MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by namibj | 2025-08-20 12:07:36+00:00
Do TPUs allow having a variable array dimension at somewhat inner nesting level of the loop structure yet? Like, where you load expensive (bandwidth-heavy) data in from HBM, process a variable-length array with this, then stow away/accumulate into a fixed-size vector?

Last I looked they would require the host to synthesize a suitable instruction stream for this on-the-fly with no existing tooling to do so efficiently.

An example where this would be relevant would be LLM inference prefill stage with (activated) MoA expert count on the order of — to a small integer smaller than — the prompt length, where you'd want to only load needed experts and only load each one at most once per layer.
by Aaargh20318 | 2025-08-20 12:08:07+00:00
I we had the same here in the Netherlands. Never helped me one bit. I even had to go to after-school handwriting coaching. My handwriting is still horrible.

I think my main problem is that handwriting is so slow. I get impatient and rush it turning it into a mess. Reading it is also slow, even when written by someone with good handwriting it's a PITA to read cursive. I hope it dies out sooner rather than later.
by gyomu | 2025-08-20 12:08:25+00:00
This would actually be a cool use case for AR glasses- digitize everything as you write it, tie it to the physical notebook it’s in, so that you can later search it, or have the system tell you things like “you wrote your thoughts on your summer 2032 London trip in pages 34-39 of the red muji notebook that should currently be in your desk’s bottom drawer”.
by bayindirh | 2025-08-20 12:09:01+00:00
As you know, almost all fountain pen nibs (sans some specialty ones) come with some tipping. This is a very hard alloy engineered to resist wear and tear.

Some manufacturers have their own formulations and grinding characteristics, and some manufacturers use "default" versions supplied by the nib vendor.

As the user writes, this tipping material starts to get polished. This can take from a couple of months (e.g. Lamy) to years (e.g. Pilot, Sailor). Since the user keeps the pen at a certain angle, the same area gets polished a lot.

This makes the pen write smoother when held "correctly" (i.e. the way the user holds), reduces contact pressure (pen starts writing almost before touching the paper) and makes the pen a little wetter in some cases, making it more reliable and enjoyable to use.

After some point you can write without ever thinking about the pen, because it never skips (even like gels, rollerballs and ballpoints), and becomes an extension of you. It's hard to precisely and accurately describe though.

For example, I have an old Lamy Safari which writes slightly broader than its Medium designation because of this. I can understand whether my Pilot Metropolitan is happy with the ink or not from how it feels on paper. I have another Pilot which feels like glass on paper due to the same effect (it was already a smooth grind but it got even smoother over time).

Another advantage of fountain pens is the writing characteristics is a constant. Since you don't change the nib with every refill, you don't get the frustration of a bad writing pen when you replace your disposable pen or refill. You only refill the ink.
by csomar | 2025-08-20 12:09:42+00:00
I am working on this problem and while I agree with the author, there is room for improvement for the current status quo:

> So going beyond the section title: CI systems aren't too complex: they shouldn't need to exist. Your CI functionality should be an extension of the build system.

True. In the sense that if you are running a test/build, you probably want to start local first (dockerize) and then run that container remotely. However, the need for CI stems from the fact that you need certain variables (ie: you might want to run this, when commit that or pull request this or that, etc.) In a sense, a CI system goes beyond the state of your code to the state of your repo and stuff connected to your repo (ie: slack)

> There is a GitHub Actions API that allows you to interact with the service. But the critical feature it doesn't let me do is define ad-hoc units of work: the actual remote execute as a service. Rather, the only way to define units of work is via workflow YAML files checked into your repository. That's so constraining!

I agree. Which is why most people will try to use the container or build system to do these complex tasks.

> Taskcluster's model and capabilities are vastly beyond anything in GitHub Actions or GitLab Pipelines today. There's a lot of great ideas worth copying.

You still need to run these tasks as containers. So, say if you want to compare two variables, that's a lot of compute for a relatively simple task. Which is why the status quo has settled with GitHub Actions.

> it should offer something like YAML configuration files like CI systems do today. That's fine: many (most?) users will stick to using the simplified YAML interface.

