MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by joliu | 2025-08-07 05:17:18+00:00
It does run inference, but on the batch of tokens that were drafted, akin to the prefill phase.

So your draft model can decode N new tokens, then the real model does one inference pass to score the N new drafted tokens.

Prefill is computation bound whereas decode is bandwidth bound, so in practice doing one prefill over N tokens is cheaper than doing N decode passes.
by okucu | 2025-08-07 05:18:02+00:00
The one I responded to was talking about something else.

You trust what the parties are saying rather than what they're actually doing? Is this a joke? The biggest warmongering party the greens are supposed to be left? This is tagesschau levels of propaganda.

You are talking about greens, the party that wants to deport everyone who criticizes Israel, sues everyone who insults them, and they literally warned against a "linksruck".
by flomo | 2025-08-07 05:18:27+00:00
The context there was Compaq sold some of the highest-end PC systems, they were into 386/486, servers, UNIX, SMP, rackmount, RAID, etc, "IBM wouldn't sell you this stuff". So, reading between the lines there, Compaq ran into this problem first and 'fixed-it' in a backwards compatible way.

(Compaq had a fantastic reputation which they tarred with shitty consumer PCs. HPE still sells Proliants, and I'd guess they still use 'compaq screws'.)
by t_mann | 2025-08-07 05:18:36+00:00
> this would be the death of expensive university educations. That obviously didn’t happen

Maybe a bit early to declare that, as the wave of college closures has shown no signs of slowing after the Covid years [0] and is expected to accelerate further [1]?

[0] https://www.2adays.com/blog/college-shutdown-surge-update-th...

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/91245055/higher-education-crisis...
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-08-07 05:19:27+00:00
> Britain was trying to impose their authority like a foreign occupation, rather than treating the colonies as an equal and integrated part of the Empire.

...to be fair, Brits back at home paid way, way more tax than Colonials did, and also had to pay market rate for tea, among other things. If Britain treated the Colonies like the rest of Britain, it wouldn't have taken until 1775 for them to revolt.

Didn't have to be that way, though. Treat the Colonies more like the Persian Empire treated its conquered states, and the USA today would just be "lower Canada".
by tolmasky | 2025-08-07 05:19:48+00:00
It's too bad startups can't invest $600B in local manufacturing to get a tariff carve out, right? Oh well, not like entrenching one of the largest companies on Earth even further could be damaging for the economy, competitiveness, or consumers.

> This is a large, measurable, and multi-year commitment. It should be acknowledged as such.

We'll see. The multi-year nature can be seen as a feature or a bug. The benefits are delivered today: tariff carve outs. The promises can be scaled back at any time in the future. We're dealing with what is likely to be an incredibly anomalous economic... "policy". It is likely to not stick around once the current administration leaves, and perhaps even during the course of the current administration. If tariffs go away in the future, then the threat (and reward) disappear along with it. We'll see how incentivized Apple is to keep these commitments under those conditions if they come about.

> Of course, Apple’s global tax practices remain a fair target. But criticising every constructive move on that basis alone risks undermining the very kind of behaviour governments should encourage: strategic reinvestment, not financial engineering.

It should always go without saying that there are ways to go about this that don't involve policies that hurt both consumers and small companies alike. The CHIPS act was one example, and the benefits were arguably more evenly distributed (vs. a set of investments that probably disproportionately help the existing market leader). This administration went out of their way to dismantle that. No conversation about this should leave that out.

> Critics may argue Apple is acting in self-interest. So be it.

