MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ndriscoll | 2025-08-18 11:32:47+00:00
I think it is actually bad notation. It was a long time ago but I think the suggestive nod was basically pointing out how the entries of the matrix are arranged as "copies of del" and that this thing should be thought of as eating 2 infinitesimal vectors. I don't think he actually wrote that (again, the prereqs didn't make sense to try to do so), but afaik some people do use that notation.

I think if you tried to actually make sense of it, you'd expect that you plug in f twice (I think ∇ already secretly lives in R^n* ⊗ L(C^infty, C^infty), so you'd expect 2 copies of each of those). If you think of it as ∇: L(C^infty, L(R^n, C^infty)) then the composition ∇^2: L(C^infty, L(R^n, L(R^n, C^infty))) ≅ C^infty* ⊗ R^n* ⊗ R^n* ⊗ C^infty, so the types should work correctly (though the type of ∇ actually needs some generic parameters for composition to make sense), and you get that you only plug f in once.

Unfortunately ∇^2 is already taken by the Laplacian, so I suppose ∇⊗∇ would be "∇^2, but the one that makes a tensor", and it'll do as long as you don't try to type check it, which physicists won't.
by xigoi | 2025-08-18 11:33:19+00:00
I’ve been introduced to the Hessian in the context of finding the extrema of functions with multiple variables, where it does not make sense to consider arbitrary output dimensions (what is the minimum of a vector function?). In this context, it is also important to find the definiteness of the underlying quadratic form, which is easier if you treat it as a matrix se you can apply Sylvester’s rule.
by codingdave | 2025-08-18 11:33:36+00:00
> At this point I hadn't realised that finding who is responsible for something in a large organisation is very much not straightforward.

This resonated strongly with me. Last time I worked in an Enterprise shop, I happened to inherit the approval system - every app in the entire org, whether an internal app or from a vendor, got configured into this home-grown monstrosity of an access approval system. It actually worked well despite being made of spaghetti, but one side effect of being the tech owner was that I knew exactly who was in charge of every system in the organization. At some point I realized that my success there was at least partially due to being the human who knew how to connect all the dots, because when someone needed such info, the answer for the entire org was, "Ask Dave."
by yobbo | 2025-08-18 11:35:20+00:00
Yep, you're correct. It should be (n+1)/(n+m+2).

If you have access to a machine or lookup tables, you might as well plug in the values for the distribution Beta(1+n,1+m) which should correspond to the joint density.

(The formula above corresponds to the mean of this distribution, so it's probably right but I haven't work it through myself now ...)
by lproven | 2025-08-18 11:35:40+00:00
> it's no more the ancestor to my phone than an Apple II.

It really is.

Both Acorn (BBC Micro designers/manufacturers) and Apple Computer (Apple II ditto) bought in the MOS 6502 chip.

When it came to successor models, both tried the 65C816.

Acorn made the Communicator:

https://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/Computers/Commun...

Apple made the Apple IIgs:

https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_55324...

Both were not delighted with its performance and looked elsewhere.

Apple went for the 68000 for its next mass-market model, the Mac. (I am aware the timeline is more complex; this is a simplification.)

Acorn evaluated the 68000, the 80186, the NatSemi 16032 and others.

It designed its own chip instead: the ARM, Acorn RISC Machine.

This was first launched as an add-on accelerator for the BBC Micro.

https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/48862/Acorn-1MB-A-Se...

It was later launched as an Acorn computer, running a 32-bit port of Acorn's MOS and BASIC. It included a 6502 emulators and so could run some BBC Micro software.

https://www.onirom.fr/wiki/blog/21-04-2022_Acorn-Archimedes/

That ARM chip is the direct ancestor of the chip in all Android devices, all iOS devices, and modern Macs.
by senko | 2025-08-18 11:35:59+00:00
> Claude Code has realtime no-intervention autoupdate enabled by default. Everyone running it has willfully opted in to giving Anthropic releng (and anyone who can coerce/compel them) full RCE on their machine.

Isn't that the same for Chrome, VSCode, and any upstream-managed (as opposed to distro/os managed) package channel with auto updates?

