MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kimbernator | 2025-08-08 22:29:56+00:00
What's the common understanding of nicotine these days? I haven't thought about this much since the early e-cigarette days around 2011, but back then the common discourse was that 1. It's really hard to measure nicotine in a cigarette in a comparable unit to vaping due to the difference in how they are consumed, and 2. Nicotine itself isn't particularly harmful, and its addictiveness is dramatically accelerated by the other things in cigarettes.

Anecdotally, I vaped (at what might be considered a high amount of nicotine) for years and basically just decided it wasn't for me one day and stopped without any drama.

Given that vaping has come a long way since then I'm certain there is a more modern understanding of these things.
by drewbug01 | 2025-08-08 22:30:06+00:00
> Confronted with such extreme potential damages, Anthropic may lose its rights to raise valid defenses of its AI training, deciding it would be more prudent to settle, the company argued.

“Our case is so weak, that a trial could pose a huge risk to our finances. So we’ll choose to forgo our day in court and settle instead. And that means you’ve violated our right to defend ourselves because LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO.”

This amount of spin is breathtaking. Puts every politician to shame, really.
by YetAnotherNick | 2025-08-08 22:30:19+00:00
It wasn't a lie, it was a misrepresentation of the total cost. It's not hard to calculate the cost of the training though. It takes 6 * active parameters * tokens flops[1]. To get number of seconds you can divide by Flops/s * MFU, where MFU is around 45% for H100 for large enough models[2].

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.08361

[2]: https://github.com/facebookresearch/lingua
by knotimpressed | 2025-08-08 22:30:20+00:00
Braving potentially getting spit roasted to ask:

If I'm making my own 18650 USB C power banks, are there any easy to miss risks? I've got the cells in holders, not welded, but the holders are specc'd above the current I need. The cells are unprotected, but the Aliexpress listing for the power management board says specifically to use unprotected cells, as at 6A draw most protection boards don't do well (dubious). The cells are tested and mechanically protected by a thick enclosure. The only EE work I'm doing is soldering 2 high gauge wires from the holder to the board that's doing everything else. I know Aliexpress isn't a bastion of quality, but the seller has good feedback and I checked over the board to make sure there's at the very least a good counterfeit battery protection IC included.

Currently, the concerns I have are: - the holder relies on good contact to deliver 6A without developing hotspots on the terminals - the board from Aliexpress perhaps should not be trusted

If there's anything else anyone can think of, I'm happy to hear it.
by spauldo | 2025-08-08 22:30:27+00:00
I suspect part of it is just the desire for something different. I browse eBay and still get the irrational urge to buy unusual hardware, even though my Sparcstations and Alpha have proven time and time again that the novelty dies away quickly.

Another part is the desire for a fresh start. x86 carries a lot of baggage. There's this idea that a new CPU architecture would somehow stop holding us back. Problem with that idea is that for the most part, x86 doesn't hold us back.

Then of course there's the remnants of the old RISC vs CISC debate that never quite died away.

People will always be fascinated by the what-ifs and if-onlys - "if only Sun had survived to the cloud era" is my personal favorite. It's harmless fun.
Show HN: A Python CEL implementation (written in Rust)
by hardbyte | 2025-08-08 22:31:46+00:00
I've been working on a Python library for the Common Expression Language (CEL). It's a wrapper around the cel-rust crate which is under heavy development. The python wrapper uses PyO3 and Maturin to handle the Rust-Python interop.

CEL is a safe, fast, non-Turing complete expression language, great for things like configuration, validation rules, or policy engines where you need to evaluate user-defined logic without the security risks of eval(). You can install it via pip or uv: `uv tool install common-expression-language`

And run the REPL: cel -i

Or evaluate an expression directly: cel 'size(data.things) > 1' --context '{"data": {"things": [1,2,3]}}

Docs: https://python-common-expression-language.readthedocs.io/en/... Source: https://github.com/hardbyte/python-common-expression-languag...
by KraftyOne | 2025-08-08 22:32:48+00:00
I'd love to learn more about what you're building--just reach out at peter.kraft@dbos.dev.