Neither this administration nor Apple seem to really care much about this. This matters for the reasons above: it doesn't make this deal particularly resilient. Both parties got what they wanted immediately: Apple got to avoid an unexpected roadblock (and perhaps gained an advantage over other companies), and Trump gets to look like he got this great deal. So what's to keep it around? This is why aligning actual long term incentives matters, vs. this short term nonsense. A congressional bill for example at minimum has constituents who will benefit or punish the representative at the polls. But we don't even need to get that technical, if neither party cares or believes in this at all, then it is of course set up to default fail. This is not a trivial undertaking we are talking about. It's not just a matter of getting the right parties to invest. You are asking to dramatically change a set of pipelines that have been established over the course of decades and regularly receive equivalent amounts of investment. If you actually want this to happen, you should care about how it happens, and you should realize it matters if this is made up entirely of cynical players with no real demonstrable upside in the end result.
by airhangerf15 | 2025-08-07 05:21:51+00:00
If you wrote some code, and then THREE YEARS LATER someone else uses that code for something malicious you did not intend, are you now responsible? That's what this case is about.

From a legal point of view, this is absolutely insane.

The jury only found him guilty on one count, and even the judge found it was the most likely to be appealed. The other two accounts the jury was deadlocked on, which should honestly terrify people. This should have been a cut and dry case. Roman seems pleased with the results, but this case should be getting a lot more attention:

https://xcancel.com/EleanorTerrett/status/195314608860242766...
by finaard | 2025-08-07 05:22:40+00:00
This is true - and a reason I'm not sure about this package. I'll still try it, but I don't think it's the right way forward.

Pretty much the only advantage is that you get access to logic available in the claude code CLI - which in large parts probably already exists in emacs or extensions. On the downside it'll bind you to claude code.

I'm generally using a generic LLM wrapper - emacs has two good ones, gptel and llm. I have both configured, as both are required by some of the extensions I'm using, but currently prefer gptel: It seems to be more advanced, especially when it comes to tool use.

Advantage of that approach is that when you're hitting a wall with one LLM being stupid with one specific issue you can just switch to a different one. Or you can use the same environment with locally hosted LLMs.

Disadvantage is that the IDE/project functionality is not tied up that nicely yet - there are a few attempts (like minuet or evedel), but nothing I really got into.

Currently I'm mostly doing a chat buffer, and the LLM has tools available to inspect and to some extend alter the current state, published here: https://github.com/aard-fi/gptel-tool-library - that works pretty well on a per file basis, and to some extend it can figure out project details, but overall it lacks project info - in part that's a context limitation thing, where that info should be provided as additional context for each instruction (which I assume the CLI is doing).

What this approach also nicely enables is fun experimentations:

- https://github.com/aard-fi/buffer-turtle implements simple turtle graphics in an emacs buffer, and has bindings for the LLM to control the turtle - https://github.com/aard-fi/arch-installer has the glue to have the LLM interact with a serial port, and some glue (like basic ANSI escape parsing) to make the result look somewhat reasonable in an emacs buffer. That allows it to do stuff like trying to install Arch linux in a VM

Both repos have links to youtube videos with some runs.
by goosejuice | 2025-08-07 05:23:02+00:00
Appeals to myself? I'm stating an opinion on the regulatory uncertainty of automobile safety. Don't be ridiculous.

My problem with all of this is that the regulatory agencies that cover safety in this country did jack shit to prevent this. Blaming Tesla is a scapegoat. The NHTSA and the FTC could have prevented this, but they're just pointing fingers at Tesla. They dropped the ball.
by trod1234 | 2025-08-07 05:23:18+00:00
The problem is what happens when you need almost no workers because Agentic workflows have replaced all of them.

More jobs being destroyed than built means less money to spend by individuals, which means less profit, which means lower expectations, rinse repeat in a loop.

This is the deflation doom spiral, and the companies causing this cycle like most other problems think, this is a problem for next quarter; each time.
by kelvie | 2025-08-07 05:23:24+00:00
Don't y'all have a #emacs slack channel or equivalent at your company? I work for a medium-sized tech company and we have a single digit amount of emacs users I feel like. The channel is mostly dead except for a few tips and tricks and the odd time people asking how we each install it on our macbooks.

Anecdotally a lot of managers use Emacs, though that may be an age thing.

