MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nwallin | 2025-08-23 22:06:57+00:00
Accept-reject methods are nonstarters when the architecture makes branching excessively expensive, specifically SIMD and GPU, which is one of the domains where generating random points on a sphere is particularly useful.

The Box-Muller transform is slow because it requires log, sqrt, sin, and cos. Depending on your needs, you can approximate all of these.

log2 can be easily approximated using fast inverse square root tricks:

constexpr float fast_approx_log2(float x) { x = std::bit_cast<int, float>(x); constexpr float a = 1.0f / (1 << 23); x *= a; x -= 127.0f; return x; }

(conveniently, this also negates the need to ensure your input is not zero)

sqrt is pretty fast; turn `-ffast-math` on. (this is already the default on GPUs) (remember that you're normalizing the resultant vector, so add this to the mag_sqr before square rooting it)

The slow part of sin/cos is precise range reduction. We don't need that. The input to sin/cos Box-Muller is by construction in the range [0,2pi]. Range reduction is a no-op.

For my particular niche, these approximations and the resulting biases are justified. YMMV. When I last looked at it, the fast log2 gave a bunch of linearities where you wanted it to be smooth, however across multiple dimensions these linearities seemed to cancel out.
by giantg2 | 2025-08-23 22:07:40+00:00
It depends. In suburban areas there are free courts generally available at parks and schools. Rural areas don't have many options. Urban areas have fewer free options that tend to be crowded. Balls are the next largest cost since they are expendable - get lost, go dead, etc. Historically these were much larger costs due to manufacturing and construction differences. My guess is that a lot of this is generational carryover as the free courts are generally newer (1980s+) and the carryrover where well of players from prior generations mostly inspired their kids to follow suit.
by queenkjuul | 2025-08-23 22:07:42+00:00
I mean considering demand exceeds capacity on the brown and red lines every single weekday evening and ridership keeps increasing as the system recovers, yes, i think it's safe to say ridership will get back to 2019 levels - we're like 80% of the way there already.

This station, once rebuilt, will be in place for another hundred years, just like the last. When it comes to permanent infrastructure upgrades that directly address real needs for residents, my upper limit on price doesn't really exist. A $500M train station really isn't a big deal in the grand scope of the total Illinois transportation budget (which will mostly be spent on far more questionable projects like expanding highways)
by mc32 | 2025-08-23 22:07:52+00:00
Other protesters also have said some vile things about other people and it's allowed to go on. So it seems that the law isn't applied evenly.

In any case, people should be able to protest and should only face lawful restrictions if they cause immediate property damage (looting, burning cars, etc.), physical assault or pose an immediate danger to people or things in their immediate vicinity.

Just saying vile and disgusting things should not be a basis for prohibiting and or arresting people. If they become physically violent or threatening, then sure, arrest them. "Shitposting" on X/Twitter, etc., should not get you arrested.

People in China know the consequences of not being able to say vile and disgusting things about their own government when they crush dissent.
by shikhar | 2025-08-23 22:09:02+00:00
Architecturally, there are a lot of the same considerations. A key difference is that we offer streams as a cloud API, and it does not have WarpStream's BYOC split – where some stuff runs in your environment and metadata lives in their cloud – so we can offer lower latencies. We are also not trying to be Kafka API compatible, S2 has its own REST API.

The dimensions we focus on are number of streams (unlimited, so you can do granular streams like per user or session), internet accessibility (you can generate finely-scoped access tokens that can be safely used from clients like CLIs or browsers), and soon also massive read fanout for feed-like use cases.
by varispeed | 2025-08-23 22:09:34+00:00
You’re demanding a sealed dossier, which is an absurd standard for public discourse. The ‘proof’ is in the public record of actions and consequences.

An administration acting as an asset would:

- Dismantle alliances (undermining military cooperation, trade disputes, questioning mutual defence).

- Give concessions without return (walking away from long-negotiated agreements, reducing deployments unilaterally).

- Sideline national security and intelligence professionals who oppose the adversary’s interests.

- Stoke domestic instability that distracts and weakens national unity.

