MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by qcnguy | 2025-07-25 08:30:01+00:00
Kubernetes services are one of the places where you don't care about startup time. Likewise for Docker itself. These are the things that do the scaling, normally.

Go is not particularly fast. People often see that Java gets faster as it runs and thinks, oh, it must be slow at the start then. But when you compare like with like, Go ends up being stuck at the bottom of the curve that Java then sharply climbs. The difference in GC quality is big, or at least, used to be? The only place where you really notice the difference is command line tools, and Java has GraalVM for that.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-07-25 08:30:30+00:00
I really wish of some decent way of getting money as a teenager without doing some insane kyc or having people buy crypto just to buy my stuff I guess. I know that anonymous money could be used for funding of bad stuff like terrorism and tax evasion but its just a mess that I can't get money but there are loopholes too :/

KYC should be made easier for teens and also I must admit, from what I see, remittances/cross country payments are just so much of an hassle but crypto sucks as a currency too in many aspects mainly on how to convert crypto <-> cash non kyc way
by klingon-3 | 2025-07-25 08:31:18+00:00
> It's really hard to trust anything public

Just feed it into an LLM, unintentionally hint at your bias, and voila, it will use research and the latest or generated metrics to prove whatever you’d like.

> The only true tests are the ones you write yourself, never publish, and only work 100% on open models.

This may be good enough, and that’s fine if it is.

But, if you do it in-house in a closet with open models, you will have your own biases.

No tests are valid if all that ever mattered was the argument and perhaps curated evidence.

All tests, private and public tests have proved flawed theories historically.

Truth has always been elusive and under siege.

People will always just believe things. Data is just foundation for pre-existing or fabricated beliefs. It’s the best rationale for faith, because in the end, faith is everything. Without it, there is nothing.
by berkes | 2025-07-25 08:31:33+00:00
> which kind of goes against the transformative argument.

Indeed a good example. We've seen several examples of code snippets where this happens too, mentioned on HN.

But it does not prove that they infringed copyright by ingesting "illegal" stuff, as GP tried to argue. Seeing a verbatim string only "proves" that it came from a specific source. But not if this source was illegally acquired, which was my point.
by bell-cot | 2025-07-25 08:32:50+00:00
> Skipping stops is the worst in that regard ...

If the expectation is that the bus will stop at every bus stop in its path.

Vs. a larger system can easily have "commuter", "direct", "express", "park-n-ride", and other busses, with different expectations.

Plus the trivial case - the bus will roll past a stop which has 0 people waiting for a bus, if no current passenger has pulled the "Getting Off at Next Stop" signal cord.
by piaste | 2025-07-25 08:33:26+00:00
> Work profiles are inferior to separate user profiles, which are built-in to GrapheneOS.

Different use cases. User profiles are only active when you manually switch to them, while work profiles are active _alongside_ your main profile.

So for untrusted apps that you only use occasionally and on-demand (like the myriads of travel / shopping / random services apps), user profiles are great. For apps that you want to keep in the background, such as the proprietary messaging apps that all your friends use, a work profile is much nicer.
by brazzy | 2025-07-25 08:35:31+00:00
> What exactly is "human" in dense human anthills with 30-story towers?

Certainly an interesting question, but completely irrelevant to the discussion. Unless you're really arguing against big cities rather than against mass transit, but that's an entirely different discussion.

> Cars are human-friendly! Far more so than ANY other transit mode.

No. Cars are human-hostile. Far, FAR more so than ANY other transit mode. Foir one thing, they kill FAR more people than any other transit more. But also because they require So. Much. More Space.

Sure, it's nice to have your own private space while moving around (not worth much when you have to concentrate on driving and are thus stressed, but let's assume that will be alleviated by self-driving cars) but you're not alone. There are 100,000 people who also want to move in the same space. And thus everyone gets a big upside once and a downside that is small but multiplied by 99,999.

The result is this: https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2018/02/07/16/48F74A0F000005...

And this: https://lede-admin.usa.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/si...

Now does that look human-friendly to you?

> And cities should be built for humans, not for transit and bikes.

But what you're arguing for is to build them for cars instead. And we have done that and we know the result is horrible. And whe have done the other options too, and we know they are much better.
by berkes | 2025-07-25 08:35:43+00:00
> were distributed with pirated media in some form,

I disagree with this conclusion. I've used e.g. the opensubtitles dataset for some data-analysis in the past. It's a huge dataset, freely available and precisely intended for such use. Now, if all the data in the opensubtitles dataset is legal, is another point.

