MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by liamdgray | 2025-08-04 22:36:15+00:00
Keywords: associative memory, Hopfield networks, transformers, attention, in-context learning, denoising

Abstract: We introduce in-context denoising, a task that refines the connection between attention-based architectures and dense associative memory (DAM) networks, also known as modern Hopfield networks. Using a Bayesian framework, we show theoretically and empirically that certain restricted denoising problems can be solved optimally even by a single-layer transformer. We demonstrate that a trained attention layer processes each denoising prompt by performing a single gradient descent update on a context-aware DAM energy landscape, where context tokens serve as associative memories and the query token acts as an initial state. This one-step update yields better solutions than exact retrieval of either a context token or a spurious local minimum, providing a concrete example of DAM networks extending beyond the standard retrieval paradigm. Overall, this work solidifies the link between associative memory and attention mechanisms first identified by Ramsauer et al., and demonstrates the relevance of associative memory models in the study of in-context learning.
by godelski | 2025-08-04 22:37:05+00:00
> The terminal should allow me to do that something else, not get in the way.

What terminal gets in the way? If there's a clash you do a remap.

I mean I really don't understand. Do you expect the terminal developer to know all the keybindings you currently use and will use in the future? That's a really big ask! Or are you asking that the terminal comes with no keybindings? I can understand that one, but I think it is not going to be popular. For most people that means more configuration. You can disable anything you don't like.

> Thankfully my main editor is Helix

FWIW I don't have clashes with vim despite vim having both of those

> I'm aware of foot

What font is foot using? It's been awhile, but I don't remember having this issue with foot. But IIRC on foot, and some other terminals, they don't know to use a nerd font by default or maybe just fail to find or prioritize.
by chrisco255 | 2025-08-04 22:38:59+00:00
> The EU claims the EU as its sphere of influence. The U.S claims The U.S and Central and South America by virtue of the Monroe Doctrine.

The Monroe Doctrine is a policy from the 19th century. A lot has happened since then.

> The U.S wanted to be in charge and be big and important

The EU isn't a sovereign country unto itself, so it either must be "big and important" or it has no other reason to exist. The EU is the second or third largest economy by GDP and not far off from the U.S. but it expects the U.S. to pay disproportionate levels for everything as if it's still 1946.

> The EU has military bases in the EU and the waters which touch the EU

The EU doesn't have military bases.
by pyuser583 | 2025-08-04 22:39:08+00:00
My immediate worry is that insurance usually focuses on fixing private harm, not public harm.

If my house burns down, there's both public harm and private harm. The public harm is the danger to bystanders, the loss of neighboring real estate values, etc. The private harm is the fact that I lost most of my equity and have to declare bankruptcy to get out of my mortgage.

Insurance is focused around preventing private harm.

So the state is now on it's own in preventing public harm (already the case), but also now liable to remedy the private harm too.

I personally know many millionaires who lost their mansions in the LA fire. I'm glad tax payers aren't paying to rebuild their $20 million dollar houses.

That's an extreme example, but insurance benefits those who have something to lose the most.

