MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dandraper | 2025-07-21 00:33:00+00:00
CipherStash founder here: FHE isn't the only option here. Specialized searchable encryption schemes exist and are much faster than FHE. Different flavours can be combined to create a comprehensive search system which is very close to the performance of plaintext information retrieval. FHE remains an option for generalized computation but can be reserved for small datasets that have been narrowed down using fast searchable encryption.

I don't think FHE is the solution to PIR but it might well form a part of it when combined with more practical approaches.
by jfengel | 2025-07-21 00:34:05+00:00
The idea was just so astonishing that I ordered some from American Science and Surplus. I connected the leads to a battery and poof, one side got hot and the other got cold. Blew my mind.

I didn't actually have a use for it. It was just neat that it actually worked.

I understand the basic physics of it perfectly well. It's just one of those things where you expect basic physics to be overwhelmed by friction or something.
by scythe | 2025-07-21 00:36:10+00:00
>in this HN post [1] shows claims of COPs of ~15 for Delta Ts of 1.3°C.

>A compressor based cooler gets a COP of about 4 in the real world.

Real life refrigeration usually isn't very interested in a difference of 1.3 C. The Carnot COP for this temperature drop near ambient conditions is, I believe, around 200. When you consider a cooling technology relative to the Carnot efficiency (or COP) you get a better idea of what the efficiency means in practice. For an AC unit blowing 10 C air on a 40 C day, the Carnot COP is about 10, while real units get less than half that. But I think that's still better than the Peltier effect getting less than 10% performance relative to Carnot limits.
by shmerl | 2025-07-21 00:37:24+00:00
> I’ve never seen Merlin’s Sound ID produce an obviously-wrong identification

Well, good luck identifying mockingbirds, lol. But that's a tricky case.

Anyway, it's a nice way to use AI, unlike so many others that pop up lately.

I wish they'd open source it all though, especially if they are getting help from volunteers.
by VonGallifrey | 2025-07-21 00:39:02+00:00
Well... Self-taught means that the person learned by their own initiative, "without formal instruction or training".

Going to the library or buying and reading books is not formal instruction, and neither is watching Videos. There is no one to guide, help, or check on progress.

I could watch the entire MIT Intro to Algorithms Course on YouTube and still be self-taught, because watching that does not make me an MIT Student and it does not make Dr. Jason Ku my instructor.
by _wire_ | 2025-07-21 00:39:08+00:00
Wonderful, insightful write up on a fascinating topic.

It's seems to be conventional wisdom today to dismiss Jaynes' analysis based on his embellishment of a significance of the neurological morphology of the corpus colossum. But how well does his analysis hold up when morphology is simply sidelined into the idea a neurological module of unknown nature and examined linguistically?

For example, it seems we have language today for aspects of self that were in ancient times regarded as other.

There's some studies into the linguistics of color sensation which seem analogous to the linguistics of the self which you term the theory of mind.

In Lacanian psychoanalysis, there's an idea of a "mirror state" of development of the self where infant consciousness develops awareness of a distinction between self and other when the father figure begins to appear as an interloper on the self's attention for the portion of the infant's sensation that was at birth bonded to the mother. IOW the infant mind must discover that mother is not him due to external influences which compete for her attention.

Such effects occur in a number of domains of psychology and perception.

There's a relatively well-known book about such identity confusions in a clinical setting titled the Man Who Mustook His Wife For a Hat.

There's the Carousel Precognition.

There's phantom limb, effects of lobotomy, etc.

What's interesting to me is that since ancient times, we collectively have moved the "other" of mind out into media devices. These devices talk to us in the mental likeness of others, but which do not exist as such in even the slightest resemblance to a person: the structure of a television couldn't be further from a person, but you never find anyone in ordinary surroundings who A) exhibits slightest confusion that there is no person in the device-- where the device itself is but the barest topography of interpersonal reality-- and B) who questions for even moment the believability of the interpersonal as presented by the device. The voice of the device-other is perfectly assimilated by the viewer.

