MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mikewarot | 2025-08-22 23:47:34+00:00
My vision for the future includes greatly reducing the power requirements for AI by rethinking computing using first principles thinking. Every single attempt at this so far wasn't willing to go far enough, and ditch the CPU or RAM. FPGAs got close, but they went insane with switching fabrics and special logic blocks. Now they've added RAM, which is just wrong.

Edit/Append: I've had this idea [1] forever (since the 1990s, possibly earlier... don't have notes going that far back). Imagine the simplest possible compute element, the look up table... arranged in a grid. Architectural optimizations I've pondered over time lead me to a 4 bits in, 4 bits out look up table, with latches on all outputs and a clock signal. This prevents race conditions by slowing things down. The gain is that you can now just clock a vast 2d array of these cells with a 2 phase clock (like the colors on a chessboard) and it's a universal computer, Turing complete, but you can actually think about it without your brain melting down.

The problem (for me) has always been programming it and getting a chip made. Thanks to the latest "vibe coding" stuff, I've gotten out of analysis paralysis, and have some things cooking on the software front. The other part is addressed by TinyTapeout, so I'll be able to get a very small chip made for a few hundred dollars.

Because the cells are only connected to neighbors, the runs are all short, low capacitance, and thus you can really, REALLY crank up the clock rates, or save a lot of power. Because the grid is uniform, you wont have the hours or days long "routing" problems that you have with FPGAs.

If my estimates are right, it will cut the power requirements for LLM computing by 95%.

[1] Every mention of BitGrid here on HN - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
by harshitaneja | 2025-08-22 23:47:44+00:00
That seems to be the conclusion I have been avoiding to reach. With graviton and other arm based linux server machines being a good bulk of my work I hoped I wouldn't have to worry about multi architecture docker builds. Ah well.

Any suggestions for something well built but lightweight and that one could figure out how to get 8+ hours of actual daily usage battery life on?
by jiggawatts | 2025-08-22 23:48:07+00:00
> journals, which do the usual peer review.

They don't though! They farm it out to expert physicists, which in the case of CERN research almost certainly also work at CERN.

> Few articles that I've myself per-reviewed were not from my own experiment.

But were they from CERN?

> Do you have example

This was a few years ago, it was a comment here on HN, but it would be hard to dig it up without an AI reading through everything.
by neRok | 2025-08-22 23:48:23+00:00
Joining videos together sounds easy, but there's tons of ways it can go wrong! You've got time bases to consider, start offsets, frame/overscan crops, fps differences (constant vs variable), etc. And even though your videos might both be h264, one might be encoded with B frames and open GOP, and the other not, and that might cause playback issues in certain circumstances. Similarly, both could be AAC audio, but one is 48kHz sample rate, the other 44.1kHz.

Someone else mentioned Lossless-Cut program, which is pretty good. It has a merge feature that has a compatibility checker ability that can detect a few issues. But I find transcoding the separate videos to MPEG-TS before joining them can get around many problems. If you fire up a RAM-Disk, it's a fast task.

ffmpeg -i video1.mp4 -c copy -start_at_zero -fflags +genpts R:\video1.ts; ffmpeg -i video2.mp4 -c copy -start_at_zero -fflags +genpts R:\video2.ts; ffmpeg -i "concat:R:\video1.ts|R:\video2.ts" -c copy -movflags +faststart R:\merged.mp4
by deathanatos | 2025-08-22 23:48:38+00:00
> Since UTF-32 allows storing every code point in a single code unit, you can also describe it that way, despite the fact that Python doesn't use a full 4 bytes per code point when it doesn't have to.

Python does not use UTF-32, even notionally. Yes, I know it uses a compact representation in memory when the value is ASCII, etc. That's not what I'm talking about here. |str| != |all UTF32 strings|; `str` and "UTF-32" are different things, as there are values in the former that are absent in the latter, and again, this is why encoding to utf8 or any utf encoding is fallible in Python.

Code points is not a meaningful metric, though I suppose strictly speaking, yes, len() is code points.

> I don't understand what you mean by "USV count".

