MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by conductr | 2025-08-08 20:57:17+00:00
I don't think building homes is really prohibitive due to regulations. I know it varies a lot by region of course. But I'm in an area that isn't really effected by earthquakes and has no frost line/need for basement/etc. I've built a few houses as a GC. It's land more than anything that's gone up in the past ~15 years since I first started in it. That's purely a market force. Second is skilled labor, even unskilled labor honestly. There's just a massive shortage of people doing manual labor/sweaty work, and I typically have access to a major pool of immigrants as we border Mexico. In terms of materials, there's some regulated things we have to do more of now, like insulation and other energy efficiency things but it's rather small in the scope of things. I currently own a 1950s built mid-century modern that was built in a time of low regs here. If I were to build it exactly as it is (to past codes) and simultaneously build it again (to current codes), the current code version would only be about 10% more. Likewise, if I demolished it and just sold the land, I'd still get about 90-100% of what it's market rate is right now. That market rate has ~quadrupled in the 15 years I've owned that house and to reiterate, the home itself is nearly worthless. I'm not in a fastly gentrifying area either. I'd say it's affluent but it always has been since I owned it, it's become more common to just knock down the original homes and build new.
by marcosdumay | 2025-08-08 20:58:30+00:00
Memristors in particular just won't happen.

But memory-centric compute didn't happen because of Moore's law. (SNNs have the problem that we don't actually know how to use them.) Now that it's gone, it may have a chance, but it still takes a large amount of money thrown into the idea and the people with money are so risk-adverse that they create entire new risks for themselves.

Forward neural networks were very lucky that there existed a mainstream use for the kind of hardware it needed.
by atty | 2025-08-08 20:58:39+00:00
The idea that a GPU is dedicated to a single inference task is just generally incorrect. Inputs are batched, and it’s not a single GPU handling a single request, it’s a handful of GPUs in various parallelism schemes processing a batch of requests at once. There’s a latency vs throughput trade off that operators make. The larger that batch size the greater the latency, but it improves overall cluster throughput.
by doormatt | 2025-08-08 20:59:11+00:00
Thanks so much for being so open and willing to discuss this!

Just to be clear though, if that lemma isn’t yet explicitly proven, then the core claim (that Algphys cannot simulate certain NP-complete solutions in polynomial time) has not been established. I agree the components may suggest difficulty in high-rigidity regions, but unless you formally prove that no polynomial-time Turing machine’s trajectory enters those regions, the P != NP conclusion doesn’t follow.
by vunderba | 2025-08-08 20:59:20+00:00
The MCP aspect (for code/tool execution) is completely orthogonal to the issue of data privacy.

If you put a remote LLM in the chain than it is 100% going to inadvertently send user data up to them at some point.

e.g. if I attach a PDF to my context that contains private data, it WILL be sent to the LLM. I have no idea what "operating blind" means in this context. Connecting to a remote LLM means your outgoing requests are tied to a specific authenticated API key.
by cbcoutinho | 2025-08-08 20:59:26+00:00
From the paper:

> Most language models face a fundamental tradeoff where powerful capabilities require substantial computational resources. We shatter this constraint with Jan-nano, a 4B parameter language model that redefines efficiency through radical specialization: instead of trying to know everything, it masters the art of finding anything instantly. Fine-tuned from Qwen3-4B using our novel multi-stage Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) system that completely eliminates reliance on next token prediction training (SFT), Jan-nano achieves 83.2% on SimpleQA benchmark with MCP integration while running on consumer hardware. With 128K context length, Jan-nano proves that intelligence isn't about scale, it's about strategy.

> For our MCP evaluation, we used mcp-server-serper which provides google search and scrape tools

https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22760
by kelnos | 2025-08-08 20:59:33+00:00
> I expect this will change in the future

I'm really hoping for that too. As I've started to adopt Claude Code more and more into my workflow, I don't want to depend on a company for day-to-day coding tasks. I don't want to have to worry about rate limits or API spend, or having to put up $100-$200/mo for this. I don't want everything I do to be potentially monitored or mined by the AI company I use.