I suggest that our adaptation to TV (facsimiles of all kinds) is quite weird and unexpected if you think about what's going on between the person and the device, but try having a dialog about this with anyone who hasn't heard of Marshall Mcluhan! Moreover AI chat is far weirder, even if you have heard of McLuhan!

Thanks for the fascinating book report.

P.S. The conceit of "the book Jaynes should have written" is a risky gimmick for your report that I expected to fail, but you pulled it off.
by kasper93 | 2025-07-21 00:39:37+00:00
Moreover the baseline _c function is compiled with -march=generic and -fno-tree-vectorize on GCC. Hence it's the best case comparison for handcrafted AVX512 code. And while it's is obviously faster and that's very cool, boasting the 100x may be misinterpreted by outsider readers.

I was commenting there with some suggested change and you can find more performance comparison [0].

For example with small adjustment to C and compiling it for AVX512:

after (gcc -ftree-vectorize --march=znver4) detect_range_8_c: 285.6 ( 1.00x) detect_range_8_avx2: 256.0 ( 1.12x) detect_range_8_avx512: 107.6 ( 2.65x)

Also I argued that it may be a little bit misleading to post comparison without stating the compiler and flags used for said comparison [1].

P.S. There is related work to enable -ftree-vectorize by default [2]

[0] https://ffmpeg.org/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2025-July/346813.h...

[1] https://ffmpeg.org/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2025-July/346794.h...

[2] https://ffmpeg.org/pipermail/ffmpeg-devel/2025-July/346439.h...
by Vespasian | 2025-07-21 00:40:00+00:00
I think this is a heavy handed law which entrenches big tech companies.

However I'd argue that from the UK perspective any of these developed countries would be considered reg-shoped.

They don't consider other countries' laws as sufficient to protect their citizens (which I probably wouldn't agree with).

I'm struggling to see a better approach to make sure any law applicable to online services is actually effective.

It seems like there are only a few options:

1. Only pass globally agreed upon laws (which is basically nothing and not realistic)

2. Only regulate domestic providers (which would severely disadvantage them and not resolve the underlying issues)

3. Block all foreign services (which is even more drastic).

In the end a states' power is tied to its territory and the people living within it. If not being active in that state at all releases you from it's laws I would consider this appropriate.

This is on the UK to fix (or not fix) for themselves.
by zer00eyz | 2025-07-21 00:41:21+00:00
> BTW, have you tried out your challenges with a LLM?

I have they whiff pretty hard.

> getting quite good at code synthesis

There was a post yesterday about vibe coding basic. It pretty much reflects my experience with code for SBC's.

I run home assistant, it's got tons of sample code out there so lots for the LLM to have in its data set. Here they thrive.

It's a great tool with some known hard limits. It's great at spitting back language but it clearly lacks knowledge. It clearly lacks the reason to understand the transitive properties of things, leaving it lacking at the edges.
by pentagrama | 2025-07-21 00:41:43+00:00
I was going to comment that the page video is a GIF and was going to be huge, around 10MB, but surprisingly is 4.28 MB. Still huge, I converted the GIF to MP4 with https://cloudconvert.com/gif-to-mp4 and is 575 KB and the quality is great. It should be more common just use <video> instead of a GIF for many cases.

I noticed that was a GIF because I have an extension to not autoplay GIFs [1], it is great to don't have to see moving stuff without consent. Actually, the extension can be better, I would prefer to have a play button to GIFs/see a "GIF" label on the image, now I have to change the setting of the extension and reload the page. I'm not a developer and try to do the extension with Claude but didn't work, if someone knows an extension with that feature let me know! I looked for it and can't find it, it may be a great opportunity to create one, devs!

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/gifpuase/
by Aurornis | 2025-07-21 00:43:48+00:00
> We seem to be near the limit of scaling (physics) we're not seeing a lot in clock (some but not enough), and IPC is flat. We are also having power (density) and cooling (air wont cut it any more) issues.

This is exaggeration. CPUs are still getting faster. IPC is increasing, not flat. Cooling on air is fine unless you’re going for high density or low noise.

