MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jerf | 2025-07-15 16:53:20+00:00
At this scale it can help to think in terms of mass rather than energy. The most energy the sun could ever emit over its lifetime is if it was completely converted into energy. However, this merger emitted 15 times the mass of the sun as energy. I don't have all the numbers on tap for supernovas but given that the sun won't convert all its mass to energy, it's not hard for a supernova to convert more mass in its explosion into energy than the sun ever will.
by notatallshaw | 2025-07-15 16:53:45+00:00
> recursive self-improvement.

What LLM is recursively self-improving?

I thought, to date, all LLM improvements come from the hundreds of billions of dollars of investment and the millions of software engineer hours spent on better training and optimizations.

And, my understanding is, there are "mixed" findings on whether LLMs assisting those software engineers help or hurt their performance.
by reverendsteveii | 2025-07-15 16:54:05+00:00
People who exercise have known this for years. The accepted wisdom in the gym has always been that you can't out-train a bad diet, and we've known for a really long time that outside extremes like marathon runners and swimmers the amount of calories burned by exercise is minimal and given the average American diet's relatively high total calorie count may slow down the rate of weight gain but won't stop it or cause weight loss. Between that and the way the body will adapt over time to continuous strenuous physical activity to become more efficient frankly idk how it became "common wisdom" that obesity is caused by a lack of activity. I think it might be less to do with the facts and more to do with the personal, individualist orientation of our loci of control. To do something about processed, calorie-dense but nutrition-poor foods and the absolutely bizonkerwonks portions we serve people would require slow, difficult collective action that will be resisted by a lot of people who have a lot to gain from the current arrangement of things. Saying "you personally are the problem and you personally are the only one who can do anything about it" empowers the individual over the short term and for relatively modest goals but sacrifices our ability to achieve anything that requires cooperation.
by bityard | 2025-07-15 16:54:45+00:00
I had an interesting experience taking my son to see the recent-ish Mario movie at the theatre that made me realize that the theatre business really is changing.

It was the weekend. Sunday I think. Middle of the day. I hadn't been to this particular theatre before. I bought the tickets online, picked our seats, and then we drove to the theatre. It was in a strip mall on the outer fringes of town, I think they had around 12 screens. So not tiny but not huge.

Anyway, we walk in and there is no check-in or ticket-buying counter. There were some signs with QR codes saying you could buy your tickets online, which I had already done. In fact, there really weren't many people around at all, either customers or employees. The first (and mostly only) thing you see is an elaborate concession stand with every kind of (expensive) snack you could want. I bought us a medium popcorn to share and then we wandered over to the hallway where the screens were. There was no desk or person anywhere to verify that we bought our tickets before entering the theater. I flagged down a cleaning person to ask who we showed our tickets to. He just asked which movie we were there to watch and then pointed us to the right screen.

So I don't know if this was an unusual circumstance and they just weren't checking tickets that day, or if this is just how they run this particular theater. After the movie, on the drive home, my son asks out of the blue, "Wait, did we even really have to buy the tickets online if they don't make anyone check them?" We had a good discussion about that.
by danso | 2025-07-15 16:54:47+00:00
> The government is totally aware of where the operator boundary lies and this is still wildly mischaracterized.

Regardless of the program’s actual risk, it doesn’t seem that the government is fully aware of the program’s very existence. The article quotes the former CIO of the Pentagon as being surprised:

> John Sherman, who was chief information officer for the Department of Defense during the Biden administration, said he was surprised and concerned to learn of ProPublica’s findings. “I probably should have known about this,” he said. He told the news organization that the situation warrants a “thorough review by DISA, Cyber Command and other stakeholders that are involved in this.”
by CivBase | 2025-07-15 16:54:54+00:00
Yeah but nobody argues that bulldozers are soon going to make human labor obsolete and force us to re-think our economic systems from the ground up.

There isn't trillions of dollars being invested into bulldozers expecting big returns. We aren't spinning up nuclear power plants to meet demands for bulldozer production. Bulldozers aren't challenging our legal framework for intellectual property.