Let's keep government insurance focused on things that private industry refuses to insure, like unemployment and health insurance for sick people.
by liamdgray | 2025-08-04 22:39:10+00:00
Abstract Tomographic Synthetic Aperture Radar (TomoSAR) building object height inversion is a sparse reconstruction problem that utilizes the data obtained from several spacecraft passes to invert the scatterer position in the height direction. In practical applications, the number of passes is often small, and the observation data are also small due to the objective conditions, so this study focuses on the inversion under the restricted observation data conditions. The Analytic Learned Iterative Shrinkage Thresholding Algorithm (ALISTA) is a kind of deep unfolding network algorithm, which is a combination of the Iterative Shrinkage Thresholding Algorithm (ISTA) and deep learning technology, and it has the advantages of both. The ALISTA is one of the representative algorithms for TomoSAR building object height inversion. However, the structure of the ALISTA algorithm is simple, which has neither the excellent connection structure of a deep learning network nor the acceleration format combined with the ISTA algorithm. Therefore, this study proposes two directions of improvement for the ALISTA algorithm: firstly, an improvement in the inter-layer connection of the network by introducing a connection similar to residual networks obtains the Extragradient Analytic Learned Iterative Shrinkage Thresholding Algorithm (EALISTA) and further proves that the EALISTA achieves linear convergence; secondly, there is an improvement in the iterative format of the intra-layer iteration of the network by introducing the Nesterov momentum acceleration, which obtains the Fast Analytic Learned Iterative Shrinkage Thresholding Algorithm (FALISTA). We first performed inversion experiments on simulated data, which verified the effectiveness of the two proposed algorithms. Then, we conducted TomoSAR building object height inversion experiments on limited measured data and used the deviation metric P to measure the robustness of the algorithms to invert under restricted observation data. The results show that both proposed algorithms have better robustness, which verifies the superior performance of the two algorithms. In addition, we further analyze how to choose the most suitable algorithms for inversion in engineering practice applications based on the results of the experiments on measured data.

Keywords: ALISTA; residual structure; Nesterov acceleration; height inversion
by lurking_swe | 2025-08-04 22:39:57+00:00
right, it’s not that arcane at all. I discovered all this over a couple weekends in my 20s. Started on reddit, then moved on to more official guides and books. I spent maybe 5 weekends in total doing this learning.

It’s really not that hard and i don’t understand why more people aren’t interested. Let’s reframe for a minute…if i said a high earner could retire a year earlier, or maybe even a few years earlier just by learning some semi-advanced tax strategies. Should they do so? Yeah. They’d be crazy not to lol.
by aquariusDue | 2025-08-04 22:40:24+00:00
For a funny take on the whole "rhetoric" is the use and abuse of logic some people might enjoy How to Win Every Argument by Madsen Pirie which also happens to be where I plucked the tagline regarding rhetoric from. It's a pretty easy book to go through in toilet break sized increments, the author goes through different fallacies and how they're employed one by one along with various rhetorical devices.

Though a few years ago when I searched for a book on rhetoric and making convincing arguments Office Of Assertion by Scott Crider also popped up, but it's aimed more at written rhetoric instead of what most people have in mind.
by HaZeust | 2025-08-04 22:40:37+00:00
>"Doctors often don’t see the value in software that solves their subordinates’ problems."

This was such a huge problem at my former company, Billit (getbillit.com), that our number 1 method on achieving clients was making such steep referral incentives for doctors, to their colleagues. We only needed one to make scale eventually happen, but the organic clients couldn't empathize with the workflows of their front desk - they didn't care.
by manas96 | 2025-08-04 22:40:55+00:00
I've always observed a curious thing within India regarding the Devnagari (Hindi) and Latin (English) scripts. Essentially all English words are always written in Devnagari, but it's rarely the other way around. For example it is much more likely to see इंग्लिश टू हिंदी than "angrezi se hindi".

My personal theory is that this is because you can make every sound you hear in English using the Devnagari script, but not the other way around.
by throw0101d | 2025-08-04 22:41:51+00:00
For a time in the 1980s John Moschitta was well-known for making fast-talking commercials:

* FedEx: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeK5ZjtpO-M

* Micro Machines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gzd11GMBONg

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Moschitta_Jr.
by liamdgray | 2025-08-04 22:42:01+00:00
Recorded at the ML in PL 2019 Conference, the University of Warsaw, 22-24 November 2019.

Anton Osokin (Higher School of Economics, Moscow), https://aosokin.github.io/

Slides available at https://docs.mlinpl.org/conference/2019/slides/anton_osokin_...

