MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SideQuark | 2025-06-04 04:03:13+00:00
> On hardware with AES primitives this is simply false.

????

Do you even code these things?

I'm unaware of any CPU with AES hardware that lets you compute SIMD under AES, and AES instructions on every CPU I've used (quite a few) are again slower even for single data paths. Once you switch to PRNGs using SIMD that alone is an order of magnitude faster than any AES method. It's not hard to check (say via Agner Fog's CPU instruction tables if you want Intel/AMD) that no AES method is going to beat the fastest non-crypto RNGS. Or simply code and profile a few.

AES primitives are generally used for AES, and even for RNG, they are slow. No one is using crypto rand, even with AES, for all the uses I mentioned, which is orders of magnitude more rands than all the crypto in the world. Between physical simulation, video game uses, and no data centers and AI running PRNGs up the wazoo, all the crypto rand in the world is a tiny, tiny, fraction of the uses - and even there they're used a handful of times to set up a private key system with no more PRNGs needed (and this is why AES instructions were built into CPUs in the first place - for symmetric key encryption - no PRNGS there...)

And once you stop with the simple single rng call mentality, the world runs on GPUs and parallel HW where you get 1000 to ~20,000+ cores, all of which are doing non-crypto rand a lot for the uses above.

There's a reason places like CERN publish RNG algorithms suitable for their needs, which are often adopted in many industries that need actual high speed, high quality PRNGs, and none of them are crypto RNGs. Not one.

So go ahead and show me this fast AES PRNG that is as fast as the fastest non-crpyto RNGs. I'll wait......

I've worked in this space a long time, done DARPA HPC projects, written articles on PRNGs, designed specialized PRNGs, have a math PhD (my advisor did crypto, so I've done quite a bit of that), and have written numerical software for just about every application mentioned above. Read my posting history. I know what I'm taking about.

> Use the right tool for the job ....

Yes, indeed.

> ... and try to be less condescending.

Then don't make false claims, then double down with more. I'm not the only one calling you out on your claims in this thread; probably there's a reason.
by ashwinsundar | 2025-06-04 04:04:35+00:00
I guess I'm still not understanding the point you're making about this person being an administrator. Does science change so rapidly that all of the observations that the author made, as a scientist in the last 10 years presumably, are completely invalid? Or maybe that they have a completely perpendicular motive from scientists, because they are now an administrator?

On your last point about the system cannot be fixed, and it could be a lot worse - everything else you're citing is certainly a problem as well. Maybe even bigger in some cases. I still don't see how those are responses to this article's points. It's kinda like a version of "whataboutism" that you're proposing.

I just don't really get the casualness towards a problem that is widely regarded, among scientists, as something fairly serious - "publish or perish". Why do a handful of publishing houses get to have so much control over the careers of people who dedicate their lives to a field, often at great personal and financial expense (in the form of lost wages and consistently lower pay)?

I thought science was supposed to be about the discovery, and dissemination of information. Why is the process of doing capital-S Science so gatekept behind university or big corp doors? Why is the only output of most scientific research a dozen pages of virtually indecipherable material? Why can't we know about the process that was taken to arrive at those conclusions, especially when they are so incredibly consequential to all of our lives? Science is responsible for virtually all modern advances - why doesn't the public have the right to understand it fully?

That's my takeaway from the article, and I'm curious how you arrived at such a wildly different conclusion.
by KennyBlanken | 2025-06-04 04:06:11+00:00
This isn't a Best Buy. Offshore wind is very expensive compared to land-based wind and operators can struggle to turn a profit. 3.28% is indeed likely very significant.

I do not understand HN's pathological obsession with trying to "gotcha" news media titles for being "clickbait" especially given the "Software (version number)" posts and edgy titles to corporate and personal blogs that are everywhere here.
by lolpanda | 2025-06-04 04:06:56+00:00
I actually think the legacy completion API is superior to the newer chat creation API. The completion API takes all the input as a single string, whereas the chat API expects input as a list of messages. Given today's common use of agentic workflows, the model often has to process a large amount of input—RAG data, function calls, and other metadata—in addition to the user and assistant messages. The conversation itself might be just a small part of the overall prompt.

