MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lxgr | 2025-06-27 14:26:39+00:00
Thank you!

Do you know if these actually preserve the structure of Gemma 3n that make these models more memory efficient on consumer devices? I feel like the modified inference architecture described in the article is what makes this possible, but it probably needs additional software support.

But given that they were uploaded a day ago (together with the blog post), maybe these are actually the real deal? In that case, I wish Google could just link to these instead of to https://huggingface.co/mlx-community/gemma-3n-E4B-it-bf16.

Edit: Ah, these are just non-MLX models. I might give them a try, but not what I was looking for. Still, thank you!
by Dig1t | 2025-06-27 14:27:21+00:00
Yes actually they are normal people doing a job. They are fellow Americans with families and lives.

Just because it’s a law you don’t agree with, that does not make it okay to hurt the officers or their families. Do you not think that sets a bad precedent?

If there’s some other law that I disagree with is it okay if I dox the officers or threaten their families?

That’s not how democracy or the rule of law works.
by tclancy | 2025-06-27 14:28:11+00:00
That's funny, I would reverse those. I loved XSLT though it took me a long time for it to click; it was my gateway drug to concepts like functional programming and idempotency. XPath is pretty great too. The problem was XML, but it isn't inherent to it -- it empowered (for good and bad) lots of people who had never heard of data normalization to publish data and some of it was good but, like Irish Alzheimer's, we only remember the bad ones.
by alexgieg | 2025-06-27 14:29:55+00:00
I imagine this won't help right now, as you and everyone else need work immediately, but for the future I'd suggest you research opening a small software development business with other programmers or, even better, a cooperative. This requires learning business management, and assuming risks, but as you see it isn't like normal job really provides security.

The main advantage is that under this arrangement the people who are your bosses, or otherwise rule over that you do, in a normal corporate job, such as sales people and accountants, become your employees and have to answer to you and your peers. Technical merit and knowledg becomes the driving force, not fantasy sales pitches and bean counting.

The main downside, besides the business risk, is likely going to be lower pay. But you'll be doing what you find valuable, so you'll have much higher enjoyment at what you do.
by wespiser_2018 | 2025-06-27 14:30:11+00:00
It's possible that the "functional" aspect of non-coding RNA exists on a time scale much larger that what we can assay in a lab. The sort of "junk DNA/RNA" hypothesis: the ncRNA part of the genome is material that increases fitness during relative rare events where it's repurposed into something else.

On a millions or billions of year time frame, the organisms with the flexibility of ncRNA would have an advantage, but this is extremely hard to figure out with a "single point in time" view point.

Anyway, that was the basic lesson I took from studying non-coding RNA 10 years ago. Projects like ENCODE definitely helped, but they really just exposed transcription of elements that are noisy, without providing the evidence that any of it is actually "functional". Therefore, I'm skeptical that more of the same approach will be helpful, but I'd be pleasantly surprised if wrong.
by loudmax | 2025-06-27 14:31:16+00:00
Fellow Virginia Tech alumnus here. "VA Tech" is perfectly legible and unambiguous. "VT scientists" is straightforward to Americans, but not everyone in the world will know what "VT" is in this context. It could be Vermont scientists, or who knows what else.

Incidentally, the author is the wife of physicist Sean Carroll. She certainly knows how to abbreviate Virginia Tech, but Ars Technica's editors will want to influence the title to appeal to a global audience.

"VA Tech" is a reasonable balance between writing something unambiguous for a global audience, but short enough to be interesting. Nobody's going to be interested in an article titled "Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University scientists build a better fog harp."

Of course, you still need to read the article itself to find out what the heck is a "fog harp," and why we need a better one.
by Mikhail_Edoshin | 2025-06-27 14:32:14+00:00
XSLT is not bad, but XML, unfortunately, is normally misused, so XSLT is tainted as it has to be a part of that misuse.