Abstract: Recently, deep neural nets have shown amazing results in such fields as computer vision, natural language processing, etc. To build such networks, we usually use layers from a relatively small dictionary of available modules (fully-connected, convolutional, recurrent, etc.). Being restricted with this set of modules complicates transferring technology to new tasks. On the other hand, many important applications already have a long history and successful algorithmic solutions. Is it possible to use existing methods to construct better networks? In this talk, we will cover several ways of putting algorithms into networks and discuss their pros and cons. Specifically, we will touch using optimization algorithms as structured pooling, unrolling of algorithm iterations into network layers and direct differentiation of the output w.r.t. the input. We will illustrate these approaches on applications from structured-output prediction and computer vision.
by recursivecaveat | 2025-08-04 22:43:30+00:00
Having thousands of applicants is only an issue if you give yourself the contrived problem of hiring the best person who sent you a resume. Your true objective is to strike a balance between cost of search and hiring someone from the top N% of potential people. Nobody has ever walked into a grocery store and bemoaned that there's no way they could locate the ripest banana in the building. You pick a number, evaluate that many at random, move on.

I think it galls people that they are likely cutting the best candidate out of the sample, but to be real: you don't have a magic incredibly sensitive, deterministic and bias free hiring method that can reliably pick the single best candidate out of thousands anyways. Any kind of cheapo ai-driven interview step you run is very possibly doing worse things to your sample than just cutting it down to size.
Ask HN: How does the Postgres ecosystem compare to Vitess at 1PB+?
by GabrielBianconi | 2025-08-04 22:43:44+00:00
I'm not an expert in databases.

The MySQL ecosystem has a mature open-source solution for scaling horizontally with Vitess.

The Postgres ecosystem seems to have alternatives like Citus, CockroachDB, etc.

Are they similarly mature? How do they compare for massive-scale deployments (1PB+ of data, insert-heavy workload)?
by anigbrowl | 2025-08-04 22:43:46+00:00
Here are some of the essay topics I had them read aloud:

[...] I expected them to laugh, but they sat in silence. When they did finally speak, I am happy to say that it bothered them. They didn’t like hearing how their AI-generated submissions, in which they’d clearly felt some personal stake, amounted to a big bowl of bland, flavorless word salad.

But that's what it has been trained on - almost all academic writing is bland flavorless word salad, and this is extremely noticeable in title fads. I have a nearly decade-long game running with my friend where me make up absolutely bullshit concepts that could nevertheless be plausibly published in a journal, and the process has been going on long before that.

'Verbing the noun: towards a genericization theory of expressivity in high-entropy counter-heterogeneity' describes an ongoing problem in academic writing where novelty is deprioritized in favor of acceptability by an evermore tightly circumscribed set of peer professionals whose socioeconomic interests favor the establishment of intellectual stasis that maximally conserves positionality in a quais-Simmelian network space parameterized by income, tenure proximity, and citation count.

Or put more clearly, the more academics write to impress each other instead of to reach the public, the more generic their titles and language will be. Being able to parse and regurgitate wordy titles and abstracts constitutes table stakes in academia, so the incentives tilt toward burying the lede any original proposals as deeply as possible so as the minimize the career-damaging possibility of rejection on technical/syntactical grounds.
by hansvm | 2025-08-04 22:44:42+00:00
Let's rephrase it to "most of even the best students" then.

I went to about the cheapest US school that had a decent math program. It costs $17,500/yr between tuition, rent, books, and rice and beans.

That's a lot of money. It's over $10/hr in pre-tax income, even if you work full-time all year, which isn't an easy bar to clear in the sort of towns with cheaper universities. Wages don't scale well enough with more expensive tuition for there to be substantially better options.

Classes are another 22+ hours each week (you could complete school in 3-4 yrs instead, but that makes it even harder to afford and doesn't really reduce the workload enough to make a difference, however I'll also factor in a 15-hour workload later).

The rule of thumb is that you should study 3 hours for every hour of class. I found that approximately correct. Some classes took a lot less. Some took a little more. Combined with the self study you need in adjacent topics, 3hrs is a fair bit low.

During the school year then, you have something that looks like a 128hr/week schedule, or 100hr if you're finishing in 4yrs, and still 60hr/week even if you're finishing in 4yrs and racking up $70k in debt.

