MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mopsi | 2025-06-23 20:39:06+00:00
> Yeah, they invaded twice and in each case a little diplomacy would have been sufficient to roll back the invasion.

That's just a stalling tactic. The very people who built Russian diplomacy and personally mentored figures like the current foreign minister Lavrov have commented that Russia's offers have never been serious, pointing to details such as the fact that the people leading the negotiations are low-level functionaries without any authority to negotiate anything. You don't send errand boys if you're serious about negotiations.
by SV_BubbleTime | 2025-06-23 20:39:26+00:00
> makers doubles down on ICE cars while the rest of the world moves in the other direction?

Automotive EE here…

As respectfully as I can; you have no idea what you are talking about and neither do the people cheering you on.

These vehicles are not ready for the markets they are (were) being pushed to.

Current electrics do not make sense in specifically hot or cold climates. They do not make sense for hard use. They do not make sense for long trips. They do not make sense for repair.

They make sense in California for people that will keep them only a couple of years until the next status symbol is available.

I own an electric, I work on some. I like the pluses, and am keenly aware of the negatives. I see people storing them outside in snow and it makes me sad for their owners that think they bought an alternative to an ICE vehicle.

EVs today are not alternatives to ICE vehicles, the are compliments.

Fun fact… right now with the systems today, most EVs that will need a new battery, will be totaled by that cost. I have the tools, I’ve been inside the 600V packs that can easily kill you. Mechanics aren’t trained, prepared for, or will accept the risk. These are not 20 year vehicles. They’re basically 8 year vehicles currently.

Disagree with your feelings all you like, I live it.
by sharkweek | 2025-06-23 20:39:30+00:00
I live in Seattle and adored playing TLOU2 in my home city. Was a total trip playing set pieces in areas where I used to work downtown.

I could get nitpicky about a few areas that didn’t really make sense (and I’m still not really sure where the Seraphite camp was in act three given geography or what our actual aquarium looks like inside) but given how much I enjoyed the game I didn’t really care.
by KomoD | 2025-06-23 20:39:32+00:00
I Just opened Ecosia, searched, the first result was an AI summary. https://i.imgur.com/1w5PmAw.png

As I paginate I get keep getting AI summaries as the first result and they're all different.

Your post also contains factual errors:

> Search results are front and center and AI is hidden away in separate tab.

Wrong as shown above.

> You can’t sign in to Ecosia.

I see a button that says "Sign up" and they even made a guest user for me.
by BanazirGalbasi | 2025-06-23 20:39:32+00:00
It really depends on what you're doing with your computer. For all of my computer science classes, a Chromebook would not have been sufficient. We did have a remote desktop server we could log into that had most of the tools we needed, but I don't even know if RDP runs well on a Chromebook. Even then, I found that I preferred developing locally so I didn't have to deal with shared computer bandwidth, which means a Chromebook would be completely inadequate.

For some of my friends outside of STEM degrees, a Chromebook would have (mostly) been fine. Given that our laptops were a major source of entertainment for us at the time, I think something with enough power for indie gaming and HD video is a must.
by FredPret | 2025-06-23 20:39:41+00:00
Everything you say is valid, but you left out the part where, in addition to new tech making a few "obscenely" rich, it also makes a layer of very many people under them extremely rich, and almost everyone else a lot better off in the long run.

Here's some stats showing the growth of the millionaire class, now up to 7% of the population: https://www.statista.com/chart/30671/number-of-millionaires-...

At the same time, here's some stats showing extreme poverty falling off a cliff: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1341003/poverty-rate-wor...

Such a thing was completely unthinkable before disruptive tech and the associated mega-rich became the new normal 200 years ago.

Having said that, you're correct to point out that negative externalities haven't really entered our minds until about 50-75 years ago, but it seems tech progress has even made clean, green living at scale possible at least in principle.
by alexjplant | 2025-06-23 20:40:08+00:00
I'm notoriously bad at figuring out video games but was able to grok this at the age of 7. It probably had more to do with the fact that education in the 90s placed a decent emphasis on computer literacy (e.g. "Mouse Practice" for Mac Classic) so I was hip to the drag-and-drop paradigm. I don't have kids but I've read that most grow up on touch interfaces these days due to the ubiquity of tablets so I'd imagine that the mouse context is foreign to them.
by czk | 2025-06-23 20:40:32+00:00
I've often thought about the amount of data that these bot services must have access to (they could log millions of private channels), data thats silo'd away from search engines/indexers and could be pretty valuable to sell to someone training an AI model, or doing other things.

