MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by allenu | 2025-08-09 04:05:23+00:00
Absolutely. I only just started using Claude Code on Sunday and I tested it by taking a small project that I was toying with and extending it with lots of features that I had thought about adding but didn't have the time.

Then, I explored a product feature in an existing app of mine that I also had put off because I didn't feel it was worth spending several days exploring the idea. It's something that would've required me to look up tutorials and APIs on how to do some basic things and then write some golang code which I hadn't done in a while. With Claude Code, I was able to get a prototype of the idea from a client app and a golang service working within an hour!

Today I started prototyping yet another app idea I came up with yesterday. I started off doing the core of the prototype in a couple of hours by hand and then figured I'd pull Claude in to add features on top of it. I ended up spending several hours building this idea since I was making so much fantastic progress. It was genuinely addictive.

A few days ago I used it to help me explore how I should refactor a messy architecture I ended up with. I didn't initially consider it would even be useful at all but I was wowed by how it was able to understand the design I came up with and it gave me several starting points for a refactor. I ended up doing the refactor myself just because I really wanted to be sure I understood how it worked in case something went wrong. I suspect in a few weeks, I'll get used to just pairing with Claude on something like that.
by benreesman | 2025-08-09 04:06:53+00:00
I won't use `ollama` on principle. I use `llama-cli` and `llama-server` if I'm not linking `ggml`/`gguf` directly. It's like, two extra commands to use the one by the genius that wrote it and not the one that the guys just jacked it.

The models are on HuggingFace and downloading them is `uvx huggingface-cli`, the `GGUF` quants were `TheBloke` (with a grant from pmarca IIRC) for ages and now everyone does them (`unsloth` does a bunch of them).

Maybe I've got it twisted, but it seems to be that the people who actually do `ggml` aren't happy about it, and I've got their back on this.
Show HN: Markdown to ePub file (for Send to Kindle)
by rahimnathwani | 2025-08-09 04:07:18+00:00
I often copy markdown from Gemini or ChatGPT, paste it into a Google Doc, download it as an epub, and then use 'Send to Kindle' to get it onto my son's Kindle.

I figured using a web tool for markdown to epub would save me a click.

Perhaps you'll find it useful.

(Code was written by GPT-5.)
by jarland | 2025-08-09 04:07:26+00:00
There is no defined process for obtaining it. If you'd like to tear down that statement into little pieces and dissect it, I recommend getting a new hobby because it's not that interesting.

MXroute doesn't go around threatening US companies with EU law from Texas. As for your requirement for evidence, this situation does not require your approval unless you work for Apple and can offer some help in the matter. The tweet you are critiquing is me (owner of MXroute) attempting to gain Apple's attention to get what Fastmail and that EU user have obtained. I'll continue doing what I'm doing, if that's alright with you. I'm well aware of the situation and what others have done. What I need at this point is eyes on the prize. I'll get what I'm after, but a public statement that I currently cannot get what I'm after is entirely appropriate for the avenue I've chosen to do so.

It's a mistake to assume that I'm merely flailing my arms chaotically and generically playing the role of Karen.
by apatheticonion | 2025-08-09 04:07:33+00:00
There are quite a lot of valid use cases to being able to transform arbitrary tokens into JavaScript at "compile" time. One that already exists is JSX, which is a macro that is baked into the TypeScript compiler but is restricted/tailored to React-style libraries.

We sort of get around this today using template literals and eval, but it's janky. https://github.com/developit/htm

A generic macro system could open the door to a framework like Svelte, Angular, Vue, etc being able to embed their template compilers (with LSP support) without wrapper compilers and IDE extensions.

e.g. imagine syntax like this being possible (not saying it's good)

```

export class MyComponent {

template = Vue.template!(<div>{{ this.foo }}</div>) #[Vue.reactive] foo = 'Hello World' constructor() { setTimeout(() => this.foo = 'Updated', 1000) }

}

svelte.init(MyComponent, document.body)

```

Where the `template!` macro instructs the engine how to translate the tokens into their JavaScript syntax and the `#[reactive]` macro converts the class member into a getter/setter that triggers a re-render calculation.