Don't get me wrong; I had free time (I worked more during the summer, less during the school year, allowing loans to cover the slack, which bought extra time here and there), but it wasn't exactly a party either. When I skipped class it was because I had to work, had to study for some other more pressing class, or found it more efficient to study the book than to try to understand that particular lecturer.
by psunavy03 | 2025-08-04 22:45:29+00:00
I don't see why people keep conflating "advanced" technological civilizations with civilizations that happen to be "advanced" within the bounds of that particular person's individual moral worldview.

These are not the same things and "advancing" on one axis does not require "advancing" on the other axis, even taking into account the fact that beyond a certain point, one person's moral viewpoints are not necessarily universalizable in the Kantian sense.
by commandersaki | 2025-08-04 22:45:53+00:00
Me: “If we do it via FFI then there’s a possibility the program may continue working (because the underlying structs share the same memory layout? right? …right?)”

I didn't understand what was being said here; was he suggesting that you call libc free using FFI; which would be fine? I understand the interviewer asked about using Rust dealloc though. I think the FFI bit is confusing me.
by jerlam | 2025-08-04 22:46:02+00:00
I've generally heard exactly the opposite.

If you book a hotel directly and something gets screwed up, the hotel is able to change your reservation or refund you directly.

If you book through a third party, the hotel can't help you since they don't have your money, nor can they change the reservation since they didn't make it, the third party did. You have to talk to the third party, and then the third party has to talk to the hotel. It adds additional steps for all interactions.

"If something goes wrong with the hotel own booking system..." - the third party is using an interface into the hotel's own booking system, and that can introduce problems of its own.
by atoav | 2025-08-04 22:47:29+00:00
I interviewed people and I would prefer a broad answer to a broad question. A broad question is an invitation for you to present me a selected platter of knowledge you have aquired about the various forms of interfaces. And the candidate who does that will always outperform a candidate who can't think about those concepts on a broad abstract level and needs to be lead to the waterhole.

"What is an interface?", is a totally legit question that can be answered without thinking about any specific interface. E.g. it could could be described as a systemic boundary between two domains, that is ideally well defined. You could talk about different interfaces, what the advantages and pitfalls of introducing interfaces are, conventions that exist etc.
Telnyx launches TypeScript/React Library for building custom AI agent widgets
by maevesentner | 2025-08-04 22:48:01+00:00
Telnyx just released @telnyx/ai-agent-lib, a new TypeScript/React Library that lets developers build fully custom frontend widgets for Voice AI Agents running on Telnyx's global WebRTC infrastructure.

The SDK exposes APIs and React components to control:

- Audio connection state - Real-time transcription - Conversation context and memory - Agent lifecycle and user messaging

This gives frontend teams full flexibility to implement multimodal AI workflows with low-latency audio and reliable WebRTC transport.

Separately, Telnyx has added image upload support to its default widget, which works with vision-capable LLMs like GPT-4o and LLaMA 4 Maverick (via Groq).

Learn more at https://telnyx.com/release-notes/widget-library or reach out to maeve@telnyx.com with any questions.
by wellpast | 2025-08-04 22:48:02+00:00
This is great. I've been working on a social site where the content users post and scroll through are microgames (<500kb). My kids are my biggest users so far. My daughter loves this pill sorting game, for example:

https://xelly.games/game/b7eba4db-dc4b-4cfe-8420-3e42e494e52...
by tensor | 2025-08-04 22:48:11+00:00
I think that's pretty straightforward. The US VC funding is far greater and easier to obtain than in Europe or other western nations. But it's a bit of a chicken and egg scenario. The US VC space exists partly because of the wild success of silicon valley. Once it got a significant lead it became a self re-enforcing system.

To compete, other countries need their own VC system which is a bit tricky. It requires likely a level of government funding or other incentives to get it off the ground and ramping up. Then also, you need to incentivize VCs to stay in your country.

