MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pyman | 2025-07-14 08:10:13+00:00
What's the rationale behind adding BYOK? Or the advantages?

You do realise you're already using an optimised model built for everyday devices, and that model includes some serious innovations in parameter-efficient processing, right?

You're a great developer, and it looks like you're thinking about adding features like BYOK quickly to please more users. But in doing that, you might be missing the real innovation you've already created. You've basically built a version of Grammarly without the privacy issues that make most IT departments ban it.

No one wants Grammarly or your tool sending corporate emails or documents to a language model. Privacy is what sets you apart from Grammarly. It's your biggest feature right now. Add a big table to your site comparing your products privacy with Grammarly's. That's your strongest selling point, and probably the only feature that can truly compete with the big players.

My advice? Keep improving the app, but keep the model local. Keep it private. That's the killer feature you've got.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-14 08:10:32+00:00
> Wealth isn't "distributed" in a free market. People work and invest to get money in exchange.

It's trickled up by regulatory capture, cheating the political system, gerrymandering, and grants to ensure the property class pay little or no taxes and get socialism for the rich while suppressing wages, expanding undocumented workers and 13a exception prison slave labor, encouraging austerity, and neoliberalism.
by sim7c00 | 2025-07-14 08:10:34+00:00
liked the read but it gets a bit confusing at some point, its abut unclear whos telling the story. moved the cube from sophies to _your_ basement, from that part. whos you? its like it was being recalled or confirmed by someone else not the writer (thats good) but not completely put in the right 'person' for the article.

totally love that the first thing on ur mind was burn the cube hah. also funny such an good opportunity eventually came by :D
by cjs_ac | 2025-07-14 08:10:46+00:00
The screenshot shows the (corrected) example sentence:

> Sometimes I still make mistakes with articles and prepositions, but my grammar is getting better every day I practice.

In American/Simplified English, this is grammatically correct. However, in 'full fat' English, practice is a noun, whereas practise is a verb; e.g.:

> I go to my practice to practise medicine.

The problem I have with this website is that it's entirely concerned with peripheral issues. The product respects my privacy - good. The product is performant - good. The product doesn't require an Internet connection - good. The product works in many writing apps - good. The product has transparent pricing - good. But I don't give a shit about any of this until you convince me that this will consistently do the correct thing, and this website singularly fails to achieve this.
by exabrial | 2025-07-14 08:12:12+00:00
I think this is pretty far off the cusp and seems like a bit of reddit logic "health insurance is scam, internet said so".

Health insurance is one of the rare services where incentives between consumer and business are well aligned. The vast majority of people are healthy. Healthcare is expensive in the US because the uninsured population continues to rise out of "they're not making me pay for it": There are entire tranches (in the US) also don't buy insurance and use the ER and abuse EMTALA for their primary care (most of this is actually unintentional in my opinion, it's less educated populations in the US who are repeatedly taken advantage of and left to ride on government, which is extremely eye-wateringly bad at spending money). Personal experience here working in an ER.

The real pathway in the US to success is getting those populations onto private health insurance. Obama tried a heavy handed "health insurance mandate" that hilariously somehow passed the supreme court, but was so laughable mis-aligned with American ideals even Biden wouldn't enforce it.

What is apparent though is these populations are completely willing to pay bills like their cell service, gasoline, car payments, etc before investing in the most important thing (their health). This gives me hope there is a way forward by riding these perceived essential services somehow. I'm not really sure what the answer is here, but there is at least opportunity for some creative solutions.

I also think the disagreement here between red vs blue isn't the outcome: both want people to be healthy. Red doesn't want single payer, whereas blue does. Red ignores the fact these systems don't exist, blue ignores the fact that no other country in the world has the diversity of America and there are not functional examples.
by moconnor | 2025-07-14 08:12:14+00:00
A very long way of saying "during pretraining let the models think before continuing next-token prediction and then apply those losses to the thinking token gradients too."

It seems like an interesting idea. You could apply some small regularisation penalty to the number of thinking tokens the model uses. You might have to break up the pretraining data into meaningfully-paritioned chunks. I'd be curious whether at large enough scale models learn to make use of this thinking budget to improve their next-token prediction, and what that looks like.
by devjab | 2025-07-14 08:13:29+00:00
Can someone help a Danish person understand these cuts? I dislike the current government of USA, but it's not like I can't see the motivation behind wanting Greenland and all the other things they do. Reductions on USA space supremacy is the one area I really can't see a reason behind. Like who benefits from this? In the grander scheme of the entire USA budget these cuts aren't going to be meaningful, if anything, it seems like a waste to not utilize something you've already spend the majority of it's life time cost to get up there.

Hopefully it will lead to a situation where the freed time will be rented out. I mean, xuntian won't be capable of replacing James Webb since it's meant to complement rather than rival.

