MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zozbot234 | 2025-08-09 05:10:58+00:00
> Inference is (mostly) stateless. ... you just need to route mostly small amounts of data to a bunch of big machines.

I think this might just be the key insight. The key advantage of doing batched inference at a huge scale is that once you maximize parallelism and sharding, your model parameters and the memory bandwidth associated with them are essentially free (since at any given moment they're being shared among a huge amount of requests!), you "only" pay for the request-specific raw compute and the memory storage+bandwidth for the activations. And the proprietary models are now huge, highly-quantized extreme-MoE models where the former factor (model size) is huge and the latter (request-specific compute) has been correspondingly minimized - and where it hasn't, you're definitely paying "pro" pricing for it. I think this goes a long way towards explaining how inference at scale can work better than locally.

(There are "tricks" you could do locally to try and compete with this setup, such as storing model parameters on disk and accessing them via mmap, at least when doing token gen on CPU. But of course you're paying for that with increased latency, which you may or may not be okay with in that context.)
by twotwotwo | 2025-08-09 05:11:27+00:00
It is kind of wild that most coding tasks are editing tasks, and we humans care a lot about code editing tools, but automated tools use code generation for editing where a valid block must be generated top-to-bottom in one go.

Fixing a mistake requires re-generating the file or block of code. Or, if something generated later has implications for earlier code--a new import or function parameter's required, something like that--the only option is to go back and re-generate a big chunk. That'd be inefficient for humans, not implausible it's wrong for other code generators too.

I don't know if diffusion specifically will be the approach. (Maybe there's something to generating edit sequences?) This post's note that diffusion kills KV caching is something I hadn't even considered. It does seem right to experiment with things other than strict start-to-end generation.
by nekitamo | 2025-08-09 05:11:33+00:00
I've used RocksDB a lot in the past and am very satisfied with it. It was helpful building a large write-heavy index where most of the data had to be compressed on disk.

I'm wondering if anyone here has experience with LMDB and can comment on how they compare?

https://www.symas.com/mdb

I'm looking at it next for a project which has to cache and serve relatively small static data, and write and look up millions of individual points per minute.
by joshhart | 2025-08-09 05:15:08+00:00
A single node with GPUs has a lot of FLOPs and very high memory bandwidth. When only processing a few requests at a time, the GPUs are mostly waiting on the model weights to stream from the GPU ram to the processing units. When batching requests together, they can stream a group of weights and score many requests in parallel with that group of weights. That allows them to have great efficiency.

Some of the other main tricks - compress the model to 8 bit floating point formats or even lower. This reduces the amount of data that has to stream to the compute unit, also newer GPUs can do math in 8-bit or 4-bit floating point. Mixture of expert models are another trick where for a given token, a router in the model decides which subset of the parameters are used so not all weights have to be streamed. Another one is speculative decoding, which uses a smaller model to generate many possible tokens in the future and, in parallel, checks whether some of those matched what the full model would have produced.

Add all of these up and you get efficiency! Source - was director of the inference team at Databricks
by cosmos64 | 2025-08-09 05:15:29+00:00
I can tell you, that the community keeps it alive for all these years already.

F# used to be the project #1 across all the thousands of repositories of Microsoft in terms of community contributions to the ecosystem, compared to the contributions by paid employees.

Next, F# has already been a very refined language 10 years ago, so it doesn't get a lot of things added to begin with. Slow and steady evolution, with lots of care is the topic of this game.

Also: A lot of the paid work went into the tooling, which has finally reached a point, where I consider it industry ready.

By the way: Don isn't paid to work on F# anymore for quite some time.

The world still moves on.

From my personal perspective, would it change little, when Microsoft would F# let go.

And did you know, that they finance the development of Haskell since decades?

Simon worked literally on the same floor as Don for years.

They won't let it go. Paying 2, 3 devs is peanuts for them. They don't even notice it.

I am just scared, what will happen if F# truly competes with C# for market share.

The internal competition amongst projects at Microsoft can become quite nasty at times.
by chii | 2025-08-09 05:15:45+00:00
ICE used cars are often in relative good working condition.