(I use emacs for Real Work, unless that Real Work involves a JVM. Still do all the git stuff in emacs/magit, though)
by bruceallmighty | 2025-08-07 05:23:27+00:00
I'd say there's a reason we've moved to daily contact lenses over re-usable ones, conveniently in a ~monthly~ 28-day pack!

There's obviously bound to be 'medical' and comfort reasons over disposable ones beyond the disposable society, but the cynic in me can't help but feel that research into longer-lasting more-comfortable reusable contacts would be taken through to market in preference to a more profitable cheaper-made daily product.
by airhangerf15 | 2025-08-07 05:24:29+00:00
It's been reported Roman sees this as a win:

https://xcancel.com/EleanorTerrett/status/195314608860242766...

It should still terrify people. It's just like the PGP/1990s encryption wars. Imagine being held responsible for some open source, MIT licensed software you wrote three years ago because someone else might have used it for something illegal.

This case is entirely about the DOJ wanting to stop any anonymous transactions. Both the Biden and Trump governments want crypto THEY control.
by anonym29 | 2025-08-07 05:24:40+00:00
So just to be clear, your take here is that the president violating the constitution isn't bad as long as the president feels that the ends justify the means?

The "rules" - the constitution, the law - must apply to everyone equally, otherwise it loses legitimacy.

If Trump believes that the means of deporting US citizens to CECOT without a trial (unconstitutional) is justified by his end goals, does that make him right to circumvent the judicial system, violating the laws established by the legislature in the process?

The system of checks and balances exists for a reason. It sets a dangerous precedent when any president treads astray of those constitutional guardrails, no matter what party, no matter what policy, because it empowers future presidents to do the same.

Maybe if more people did sympathize with these values, we wouldn't have the president shipping American citizens to prisons overseas without trial.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-08-07 05:24:53+00:00
Is it Jupiter that's unusually dense or this planet that's unusually light? Related, any idea what the feasible range of densities is for a planet of a given size? I always assumed something as large as Jupiter would be impossible for a human to set foot on due to being crushed.

A ball of foamed rock the size of a planet is an amusing thought but I have to assume that's physically impossible.
by furyofantares | 2025-08-07 05:25:00+00:00
Not an expert, but here's how I understand it. You know how input tokens are cheaper than output tokens? It's related to that.

Say the model so far has "The capital of France". The small model generates "is Paris.", which let's say is 5 tokens.

You feed the large model "The capital of France is Paris." to validate all 5 of those tokens in a single forward pass.
by throwaway284927 | 2025-08-07 05:26:05+00:00
To me, they both seem to be talking about what explains the perceived difference in effectiveness and efficiency between children and adults when they learn a new language.

The first comment seems to be arguing that the difference is "literally just a function of time and exposure opportunity and nothing else" (explicitly ruling out a significant effect related to a difference in brain plasticity related to age), while the comment you're answering to argues that brain plasticity, even under the same conditions of time and exposure opportunity, makes a significant difference.
by ameliaquining | 2025-08-07 05:27:06+00:00
In the U.S., renting a single-family home is not usually a particularly good idea. Because of the tax disadvantages that I mentioned upthread, but also because the market's relatively thin (in part because of said tax disadvantages) and this makes it harder to find a house you like as much.

(You can pay people to do maintenance tasks on your house, and if you rent then you're already indirectly paying for that. Professional landlords benefit a bit from economies of scale and such, but it's a minor difference.)
by m463 | 2025-08-07 05:27:18+00:00
Arch linux is a good roll-up-your-sleeves alternative to linux from scratch. It is the polar opposite of debian, forcing you to understand and make choices of how your system is set up, and what packages you install.

What is interesting is that after the initial hard install, you just keep on updating incrementally and there is never a "giant upgrade" like debian12 -> debian13
by bradley13 | 2025-08-07 05:29:08+00:00
ChatGPT didn't ruin anything. Lazy students did.

I'm a prof, and my experience so far is that - where AI is concerned - there are two kinds of students: (1) those who use AI to support their learning, and (2) those who use AI to do their assignments, thus avoiding learning altogether.