Is it part of the anti-science? Do they hope they can contract stuff out to the private sector? Or what?
by pjmlp | 2025-07-14 08:13:49+00:00
That was already available in languages like Modula-2 and Object Pascal, as the blog post acknowledges the idea is quite old, and was also the common approach to manage memory originally with Objective-C on NeXTSTEP, see NSZone.

Hence why all these wannabe be C replacements, but not like Rust, should bring more to the table.
by graemep | 2025-07-14 08:14:05+00:00
> Does that mean every vendor of anything is potentially a bad actor

Yes, of course they are. Left unregulated they will form cartels. As Adam Smith said, "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

They will try to raise barriers to entry as well, to limit competition. They will try to increase sales by many means.

They may be ethical enough not to do all that, but the potential is definitely there.
by pjmlp | 2025-07-14 08:16:29+00:00
One should note that Ada evolve quite a lot since 1983, and there are many improvements upon on how to manage resources in the language in a safe way.

There is its own version of RAII, controlled lifetimes, unbounded collections, the dynamic stack allocation on runtime (with exception/retry) is also a way to do arena like stuff, SPARK proofs, and as of recent ongoing standards work, some affine types magic dust as well.
by jjbinx007 | 2025-07-14 08:17:39+00:00
I recently used Gemini to help with some dashcam videos that weren't being saved properly. I was sure most of the data were there but the files wouldn't play in VLC or MPC, so I asked Gemini.

It suggested various things to try, and after pasting in the error messages each time it suggested more and more radical things. Eventually it suggested a program called Untrunc, where you give it a working video file as a reference and then the file that's faulty and as if by magic it worked!

Just wanted to mention this in case anyone else is struggling to get FFmpeg to repair a file.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-14 08:17:53+00:00
> We certainly wouldn't want HN to be like this forever (it's no fun to moderate, that's for sure). We'll keep doing what we can to move things in the right direction.

Isn’t the work of manual moderation largely no fun to begin with, when the rubber meets the road and you need to formulate a novel response, I mean?

I don’t mean to minimize your role here, as all the mods are awesome, and I can’t speak for others out of respect, but I can be trying and have definitely made more work for you all at times.

But all that said, what do the mods do here? What does moderation of HN look like on a good day? What makes the job fun in the first place? Can we build in more fun for users and mods? (Meta-moderation and its points system on Slashdot were peak internet message board user voting and moderation for me, I’ll admit. But Slashdot isn’t Slashdot anymore either.)

I guess I’m trying to understand what you can do and are doing to move things in the right direction, and what that means for HN, and more importantly, how we all can make HN more fun for all involved, hopefully even mods.
by tirant | 2025-07-14 08:18:39+00:00
Different people react differently to flu and colds.

I usually don’t get any colds at all, but I catch the flu once a year and need to be in bed at least for a week. So I started vaccinating since a couple of years and have avoided it so far.

My wife on the other hand catches every cold possible but her flu is gone in a couple of days.

Said that, my doctor has always strongly advised against doing any sport during flu or immediately after due to risks of heart infection. That’s something I’m going to follow, I’m not a sports professional and I have no need to risk my hearts health.
by McAlpine5892 | 2025-07-14 08:19:05+00:00
> Do you really think it's fair to compare a questionable UFO sighting

Fair enough. I chose my example poorly. My point still stands: personal anecdotes are a terrible way of understanding most anything.

> It's the same as when the marijuana legalization advocates say "it's basically medicine lol" or deny that addiction is possible

100% feel you here. Even as a user.

> There are a lot of bad things people consume and I support banning very few of those. Pornography is not one. Please don't mistake my position.

I appreciate your clarity here and I apologize for being a bit of jerk. So often it feels like people choose views purely on their own internal personal morality. Not a larger live-and-let-live attitude. Which kinda ties into the cannabis legalization thing above imo. The truth was fudged to make the moral argument easier - because that convinces people.

So, again, apologies for jumping down your throat and I appreciate the links.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-14 08:19:26+00:00
Dumb, rich Americans don't know how government works and don't understand what anything is for, even if it's critical for their survival or for the survival of millions of others, or crucial for future economic investment and prosperity. They just want to Retire All Government Employees (RAGE) because this is a utopian libertarian belief that "government is bad" and "costs money for no benefit". That, somehow, everything would be "perfect without government". They feel they are entitled to change everything according to their (uninformed) ideas because they are special and important by being rich. It's way past neoliberal austerity by reckless leadership making massive changes without being careful.

They've never heard of the problems with utopias or throwing out babies with the bathwater.
by BiteCode_dev | 2025-07-14 08:19:35+00:00
They removed friction by centralizing all restaurants so you can choose from one place, standardizing the experience no matter the food source, making selection simple and payment/refund easy.

The human brain is wired to go the way of the least resistance short term, no matter the cost long term, so customers pay a lot for that.