It should offer a basic programming/interpreted language like JavaScript.

This is an area where WebAssembly can be useful. At its core, WASM is a unit of execution. It is small, universal, cheap and has a very fast startup time compared to a full OS container. You can also run arbitrarily complex code in WASM while ensuring isolation.

My idea here is that CI becomes a collection of executable tasks that the CI architect can orchestrate while the build/test systems remain a simple build/test command that run on a traditional container.

> Take Mozilla's Taskcluster and its best-in-class specialized remote execute as a service platform.

That would be a mistake, in my opinion. There is a reason Taskcluster has failed to get any traction. Most people are not interested in engineering their CI but in getting tasks executed on certain conditions. Most companies don't have people/teams dedicated for this and it is something developers do alongside their build/test process.

> Will this dream become a reality any time soon? Probably not. But I can dream. And maybe I'll have convinced a reader to pursue it.

I am :) I do agree with your previous statement that it is a hard market to crack.
by josevalim | 2025-08-20 12:09:45+00:00
There are two main reasons why being framework specific can be a big boost:

1. We annotate and understand your template language. So when you select an element, we not only know its tag and attributes, but we also know which template file rendered it. The more structured the template language is (JSX, HEEx, etc), the better job we can do, which means LLMs don't have to guess.

2. We also run code within the web framework. This means database access, built-in documentation using the exact versions in your project, access to language and framework reflection/introspection APIs, etc. So the agents have more, err, agency.

I hope this clarifies it a bit!
by numpad0 | 2025-08-20 12:09:49+00:00
Well, you can walk up to an F-35 and see it, it's not like they're invisible. The question always was how close the enemies would have to be to see it, and if that distance is >100mi, you're dead before you see it and the discussion is moot. If your camera couldn't see over the horizon(NOTE: Earth is round), then the point is moot as well.

The entire hyperbole feels like someone saw couple F-35 on a satellite photo and grew misguided confidence. I don't work for any military or intelligence fields, but I'm sure they are going to take out that capability from enemies quickly, and then they'll be back to ground based sensors, and then stealth matters again. It's crazy not everyone just sees that.
by nivertech | 2025-08-20 12:10:02+00:00
Task decomposition is the most important aspect of software design and SDLC.

Hopefully, your GitHub tickets are large enough, such as covering one vertical scope, one cross-cutting function, or some reactive work such as bug fixing or troubleshooting.

The reason is that coding agents are good at decomposing work into small tasks/TODO lists. IMO, too many tickets on GitHub will interfere with this.
by potato3732842 | 2025-08-20 12:10:53+00:00
That show was great but I think they missed an opportunity to tie the events it dramatizes into the broader geopolitical context that would greatly shape our civil wars.

In forcing "King Boats'n'hoes" to take his country and go it alone when he did and under the circumstances he did the pope kicked over one of the key dominoes in the line that leads to our modern balance of power. It's one of those pivotal moments in world history that only really happened the way it did due to the inclinations and personalities of the people involved.
Show HN: Pinch – macOS voice translation for real-time conversations
by christiansafka | 2025-08-20 12:10:58+00:00
Hey HN! I’m Christian, daily lurker and some might remember our original launch post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42935355). Today we're launching Pinch for Mac, which we believe is a step-change improvement in real-time AI translation. Our vision is to make cross-lingual conversations feel as natural as regular conversations.

TL:DR During an online meeting, the app instantly transcribes and translates all audio you hear, and allows you to decide when you translate your voice and when you don't. It's invisible to others (like Granola), and works everywhere without any meeting bots. Try it at startpinch.com

Here's a live demo we recorded this morning, without cuts: https://youtu.be/ltM2p-SosLc

When we first launched Pinch, we shipped a video conferencing solution with a human-like AI interpreter that was an active participant in your call. Our users hold the spacebar down while speaking to the translator, and when they release the spacebar the translator speaks out to the entire room.