In some classes this has flipped the bell curve on its head: lots of students at either end, and no one in the middle
Show HN: Complexipy, calculate the cognitive complexity of Python
by rohaquinlop | 2025-08-07 05:29:41+00:00
This is a python CLI and library that calculates the cognitive complexity of Python files. Cognitive complexity is a metric that defines how easy (or hard) is a code, this is a metric focused on devs and AI agents.

I've developed complexipy to be fast and to help to keep projects easy to maintain.
by pmontra | 2025-08-07 05:30:43+00:00
It's not only about palladium or any other kind of ore. It's that you can launch from there to Earth orbit and spare most of the costs of lifting mass from the surface of our planet. Then you build habitats and ships with that stuff because it's much cheaper. Too bad we don't have neither mining nor factories in space yet. Two not trivial technologies to develop.

The book Delta V [1] explores that scenario, with an asteroid on an orbit close to Earth to minimize the delta v to ship things back home.

[1] https://daniel-suarez.com/Delta-v_synopsis.html
by simonw | 2025-08-07 05:30:51+00:00
This is a great explanation, thanks for putting it together.

It more or less fits my fuzzy mental model of how this stuff works.

I'm completely fine with my test prompt taking advantage of this - the point of "implement space invaders" is to explore how well it can construct a game of that shape based on the examples that it has seen in its training data, especially in comparison to other models.

I'm not trying for a test of ability to produce a unique new game - I want a short prompt that gets it to output some HTML and JavaScript that I can then interact with.
by recursivecaveat | 2025-08-07 05:31:38+00:00
Sometimes I wonder what an MOOC-like education that went all-in on signalling/credentialism would look like. You convince some real down-on-their-luck university to lend you their name to provide eduction for lower income adults, you rent a big empty room with folding chairs in downtown where people actually live a few nights a week, a contracted PhD with a tweed jacket and a blackboard lectures in person, curriculum straight from an old edition textbook with pen-and-paper tests.

What would it cost without the overhead of a whole university around it? Would adults attend?Would employers accept it? Hard to change eduction more than a little at a time, since the buyer is literally buying a "you did it" certificate for 10s of 1000s of dollars, they are justifiably risk averse. The person examining the credential also doesn't want to do individual research on every single person's eduction.
by vFunct | 2025-08-07 05:32:31+00:00
Yah I wish Apple made laptops like those Windows laptops, with angular wedged plastic housing holding a barely functioning trackpad and 30 different USB-A ports with grills and 5 fans and all topped off by bright rainbow LEDs everywhere and of course an Intel-Inside sticker so you remember what kind of CPU you have in case you forgot.

Maybe add a Dragon print on the cover as well? That would be so cool. I am also an adult.
by ahmedfromtunis | 2025-08-07 05:32:38+00:00
But what would happen if the small model's prediction was "is Rome."? Wouldn't that result in costlier inference if the small model is "wrong" more than it is correct.

Also, if the small model would be sufficiently more "correct" than "wrong", wouldn't be more efficient to get rid of the large model at this point?
by deaddodo | 2025-08-07 05:33:01+00:00
You’re picking and choosing, and being obscenely obtuse because you want to win a nothing internet argument.

They dual draft bills. A draft is not the same thing as a proposal. When it actually runs through the process, one of the two drafts runs its course (as a proposal) in the origination chamber. That same bill is then passed to the second chamber to get approved. If it happened “all the time”, you would link examples rather than barely related Georgetown University theory pieces.

Do I need to link you the “School House Rock” video? Or are you going to continue to link out of context/slightly tangential articles to try and prove your point in a typical armchair expert manner? If so, just move on and pretend you “won”; it’s more productive.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-08-07 05:33:24+00:00
Note: why do I ask if sections ever repeated, because removal of sections as coding error implies assembling document from parts which strikes me weird here but OK it is a common document pattern also, maybe someone thought it was a clever idea at the time.