I have many pizza places that tell me they still deliver themselves for cheaper: almost nobody takes the option, they use the giant company app.
by shikaan | 2025-07-14 08:20:31+00:00
Exactly this.

I have been planning on trying to glue up something with v86[1] as I did in OSle[2] but I did not get to it yet.

In that case, everything would run locally and sandboxes, so you would not have to care.

[1]: https://github.com/copy/v86

[2]: https://github.com/shikaan/osle
by dqv | 2025-07-14 08:21:04+00:00
When I see people commenting "shut your bitch ass up" (now deleted), "triggered", "keep dreaming my guy", it is distinctly generational (young gen z) to me. It is a style of communication.

Torvalds may have "invented" OSS toxicity, but, as far as I can tell, he was not popping in saying SYBAU like he was commenting on a tiktok brainrot compilation.
by stavros | 2025-07-14 08:21:13+00:00
I'll dispute that, I work for one of the online pharmacies and we won't stop selling it to you once you've reached BMI 25. We do have criteria to guard against sudden or extreme weight loss, but I think the BMI criterion for that is something like < 20 BMI (don't quote me on that, as I'm not sure, but it's not 25).

We'll also keep you on a small maintenance dose if you want, that's a conversation you'll have with your clinician and they'll judge whether it's medically appropriate. As far as I know, there's usually no reason to prevent you, though.
by hollowonepl | 2025-07-14 08:22:01+00:00
I did not know that pointer indexing registers had direct low byte access, like `si/esi` (in 16/32bit when I last time used assemblers directly) that comes with `sil` as `ax/eax` analogy to `al`. Are there really opcodes for that that were added in the later evolution of x86_64? Seems I need to double check the specs of the platform again... out of plain curiosity!
by pjmlp | 2025-07-14 08:22:06+00:00
One recurring theme about these new wannabe C and C++ replacements, but not like Rust, is that their solution is basically to use what already exists in C and C++ for the last 30 years, if only people actually bother to learn how to use their tools.

Unfortunely it is a bit like debugging, lets keep doing printf(), instead of take the effort to learn how to use better approaches.
by tossandthrow | 2025-07-14 08:22:51+00:00
I get this.

> ... in 'full fat' English ...

English is a bastard of a language and getting messier every day as new nations adopt it is their standard language.

Setting the bar where it is well written and unambiguously understandable is IMHO completely fine for a 15$ product.

Having a text spell checked to comply with contemporary Oxford English is likely not the goal of this product.
by BiteCode_dev | 2025-07-14 08:22:52+00:00
Getting in the market now is super tough.

We have a French company, called Delicity, that has been doing just that for the last few years. They have a smart strategy and determined people.

It works, but they have to fight tooth and nail for each city they get a foothold in.

I had a call with the founder, the guy has more dark circles than visible eyes.
by TheDong | 2025-07-14 08:23:21+00:00
I agree with the point about non-EU web developers.

As long as people in the US can't test their web app on "firefox for iOS" without first buying a plane ticket to the EU and getting an EU sim card, all eu-only browser engines on iOS will be second-class citizens.

I think the next logical extension is that actually limiting general public use across the entire world makes apple less compliant with the DMA. Mozilla will not be able to justify putting significant effort into the iOS port as long as it can only reach a small fraction of users, so in reality the way to get browser-engine competition in the EU is to mandate that apple _not_ impose EU-specific rules about what apps can be installed.
by Arnavion | 2025-07-14 08:24:55+00:00
Proc macros themselves are slow too. If you compile them in debug mode, they run slowly. If you compile them in release mode, they run faster but take longer to compile. This is especially noticeable with behemoth macros like serde that use the complicated syn parser.

Compiling them in release mode does have an advantage if the proc macro is used a lot in your dep tree, since the faster invocations compensate for the increased compile time. Another option is shipping pre-compiled macros like the serde maintainer tried to do at one point, but there was sufficient (justified) backlash to shipping blobs in that case that it will probably never take off.

Here's a comparison of using serde proc macros for (De)Serialize impls vs pre-generated impls: https://github.com/Arnavion/k8s-openapi/issues/4#issuecommen... In other words the amount of code that is compiled in the end is the same; the time difference is entirely because of proc macro invocation. 5m -> 3m for debug builds, 3.5m -> 3m for release builds. It's from 2018, but the situation is largely unchanged as of today.
by moomoo11 | 2025-07-14 08:25:38+00:00
Sorry I should have clarified. Continue with a deal with a top provider.

If Apple continues to make excellent hardware, maybe the best of those providers will pay them $10B a year to be the default models like Google paid them for search.

Their core competency is hardware. Let’s be honest nobody really runs Apple software on their Macs. Most of the software distribution is 3rd party. Very few people use Pages, for example.
by Antitoxic6185 | 2025-07-14 08:26:14+00:00
you seem to be leaking your access token for mapbox.com api?