One option is that you have DBOS workflows that schedule and submit jobs to an external worker app. Another option is that your workers use DBOS queues (https://docs.dbos.dev/python/tutorials/queue-tutorial). I'd have to better understand your use case to figure out what would be the best fit.
by anon291 | 2025-08-08 22:34:38+00:00
At the end of the day, the answer is... specialized hardware. No matter what you do on your local system, you don't have the interconnects necessary. Yes, they have special software, but the software would not work locally. NVIDIA sells entire solutions and specialized interconnects for this purpose. They are well out of the reach of the standard consumer.

But software wise, they shard, load balance, and batch. ChatGPT gets 1000s (or something like that) of requests every second. Those are batched and submitted to one GPU. Generating text for 1000 answers is often the same speed as generating for just 1 due to how memory works on these systems.
by mauvehaus | 2025-08-08 22:37:09+00:00
> Oh, and civilians can own muzzle-loading black powder cannons. Imagine what someone could do with a 32-pound cannonball.

At many historical locations, said cannons are just sitting around entirely unguarded! Anyone[0] could just come and take one.

[0]...equipped with heavy equipment and maybe a hefty grinder or a stout set of bolt cutters.
by maldonad0 | 2025-08-08 22:37:14+00:00
Democracy, or "Democracy"? Did the people have any choice in the Patriot Act and many others? On the actions following the 2007 crisis and the extraordinary bailout? Do EU citizens have any choice in the actions of the EU Comission, like Chat Control?

Democracy only exists for a short time after a revolution. After a while, the power permanently consolidates in a number of elites and the democracy becomes "democracy", that is, little more than a show.

The only time democracy works incorruptibly is in small groups where everyone knows each other and everyone knows what's going on.
by jwmcq | 2025-08-08 22:37:35+00:00
I wonder if this could be updated to use OpenRouter in a similar way to Emigo[1] was aiming to do.

(I use the past tense, because Emigo has not been updated in a quarter of a year, which seems as if it may as well be decades in the timeline of this sort of stuff.)

[1] https://github.com/MatthewZMD/emigo
by dang | 2025-08-08 22:37:40+00:00
Please edit out swipes and name-calling from your posts to HN, as the site guidelines request: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Edit: You did it elsewhere in this thread too - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44840174. That's not cool, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.

Fortunately, your recent comment history looks fairly free of this kind of thing (that's good), so it should be easy to fix.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-08-08 22:37:58+00:00
I mean it's not so much that they lost momentum as there's just... not a ton of good reasons to go to the moon. It's a long, incredibly dangerous trip and there's just not much there.

Same reason we've never sent people to Mars, it's even more complicated, magnitudes more dangerous, and what exactly are we accomplishing in doing so...? Nothin there.
by wfn | 2025-08-08 22:38:03+00:00
Thank you for the pointer to LEANN! I've been experimenting with RAGs and missed this one.

I am particularly excited about using RAG as the knowledge layer for LLM agents/pipelines/execution engines to make it feasible for LLMs to work with large codebases. It seems like the current solution is already worth a try. It really makes it easier that your RAG solution already has Claude Code integration![1]

Has anyone tried the above challenge (RAG + some LLM for working with large codebases)? I'm very curious how it goes (thinking it may require some careful system-prompting to push agent to make heavy use of RAG index/graph/KB, but that is fine).

I think I'll give it a try later (using cloud frontier model for LLM though, for now...)

[1]: https://github.com/yichuan-w/LEANN/blob/main/packages/leann-...
by arduanika | 2025-08-08 22:38:47+00:00
Generally a nice short post of unmitigated moral clarity, but then it's jarring to see this equivocation about "the arguably autocratic China". "Arguably".

Are we being asked to call a spade a spade here, or what? If so, why these weasel words?

When emulating those "who went to Spain to fight Franco in the 1920s [sic]", is the idea that we should denounce fascism, but only in ways that won't offend the Party?
by mlinhares | 2025-08-08 22:39:34+00:00
Yeah, it’s visible there is no particular plan for anything. Once they’re announced someone shows up to try to retcon it to something that resembles a reason but it is clear there are very large whales profiting from trading against these decisions.