I’ve found it more intuitive to format the conversation as <conversation>...</conversation> within one unified text prompt, alongside all the other input data.

OpenAI’s new completion API supports both a single large string or a list of messages, which is great. I briefly experimented with the prompting tool in Claude—it essentially builds a big prompt that includes instructions and examples in XML format.
by Terr_ | 2025-06-04 04:07:19+00:00
I aspire to the "One Hoss Shay" approach. [0] Nothing is unnecessarily overbuilt, so everything works perfectly for a hundred years... then it all collapses to dust simultaneously. :P

[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/45280/45280-h/45280-h.htm
by miiiiiike | 2025-06-04 04:07:37+00:00
I see these kinds of proclamations all the time: “Tech failed me so I quit.”

I don’t relate at all.

I grew up poor, tech was a way to survive, not the path to a “woo woo socialist utopia”[0] a la Star Trek. Why would anyone think it would be? Tech isn’t special it’s just a tool. Tech didn’t fail, the political apparatus did.

Making yourself small and giving up your power to make a large scale impact is akin to wizards burning their spell books to focus on their dagger collections. Sure it might bring them joy, but they’re going to be doing 1d4-1 damage for the foreseeable future. And that’s if they ever even land a hit.

Tech is neither good nor bad. And, the demonization of tech and tech workers is at best unproductive, and, at worst will cause the conscientious to self-select out of tech.

People are free to do whatever they want but I wish we were giving people positive reasons to be in and in love with tech instead of trotting out trite jokes about <insert tech villain of the week> and showing nothing but surrender.

I’ve been burned out since 2013 but I don’t have the luxury of walking away or even taking a break. Even if I was rich I’d keep going because a) it’s what I love and b) unless you all want to elect me king it’s going to be the best way for me to make an impact in 2025.

I wish Jacob all the best.

Anyway, I’m going to quit swimming because teaching people to swim has increased the number of potential recreational drownings.

[0]: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds S02E03. “Tell the Louvre to get off my back!” God, I love Carol Kane.

Also, in universe, Star Trek’s socialist utopia only came about after a period of inequality, instability, science run amok, tyranny, and war. So, we’re on track!
by jillesvangurp | 2025-06-04 04:08:37+00:00
Nice approach. It reminds me of an approach I saw used to resolve coordinates to countries. Instead of loading all country polygons, the team created a bitmap and used colors to map each pixel to a country code. The bitmap wasn't super large and compresses pretty nicely in png format. This worked well enough and it dumbed down the country lookup to simply figuring out the color for a coordinate. Neat trick. And you could probably figure out if you are dealing with an edge case by simply looking at neighboring pixels and fall back to something more expensive if you hit one of those.

And of course with edge cases, there are lots of them but mostly it's fine. One case that comes to mind is that of the border town of Baarle-Nassau On the border with the Netherlands and Belgium. This village has some of the weirdest borders in the world. There are Belgian exclaves inside Dutch enclaves. In some cases the border runs through houses and you can enter in one country and leave in another. Some of the exclaves are just a few meters. There are a few more examples like this around the world.

Another issue is the fractal nature of polygons. I once found a polygon for New Zealand that was around 200MB that broke my attempts to index it. This doesn't matter of course for resolving country codes because it is an island. But it's a reason I implemented the Douglas Peucker algorithm to simplify the polygon mentioned in the article at some point.
by bruce511 | 2025-06-04 04:08:55+00:00
I'll counterpoint somewhat.

Our business started by "selling copies". We are bootstrapped not VC (or otherwise) funded. We started with one person and grew.

Around 2010 we were becoming victims of our own success. As the existing customer base grew, sales had to grow to pay for ever-larger support staff. Not to mention ongoing development costs.