'pk.eyJ1IjoiZnJpZ2dlcmkiLCJhIjoiY21jbHdmZmZmMGV3dTJpcHR5cWcwOHhzdyJ9.Z-XMMh_nFDjm8FUyB2tZ_w'
by Y-bar | 2025-07-14 08:27:42+00:00
Wasn't this exactly what people were hating it for? IKEA used it for print and lots of large prints at that, not just pixel displays? I never said or wrote anything about it as far as I can remember, but I do think it looked worse than their previous typeface. Verdana is quite okay, if not good even, for body text.

But it looks like they have changed or customised their typeface recently, the digits and letters like "y" do not look like standard Verdana any more.
by bigiain | 2025-07-14 08:28:06+00:00
> I’ve found laypeople to be _more_ creeped out by targeted advertising, in particular, than tech people

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it" -- Upton Sinclair

Tech people are many orders of magnitude more likely to be getting paid to be "the creeps" by targeting the advertising.
by LourensT | 2025-07-14 08:28:56+00:00
He might be referring to his sleeping heart rate. Mine's around 40bpm too, and although I'm in shape, I am definitely not an athlete. There is a correlation with height (taller -> slower bpm). If you are young and fit, I don't think you have much to worry about a slow resting heart rate, in the absence of other symptoms.
by derdi | 2025-07-14 08:30:57+00:00
dest/src order is not a big deal in absolute terms: The ISA designer picks an order, documents it, everyone follows their documentation, done. Intel picks one order for programming Intel, DEC picks another order for programming the VAX? Great, just look in the instruction set manual and you're set.

The silly thing is importing one order to another architecture that uses the opposite order. Now your users have to transpose operands for no reason. The really silly thing is messing up the operand order of the cmp instruction in the process. The VAX assembly language had a compare with the sane operand order, BTW.
by lmm | 2025-07-14 08:31:00+00:00
> it wouldn't fix the base problem that a program can't simply print a file name to stdout if it thinks stdout might be connected to a terminal. Even if the terminal didn't "break", it would still not display the file name in a useful way (e.g. a user couldn't copy paste it from there).

Well, I'm all for having something like a "raw copy" function in the terminal, but if a filename contains characters that can't reasonably be copy-pasted then there's not really anything that can be done about that (other than "don't give your files silly names"). I think having the terminal get into a bad state is a far worse problem; weird/corrupted filenames are something that happens and people generally figure out a way to deal with them.
by mike_hearn | 2025-07-14 08:31:10+00:00
It's not a lack of local talent. It's a combination of two governance problems:

1. Europe has no large data centers. It has no such datacenters because the Green movement is much more powerful in Europe than in America, and they have systematically blocked the expansion of gas turbine power in favor of over-builds of renewables. The result is Germany having the most expensive electricity in the world. It just isn't affordable to train an LLM in the EU. Notice how Elon Musk has imported gas turbines from around the world to power the xAI datacenter; that just wouldn't be allowed in the EU.

But, still, a German company could do so using US datacenters. Mistral in France has probably done it this way. But then you hit:

2. Copyright laws in Europe are more restrictive. Even in the US it's very unclear whether training an LLM on copyrighted works is actually legal, but the US courts are fairly efficient and US law has the concept of fair use, which is flexible enough to give them the leeway to decide it's legal. In Europe the fair use equivalents are either more restrictive or don't exist at all, and courts follow the local culture of being much less business friendly, so it's much riskier to attempt this. The EU as a set of institutions is much more in hoc to the press than people realize, and MUCH more so than US administrations are. They regularly side with copyright holders over tech companies in disputes in a mostly successful attempt to curry positive PR for the EU project.

It won't win me any friends on HN but both of these factors boil down to a lack of a strong Republican Party equivalent in Europe. I don't think Americans appreciate the extent to which their economic success is dependent on the strength of the Republicans, and they really should. If American conservatism collapsed or was taken over by the left, as has happened in parts of Europe, you'd be seeing the EU-ification of America very quickly.
by nicbou | 2025-07-14 08:31:17+00:00
I help people settle in Germany. This is a very accurate post in my opinion.

In the end, perhaps digitalisation saves me from visiting an office in person, but the processes are still painfully slow and opaque. You still fire off PDFs into the void. There is rarely any prevalidation of your documents, so there can be a 6-week lag between the submission and the validation. People are terrified of making mistakes, especially because each case worker makes their own rule. During that time you can't inquire about the status of your application, or even refer to it when adding more documents. It's a far cry from a proper ticketing system.

One other thing I did not see: using your ID for authentication is ridiculously complicated and confusing. Nobody does it unless they're forced to. Immigrants are often left without a valid ID for months, again because of delays in processing time.