When these patterns converge, you don’t need classified files to hear the smoke alarm. My point stands: U.S. weapons are a hard sell when its own foreign policy works against its strategic interests.

Btw. Your command of English is very good, comrade.
by FireBeyond | 2025-08-23 22:09:38+00:00
lol, if you want to be pedantic the article says MOST packages, not some.

> Postal services in Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Italy said they will stop shipping most merchandise to the U.S. effective immediately. France and Austria will follow Monday, and the United Kingdom Tuesday.

> India's government also said the country will temporarily suspend postal deliveries to the United States starting Monday, except letters, documents and gift items of up to $100 in value

Stop defending policies created by someone who gives not one shit about anything that doesn’t benefit him personally, his ego, or both.
by JeremyNT | 2025-08-23 22:10:36+00:00
RFC speak is a good way to put it.

Also, there's a big difference between giving general "always on" context (as in agents.md) for vibe coding - like "validate against existing code" etc - versus bouncing ideas in a chat session like your example, where you don't necessarily have a specific approach in mind and burning a few extra tokens for a one off query is no big deal.

Context isn't free (either literally or in terms of processing time) and there's definitely a balance to be found for a given task.
by ben_w | 2025-08-23 22:10:41+00:00
Your analogy is the bad one here.

To be like that, almost everyone would need to own a dog, and everyone including the non-dog-owners would have things delivered by dog, the dog park would have to actively block access to most places, and the fees for the dog owners pay for the dog park would have to be insufficient for the dog park and the park instead subsidised by general taxation even from the people who only get stuff delivered by dog… which would be quite fair and reasonable because almost all the damage to the dog park that the maintenance fees would need to cover, would be due to specifically the delivery dogs.

The actual point of the dog park fees in this scenario would be to reduce the usage of the dog park, due to everyone riding their dogs everywhere. Which is a heck of a mental image.

Roads aren't for pleasure, they're economic infrastructure that some people happen to enjoy.
by divan | 2025-08-23 22:11:18+00:00
I'm searching badly for a similar tool (code-based animation renderer) but not focused on math, but rather on general-purpose infographic/charts/motion graphics. The traditional approach for that, of course, is to use After Effects/Davinci Fusion/Blender/Cavalry/etc., but since I've first tried PovRay back in the early 2000s and then tools like Manim, I can't stop thinking about a code/text-based motion graphics tool. It would shine in use with LLMs, of course, and while I see some new "ChatGPT-wrappers for Motion Graphics" pop up now and then, I don't need yet another chat to send me cloud-rendered videos in the Electron app. I want a templated code/language for the graphics and style I'll settle on to use with different data and be able to render it locally (or event automate) as much as I want.
by thr0w | 2025-08-23 22:13:23+00:00
> I disable nested loop join and it's 4 seconds.

I feel your pain. I've been through all stages of grief with `enable_nestloop`. I've arrived at acceptance. Sometimes you just need to redo your query approach. Usually by the time I get the planner to behave, I've ended up with something that's expressed more simply to boot.
by simonh | 2025-08-23 22:15:59+00:00
It depends what the minimal needs are, but basically the US has this for chips already. Yes the US only makes older chips, but in fact those are the ones that really matter, that you can’t do without. The ones that are in everything.

However making everything domestically just isn’t really viable for any country any more. The scale of our technological civilization and the diversity of goods and materials it depends on is more that any one continent can support, let alone one country.

It would be possible to collapse that down to one continent if absolutely necessary, but it would be incredibly economically painful and the US would need to give up on a lot of non-essentials and other priorities to devote resources to duplicating capacity that already exists elsewhere.
by general1726 | 2025-08-23 22:16:06+00:00
I mean just try to sumarize ads running on YouTube: Lightsabers ad which is actually a torch - scam. Wooden cutting board as source of microplastics - scam. Muscular old geezer selling Tai-chi - grift and scam. Mobile games advertising a "playthrough" but real game is completely something else - scam. Palestinians having difficult life - propaganda. Israel delivering help to Palestine - counter propaganda.