The number of Unicode scalar values in the string. (If the string were encoded in UTF-32, the length of that array.) It's the basic building block of Unicode. It's only marginally useful, and there's a host of other more meaningful metrics, like memory size, terminal width, graphemes, etc. But it's more meaningful than code points, and if you want to do anything at any higher level of representation, USVs are going to be what you want to build off. Anything else is going to be more fraught with error, needlessly.

> It's what the Unicode standard says a character is.

The Unicode definition of "character" is not a technical definition, it's just there to help humans. Again, if I fed that definition to a human, and asked the same question above, <facepalm…> is 1 "character", according to that definition in Unicode as evaluated by a reasonable person. That's not the definition Python uses, since it returns 5. No reasonable person is looking at the linked definition, and then at the example string, and answering "5".

"How many smallest components of written language that has semantic value does <facepalm emoji …> have?" Nobody is answering "5".

(And if you're going to quibble with my use of definition (1.), the same applies to (2.). (3.) doesn't apply here as Python strings are not Unicode strings (again, |str| != |all Unicode strings|), (4.) is specific to Chinese.)

> "Character" is completely meaningful, as demonstrated by the fact the Unicode Consortium defines it, and by the fact that huge amounts of software has been written based on that definition, and referring to it in documentation.

A lot of people write bad code does not make bad code good. Ambiguous technical documentation is likewise not made good by being ambiguous. Any use of "character" in technical writing would be made more clear by replacing it with one of the actual technical terms defined by Unicode, whether that's "UTF-16 code point", "USV", "byte", etc. "Character" leaves far too much up to the imagination of the reader.
by notherhack | 2025-08-22 23:49:35+00:00
A government stake gives confidence in the company’s survival that a one-time cash dump for the CHIPS act couldn’t.

It’s not a lot different than what car and financial companies got in 2009. They were about to go under because no one thought they’d be around long enough to get out from under and deliver goods or pay their debts. The government stake enabled them to keep operating and eventually recover and then the government returned the stake to the market (or will soon w/ Fannie & Freddie).
by neilv | 2025-08-22 23:49:53+00:00
If I had money entrusted to Coinbase, I'd be concerned about:

1. The idea of them using AI coding tools in a forced way like this. (Meticulous code quality, and perfect understanding of every detail, are critical.)

2. The culture implications of insta-firing someone whose explanation you didn't like, for why they hadn't started using AI tools yet.

3. Scheduling the firing call for a Saturday. Are they in some kind of whip-cracking forced march, and staff going to be fatigued and stressed and sick and making mistakes?
by scyzoryk_xyz | 2025-08-22 23:49:53+00:00
Well. Obviously if you have the attention span it probably makes most sense to actually learn the flags and teach yourself to write FFMPEG commands. That's the serious way to do it if you have a serious workflow.

But I've found it easier to brute force with LLM's because, like, every time I had to do video work it'd be something different. Prompts like 'I need to remove this and this and change the resultion from this to that', 'I need it to be this fps or that, or even I want this file to weigh this much. Or I 'need to split these two' or 'combine those three'. It'll usually get you a chunk of the way there. Another prompt or two of double-checking, copy paste into CMD line or terminal and either brr or error copy paste what does this mean. 3 minutes later it's doing the thing you wanted, and you're more or less understanding what's it giving you.

But I keep an Obsidian file with a bunch commands that made me happy before. Dumping that I to the context window helps.

Another one has been multi camera, multi screen recordings with OBS. I discovered it was easier to do the math, make a big canvas, record all the feeds onto those so I don't have to think about syncing anything later. Then brr an FFMPEG command to output that 1920x1080 and that 3840x2160

Whisper is great with that too - raw recording, output just the audio. 'give me whisper command to get this as srt'. Then 'now render subtitles onto this video'

There was an experiment I tried that kinda almost worked where I had this boring recording of some conversation but needed to extract scattered bits. Used whisper to get transcript, put that into LLM, used that to zero in on the actual bits that were important, then got it to spit out the timecodes. Then hobbled together this janky script that cut out those bits and stitched them together. That was faster than taking the time to do it with a GUI and listening it all through.