A while back there was a service called 'Spy Pet' that ran hundreds of discord bots selling access to searchable data logs. I wonder if discord is primarily concerned about the massive logging capability of services like these.
by pydry | 2025-06-23 20:40:42+00:00
The alliance exists to attack, not defend.

That's why of the 4 wars it has taken part in in the last 30 years, 4 have been wars of aggression while 0 have been defensive (article 5 was invoked for 9/11 but occupying afghanistan wasnt a defensive move it was an imperial move).

It's a dog eat dog world out there for sure but sometimes the 14 year old boy isnt safer joining the crips for protection from the bloods. Sometimes he's just sacrificed as a pawn in a wider turf war as the crips' promises of protection ring hollow.
by tmyklebu | 2025-06-23 20:41:01+00:00
Well, modular multiplication is faster than modular inverse, both asymptotically for large moduli and practically for almost all moduli I can think of. (2, 3, and 4 being notable exceptions!)

The article computes modular inverses of a_1, ..., a_n by:

- Computing (a_1 * ... * a_i) = (a_1 * ... * a_{i-1}) * a_i recursively

- Computing (a_1 * ... * a_n)^(-1) by square-and-multiply

- Computing (a_1 * ... * a_i)^(-1) = (a_1 * ... * a_{i+1})^(-1) a_{i+1} recursively.

- Computing a_i^(-1) = (a_1 * ... * a_i)^(-1) * (a_1 * ... * a_{i-1}) for each i.

The second step is a scalar operation, so its running time is immaterial as long as you aren't doing something too silly.

For my caveman brain, both Fermat's little theorem and square-and-multiply exponentiation are pretty easy to understand. Moreover, the code is going to be "defect-evident"---if I've gotten the logic wrong or forgotten integer promotions or modular reductions as in qsort's post, it'll quickly be clear by skimming the code.
by sgt101 | 2025-06-23 20:41:16+00:00
There are lots and lots of things that we can't personally observe about the universe. For example, it's quite possible that everyone in New York is holding their breath at the moment. I can't prove that either way, or determine anything about that but I accept the reports of others that no mass breath holding event is underway... and I live my life accordingly.

On the other hand many people seem unwilling to accept the reports of others that they are conscious and have freedom of will and freedom to act. At the same time these people do not live as if others were not conscious and bereft of free will. They do not watch other people murdering their children and state "well they had no choice". No they demand that the murderers are punished for their terrible choice. They build systems of intervention to prevent some choices and promote others.

It's not orthogonal, it's the motivating force for our actions and changes our universe. It's the heart of the matter, and although it's easy to look away and focus on other parts of the problems of intelligence at some point we have to turn and face it.
by zzo38computer | 2025-06-23 20:41:45+00:00
If you are doing searching, then a variant can be that it does not need to predict what words you meant, but will search for all words that match the numbers you pushed.

For example, if you try to search for a title and one of the words in your search is entered "223", then either "ace" or "bad" can be in that position, and if there is a title with "ace" matching in that position and a title with "bad" matching in that position, both are displayed.

So, this variant is you enter the entire title (or a substring of the title) first before it predicts what words you meant. After it is entered then all results are displayed, with a number next to each one, and then you must push the number corresponding to the one that you want.
Ask HN: Feedback on "QSS" – A Quantized Vector Search Engine in C
by wmolino | 2025-06-23 20:42:28+00:00
Hi HN,

I've been working on a vector search engine called QSS (Quantized Similarity Search). It's written in C and explores the idea of aggressively quantizing embedding vectors to 1-bit per dimension. It uses XOR + popcount for fast approximate search, followed by re-ranking using cosine similarity on the original vectors.

The main goal is to see how far you can push quantization without sacrificing too much search quality—while gaining significantly in memory usage and speed.

