MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dawnofdusk | 2025-08-28 14:01:37+00:00
I have some minor complaints but overall I think this is great! My background is in physics, and I remember finally understanding every equation on the formula sheet given to us for exams... that really felt like I finally understood a lot of physics. There's great value in being comprehensive so that a learner can choose themselves to dive deeper, and for those with more experience to check their own knowledge.

Having said that, let me raise some objections:

1. Omitting the multi-layer perceptron is a major oversight. We have backpropagation here, but not forward propagation, so to speak.

2. Omitting kernel machines is a moderate oversight. I know they're not "hot" anymore but they are very mathematically important to the field.

3. The equation for forward diffusion is really boring... it's not that important that you can take structured data and add noise incrementally until it's all noise. What's important is that in some sense you can (conditionally) reverse it. In other words, you should put the reverse diffusion equation which of course is considerably more sophisticated.
by ndiddy | 2025-08-28 14:01:49+00:00
Welcome to Hacker News! I'm glad my comment encouraged you to join the site.

I didn't write the article, I was just commenting because other users seemed to miss information that was written in it.

The picture with the thermal paste shows that paste was squeezed out from the entire perimeter of the CPU, so the cooler is making contact with the whole CPU. The paste is squeezed thinner near the lower side of the CPU because that's where the mounting pins are located, meaning that's where the mounting pressure is the strongest. The impression left by the thermal paste matches the diagram on Noctua's site ( https://noctua.at/pub/media/wysiwyg/offset/heat_cooler_base_... ).

Noctua lists the NH-U9S cooler as being compatible with the 9950X, and claims it has "medium turbo/overclocking headroom", see https://ncc.noctua.at/cpus/model/AMD-Ryzen-9-9950X-1831 . I'm not sure how they come up with their compatibility ratings, but I generally trust Noctua knows what they're doing when it comes to CPU cooling.

It's also important to note that the author only tried the offset mount after they had a CPU die when the cooler was mounted centered on the CPU.

Overall, I think it's unlikely that these failures can be blamed on poor cooling.
by mrkeen | 2025-08-28 14:02:07+00:00
> Because of those "inaccessible" rules, we can never have a readwrite reference and a readonly reference to an object at the same time.

I can't not see this as a good thing. It's almost at the level of "the only thing an ownership system does".

If my thread is operating on a struct of 4 int64s, do I now have to think about another read-only thread seeing that struct in an invalid partially-written state?
by rossdavidh | 2025-08-28 14:02:10+00:00
"Heavy readers - applications that consume massive amounts of context but generate minimal output - operate in an almost free tier for compute costs."

Not saying there's not interesting analysis here, but this is assuming that they don't have to pay for access to the massive amounts of context. Sources like stackoverflow and reddit that used to be free, are not going to be available to keep the model up to date.

If this analysis is meant to say "they're not going to turn the lights out because of the costs of running", that may be so, but if they cannot afford to keep training new models every so often they will become less relevant over timte, and I don't know if they will get an ocean of VC money to do it all again (at higher cost than last time, because the sources want their cut now).
by zdragnar | 2025-08-28 14:02:20+00:00
It is a condition that is employable in the abstract, as symptoms are as varied as individuals are.

The difficulty begins with the treatment- the medications can be extremely unpleasant, and it is not uncommon for patients to cease taking them.

Unfortunately, people with the condition can be unreliable narrators, so to speak, and so any deviation from perfectly normal becomes suspicion of medication refusal, as the author noted in the article. Even when they are perfectly honest and accurate, just having a rough day will mean being met with distrust at best.

The thing that struck me as odd in the article is the repetition of fear as a reaction in others. There's not enough information to understand if this is accurate or not. One of my friends growing up had a cleft lip; his low self image had him constantly assuming the worst in others despite it (from my observations) contributing far less to people's reactions than he'd imagined.