Of course there are tools like opus clip that spit that out for you now so...

Although to be honest, when the stakes go high and you're doing something serious that requires quality you do it slow.

The point at which I was doing this most was when I was doing video UX/UI research on a hardware/software product. We would set up multi-cams, set and forget so we could talk to subjects and not think about what's being captured.

Dozens of hours of footage, little clips that would end up as insights on the Product Discovery Jira for the thing. So quality wasn't really important.
by torstenvl | 2025-08-22 23:50:18+00:00
> You’re arguing against a strawman.

Ironic.

> The advice wasn’t to ignore learning about code points

I didn't say "learning about."

Look man. People operate at different levels of abstraction, depending on what they're doing.

If you're doing front-end web dev, sure, don't worry about it. If you're hacking on a text editor in C, then you probably ought to be able to take a string of UTF-8 bytes, decode them into code points, and apply the grapheme clustering algorithm to them, taking into account your heuristics about what the terminal supports. And then probably either printing them to the screen (if it seems like they're supported) or printing out a representation of the code points. So yeah, you kind of have to know.

So don't sit there and presume to tell others what they should or should not reason about, based solely on what you assume their use case is.
by jsnell | 2025-08-22 23:50:38+00:00
No space between paragraphs and blockquotes definitely hurts, and the subheading formatting is clearly not right. But the same content is posted on multiple sites. Maybe you'd find e.g. the Substack formatting more readable?

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/deepseek-v31-is-not-having-a-m...
by johncolanduoni | 2025-08-22 23:50:44+00:00
Yeah all agreed - the only addendum I’d add is for cases where you can’t use large buffers because you don’t have the data (e.g. realtime data streams or very short request/reply cycles). These end up having the same problems, but are not soluble by TCP or UDP segmentation offloads. This is where reduced syscall overhead (or even better kernel bypass) really shines for networking.
by monkeywork | 2025-08-22 23:50:46+00:00
Curious who is looking for "community" when it comes to their email hosting provider. The word "community" gets tossed around so much it's basically meaningless - but I mean, even in the loosest definition of it why would you want to interact with random people who simply use the same provider you do... like would you want a Discord server for your local gas station chain or power company?
by inopinatus | 2025-08-22 23:51:06+00:00
It is still viable to self-host everything from photos to mail yourself and sync to cloud/storage services as disaster recovery. It helps if you have an infrastructure background but anyone can set this up. Never trust just one service; no company is too big to fail and durability is always best effort, even if that effort is very good. Mail is the most annoying service to self-host, not because it's technically difficult but because deliverability is a long-term reputation function that easily deteriorates from misconfiguration or neglect. Nevertheless I've been my own MX and storage provider since the early '90s and it's too late to change my ways now, you just have to keep up with the gold standard as it varies.

The biggest hazard, especially if the whole family uses your stuff, is key-person risk, since infrastructure requires maintenance. The second biggest is being out of your depth in securing it.

My only regret in all my years of self-hosting was that time I returned a portable /24 to APNIC. Still stings even if it was the right thing to do, civically speaking.

I retain gmail & hotmail accounts for deliverability checks and as signup swamps.
by bcrosby95 | 2025-08-22 23:51:26+00:00
> Bailouts aren't following some rules of fairness

And people wonder why populism came back. Huge transfers of wealth aren't about 'fairness', its about preventing greater economic problems that the people who received the bailout say will happen if they don't get bailed out.

At the end of the day, this line of thought is going to fuck over the country far more than any depression would.
by mindcrime | 2025-08-22 23:51:30+00:00
greatly reducing the power requirements for AI by rethinking computing using first principles thinking.

I feel some affinity for this statement! Although what I've said in the past was more along the lines of "rethinking our approach to (artificial) neural networks from first principles" and not necessarily the foundations of computing itself. That said, I wouldn't reject your position out of hand at all!

It certainly feels like we've reached a point where there may be an opportunity to stop, take stock, look back, revisit some things, and maybe do a bit of a reset in some areas.
by sarchertech | 2025-08-22 23:51:31+00:00
I know people whose kid got a hand me down android from a friend and connects through neighbors open WiFi, public open WiFi etc…

And from what I’ve heard it’s not that uncommon for kids to do something similar when parents take away their phones.

