MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rododecba | 2025-07-23 08:10:13+00:00
The idea came from the need to express something without expecting anything in return, from complete anonymity. While developing it, I came up with the easiest way to explain what the site is about: "Write whatever you want, without expecting anything in return. Your words will be a bottle thrown into the sea, found by someone somewhere in the world, without knowing who you are or who found it."

These are the core values behind my idea:

Radical anonymity: No one follows you, no one knows who you are. Your identity doesn't matter—only your thoughts.

No social validation: There are no “likes,” no followers, no public comments to influence or condition you. The only interaction is throwing your bottle (your thought), and if someone finds it, they can reply—just as anonymously.

Pure freedom of expression: You can write anything, without fear of judgment or social pressure. It’s your space to release what’s inside you, with no strings attached.

Unexpected human connection: Your message can reach anyone, in any country, at any moment. It’s an act of faith in humanity and in randomness.

No history, no reputation: Forget the past. No one builds a profile or a personal brand here. Every message is a standalone moment, with no past or future context.

An antidote to overexposure: A refuge from hyperconnectivity, social pressure, and the constant need for approval.

Safe and respectful space: Even in anonymity, respect is the foundation. We don’t tolerate messages of hate, violence, or discrimination.

Zero algorithms, zero manipulation: No personalized feeds, no trending topics. Everything is random. Everything matters equally.

I also created something called the “Time Capsule,” definitely my favorite feature: Write a thought and send it into the future. You can schedule the capsule for 1 hour, 100 years, or more.

The site is available in both Spanish and English. Messages written in other languages can be read using the built-in translation option.

I’d love for you to try it out and share your thoughts, ideas, and feedback.

Thank you to the entire community.
by muchlakshay | 2025-07-23 08:11:00+00:00
thanks!!!! appreciate that a lot. i’ve mainly tested it on MNIST for now, the CUDA backend trains one epoch in ~0.4ms (batch size 1000, RTX 3060, as i mentioned in the post). It was primarily a deep dive into CUDA/C++, manual memory management, and building a dual backend architecture with a custom matrix lib (GPU-side completely from scratch). this was actually my 4th serious attempt at building a GPU-based MLP from scratch. I failed multiple times, sometimes due to a single line of code. in earlier attempts, i had this optimization idea: store both the weights and their transposes in GPU memory, so i wouldn’t have to compute the transpose each epoch. Seemed clever, until training started failing badly. Turned out I was only updating the original weights matrix after backprop, but the transposed one was still holding stale values from earlier. this broke training completely, and I spent weeks trying to debug it, couldn’t figure it out until this current version.

honestly, the biggest gotchas were-

-memory coherence issues like above (esp. when trying to cache 'smartly')

-launching kernels in the right order while keeping data in sync

-maintainingg modularity without sacrificing too much performance

i avoided fused kernels/shared memory in this version to keep things clean and reusable, but now that the core works, I plan to start optimizing that layer too.
by bayindirh | 2025-07-23 08:11:23+00:00
No, v1. I mean, you can't buy a x86_64-v1 server for a decade now, and if you have one and it's alive, it's a very slim chance it's working unless it's new old stock.

If it has seen any decent amount of workload during its lifetime, it possibly has a couple of ICs which reached their end of their electronic life and malfunctioning.
by wibbily | 2025-07-23 08:12:08+00:00
I think I follow this philosophy. You spend a lot of time looking at the insides of the things you build, even if no one else does - why shouldn't I get to see beauty too.

Related but distinct from aesthetic beauty, there's a sort of mechanical beauty. Simplicity and elegance and all that. All the parts that came out of the Macbook were held in with one screw - good - but all those screws look to be different shapes and sizes - less good. Maybe it isn't possible to have both. For my money I spend a lot of time going back and forth between the two.
by TheAceOfHearts | 2025-07-23 08:12:39+00:00
It would be great if some of these datasets were free and opened up for public use. Otherwise it seems like you end up duplicating a lot of busywork just for multiple companies to farm more money. Maybe some of the European initiatives related to AI will end up including the creation of more open datasets.