So, we are left wondering: is the author of the post a reliable narrator, or are their symptoms coloring their perception of the interactions with others in a way that they are misjudging?
by avastel | 2025-08-28 14:03:02+00:00
(Author here) TBH I don't think the main goal of Google was to make bots undetectable. It was more a side effect of preventing side effects while reviewing errors in the devtools: https://source.chromium.org/chromium/_/chromium/v8/v8/+/e08e...

It was the same when Google released the new headless Chrome a few years ago: https://antoinevastel.com/bot%20detection/2023/02/19/new-hea... It made vanilla/naive bots more realistic/detectable by default.
by verdagon | 2025-08-28 14:03:07+00:00
Great question! That's a big enough topic that I'd love to write a followup post about it. There's also a good thread on r/Compilers at https://www.reddit.com/r/Compilers/comments/1n2ay7g/comment/... about how Nick's model should support that.

TL;DR: Mutability is tracked at the group level, so we can share an immutable group with any number of threads (especially good with structured concurrency) or lend a mutable group to a single other thread. References themselves are still aliasable, regardless of the group's mutability.

Taking an existing (mutable, aliasing) group and temporarily interpreting it as immutable has precedent (I did it in Vale [0]) so I like the approach, but I might be biased ;)

(This is from my memory of how Nick's proposal works, I'll ask him to give a better answer once morning hits his Australia timezone)

[0] https://verdagon.dev/blog/zero-cost-borrowing-regions-part-1...
by turboponyy | 2025-08-28 14:03:23+00:00
I actually completely agree with both the article and your point that your code should directly communicate your intent.

The angle I'd approach it from is this: recording whether an email is verified as a boolean is actually misguided - that is, the intent is wrong.

The actual things of interest are the email entity and the verification event. If you record both, 'is_verified' is trivial to derive.

However, consider if you now must implement the rule that "emails are verified only if a verification took place within the last 6 months." Recording verifications as events handles this trivially, whilst this doesn't work with booleans.

Some other examples - what is the rate of verifications per unit of time? How many verification emails do we have to send out?

Flipping a boolean when the first of these events occurs without storing the event itself works in special cases, but not in general. Storing a boolean is overly rigid, throws away the underlying information of interest, and overloads the model with unrelated fields (imagine storing say 7 or 8 different kinds of events linked to some model).
by harph | 2025-08-28 14:03:31+00:00
It seems it's because OP is generating the whole screen every frame / every move. Of course that will give inconsistent results.

I wonder if this approach would work better:

1. generate the whole screen once

2. on update, create a mask for all changed elements of the underlying data

3. do an inpainting pass with this mask, with regional prompting to specify which parts have changed how

4. when moving the camera, do outpainting

This might not be possible with cloud based solutions, but I can see it being possible locally.
by OskarS | 2025-08-28 14:03:54+00:00
A piece of advice I read somewhere early in my career was "a boolean should almost never be an argument to a function". I didn't understand what the problem was at the time, but then years later I started at a company with a large Lua code-base (mostly written by one-two developers) and there were many lines of code that looked like this:

serialize(someObject, true, false, nil, true)

What does those extra arguments do? Who knows, it's impossible without looking at the function definition.

Basically, what had happened was that the developer had written a function ("serialize()", in this example) and then later discovered that they wanted slightly different behaviour in some cases (maybe pretty printed or something). Since Lua allows you to change arity of a function without changing call-sites (missing arguments are just nil), they had just added a flag as an argument. And then another flag. And then another.

I now believe very strongly that you should virtually never have a boolean as an argument to a function. There are exceptions, but not many.
by steveruizok | 2025-08-28 14:04:12+00:00
We did a similar thing at tldraw with Draw Fast (https://drawfast.tldraw.com/) and it was very fun. Inspired a few knock offs too. We had to shut it down because it was getting popular on Russian Reddit. A related project Lens (https://lens.tldraw.com) also used the same technique, but in a collaborative drawing app.

At the peak, when we were streaming back video from Fal and getting <100ms of lag, the setup produced one of the most original creative experiences I’d ever had. I wish these sorts of ultra-fast image generators received more attention and research because they do open up some crazy UX.
by echelon | 2025-08-28 14:04:17+00:00
This was built in September 2022, and it's still pretty mind-blowing today:

https://madebyoll.in/posts/game_emulation_via_dnn/demo/

https://madebyoll.in/posts/game_emulation_via_dnn/

Hook world state up to a server and you have multiplayer.