That design was intentional - it puts the task of context selection on the user and prevents people from interrupting each other awkwardly (only one person can press spacebar at a time). It also comes with heavy tradeoffs, namely:

* Latency - Up to 2x longer meeting lengths due to everyone hearing your full sentence and then the translation of your full sentence

* Friction with first-time users - Customers using Pinch for external communication often meet with new people each time, and we've learned of several that send out an instruction doc pre-meeting on how to join and use translation in the Pinch call. Bad signal for our UX.

* Restricting our customers to those who are meeting creators

Benefits of the desktop app:

1. It creates a virtual microphone that you can use in any meeting app

2. Instant transcription+translation means you can understand what's going on in real-time and interrupt where necessary

3. Simultaneous translation - after you start speaking, the others will hear your translated audio as fast as we can generate it, without interrupting your flow.

Over the last months our focus has been on developing a model and UX to support high translation accuracy while automating context selection - knowing exactly when it has enough words to start the translated sentence. We’ve rolled this out to the desktop app first.

We're incredibly excited to go public beta today, you can give it a try at www.startpinch.com

Cheers, - Christian
by jmclnx | 2025-08-20 12:12:10+00:00
Antisemitism has been growing in the US and started growing fast in 2016, I wonder why.

Plus if anyone thinks Trump is defending Jewish people here in the US, I have a bridge to sell you. He is using that as a tool to extract revenge, the only reason he is supporting Israel is because he hates Arabic people far more.

Like all paranoid authoritarians, he will move on Jewish people once he believes he "won" against Arabs.

Columbia should have joined with Harvard and other ivy league schools to fight against Trumps illegal acts. Instead each school is left flapping in the wind.
by qwertox | 2025-08-20 12:13:07+00:00
I haven't really done anything serious with Claude Code, but today I tested starting claude in ~/claude/test, and told it to list my home dir, which it then did.

Is there a way to tell tools like Claude Code that it must never leave ~/claude/test, and don't event think about using absolute paths, or relative paths which contain `..`?
by Tsarp | 2025-08-20 12:14:17+00:00
Im using LanceDB (and pretty happy with it so far). I am looking at the chroma docs and have a few questions

1. I see the core is OSS, any chance of it being pushed up on crates.io(i see you already have a placeholder)

2. Is it embeddable or only as a Axum server?

Do you see all providers converging on similar alpha i.e cheap object storage, nvme drives,ssd cache to solve this?

Cheers and congrats on the launch
by specproc | 2025-08-20 12:15:24+00:00
He drew hard on his cigarette. Annoyance flickered across his face, like an artefact in the poorly-compressed bootleg movies he sold to his fellow low-lifes at The Pig and Drum.

Some Corpo-type, no doubt. Can't help seeing something good scroll across their feed tube without calling Legal.

He'd worked with a few in the past. Not bad all-in-all, at least they paid on time. That said, he could think of few he'd drink with.

He toyed with the idea of leaving a bitchy comment. Probably get downvoted to oblivion.

The dogs in the yard barked at a passing vehicle.

Irritated by the animal noise and the corpo whining, he thrashed something out. Pulling another cigarette from his pack, he hit "reply".
by josevalim | 2025-08-20 12:15:31+00:00
Hi folks! Great to see our work on the front page, and I'm happy to answer questions.

Regarding next steps, we're currently working on React integration, with Python and JavaScript server-side web frameworks coming next. If you're interested, here's our survey/waiting list: https://forms.gle/8MeXwGjpBFDeGNQw9
by AlecSchueler | 2025-08-20 12:16:06+00:00
> From the standpoint of "hard to ban what's used by a large part of the population" this does justify legalization indeed.

I think they meant more that the negative effects don't seem that big because most people are ok even with such a large proportion of people already being experienced with it.

> triggered by the parent's comment weird theory that "cannabis was only forbidden because of criminal big pharma".

I don't believe it was either but I'm not sure your counter evidence really works. The science that you alluded to about long term effects all significantly post-dates the ban so couldn't have played a role in it.
by nerdjon | 2025-08-20 12:16:41+00:00
I am very curious realistically how can they reliably fix this.