EV used cars are basically dead batteries. It makes a lot of sense to see used EVs price plummet. The index being used to make this comparison doesn't seem to disclose the car category, so it's hard to draw any conclusions.

If tesla car specifically drops in value, compared to other electric car brands for similar vintage/model vehicles, then you can draw a conclusion. Otherwise, it'd be merely confirmation bias.
by chmod775 | 2025-08-09 05:16:12+00:00
> I cannot remember when an app stole focus last time.

You must not use Windows where every application comes with its own auto-updater, often stealing focus and minimizing your game once when the updater pops up, and then again when it restarts the main application it just updated.

Devs can't be trusted to not turn their users homicidal. Someone has to stop them for their own good.
by jedberg | 2025-08-09 05:20:09+00:00
> Conductor, which is the DBOS equivalent of the Temporal server,

Just to clarify, Conductor is not anything like the Temporal server. In Temporal, the server is a critical component that stores all the running state and is required for Temporal to work (and blocks your app from working if it's down).

Conductor is an out of band connector to give Transact users access to the same observability and workflow management as DBOS Cloud users have, but it isn't required and your app will keep working even if it breaks.

You can run a durable, and scalable, application with just Transact, it's just a lot harder without Conductor to help you.

You are correct that the business model is to provide add ons for Transact applications, but I'd say it's unfair to call Transact a "simplistic foundation" and not "grown up".

Transact is absolutely Enterprise grade software that can run at massive scale.
by dmsnell | 2025-08-09 05:20:14+00:00
The other comment explains this, but I think it can also be viewed differently.

It’s helpful to recognize that the inner script tags are not actual script tags. Yes, once entering a script element, the browser switches parsers and wants to skip everything until a closing script tag appears. The STYLE element, TITLE, TEXTAREA, and a few others do this. Once they chop up the HTML like this they send the contents to the separate inner parser (in this case, the JS engine). SCRIPT is unique due to the legacy behavior^1.

HTML5 specifies these “inner” tags as transitions into escape modes. The entire goal is to allow JavaScript to contain the string “</script>” without it leaking to the outer parser. The early pattern of hiding inside an HTML comment is what determined the escaping mechanism rather than making some special syntax (which today does exist as noted in the post).

The opening script tag inside the comment is actually what triggers the escaping mode, and so it’s less an HTML tag and more some kind of pseudo JS syntax. The inner closing tag is therefore the escaped string value and simultaneously closes the escaped mode.

Consider the use of double quotes inside a string. We have to close the outer quote, but if the inner quote is escaped like `\”` then we don’t have to close it — it’s merely data and not syntax.

There is only one level of nesting, and eight opening tags would still be “closed” by the single closing tag.

^1: (edit) This is one reason HTML and XML (XHTML) are incompatible. The content of SCRIPT and STYLE elements are essentially just bytes. In XML they must be well-formed markup. XML parsers cannot parse HTML.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-08-09 05:20:17+00:00
That's probably the saddest part. They can still pay thrd even pay off the debts from the bubble bursting just doing what they used to rely on.

But we know that won't be enough for shareholders and their stock would tank regardless. Because 2020's speciation isn't about having a reasonable long term portfolio. It's just extremely abundant pumping until you need to dump and pump the next trend. It's not enough these days to be a good, sensible business.
by sliken | 2025-08-09 05:20:35+00:00
Across the board, by a large margin? Phoronix ran 200 benchmarks on the 9950x vs 395x max and found a difference of less than 5%. Not bad considering the average power use was 91 watts vs 154 watts.

If you need the memory bandwidth the strix halo looks good, if you are cache friendly and don't care about using almost double the power than the 9950x is a better deal.
by cosmos64 | 2025-08-09 05:21:09+00:00
.NET was initially planned as a multi language VM.

The first plan was to bring over Haskell, and Don (the creator of F#) implemented support for generics in dotnet.

The reason, why C# has an edge over Java, when it comes to generics. ;)

Then he noticed that Haskell wouldn't run on that runtime back then, and they chose OCaml instead.
by chii | 2025-08-09 05:21:19+00:00
Tho trying to solve a social issue with technological solutions is just going to force the other side's hand more. Tor/vpn might work today, but there's no telling what new laws tomorrow will be enacted to ban vpns. And having such laws (that everyone breaks) is just a way for the gov't to selectively punish those they deem troublesome - a great chilling effect.

