MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-08-14 12:27:59+00:00
From https://opendata.blender.org/ :

Apple M3 Ultra (GPU - 80 cores) scores 7235.31

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU scores 7931.31

Note the memory constraints of NVIDIA are not like Apple silicon which tends to also be less i/o constrained. YMMV

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8yS-2OyJhw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju0ndy2kwlw

Apple m3/m4 silicon is certainly good in some ways, but the bottleneck is often a lack of CUDA software support and price (could buy >4 times the GPU raw performance on a dual rtx 5090 desktop.) =3
by zdragnar | 2025-08-14 12:28:06+00:00
I think the sharing is easy. The maintaining is hard when there isn't clear ownership. How do the teams divide maintenance duties? How are vandalism and moderation dealt with across teams? How do disagreements between teams over style and quality dealt with? Cost of hosting split?

All of these are possible to answer, but they are also much easier to deal with when you're not sharing between different organizations.
by Stratoscope | 2025-08-14 12:28:33+00:00
My first summer job was a $2/hour "Night Operator" at Transdata, a Phoenix timesharing company. They shut down their timesharing service at night, so after running a few batch jobs, I had the SDS Sigma 5 all to myself.

We had a few one-card programs, some fun, some useful. A single card held 80 bytes of machine code.

The Sigma 5 had a small speaker on the front panel that you could toggle between two states to move the cone in or out. How often you toggled it determined the pitch of the sound.

One card was called BIRDS. It toggled the speaker to make it sound like several birds chirping at each other.

A more useful one was PRINT. You put it in front of a deck of cards, ran the deck through the card reader, and it would print the deck.

It was a bit slow, because it used a single memory buffer:

1. Read card 1 2. Print card 1 3. Read card 2 4. Print card 2 5. Read card 3 6. Print card 3 etc.

In other words, at any moment either the card reader or the printer would be operating, not both.

I studied the code and found there were just enough bytes left out of the 80 to implement double buffering by flipping a buffer pointer at each step:

1. Read card 1 into buffer A 2. Print card 1 while reading card 2 into buffer B 3. Print card 2 while reading card 3 into buffer A 4. Print card 3 while reading card 4 into buffer B etc.

Twice as fast!
by opendomain | 2025-08-14 12:28:35+00:00
I forgot to mention - I won the lottery! I won the 2nd prize of the recent Powerball - $50,000 and I am donating it to the new AntiFascist foundation.

I am NOT rich. This money could have a significant impact on my life. But I wanted to help others and so I am showing my commitment to fight for Freedom.

I have run OpenDomain for 25 years and have contributed domains to Open Source worth millions all for Free. I am ending that project to fight the rise of fascism.

I welcome ANY help or criticism - https://Antifascist.org
by pllbnk | 2025-08-14 12:29:15+00:00
Everybody misses the key information here - it’s a Belarusian app. CEO and CTO are Belarusian (probably there are more C-level people who are Belarusian or Russian). Not only are users giving up their private information but they are doing so to the malevolent (by definition) regimes.

When the Western app says they don’t sell or give out private information, you can be suspicious but still somewhat trustful. When a dictator-ruled country’s app does so, you can be certain every character you type in there is logged and processed by the government.
by mxuribe | 2025-08-14 12:29:22+00:00
Is AP the "right protocol", well, we shall see. i happen to think that, not so different from, say, smtp or imap, while AP does have some issues, i think AP will be *good enough*. I say, good enough, in order to get started, to get momentum...once that happens, then yes, things can be optimized...and by then the value of federation for things like code forges will be obvious, and then the next phases will be more about optimization - both technical and otherwise.
by P1980Jersey | 2025-08-14 12:29:25+00:00
This is now a genre of article that repeats everywhere. Its form is:

"X percent of Americans agree with the statement 'vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they prevent', which shows America has completely lost the ability to agree on basic facts, everyone is living in a different reality, and this explains why they will not agree with the following specific correct views: [...]."