That seems to be the main way people are profiting from this admin, insider trading. I doubt we’ll ever figure out who they were.
by dang | 2025-08-08 22:40:05+00:00
Please edit out swipes and name-calling from your posts to HN, as the site guidelines request: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. I realize you didn't start it, but we need commenters here to follow the rules regardless of what others are doing. (Otherwise we end up in a downward spiral: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...)

Edit: You did it elsewhere in this thread too - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44842213. That's not cool, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are.

Fortunately, your recent comment history looks mostly free of this kind of thing (that's good), so it should be easy to fix.
by CursedSilicon | 2025-08-08 22:40:11+00:00
Something that has haunted me for many years is how much Apple has built a brand around "we don't let anyone touch your data!"

And I don't mean just as a branding that "normal people" (ones who aren't interested in or involved with tech) believe

They even manage to sell it to people who know how things work behind the curtain!

I have had people I once respected that are as deep into the weeds of technology as I am ask me, point blank to my face. "Can you prove it?" when I snark that things like iCloud in China are obviously backdoored. This was before they bent the knee to the UK as well [1]

Is there something in the water for Apple users?

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/122234
by ath3nd | 2025-08-08 22:40:32+00:00
> And even in this conflict where you're defending the agressors: > https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpw5v077nyjo

Bad for that lady, never good to keep people in captivity. If you are so sympathetic for people being kept in captivity, you should really decry the fact that Israel is keeping 2 million Palestinians in captivity in their own country.

> And even in this conflict where you're defending the agressors:

Are the 20k children and 30k women that Israel killed also aggressors? If that's the case, the 1400 people Hamas killed must have been also aggressors. See, it works both ways.
by costco | 2025-08-08 22:41:32+00:00
If you already have an understanding of how Tor works and want to know how attacks on it work, read these!

- https://github.com/mikeperry-tor/vanguards/blob/master/READM...

- https://github.com/mikeperry-tor/vanguards/blob/master/READM...

- https://spec.torproject.org/proposals/344-protocol-info-leak...
by kimixa | 2025-08-08 22:42:09+00:00
I don't fear AI, I fear Juniors using AI.

It feels like it completely messes up my current experience and heuristics to judge a junior's skills from their output, and what expectations I have for their skills and growth from that to then not be a "Junior".

I don't want to end up having to treat all their output with the same fine-toothed comb forever more.

And I'm trying not to be negative about the current crop of AI's effect on learning, but I certainly feel like I remember a lot less if I just read, even extremely thoroughly, compared to directly writing or typing the output myself. Though that's probably the sort of thing you can only ever look back in retrospect to really know either way.
by deaddodo | 2025-08-08 22:42:57+00:00
AMD also received many Hail Marys as a result of Intel’s anticompetitive behavior. Directly via payouts Intel and partners had to make, and indirectly via companies being more willing to work with them for their GPU expertise and better (out of desperation) licensing/purchase agreements.

Intel can’t rely on the same. They haven’t been directly impacted by another larger company, they rely too much on a single technology that’s slowly fading from the spotlight, and they can’t compete against AMD on price.

Maybe if they ended up in a small and lean desperation position they could pivot and survive, but their current business model is a losing eventuality.
by tgma | 2025-08-08 22:43:22+00:00
This administration (and the previous one) have been paying billions of dollars to chip companies to make fabs in the United States.

Trump in particular is essentially trying to make sure Intel lives despite market forces. It is effectively a quasi-nationalized entity akin to major military-industrial complex entities.

Given that, we are not talking about a random private entity. A US President making such statement about Intel is entirely justified.
by vlovich123 | 2025-08-08 22:43:48+00:00
1. They have many machines to split the load over 2. MoE architecture that lets them shard experts across different machines - 1 machine handles generating 1 token of context before the entire thing is shipped off to the next expert for the next token. This reduces bandwidth requirements by 1/N as well as the amount of VRAM needed on any single machine 3. They batch tokens from multiple users to further reduce memory bandwidth (eg they compute the math for some given weights on multiple users). This reduces bandwidth requirements significantly as well.