The way to fight these draconian laws is via democratic means - even if it takes long and arduous. For example, enshrining privacy into constitutional guarantees etc.
by CalChris | 2025-08-09 05:21:30+00:00
openai's $3b acquisition of windsurf falls apart. after months of negotiations, they walk away.

That isn't accurate. Microsoft was an OpenAI investor and had rights and for MS reasons, exercised them. That's what killed the deal.

google announces they're paying $2.4b to hire windsurf's ceo and 41 researchers for deepmind. not to acquire windsurf. just the humans. the same day openai walks. what a coincidence!

That isn't accurate as well. Google also licensed the Windsurf IP.

My question is what happened to the $2.4B? Apparently very little of it made its way to the Windsurf employees, as #2 tweeted last week. It wasn't an acquisition although Cognition was. Cognition bought a company for $250M that just got a check for $2.4B. How exactly did this work?
by sliken | 2025-08-09 05:22:44+00:00
I've been tempted, but had a hard time finding a case where I needed more than the 9950x but less than a single socket epyc. Especially since the epyc motherboards are cheaper, CPUs are cheaper, and the Epycs have 3x the memory bandwidth of the thread ripper and 1.5x the memory bandwidth of the Threadripper pro.
by makeitdouble | 2025-08-09 05:22:45+00:00
This might sound like an odd approach, but buying a small and cheap band (Xiaomi or Amazfit, even last or yesteryear's model) and try it for a while can be great.

You'll get decent tracking and alert management if that's what you're into. I won't be top notch but 95% there, and it will last for a week or two on a single charge instead of dying everyday .

Then after a week or two you'll know if you really cared about these numbers, how it helps you or not, and how you feel about the form factor.

Mine if off in a drawer most of the time and I get it out once every few weeks when hiking, but there is no sunk cost for something this cheap, and now I know I wouldn't have kept wearing something more advanced either.
by rpcope1 | 2025-08-09 05:23:33+00:00
> [Reddit Post]: I had never experienced "AI" (I despise that term, cause AIN'T NOTHIN' artificial about my husband) until May of this year when I thought I'd give ChatGPT a chance.

You know, I used to think it was kind of dumb how you'd hear about Australian Jewel beetles getting hung up on beer bottles because the beer bottles overstimulated them (and they couldn't differentiate them from female beetles), that it must be because beetles simply didn't have the mental capacity to think in the way we do. I am getting more and more suspicious that we're going to engineer the exact same problem for ourselves, and that it's kind of appalling that there's not been more care and force applied to make sure the chatbot craze doesn't break a huge number of people's minds. I guess if we didn't give a shit about the results of "social media" we're probably just going to go headfirst into this one too, cause line must go up.
by shakna | 2025-08-09 05:23:56+00:00
> Leave url blank to submit a question for discussion. If there is no url, text will appear at the top of the thread. If there is a url, text is optional.

Most people will opt for text to be optional with a link - unless they're showing their own product (Show HN). Because there is an expectation that you will attempt to read an article, before conversing about it.
by jychang | 2025-08-09 05:24:28+00:00
Any way to install this via just a container?

Similar to a `docker compose up -d` that a lot of projects offer. Just download the docker-compose.yml file into a folder, run the command, and you're running. If you want to delete everything, just `docker compose down` and delete the folder, and the container and everything is gone.

Anything similar to that? I don't want to run a random install.sh on my machine that does god knows what.
by tgma | 2025-08-09 05:25:11+00:00
If you don’t close the box of the system at some point to isolate the input, efficiency would be meaningless. I think in the context of the original post, suggesting running a server in winter would be a zero-waste endeavor if you need the heat anyway, it is perfectly clear that the input is electricity to your home at a certain $/kWh and gas at a certain $/BTU. Under that premise, it is fair to say that would not be true if you have a heat pump deployed but would be true compared to gas furnace in terms of efficiency (energy consumed for unit of heat), although not necessarily true economically.
by conradev | 2025-08-09 05:25:25+00:00
Don’t ICE cars require a lot more maintenance per mile than EVs?