How it works Embeddings are quantized to 1 bit per dimension (e.g. 300D → 300 bits → ~40 bytes).

Search is done using bitwise XOR and popcount (Hamming distance).

A shortlist is re-ranked using cosine similarity on the original (float) embeddings.

Supports GloVe, Word2Vec, and fastText formats.

Goals Analyze the trade-offs between quantization and search accuracy.

Measure potential speed and memory gains.

Explore how this approach scales with larger datasets.

Preliminary tests I’ve only run a few small-scale tests so far, but the early signs are encouraging:

For some queries (e.g. "hello", "italy"), the top 30 results matched the full-precision cosine search.

On Word2Vec embeddings, the quantized pipeline was up to 18× faster than the standard cosine similarity loop.

These results are anecdotal for now—I’m sharing the project early to get feedback before going deeper into benchmarks.

Other notes Word lookup is linear and unoptimized for now—focus is on the similarity search logic.

Testing has been done single-threaded on a 2018 iMac (3.6 GHz Intel i3).

If you're interested in vector search, quantization, or just low-level performance tricks, I'd love your thoughts:

Do you think this kind of aggressive quantization could work at scale?

Are there other fast approximate search techniques you'd recommend exploring?

Repo is here: https://github.com/buddyspencer/QSS

Thanks for reading!
by NoImmatureAdHom | 2025-06-23 20:42:38+00:00
As far as cryptographic solutions go: what would be ideal is homomorphic encryption, where the server can do the calculations on data it can't decrypt (your query) and send you something back that only you can decrypt. Assuming that's unworkable, we could still have anonymity via cryptocurrency payments for tokens (don't do accounts) + ipfs or tor or similar. You can carry around your query + answer history with you.
by marifjeren | 2025-06-23 20:42:55+00:00
Seems a lot of people like this and are happy about it, but I for one am tired of the proliferation of python package management tools.

Many languages have many package management tools but most languages there are one or two really popular ones.

For python you just have to memorize this basically:

- Does the project have a setup.py? if so, first run several other commands before you can run it. python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate && pip install -e .

- else does it have a requirements.txt? if so python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate && pip install -r requirements.txt

- else does it have a pyproject.toml? if so poetry install and then prefix all commands with poetry run

- else does it have a pipfile? pipenv install and then prefix all commands with pipenv run

- else does it have an environment.yml? if so conda env create -f environment.yml and then look inside the file and conda activate <environment_name>

- else I have not had to learn the rules for uv yet

Thank goodness these days I just open up a cursor tab and say "get this project running"
by o11c | 2025-06-23 20:43:04+00:00
You're thinking of the inferior system that predated T-9. The whole point of T-9 was using a language-specific word frequency list so that words can be entered with just one digit per letter.

The main word pairs that this often fails for are "me/of" and "no/on" (edit: other super-common words are "go/in", "he/if", and "up/us"; "am/an" isn't a problem since you usually write "I'm"); prefixes that can end with "-er" or "-es" are also ambiguous. For those you need to press the arrows to select a possibility manually. If there's an ambiguity for longer words (usually, if the word you're looking for is not in the dictionary), you might have to use the arrows ahead of time and then keep typing before the space; it will try to complete suffixes that go after that prefix.

There are only around 2000 ambiguous digit sequences after excluding the -er/-es pair, and for most of those at most one is likely to be used in texting even if they're "common" in English.

The most ambiguous sets, with 6-8 "common" "words", are:

2253 able bake bald bale cake calf 22537 abler bake[rs] balds bales cakes calfs 2273 acre bard bare base cape card care case 22737 acres bards bare[rs] base[rs] cape[rs] cards cares cases 24337 aides bides cheep cheer chefs cider 269 any bow box boy cow cox coy 4663 gone good goof home hone hood hoof 46637 goner goods goofs homes hones hoods hoofs inner 7243 page paid rage raid sage said 727733 parred parsed passed rapped rasped sapped 7277464 parring parsing passing rapping rasping sapping 729 paw pay raw ray saw say 7327 pear peas reap rear sear seas 74337 ride[rs] rifer sheds sheep sheer sides 7627 roar robs snap soap soar sobs 7673 pope pore pose rope rose sore (no +7 since "popes" isn't common) 78337 puffs queer ruder ruffs steep steer 7867 pump puns rump rums runs stop sums suns 787433 purged pushed rushed stride strife surged