It's a bad default, but pretty much standard practice, and done in the name of security.
by zbentley | 2025-08-18 11:37:19+00:00
TiddlyWiki is another (20+ year old and still being updated!) took in this space. It looks like hyperclay is a bit more oriented towards multitenancy and database-backed persistence than TiddlyWiki (very much trying to be a single-writing-user tool) after a quick read?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiddlyWiki
by flohofwoe | 2025-08-18 11:37:20+00:00
Silver coins from the Islamic world were not exactly rare in Scandinavia (e.g. https://www.medievalists.net/2023/11/nearly-500000-dirhams-w...), and trade is a much more likely explanation especially over such large distances. AFAIK trading vs raiding was often just a question of opportunity and might have been done by the same viking/trader group depending on what was more 'convenient' (or: first raid and then setup an adhoc trading point just around the corner to exchange the loot against silver coins because those are easier to carry home - or the classic: do slave raids on the way from Scandinavia to the Black Sea, and trade the captured slaves with the Greeks-slash-East-Romans and Muslims against silver).
by CharlieDigital | 2025-08-18 11:37:35+00:00
A few weeks back, I actually started working on an MCP server that is designed to let the LLM generate and execute JavaScript in a safe, sandboxed C# runtime with Jint as the interpreter.

https://github.com/CharlieDigital/runjs

Lets the LLM safely generate and execute whatever code it needs. Bounded by statement count, memory limits, and runtime limits.

It has a built in secrets manager API (so generated code can make use of remote APIs) can, HTTP fetch analogue, JSONPath for JSON handling, and Polly for HTTP request resiliency.
by pavlov | 2025-08-18 11:37:55+00:00
I think the scale difference is the whole point. Wikipedia has billions of active users, while these Hyperclay-style persistent documents have only a few.

Saying "we don't need this because Wikipedia already solved it" is kind of like saying in 1976: "Nobody needs the Apple II, we already have IBM mainframes that have solved every useful problem in computing much better."
by pjmlp | 2025-08-18 11:38:03+00:00
Because the runtime still takes advantage of those concepts, an array doesn't stop being an array, and magically turns into a list, with different hardware requirements only because a language is dynamic.

Same applies to all other remaining types.

That is how even though people see Lisp as a dynamic language using only lists, in reality most Lisps (and Schemes) since the 1980's have all necessary types to write machine friendly code (aka mechanical sympathy), including having existed graphical workstations that only failed the market because UNIX and C were as cheap as free beer for all pratical purposes.
by technothrasher | 2025-08-18 11:38:11+00:00
Thank you for the kind word. He is doing great, and in fact we're dropping him off to begin his college career this Thursday. It's always interesting to hear from people with different cognitive and neurological profiles. It;s fascinating how the brain works similarly and differently with individual people. I can sympathize with your memory issues. I've always had a terrible working memory. It makes arithmetic and spelling difficult, as I cannot keep the letters and numbers in my head long enough.
by jumploops | 2025-08-18 11:38:11+00:00
The promise of MCP is that it “connects your models with the world”[0].

In my experience, it’s actually quite the opposite.

By giving an LLM a set of tools, 30 in the Playwright case from the article, you’re essentially restricting what it can do.

In this sense, MCP is more of a guardrail/sandbox for an LLM, rather than a superpower (you must choose one of these Stripe commands!).

This is good for some cases, where you want your “agent”[1] to have exactly some subset of tools, similar to a line worker or specialist.

However it’s not so great when you’re using the LLM as a companion/pair programmer for some task, where you want its output to be truly unbounded.

[0]https://modelcontextprotocol.io/docs/getting-started/intro

[1]For these cases you probably shouldn’t use MCP, but instead define tools explicitly within one context.
by zahlman | 2025-08-18 11:39:23+00:00
> If only browser vendors allowed their users to persist HTML files back to their own machines, we'd have a whole new ecosystem of personal applications!

The trick TiddlyWiki does with data URLs (IIRC?) (https://tiddlywiki.com/#Saving%20with%20the%20HTML5%20saver) seems pretty close to me.
by cgriswald | 2025-08-18 11:39:41+00:00
I understand being a parent is scary and stressful. I wish I could tell you that goes away, but it doesn’t. However, your children, I hope, will spend far more of their lives as adults than as children and I think you should worry a lot more about what type of world you’re helping to create for them.