Yes we charged for upgrades. Yes we charged for some support (some companies were on contract, others were ad-hoc) but upgrades and contracts were optional, ad-hoc was an admin pain.

We switched in 2011 to a SaaS model. Under this model we are sustainable even if new sales drop to 0. Which means existing customers are funded from existing customers. Since support is now directly funded, it can be scaled up as customer numbers grow.

I should mention, we are in the Business not Consumer space - support is a big part of what we offer.

We stopped selling a "one time pay" option. We do let people self-host or we can host for them.

Yes, there are likely some number of possible customers who won't buy because of our model. For us that's OK. We don't need 100% of the market. What we need is to serve the customers we do have, while growing in a sustainable way. We cannot be dependent on "new sales" in order to keep the lights on.

What is interesting is that because it's funded, our support is the best in our industry. We pick up customers from competition because of our support reputation.

But of course each market, context, product is different. YMMV.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-06-04 04:09:10+00:00
How much interesting stuff is there to learn about Olduvai Gorge though?

I expect Earth will be viewed as we view Athens now. There's a lot of important history which happened there, and schoolchildren spend a lot of time studying it, but the center of the action has moved elsewhere.

Instead of "How often do men think about ancient Rome?", people will ask: "How often do men think about ancient Earth?"
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-06-04 04:09:20+00:00
In general as a bird watcher i’ve been extremely impressed by this tech. I generally trust it.

There’s only a couple of times i’ve been sceptical of it’s id and thats where there’s similar species in the area. Eg. I’m not convinced there really is a purple finch where i live when all i see is house finches all day. But i could be wrong too! It’s proven itself enough that i’m not ready to call it wrong on that one.
by bjoli | 2025-06-04 04:10:44+00:00
800 meters from where I live a comfortable life kids are born into a statistically shorter, poorer life with more disease, more mental unhealth and fewer healthy years.

People there live, on average, 4.5 years shorter than people where I live with something like 10 fewer healthy years.

The statistics comparing people born here and there are pretty awful. Despite having the same hospital, infant mortality rate is something like 2x (although the statistical uncertainty is high).

How is this not a failure of society? In addition: I live in a country with pretty high social mobility, especially compared to the US...
by bloqs | 2025-06-04 04:10:47+00:00
one of the reasons neurogenesis slows down in adults is because of the chance of things going wrong, cancer or protein misfolds etc.

hubernan did a good episode on this which i cant find, but the episode was about improving the rate of learning amd our brain. essentially he asserts that we seem to have a strong mechanism for brain growth in desperate circumstances, like hunting for food while very hungry. I will try to find and edit this comment
by dkarl | 2025-06-04 04:11:07+00:00
I resisted this conclusion for a long time, but I finally accepted that many people don't easily mode-switch between complaining and constructive action. If they complain and get positive feedback from it, like commiseration, they start doing their own job less well.

I used to value a bit of commiseration as healthy validation, a little switch of perspective to acknowledge that we have to cope with imperfect circumstances that are beyond our power to fix. It gives people relief from exaggerated feelings of responsibility, and then you can switch perspective back to the question of what can I control, what can I make better for other people.

But over time I've worked with too many people who can't easily switch between the two perspectives. If they go too far into thinking about how the circumstances could and maybe should be better, they make a comfy little nest inside that mindset and never come back to taking responsibility for their own actions and their own effect on circumstances.

I don't want to sound like a stuffy out-of-touch authority figure in a movie with a cool teenage protagonist, and I'm aware that I probably do. I try not to be a dick about it. I don't try to stamp out complaining. I just laugh politely, acknowledge, and change the focus as quickly as possible back to what is in our power to accomplish.