Think about how often, while texting, you actually use the second-most-common of a given word set.
by b00ty4breakfast | 2025-06-23 20:43:31+00:00
all it takes is not shopping at amazon. now, obviously, if by some awful twist of fate, amazon is the only place to buy your life-preserving medications or whatever (God forbid things ever get that dystopian in my lifetime) then my advice is silly and you should ignore it. but if someone needs some household good or even some foodstuff that only amazon has or that amazon sells cheaper than the other places, then it's time to suck it up and not get your (the general you, not you personally) favorite brand of rocky road ice-cream bars or that brand of soap that you love.

I reckon in the first world, there is nothing that amazon sells that we can't simply skip or get somewhere else that would leave anybody in danger of death or serious injury.

I know it's tre chic to wallow in helplessness wrt certain things these days but we aren't yet completely without recourse even if we aren't going to buy our way into an entirely new order any time soon.
by schmidtleonard | 2025-06-23 20:43:58+00:00
Most people can get on board with jumping spiders. Big eyes, recognizable behavior, fuzz like fur, aspect ratios that aren't foreign to mammals. But if they mean knobbly things that look like they came out off the sea floor / out of an alien film, yeah, I'll grant them that they have a special skill if they can find those cute.
by haiku2077 | 2025-06-23 20:44:02+00:00
In short: Better materials and better computational models.

https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15078050/we-drive-the...

> In the last decade, the spiciest street-legal tires have nearly surpassed the performance of a decade-old racing tire, and computer modeling is a big part of the reason

(written about 8 years ago)
by PufPufPuf | 2025-06-23 20:44:46+00:00
Sadly hashbangs are technically limited to: 1) Support only absolute paths, making it necessary to use /usr/bin/env which is in standardized location to look up the uv binary 2) Support only a single argument (everything after the space is passed as a single arg, it's not parsed into multiple args like a shell would), making it necessary to use -S to "S"plit the arguments. It's a feature of env itself, for this very use case.

So there isn't really much to do to make it simpler.
by jsemrau | 2025-06-23 20:45:00+00:00
Tesla was/is? Luminar's biggest customer [1]. So they used it for something, likely ground-truth validation [2]

[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/luminar-says-tesla-is-big... [2] https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-no-longer-needs-lidar-ground...
by Workaccount2 | 2025-06-23 20:45:06+00:00
I have lost enormous money shorting Tesla over the years. I'm even short right now.

I can tell you though, Tesla is the only company doing two things:

Making full self driving car that doesn't need an expensive and expansive sensor suite. Just off the shelf cameras and a GPU.

Making full self driving that can drive anywhere, no pre-mapping needed.

Waymo probably could do without pre-mapping, Mercedes probably not. Right now though Tesla is the only player with a car that you can buy and will "self drive" anywhere in the country. The other car companies cars only work on select pre-mapped roads, and IIRC Mercedes only works on highways and over 40mph.

The bet against Tesla is that they will not be able to pull this off. Not that competitors will beat them to the punch. If Tesla did get FSD with cameras on par with Waymo, Waymo would likely be unable to compete.
by gabrielruttner | 2025-06-23 20:45:06+00:00
thanks! we think of mastra and other frameworks as "batteries included" for patterns like memory and reasoning. this is great for many but not all projects. i think mastra is doing a great job balancing some of this by simply wrapping vercel's ai sdk (we took some inspiration here in our tool picker and it is recommendation for llm calls).

we're leaning away from being a framework in favor of being a library specifically because we're seeing teams looking to implement their own business logic for most core agentic capabilities where things like concurrency, fairness, or resource contention become problematic (think many agents reading 1000s of documents in parallel).

unlike most frameworks we've been working on the orchestrator, hatchet, first for over a year and are basing these patterns on what we've seen our most successful companies already doing.

put shortly - pickaxe brings orchestration and best practices, but you're free to implement to your requirements.