Raising children is not a risk free activity. Parents shouldn’t follow their children 24/7, even if they could. Your children, by accident AND through their own curiousity are going to be exposed to things you don’t think they are ready for. You can’t stop that, even in a perfect world. Prevent and delay it as best you can, sure, but the best protection is internal. Instill in them the ability to make good choices, build trust and confidence and be someone they can talk to about it when it happens.

There’s nothing new here. Nothing special about the internet. Parents were saying the same thing about us when we were children and none of their controls were effective. We were still exposed to some things before we were ready. Those kids with shitty parents (and even the ones with good ones) are going to get around any such restrictions and expose your kids to things and your kids might expose them to things as well.

Stop denigrating non-parents’ opinions. Not only do they have a stake in the situation but you seem to forget they were also children too. And before you write off my opinion the same way, my children are adults.
by danaris | 2025-08-18 11:39:50+00:00
> this current adminstration ruined a lot of incentive to want to get citizenship here. The world is watching those citizenships being revoked in real time.

This also means that until and unless we can squash this country's fascist tendencies with something approaching permanency, they're never going to trust that such things will be honored again.

As things stand, that effectively means that the Republican Party needs to go, and be replaced by something much more center-right. (Or, even better, overhaul our voting system so that a two-party system is no longer effectively mathematically guaranteed.)
by lproven | 2025-08-18 11:40:57+00:00
> architecturally, it had nothing to do with the original BBC Micro.

This is not true. It had lots to do with it.

* The Archimedes used a CPU whose designers (Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber) have specifically said they built it to be conceptually similar to the 6502. Source: I have met both and seen them say this in person.

* The Archimedes ran RISC OS which is a rewrite of the BBC MOS. Source: I have interviewed the project leader, Paul Fellows.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/23/how_risc_os_happened/

The Archie came with !6052tube and could run some BBC apps.

Source code: http://bbc.nvg.org/rom/Acorn/os/?C=N;O=A
by blenderob | 2025-08-18 11:41:11+00:00
I'd have loved to use Typst but all journals I submit to ask for LaTeX. And it isn't just LaTeX they ask. They ask LaTeX with specific documentclasses. The mainstream academia and journals have so much tooling built around LaTeX and documentclasses and they have so much inertia that I am very pessimistic that Typst will ever get any "market share" in mainstream publishing!
by throw0101c | 2025-08-18 11:41:23+00:00
> - Availability/survival bias: People took fewer pictures in the past and were more likely to be taking those pictures on special occasions (when they were dressed nicely).

Contra: while not as prevalent as in the current digital age, street photography was a thing in the past too. If you look at the photos (e.g.) Vivian Maier took of everyday people, doing everyday things, you'll get a more random sampling:

* https://www.vivianmaier.com/gallery/street-1/

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_photography
by Proofread0592 | 2025-08-18 11:41:29+00:00
> Should Harry [open AI's therapist LLM] have been programmed to report the danger “he” was learning about to someone who could have intervened?

> In December, two months before her death, Sophie broke her pact with Harry and told us she was suicidal, describing a riptide of dark feelings. Her first priority was reassuring her shocked family: “Mom and Dad, you don’t have to worry.”

> Sophie represented her crisis as transitory; she said she was committed to living. ChatGPT helped her build a black box that made it harder for those around her to appreciate the severity of her distress. Because she had no history of mental illness, the presentable Sophie was plausible to her family, doctors and therapists.

> As a former mother, I know there are Sophies all around us. Everywhere, people are struggling, and many want no one to know. I fear that in unleashing A.I. companions, we may be making it easier for our loved ones to avoid talking to humans about the hardest things, including suicide. This is a problem that smarter minds than mine will have to solve. (If yours is one of those minds, please start.)

> Sophie left a note for her father and me, but her last words didn’t sound like her. Now we know why: She had asked Harry to improve her note, to help her find something that could minimize our pain and let her disappear with the smallest possible ripple.