The reader is positioned such that if he does not agree with the specific "rational" views enumerated, he feels himself included in a group believing specific other, "irrational" things stated as the basic problem. The article becomes an instance of the problem it attempts to locate.
by Foxboron | 2025-08-14 12:29:54+00:00
> That's how "I use Arch btw" became a meme.

Not really.

The meme is from 4chan and the /g/ board that had some origins around 2011/2012. Gentoo was the main meme before this.

After 2012'ish the meme-culture from 4chan became mainstream internet culture with the popularity of reddit. Nothing has really progressed beyond that.

> These people have now moved to NixOS.

[citation needed]
by ivanmontillam | 2025-08-14 12:30:10+00:00
> Simply sitting in a chair for hours is really mentally taxing and a huge waste of time.

How do people that rawdog international flights do it? No phone, no books, no music, maybe just the flight screen with the little aeroplane over the map.

You could just let your thoughts wander. That's a form of meditation, letting the mind unravel on its own.

I wish I did it more, actually.
by sandreas | 2025-08-14 12:30:30+00:00
For LLMs, VRAM is the requirement number one. Since MacBooks have unified RAM you can use up to 75% for the LLM, so a higher RAM model would open more possibilies, but these are much more expensive (of course).

As an alternative you might consider a Ryzen Pro 395+ like in the Framework desktop or HP Zbook G1a but the 128GB versions are still extremely expensive. The Asus Flow Z13 is a tablet with ryzen 395+ but hardly available with 128GB
by seabass-labrax | 2025-08-14 12:30:36+00:00
I am pretty sure that the government did not directly instruct websites to remove protest footage in the case you are referring to. There is substantial ambiguity in the Online Safety Act, so it is only natural that companies that don't have a stake in what they're publishing will be quick to consider it too risky to show.

This is important, because if your point ever becomes a significant argument against the Online Safety Act, it is likely that the government will be able to retort that it was the online services voluntarily censoring - conveniently ignoring, of course, the context which you and I know of.
by tptacek | 2025-08-14 12:30:39+00:00
I'm at 10k points after a couple months. Previous experience was self-teaching linear algebra, which I needed for cryptography work, and I managed well enough to help my daughter cruise through a proofs-heavy linear algebra course at UIUC; I'd have aced it if I took it. I started doing MathAcademy for two reasons: to replace an NYT crossword habit with something more rewarding, and because I have (had) no calculus. I do about 250 points per week.

Math Academy is --- so far --- probably one of the better dollars-for-skills trades I've made in my adult life, easily outstripping every book I've ever bought.

I have a lot of gripes!

* The gamification is really annoying as an adult learner. There are lots of little cues in the system to keep moving forward, which pushes me past what feels like the limits of retention. There is no credential Math Academy can give me that I give a shit about, so moving faster for the sake of it is a bad trade for me.

* Along similar lines, I really wish it was easier to get more explicit review. Part of the premise of Math Academy is that the spaced repetition comes in large part from units that build on each other; you're making relentless forward progress with reviews baked into new material. I've at times had to have o4-mini make me problem sets, which seems dumb since I'm paying for exactly that from Math Academy.

* "Foundations", the adult learning series, is premised as being a curriculum stripped of stuff high school students learn solely because they'll be tested on it. They could strip it more. I got that sense in Foundations II but wasn't confident enough to call it out; now I'm doing linear algebra stuff and, I mean --- I object on moral grounds to inverting a matrix with determinants!

The flip side though: I have a decent grip on calc now, after just a couple months of doing this rather than crosswords. My trig, another weak spot, is annoyingly better (also I now know I authentically hate trig). The gripes are just gripes; my overall experience is, it does what it says on the tin.