This is just cynicism. Even an M4 MacBook Pro is substantially faster than an M1 from a few years ago, which is substantially faster than the previous versions.

Server chips are scaling core counts and bandwidth. GPUs are getting faster and faster.

The only way you could conclude scaling is dead is if you ignored all recent progress or you’re expecting improvements at an unrealistically fast rate.
by tpurves | 2025-07-21 00:46:09+00:00
No you were right to be disappointed! I was similarly in a state of excited awe to see someone play actual quake inside the notch of a mac. Much like the noble hacker tradition of getting Doom to run on the most unexpected devices possible. So yes, ID Software games running in weird places is an entirely reasonable expectation!

'just a terminal' is maybe also a legit term of art and entirely useful for somebody out there. But much less cool that we were hoping for!
by lstamour | 2025-07-21 00:46:19+00:00
Electronics and tightly sealed houses, both of which the Amish might avoid, together allow for a lot more formaldehyde build up indoors. My pet theory (with no proven evidence except my own two eyes, as someone possibly affected by formaldehyde, which means the details are just guesswork right now) is that formaldehyde indoors is responsible for the increase in reported allergies, poor vision (glasses), asthma, ADHD, and possibly increases in divorce rates or staying single - by which I mean that it can cause irritability.

I figure it is the primary cause of road rage, that it can possibly bind to and release microparticulate of metals like iron and aluminum, that it can store itself not just as a solid at room temperature but also in the rubber parts of a scooter while it charges or silicone or foam parts of a CPAP as you breathe in and out (you naturally produce formaldehyde, but increased presence in your exhaled breath has been associated with cancer, for example).

It also causes insomnia and can cause very low humidity in an enclosed space, which might both increase static shocks but also possibly break electronics when combined with its effect on certain metals mentioned earlier.

I’ve an even crazier pet theory that in the presence of other VOCs and sunlight, formaldehyde can multiply, but I don’t have anything to back that up. Formaldehyde with CO2 and UVA can react to become ozone, but ozone with UVA and other VOCs can become formaldehyde. As a result, on a particularly sunny day, I think even outdoor formaldehyde levels can rise and cause the day to feel even warmer than it otherwise should, and that it’s the formaldehyde that can then cause more inattentive accidents.

I’ve another theory that if you take something on to a train with micro metal particulate offgassing and formaldehyde, that it will bind itself to the heat of the wheels over the tracks and be released along with microparticulate from the metal rails every time the train runs by.

I could give more evidence of why this might be so, such as increased rates of emergency repairs of train tracks in my area, Toronto, and a study from 2017 that says Torontos subways have the most metal particulate in NA, but since it’s just speculation right now, take everything I said with a grain of salt, please.

I should add that burning natural gas indoors without appropriate airflow is a wonderful way to introduce a lot of formaldehyde to your living quarters over the years. If I could ban all forms of combustion indoors, I would, I really would.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-21 00:46:21+00:00
I don’t get it. There are multiple providers. I cancel one provider and sign up for someone new in a few minutes when I feel like changing. I’ve been doing this every few months.

I think the only people worried about lock-in or Black Mirror themes are the people who are thinking about these subscriptions in an abstract sense.

It’s really easy to change providers. They’re all improving. Competition is intense.
by sokoloff | 2025-07-21 00:47:31+00:00
The ΔT between evaporator (typically 2-6°C while cooling) and condenser (often 40-50°C in cooling mode) is much higher than 20°C. The condenser is often almost 20°C above ambient outside temperature.

The design ΔT of ~10°C is the typical return-to-supply air ΔT.
by briHass | 2025-07-21 00:49:06+00:00
There's some commercial options for this, but it's not common. Usually, these devices just have their own compressors, because they all pale in comparison to the heat pump(s) used for climate control. For example, I have a HP water heater, and its heat pump is about 1/3 of a ton, whereas most homes need 3+ tons for climate control. Fridges are a fraction of that.

For HP clothes dryers, there's no efficiency to steal from somewhere else, because they use both the hot and cold coils - similar to (the same, really) dehumidifiers.