So my understanding is that this is that the database/index that copilot used already crawled this file so of course it would not need to access the file to be able to tell the information in it.

But then, how do you fix that? Do you then tie audit reports to accessing parts of the database directly? Or are we instructing the LLM to do something like...

"If you are accessing knowledge pinky promise you are going to report it so we can add an audit log"

This really needs some communication from Microsoft on exactly what happened here and how it is being addressed since as of right now this should raise alarm bells for any company using Copilot and people have access to sensitive data that needs to be strictly monitored.
by metalman | 2025-08-20 12:17:08+00:00
ouch, mercyless as someone who has read a lot about the crusades and has visited some of the places involved by hapenstance, it does seem to me that the practice of learning the hard won leasons of history has as pointed out, been turned into something else entirely reading the only first hand descriptions of King Richard as written by the daughter of the King of Constantinopal does give the whole mad affair a bit of perspective, we also have some other descriptions of what constituted the living conditions of Kind Richard and his knights while on crusade, and the notion of "living rough" does it no justice, but from middle easter sources we do have glowing accounts of how much they coveted the crusaders horses, and how time and time again, a night was spared any direct attack as it might injure the horse he was riding, the deduction I get from that is: horses were valued by everyone so highly at the time that all in all, it was better to be a horse. And as I somehow ended up having a destrier myself, I can empythise.
by xelxebar | 2025-08-20 12:18:01+00:00
I think you did a good job delineating top complaints people have about shell, but I have to reject the pro/con framing.

Shell operates quite naturally under stream-oriented data-centric design patterns. But that's an architectural familiar to almost nobody in our OOP- and FP-happy industry these days. Try using Python like a relational database language (e.g. SQL), and complex stuff gets messy, the syntax starts feeling hostile, logic becomes obscure, etc. The purported ickyness of shell stems not from shell per se but from trying to force it into a foreign design space.

Principles that work well with shell: Heavily normalize your data; Organize it into line-oriented tables with whitespace-separated fields; Use the filesystem as a blob store; Filenames can be structured data as well; positional parameters form a bona fide list.

> hard to escape everything correctly

IME, all of the really painful escape patterns can always be avoided. You see these a lot when people try to build commands and pass them off to exec. That's mostly unnecessary when you can just shove the arguments in the positional parameters via the set builtin: e.g.

set -- "$@" --file 'filename with spaces.pdf' set -- "$@" 'data|blob with "dangerous" characters' set -- "$@" "$etc" some_command "$@"

which is functionally equivalent to

some_command "$@" --file 'filename with spaces.pdf' \ 'data|blob with "dangerous" characters' \ "$etc"

It also helps to rtfm and internalize the parsing steps that happen between line of input and the eventual execve call.
by TuringNYC | 2025-08-20 12:18:17+00:00
> Yeah I think this is how it usually works, and yeah at $100bn valuation they are now 100% worthless, because investors get paid first, and there's no way they'll get sold or IPO for more than $100bn.

Not quite right? Because the raise-implied valuation doesnt account for preferences. The IPO could be for 50bn and the latest investors could do well given the preference stack of first money outs in later rounds.
by 1oooqooq | 2025-08-20 12:18:33+00:00
it's riddled with scams, and thinking any of this will detect any of the things you mention is very foolish, native and show a total lack of understanding of the scams. of you think using a proxy is essential for visa scam, i would even know where to begin to correct you.

it's one hundred per cent clueless privacy invasion. they are probably also opening ports via other means and using that for side channel ID like Facebook does.

just like any other documentation scam, the only weak point is on the "last mile" that's why you will always have a human interviewer.

the visa process is abusive and unpractical because people will work around any hurdle and their kpi will never be affected no matter how crappy they manage to make to whole process. or how many doge kids implement useless privacy invasion tech just because.
by DrScientist | 2025-08-20 12:19:16+00:00
If there were abusing it large scale, I still think it would come out ( cf Snowdon ) - the more people are involved, the more likely something is to leak.

ie in terms of conspiracy theories - those that involve large numbers of people being in the know, but nothing leaking, are the most unlikely.