I have seen so many ads on YouTube and so far it was either scam or propaganda.
by RugnirViking | 2025-08-23 22:17:09+00:00
first off; it seems to have worked in Britain. Have you seen the pool of leaders and politicians there compared to the US? Still dominated by the same elite schools, but much more diverse (ofc the diversity is literally skin deep but for the pure purposes of achieving this it does work)

secondly, have you ever heard of the Pygmalion effect? people aren't static. If you introduce somebody to a high performing environment and tell them they're meant to be there, many of them will rise to the challenge. Of course, there is room for natural aptitude -- but nobody is proposing the schools take entirely random people. They'd still be selecting the best of the cohort. People who were able to succeed dramatically enough to be noticed, just in different environments. Similarly, in your navy SEAL example, a lot is made out of the fact that soldiers like that aren't naturally born, they're made (through training, through the culture they have developed, the standards and professionalism they hold themselves to) Again, you'll want people with certain traits in the first place (low propensity for stress, high intelligence, high fitness, leadership), but to presume the current selection is perfectly meritocratic would be foolish, and its not like people are even suggesting that we don't try to select for such things, only to try and add another consideration to the mix.
by hermitcrab | 2025-08-23 22:17:09+00:00
> So it seems that the law isn't applied evenly.

Of course. It is applied by humans, with all the failings that implies.

>In any case, people should be able to protest and should only face lawful restrictions if they cause immediate property damage ... Just saying vile and disgusting things should not be a basis for prohibiting and or arresting people.

That may be your viewpoint, but UK law says otherwise.
by queenkjuul | 2025-08-23 22:17:15+00:00
Chicago residents are 3x less likely to own a car compared to the national average, despite the costs being near the national average. Illinois as a whole is one of the least car-reliant states in the country.

https://datausa.io/profile/geo/chicago-il/

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/car-ownership-s...
by starchild3001 | 2025-08-23 22:18:14+00:00
Amiga forever! Curation first. Two follow ups:

1) An amiga museum with all the games, artwork, coding technology, music technology etc. Perhaps an AI can be tasked to produce all of this soon. Youtube videos might be an engaging delivery mechanism. A physical museum too can be considered, perhaps as part of Computer History Museum and similar.

2) AI coding might unlock mass creation of new software, games, demos, music etc. What was once conceived impossible will be very possible and likely abundant soon -- think of brand new games, and mind blowing new old-style Amiga animations with music.

Of course, this will be only possible with the dedication and efforts of enthusiasts. Thank you!!
by robocat | 2025-08-23 22:19:10+00:00
> die of heat stroke just not to use that pesky Yankee tech

Japanese tech is the best for temperate New Zealand homes. Called a heatpump here but also has aircon functionality i.e. electric heating in winter and aircon in summer on hot days as necessary. Mitsubishi, Panasonic, Toshiba and Fujitsu etc. Not sure I've ever seen a Carrier here (and I can't even name other US brands). There are also some cheaper Chinese brands.

Part of the problem on forums is that the wording varies by country and hot US states install A/C only systems: which you would never do in temperate climes. The word split is uncommonly used here (as a kiwi I'm not entirely certain of the meaning).
by like_any_other | 2025-08-23 22:19:11+00:00
> Other protesters also have said some vile things about other people and it's allowed to go on. So it seems that the law isn't applied evenly.

For example: The now-suspended councillor, wearing a black polo top and surrounded by cheering supporters, said: “They are disgusting Nazi fascists. We need to cut all their throats and get rid of them all.” - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/08/15/suspended-labour... (unpaywall: https://archive.is/gT2fa)

He was charged, but the jury took little more than half an hour to reach a not guilty verdict. Speculation is that this was simple in-group preference - The trial was at Snaresbrook Crown Court, in the constituency of Leyton and Wanstead. At the 2021 Census, the white British population in Leyton and Wanstead was less than 34% of the total population. The jury likely reflected that. And such in-group preference is well documented: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/judicial-institute/sites/judicial-inst...
by AIPedant | 2025-08-23 22:19:49+00:00
This seems like a cool company and I don't want to nitpick too much, but gamers have no respect for history:

Castlevania... [so] called because it is a Metroidvania game set in a Castle.