It would need to be adopted by TC39 of course and the expectation would be that, if provided at runtime, a JavaScript engine could handle the preprocessing however transpilers should be able to pre-compute the outputs so they don't need to be evaluated at runtime.
by GolDDranks | 2025-08-09 04:08:52+00:00
I would be relieved to be mistaken, but I still see quite egregious risks there. For instance, a human bad actor with a powerful AI would have both intelligence and agency.

Secondly, I think that there is a natural pull towards agency even now. Many are trying to make our current, feeble AIs more independent and agentic. Once the capability to effectively behave so is there, it's hard to go back. After all, agents are useful for their owners like minions are for their warlords, but an minion too powerful is still a risk for their lord.

Finally, I'm not convinced that agency and intelligence are orthonogal. It seems more likely to me that to achieve sufficient levels of intelligence, agentic behaviour is a requirement to even get there.
by amy_petrik | 2025-08-09 04:10:09+00:00
We should allow anyone who wants to come to the US, to come here, to use our welfare system (housing and food are a HUMAN RIGHT). Learning a new language is also pretty damn hard and the US citizens are pretty well educated, so we ought to all learn Spanish to be hospitable neighbors to our new residents. If they don't want to work, that's fine, I myself sometimes don't feel like working and that's a human right too. If someone feels that way about work, they still ought to be able to eat, live, sleep, safely, and receive medical care.
by benreesman | 2025-08-09 04:10:24+00:00
`ggerganov` is one of the most under-rated and under-appreciated hackers maybe ever. His name belongs next to like Carmack and other people who made a new thing happen on PCs. And don't forget the shout out to `TheBloke` who like single-handedly bootstrapped the GGUF ecosystem of useful model quants (I think he had a grant from pmarca or something like that, so props to that too).
by bapak | 2025-08-09 04:10:26+00:00
I guess this could be a cross-platform format but you could also just store it as a sequence of commands

echo "Hello, world!" > file mkdir -p dir/subdir echo -n "Content.\n" > dir/subfile ln -s "target path" link printf '#!/bin/sh\necho Howdy!' > script chmod +x script

Would be the same as what's in the readme:

{ "file": "Hello, world!", "dir": { "subfile": "Content.\n", "subdir": {} }, "symlink": ["link", "target path"], "script": ["script", "#!/bin/sh\necho Howdy!"] }
by ofrzeta | 2025-08-09 04:10:27+00:00
I would be very reluctant to use it because of the fear that at some point Microsoft just kills it. You have to wonder why they are keeping it alive so long as they are probably getting not much value out of it (some people here say they are using it as a testbed for functional features in C# but I don't believe this - I guess the C# team has enough resources to do their explorations on their own). I guess if Don Syme leaves Microsoft or retires that will be the end of it.
by hakfoo | 2025-08-09 04:11:16+00:00
I wonder what risks the bubble has for them. If they can sell every $30K AI accelerator they make right now, that might cause them to overextend, committing to up-front capacity or long term projects that are financed by the current spend patterns, or just neglecting other parts of their product line.

If the hype dies and they're back to selling 5090s to gamers, can they afford to pay those bills?
by crawfordcomeaux | 2025-08-09 04:12:43+00:00
The few problems humanity has that need to be solved:

1. How to identify humanity's needs on all levels, including cosmic ones...(we're in the Space Age so we need to prepare ourselves for meeting beings from other places)

2. How to meet all of humanity's needs

Pointing this out regularly is probably necessary because the issue isn't why people are choosing what they're doing...it's that our systems actively disincentivize collectibely addressing these two problems in a way that doesn't sacrifice people's wellbeing/lives... and most people don't even think about it like this.
by superasn | 2025-08-09 04:13:19+00:00
Thanks for the helpful reply! As I wasn't able to fully understand it still, I pasted your reply in chatgpt and asked it some follow up questions and here is what i understand from my interaction:

- Big models like GPT-4 are split across many GPUs (sharding).

