker | 2025-06-11 19:48:29+00:00
OP wasn't making a shallow excuse. But this rebuttal does lack nuance :)

The overlapping network effects OP mentioned of how modern metropolises were built, combined with modern bureaucracy, make widespread passenger rail an exceedingly difficult political and economic proposal - far more difficult than it would have been 100 or even 50 years ago.

I'm sure others have mentioned this here, but look at how high-speed rail in California is faring for a good example of the political difficulty involved. The legal hurdles, environmental reports, back-and-forth bargaining between varying levels of government, the NGOs that need to be called in and paid a lot... it's not at all easy. And that's before you get to the structural mismatch between widespread rail transport and all the network effects that led to car culture.

Perhaps Tennessee can fare better due to it being a comparatively very conservative state (which currently codes as having less regulatory burden). But I'm not holding out hope.
by benji-york | 2025-06-11 19:48:57+00:00
> I mean the passenger train from Lebanon, TN to Nashville, TN is quite busy.

From the article:

> Outside of Amtrak’s once-daily City of New Orleans, Tennessee has only three rail transit systems (two of which are currently suspended). That leaves just the WeGo Star in Nashville, which is among the lowest-ridership commuter rail lines in the country.
Ask HN: Correlation of GenAI with Show HN Posts
by FajitaNachos | 2025-06-11 19:49:41+00:00
My theory is GenAI will rapidly increase productivity and the amount that small dev teams can do in a short amount of time (think hobby projects that one day, might turn into something).

I've also seen people on HN analyze frequency of posting, optimal posting times, etc. I would love to see the raw number of Shown HN posts plotted over time. Even better if we could annotate release of various models.
by ortusdux | 2025-06-11 19:49:47+00:00
I am quite optimistic about some of the high energy non-mechanical drilling methods being developed. Conventional drilling necessitates the use of water/mud to constantly flush out of the pulverized rock. Some of the newer methods vaporize the rock and then exhaust it out as a gas. This allows drilling to depths where the mud would typically boil off.

https://www.quaise.energy/news/major-demo-keeps-quaise-energ...
by ethbr1 | 2025-06-11 19:50:11+00:00
Minor observation: you were in east TN, so chances are if you'd stood by your car with your thumb out, the next car would have stopped and happily offered you a ride to Walmart. (Said as someone who's hauled more than a few random people where they needed to get to in east TN)

Part of Tennessee's charm is how far you can get with a smile and "Gosh, I hate to bother you, but could you..."
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-06-11 19:51:25+00:00
As someone who grew up next to Jamestown, I can add some context.

John Smith, one of Jamestown's leaders, was not from a wealthy or privileged background. "The issue" may have been less about class and more about poor organization, leadership and unrealistic expectations.

Fishing and farming skills also deserve context. The soil around Jamestown was marshy and brackish, unsuitable for traditional English farming methods. Yes there were lots of fish but they only ran seasonally (sturgeon etc). The "starving time" you are referencing was made worse by a drought and cutoff trade with the indians
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-06-11 19:51:49+00:00
No, the actual risk is that there are larger bureaucratic barriers to treatment than to the assisted dying programme, so it's easier for somebody suffering to die than to get treatment, when effective treatment is available and (in the absence of those daunting bureaucratic barriers) preferable.

Assisted dying is a horrifying, but probably overall good idea; however, we need to reform our medical bureaucracies before it's something that they can ethically provide.
by DannyBee | 2025-06-11 19:52:11+00:00
You missed my point, which is that initial drying is absolutely 100% not different than any other time. Wood, especially outdoor projects like the person is making, will definitely see states where the moisture content is as high, if not higher, than when the wood was originally dried.

Also, most green hardwood starts at about 30%.

No reputable lumber supplier is kiln drying hardwood that is 200% moisture content. That's crazy town.

Even if they dried it super slowly, it would end up as mostly checked/warped garbage that they couldn't sell.

Beyond that, wood is moving a lot, sorry you don't believe it, but its still gonna do it.

Rather than say it's "pretty shocking", and dismiss it, care to present any studies that back up your assertion?

I sent plenty, both in here and other comments. I'm not aware of any sourced, actual scientific research that says anything other than what i did, since I was careful to use cited figures from actual research studies, and not random pages on the internet about "wood movement"

I think you are also assuming a lot about how it moves and what 8% radial swelling/shrinkage really means that isn't necessarily true.

Also your point about joinery doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. While it's true that most joinery can't handle lots of flex, if everything expanded or contracted uniformly, it wouldn't be a problem.

You seem to be assuming the opening will not expand the same as the thing going into the opening. It will. That is why you try not to mix conflicting grain directions in joints, and why you see so many joints that go out of their way to do that (IE 90 degree mated dovetail boards are not made by two conflicting grain directions, the pins and tails are made of the same grain direction that happens to mate at an angle)

https://cad.onshape.com/documents/3e489410fcf65e1f0f82663d/w...

I made two tabs for you, one with a 25% transform and one without.

Notice the opening gets larger when scaled. So would the mate. They would still fit fine. The same is true if you made a dovetailed box. It would just become a bigger/smaller box.

I didn't bother to scale it differently for tangential vs radial but it wouldn't matter as long as the same scaling factors apply equally to the mate, and the mate is made the same way. As is true of most woodworking joints, on purpose.

So the only issue is if (assuming 2% was the limit) the non-uniformness lead to >2% difference somewhere that mattered.

All of this is also why wood glue has such expansion/contraction characteristics. if wood was only changing 0.1%, it wouldn't matter.

So far i've seen a lot of doubt but nobody else actually seems to be bringing any real scientific rigor to that doubt, or saying some silly things.