To me, this is very similar to why all of the smart-home stuff I've purchased all must have local control, and why I run my own smart-home software, and self-host the bits that let me access it from outside my home. I don't want any of this or that tied to some company that could disappear tomorrow, jack up their pricing, or sell my data to third parties. Or even use my data for their own purposes.

But yeah, I can't see myself trying to set any LLMs up for my own use right now, either on hardware I own, or in a VPS I manage myself. The cost is very high (I'm only paying Anthropic $20/mo right now, and I'm very happy with what I get for that price), and it's just too fiddly and requires too much knowledge to set up and maintain, knowledge that I'm not all that interested in acquiring right now. Some people enjoy doing that, but that's not me. And the current open models and tooling around them just don't seem to be in the same class as what you can get from Anthropic et al.

But yes, I hope and expect this will change!
by ActorNightly | 2025-08-08 20:59:40+00:00
No, they are a liquidity provider. Liquidity providers only make money when there are imbalances in the market. Notionally because markets tend to drive fast towards efficiency, you can't realistically make money just being a market maker.

So then, you have to offer additional services. HRT has the SDP that they provide, and of course charge fees for. But then the question is why would anyone do this, versus just going through any other financial institution.

The answer is basically all up on their website

"As a liquidity provider, HRT develops automated trading algorithms designed to provide the best prices to our clients".

The question that should be asked is as a user, why would I want to sign up with HRT or any similar financial company? The answer for HRT is because you want to have access to more complicated financial derivatives - you don't need to sign up and pay fees to buy basic stock.

So they promise that their algorithms give the user the best price, which is a legal way of saying that you will pay less for a certain asset and make money on it, and you can't say that because you can't guarantee this.

And its well known that nobody ever gets rich of an algorithm in finance unless you are well established large firm intricately tied with the government that can move so much money as to influence trading.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-08-08 21:00:54+00:00
Neat. As a Claude Code plan user can I use this ? I've never tried the API access method.

Claude is remarkably effective at writing elisp I surprisingly found. I had it whip up a mode today for something today (Notation3/N3 RDF triples) complete with etags support, etc. and it just... did it.
by ewoodrich | 2025-08-08 21:01:07+00:00
Yes, either through passing the full context of the current task/conversation to a new model to continue working from that point on, or through the intermediary step of the plan document generated by Gemini or whichever larger model that is then passed back to 4.1 to implement.

The latter is a commonly recommended strategy in general for any large task even with more powerful models to keep context manageable and allow recovering easily if on step 9/10 the LLM loses it and starts mangling all the previous work it did. That way you don't have to start all over from the last good checkpoint or commit.
by bigyabai | 2025-08-08 21:01:17+00:00
> Any time I go to a local model it feels like I’m writing e-mails back and forth

Do you have a good accelerator? If you're offloading to a powerful GPU it shouldn't feel like that at all. I've gotten ChatGPT speeds from a 4060 running the OSS 20B and Qwen3 30B models, both of which are competitive with OpenAI's last-gen models.

> the first Apple M1 chip was released less than 5 years ago

Core ML has been running on Apple-designed silicon for 8 years now, if we really want to get pedantic. But sure, actual LLM/transformer use is a more recent phenomenon.
by michaelt | 2025-08-08 21:02:18+00:00
Why stop at 80 H100s for a mere 6.4 terabytes of GPU memory?

Supermicro will sell you a full rack loaded with servers [1] providing 13.4 TB of GPU memory.

And with 132kW of power output, you can heat an olympic-sized swimming pool by 1°C every day with that rack alone. That's almost as much power consumption as 10 mid-sized cars cruising at 50 mph.

[1] https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/system/gpu/48u/srs-gb...
by quickthrowman | 2025-08-08 21:02:39+00:00
> there's rules on everything for how many outlets must be on the counter

This is the case for every authority having jurisdiction that has adopted the National Electrical Code, and for good reason.