- Each GPU holds some layers in VRAM.

- To process a request, weights for a layer must be loaded from VRAM into the GPU's tiny on-chip cache before doing the math.

- Loading into cache is slow, the ops are fast though.

- Without batching: load layer > compute user1 > load again > compute user2.

- With batching: load layer once > compute for all users > send to gpu 2 etc

- This makes cost per user drop massively if you have enough simultaneous users.

- But bigger batches need more GPU memory for activations, so there's a max size.

This does makes sense to me but does this sound accurate to you?

Would love to know if I'm still missing something important.
by TimTheTinker | 2025-08-09 04:16:02+00:00
For content-driven sites - absolutely.

I'm talking about long-lived apps where work is being accomplished. An SPA allows downloading and caching al or most of the frontend, then further communication can proceed using minimal bandwidth as the user works.

With traditional SSR, every page/form the user navigates to requires downloading all markup, styles, and client-side behaviors for that route.
by apatheticonion | 2025-08-09 04:17:36+00:00
You stop noticing the borrow checker after a while and being able to write insanely parallel/performant code is quite rewarding.

Again, not all websites need to be usable on low end hardware/have a 1mb memory footprint - but there are a lot of use cases that would benefit.

Think, browser extensions that load on every tab and consume 150mb+ * number of tabs open and shares the main thread with the website.

ServiceWorkers that sit as background processes in your OS even when the browser is closed, that sort of thing.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-09 04:17:41+00:00
“News-Teller” are two English words that wouldn't be used together in that way, “Herald” is one English word and literally means what the naive combination of those two suggests, and is extremely commonly used in that sense in the name of news outlets (newspapers, etc.)

“Crier” is another pissibility with overlapping denotation that is also somewhat commonly seen in that context, “announcer” would work today in speech, but largely is a product of TV & radio so would be somewhat odd choice given the other options available.
by anonym29 | 2025-08-09 04:19:33+00:00
Is the snark really necessary here? These companies (Microsoft, Apple) have genuinely concerning practices regarding user ownership/control, data privacy, and there are legitimate concerns regarding the stewardship practices of Red Hat. I'm trying to engage in good faith, I've demonstrated a willingness to take your criticism seriously, and I'm willing to substantiate my claims, I don't understand why you're being so rude.

If you don't care enough to keep the conversation going, that's fine, but why do the whole catty "mean girl" / light bullying / social ostracization routine along with it? There's no reason for that.

@ dang @ tomhow
by rerdavies | 2025-08-09 04:19:37+00:00
Intense nostalgia. It brings me back to a point in time where the world suddenly turned and the possibilities seemed limitless. And all of those possibilities looked a little more idealistic, and a little less mercenary than what we actually got.

Not that I'm really complaining. I do like what we got.

And curiously different from the AI revolution, where there are no pretensions of idealism at at all, and everyone clearly understands that whoever wins this time will quite literally own the entire world, if the plan succeeds. And that it won't be a pleasant or pretty world for the rest of us, and that all of the leading candidates for King of the Universe don't care at all that the rest of us will be discarded. The complete opposite, in that regard.

I shall have to break out my set of AOL CD drink coasters, and put songs from Camelot on permanent repeat in order to mark the passing of an age with the solemnity it deserves.
by philwelch | 2025-08-09 04:21:19+00:00
What incentive do any of the big LLM providers have to solve this problem? I know there are technical reasons, but SaaS is a lucrative and proven business model and the systems have for years all been built by companies with an incentive to keep that model running, which means taking any possible chance to trade off against the possibility of some paying customer ever actually being able to run the software on their own computer. Just like the phone company used to never let you buy a telephone (you had to rent it from the phone company, which is why all the classic Western Electric telephones were indestructible chunks of steel).
by wtallis | 2025-08-09 04:21:19+00:00
With a dial-up connection, you really want a native app that only hits the network for functionality that fundamentally needs to be done over the network. And you want the app to be hitting stable APIs, rather than requiring weekly updates to keep it in lockstep with a front-end server's constant development churn.