Ouch - this is precisely backwards. Metroidvanias are named after Metroid and Castlevania because those series practically defined the genre.

Also a bit frustrating because the first Castlevania itself isn't actually a metroidvania, it's a more conventional action-platformer. Castlevania II has non-linear exploration, lots of items to collect, and puzzle-solving, all like Metroid. So it's not too surprising Antithesis had to do a lot of work for adapting their system to Metroid - but I wonder if this work means it now can handle Castlevania II without much extra development.
by Squeeeez | 2025-08-23 22:23:47+00:00
Yes, the change from not being pressed into your seat to being pressed into your seat is jerk. Basically the difference between two acceleration "levels".

Snap is how abrupt those changes between accelerations are. If you accelerate a bit, and then suddenly the light turns orange and you floor it, and the turbo kicks in, and your passengers go "woaaaaaah going to need a barf baaaaag" for example, it was probably not very smooth.

Sometimes instead of linear accelerations, those concepts can be easier to understand as changes in angular motions. You're on a curve of a certain radius, and suddenly the radius changes. The change is the jerk. How sudden the change happens is the snap.
by StrandedKitty | 2025-08-23 22:24:05+00:00
For some reason I thought this article would explain how to ID a specific cat, that is basically facial recognition for cats.

Is this even something that's possible with current tech? Like, surely cats have some facial features that can be used to uniquely identify them? It would be cool to have a global database of all cats that users would be able to match their photos against. Imagine taking a picture of a cat you see on the street, and it immediately tells you the owner's details and whether it's missing.
by nitia | 2025-08-23 22:24:12+00:00
Researchers at UCLA and UC Riverside have developed a novel computing system that harnesses quantum oscillators to solve complex optimization problems at room temperature, marking a departure from traditional quantum computing approaches that require extreme cooling. The breakthrough, published this week in Physical Review Applied, demonstrates how specially engineered materials can naturally evolve toward optimal solutions for problems spanning telecommunications, scheduling, and logistics.

The system represents a new class of "Ising machines" that exploit the physical properties of tantalum sulfide, a charge-density-wave material, to perform computations through quantum mechanical processes rather than digital algorithms. Unlike conventional quantum computers that operate near absolute zero, this architecture functions at ambient temperatures while maintaining quantum coherence.
by card_zero | 2025-08-23 22:24:38+00:00
They did try to, as well, in Manvers. Can't remember if this was before or after her post, and presumably they weren't really following her instructions, but given the high probability that her post might cause somebody to set a hotel on fire, it seems that she could have been convicted even under US law.

"Bins were set alight and pushed against fire exits"

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyj2nlw9wgo
by derefr | 2025-08-23 22:25:24+00:00
It's especially bizarre that ROMhacks would be suppressed from IA, when IA has played host to plain-old 100%-infringing ROMs for years now, with nobody seeming to care.

(I will not directly link to these collections, for the fates are cruel. I'll just say that these IA collections are 'complete' per-console ROM collection archives created by "GoodMerge", a ROM collection validation and repacking tool — and are named very intuitively given that.)
by bandika | 2025-08-23 22:25:56+00:00
I think you are really wrong here. I’m 47 and after on and off running for decades, a few months ago I started to run every day. 2K in the first month - to start gently, then 2M (3.22k) for a month, then the next month 5k, and then 8k. I am doing 10k every day after 5 months, and I've never felt before so fit and healthy. I think it’s never too late to start exercising regularly, even if it means daily.
by 4683467953381 | 2025-08-23 22:26:24+00:00
Free speech is both paramount for its own sake and necessary for democracy. You cannot have a functional electoral democracy if the people already in power can decide what arguments and opinions everyone else can express. The viewpoint that censorship of expressions that those in power deem dangerous to democracy is justified to protect democracy is perhaps itself the viewpoint most dangerous to democracy. That doesn't mean it should be censored. It means it should be expressed by those who wish to express it and argued against by those who wish to argue against it, as with all viewpoints.
by dkdcio | 2025-08-23 22:26:34+00:00
I’m really confused how you got that from the comment you’re replying to, and why you’re continuing to defend misinformation you’re spreading in the original comment. you implied TI primarily makes money from calculators and MSP430s. this is easily provably false

the person above made an analogy —- they didn’t claim TI loses money per calculator
by bitpush | 2025-08-23 22:27:12+00:00
You're getting down voted because of the curt "it sucks" which shows a level of shallowness in your understanding.