So one might argue that using this opensubtitles dataset, makes one complicit to the illegal activities of opensubtitles themselves, IDK: IANAL.
by SomeoneOnTheWeb | 2025-07-25 08:35:47+00:00
That's normal. For HDR to look good, you need a monitor that hits approximately 1000 nits in brightness. Your monitor only hits 250, which is completely insufficient to display HDR content.

This is one of the stupid things with many monitors, showing HDR at 250 nits is worse than showing no HDR at all. So no matter what you do, 99% of HDR content will look bad on your screen.
by tonyedgecombe | 2025-07-25 08:36:10+00:00
I’m pretty sure the programmability of PostScript was a mistake. Adobe clearly thought that because most of it was removed from PDF.

I was working in sales/support/marketing for printer companies in the eighties and people were buying PostScript printers for the scalable fonts, device independence and compatibility. The most common objection was performance which was somewhat related to the programmability.

We used to supply the red and blue books with each printer but I don’t remember anybody breaking the seal on them.

Having said all that I have spent the last year writing a PostScript interpreter.

I’m not sure I’d call PDF concatenative, you certainly can’t cat two PDF files together to make a merged document. There are header and footer sections to deal with.
by fsh | 2025-07-25 08:36:31+00:00
I believe that it may be misguided to focus on compute that much, and it would be more instructive to consider the effort that went into curating the training set. The easiest way of solving math problems with an LLM is to make sure that very similar problems are included in the training set. Many of the AI achievements would probably look a lot less miraculous if one could check the training data. The most crass example is OpenAI paying off the FrontierMath creators last year to get exclusive secret access to the problems before the evaluation [1]. Even without resorting to cheating, competition formats are vulnerable to this. It is extremely difficult to come up with truly original questions, so by spending significant resources on re-hashing all kinds of permutations of previous question, one will probably end up very close to the actual competition set. The first rule I learned about training neural networks is to make damn sure there is no overlap between the training and validation sets. It it interesting that this rule has gone completely out of the window in the age of LLMs.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8ZgLYwBmB3vLavjKE/some-lesso...
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by stevenjgarner | 2025-07-25 08:37:23+00:00
I am curious about the use cases where a VIDEO recording is inherently more useful than a TEXT recording of a terminal session. I have found simply using:

script session.log

... to be invaluable, especially when documenting commands that will be finding their way into a bash script or when I am collaborating with another person who will always have script available in their terminal but may have restrictions on being able to install asciinema.
by kouteiheika | 2025-07-25 08:37:23+00:00
The training memory breakdown is wildly inaccurate.

- No one trains big models in FP32 anymore.

- Gradients can also often be in BF16, and they don't actually have to be stored if you're not using gradient accumulation or if you're accumulating them directly in the optimizer's state.

- 32-bit Adam is silly; if you don't have infinite VRAM there's no reason why you wouldn't want to use 8-bit Adam (or you can go even lower with quantized Muon)

- Activations? They take up memory too, but are not mentioned.

It shows that to train a 3.77B parameter model I need 62GB of VRAM; just to give you some perspective for how overestimated this is: a few weeks back I was training (full fine-tuning, not LoRA) a 14B parameter model on 24GB of VRAM using every trick in the book to lower VRAM usage (to be fair, not all of those tricks are available in publicly available training harnesses, but the point still stands that even with an off-the-shelf training harness you can do a lot better than what this calculator suggests).
by kelnos | 2025-07-25 08:37:42+00:00
> Yet there may still be individuals who can argue differently.

Of course! There are always outliers. But I think it is fair to say, as a general statement, that to lose or maintain weight, you have to focus on your diet, and exercise is not going to cut it. Sure, 1% of people might be able to "outrun their unhealthy diet", but that's not really useful information for the staggeringly vast majority of people out there. (Making up a percentage there; I think my point is still valid at 10%.)

1200 miles per year is a lot of running. That's 23 miles a week, or let's say ~6 miles, 4 days per week. Very few people are going to be able to -- or just flat out want to -- commit to that regimen.
by drcongo | 2025-07-25 08:38:35+00:00
I tend to think all these business leaders are actually business larpers. They dress up as what they see other business people dressing up in, they lay off loads of people because they see other companies doing that, they send stupid letters like this out because they think that's what they're supposed to do while dressed up as a business leader. You get business larpers at every company, sometimes they happen to be good enough at the larping that people put them into actual leadership roles and then this sort of thing happens.
by Mawr | 2025-07-25 08:38:37+00:00
> I know what a UUID (or a String) is. I don't know what an AccountID, UserID, etc. is.