A lack of outlets in a kitchen combined with countertop appliances that heat up things like coffee makers, rice cookers, hot plates, or crock pots can easily harm.

Building and fire safety code books are written in blood, as they say.

That being said, California has a lot of stupid regulations, like mandatory environmental studies and things of that nature. Great for environmental engineers/consultants and existing real estate owners but it’s bad for everyone else.

Also Prop 13, that’s a real bad deal for anyone that isn’t going to inherit a grandfathered house with ridiculously low property taxes.
by tehlike | 2025-08-08 21:02:46+00:00
My storage needs were increasing by the day. Electricity is now a small monthly cost. I have more cores and ram than ever, and can easily expand it. Main machine now runs with 1TB ram and 15TB SSD and other has more than 384G ram. I currently use 3TB ssd storage, and get way more performnce than Hetzner's VMs with ceph ssd disks. I do need redundancy, but it's not something hetzner was giving me anyway, and if my anectode is not a mess up, i actually got database corruption on hetzner that never happened on my own local setup.

I'd have colo'ed or used dedicated as it's definitely better than their VMs, but they don't have that in their US datacenters.

I am pretty happy with my current setup, I have significantly less down time (few mins a month) than when I was on hetzner - but this is mostly due to my need for more ram at times.

I also used this as an excuse to get 56G mellanox fiber switch and get poe cameras etc in a full homelab manner, so it's been fun, on top of being cheaper. Noise is not a concern, I got a sound-proof server rack that's pretty nice. It takes up space, but i have kids, so my garage is near full at times anyways :)
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-08-08 21:03:10+00:00
I have a 2 hour window after I wake up, to do the kind of thinking that leads to persistently useful conclusions.

The article calls out the phone but mine phone often provides inspiration (caveat: curated use of less than a half hour).

The real barriers to this deep thought are weekday work schedules; they have me out the door shortly after waking up. (FTR, insomnia says NO to waking 2hrs earlier).
by s17n | 2025-08-08 21:03:21+00:00
A lot of people are in fact defending the game, just look at the replies to my post. I'm a staunch free speech proponent but defending this game is like defending the Nazis' right to march - we should defend the right to create it on principle, but also we should be clear that like the nazis, the creators of this game are despicable, the game has no value, and the world would be better off if the game didn't exist.

I think its obvious that making the game should be legal, and also obvious that platforms like Steam should ban it. Payment processors are a weird middle ground, I'll leave it to smarter people than me to figure out the ethics there.
by geoffeg | 2025-08-08 21:04:10+00:00
Most aircraft have a GPS on the panel that can show you the airspace around you and along your flight path, but it's not a required instrument. It's more of a 2D depiction of the airspaces, but there are three dimensional depictions on them. There's also apps like ForeFlight and Garmin Pilot that you can run on a tablet or phone.

Before those electronic methods became ubiquitous pilots used paper charts and references and used ground references, pilotage and navigation aids to determine their position on that paper map. For instance, here's the complex airspace around the aircraft owner's home airport. https://skyvector.com/?ll=33.897663018511054,-117.6024627647...
by YetAnotherNick | 2025-08-08 21:04:39+00:00
Deepseek main run costed $6M. qwen3-30b-a3b probably would cost few $100Ks, which is ranked 13th.

GPU cost of the final model training isn't the biggest chunk of the cost and you can probably replicate results of models like Llama 3 very cheaply. It's the cost of experiments, researchers, data collection which brings overall cost 1 or 2 order of magnitude higher.
by opo | 2025-08-08 21:05:00+00:00
>The bombs didn't cause Japan to surrender.

According to Togo they did:

>...Meanwhile in the afternoon of August 8, before the entry of the Soviet Union into the war or the bombing of Nagasaki, the emperor met with Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo. Shortly after the war, Togo affirmed that the emperor stated the war must end at this meeting. New evidence now confirms Togo’s account that it was the atomic bomb that moved the emperor to decide to end the war.