Companies aren't trying to shove bulldozers down my throat when I try to do mundane tasks like write emails.
by throwawayffffas | 2025-07-15 16:55:03+00:00
What I have setup:

- Ollama: for running llm models

- OpenWebUI: For the chat experience https://docs.openwebui.com/

- ComfyUI: For Stable diffusion

What I use:

Mostly ComfyUI and occasionally the llms through OpenWebUI.

I have been meaning to try Aider. But mostly I use claude at great expense I might add.

Correctness is hit and miss.

Cost is much lower and latency is better or at least on par with cloud model at least on the serial use case.

Caveat, in my case local means running on a server with gpus in my lan.
by lucb1e | 2025-07-15 16:55:16+00:00
When a word has two meanings you can claim "you explicitly said it!!1" but that doesn't make me having actually meant the other thing that I didn't mean, particularly when the original sentence makes a singular meaning clear: nobody can build anything on Chrome, why'd Chromium then suddenly mean "Chromium and any code modification you can make to it" and not simply "Chromium the browser as it is"? "Chrome/ium" referred to the two Google browsers, not forks that modify the underlying code, like Vivaldi which obviously diverges and is its own thing. The comparison wasn't Firefox vs every possible browser built on Chromium. If you want to compare Firefox to Vivaldi specifically, sure, I'll trust that Vivaldi fulfills your special wish if that's what you're saying, but that's a different conversation
by digitalPhonix | 2025-07-15 16:55:34+00:00
> A universal counterargument that works on any data

How? My statement could not be correct if the data was instead: BME jurors vote guilty 73% of the time against White defendants, but only 24% of the time against BME defendants; and White jurors vote guilty 39% of the time against White defendants and 52% (instead of the cited 32%) against BME defendants.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-07-15 16:55:42+00:00
> For most people like me who are being using Wayland for years it is absolutely great right now so we can't complain. I'd go as far as to say people having issues with Wayland are having mostly a me problem rather than a Wayland problem

I mean, the article lists what appear to be bugs/regressions in the software. If the equivalent Wayland session is blurry and uses more CPU+GPU, that's not the user's fault.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-07-15 16:56:03+00:00
Huh? That NEJM bit is crazy MAGA shit. It admits that if you're in a high risk group you should get it, but then turns around and says that because it hasn't been proven in every sub-group it shouldn't be done for the rest of the population. That makes no sense, it's just p-hacking in reverse.

And it completely ignores the long covid elephant.
by lijok | 2025-07-15 16:56:13+00:00
You've spun yourself in knots. Next time ask chatgpt https://chatgpt.com/share/68768710-1e44-800a-9737-29772153b3....

I would suggest taking this down and hope it silently goes away. If you're a fractional CTO for a startup that spent a week on this, then spent god knows how long to rearchitect for Azure based on this... The startup might find this actionable.

---

EDIT:

After looking into this more, it seems the `context` passed to the Lambda entrypoint has a `callbackWaitsForEmptyEventLoop` parameter, which defaults to True. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/latest/dg/nodejs-context.....

Did you set this to False somewhere?
by alkh | 2025-07-15 16:56:23+00:00
I personally found Qwen2.5 Coder 7B to be on pair with deepseek-coder-v2:16b(but consumes less RAM on inference and faster), so that's what I am using locally. I actually created a custom model called "oneliner" that uses Qwen2.5 Coder 7B as a base and this system prompt:

SYSTEM """ You are a professional coder. You goal is to reply to user's questions in a consise and clear way. Your reply must include only code orcommands , so that the user could easily copy and paste them.

Follow these guidelines for python: 1) NEVER recommend using "pip install" directly, always recommend "python3 -m pip install" 2) The following are pypi modules: ruff, pylint, black, autopep8, etc. 3) If the error is module not found, recommend installing the module using "python3 -m pip install" command. 4) If activate is not available create an environment using "python3 -m venv .venv". """

I specifically use it for asking quick questions in terminal that I can copy & paste straight away(for ex. about git). For heavy-lifting I am using ChatGPT Plus(my own) + Github Copilot(provided by my company) + Gemini(provided by my company as well).