However I totally agree that the recent trend towards secret courts, the attempts to remove access to a jury of your peers, and the creeping abuse of terrorism legalisation is both wrong and worrying.

However that's kind of my point - the existence of state powers of search isn't the issue, the issue is whether they are under proper control. The issue isn't whether the government can see the stuff I have with Apple, it's what's the process to allow that to happen.
by privong | 2025-08-20 12:19:31+00:00
> If you turned in an assignment written in pencil, it was legit for the teacher to use their eraser and give you an F for turning in empty paper. (They never did this but threatened it a lot).

I find this slightly amusing/ironic because many (most?) fountain pen inks are not waterproof. I had a sheet of paper that was full of (fountain pen written) writing on my desk when I spilled a glass of water -- after the paper dried there was hardly any evidence that there had been writing on the paper. I know that's not the parent's point, but something turned in that was written with a fountain pen would be easier to remove: a teacher would just need to dunk the paper in water!
by em-bee | 2025-08-20 12:19:33+00:00
i believe XSLT is touring complete, and regarding exploits, you rather want to read this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44910050

it turns out that because XSLT was largely ignored, it is full of security issues, some of which have been in there for decades.

so the reason XSLT doesn't have a history of exploits is because nobody used it.
Fastmail have fixed a privacy fail
by chrisjj | 2025-08-20 12:20:26+00:00
True title (before HM censorship): Fastmail have fixed a horrific privacy fail

In the Fastmail web email client, doing print to PDF on a search-found message having attachment would leak the search query into the PDF - invisible completely in preview and invisible in the PDF except to someone hovering over the attachment name.

Until recently. This is now fixed.

You might want to sanitise any previously stored PDFs before sharing.

Unverified by me is a report that folder names too could be leaked.
by einpoklum | 2025-08-20 12:20:29+00:00
We should remember that these structural diagrams are _not_ necessarily what NVIDIA actually has as hardware. They carefully avoid guaranteeing that any of the entities or blocks you see in the diagrams actually _exist_. It is still just a mental model NVIDIA offers for us to think about their GPUs, and more specifically the SMs, rather than a simplified circuit layout.

For example, we don't know how many actual functional units an SM has; we don't know if the "tensor core" even _exists_ as a piece of hardware, or whether there's just some kind of orchestration of other functional units; and IIRC we don't know what exactly happens at the sub-warp level w.r.t. issuing and such.
by molteanu | 2025-08-20 12:20:41+00:00
Just curious how these lines work out,

"People who log workouts are 2x more likely to stick to their routine and make gains, No social feeds, no distractions, just results. $1.99/month vs $9.99 competitors."

For me it would be a no-go, just from the 2x (unfounded?!) affirmation and how this is cheaper that (all?!) of the competitors. Do people actually like this kind of motivationals, so to speak?

Concrats! :)
by smarx007 | 2025-08-20 12:20:45+00:00
Who said it must be done during training? Most of the enterprise data is accessed after training - RAG or MCP tool calls. I can see how the techniques I mentioned above could be applied during RAG (in vector stores adopting Apache Accumulo ideas) or in MCP servers (MCP OAuth + RFC 8693 OAuth 2.0 Token Exchange + Zanzibar/Biscuit for faithfully replicating the authz constraints of systems where the data is being retrieved from).
by lyleaf | 2025-08-20 12:21:12+00:00
My bf and I had a van trip around Australia with our trusty 20 year old Toyota Hiace last year. We are both freedivers (with me particular a water maniac) and we loved to dip into the water along the way.

But we soon found out that finding out snorkeling spots nearby is difficult. There are beaches everywhere but we had to dig into lots of websites, pdfs, talking to local travel centers to find the nice spots.

Since we are both unemployed software engineers we built a platform where everyone can

- find freediving/snorkeling/diving spots

- add snorkeling spots

- review spots and share your pictures

- add spots to your favourite

We soon found out that asking people to use and write reviews on the app is so hard. Our app was easy to use but - why don't people bother to use it? LOL

Have you done something similar before and how did you solve it?