Then again, maybe we're still operating from a framework where the dataset is part of your moat. It seems like such a way of thinking will severely limit the sources of innovation to just a few big labs.
by rcxdude | 2025-07-23 08:12:50+00:00
Earlier, for the most part. There was a fairly well known set of standard objections. A lot of the others were to do with the implications of the earth rotating, like the fact that things seem to fall straight down (not quite, but it was only after Galileo's death that someone managed to demonstrate this clearly, and not for lack of trying), and that you don't get a huge wind generated by the rotation (it does affect the winds, but you need a far more sophisticated framework for understanding motion that only really started to take shape with Newton to put this together). The star parallax thing was further complicated by an quirk of optics, which is that stars don't appear to be perfect point objects, they (to the naked eye and to telescopes) do have some apparent diameter, and that diameter implied that if they were far away enough to not have parallax, not only would the universe need to be much bigger, the stars themselves would need to be huge, many times the size of the solar system.

It also didn't help that Galileo's model was still incorrect and inelegant, due to the insistence on circles and epicycles. It actually needed more cycles to explain than the geocentric version of the model! It was Kepler that actually got things right and elegant by allowing orbits to be ellipses.

(As an aside, there's one exchange of letters between Galileo and a bigwig member of the church, where amusingly, to modern observers, the church guy was more correct about the astronomy and Galileo was more correct on the theology!)
by mathan_karthik | 2025-07-23 08:14:43+00:00
Thanks for the thoughtful questions and for sharing your experience!

On country-specific tax logic and edge cases: I’m planning to design the core with extensibility in mind—so things like tax rules, invoice sequencing, and regional compliance can be handled via plugins or configuration modules. For example, German invoice sequencing or Singapore GST could be implemented as optional adapters, and I’d love help identifying the most common patterns and pain points.

Authentication: Unified auth/session handling is a big goal, but I recognize each platform’s OAuth flow is a bit different. My idea is to abstract the common flows and provide helper functions, but also allow for custom overrides where platforms deviate too much. I’d be interested in hearing more about where OAuth gets especially tricky for your use cases.

Data mapping/sync: This is definitely the hardest part. My current thinking is to define a canonical data model (for invoices, customers, etc.), then provide mapping layers for each platform. There will be tools to help with syncing and conflict resolution, but I expect this will need ongoing refinement as APIs evolve and edge cases pop up.

Would love to keep this conversation going—if you have specific war stories or must-have features, please let me know! And if anyone’s interested in collaborating, I’d be happy to open up the repo early for feedback and contributions.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-07-23 08:15:00+00:00
>despite the inflow of illegal immigrants to south europe

Why "despite"? How many people who move illegally to Europe want to go work hard labor on farms if they can have easier avenues of making money?

From what I read in newspapers, most farm workers at least in DACH region tend to be Romanians, which are EU citizens, and in Scandinavia they tend to be Asians on legal work visas, basically all legal workers who wanted those jobs from the get go.

So you can't fix the Europe's famously perpetual "muh (cheap) labor shortage" with open borders to illegals, if those people don't want those jobs to begin with. That's like leaving your house front door wide open, hoping that from all those people who walk in, someone might want to be your maid for cheap, and not just eat your food and walk out.
by sakisv | 2025-07-23 08:15:39+00:00
Essentials: my own domain for emails, Fastmail, Bitwarden, Google for 100GB of storage.

Less essential: Obsidian, Kagi (this one may be bumped to the "essentials" at some point), a few VPS on Hetzner to run some projects, domain names for said projects.

Just because I like them and want to support them: Signal
by cjs_ac | 2025-07-23 08:15:40+00:00
In Kelvedon Hatch in Essex is the Secret Nuclear Bunker[0], which was first used as a RAF command post in the Second World War, but ended up as a Regional Government HQ for use in the event of a nuclear war. The room which was intended to be used for communication with surviving civil servants is filled with '80s microcomputers, and there's a manually operated telephone exchange (the automatic one having been removed when the bunker was decommissioned). The scariest part is probably the manikin of Margaret Thatcher in what would have been her private quarters.