It’s easy to say that parents should just limit access and I think they should. I definitely plan to when my kids are old enough for this to be a problem.

But kids are under extreme peer pressure to be constantly online, and when a kid is willing to go to extreme lengths to get access, it can be nearly impossible to prevent it.

There’s also more to it than what parents should do. It’s about what parents are doing. If something is very hard to do most people won’t do it. As a society we all have to deal with the consequences of bad parenting.

We don’t know the consequences of kids having access to porn, but we have correlative studies that show they probably aren’t good.

I’m more concerned with social media than porn though. The correlation between social media use and the rise in teen suicide rates looks awfully suggestive.
by oefrha | 2025-08-22 23:52:04+00:00
(Some but not all) terminal emulators are capable of rendering CJK perfectly aligned with Latin even when mixing fonts. Browsers are fundamentally incapable of that because aligning characters in different fonts wasn’t a goal at all. VS Code being a webview under the hood means it inherited this fundamental incapability.* Therefore, don’t hold your breath.

* I'm talking about the DOM route, not <canvas> obviously. VS Code is powere by Monaco, which is DOM-based, not canvas-based. You can "Developer: Toggle Developer Tools" to see the DOM structure under the hood.

** I should further qualify my statement as browsers are fundamentally incapable of this if you use native text node rendering. I have built a perfectly monospace mixed CJK and Latin interface myself by wrapping each full width character in a separate span. Not exactly a performance-oriented solution. Also IIRC Safari doesn’t handle lengths in fractional pixels very well.
by parineum | 2025-08-22 23:52:26+00:00
> Capitalism for profits, socialism for losses. I’m sick of seeing this sort of behavior pan out time and time again, though I’m hardly surprised by it at this point

I'm not sure how this applies.

The US government just gained a 10% stake for nothing (that wasn't already given). Effectively going from the scenario you are painting to now taking a part of the profit as well.

I guess you were surprised after all!
by creato | 2025-08-22 23:52:28+00:00
"People" you are referring to want a level playing field. If the Chinese government is tilting the field, there aren't a lot of good options. You can either watch the Chinese subsidize draining most productive capacity from the rest of the world, erect trade barriers (my preference, but it would require cooperation with other countries, which... ain't gonna happen for a while now), or try to tilt back.
by gmueckl | 2025-08-22 23:52:49+00:00
Sometimes (only sometimes, I promise) I wonder whether this kind of legislation is being dreamt up by a think tank tasked with planning how to implement some ulterior goal (e.g. massively increased surveillance to fight crime - it's far too easy to unsert something more nefarious here). The politicians then just follow the action plan and repeat talking points from party advisors.
by jcarterwil | 2025-08-22 23:53:00+00:00
We recently published a FutureCast piece imagining Heartland Mart, 2036 — a discount retailer that evolves into the frontline of healthcare.

The scenario is fiction, but it’s based on real trends:

Continuous glucose monitoring & nutrient density scoring becoming cheap

Rural retail chains reaching more households than clinics

Chronic disease costs ($1.9T annually in the U.S.) creating an incentive for food/health convergence

Data + supply chain innovations aligning farmers, retailers, and insurers around prevention

In the story, Heartland Mart starts as a dollar store, then layers food scoring, metabolic coaching, and insurance alignment. Over a decade, this collapses healthcare costs by nearly half.
by xg15 | 2025-08-22 23:53:02+00:00
For starters:

- Creating a unique ID that is directly bound to hardware.

- Accessing the memory of any process, including browsers or messengers.

- Installing persistent background processes that are hidden from the rest of the system.

But I think that's the wrong question. Talking about the kernel driver is a distraction.

The abuse scenario that I think is most likely would be that the game and/or anticheat vendor uses the hardware ID for user profiling instead of just ban enforcement, and that the "logging" functionality is coopted to detect software or activities that aren't related to cheats at all, but are just competition of the vendor or can once against be used for profiling, etc.