It's literally the opposite. A string is just a bag of bytes you know nothing about. An AccountID is probably... wait for it... an ID of an Account. If you have the need to actually know the underlying representation you are free to check the definition of the type, but you shouldn't need to know that in 99% of contexts you'll want to use an AccountID in.

> Now I need to know what those are (and how to make them, etc. as well) to use your software.

You need to know what all the types are no matter what. It's just easier when they're named something specific instead of "a bag of bytes".

> https://grugbrain.dev/#grug-on-type-systems

Linking to that masterpiece is borderline insulting. Such a basic and easy to understand usage of the type system is precisely what the grug brain would advocate for.
by zuminator | 2025-07-25 08:39:49+00:00
I think realistically the US is unfortunately never going to protect Taiwan. There's no way I see it getting into an unwinnable hot war with China over territory so close to the mainland. If China sent troops to secure the Taiwanese fabs, how could the US possibly dislodge them without destroying the thing they want to protect? The focus on the CHIPS Act by both recent administrations seems an admission that they don't expect to rely on Taiwan's production long term. The question is will China sit back and let TSMC complete factories in the US, or will it invade Taiwan first? I've seen estimates that Beijing expects to surpass Taiwan's fab abilities in as soon as five years, so perhaps they don't even care about the US acquiring expertise that will be obsolete by the time it is built. Hopefully a knowledgeable individual can correct my extremely limited understanding of this issue.
by kelnos | 2025-07-25 08:40:04+00:00
I don't think we're talking about "unhealthy diet" solely in the sense of eating unhealthy foods. The real issue is calorie intake. If you are taking in an unhealthy amount of calories -- regardless of the source -- you are unlikely to be able to outrun that diet.

And you're kinda agreeing with that point: you eat fast food a few times a week, but you don't eat breakfast. So perhaps your caloric intake is still at a reasonable level for your body, regardless of the source of those calories.
by throwaway81523 | 2025-07-25 08:40:29+00:00
For me it's less about performance than cleaner concurrency. Do you know (unless this has been fixed recently) that io_uring is the only way you can asynchronously open a file? Erlang and GHC both have lightweight threads/processes that use asynchronous i/o (for sockets, say), but they keep a separate OS threadpool to be able to do stuff like open files. io_uring lets you write an actual multitasking OS-like thing that runs in a single Linux thread.
by 15155 | 2025-07-25 08:40:30+00:00
> If a heavy conflict were to erupt, China's supply chains would be cut off via naval blockade

Or possibly the 30+ fast attack submarines sinking every military or resupply vessel in the region, augmented by a colossal amount of rapidly-deployed naval mines.

Taiwan doesn't buy them much in this regard. Why would China be permitted to use sea freight at all in a "heavy conflict" scenario? Why not just sink these vessels near their origin - why allow Brazilian soybeans to even make it out of the hemisphere?
by other8026 | 2025-07-25 08:40:30+00:00
Absolutely. You can basically get almost the same experience as you would on a stock OS device, but with much better privacy. On the stock OS, Google apps get privileged access, so they can still access photos and your camera and all that, but what people don't realize is that their privileged access also includes things like usage data, hardware identifiers, etc. Using Google apps on GrapheneOS makes a lot of sense.

The only problems you might run into would be some features might require privileged access, things like Now Playing. Makes sense because normal apps cannot have unrestricted access to the microphone like that. Google Wallet works, but you cannot make payments because the app refuses to work on alternate OSes.

Besides that kind of stuff, though, I've used all sorts of Google apps without issues.
by hellotheretoday | 2025-07-25 08:41:26+00:00
It’s an everyone sucks here situation. Gawker was undeniably shitty for outing thiel and posting a sex tape of hogan and then refusing to take it down. But the impact of the lawsuit was basically that if a billionaire has a vendetta against your media org they can fund a lawsuit even if they are in no way involved. And it’s rumored that Thiel funded several suits, not just hogans, discreetly. Even with hogans he was challenged but was allowed to keep funneling cash to take gawker down

The end result of that is that media orgs are now far more cautious about posting “exposes” of powerful people. Gonzo journalism in America is basically dead except for a handful of independent outlets that have much less impact, funding, and reach. Now it’s substacks of people that used to work for the intercept and rolling stone because media with money is playing it safe posting articles about trumps latest antics and 12 vacation spots you have to check out before you die.
by bubblyworld | 2025-07-25 08:42:01+00:00
I don't think everybody has to pay lip service to this stuff every time they talk about AI. Many people (myself included) acknowledge these issues but have nothing to add to the conversation that hasn't been said a million times already. Tao is a mathematician - I think it's completely fine that he's focused on the quantitative aspects of this stuff, as that is where his expertise is most relevant.
by impossiblefork | 2025-07-25 08:42:06+00:00
Six metres is half a tennis court. That's a distance that I can easily run to get in position to hit a volley. Of course you can run that distance and stab someone as he takes his gun out, and if you are to counter that you must move too.