The true role of XML are grammar-based notations. These occur in two places: when a human gives data to a machine and when a machine produces data for a human. This is where XML is used despite its often mentioned shortcomings; for example, many notations to describe the user interface are based on XML. This is convenient, because user interfaces are created manually. (I am not mentioning text markup, it is well known.)

Yet XML was often used as a notation for machine-to-machine exchange. For example, the ONIX book description standard. Here data are moved between two computers, yet for some reason they have to form grammatically correct phrases according to a set of grammar rules. Computers do not need grammar. They do just fine with non-grammatical data, like a set of tables. It is way simpler for them; parsing or generating grammar, even explicit, is pure overhead for data exchange and is only necessary when data enters or leaves the computed pipeline.

So, to your examples: configuration in XML is actually fine, but IPC is not. Configuration is written by hand, IPC happens between machines. IPC specification, on the other hand, is also a good fit for XML.

That said, XML and thus XSLT has another flaw: it is way too verbose and has no good way to format it. Conciseness was an explicit no-goal but now we can say it was a mistake.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-06-27 14:33:52+00:00
> I'm not sure how you maintain hidden ground stations while providing a commercial service that justifies many $MM in capital and requires state support to get launch permission.

Who said that Starcloud's business model is about commercial services? At https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44397026 I rather speculate that Starcloud's business model is about getting big money defense contracts.
by mathi0750 | 2025-06-27 14:33:54+00:00
Hey folks, With FLUX.1 Kontext [dev] dropping yesterday, we're comparing prompting it vs a fine-tuned FLUX.1 [dev] and PixArt on generating consistent characters. Besides the comparison, we'll do a deep dive into how Flux works and how to fine-tune it. What we'll go over: * Which models performs best on custom character gen. * Flux's architecture (which is not specified in the Flux paper) * Generating synthetic data for fine-tuning examples (how many examples you'll need as well) * Evaluating the model before and after the fine-tuning * Relevant papers and models that have influenced Flux * How to set up LoRA effectively This is part of a new series called Fine-Tune Fridays where we show you how to fine-tune open-source small models and compare them to other fine-tuned models or SOTA foundation models. Hope you can join us later today at 10 AM PST! https://lu.ma/fine-tuning-friday-3
by scapbi | 2025-06-27 14:34:40+00:00
We’ve been building Mochi, a small statically typed language for querying structured data like JSON, CSV, and in-memory lists. In the latest release (v0.10.5), you can write SQL/LINQ-style queries with from, where, join, and group by, all fully type-checked and testable inline.

What makes it different: queries compile to a register-based bytecode VM (written in Go) with compiler passes like constant folding, liveness analysis, and dead code elimination. It’s meant to feel like writing SQL inside a real language, backed by actual compiler infrastructure.

If you’re interested in how query engines, DSLs, or virtual machines work, this might be worth exploring.
by tok1 | 2025-06-27 14:35:17+00:00
> Instead, its documented approach to running as some other account is to add some of the superuser's privileges to Kea [...]

Not disagreeing, just want to mention that Kea can run fine without privileges, which is also documented at the link provided. Key is to use DHCP relaying, a technique which becomes relevant quickly in larger setups anyways because you cannot (or don't want to) give the DHCP server access to all subnets: Instead of the DHCP server(s) processing local requests, DHCP relaying agents encapsulate and unicast-forward the whole DHCP request-response traffic to centralized DHCP instance(s). Those relaying agents (on switches/routers) do require privileges but potentially posing a smaller attack surface due to being much simpler. Sadly, ISC has not made a successor dhcprelay as part of Kea, but luckily systemd-networkd implements the RelayTarget parameter, adding this capability (at least for IPv4).
by MattRix | 2025-06-27 14:35:34+00:00
I feel like this take is missing a sense of balance. You can have a goal of advancing scientific research while also still making money. You don’t have to choose one extreme end of the scale.

I’d argue that the product providing some monetary value for Google will help ensure that this team doesn’t get moved some more profitable project instead. That way they can continue improving this tool and make more tools like it in the future.
by heresie-dabord | 2025-06-27 14:36:46+00:00
> What is more likely is that the decisions are largely rational, just don't correspond to your preferences.