The tradeoff would also be running high-pressure refrigerant lines everywhere. That would require EPA certification (in the US, anyway) to connect/disconnect an appliance, and it would probably be less reliable. These sealed-system units are generally pretty reliable, because the refrigerant is installed at the factory under ideal conditions, and there's no connections that are made later that may be done poorly.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-21 00:49:32+00:00
> The problem with paid LLMs is that one cannot easily switch to open-source ones (because they are not as good as the paid ones). So, it's a dependency that cannot be avoided

How is that any different than JetBrains versus vim?

Calling LLMs a strong dependency or a lock-in also doesn’t make sense. It’s so easy to switch LLMs or even toggle between them within something like Copilot.

You can also just not use them and write the code manually, which is something you still do in any non-trivial app.

I don’t understand all of these people talking about strong dependencies or vendor lock in, unless those comments are coming from people who haven’t actually used the tools?
by llbbdd | 2025-07-21 00:50:00+00:00
Over-estimation or not, it's safer to take an Uber than the subway or bus. The granularities of the stats don't affect my decision much.

> I don't see why you apply that to the NYC subway and not to Boeing flights

Because again technical and social issues merit different weighting. If I'm flying on a 787-MAX I am at the mercy of all the good and bad design decisions that went into producing it. Those will be relatively consistent between flights for better or worse. The population of people traveling on a bus or subway routinely changes and is much less predictable. That predictability matters a lot here (to me). And given the option between weighting the threat of strangers around me vs. the threat of technical issues with a particular manufacturer, it seems to me that Boeing would have to crash a lot of planes on US soil before it would outweigh the number of people threatened or made uncomfortable on other forms of public transit.
by what-the-grump | 2025-07-21 00:50:03+00:00
Because if it worked better then we’d be doing it already. But no amount of cryptobro podcasts are going to fix the shortcomings of digital currencies. And everyone knows this.

My dollar will be worth a dollar tomorrow and will sit in my wallet. My crypto currency is worthless on most of the planet. Do you take payments in LoL skins or vbucks?
by jfengel | 2025-07-21 00:51:06+00:00
Unfortunately, the legal definitions are the result of regulatory capture. Commercial organic farming has effectively nothing in common with JI Rodale's use when he coined it. (Well, popularized it.)

If you want to know how the animals are treated you need to visit the farm. Which you cannot do for commercial organic farms.

If you can, you could satisfy yourself that the animals are being treated in accordance with your conscience. Unfortunately it will cost at least twice as much. (And, aggravatingly, possibly emits more greenhouse gases.)
by zaptheimpaler | 2025-07-21 00:51:14+00:00
Where is the strong dependency? I can point Cursor at Openrouter and use any LLM I want, from multiple providers. Every LLM provider supports the same OpenAI completions API.

I wish the stuff on top - deep research modes, multimodal, voice etc. had a more unified API as well but there's very little lock-in right now.
by robertwt7 | 2025-07-21 00:51:51+00:00
I am Australian, the state that we have become is just sad. The fact that this is brought under the disguise of "child protection" is ridiculous and I never would have imagine a future in my own country where I have to submit my ID to access anything online. They will never achieve anything with this because everyone will just use VPN. It's costing taxpayer's money without any useful outcome. The level of incompetence displayed by this government is astonishing.
by djljr | 2025-07-21 00:52:04+00:00
This unlocked something very special for us. We have a card for each parent, grandparent and many others reading books to our 3 year old. It's very easy to link a blank nfc card to a playlist that corresponds to the reader. He loves picking a family member after we finish books to read more while he falls asleep.

https://www.reddit.com/r/YotoPlayer/s/YZq49FRFys
by chambers | 2025-07-21 00:54:07+00:00
You should look up the term "zero cost abstractions".

It's the organizing principle of the second generation of Rust's leadership[1]. Formally, it means "zero runtime cost"[2], but the now-former maintainers operated as though it meant Rust could get rid of all cost. The belief was that they can have a language that's faster than C, safer than Ada, more ergonomic than Java, more memory safe than Go, by either making the compiler do more work, or working more on the compiler. In practice, I think this belief caused massive complexity in the compiler, trade-off dishonesty in the community, and bad evangelism in domains unsuited for memory safety (e.g. games programming)

[1] Graydon, the original author of Rust, was against this idea.