I read people (and reviews, including expert reviews) complain about Math Academy's spartan approach to explanation/exposition/proofs. It's a super fair concern. For my part, I pair Math Academy with GPT; GPT is better than any online math education resource at explaining and handholding. I don't need explanations; what I need is a focused, structured curriculum: do this, then this, here's the problem sets, here's a graded quiz. I know how to read a book already; books didn't teach me any math --- university linear algebra course homework problem sets did. This is a better version of that.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-08-14 12:30:49+00:00
It is fascinating, isn't it. It is like a downwards spiral with a line most people would not even think of considering crossing. That said, current version of the surveillance appears a little more pervasive ( and to an extent a little self-imposed ) so I wonder if that 'feeling justified' will even matter. Examples do exist of enduring dictatorships with extremely efficient intelligence apparatus turned on its populace.
by nunez | 2025-08-14 12:31:05+00:00
I tried making my iPad my computer three times. Despite its awesome specs, these remain a huge pain in the rear for actual dev work.

iPadOS and iPhoneOS will remain useless for actual dev work until they unlock hardware virtualization in Virtualization.framework.

Apps on the iPhone and iPad will remain sandboxed, and root isn't possible, so being able to run a VM that _can_ run as root is the next best thing.

I believe this framework on mobile uses software emulation, which is horribly slow and guzzles battery.

Well, this and third-party browser engine support. Mobile Safari is absolutely horrible. This doesn't become apparent until you're using your iPad full time. Death by a trillion cuts. It also burns battery when you start using it with desktop websites.

Until then, the experience is basically you using your iDevice as a dumb terminal (don't mean that as a dig against Termius; great app given its limitations) to some server somewhere where actual work is done. Rendering issues galore if you use vim with color schemes.
by GlibMonkeyDeath | 2025-08-14 12:32:43+00:00
As always, the poison is in the dose, and the environment matters a lot.

It's a very similar pattern to other engineered addictive substances (introduction/harm/recognition/regulation.)

Tobacco has been around forever in the Americas. Were Native Americans sprawled out on the forest floor, unable to function because of tobacco? Of course not. The mild high and self-limiting supply of tobacco was no problem in their environment.

Then came the industrialization of tobacco. Cigarettes came in convenient dosages, and were cheap and ubiquitous. You could get cigarettes anywhere, and you could smoke them almost anywhere. They were given out for free to soldiers. Movies made smoking look glamorous. And smoking does help keep you slim.

But then people started living longer, and the health problems of tobacco addiction (even to people just in proximity to tobacco smoke) became clear. So we no longer let tobacco companies advertise to children, and attractive actors (mostly) no longer smoke in movies. We tax the hell out of tobacco, and restrict smoking areas more and more. We also forced the tobacco companies to clearly label their product, and there are widespread education campaigns.

Eventually tobacco use dropped. But it wasn't primarily because the addicts all suddenly found self-discipline.

The social media companies, just like tobacco, will never see the problem until they are forced. And I am afraid, given the sums of money involved, we will end up with the equivalent of social-media "vaping" (that has to go through the full cycle of introduction/harm/recognition/regulation again...)
by zdragnar | 2025-08-14 12:34:07+00:00
Actually, swallowing a rock will almost certainly cause problems. Telling your state medical board that your doctor told you to take a rock will have a wildly different outcome than telling a judge that you swallowed one because ChatGPT told you to do so.

Unless the judge has you examined and found to be incompetent, they're most likely to just tell you that you're an idiot and throw out the case.
by gentooflux | 2025-08-14 12:34:14+00:00
This seems less "decentralized social network" and more "html-less www with extra steps," especially since it's only going to allow socializing between the specific types of people who fall within 3 very specific Venn diagram circles who 1) use emacs, 2) use org-mode, and 3) want to go through the trouble of hosting their own section of the network.
by Xmd5a | 2025-08-14 12:34:44+00:00
There are several ways to look at lisp macros but I think the most fundamental aspect is that they are hooks that allow one to run code at compile time in a dynamic compilation environment. In other words with lisp macros comes compile-time state. This is a big deal. Imagine the following piece of code:

(serveMQTT ...) (serveMQTT ...) (serveMQTT ...) (serveMQTTDoc ...)