Cyber Security itself is an example of this. It may seem rational to want guarantees of security for the entire supply chain. But that simply isn't possible in reality.

A professional effort is the judicious application of resources to the highest priorities. That includes care in design and testing. Applications built with C and C++ are running everywhere around the world, every minute of every day.
by estebank | 2025-06-27 14:37:05+00:00
This is a pattern a crate author can rely on (write a function that uses genetics that immediately delegates to a function that uses trait objects or converts to the needed types eagerly so the common logic gets compiled only once), and there have been multiple efforts to have the compiler do that automatically. It has been called polymorphization and it comes up every now and then: https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/add-back-polymorphization/...
by IAmBroom | 2025-06-27 14:37:10+00:00
The "Bathtub Curve" was an eye-opener for me.

As an engineer and a nitpicker, I spent most of my life looking for optima. What's the BEST stand mixer on the market? Which product had the best combination of features? Etc.

The bathtub curve describes systems where either extreme is undesirable, with a nice, stable, slow-changing center (so, like a cutaway bathtub, "Badness" is high on both ends, and fairly flat in the middle). In these systems, the optimal point isn't really important - so long as you stay away from the extrema, you're pretty good.

It's been helpful for me in reframing things generally... Does a 0.1% improvement in metrical quality really mean anything? Or could I have just gone with the good-enough option, and used that spare time to cuddle my dogs?
by ninetyninenine | 2025-06-27 14:37:17+00:00
There’s no red flag.

These background tasks are all database calls. That means the cpu is just waiting on the database for the majority of the call. Most modern servers can handle 10k of these calls concurrently. And you can do this off of one not so powerful CPU. Even half a cpu can handle this. Of course it depends on the CPU but you get my point.

The database is the bottleneck. The database is the thing that needs to be scaled first before you scale servers. This is the most common web application pattern. One way is providing more compute to the database (sharding is better then increasing cpu power as the bottleneck in the database is usually filesystem access not cpu power). Another way is to have a queue buffer the traffic spikes. Both of these are addressing an issue with the database first.

In most web apps. All the server does is wait for a database. The database is doing compute. You never want the server to do compute as that becomes what we call a “blocking call.” These blocking calls are the ones you offload to an external service as these calls “block” entire cpu threads. database calls do not “block” as the server will context switch to another green thread during database calls.

If you work somewhere where you’re scaling crud servers but not after scaling a central database it usually means you’re in a company that doesn’t get it and overemphasizes on “architecture” over common sense. It’s actually extremely common in lower tier small companies to have not so smart people build things like this that don’t make any sense. They aren’t thinking coherently and I’ve seen tons of people who just miss this common sense notion.

I’ll be Frank. It’s stupid and defies common sense. It’s likely you are doing this? But it’s also extremely commonplace.
by blackbear_ | 2025-06-27 14:37:59+00:00
> I read the paper before I made my original comment.

That's good, now I'm wondering about the others in the thread.

> 'Omics papers get away with a lot of hand waving

Making assumptions and interpreting results is part of any type of analysis, especially for unsupervised learning approaches like clustering. Or maybe I am missing something: how do you not-handwave the results of a clustering analysis if you don't have any supervision signal?

In any case, I agree that omics in particular take many more liberties than usual with their interpretations. And yet, sometimes they come up with useful and important finding. Yes, a broken clock...2x a day, but maybe after working in the same field for many years one can gain some insights and intuitions.

> but you are going to find peaks in a random walk

I would hope so since a random walk has pretty obvious peaks, and it's not hard to test if the peak is significantly beyond the level expected due to chance.

Do you have actual concerns about the data and the peaks they found, or are we back at wondering about all the fallacies that they may or may have not committed?

> They didn't test the theory that rapid aging occurs at those two specific time points in an independent hold out set.

This is a glaring omission, I agree.

> this paper does not prove they are biological. They could correspond to common socially driven changes in behavior.