[0] https://secretnuclearbunker.com/
by brabel | 2025-07-23 08:16:08+00:00
You don’t even need GraalVM. Use jlink (part of the JDK) to create a JVM runtime with only the parts of it that you use, specially if you use the module system. Then you distribute your app as a binary basically, plus the resources it needs (the class files and images/text/etc files). I prefer that to using Graal because very often using Graal requires specifying extra metadata and behavior may differ from what you test, not to mention the atrocious compilation times and its lack of a JIT which means it may start faster, but peak performance is very likely lower.
by stephenhandley | 2025-07-23 08:16:15+00:00
Effective TODOs capture a code-level design tradeoff and any associated debt which

- won't have sufficient positive impact on the bug/feature you are working on

- you don't have time to address at that point in time

- are significant enough to require pay down later

How to address them in terms of tooling and process is a way bigger question
by KronisLV | 2025-07-23 08:16:16+00:00
I did! I do think Mistral models are pretty okay, but even the 4-bit quantized version runs at about 16 tokens/second, more or less usable but a biiiig step down from the MoE options.

Might have to swap out Ollama for vLLM though and see how different things are.
by minebreaker | 2025-07-23 08:16:17+00:00
Fair criticism, but it's not really a practical problem. Usually a linter will catch them easily, and even when junior devs ignore the warnings, you can just tell them to use "equals."

The thing is that, equality is the difficult problem. "equals" in JVM languages has a lot of problems. Dynamic languages are much more horrible in this aspect. JavaScript `==` is much worse than Java. Python is guilty too in my view, for using `__eq__` method. The only language I know which solves the problem correctly is Haskell. (Or, `Eq` in Cats)
by gryf73 | 2025-07-23 08:16:57+00:00
> It's a pity no one ever tried to replace the WINGs widget set with actual GNUstep

It was by purpose at the beginning. Window Maker suppose to be lightweight window manager which resembles nextSTEP, nothing else. GNUstep people has decided to adopt wmaker as their window manager, not other way around.
by mark_undoio | 2025-07-23 08:17:29+00:00
I've heard various online stories, over the years, about how nobody nails the ergonomics quite like Maltron does. Which is amazing given how long they've been about.

I have an old Maltron that I got cheap (many years ago and it was old then!) and it's remarkable how unlike a modern consumer product it was. Thin, vacuum formed plastic, point-to-point soldered wire keyboard matrix. But that classic shape, keys with full sized key caps and travel, etc are all present.

The Kinesis I also have is much more mainstream - it feels more solid and looks more like a consumer product. But I understand it's just not quite as good, ergonomically.
by astrobe_ | 2025-07-23 08:18:11+00:00
> And there isn't really just one thing that gets outdated on phones. You usually want a better screen, better camera, better CPU, more ram, new battery.

I can't help but notice that you don't mention the part that makes it a phone (e.g. the 2G/5G/Wifi modem chip). Maybe one should actually sell those as cartridges... Nevermind, that would be a PC-Card.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-07-23 08:18:42+00:00
I think anyone that does get convinced and skip meat should be able to use LLMs without shame or guilt, while we continue to pressure everyone else to save resources and we continue to pressure LLM companies to save resources.

LLM companies only get let off the hook if a very large fraction of their users do the meat skip thing, which is not very likely but could theoretically happen.

LLMs being a new category of energy use should get them some extra scrutiny, but only some. Maybe 3x scrutiny per wasted kilowatt hour compared to entrenched uses? If our real motivation is resource use, and not overreacting to change, LLMs should get some pressure but most of the pressure should go toward preexisting wasteful uses.

Nobody is advocating to ignore LLMs. But we shouldn't overstate them too much either.