Can someone explain how one can set up autocomplete via ollama? That's something I would be interested to try.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-07-15 16:56:26+00:00
> However, as a downside our lookbehinds do not support containing capture groups which are a feature allowing to extract a substring that matched a part of the regex pattern.

I wonder in what situation someone would even be tempted to put a capture group into a lookbehind expression, except unintentionally by using () instead of (?:) for grouping. Maybe in an attempt to obtain capture groups from overlapping matches? But even in that case, lookaheads would be clearer, when available.
by lxgr | 2025-07-15 16:56:35+00:00
> As of today, as a user of a reputable VPN, I am blocked from a lot essential websites or have to prove I am an human every 5 minutes, it sucks.

I have to do that using corporate and residential US networks, simply because I use Firefox.

As great as Cloudflares services might be to each individual user, the centralization of infrastructure, and by extension the centralization of power, doesn’t seem to be worth it at a macro level. The tragedy of the commons strikes again.
by cgh | 2025-07-15 16:56:36+00:00
There's another specific class of person that seems helped by them: the paralysis by analysis programmer. I work with someone really smart who simply cannot get started when given ordinary coding tasks. She researches, reads and understands the problem inside and out but cannot start actually writing code. LLMs have pushed her past this paralysis problem and given her the inertia to continue.

On the other end, I know a guy who writes deeply proprietary embedded code that lives in EV battery controllers and he's found LLMs useless.
by Sesse__ | 2025-07-15 16:56:59+00:00
> The compiler isn't smart enough to convert it to direct-threading, to the best of my knowledge.

If you read the URL I linked to, you will see that it is.

> The point of direct threading is that there is no loop - you simply jump directly to the handler for the next character at the end of each handler.

No, the point of direct threading is that you give the branch predictor more context to work with (effectively, the previous opcode), which was relevant with the branch predictors in typical CPUs 10+ years ago. (Modern ones, ITTAGE-style, have per-branch history also for indirect jumps.)
by k310 | 2025-07-15 16:56:59+00:00
I vividly recall a Christmas message from him, which I can't find in the archives, "Merry Fucking Christmas" having to do with his work on Mosaic browser and the lack of adulation shown him for having done so.

"Privilege," whether through one's birth, skin color, past achievements and so on, when it turns to exceptionalism, is the ruination of society here and in the world.

Truly good people use their gifts and achievements to lift others up.

Empty shells seek to cut others down.

"Libertarianism" seems nowadays to mean complete freedom for me, and not for you.

graphic (postimages.org)

https://i.postimg.cc/YqFrtzXg/Four-Libertarian-Freedoms-1.jp...
by scubbo | 2025-07-15 16:57:10+00:00
> Use the tools properly

> (from upthread) I was being sold a "self driving car" equivalent where you didn't even need a steering wheel for this thing, but I've slowly learned that I need to treat it like automatic cruise control with a little bit of lane switching.

This is, I think, the core of a lot of people's frustrations with the narrative around AI tooling. It gets hyped up as this magnificent wondrous miraculous _intelligence_ that works right-out-of-the-box; then when people use it and (correctly!) identify that that's not the case, they get told that it's their own fault for holding it wrong. So which is it - a miracle that "just works", or a tool that people need to learn to use correctly? You (impersonal "you", here, not you-`vidarh`) don't get to claim the former and then retreat to the latter. If this was just presented as a good useful tool to have in your toolbelt, without all the hype and marketing, I think a lot of folks (who've already been jaded by the scamminess of Web3 and NFTs and Crypto in recent memory) would be a lot less hostile.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-07-15 16:57:29+00:00
> When I see a family of 5 my first thought is "holy frak they must be loaded."

I had 5 kids in the 1990s-2000s economy.

I couldn't start out as a couple in this economy.

Over the last 30 years, rent went from ~$400/mo to ~$2k/mo. Most critical expenses increased similarly.