True, but it dot make this paper worth any less. If anything, it's a great question for follow-up work.
by localvoid | 2025-06-27 14:38:08+00:00
If I understand it correctly, the main argument in favor of tagged templates is that it doesn't require any changes to the js engine and that is why it will be way much easier to push forward. Browser implementation should be quite straightforward and it will be possible to implement a semi-efficient polyfill.

Personally, I don't think that it will have any significant impact, everyone will continue using React,Vue,Svelte and it is highly unlikely that they are going to adapt this new API.
by qsort | 2025-06-27 14:40:23+00:00
I have done something exactly like this in production for a system that turned natural language into SQL. This was pre-LLM, so we had models that produced intent and keywords as structured output and we had to turn it into queries for several backends. The project didn't work out for a variety of reasons, but technically it was beautiful: it produced query plans that in many cases were identical to those from the queries analysts wrote by hand. So yeah, I accidentally wrote a compiler. Does it still count?
by jacknews | 2025-06-27 14:40:46+00:00
How can it not be, where you want to build an enclave of 'like' people (alike in friend connections, education, outlook, not only race, which is what you seem to assume).

It's a stage of life where you should be branching out and meeting 'other' people, not just surrounding yourself with college buddies, and further cloistering yourself in that bubble.
Show HN: Simple Speech-to-Text with an Arduino Nano
by briansm | 2025-06-27 14:40:51+00:00
Hi HN.

A while back, somebody (not me) posted a link here to a hobby project I did:

"Simple Speech-to-Text on the '10 Cents' CH32V003 Micro-controller"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40504481

So I though I'd submit a link to a follow-up project, that uses an 8-bit 'Arduino Nano' micro-controller instead to see how low-power I can go doing real-time MFCC-based feature extraction for spoken audio samples. Because reasons. (proof-of-concept more than anything).
by darwi | 2025-06-27 14:40:53+00:00
The x86-cpuid-db project [1] heavily uses XSLT 3.0 through the “saxonche” PIP package.

It has worked amazingly well for us, and the generated files are already merged in the Linux Kernel.

[1] https://gitlab.com/x86-cpuid.org/x86-cpuid-db
by weinzierl | 2025-06-27 14:41:36+00:00
That is beautiful. Besides the globe and the cool animations I like the dashboard that shows summary stats.

This made me think. Either Frauenhofer or Helmholtz in Germany used to have a site where you could enter your specific flights and it would tell you your overall radiation exposure. This was meant mainly for flight personnel and it was not nearly as beautiful. The accumulated exposure would be a useful addition for the dashboard.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-06-27 14:42:04+00:00
The analysis has zero redundancy for either servers or support systems.

Redundancy is a small issue on Earth, but completely changes the calculations for space because you need more of everything, which makes the already-unfavourable space and mass requirements even less plausible.

Without backup cooling and power one small failure could take the entire facility offline.

And active cooling - which is a given at these power densities - requires complex pumps and plumbing which have to survive a launch.

The whole idea is bonkers.

IMO you'd be better off thinking about a swarm of cheaper, simpler, individual serversats or racksats connected by a radio or microwave comms mesh.

I have no idea if that's any more economic, but at least it solves the most obvious redundancy and deployment issues.
by mh- | 2025-06-27 14:43:22+00:00
That's a great question that is beyond my technical competency in this area, unfortunately. I fired up LM Studio when I saw this HN post, and saw it updated its MLX runtime [0] for gemma3n support. Then went looking for an MLX version of the model and found that one.

[0]: https://github.com/lmstudio-ai/mlx-engine
by stek29 | 2025-06-27 14:43:44+00:00
The post implies that ISPs are doing the throttling — but in fact, ISPs have little control over it lately. This kind of tampering is mostly done on TSPU devices (Technical Measures for Threat Counteraction), which is fully controlled by Roskomnadzor. ISPs have little control over it — the system is highly centralized, and Roskomnadzor can carry out sophisticated and targeted actions. For example, they're able to swiftly block some services and networks in specific regions and/or on specific types of connections (cellular vs wired, or even exact ISPs), or to perform

For example, when YouTube blocking first began, TSPUs were only throttling it on wired networks. This created an unfair advantage for cellular ISPs, prompting many people to cancel their wired internet contracts and switch to mobile networks.