> In that, Harry failed. This failure wasn’t the fault of his programmers, of course. The best-written letter in the history of the English language couldn’t do that.
by jen20 | 2025-08-18 11:41:47+00:00
Many things do not give you that option, and the ads are obnoxious and invasive to privacy. If that is the only option, you will get nothing from me, and your ads will be blocked.

Furthermore if there is a content subscription involved, I will only ever consider it via Apple because I refuse to risk having to telephone someone to cancel something I signed up for online.

The well has been poisoned by an obnoxious industry and that industry is unlikely to ever gain even a modicum of respectability.
by edwinjones | 2025-08-18 11:41:59+00:00
Agreed, it really looks like quite a small prompt wrapper: https://github.com/ngafar/llama-scan/blob/main/llama_scan/co...

The url to connect to ollama seems to just be hard coded so I don't see why you couldn't point this at a different machine on your network rather than having Ollama running locally on every machine you need this for like the readme implies.
by Krssst | 2025-08-18 11:42:17+00:00
I fail to what hard choice there is to make. Choices are:

* use it

* don't use it

* use something else

* pay to change the picture

Easy.

> fetishes

And what fetish would that be? That's just a picture of a girl (maybe? Not sure they were ever gendered) holding a magnifying glass, if that's improper I'm not sure what is proper.
by rickdeckard | 2025-08-18 11:42:55+00:00
> Google has a walled garden as well.

For the Smartphone OS, maybe yes. But not for the Hardware, Services and the rest of its *entire* ecosystem.

Google is not the savior for that industry, it's just the only real alternative (until some regulation hopefully enables a competitor to rise)

> Talking to my less techy friends, they won't even consider the thought of moving just because their purchases won't carry over.

Yes, hence the applause for everyone who just TRIES.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-18 11:43:12+00:00
The recent interest on NVidia making Python first class on CUDA ecosystem is what makes me wonder how successful Mojo migth becomem, if they aren't faster than NVidia with Python.

All the attempts to attack CUDA fail to undestand why most researchers flock to it, instead of enduring the pain of the competion tooling, and they tend to focus on a single aspect of CUDA, be it C++, or something else, but never the polyglot support, the libraries, the IDE integration, the graphical debuggers, the compiler backends for other developers to target CUDA.
by jacquesm | 2025-08-18 11:44:30+00:00
Yes, it is 'somehow a problem'. Just like the reverse is 'somehow a problem'. Effectively advising a large audience that they can ignore the law whereas there are plenty of examples of why you probably shouldn't be ignoring the law is a pretty silly thing to do.

https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/stlouis/press-releases/200...

Is one of my favorite examples to point to but there are countless others besides.
by lproven | 2025-08-18 11:44:56+00:00
> modern x86 has very little in common with the 8088.

It is directly binary compatible. A Core i7 can boot and run MS-DOS from the 8088.

I offer a freebie DOS distro for modern PCs:

https://github.com/lproven/usb-dos

What more do you want than "executes the same binaries"?
Show HN: Olla – Lightweight LLM Proxy for Homelab and OnPrem AI Inference
by thushanfernando | 2025-08-18 11:45:20+00:00
We’ve been running distributed LLM infrastructure at work for a while and over time we’ve built a few tools to make it easier to manage them. Olla is the latest iteration - smaller, faster and we think better at handling multiple inference endpoints without the headaches.

The problems we kept hitting without these tools:

* One endpoint dies > workflows stall

* No model unification so routing isn't great

* No unified load balancing across boxes

* Limited visibility into what’s actually healthy

* Failures when querying because of it

* We'd love to merge all them into OpenAI queryable endpoints

Olla fixes that - or tries to. It’s a lightweight Go proxy that sits in front of Ollama, LM Studio, vLLM or OpenAI-compatible backends (or endpoints) and:

* Auto-failover with health checks (transparent to callers)

* Model-aware routing (knows what’s available where)

* Priority-based, round-robin, or least-connections balancing

* Normalises model names for the same provider so it's seen as one big list say in OpenWebUI

* Safeguards like circuit breakers, rate limits, size caps

We’ve been running it in production for months now, and a few other large orgs are using it too for local inference via on prem MacStudios, RTX 6000 rigs.