[1] https://github.com/hatchet-dev/hatchet
by tetha | 2025-06-23 20:45:12+00:00
For me, the big key was: uv is so much easier to explain and especially use - especially for people who sometimes script something in python and don't do this daily.

pip + config file + venv requires you to remember ~2 steps to get the right venv - create one and install stuff into it, and for each test run, script execution and such, you need to remember a weird shebang-format, or to activate the venv. And the error messages don't help. I don't think they could help, as this setup is not standardized or blessed. You just have to beat a connection of "Import Errors" to venvs into your brain.

It's workable, but teaching this to people unfamiliar with it has reminded me how.. squirrely the whole tooling can be, for a better word.

Now, team members need to remember "uv run", "uv add" and "uv sync". It makes the whole thing so much easier and less intimidating to them.
by klik99 | 2025-06-23 20:45:27+00:00
Google AI says: "While the term "insane" is subjective, dumping a bear carcass in Central Park is both illegal and highly inadvisable."

RFK believes "For decades, the CDC has kept a tight grip on the Vaccine Safety Datalink, concealing vital vaccine safety information from the public," - IE that CDC has conspired to conceal harmful effects of vaccines. If he finds that database, I'll gladly sit up and listen. But until he finds it I'll consider this a conspiracy theory and, according to Psychology Today, belief in conspiracy theories is not necessarily associated with mental disorders.

I disagree with a lot of people in the Trump administration, but I only use the word insane (in the subjective sense, not in the literally diagnosed sense) to describe RFKJr.

I don't give him credit because he comes to his view from a lot of dangerous mistrust of science and medicine. I know a lot of people at CDC who work on flu vaccines and AIDs research, and my step-father was on the team that eradicated smallpox. RFKJr has done unimaginable harm to public health and is pushing us backwards. The people at CDC genuinely want to help people. You can say they've done things wrong, overstepped in some way, or have too much research money from private industry, and that could be a good discussion. No group is perfect, but the answer isn't to destroy it all, or think the CDC is part of a conspiracy.

I think food dyes need more research and better understanding before deploying to millions of people, that is not the same as his anti-science stance. While breaking a lot of things, he also happened to do something good, I don't think that counts as "solving the actual problem".

And, as far as your last point about previous administrations I meant both democrat and republican, but it's been obvious a long time that Democrats pandering would cause a backlash.

At any rate, I don't discount peoples ideas as brainwashing or preconceived ideas, even people I disagree with. I want America to succeed. Trump even did a few things in his first term I agreed with. You seem to have a filter to think people who don't buy into this "new golden age" are brainwashed or tribal. This isn't true. Spend some time considering other view points.
by floxy | 2025-06-23 20:46:29+00:00
Are the particle velocities that are being measure correlated at all? As in, flowing away from the sun or similar? I'd think that something with a well-defined "temperature" would be composed of randomly moving particles with a mean velocity of zero. I'd also be interested in the distribution of particle speeds. Would anyone one consider a collimated beam of neutrons to have a temperature?

And I wonder what the distance mean free path length is. I suppose that must be pretty large. So that the T^4 Boltzmann radiation law doesn't really apply to these ~40,000 Kelvin temperatures? Or maybe the emissivity of hard vacuum is really low? I guess I've never thought about it before.
by franga2000 | 2025-06-23 20:47:15+00:00
I remember disabling T9 as the first step when getting any "new" phone, so it must've been enabled on some. Then again, I rarely got phones new from the store, so this might have been because they were factory reset.

I don't think I ever really knew what it was, other than "that thing that made typing difficult". I doubt any phone shipped with a Slovene dictionary for T9, so it was probably just doing its best trying to map my seemingly nonsensical keypresses onto English words.
by nico_h | 2025-06-23 20:48:38+00:00
Oh wow, growing, drying, transporting, roasting, transporting, brewing something takes more energy and physical resources than a single query in a computer? Physical goods are amazing like that. I wonder how margins on software stuff are so high!??!

More seriously, i’m not too sure about the energy cost and IP infringed during the training and the value added to society by providing generic and mostly accurate but sometimes wildly wrong answers. Or from generating text or pretty pictures for a few milli-cents in cooling and electricity vs asking a human to do the same for a few kilo-cents.

It’s a lot of ladder kicking in the software industry these days.