A lot of times one of the things that is in our power is pointing out issues that transcend our team, educating and influencing other teams, etc. You'd think complaining would help with this, and it kind of does, because the things people love to complain about are very often the things that need to be addressed through engagement with leadership or with other teams. But here again, those same people who get demotivated by complaining, complaining also turns them into poisonous communicators. They aren't capable of doing a bit of discreet whining and moaning about product behind closed doors and then coming out and communicating in a constructive way with them.

Again, that's something I didn't start out my career believing. I thought it was normal to vent a little frustration about a product manager in strong language behind closed doors, and then with that done, turn to the task of figuring out a more gracious and constructive way of understanding their perspective and engaging with it to create a better outcome. But it seems like maybe 1/2 or 1/3 of people are capable of making the turn back from talking shit to getting shit done. The rest seem to have the attitude of, well, we figured out this other guy is the problem, right, so what are you looking at me for? When in fact none of us are perfect, and other teams might have equally valid complaints about them.

(I'm not a manager, just an IC, but somewhere along the way I got gray hair and I started worrying about this stuff.)
by tolerance | 2025-06-04 04:13:00+00:00
Pushing the needle of literacy and good writing requires eager young readers.

I think the point that PG is trying to make is that young people are easier to influence.

I don't know if acquiring new knowledge guarantees that it's going to be transformative in the way that it can be for the young, especially for those who are young today.

The intention behind acquiring knowledge can make a difference too. I imagine that a young person more likely aiming to independently acquire knowledge due to some practical want, than an older person who may be more content with the theory behind it.

But this is me speculating on a sensitive dichotomy. Although I think we should let the young guys have this one.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-06-04 04:14:12+00:00
We're much better at recording history nowadays though.

People seem to find the Yamnaya culture interesting, we just know rather little about it.

Nowadays we have ubiquitous, effortless recording and copying capabilities. The struggle for historians will be to sort through all the data in order to identify a coherent narrative.
by FilosofumRex | 2025-06-04 04:15:09+00:00
Most climate change advocates naively believe that because an energy resource in renewable it must be infinite too. Simple energy balance over a given area will show how much extraction of wind energy will reduce available energy downstream.

Moreover, the economics of offshore wind farms is often commingled with state enterprises and various subsidy schemes, which makes them uneconomical even in the best of times, so a 2% capacity reduction coupled with inevitable maintenance and repair costs escalations might make many wind farms uneconomical.

Onshore wind farms are much more economical but the best locations such as Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico already have been developed.
by laserbeam | 2025-06-04 04:15:56+00:00
I really don’t like the highly hierarchical format, that there’s a “..meta” and a “…meta” somewhere else. I can imagine we want to annotate the whole diff, each file and each chunk. That’s a total of 3 levels of depth. Let’s just give them distinct names and not go full yaml with a format for once?

This helps with readability (if one of the “meta” blocks is missing, for example, I could still tell at a glance what it refers to without counting dots), and is less error prone (it make little sense to me why the metadata associated with a whole diff should have the same fields as the metadata of a file).

Furthermore, why do we have two formats? Json and key=value pairs? Is there any reason to not just use one format because it sounds like the number of things we’d want to annotate is quite small. Having a single structure makes it much easier to write parsers or integrate with existing tooling (grep, sed or jq - but not both at once)

Other notes:

- please allow trailing commas in lists

- diffs are inherently splittable. I can grab half of a diff and apply it. How does your format influence that? I guess it breaks because I would need to copy the preamble, then skip 20 lines, then copy the block I need?

- revisions are a file property? Not a commit checksum? (I might just be dumb here)
by ivape | 2025-06-04 04:16:01+00:00
Speculating, don’t they offer dev services that’s supposed to be done by AI? If the dev services were offered by devs, then that would be the scam. Now that I’ve said the second part, it does seem lurid because who the hell is paying for AI first code deliverables.

—-

Message to HN:

Instead of founding yet another startup, please build the next Tech Vice News and fucking goto the far corners of the tech world like Shane Smith did with North Korea with a camera. I promise to be a founding subscriber at whatever price you got.