A few folks that use JetBrains Junie just use Olla (https://thushan.github.io/olla/usage/#development-tools-juni...) in the middle so they can work from home or work without configuring each time (and possibly Cursor etc).

You can compare how Olla is complimentary with tools like LiteLLM (https://thushan.github.io/olla/compare/litellm/) and others in our docs (https://thushan.github.io/olla/compare/overview/).

Links:

GitHub: https://github.com/thushan/olla

Docs: https://thushan.github.io/olla/

Olla is still very much in early development (v0.0.16).

Next up: auth support so it can also proxy to OpenRouter, GroqCloud, etc.

If you give it a spin, let us know how it goes (and what breaks). Oh yes, Olla does mean other things (https://thushan.github.io/olla/about/#the-name-olla).
by mrweasel | 2025-08-18 11:45:31+00:00
The UK age verification seems to be "Upload your ID to a porn site", but that's not the EU solution from what I can tell. What the EU is building is an Identity Wallet, where your national online ID verifies your age with your wallet. The wallet can then tell the sites that yes, this person is in fact 16+ or whatever the age restriction is. How they plan to avoid having kids just borrow their parents phones I don't know, frequent reconfirmation maybe?

The mistake that UK, and probably others, have made is that the government isn't actually able to provide the required infrastructure.

If the solution is anonymous in the sense that the government doesn't see that I visit some site, and the site doesn't see who I am, then I struggle to see problem. This assumes that it's only applied to services and products that are already age restricted in the physical world already.
by akk0 | 2025-08-18 11:46:16+00:00
There's lots of building blocks for decentralized data storage and transmission, but that by itself is not enough to build a fully decentralized, self-funding application.

With blockchain/smart contract tech you can build an app that from the user perspective looks like any other web app but that has its state fully in the blockchain and all computation done by miners as smart contract evaluation, self-funding by charging users a small amount on each transaction (something that scares off most people but crypto users are used to it and the prize can be fractions of a cent). The wallet does double duty as auth, it's just a public/private key pair after all, and that is a big feature.

Another big thing it does for you is handle synchronization -- there is a single, canonical blockchain state, and maintaining it and keeping it consistent is someone else's job, paid for and overseen by an ecosystem that is much larger than what you are building.

A friend and I built a POC Reddit clone on top of Solana this way, as just a bunch of static html/js and a smart contract, without any servers/central nodes and without users needing to install anything or act as a node themselves. I'm not aware of any other tech that can realistically do this.

Unfortunately the blockchain is a very hostile, expensive and limited computing environment. You can farm out storage to other decentralized systems (we used IPFS) and so long as you're not a custodian of anyone's money you're not as worried about security, but the smart contract environment is still extremely restrictive and expensive per unit compute.

The integration situation is broke-ass JS/TS "breaking changes twice a week to keep them on their toes" hobby software shit. If you precisely copy the examples from the docs there may be an old version where it almost works. My friend also did Rust integrations where my impression is things are somewhat better, but that's not saying much.

Decentralization is a spectrum and we were pretty radical about it back then. The motives were more about securing universal access to critical payment and communications infrastructure against generic Adversaries and the challenge of achieving bus factor absolute zero than about practicality.
by adrian_b | 2025-08-18 11:47:00+00:00
Thyristors in the strict sense of the word, i.e. SCRs, are still used only in a very small fraction of the applications that were dominated by them a few decades ago.

Classic thyristors are useful only for controlling 50/60 Hz AC consumers.

Many applications that were done in the past with normal thyristors, for lack of alternatives, like electric motor control, are done now with GTO (gate turn-off) thyristors or with IGBTs (insulated gate bipolar transistors) or with silicon carbide transistors.

Even the use of GTO thyristors is regressing. If any thyristors will still be used in the future, they will use silicon carbide, with which they can be much faster than the silicon thyristors.
by puredanger | 2025-08-18 11:48:15+00:00
The absolute number of survey respondents is not a good proxy for community size - the survey runs at different times of the year, for different lengths of time, and with different amounts of marketing. The only goal with the survey is to get a representative sample size. We have other sources of data, both public and private, that are better indicators and indicate the community size is likely growing at this time.