[2] The term originates from C++ as "zero overhead" which was smaller in scope, and not a governing principle of the C++ language.
by pzmarzly | 2025-07-21 00:54:41+00:00
> who else has done enough that many people would have a chance of knowing their name?

Not sure if that counts, but I suspect ZUN (Touhou) and Toby Fox (Undertale) are recognised by more people for their music than for their games. A lot of people have heard e.g. Megalovania, Spider Dance, Bad Apple, UN Owen was Her, or Flowering Nights, but don't know a single about the games they are from other than the name.
by rayiner | 2025-07-21 00:54:52+00:00
> The other thing that has not been mentioned so far in this sub-thread (but maybe elsewhere) is that public transport is very relaxing.

No it’s not. In NYC it’s crowded, loud, and full of weirdos. You often have to stand and can’t get a seat. You have to really get good at tuning everything out. Meanwhile, driving (especially with supervised self driving or even modern adaptive cruise control and lane keeping) is quieter, has better climate control, and you can listen to a podcast or music without headphones.
by jjk166 | 2025-07-21 00:55:02+00:00
One needs to distinguish between quality, consistency, value, and utility.

My parents have a fridge that has been running consistently without issue for 40 years. It is a quality fridge.

What fraction of the fridges made at the same time by the same company are also still running? I can't say for certain but I certainly haven't encountered one since my childhood. They may have been capable of high quality, but not consistently high quality. My parents just lucked out.

The fridge lacks most features of more modern fridges like water filtration or an ice maker, and the design of its shelves weren't particularly ergonomic. A similar fridge would be much cheaper today, at least adjusted for inflation. Put another way, a modern fridge of the same price point would be more valuable.

But the fridge has spent the past 25 years as a backup fridge mostly for longer term storage of bulk items, so the lack of features have not really impacted its utility. Keeping things cold is the primary purpose of a fridge, everything else is a gimmick.

Things have across the board gotten more consistent and cheaper for a given value. A lot of products have suffered feature bloat which detracts from their utility. I don't believe there has been any meaningful shift in quality in the past few decades - for the most part its just people misremembering the past, cherry picking anecdotes, or being deliberately obtuse about how they actually use products and services. Some specific industries may have seen changes, but there is not a bewildering phenomenon across the board.
by julienmarie | 2025-07-21 00:55:27+00:00
I think we need to look at it per type of use. The beauty of the web is its versatility.

- It's an ever evolving information repository - the initial use - from Wikipedia to blogs to newspapers.

- It's a debate space - forums ( used to be newsgroups )

- It's a transaction space - ecommerce, marketplaces

- It's a social space – from keeping in touch to meeting new people – social media, dating websites. used to be irc

- It's an entertainment space - tiktok, youtube, netflix, etc...

AI will have the harshest initial impact on the information repository use. It will cannibalize it but also needs it to feed itself.

The transaction space will be affected. Protocols like MCPs once strengthened will need to support transactions. Payment infrastructure will need to be built for this.

Then, the social space will be the weirdest. AI Companions will become ubiquitous, naturally filling the void left by the weakening of the social fabric and loneliness epidemic.

For the debate space, 99% of it doesn't play the role of debate, but more of the role of echo chamber and social validation. It's AI Companionship but by community. These spaces will stay. AI is one to one, not one to many. But they will drastically lose appeal. AI will perfectly play this role of validation and echo chamber.

Finally, entertainment is already being disrupted. The question will be how the industry as a whole ( it's more than purely content creation, it's the whole mythos creation around it ) will adapt to the possibility of on the fly content creation.

AI will become the main human-machine interface, and the role of machines will grow exponentially in our daily lives. The capitalistic concentration that will ensue will be never seen before. The company who will win AI will be the most powerful company in history. They will dominate not only tech, but culture, economics, world view.

Remember, GPT2 was only released 6 years ago.