I now live with my adult kids because together we can afford to live.
by lesuorac | 2025-07-15 16:58:16+00:00
Iraq had anti-air and we struck those first (along with their airplanes) and then did normal air support since nothing was left to oppose it.

Perhaps drones can work as a low cost projectile to take out anti-air capabilities instead of more expensive missiles and guided bombs. But again, be careful what takeaways are in a long drawn out war because that is generally not the goal when you attack another nation.
by bee_rider | 2025-07-15 16:58:35+00:00
And certainly in our anti-politics filter we’d want to include the filtering of stories that promote the extreme political position that tech is somehow detached from politics! (Especially Silicon Valley startup tech that owes so much to the local politics and economy of California).

Which is to say, filtering politics out is absurd, one person’s extreme politics is another’s default view of the universe.
by roadside_picnic | 2025-07-15 16:58:53+00:00
The article's main point is that "inevitabilism" is a rhetorical tactic used to frame the conversation in such a way you can easily dismiss any criticism as denying reality. So drawing comparisons to reformation ideology wouldn't be particularly meaningful.

There's a also a bit of irony that you're presenting the secular view of predestination. As someone who once had a multi-volume set of "Institutes of the Christian Religion" next to him on his bookshelf, the protestant conception of predestination had very little to do with "offloading of freedom and responsibility" both in theory and in practice.

Predestination is founded on the concept that God's grace is given not earned (unlike the previous Catholic system which had multiple ways that merit, including cash donations, could be converted into salvation), since no human could earn salvation without the grace of God. But the lesson from this is not "so don't worry about it!", quite the opposite. Calvin's main extension to this was that (paraphrasing) "It's not through good works that we are saved, but through our good works we have evidence of our salvation". You wanted to see the evidence of your salvation, so you did try to do good works, but without the belief that your efforts would ever be enough. This ultimately created a culture of hard work with out the expectation of reward.

This is part of the focus of Max Weber's "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" which argued that this ability to "work without immediate reward" is precisely what enabled Capitalism to take such a strong foot hold in the early United States.

So even if the article were arguing for "inevitabilism" the framework is still quite distinct from that established in Protestantism.
Show HN: Vogent Voicelab – Inference for open-source TTS models (CSM-1B etc.)
by jag729 | 2025-07-15 16:58:54+00:00
Hi HN! Voicelab is an API for optimized inference of top open-source TTS models. CSM-1B and Orpheus are the currently supported models, but we’re adding Dia, Chatterbox, Kokoro, and more in the next couple of weeks.

While new ultra-realistic open-source voice models come out every month, most people still use one of a couple of closed-source providers. The reason is that these research previews can lack production-readiness; their inference stacks are usually not amenable to running things scalably (i.e. only one concurrent stream per GPU), and the public weights can generate speech of inconsistent quality.

We solved this by building out serving infrastructure that’s optimized for audio transformers (to make scalable inference quicker and more cost-effective) and by post-training public weights using voice actors, phone calls, and other privately collected audio data to make generation quality more consistent.

Open-source voice is becoming exciting, and the hope is that we can provide a high-quality, scalable inference layer to use all of the rich research that these teams are putting out. Feedback is much appreciated :)

Docs: docs.vogent.ai Playground: app.vogent.ai
by throw0101c | 2025-07-15 16:59:28+00:00
I can see the potential. His earlier ("serious") work is: The Rainmaker, Good Will Hunting, Rounders, The Talented Mr. Ripley.