With serveMQTT as a macro, we could store each mqtt topic, accepted args, etc ... into a compile-time datastructure. serveMQTTDoc, a macro too, would fetch the content of this datastructure, generate the documentation string for all mqtt topics at compile time, and return this string at run-time when queried.

Compile-time state and a language that is also its own macro-language. That'd be a nice thing to have.
by slightwinder | 2025-08-14 12:34:56+00:00
> So, for example, you can't just discuss something on Twitter with your followers.

That is a problem with the platform. Nothing is stopping you from changing the platform. You want it to be different, but don't want to use the different that already exists?

> Even when that doesn't happen, many of your followers would still miss your posts if you don't appease the algorithm because they would still use the algorithmic feed

That's still their own "choice". They decide to use Twitter, and they decide to stay on the algorithmic view. But ok, to be fair, Twitter, and other big networks, are kinda unstable on which view they offer and use by default. Forcing them to give more stable control to the user would be good. But I doubt it would fix anything on the grand scale.

> So no, the very existence of the algorithmic feed is the problem

The algorithmic feed exists mainly because there is too many content, so you will miss something anyway. Removing it will fix nothing for most people, it will only change what you miss. People have used self-configured algorithms even before social media existed. The demand has always been there.

But of course, we could talk about the actual implementation and it's dark leanings.
by sipofwater | 2025-08-14 12:35:24+00:00
See also: https://old.reddit.com/r/AnythingGoesNews/comments/1mpxd6w/h... (old.reddit.com/r/AnythingGoesNews/comments/1mpxd6w/handson_we_ran_full_desktop_linux_apps_on_an/n8mou5j/)
by arrowsmith | 2025-08-14 12:36:51+00:00
Decades of neoliberalism and mass immigration (but I repeat myself) dissolved all the ties — family, community, faith, national identity — that once bound us together. Now there's no social solidarity or cohesion and no-one trusts each other, so they turn to the all-powerful state as the only thing left that can maintain order.

Neoliberalism's end game.
by schaefer | 2025-08-14 12:37:30+00:00
You could train an unbeatable tic-tac-toe ai on your laptop in five minutes. It doesn’t get any stronger than that.

—

I know, I know. I’m intentionally misinterpreting the OP’s clear intent (the stuff of comedy). And normally a small joke like this wouldn’t be worth the downvotes…

But, I think there’s a deeper double meaning in this brave new world of prompt engineering. Most chat isn’t all that precise without some level of assumed shared context:

These days the meaning of the phrase ai has changed from the classical definition (all algorithms welcome), and now ai usually means LLMs and their derivatives.
by tptacek | 2025-08-14 12:37:48+00:00
How exactly do NULL ciphers accomplish enterprise monitoring goals? The point of the TLS 1.3 handshake improvements was to eliminate simple escrowed key passive monitoring. You could have the old PKZip cipher defined as a TLS 1.3 ciphersuite; that doesn't mean a middlebox can get anybody to use it. Can you explain how this would get any enterprise any access it doesn't already have?
by DonHopkins | 2025-08-14 12:37:53+00:00
>New Protein Therapy Shows Promise as Antidote for Carbon Monoxide Poisoning

So Shatner was right all along: not only is Promise Margarine good for lowering your cholesterol level, but it can also treat carbon monoxide poisoning! And it tastes like butter, promise.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3wf717fKFE
by DrScientist | 2025-08-14 12:37:54+00:00
>Personally, I think the benefit from having automated tutors that are attentive and patient and can answer questions about almost any topic known to man dwarfs the benefit from defending intellectual property.

Why is it one or the other? Your argument is like saying we shouldn't pay nurses a fair wage because it get's in the way of great care for everyone.

It's not an either/or situation - it's how you allocate rewards for the different contributions to the new tech. Currently tech companies are saying there is zero value in that training data - that's clearly not the case.

I think I finally understand your misunderstanding - I'm not arguing AI should be banned as it destroys a musicians job because in the future all music will be AI generated. That's not my concern - I'm not saying anyone deserves a job in perpetuity.