And the giving up meat defense is not a defense for the companies, it's a defense for individual users that actually do it.
by setopt | 2025-07-23 08:19:10+00:00
Now that’s interesting, thanks for sharing. Link: https://apps.apple.com/no/app/synctrain/id6553985316

I’ve tried Möbius before but wasn’t happy with it. Ended up switching to Resilio Sync (proprietary, one-time purchase) some years ago; the iOS client was better, it synced faster, and it was better at working around NAT/FW issues.

But I recently tried Syncthing again, and it seems to have mostly catches up except for the iOS client.
by js8 | 2025-07-23 08:19:42+00:00
I wish but the opposite seems to be coming - Haskell will have less support from coding AIs than mainstream languages.

I think people, who care about FP, should think about what is appealing about coding in natural language and is missing from programming in strongly typed FP languages such as Haskell and Lean. (After all, what attracted me to Haskell compared to Python was that the typechecking is relatively cheap thanks to type inference.)

I believe that natural language in coding has allure because it can express the outcome in fuzzy manner. I can "handwave" certain parts and the machine fills them out. I further believe, to make this work well with formal languages, we will need to use some kind of fuzzy logic, in which we specify the programs. (I particularly favor certain strong logics based on MTL but that aside.) Unfortunately, this line of research seems to have been pretty much abandoned in AI in favor of NNs.
by Expurple | 2025-07-23 08:19:49+00:00
> the linux kernel is good evidence against it.

To quote my other comment:

> I wasn't there, but the narrative online seems to be that Linux won due to its strong momentum and the leading position that it established back in the 90s, while the BSDs were held back by the AT&T lawsuit. Due to this leading position and the network effect, using and contributing to Linux is simply much more cost-effective. Privately forking a BSD and making it "better" than Linux would give you a competitive advantage, sure. But it's a prohibitively expensive thing to do.

> In other words, it's a historical accident that there was no strong BSD alternative when Linux was picking up steam. Now it's too big to fail, and the GPL works in full force. GPL can't work in full force in the early stages of a project.
by tietjens | 2025-07-23 08:19:53+00:00
yes, this. biggest problem and danger in my daily work with llms. my entire working method with them is shaped around this problem. instead of asking it to give me answers or solutions, i give it a line of thought or logical chain, and then ask it to continue down the path and force it to keep explaining the reasoning while i interject, continuing to introduce uncertainty. suspicion is one of the most valuable things i need to make any progress. in the end it's a lot of work and very much reading and reasoning.
by vedmakk | 2025-07-23 08:20:16+00:00
Dimming the monitor just turns white into gray globally. It lowers overall luminance, but doesn't fix the relative contrast or the perceptual glare caused by high-contrast elements like pure white on pure black.

In fact, even at lower brightness, bright-on-dark can still cause halation, retinal fatigue, and visual vibration, especially in low-light environments.

Designing softer contrasts does the same thing, but more intentionally - and we can't assume users have ideal screen settings. Better to design for humans, not hardware.

Also: white-on-black is just one example.
by ekunazanu | 2025-07-23 08:21:02+00:00
> Because there’s a lot of overlap between the red and green cones, our brain subtracts some green from red, yielding this spectral response:

No, cones do not produce a negative response. The graph shows the intensity of the primaries required to recreate the spectral colour at that wavelength. The negative implies that the primary was added to the spectral colour to match it with itself, instead of adding it with the other primaries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIE_1931_color_space#Color_mat...
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-07-23 08:22:39+00:00
> Might have to swap out Ollama for vLLM though and see how different things are.

Oh, that might be it. Using gguf is slower than say AWQ if you want 4bit, or fp8 if you want the best quality (especially on Ada arch that I think your GPUs are).

edit: vLLM is better for Tensor Parallel and also better for batched inference, some agentic stuff can do multiple queries in parallel. We run devstral fp8 on 2x A6000 (old, not even Ada) and even with marlin kernels we get ~35-40 t/s gen and 2-3k pp on a single session, with ~4 parallel sessions supported at full context. But in practice it can work with 6 people using it concurrently, as not all sessions get to the max context. You'd get 1/2 of that for 2x L4, but should see higher t/s in generation since you have Ada GPUs (native support for fp8).
Show HN: Two steps to build a personal website (fuck vibe coding)
by _mad_eye_ | 2025-07-23 08:23:12+00:00
let's just admit it, vibe coding a personal website is tiring, you have to design, code, host, get a domain blablabla; to get a good enough personal website, you have to spend at least 2 hours. And we all know building a personal website is a chore!