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/japans-surren...
by danbruc | 2025-08-08 21:05:12+00:00
Then it's not maths fault it tries to find an answer that matches your persistence, especially since I'm sure somewhere in its training set alabamer exists.

It is not supposed to find an answer that matches my persistence, its supposed to tell the truth or admit that it does not know. And even if there is an alabamer in the training set, that is either something else, not a US state, or a misspelling, in neither case should it end up on the list.
by nmca | 2025-08-08 21:05:33+00:00
Isn’t the answer to the question just classic economies of scale?

You can’t run GPT4 for yourself because the fixed costs are high. But the variable costs are low, so OAI can serve a shit ton.

Or equivalently the smallest available unit of “serving a gpt4” is more gpt4 than one person needs.

I think all the inference optimisation answers are plain wrong for the actual question asked?
by tomhow | 2025-08-08 21:05:36+00:00
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Please don't post shallow dismissals...

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by SlowTao | 2025-08-08 21:06:12+00:00
The more I think about it the more I find it kind of odd yet somewhat endearing that we have so much of our lives determined by the orbit of the planet. Not so much things that are actually affected by it like seasons and its impacts on ecology, but on a yearly scale we had software updates, new hardware and financial reconciliation. Things that all feel so abstract and yet are tied to the cycle of our rock spinning around the sun. The druids approve!

So I have no issue when something like a laptop being pushed back, it was all very arbitrary anyway. Can they release is a Mars based yearly cadence?
by lern_too_spel | 2025-08-08 21:07:08+00:00
I mean to say that it's incorrect to claim that the Chinese civil war is ongoing and even more incorrect to say that one side of it does a good job manufacturing chips. The part of the KMT that fled to Taiwan constitutes a minority of Taiwan's population and is not even politically dominant any more, and the rest were Japanese citizens who then became Taiwanese citizens, never having fought in a civil war.
by jcranmer | 2025-08-08 21:07:43+00:00
The role of the atomic bombings in compelling Japanese surrender is still hotly debated, and will remain so until the end of time because, quite frankly, we don't have the historical record that will conclusively decide the debate.

Strategic bombing, outside of maybe the two atomic bombings, has never compelled an enemy's surrender despite several attempts to do so. And the fact that the bomber corps's own survey, trying to argue for the value of its work, suggested that it alone was capable of bringing Japan to surrender without any other forces given enough time should be regarded with a healthy degree of skepticism.
by cnst | 2025-08-08 21:08:06+00:00
I'm writing this on a 16GB M1 MacBook Air, but I've gotten disillusioned with macOS and Macs.

When everything is done in a browser, the biggest differentiator on a laptop would be monitor and peripheral support, and Apple is behind the competition.

macOS has no support for daisy-chaining with DP MST, no support for a second monitor (new to M1, the 2020 Intel model does support dual external monitors), no way to turn-off antialiasing, limited ports, RAM and storage options, limited repair and expansion options.

Why exactly do we even still use macOS anyways?

Even the cheapest Chromebook laptops have better monitor support and better expandability, at 1/10th the cost.
by amalcon | 2025-08-08 21:08:21+00:00
If anything, it would be even more so. If a person on the moon had a medical emergency, this would be a serious problem but there's another person there to help and/or fly the lander back to the capsule. If the person in the capsule had a medical emergency, it's hard to see how any of the crew survive.

More likely though, as you suggest, the same astronomical standards (pun intended) applied to all crew members.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-08-08 21:08:55+00:00
During times of high utilization, how do they handle more requests than they have hardware? Is the software granular enough that they can round robin the hardware per token generated? UserA token, then UserB, then UserC, back to UserA? Or is it more likely that everyone goes into a big FIFO processing the entire request before switching to the next user?

I assume the former has massive overhead, but maybe it is worthwhile to keep responsiveness up for everyone.
by toast0 | 2025-08-08 21:08:56+00:00
Ok well, rant time. The forum stuff yeah ok.