Or a terminal UI, since that usually worked well back when dial-up was common.
by markasoftware | 2025-08-09 04:22:33+00:00
There's some subtlety here so my apologies for the long reply.

Nym/Loopix (and I405, though it's so experimental I feel bad even talking about it) completely defeat end-to-end correlation attacks, where an attacker tries to find statistical similarities between the encrypted traffic on the first hop (from the user's home network to some proxy), and the final hop (from some proxy to the final destination clearnet site).

Tor is trivially vulnerable to end-to-end correlation attacks. In addition to the paper you posted, my favorite is http://petworkshop.org/2007/papers/PET2007_preproc_Sampled_t... , which describes how an adversary monitoring just a small fraction (<0.1%) of traffic at key internet exchanges could deanonymize many Tor users.

Nym/Loopix and I405 defeat end-to-end correlation attacks with the same basic idea: Send fixed-rate traffic on the first hop, regardless of whether the user is actually trying to send any tunneled traffic. Both sample from a statistical distribution to decide when to send the next packet, and they send an empty packet if there is no actual data to send. In this way, the traffic being sent on the first hop does not depend at all on the inner cleartext data the user is sending/receiving.

The Mixmatch paper, which AFAIK is the only published attack against Nym/Loopix, is NOT an end-to-end correlation attack. It relies on the attacker controlling one or more Nym "gateways" (equivalent of guard nodes in Tor) and therefore being able to decrypt traffic from users whose first hop goes through that gateway. Further, I believe that the attack described in this paper becomes increasingly difficult as the number of users increases, and the authors of the paper include Nym developers who are actively making changes to make this attack harder. It's not a fundamental weakness in Nym/Loopix, the way that E2E correlations are for Tor.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-08-09 04:23:27+00:00
These things have cost associated. In the case of AI models that cost comes in the form of massive amounts of GPU hardware. So, I can see the logic for OpenAI to not want a lot of users lingering on obsolete technology. It would be stupendously expensive to do that.

Probably what they'll do is get people on the new thing. And then push out a few releases to address some of the complaints.
by js8 | 2025-08-09 04:24:47+00:00
Speaking of sniff checks, you might want to do that first, because that's not actually the prediction that Marx was making.

In my understanding, Marx was actually appreciative of free market building stuff. The question he asked was this: If the workers pay for the goods produced with increasingly bigger share of private property of capitalist class, what happens once there is no more property to give away to capitalists? (And he was actually the first to ask this question, and treat capitalism as a dynamical system, which makes him into one of the greatest economists of all time.)

Of course, it didn't fail completely, for two reasons. One is people actually instituted social democratic and keynesian reforms that prevented the collapse. (Marx was an optimist in that people will learn and eventually reject capital ownership completely, but they didn't.)

The other reason is that we continuously invent new forms capital (private property) to inject into flailing capitalism. In other words, we find more and more public goods that can be privatized - things such as mortgages and other consumer debt, intellectual property, new financial instruments, health care insurance, private and behavioral personal information ("big data"), new forms of money such as Bitcoin, openly available information sucked up by generative AI etc.

But that doesn't mean capitalism (especially its financial arm) isn't parasitic - it just didn't manage to kill the host yet.
by benreesman | 2025-08-09 04:24:51+00:00
I don't think it's either useful or particularly accurate to characterize modern disagg racks of inference gear, well-understood RDMA and other low-overhead networking techniques, aggressive MLA and related cache optimizations that are in the literature, and all the other stuff that goes into a system like this as being some kind of mystical thing attended to by a priesthood of people from a different tier of hacker.