At least my 2cents.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-08-04 22:48:23+00:00
> By 2040, the U.S. dollar will no longer be the global reserve currency.

I would argue "no longer be the _primary_ global reserve currency", but go on, I'm listening ...

> It might not even be the default unit of exchange for Americans back home.

This isn't a serious article; I don't have the time to read it.
by scottlamb | 2025-08-04 22:50:09+00:00
> I think this mitigates much of the risk of using Chinese OEM cameras.

I see two major problems buying from these companies.

The first is the practical risk that they will deliberately spy on you or just (through poor software quality) make it possible for others to do so. And yeah, putting them in a (V)LAN that can't access the Internet seems more or less sufficient. In theory they could exploit your browser in some way but I don't worry about this too much.

The second is the moral injury from buying from a company that actively participates in the Uyghur genocide. Not just "making cameras that the Chinese government buys through a retailer" but "writing software specifically to identify Uyghur ethnic features" [1] and/or "contracting with the Chinese government to install cameras at internment camps". [2] And there's no simply VLAN configuration that will wipe the blood off your hands.

They're nice cameras especially for the price, and I still use some I bought before I knew about this, but I can't bring myself to buy more or recommend others do so.

fwiw, I'm not aware of any evidence Reolink has participated in this, despite being a Chinese company. I try to stay away from Dahua, Hikvision, and Uniview, which is harder to do than it sounds because they make cameras sold under many brand names.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/world/chinese-tech-patents-t...

[2] https://ipvm.com/reports/hikvision-targeted
by southwindcg | 2025-08-04 22:50:09+00:00
Just to make sure you're aware, there's the Firefox View feature which lists Open and Recently Closed tabs, sorted by parent window, with a search box for filtering. Navigate this page with mouse or keyboard (Tab and arrow keys). It also lists History by date or domain.

There's also the List All Tabs feature, which has been available a long time. Either or both of these can be added to your toolbar from the Customize Toolbar page.

I guess anything more sophisticated could be done via add-ons.

Is there a browser you feel does a better job of tab switching?
by mafuy | 2025-08-04 22:50:14+00:00
No. If they were allowed to just say "We did nothing wrong" to not have to cooperate with an investigation, it would open the door to trivial abuse. It is reasonable to assume they are at least partially to blame. Just like a regular citizen can be arrested when they have a backpack full of money an hour after a bank robbery happened, because it is a reasonable asumption, Tesla should be submitted to an investigation until it becomes clear that the backpack's content is legit.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-08-04 22:50:17+00:00
> When I was studying Japanese, I was thinking how it's always best to learn words in sentences and that it would be good if the sentences for a particular word were random.

>Extending that, the sentences could be picked such that the other words are words scheduled for today meaning much more bang for buck per learning hour.

Just the other day I was thinking about how there’s a good chunk of vocab that could be “mined” from the sentences in my vocab deck.

I think that this idea would work well, but would probably require a whole new SRS program to be able to implement it cleanly. It’s too dynamic for a traditional SRS app like Anki which is pretty static in nature.
by dabedee | 2025-08-04 22:50:24+00:00
AWS claims their cloud is "sovereign" and "independent" while remaining owned by a US corp subject to US law (including the CLOUD Act). That's not how sovereignty works. EU citizen operators don't change the fact that the underlying technology, patents, and corporate control remain American. Zero details on pricing, available services, or how they'll handle conflicts between US law and their "sovereignty" promises. For something launching next year, that's concerning.
by TheAlchemist | 2025-08-04 22:50:25+00:00
It's really good that these stories start to hit the headlines - Tesla was doint it for ages. Only recently they start to feel the heat and settled some cases. This should criminal behaviour.

Another interesting thing is that this post does not appear on HN front page. Surely it should be relevant here that one of the top AI / Robotics / Tech, whatever you name it, company in the world is doing this kind of stuff in the open. But that may get people curious to actually look at what and how they are doing things and realize it's all smokes and mirrors and maybe there is much more shady business going on there.

I just can't wait when this house of cards collapse.