Acknowledging this, we built Noey.ai, you will be able to build your personal website by just filling a questionnaire, and we will handle the design part, code part and hosting part for you. Everything from signup to a goodlooking website in 4 minutes.

We're launching beta now, currently we only support building one-pager websites, text editing & image replacing. With more features coming soon! (multi-pager, social links, portfolio sections, blogs.. )

demo: I built this with only my resume and name. https://ixic.my-site.io/
by kadoban | 2025-07-23 08:23:15+00:00
It could _probably_ figure out a lot of cases via some kind of static or runtime analysis.

Like the example from the linked article, there's one animation involved essentially and if the browser does the hard work for the entire length of one animation cycle and no layout ever changes, just assume it never will? It would have to have a bunch of edge cases to handle correctly I'm sure though.
by tialaramex | 2025-07-23 08:23:46+00:00
In C you program the C Abstract Machine, this machine is a child's drawing of the Digital computers on which C was invented, it's simpler and easier to grasp than they actually were but fundamentally similar. Your computer today does not much resemble this, but your computer is the real machine your software will be executed on anyway. Mistaking the Abstract Machine for your real one is a catastrophic misunderstanding and C feels as though this is the bare metal when it is not.

As a result it's more honest to use a language where it doesn't feel as though you're touching the bare metal, because you aren't anyway†

When I last checked both Oxford and Cambridge teach an ML as First Language. So did the place where I did my degree decades ago although today it teaches Python (which I believe is a mistake). That's because the theory of computation is foundational here, not the practice.

† Even assembler isn't touching the bare metal, you have features like out-of-order execution and register renaming between the machine code you wrote and the actual things done.
by rcxdude | 2025-07-23 08:24:45+00:00
The Catholic Church was quite tyrannical about opining on matters of theology. Heliocentrism vs Geocentrism, which discussed in terms of whether it's really true or not (as opposed to merely an interesting mathematical model), was considered to be this. That didn't mean that the church was unwilling to discuss it, but that they wanted the public discourse to be controlled to avoid it seeming to conflict with their domain, at least until they could be convinced (and Galileo's main problem is that he could convince very few people inside and outside the church, due to lack of available evidence) and change their official line themselves.

The other problem for Galileo was that he did basically just piss off a bunch of people (he was, by all accounts, very good at publicly dunking on people, whether they were right or wrong. He'd be a natural on modern social media). There was a large group who basically started conspiring against him, trying to implicate him in going against the church, and then his book (which was 'approved' through a very chaotic, almost comical sequence of bad timings and missed communication) managed to insult and piss off the Pope, who was previously a very close friend.

So, ultimately the broad thrust of the situation is not changed: the church was ultimately wrong and unreasonable in their demands, and Galileo was ultimately correct in rejecting Geocentrism, but the church was more reasonable than generally implied in the simplified telling, and Galileo was a lot less correct, and especially lacked good rational arguments and evidence for his specific model.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-07-23 08:26:32+00:00
I feel very little patriotism for the EU bueaucracy and expect it to support surveillance and lawfare.

In essence the idea is good, but I don't see it as something positive in political reality.

On the contrary, software should keep its very critical stance against state actors and their bureaucracies. I also am conviced today that keeping the EUs budget small is beneficial and the EU lacks legitimacy to collect taxes in my opinion.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-07-23 08:26:57+00:00
One does not necessarily need a healthy environment for the next generation of scientists if there is already a surplus of them willing to work in rather sordid conditions, and if there is a surplus of scientific discoveries that can be easily capitalized upon with few workers. Or if there is a surplus of science being done elsehwere. The system optimizes for short-term production and growth, and a good environment for science everyhere is not necessarily optimal for that.