2025 update:

https://madebyoll.in/posts/world_emulation_via_dnn/

https://madebyoll.in/posts/world_emulation_via_dnn/demo/
by Spooky23 | 2025-08-28 14:04:39+00:00
All of these companies have good and bad stories. I’ve been in the IT biz for a long time and have lots of stories of heroics and villainy.

I can think of a bad one where a significant number of laptops and 1st party docking stations were deployed. There was an issue where in certain scenarios plugging into the dock would brick the dock. It affected ~5% of the population in 90 days. Vendor response: fuck you.

One of the interns working on desktop support at the org figured out that certain laptop serial number ranges were affected. She then popped it open and found what turned out to be a counterfeit chip.

Flying monkeys were released and the CEO of the vendor got a call. End result: ~$40-50M redeployment of everything, eaten by the vendor. If they had been accountable from the beginning, they likely would have recalled $3-5M of devices and spent $300-500k on deployment.

On the flip, I remember one scenario where an off warranty device failed before its replacement was ready (and the replacement was another vendor). The part wasn’t available locally, and the account exec ditched a conference in Chicago, picked up the part from a depot in Indiana and drove it to Massachusetts overnight, with a CE waiting for it in the lot.
by estearum | 2025-08-28 14:04:55+00:00
Neither the City of LA nor any city in the world has a municipal water supply equipped to combat an urban wildfire. Embers were blown miles ahead of the fire front onto new rooftops.

Using guidelines from the National Fire Academy to suppress housefires, they would've needed to simultaneously deploy 10 or 12 thousand industrial-zone (not residential-zone) fire hydrants. Not only do those not exist, but there would've been no way to pressurize them simultaneously.

At only hour 4 of the fire (1200 acres, assume 5% are structures), they already would've had to deploy 1800 industrial-zone fire hydrants to suppress it. Again using NFA's flow rate guidelines. The Santa Ynez Reservoir, had it been full, would've been emptied in about an hour assuming it could maintain pressure (which it couldn't).

Wildfires are fundamentally fought with firebreaks and aircraft, both of which are extremely challenging in high-wind urban environments. They are contained until they burn out their fuel. They are not ever combatted with municipal water supplies.

Can you state specifically what were obviously avoidable failures?
by jsnell | 2025-08-28 14:04:58+00:00
For the top few providers, the training is getting amortized over absurd amount of inference. E.g. Google recently mentioned that they processed 980T tokens over all surfaces in June 2025.

The leaked OpenAI financial projections for 2024 showed about equal amount of money spent on training and inference.

Amortizing the training per-query really doesn't meaningfully change the unit economics.

> Fact remains when all costs are considered these companies are losing money and so long as the lifespan of a model is limited it’s going to stay ugly. Using that apartment building analogy it’s like having to knock down and rebuild the building every 6 months to stay relevant. That’s simply not a viable business model.

To the extent they're losing money, it's because they're giving free service with no monetizaton to a billion users. But since the unit costs are so low, monetizing those free users with ads will be very lucrative the moment they decide to do so.
by cl3misch | 2025-08-28 14:05:07+00:00
The previous comment highlights an example where backprop is confused with "a supervised learning algorithm".

My comment was about "confusing backpropagation with gradient descent (or any optimizer)."

For me the connection is pretty clear? The core issue is confusing backprop with minimization. The cited article mentioning supervised learning specifically doesn't take away from that.
by bayindirh | 2025-08-28 14:05:12+00:00
I'll expand on the first example, the datetime one.

Many user databases use soft-deletes where fields can change or be deleted, so user's actions can be logged, investigated or rolled back.

When user changes their e-mail (or adds another one), we add a row, and "verifiedAt" is now null. User verifies new email, so its time is recorded to the "verifiedAt" field.