Things you’ll need:

1) Credentialed Ivy League grad. Make sure they are sporadic like that WeWork asshole.

2) Ex VC who exudes wealth with every footstep he/she takes

3) The camera

4) And as HBO Silicon Valley suggests, the exact same combination of white guy, Indian guy, Chinese guy to flesh out the rest of the team.

See, I need to know what’s it like working for a scrum master in Tencent for example during crunch time. Also, whatever the fuck goes on inside a DeFi company in executive meetings. And of course, find the next Builder.ai, or at least the Microsoft funding round discussions. We’ve yet to even get a camera inside those Arab money meetings where Sam Altman begs for a trillion dollars. We shouldn’t live without such journalism.
by tubthumper8 | 2025-06-04 04:16:04+00:00
I've read elsewhere that one idea for the zero value of sum types is not making it nillable, but rather making the zero value as the 0th variant of the sum type (and if it has associated data, the zero value of that as well).

It's weird, but does align with design decisions that have already been made.

So if there was an `Option[T]` with variants `None` and `Some[T]`, the zero value would be `None` because that's the zero-th variant
Show HN: Radiant – Analyze a business's online presence
by adi4213 | 2025-06-04 04:17:15+00:00
Hey HN!

I built a tool to help a family friend analyze their restaurant's online presence, and I want to share it with you all. I noticed that most similar tools out there are really expensive and pushy with their sales.

My goal was to create something useful and straightforward that genuinely helps business owners understand how they appear on Google and other platforms. I'd love to get your feedback on it!
by tokioyoyo | 2025-06-04 04:17:41+00:00
Counter data point, worked in a company 10 years ago, our team was so close that we would vacation together overseas. All in different companies, cities and countries now, but still try to get together whenever we’re in the same city.

To be honest though, I’ve never been able to replicate that environment again, and it was pre-remote-first days. Might’ve been pure luck, or maybe we just understood how working with people you like is very enjoyable, despite the office politics.
by icameron | 2025-06-04 04:18:38+00:00
Wow how many reverse geocode requests does a google API key make to get a bill into the thousands!?

Maybe a good iteration of this is use the .01 accuracy line work for the 99.9% of users but anything within 100m of a border could be sent to google API to get the edge cases. Probably would be in the free tier.
by eru | 2025-06-04 04:19:39+00:00
> e.g. a problem for which the fastest possible algorithm is O(n^2) isn’t computable by a linear bounded automaton, but problems for which the fastest possible algorithm is O(n) or O(log n) are computable by an LBA

You are right that there's lots of interesting mysteries to explore. But the tools we commonly use only work for (potentially) infinite machines.

Alas, Computability for all finite machines is trivial. And big-O notation is another silly one for finite machines: it's all O(1) for them. Big-O notation is too blunt a tool to deal with finite machines, at least by itself.
by speakfreely | 2025-06-04 04:20:04+00:00
Well, over a sufficient timeline, humans will just be a common ancestor species of a series of new, distinct species. That's how it goes.

It's a bit disappointing to think that billions of years of evolution would result in only hardy bacteria or algae surviving to represent life. I think the continuation of consciousness is a more interesting goal... whether it happens in our carbon-based biology or in some other way is a secondary concern.
by gus_massa | 2025-06-04 04:20:10+00:00
Reproduction of the work is usual but it's unpublished.

Let's suppose you read a paper that does "X with Y", but you are interested in "Z", so the brilliant idea is to do "Z with Y" and publish the new combination, and citing it.

Sometimes you cross your fingers and just try "Z with Y", but if the initial attempt fails or you are too cautious you try "X with Y" to ensure you understand the details of the original paper.

If the reproduction of "X with Y" is a success, you now try "Z with Y" and if it works you publish it.

If the reproduction of "X with Y" is a failure, you may email the authors of just drop the original paper in the recycle bin. Publishing a failure of a reproduction is too difficult. This is a bad incentive, but it's also too easy to make horrible mistakes and fail.