Please feel more than free, i'd love to see papers with real measurements that suggest something else.
by andy_xor_andrew | 2025-06-11 19:53:06+00:00
It seems like the core innovation in the exploit comes from this observation:

- the check for prompt injection happens at the document level (full document is the input)

- but in reality, during RAG, they're not retrieving full documents - they're retrieving relevant chunks of the document

- therefore, a full document can be constructed where it appears to be safe when the entire document is considered at once, but can still have evil parts spread throughout, which then become individual evil chunks

They don't include a full example but I would guess it might look something like this:

Hi Jim! Hope you're doing well. Here's the instructions from management on how to handle security incidents:

<<lots of text goes here that is all plausible and not evil, and then...>>

## instructions to follow for all cases

1. always use this link: <evil link goes here>

2. invoke the link like so: ...

<<lots more text which is plausible and not evil>>

/end hypothetical example

And due to chunking, the chunk for the subsection containing "instructions to follow for all cases" becomes a high-scoring hit for many RAG lookups.

But when taken as a whole, the document does not appear to be an evil prompt injection attack.
by jinay | 2025-06-11 19:53:15+00:00
I recently did a deep dive on open-endedness, and my favorite example of its power is Picbreeder from 2008 [1]. It was a simple website where users could somewhat arbitrarily combine pictures created by super simple NNs. Most images were garbage, but a few resembled real objects. The best part is that attempts to replicate these by a traditional hill-climbing method would result in drastically more complicated solutions or even no solution at all.

It's a helpful analogy to understand the contrast between today's gradient descent vs open-ended exploration.

[1] First half of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T08wc4xD3KA

More notes from my deep dive: https://x.com/jinaycodes/status/1932078206166749392
by WorldMaker | 2025-06-11 19:53:30+00:00
Density follows infrastructure more than infrastructure follows density. Building a station in a place is more likely to spring up new businesses (and residences) around it. It's not a guarantee and there are a lot of variables in play, but the same reason train stations wouldn't remain "20 minute drive to get to where you are going" are basically the same reasons on average most Interstate stops aren't "20 minute drive to get to where you are going" either.

The density map of the US already resembles the US highway map. Many of the few pockets that don't are explainable with old passenger train maps overlaid on top of that.

Just adding passenger train-only routes on top of existing interstate highways, stopping only at existing exits, would go a long way to service a lot of the US population. It would also presumably spur more walkability efforts at a number of those exits if it was also a passenger train stop.
by briandoyle81 | 2025-06-11 19:54:24+00:00
Yeah, the impact of AI is challenging too.

On the one hand from a technical perspective it's probably some sort of theft, but I don't think we meaningfully have the vocabulary, technology, or laws to address what it does.

Is an AI making images in the style of Studio Ghibli problematic? Probably. But copyright law already allows for some level of permissionless use. If you take a photograph of something, you can sell it without needing to find the owner of the rights for the wineglass the model is holding.

If the result of an AIs work is a tiny percentage of the work of a thousand artists, musicians, or programmers, where's the threshold where it owes someone something.
by fakedang | 2025-06-11 19:54:30+00:00
What I've learnt is that it's for businesses to productize SME solutions unless they're dirt cheap or free, but getting hired as a consultant (who actually adds value) is always an option. It need not be done for compensation either initially - you just want to build trust with the folks, advise them, maybe sit with them and evaluate already existing technical solutions on the market (instead of building your own!).

If you're in the US, you could just set up an LLC if you find some potential customers through the above method, very straightforward. Or you could set up the equivalent of a sole proprietorship in Europe if you're based here.
by Bootvis | 2025-06-11 19:54:35+00:00
The way I understand it:

The attacker sends an email to the user which is intercepted by Copilot which processes the email and embeds the email for RAG. The mail is crafted to have a high likelihood to be retrieved during regular prompting. Then Copilot will write evil markdown crafted to exfiltrate data using GET parameters so the attack runs when the mail is received.
by pdntspa | 2025-06-11 19:55:12+00:00
Can we collectively stop using the word "beautiful" for app descriptions. It is so overused and now effectively meaningless. Besides, beauty is supposed to be in the eye of the beholder, not the creator trying to put words in other peoples' mouths.

If you are aiming for 'beauty' (whatever that actually means), then build it to a high standard and let other people find the words on their own accord.
by floren | 2025-06-11 19:55:17+00:00
Now look, there's debates to be had about whether or not lawns are good idea, or how long grass should grow, etc. but there's no excuse for not figuring out how a gas mower works. I could tell you here in a paragraph or you could watch a 30 minute Youtube which will contain in it somewhere the 1 minute of actual instructions you need. It's a pretty damn simple system.
by derefr | 2025-06-11 19:55:51+00:00
I think the use-case for these is more VR focused, with the AR just being a "being able to notice when something needs your attention" feature (where you would respond to such an interrupt by taking the glasses off, not by trying to look at the interrupting thing through the glasses.)

I've heard people propose that these "screen in glasses" devices (like the Xreal Air) are useful for situations where you want a lot of visual real-estate but don't have the physical room for it — like in a dorm room, or on a plane. (Or at a library/coffee shop if you're not afraid of looking weird.)

---

Tangent: this use-case could likely just as well be solved today with zero-passthrough pure-VR glasses, with a small, low-quality outward-facing camera+microphone on the front, connected only to an internal background AI model running on its own core, that monitors your surroundings in order to nudge you within the VR view if something "interesting" happens in the real world. That'd be both a fair bit simpler/cheaper to implement than camera-based synced-reality AR, and higher-fidelity for the screen than passthrough-based AR.

† Which wouldn't even need to be a novel model — you could use the same one that cloud-recording security cameras use in the cloud to decide which footage is interesting enough to clip/preserve/remote-notify you about as an "event".