This stuff is well understood in public, and where a big name has something highly custom going on? Often as not it's a liability around attachment to some legacy thing. You run this stuff at scale by having the correct institutions and processes in place that it takes to run any big non-trivial system: that's everything from procurement and SRE training to the RTL on the new TPU, and all of the stuff is interesting, but if anyone was 10x out in front of everyone else? You'd be able to tell.

Signed, Someone Who Also Did Megascale Inference for a TOP-5 For a Decade.
by LittleCloud | 2025-08-09 04:25:45+00:00
Speaking as a C# developer, who had in the past wanted to learn F#, but never got very far. What discourages me every time:

- C#'s good enough. Nothing's stopping you from writing functionally-oriented code in C# (and I do prefer that over traditional "enterprisey" object-orientation.)

- It's relatively difficult to have a codebase that is partly in C# and F# for incrementally trying things out. (I understand this is not really F#'s fault, owing to the .NET compilation model where C# and F# compilers each produce their own assemblies. And that Microsoft hardly cares about F#, and the tooling leaves a lot to be desired - admittedly I'm spoiled by C# tooling. )

- F# having its own implementations of concepts like async, option types introduces friction with C# obviously. I get that F# async is more powerful in some ways, but then again... F#'s option type is a reference type unlike C#'s Nullable<> value type, it's hard to see what's the advantage in that other than worse performance. One almost gets the impression that F# designers don't care about performance (while C# designers do in the past few years with additions to the ecosystem like Span<T>). This makes it hard to justify coding in F# for infrastructure libraries (which is what I often do).
by apatheticonion | 2025-08-09 04:26:11+00:00
It's not unusable per-se, however being unable to take advantage of Rust's fearless concurrency and having to glue everything together with JavaScript severely restrict the usefulness.

May as well just use TypeScript and React at that point.

The dream is to be able to specify only a wasm file in an html script tag, have the tab consume under 1mb of memory and maximise the use of client hardware to produce a flawless user experience across all types of hardware.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-08-09 04:26:40+00:00
I'm crazy excited for High Bandwidth Flash, really hope they pull it off. There is a huge caveat: only having a couple hundred or thousand r/w cycles before your multi $k accelerator stops working!! A pretty big constraint!

But as long as you are happy to keep running the same model, the wins here for large capacity & high bandwidth are sick ! And the affordability could be exceptional! (If you can afford to make flash with a hundred or so channels at a decent price!)
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-08-09 04:29:34+00:00
Classic economics thinking: totally fucked "faster horses" thinking.

The addressable market depends on the advantage. Which right now: we don't know. It's all a guess that someone is going to find it valuable, and no one knows.

But if we find that we didn't actually need $700 NIC's to get shitty bandwidth, if we could have just been putting cables from PCIe shaped slot to PCIe slot (or oculink port!) and getting >>10x performance with >>10x less latency? Yeah bro uhh I think there might be a desire for using the same fucking chip we already use but getting 10x + 10x better out of it.

Faster lower latency cheaper storage? RAM expandability? Lower latency GPU access? There's so much that could make a huge difference for computing, broadly.
by addaon | 2025-08-09 04:30:28+00:00
> For example, NASA spacecraft run critical calculations in triplicate - multiple processors run the same operation, and if one disagrees due to a stray bit flip, the other two out-vote the process.

Triple modular redundancy is one way to achieve reliability in the face of arbitrary single errors, but it’s not the only way. In my experience dual-dual approaches are more common these days. A dual-channel system calculates everything twice, and checks that the results match; and fails detectably (usually fails silent) if they don’t match — that it, it converts arbitrary errors into detectable errors. Then, downstream systems receive command streams or other data from each of two such fail-detectable systems; and can assume that if they receive commands from either system (and those commands are protected from corruption during transmission), they can trust it. While this requires 4x computation rather than 3x, it avoids the (relatively complicated) voting system, and is /massively/ aided by the wide availability of lockstep processors that provide the first level of dual-channel checking on a single piece of silicon.