None of that strictly requires a kernel driver. Most of that stuff could be easily done with a usermode daemon. But under normal circumstances, there is no way I'd install such a program. Only in the name of cheat prevention, suddenly it gets permissible to make users install that stuff if all they want to do is play some game.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-08-22 23:53:28+00:00
> With your experience in C I have no idea you why you don't want to reuse same allocation multiple times and instead keeping all of them separately while reserving allocation space for possibly less than you need.

Which part are you referring to, here?

> Even if you'd assume all of this should be on stack you still would crash or bleed memory through implicit allocations that exit the stack.

What do you mean by this? I don't mean to be rude, but this sounds confusing if you understand how memory works. What do you mean an allocation that exits the stack would bleed memory?
by bgwalter | 2025-08-22 23:53:29+00:00
So, Armstrong, how did your company get off the ground without "AI" in the first place?

Is he returning a favor for all the goodies that "crypto" is getting from this administration? Like Tether being legitimized in El Salvador by best friend forever Bukele and having its finances and (alleged) USTD backing handled by Lutnick's Cantor Fitzgerald?
by jetsnoc | 2025-08-22 23:53:53+00:00
I'll admit it. I've done this, but only a few times and only when someone sent me truly egregious AI slop—the kind where it's obvious no human that respects my time ever looked at it.

My reaction is usually, "Oh, we're doing this? Fine." I'll even prompt my LLM with something like, "Make it sound as corporate and AI-generated as possible." Or, if I'm feeling especially petty, "Write this like you're trying to win the 2025 award for Most Corporate Nonsense, and you're a committee at a Fortune 500 company competing to generate the most boilerplate possible." It's petty, sure, but there's something oddly cathartic about responding to slop with slop.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-08-22 23:54:04+00:00
I get that everyone wants to dunk on the crypto/AI guy, but their claim boils down into "AI is helpful but it shouldn't do all the work for you" which is a stance almost everyone has.

I don't think the CEO should know whether or not I've used AI though nor do I think it's fair to fire people for it.

I guess I could maybe see a case for catching someone saying "I don't care about trying out new tools" - it's a position held by some of the least productive people I've ever worked with. But there other reasons why someone might not have picked up new tools yet, like "I'm just trying to get my damn work done" or "I tried this tool but it just seemed distracting".

I fall into those camps all the time wrt new tools.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-08-22 23:54:05+00:00
> "Instead of better-regulated companies, why shouldn’t the solution be no more companies?"

This is a very weird, even quite childish, criticism.

There's an outside chance that some of the stuff Doctorow wants can be implemented. There's literally zero chance that companies in general are abolished (in favor of what, exactly?) just because a few megacorps, given perverse incentives, have become bad actors.

Besides, large firms are, effectively, the most unkillable human-derived things that exist. If you "abolish" them in one place, they'll nevertheless still exist in another, or they'll simply pick up move somewhere else, like high-net-worth individuals. "Headquarters" are often merely a formality.
by slashnode | 2025-08-22 23:54:08+00:00
> I’m surprised with what all worked out of the box, like hibernating, external monitors/keyboards, media keys. Not sure how much is thanks to DHH’s Omarchy, and what’s native Arch Linux support

It's pretty much ALL Omarchy. If you install Arch by itself you get a tty prompt... and that's about it.

Omarchy looks super impressive. Haven't used it myself, but the scripts and dotfiles in the Github repo (https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy) have been inspiring
by stillthat | 2025-08-22 23:54:27+00:00
it's not.

but peoples' "navigation" or "traversal" skills are.

it's the fault of the upper classes, starting at journalists and psychologists, if you care for some help with your research. they've been sucking for a while; at their jobs, understanding their true desires, fulfilling them, obviously, too, and they've been really really really (don't use this word as a scalar) bad in general, at developing their ability to get closer to what they want, and what they want to get on the way. they all submitted to shit.

and because journalism submitted to shit, it was very very very very ( don't use this word as a scalar) easy for ads people and ads divisions to trash peoples' "traversal" or navigation skills via ... well, shit.