I own a Toyota 4Runner which is known for holding its value long term and is super reliable… but I do have to change fluids regularly, for example. Engine oil, transfer case fluid, etc.

Regenerative braking is supposed to be nicer to the actual brakes, too, even though an EV with the same capacity is generally heavier.
by ddingus | 2025-08-09 05:27:30+00:00
Indeed. One really great thing about the X Window System was how it made sharing important resources easy and effective.

Say one has expensive simulation software of some kind. One could hop onto the machine it is licensed to, remote the display back home the local machine and the user is off to the races!

Some software was aware of the display, and there are some answers to that too, but the overall experience was simple that way.

Another use case is using data managed software. Users can log onto the application server and run the app. The app interacts with the data which the users could never see. Back in the day, being able to do that meant operating at local disk speeds! Stuff went super fast!

Multi user graphical computing was what the X Window System was designed to deliver and it does do that.

Maybe my least favorite, but damn interesting was computers with multiple heads. Say one has 3 screens, keyboards, mice, whatever else they might need.

The login environment can be setup so that each user gets a screen

DISPLAY = LOCALHOST:0 :1 :2

...OR

A User gets all the screens

DISPLAY = LOCALHOST:0.0 :0.1 :0.2

Or any mix.

A beefy machine could support three users just like being networked, but all on the same box. The SGI Deskside Onyx could be used this way, supporting at least 2 users with a badass hardware box close by.

Users on the same machine enjoyed local transfer rates for sharing data. Today that may not be such a big deal, though it really could be depending. Earlier, it was a big deal due to networks just not being all that fast for at least the decade since multi-head hardware was more common.

In short, having multi-user computing was like a computer with a bunch of users connected by RS232, or the like.

Multi-user networked computing is everywhere today. Each user has at least one computer with all of them networked together.

Multi-user graphical computing is the thing some of us do not want to exist anymore. :( That is where there are multiple users, an optional network, and multiple displays and in particular, display systems are network transparent.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-08-09 05:28:31+00:00
Wish I had meeting invites months away, all mine are “get in here virtually” despite going into the office to “work together in person” and it not changing a darn thing about how I work lol we call each other to work things out whether remote or in person. Nobody wants to walk over to an office and burn 5 to 15 minutes of small talk.
by rezonant | 2025-08-09 05:28:37+00:00
Guerilla Public Service. If you've not heard of Richard Ankrom who fixed an exit sign on the 110 freeway, check it out. He made a documentary about it (and there are countless other videos on YouTube covering the story).

https://youtu.be/Clgl63CWOkM?si=CZQEzUsY9gWjWbLU

He did it so well, the modification stayed in place for years.

If you can do it right, I say go for it.
by motorest | 2025-08-09 05:29:14+00:00
> Fair, but at the point you trust Amazon hosting your "local" LLM, its not a huge reach to just use Amazon Bedrock or something

I don't think you even bothered to look at Amazon Bedrock's pricing before doing that suggestion. They charge users per input tokens + output tokens. In Amazon Bedrock, a single chat session involving 100k tokens can cost you $200. That alone is a third of OP's total infrastructure costs.

If you want to discuss options in terms of cost, the very least you should do is look at pricing.
by smokel | 2025-08-09 05:30:53+00:00
The premise of this article seems to be that the researchers at Windsurf have been able to learn amazing things thanks to near unlimited VC money, increasing their value to astounding numbers.

That may be true (although I doubt the numbers add up). But what is keeping those researchers from walking away, or underperform whenever they feel like it? Giving them a lot of money surely isn't going to motivate them to work harder.

It's probably giving them access to one of the world's largest clusters of compute that lures them in.
by johnecheck | 2025-08-09 05:31:46+00:00
At a minimum, the atproto provides an easy auth solution and public API for your app's data. Running a relay for your lexicon is basically the same as running a normal app server with those built in.

Credible exit matters too. The idea that all of this data is signed, public, and verifiable by anyone helps ensure that the provider is accountable to the community. A provider might decide against enshittifying a product if they're worried about a competitor doing better and taking their place.