If you're rooted as a tree, of course you'll be killed. You must make use of your own movement to create time, just as Nadal does when he step diagonally back from the ball 'sal y entra'.
by wishfish | 2025-07-25 08:42:27+00:00
As you're working with the OEM, I hope you'll consider a model which will come with either an IPS screen or is compatible with a 3rd party IPS replacement.

I bought a Pixel 9 Pro Xl specifically to use with GrapheneOS. Unfortunately, its OLED and my eyes were incompatible. The PWM on the screen was terrible and I had to return it after some headaches.

Of course, none of that was the fault of GrapheneOS. I absolutely loved using it and think your project is vital.
by atoav | 2025-07-25 08:42:59+00:00
As you mentioned correctly: if you go for strongly typed types in a library you should go all the way. And that means your strong type should provide clear functions for its conversion to certain other types. Some of which you nearly always need like conversion to a string or representation as a float/int.

The danger of that is of course that you provide a ladder over the wall you just built and instead of

temperature_in_f = temperature_in_c.to_fahrenheit()

They now go the shortcut route via numeric representation and may forget the conversion factor. In that case I'd argue it is best to always represent temperature as one unit (Kelvin or Celsius, depending on the math you need to do with it) and then just add a .display(Unit:: Fahrenheit) method that returns a string. If you really want to convert to TemperatureF for a calculation you would have to use a dedicated method that converts from one type to another.

The unit thing is of course an example, for this finished libraries like pythons pint (https://pint.readthedocs.io/en/stable/) exist.

One thing to consider as well is that you can mix up absolute values ("it is 28°C outside") and temperature deltas ("this is 2°C warmer than the last measurement"). If you're controlling high energy heaters mixing those up can ruin your day, which is why you could use different types for absolutes and deltas (or a flag within one type). Datetime libraries often do that as well (in python for example you have datetime for absolute and timedelta for relative time)
by gorbypark | 2025-07-25 08:43:19+00:00
This is an issue with the prompt and/or the tool descriptions and/or the model.

A MCP server is really just a collection of functions the model can call, and a list of those functions and their description/input params. In theory the MCP connector is calling /get-tools on the MCP servers and injecting that into the prompt, so the model knows which tools are available, their description and input params. It's then up to the model to pick a specific tool to use.

I don't know where specifically the MCP tools are injected into the prompt or what the original system prompt is (ie: maybe it's saying "always give the internal tools priority and only use MCPs if nothing else fits").

It could be the MCP server has poor descriptions of the tool. That is what the model uses to decide to use it or not.

It could also be the model just sucks. Claude Opus/Sonnet seem to be some of the best at tool calling, but it's still up to the model to pick which tools to use. Some models are better than other. Some models start to regress in their tool calling abilities as the context window fills up.

My instinct is the MCP tools have bad descriptions. I've done a bit of reverse engineering of Claude Code and most of the tool descriptions are very detailed. "Use this tool to call a bash command" would be a bad tool description. The Claude Code bash tool description is 110 lines long containing detailed usage information, when to use it, when not to use it, example usage and etc. It also has a summary at the bottom of very important things (that were just written above in the same description) for the model not to forget (they use the word IMPORTANT and YOU MUST a lot in the prompts/descriptions)
by jorams | 2025-07-25 08:44:26+00:00
> Then they replayed that because Google isn’t signing the “to” field.

Google is signing the To field (at least on all email they send me). The attacker didn't change that either, as displayed in the screenshots in the article. The attacker took an email legitimately sent from Google to them, then redirected it to the victim.

An equivalent real-world mail scenario would be me taking a letter from my bank to me, putting it in a new envelope, then sending it to you. Then your assistant takes it out of the envelope and puts it into your inbox. The letter in your inbox is a completely valid letter from said bank, intended for me.

There's two things in this article Google does badly: Allowing free input of an app name and putting it directly at the top of an email they send without preceding it with an indication what the email is about, and hosting user-managed websites on a subdomain of google.com.
by ncruces | 2025-07-25 08:44:31+00:00
How is that a data race? Also, you're using unsafe.

The post is about data races in safe Go leading to crashes or exploits, because things like "eface" (the tuple used to implement interfaces) and slices (again a tuple) are multi-word and thus impossible to update atomically.

This is not an issue in Java because such things always box behind a pointer.