Since there were no legal grounds for the block, and the government even denied the blocks, trying to blame the throttling on Google, some ISPs just started circumventing the blocks, effectively counteracting the TSPU blocks.

They soon had to stop doing that because of warrants and threats from Roskomnadzor — but it clearly illustrates that ISPs have virtually no control over internet blocking — in either technical or legal terms.

As for Cloudflare specifically — there’s more to the story, and I’m disappointed the post didn’t include more details.

Roskomnadzor is blocking TLS 1.3 ECH — and they are doing it for Cloudflare specifically, forcing Cloudflare users to disable ECH on their domains if they want their websites to be accessible in Russia when using up-to-date browsers.

This also means that, for the website using Cloudflare to be accessible, it needs plaintext SNI. Cloudflare also does not allow domain fronting.

This has allowed Roskomnadzor to implement selective allowlist-based blocking on Cloudflare networks, which is a new step in Russian internet censorship. It feels like Cloudflare could've done a more in-depth analysis of selective blockings, since they probably can see whether there are statistically noticeable differences in metrics for different domains.

References (some are in Russian):

On some regions having some services like Telegram blocked for months:

- https://ntc.party/t/в-дагестане-отключили-зарубежный-интерне...

- https://www.forbes.ru/tekhnologii/532303-v-dagestane-i-cecne...

- https://www.vedomosti.ru/technology/articles/2025/05/31/1114...

On ISPs getting threats from Roskomnadzor for un-throttling YouTube:

- https://www.cnews.ru/news/top/2024-08-29_mgnovennaya_reaktsi...

- https://www.forbes.ru/tekhnologii/520476-uskorausim-youtube-...

On cloudflare-ech being blocked (since November 2024):

- https://github.com/net4people/bbs/issues/417

- https://ntc.party/t/обсуждение-блокировка-замедление-ech-clo...

on allowlists:

- https://ntc.party/t/09062025-информация-по-блокировке-cloudf...

- https://ntc.party/t/белые-списки/16717/10
by molteanu | 2025-06-27 14:43:49+00:00
I find it is a real challenge to come up with a good title. On the one hand it should, probably, convey to the potential reader something about the contents of the article, on the other hand it should be something to differentiate it from the rest of the articles published on the same subject.

I like those that read something like a punch-line, that come across as something different that just a summary of the article. But these maybe work best for literature, prose, movies, etc.
by sebmellen | 2025-06-27 14:44:19+00:00
Greetings Jimbokun,

I trust this message finds you well.

I am writing to inquire about the projected completion timeline for the HackerNews initiative. In order to optimize our downstream workflows and ensure all dependencies are properly aligned, an estimated delivery date would be highly valuable.

Could you please provide an updated forecast on when we might anticipate the project's conclusion? This data will assist in calibrating our subsequent operational parameters.

Thank you for your continued focus and effort on this task. Please advise if any additional resources or support from my end could help expedite the process.

Best regards, Sebmellen
by IAmBroom | 2025-06-27 14:44:33+00:00
In this age, is living next to "10 besties" really needed?

I have one neighbor that I'm really close to - yay! I can borrow their wheelbarrow, or they can borrow my sprinkler attachment, without asking, and return it promptly (to remain friends!). We watch each other's dogs on vacation. All of this is much easier than if I had to use a farther-away friend.

But my other neighbors are just ... small-f friends. Friendly. I would even consider asking them to borrow a cup of sugar.

But as nice as it would be to have ALL my besties nearby, we do just fine with phone calls, texts, social media, and seeing each other at events.

I do agree with the advantage of incremental change. I suck at completing big tasks. But if I view each step as a small task, I can get there.