Nothing in the world is simply outright garbage. Even the seemingly worst products exist for a reason and is used for a variety of use cases.

So, take a step back and reevaluate whether your reply could have been better. Because, it simply "just sucks"
by Telaneo | 2025-08-23 22:27:14+00:00
This is the reflex/instinct approach though. Sure, they increase friction for people with adblock, and then 5 minutes later, uBlock Origin does an update to undo Youtube's friction, and we're back to square one. No gain for anyone, no thought of what happens long term, just busywork.

I'll pay for Youtube Premium the day they bring back a pre-2015-ish Youtube web layout, tone down the ads accordingly for those who can't pay, community subtitles, dislikes and annotations. I have no intentions of paying for a service that grows worse year over year, which I constantly have to counteract with either browser add-ons, or separate programs like yt-dlp and Freetube. I'll pay for the content if need be, but that's what Patreon is for in most cases. Youtube's a middleman I'd rather not have to deal with, but which we're stuck with.
by tanelpoder | 2025-08-23 22:30:34+00:00
I wrote the CatBench vector search playground toy app exactly for this reason! [1] ("cat-similarity search for recommendation engines and cat-fraud detection"). I built it both for learning & fun, but also it's useful for demoing vector search functionality, plugged in to regular RDBMS application schemas in business context. I used cats & dogs as it's something everyone understands, instead of diving deep into some narrow industry vertical specific use case.

[1]: https://tanelpoder.com/posts/catbench-vector-search-query-th...
by bitpush | 2025-08-23 22:30:45+00:00
> First we have to close every company that depend on ads to survive. All of them.

Spoken like someone who has never built anything of value in the world. Even Apple, who famously "hates advertising and adtech companies" makes ads to promote their products. Ads exist for a reason.

Your statement is no better than "if your company emits carbon, you need to close". Sounds nice. Doesn't work
by Telaneo | 2025-08-23 22:31:13+00:00
I have a hard time imagining a world which Youtube ceases to work in a browser with uBlock Origin. Instead we're in a world where Youtube screws us around for a bit, and then uBlock does an update and everything goes back to 'normal'. This isn't productive for either side. It's just busywork.

Maybe Youtube sees it differently and can actually imagine that world, but even then, it doesn't really seem like that's the state of things they're working towards.
by musicale | 2025-08-23 22:31:16+00:00
I always assumed that the rug shops were for money laundering.

Palo Alto may buy a lot of rugs, but it seems like one shop should be sufficient to supply the entire city.

Though now I am imagining Palo Alto rolling out its new, grand vision for commerce: to become the Rug Shop Capital of the Greater Bay Area. In cooperation with Stanford Business School's new program in Rug Store Management, and the department of Rug and Textile Studies.

Rug stores also seem to be perpetually "going out of business", but I don't know if this is actually the case and why.
by hermitcrab | 2025-08-23 22:31:17+00:00
Most people don't want to live in a society where:

* people can say vile racist/sexist/homophobic things.

* where the state censors what you can say.

But you pretty much have to pick one or the other. The US took the maximalist free speech approach. Europe didn't. Due to differences in culture and history. I think both are defensible on various grounds.

However successive UK governments also seem keen to restrict the right to peaceful protest. I would say that is a different thing and I'm not sure it is helpful to conflate the two.
by like_any_other | 2025-08-23 22:31:49+00:00
> go to war

It won't be war. It'll be one-sided trade deals [1,2], and a slow erosion of economic and political sovereignty, culminating in a puppet state.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada-China_Promotion_and_Rec...

[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/fipa-agreement-with-china-wha...