So basically the main tricks are batching (only relevant when you have > 1 query to process) and MoE sharding.
How many tabs do you keep open at the same time?
by Toby1VC | 2025-08-08 22:44:10+00:00
Currently I only have 42 tabs, of those only 36 are loaded. But sometimes I can have hundreds. Some users of my Grasshopper extension ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/grasshopper-urls/ ) work with thousands of tabs.
by mlinhares | 2025-08-08 22:44:47+00:00
A country like the US should be self sufficient in energy, food and medicine, but there has never been a concerted policy to do that.

One of the biggest reasons is lobbying, for the US to be self sufficient in energy, for instance, it would have to invest heavily in renewable energy (like china is doing) but the oil lobby is never going to let that happen.

So with the government so captured by interests that don’t care about the long term stability of the country itself, it’s very difficult to effect these large changes.
by snozolli | 2025-08-08 22:44:51+00:00
George W. Bush called for a permanent moon base back in '04. The primary motivator, from what I recall, was as a launching point for Mars exploration.

https://www.npr.org/2004/01/15/1597182/bush-calls-for-manned...

The timeline is pretty entertaining and a bit depressing, if you wanted to see the plan succeed:

...

By 2014: The first manned mission for the Crew Exploration Vehicle.

By 2015: Astronauts will land on the moon using the Crew Exploration Vehicle.

By 2020: The United States will have established an extended human presence on the moon, using it as a launching pad for other manned exploration missions.

As for why, 1) to ensure the survival of humanity, 2) to drive scientific development and 3) because it's there.
by titanomachy | 2025-08-08 22:44:56+00:00
The human and chatbot went into a delusional spiral together. I’ve talked to a couple people recently IRL who are into fringe, new-agey “science” and had their half-baked ideas amplified and strengthened by chatbots. Most of my own chatbot experience has been pretty straightforward professional stuff, and it’s mostly stayed pretty close to reality for that. In contrast, this seems pretty clearly harmful.

As a test, I just came up with a random bullshit theory to unify QM and GR. ChatGPT told me it was “promising” and is currently “running numerical simulations to verify the theory’s plausibility”.
by nerdsniper | 2025-08-08 22:46:33+00:00
“AI Safety” is really about whether its “safe” (economically, legally, reputationally) for a third partyy corporation (not the company which created the model) to let customers/the public interact with them via an AI interface.

If a Mastercard AI talks with customers and starts saying the n-word, it’s not “safe” for Mastercard to use that in a public-facing role.

As org size increases, even purely internal uses could be legally/reputationally hazardous.
by tgma | 2025-08-08 22:46:58+00:00
> Intel was (and arguably still is) too large relative to its current technical capabilities. Yet even in this current “bad chips” era, Intel is only, at worst, about 10% behind in gaming performance (largely due to cache disparity) and is on par or better in most other workloads. From the K10 era until Zen 3, AMD processors were objectively worse (sometimes comically so) and AMD still managed to survive.

The current “bad chips that are only 10% behind” are fabbed by TSMC, not Intel.
by benreesman | 2025-08-08 22:47:11+00:00
There's a range of options on this and numerous good mental models for it: flakes are "dirty", Haskell does things in a very granular regime of mutability bounded context combinators, NixOS has to cope with changing hardware (NixOS modules at the absolute apex of "official"-ness escape hatch it, you have to be pretty explicit to get a reliable pin of the kernel, I'm running `linuxPackages_testing` on this machine I'm typing from because I'm setting up a 5090 and need "the newest one" on everything: 2 months ago? 6.16-rc3, today: I think it's 6.17-rc1 or something, haven't looked).

So, much like a `nix flake check` might fail and you want your CI to flag that, a `nh home switch .` might be necessary to get the editor you need to fix the fail. Functional programming has decades of consensus on every possible variation of this.