My point is simply that in building the models they have to respect the current laws - and that means respecting the content owners rights and either paying what they ask or not using it.
by _mlbt | 2025-08-14 12:38:09+00:00
There's a couple really big things I like about linear. As you said you can follow the thread of conversation in chronological order. Another big thing for me is that it doesn't have comment karma. Upvotes and downvotes result in echo chambers that suppress alternative viewpoints. PG got it almost right here by making you have to meet a threshold to downvote, but I think it would be better if downvotes didn't exist here at all. It becomes an "I disagree with your opinion" button. Also, threaded discussions encourage people to just highjack one of the top voted threads instead of replying to a more relevant person later down the line.

Also on the topic of moderation, I feel like less is more. Unless it's spam, child pornography, or threats of violence, it should probably just be left alone. Reddit in particular is extremely over moderated these days. Outside of a handful of subreddits, it is impossible to post conservative views because moderators will ban you for them. Just basic stuff like "I support <Republican candidate> and here's why..." results in a ban. Even just being subscribed to /r/conservative is enough to be automatically banned from several other subreddits. While there are exceptions, most of the moderators are in actuality just a bunch of petty, censorious tyrants.
by analog31 | 2025-08-14 12:38:27+00:00
Granted I've been out of school for decades. The textbooks were always an accessory to classroom instruction and not intended for stand-alone learning. Math students quickly figured out that the most important thing was doing the problems, the text was essentially a reference, and the classroom was for guidance through the concepts, and for motivation.

Of course the humanities classes were about books, so learning how to study the books themselves was a major part of the practice.

Programming seems to lend itself particularly well to self learning because the computer allows for endless trial-and-error practice.
by ho_schi | 2025-08-14 12:38:38+00:00
I shall edit more in the Wiki and post less here.

The Wiki is the stronghold of Arch. As are the the packages. A lot of stuff makes good things good is a lot manual labor by all involved people.

PS: Removing stuff or not accepting changes is also a significant part of the Wiki. It hurts, as usual. But necessary for readability.
by graycat | 2025-08-14 12:38:48+00:00
> Classes are divorced from the practical applications of learning. Apprenticeships train in exactly the situation you’d want to apply the skill.

Hmm .... Something like in the movie "The Hunt for Red October", the US Navy wanted:

(1) Start with recordings by US submarines of underwater sounds, and write software to estimate the power spectra using the FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) and the Blackman and Tukey, "The Measurement of Power Spectra".

(2) Given ships at sea and a war, how long would the US submarines last? Start with some WWII analysis of search and encounters by Koopmans and do a Monte-Carlo Markov process, generate many independent sample paths and average.

Gee, how could I do those without my academic courses in analysis and probability? And there are more examples, including the crucial, original core math in my startup.
by highfrequency | 2025-08-14 12:38:51+00:00
This is awesome - thanks for sharing. Appreciate the small-scale but comprehensive studies testing out different architectures, model sizes and datasets.

Would be curious to see a version of your model size comparison chart but letting the training continue until perplexity plateaus / begins to overfit. For example: are your larger models performing worse because they are overfitting to a small dataset, or because you are comparing model sizes at a fixed 5 minute computation time - so that the large models just don't get to learn very much in that time.

(Also interesting would be learning curve comparisons between architecture/param count)
by everdrive | 2025-08-14 12:39:33+00:00
You can -- the real problem here is that each app could violate your privacy in different ways. Unless you break TLS and inspect all the traffic coming from an app (and, do this over time since the reality of what data is sent will change over time) then you don't really know what your apps are stealing from you. For sure, many apps are quite egregious in this regard while some are legitimately benign. But, do you as a user have a real way to know this authoritatively, and to keep up with changes in the ecosystem? My argument would be that even security researchers don't have time to really do a thorough job here, and users are forced to err on the side of caution.
by ajay-joshi | 2025-08-14 12:39:34+00:00
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