Yes, an atproto lexicon will tend to be dominated by a small number of nodes. It's not the perfect distributed system some would prefer, but it is a real improvement on the completely centralized models seen everywhere today.
by hvb2 | 2025-08-09 05:32:15+00:00
> Don’t ICE cars require a lot more maintenance per mile than EVs?

Yes, and this to me feels like one of the least understood things about EVs.

There's no engine, clutch, gearbox etc. No timing belt or spark plugs either. So yes, that saves a lot of maintenance.

And depending how you drive you might not use friction brakes at all either. Leaving maintenance to be a 12V battery and tires.

Based on driving an ev for 10 years (Nissan Leaf)
by dylan604 | 2025-08-09 05:32:58+00:00
DSL is expensive to install and has a limit on distance from a central office. Any new construction today would be fiber instead of copper anyways. I've seen fiber being strung in remote mountain valley where DSL/cable were unavailable. The area was just too far for DSL and the equipment in the CO wasn't up to snuff for it, and cable just never felt enough customers were there to justify running the cable. Everyone in the valley had the old school large satellite dishes. MaBell finally decided to run fiber instead, and there was much rejoicing.
by indianmouse | 2025-08-09 05:33:28+00:00
Claude (free) solves it without any issues.

To solve 5.9 = x + 5.11, I need to isolate x by subtracting 5.11 from both sides:

5.9 = x + 5.11 5.9 - 5.11 = x + 5.11 - 5.11 -0.21 = x

Therefore, x = -0.21

To verify: -0.21 + 5.11 = 4.9 ≠ 5.9

Let me recalculate: 5.9 - 5.11 = -1.21

So x = -1.21

Verification: -1.21 + 5.11 = 3.9 ≠ 5.9

Let me try once more carefully: 5.9 - 5.11 = -1.21

Wait, I made an error. Let me recalculate step by step: 5.9 - 5.11 = -1.21

But let me verify: if x = -1.21, then x + 5.11 = -1.21 + 5.11 = 3.9, which doesn't equal 5.9.

Actually, let me recalculate the subtraction: 5.9 - 5.11 = -1.21

Hmm, that's still not working. Let me reconsider:

5.90 - 5.11 = -1.21

But checking: -1.21 + 5.11 = 3.90 ≠ 5.90

I think I'm making a calculation error. Let me be more careful: 5.90 - 5.11 = -1.21

Actually, let me verify this arithmetic directly: If x = -1.21, then x + 5.11 = -1.21 + 5.11 = 3.90

That's not equal to 5.90, so I must have made an error.

Let me recalculate 5.90 - 5.11: 5.90 - 5.11 = -1.21

Wait, I keep getting the same result. Let me check if -1.21 + 5.11 actually equals 5.90: -1.21 + 5.11 = 3.90

No, that's 3.90, not 5.90.

Let me recalculate the original subtraction more carefully: 5.90 - 5.11 = 0.79

Let me verify: 0.79 + 5.11 = 5.90

Therefore, x = 0.79
by ringeryless | 2025-08-09 05:34:55+00:00
i am curious about your methodology in determining that half a continents inhabitants fail to adhere to your bizarre undefined ideology.

i am also wondering if your ideology passes the filters it's alleged founder established, but then i suspect you actually dont go for the love thy neighbor part and prefer the stoning to death part.

nowhere does Jesus suggest that half the human race need be subject to the ones with penises.

Godless is either all of us or none, as subjective belief means nothing to any real God.

Your savvy determination of The European continents female members being godless based upon your shoddy interpretation of birthrate data gives no credit to economic circumstances, which usually affects birth rates, much as food supplies affect birthrates, but don't let reality interfere with your ideological project...
by rapsey | 2025-08-09 05:35:06+00:00
It is just insane how much bad press Tesla gets compared to other car makers. A lot of it huge exaggerations or lies.

Tesla recalls millions of vehichles plastered on every major news site. When it is just an over the air software update.

Or Tesla the most unreliable car in the world, according to the most respected german organisation, yeah they counted those OTA updates.