Now, we have many e-mails for the same user with valid "verifiedAt" fields. Which one is the current one? We need another boolean for that (isCurrent). Selecting the last one doesn't make sense all the time, because we might have primary and backup mails, and the oldest one might be the primary one.

If we want to support multiple valid e-mails for a single account, we might need another boolean field "isPrimary". So it makes two additional booleans. isCurrent, isPrimary.

I can merge it into a nice bit field or a comma separated value list, but it defeats the purpose and wanders into code-golf territory.

Booleans are nice. Love them, and don't kick them around because they're small, and sometimes round.
by estebarb | 2025-08-28 14:05:17+00:00
I'm not sure if I understand it correctly. So, if I have a hashtable, adding or removing an element would invalidate existing pointers to any other element in the hashtable? I guess it makes sense from a memory release POV, but... I end up thinking that for databases using GC or RC is a better approach. Maybe I'm biased, but I have found far easier to work on databases written in C or C#. For that kind of programs I felt Rust overrestrictive and forcing to more dangerous patterns such as replacing pointers with offsets.
by ben_w | 2025-08-28 14:05:53+00:00
Surgery is at a point where you can take a living human's heart out without killing them, and replace it with one you got out a corpse. And if the waiting list for donated corpse hearts is too long, you can have yours switched off for months while a machine pumps for you.

Lungs, kidneys, liver, lots can be successfully transplanted in similar ways.

> Surgery wasn't gotten to by way of working really hard on a magic trick

My point is other way around: if you wanted a magic trick where you could literally cut someone in half for real and then put them back together, that is literally "surgery".

> They are not actually catching a bullet. No matter how hard they work on perfecting their bullet catch trick, this will not allow them to catch a real bullet shot from a real gun in their real teeth. Working on the trick is not the journey where the end point is doing the actual thing you're representing in the trick.

For some tricks, sure.

For others… is the nailgun memorising trick faked for safety reasons? I mean, I sure would, and I assume their insurance requires at least some safety interlock that's not visible, but you can just memorise a sequence as Penn says while doing the trick.

And a few of the Fool Us tricks he says ~"we think you just practiced really hard for a very long time": https://youtu.be/Lx1P1YA2rlA?feature=shared&t=325 and same video different timestamp: https://youtu.be/Lx1P1YA2rlA?feature=shared&t=482
by Workaccount2 | 2025-08-28 14:06:02+00:00
No details on the implementation, but something like this would be great, because currently the fastest way to find out if an economic data print is good or bad is to watch the stock market, and then the numbers turn up in the news and tweets ~2 minutes later.

It's not clear where (and maybe not easily accessible) to get these numbers at -exactly- the moment they release.
by alphazard | 2025-08-28 14:06:13+00:00
The timestamps instead of boolean thing is something good engineers stumble upon pretty reliably. One gotcha is the database might be weird about indexing nulls. I'm not going to give an example because you should really read the docs for your specific database if this matters.

The ever growing set of boolean flags seems to be an attractor state for database schemas. Unless you take steps to avoid/prohibit it, people will reach for a single boolean flag for their project/task. Fortunately it's pretty easy to explain why it's bad with a counting argument. e.g. There are this many states with booleans, and this fraction are valid vs. this many with the enum and this fraction are valid. There is no verification, so a misunderstanding is more likely to produce an invalid state than a valid state.
by CorrectHorseBat | 2025-08-28 14:06:17+00:00
page 48: > E3: Bei Schreibung mit Großbuchstaben ist neben der Verwendung des Groß buchstabens ẞ auch die Schreibung SS möglich: Straße – STRAẞE – STRASSE.

While in older versions [1] it was the other way around:

> E3: Bei Schreibung mit Großbuchstaben schreibt man SS. Daneben ist auch die Verwendung des Großbuchstabens ẞ möglich. Beispiel: Straße – STRASSE – STRAẞE.