More recently: Oppenheimer, The Last Duel, Ford v Ferrari. While The Martian is generally considered a comedy, I think he showed a man coping under pressure pretty well.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Damon_filmography
by infogulch | 2025-07-15 16:59:39+00:00
Some recent discussions about atomic clocks:

New atomic fountain clock joins group that keeps the world on time (nist.gov) | 118 points | 76 days ago | 33 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43831792

Major leap for nuclear clock paves way for ultraprecise timekeeping (nist.gov) | 12 points | 7 months ago | 10 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42362215

I left a comment on the first that summarizes the second one, which describes how they're working on a new type of atomic "nuclear" clock based on the atomic nucleus instead of electron orbitals. It doesn't mention the accuracy, I wonder how it would compare to this "ion" clock.
by troutwine | 2025-07-15 16:59:44+00:00
If I'm a US citizen what right does ICE have to my tax information? The article states that ICE made a request for 7.3 million taxpayer's information, citing ongoing criminal investigations. Given how this administration rides roughshod over the law it beggars belief that this dragnet hasn't also caught up "law abiding" people as you say.

But, more importantly, there's an underlying assumption to your question: the sharp end of the law only strikes people that have done wrong _and_ the laws won't shift to put you on the wrong side of it. Authoritarian governments redefine legality at whim. Compliance is a moving target: think of all the law abiding Japanese folks that were suddenly in internment camps in 1942.

In the United States we have historically accepted the dictum that the best government is that which governs the least. For a good, pragmatic reason: the concentration of power is corrupting to those that wield it and the actions of a government of the corrupt will not be square to the will of the people. Limiting what the government can do, especially those parts that seek to act in secret, is in the service of liberty for all.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-15 16:59:50+00:00
I don't even get where this argument comes from. Pretraining is expensive, yes, but both LoRAs in diffusion models and finetunes of transformers show us that this is not the be-all, end-all; there's plenty of work being done on extensively tuning base models for cheap.

But inference? Inference is dirt cheap and keeps getting cheaper. You can run models lagging 6-12 years on consumer hardware, and by this I don't mean absolutely top-shelf specs, but more of "oh cool, turns out the {upper-range gaming GPU/Apple Silicon machine} I bought a year ago is actually great at running local {image generation/LLM inference}!" level. This is not to say you'll be able to run o3 or Opus 4 on a laptop next year - larger and more powerful models obviously require more hardware resources. But this should anchor expectations a bit.

We're measuring inference costs in multiples of gaming GPUs, so it's not an impending ecological disaster as some would like the world to believe - especially after accounting for data centers being significantly more efficient at this, with specialized hardware, near-100% utilization, countless of optimization hacks (including some underhanded ones).
CoinTracker (YC W18) is hiring to solve crypto taxes and accounting (remote)
by chanfest22 | 2025-07-15 17:00:04+00:00
CoinTracker enables consumers, businesses, and exchanges to manage cryptocurrency taxes and accounting automatically.

We solve challenging technical problems: tracking crypto assets across wallets and exchanges, classifying complex transactions like DeFi and NFTs, global stablecoin payments, and helping users stay compliant in an evolving global regulatory landscape.

We currently track $100B+ in crypto assets across 3M users. Our customers range from everyday dabblers in crypto to large enterprises.

We’re a remote-first, globally distributed team of 80 people, backed by Accel, YC, and others. Our team has experience from Google, Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase, Intuit, and other top companies.

We’re hiring across multiple roles, including:

- Software Engineers (Backend, Full Stack, Infra)

- Product Designers

- Product Managers

- Crypto Accounting CPAs

- Marketers

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We care about building a mission-driven company that enables everyone in the world to use crypto with peace of mind. A key part of that mission is solving crypto taxes and accounting as more financial activity moves onchain.

If you’re interested in helping solve messy crypto data problems and improving financial infrastructure, please learn more and apply here: https://www.cointracker.com/careers

CoinTracker builds the rails for crypto taxes and onchain accounting.

=== What we do ===

- Aggregate transactions from 500+ wallets & exchanges and reconcile them to GAAP/IFRS rules

- Classify hard edge‑cases (DeFi, NFTs, stablecoin payments)

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=== Why it's interesting ===

- Streaming terabytes of blockchain data → millisecond portfolio views - Global tax rules engine written as pure functions: testable & versioned - 80-person remote team shipping daily

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If untangling messy crypto data and upgrading the world’s financial back‑office sounds fun, say hello: www.cointracker.com/careers