But why do I have to run the scan? Why doesn't it run automatically in the background. What happened that lead to whatever it's fixing... is the telemetry working???

I also find it amazing when the windows store manages to end up broken and need to be reinstalled... Why doesn't it fix itself? And what with all the signature verification stuff, why doesn't whatever is corrupting the files not fail the signature check.

Thanks for reading my newsletter.
by andrewgleave | 2025-08-08 21:10:05+00:00
Yeah. Read “Programming as Theory Building” by Naur [1] to understand why you need to still need to develop a theory of the problem and how to model it yourself lest the LLM concoct (an incorrect) one for you.

[1] https://gwern.net/doc/cs/algorithm/1985-naur.pdf
by mulmen | 2025-08-08 21:10:14+00:00
In my city the cops are most likely to be the ones terrorizing people. In the last 5 years they:

Teargassed a neighborhood, escalating a protest to violence.

Hit and killed a woman with their car then laughed about it.

> "Yeah, just write a check," Auderer says, chuckling. "$11,000. She was 26 anyway, she had limited value."

Threatened to close the precinct in the largest residential neighborhood in the country if their scope of responsibility was reduced.

Committed voter fraud in an attempt to defeat police reformers.

Participated in an insurrection.

Covered up officer involvement in the January 6th insurrection by refusing to name the officers involved.

They’re not a trustworthy bunch.
by chongli | 2025-08-08 21:10:20+00:00
The path we’ve taken was definitely not inevitable, just like the path a ball takes down a long bumpy hill. Yet the broad strokes of where that ball ends up are reasonably foreseeable: at some local minimum but not necessarily a global minimum.

So what are the broad strokes of humanity that could have reasonably been foreseen? A trend towards greater societal social complexity, increased resource consumption, increased energy use, economic efficiency, and wealth concentration.
by kristopolous | 2025-08-08 21:11:05+00:00
They mentioned The Little Mermaid. Divine was slated to voice Ursula ... I wonder how that would have changed the legacy. Ursula was designed after Divine but that was fairly insider knowledge.

Having the John Waters drag queen actually voice her, it might have made a lot of people not consider it a family film in 1989.

Disney has a long history of gay-coded characters that the mainstream doesn't really pick up on and just reads as wacky or eccentric, such as here, in 1941: https://youtu.be/H2iT9kfsMKU?si=-5Z6_qgaUyucDJXg&t=82
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-08-08 21:12:12+00:00
Really, they could probably get away with selling M4 devices for another couple cycles. As far as performance is concerned, even going back to the M1, the only group feeling inadequacies large enough to make upgrading a “must” are those whose needs sit within spitting distance of cusp of consumer/prosumer computing. Battery life is still industry leading with only a handful of competitors just recently being able to claim similar real world numbers (thanks mostly to Lunar Lake, which isn’t available for many models and comes at the cost of some performance).

I’ve used both M1 Max and M4 Max machines extensively and while the latter is a good deal faster, it’s only really noticeable with longer sustained tasks and particularly large projects. The high-RAM variants of M1 models in particular should continue to be quite servicable for some time to come.
by ActorNightly | 2025-08-08 21:12:12+00:00
You can have one module with all the capability, but the capability is separated into submodules. And the __init__.py of the module doesn't auto import the submodules

So when you do this

import bigmodule

It doesn't do anything functionality, and you may only have some small top level things available for you, like bigmodule.config, or bigmodule.logging.

Then, you have your big initializer code in bigmodule.financedata. But the stuff you need for running scripts is in bigmodule.scripts.

So when you write

from bigmodule import financedata

This code will take a while.

But if you write

from bigmodule import scripts

This will load fast.

You don't need to have gazillion modules, just good organization. Also, in general, its a good practice to gate intensive compute/network operations behind an explicit function you need to call.

Also thank you for focusing the convo on the tech stuff instead of repeating finance bro myths