[1] https://www.rechtschreibrat.com/DOX/rfdr_Regeln_2016_redigie...
by Aachen | 2025-08-28 14:06:30+00:00
Then is now. Projects like Anubis and OpenStreetMap explicitly don't support uncommon setups, you just don't get to use those parts of the internet. When talking to e.g. OpenStreetMap sysadmins, the reason given was that they see no other way to keep the site online and available for anyone

The web is dying at the same time as mobile OS freedoms, while important organisations such as governments and banks are moving away from browser access and towards doing everything (including 2FA in one device) on a phone
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-08-28 14:06:40+00:00
> What do you mean, that's the business model more than half the VC-funded startups now. Provide something for free or near free, wait until your customer is dependent on you and/or consolidate into at least an oligopoly and then put the thumbscrews on.

You skipped the part where you bankrupt your competition in the space who can't afford to hemorrhage cash they don't have like a VC-backed startup can, hoover up all the customers, then charge more than the old guard industry did in the first damn place for a worse version of the same service, while also paradoxically paying any workers needed to provide said service even less than they were making before.
by hedora | 2025-08-28 14:06:47+00:00
California is digging out of a combination of over a century of misguided forest management efforts (replacing thousands of years of work by indigenous people with fire suppression), and also unprecedented climate change.

Should they do more? Of course. With what resources?

I recently learned 82% of California fire fighters are unpaid volunteers. That doesn’t include the prison labor.

The entire government has its priorities completely wrong, especially at the federal level. Blaming the city of LA makes very little sense.

Blaming environmentalists for consistently sounding the alarm over this stuff for 50+ years and then being ignored also doesn’t make sense.

One thing that does make sense: Look at the writings of the people that blocked wind and nuclear power in the 1980’s, and solar / batteries in the 1990s.

They explicitly said they knew their actions would burn the planet down, and it didn’t matter to them. Now they’ve dismantling our democracy, eliminating emergency response groups like FEMA, and retasking the national guard (California’s last line of fire defense) as an illegal police force.
by mariyadavydova | 2025-08-28 14:06:56+00:00
"Write with confidence, edit with precision, research with intelligence."

We built this prototype because we are super passionate about AI agents in general and this idea in particular. But now we need to convince our VCs that this is something people would love to use, not just us. So, guys, if you like the idea of a pragmatic, practical AI copilot that writes WITH you, not INSTEAD of you, please leave your email as a vote in our sign-up form ;)) Any feedback is also very much appreciated!
by jsheard | 2025-08-28 14:07:00+00:00
You're comparing apples to oranges, holding up today's practical real-time rendering techniques against a hypothetical future neural method that runs many orders of magnitude faster than anything available today, and solves the issues of temporal stability, directability and overall robustness. If we grant "equation based" methods the same liberty then we should be looking ahead to real-time pathtracing research, which is much closer to anything practical than these pure ML experiments.

That's not to say ML doesn't have a place in the pipeline - pathtracers can pair very well with ML-driven heuristics for things like denoising, but in that case the underlying signal is still grounded in physics and the ML part is just papering over the gaps.
by sixo | 2025-08-28 14:07:12+00:00
It's not even worth mentioning this problem unless you talk about how the result depends on the data generating process. If you take it to be something like "you randomly sample from families with two children, discarding any without at least one girl", you get the 1/3 result, but there are various other ways to read a sampling process from the problem statement which lead to other results.
by monkeyelite | 2025-08-28 14:07:46+00:00
> Now you dont know exactly what field to check.

Yes you do - you have a helper method that encapsulates the details.

In the DB you could also make a view or generated column.

> This is just micro-optimization for no good reason

It’s conceptually simpler to have a representation with fewer states, and bugs are hopefully impossible. For example what would it mean for the bool authorized to be false but the authorized date time to be non-null?
by mikeyouse | 2025-08-28 14:07:55+00:00
Aside from all the actual success stories with products they rolled out, they'd built comprehensive guides for software procurement that were making every part of the government more efficient -- and then the ~arsonists~ experts at DOGE came through and deleted all of that work because some 'move fast and break things' toadies decided they didn't want to spend so much time on planning and they'd rather just build baby build.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250201222157/https://18f.gsa.g...