There are any number of things you could do here (and the message linking you to the `nix-ld` website is an improvement over `libstdc++.so.6 not found blah`). But breaking a library that statically links everything NVIDIA ever wrote precisely so that it will run anywhere because you have a canonical `CC` in your own `NIX_` environment variable prefix set and you just refuse to let grubby ubuntu software see it?

That's incompatible by design. // hypermodern // nixos has a principle that I realize isn't in the `README.md`: it's never incompatible by design for no upside.
by 827a | 2025-08-08 22:48:01+00:00
I agree that there is no reason to believe the current administration has any priority in fixing the situation, and its definitely reasonable to state that they're operating in bad faith, and that we have much bigger problems than this situation. However; continuing to pump taxpayer dollars and debt into an already enriched, broken system like this is on some level negligence.

UCLA paid their head football coach ~$6M/year. Will they ever decide to take any kind of money of that scale and fund Tao's research at IPAM? The reason you'll hear is "its ROI, a great football program generates revenue for the university" but the reality is: like 70% of University athletics programs are unprofitable, including UCLA's football program. Moreover: while I understand that universities have to operate like a business, their business goal must be "to make as much awesome education and research happen"; everything must serve that goal, and it doesn't today. I am extremely unconvinced that hyper-sized athletics programs and millionaire coaches further this goal, especially against the backdrop that they're tremendously and systemically unprofitable for everyone except the coaches, management, and the NCAA.
by dang | 2025-08-08 22:48:37+00:00
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it quite a lot. It destroys what this site is for, so we ban such accounts.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
by nosignono | 2025-08-08 22:48:47+00:00
A whole of stuff here feels... emotionally loaded in a way that's designed to be manipulative rather than heartfelt. Saying "A gun craves to be shot" is a clear example -- guns don't crave anything. I'm a pro-gun leftist, so maybe I'm just sensitive to this specific example.

Another example, much of the article uses "China" to suggest a broad, villainous other. Like so much American media, this reads like, "What are we, China?" or alternatively, "Surely we are better than China..." Which assumes a level of backwater, out of date, poorly run culture in China.

As a concrete example, the author says something to the effect of, "China claims to have quickly built a hospital, which I very much doubt." And explains nothing further -- why do you doubt that? What evidence do you have? Or are you just relying on your audience to credulously agree that because it came out of China, it's bad or a lie?

Additionally, the article appeals to the idea that we are all self interested by our fundamental nature. That we're all programmed to survive at all costs, and the means of that survival is individual self interest. Plenty of folks (myself included) believe that our survival instinct is one of social cohesion -- we survive because we band together into social groups.

So I agree with the conclusion -- we should be fighting fascists, and we should be doing it with strong policy and aggressively pushing fascists out of shared spaces (a bar that permits one nazi to be there is a nazi bar), I just think this article doesn't make the case for that very effectively.
by sugarpimpdorsey | 2025-08-08 22:50:17+00:00
> To be completely honest, the joke is getting a little bit old.

The real joke is Apple shipping a buggy, DIY'd version of SMB because they ditched Samba over some GPL3 quibble, and they abandoned AFP. Meanwhile, Microsoft is still the reference implementation of SMB...

I assume the icons are still there because there is nobody left at Apple that knows how they got there and where the code is that controls it.
by petsfed | 2025-08-08 22:50:35+00:00
Its definitely not stable, because the nuclear-armed countries' only arguments against nuclear proliferation are "trust us, you don't want this" and (said quietly) "if everybody has these, we'd lose a lot of power". So non-profileration efforts are a game of cat-and-mouse. We needed to have an ironclad "we are demonstrating that nobody needs nuclear weapons by doing x,y and z", and instead, Russia and NATO both said exactly that, then kept provoking each other to see who would flinch first over Ukraine.

And I agree, nuclear power is a ridiculous casualty of that scramble for power.
by rini17 | 2025-08-08 22:51:07+00:00
> Thinking that LLMs must do things right, that people find simple, is a common mistake

Show me any publicly known visible figure that tries to rectify this. Everyone peddles hype, there's no more Babbage as in the "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" anecdote.