But if you assemble documents you have two common types of bugs: missing parts of document bugs and parts of document repeating bugs.
by mjevans | 2025-08-07 05:34:16+00:00
7! 5040 has the less than useful property of being quite large for interacting with human scales.

5! 120 however lacks fine precision required at human scale. Haven't done the math but it's probably something like using 3.1 as the analog of Pi.

360 seems like it might have been chosen based on a mix of precision and practicality. Many small prime factors ( 2 2 2 3 3 5 ). Also an extra prior prime factor for every added prime. 75600 too big, and 12 what analog clock faces use as their primary number.
by cristoperb | 2025-08-07 05:35:06+00:00
My simplified understanding: The target model can validate the draft tokens all at once, in a single forward pass. The output of that forward pass is a list of probabilities for each draft token which are compared to the probabilities produced by the draft model. If the target model's probabilities are the same or greater than the draft model, the tokens are accepted. Worst case none of the draft tokens are accepted and instead the target model selects the single next token as usual.
by villgax | 2025-08-07 05:35:18+00:00
Total garbage move & good disclosure/warning of future work culture.

Open source really has shown how you do not need so much cruft/guilt-tripping to build on top of good models.

How sad is it to over work folks & be proud of it, sure if Cognition equity is going to the trash just as Windsurf's lol, the irony of all this grind.

Is the logic that working with AI will need grind, waiting for the burnout blogs to show up here in some time.
by atoav | 2025-08-07 05:35:21+00:00
I often handcode UI layouts and animations in C on embedded devices. I also use HTML and CSS a lot.

Sometimes I prefer the raw simplicity of writing your own layout code. You then basically just need X/Y coordinates, anchor points and dimensions of the screen and the elements on them. The rest can be done using simple arithmetic. The good thing about this is that you can do 95% of what people use CSS for, while using a handful of consistent methods. Wbile this to the uninitiated requires some introduction into how to think in a coordinate system, the simplicity can be refreshing.

Meanwhile in CSS you have a organically grown complexity of features where sometimes things that should be simple are hard, often because the elements that should be styled have default attributes with subtle differences which people aren't aware of. Only the minority could tell you the differences between display: inline, block, inline-block, contents, flex, grid, table, rable-column-group, etc. But elements may have them set per default.

I get that it is hard to simplify CSS for reasons of backwards compatibility, but sometimes I wish that instead of adding on top someone had had a long hard think about how to solve the problems elegantly and with consistency instead.
by isoprophlex | 2025-08-07 05:35:56+00:00
but... do you get any validation during the forward pass? the small model could just as well have generated "is Berlin." or whatever. do these models somehow give you a likelihood for the next token when you're prefilling, that you can compare against? if so why not just... use that always?

or is this a scenario where computation is expensive but validation is cheap?

EDIT: thanks, people, for educating me! very insightful :)
by throwaway290 | 2025-08-07 05:36:54+00:00
No, now there is more people who are not learning. Previously students had to learn. Group 2 was very small because you had to be very lucky to get your assignments done for you without learning at least something yourself. And if you half assed your assignment it would be noticeable by the lecturer. Now it is a no brainer for many people to be in group 2
by moomoo11 | 2025-08-07 05:37:20+00:00
Yeah. AI is a great tool.

I’m paying 200 for Claude code and another 60 bucks for other tools. I don’t need to hire anyone yet or waste my time delegating for same performance but 40x the cost .

The tools are as good as I can make them, so ultimately it’s on me and I like that.
by __rito__ | 2025-08-07 05:37:40+00:00
YouTube + a maintained webpage with slides, assignments, problem sets, midterm and final papers etc. is a fine combination.

MIT OCW is great in this regard.

But can't say that I didn't appreciate the interactive quizzes in MOOC platforms. They are really effective for me.

Fill-in-the-blanks type programming assignments are useless. But the written code can teach you.

In-video quizzes in Coursera is also good for learning, since they ask you something that you should be able to solve with video content up to time t, but they explain it later at t+1. I think the co-founder also mentions this in her TED talk. This is good. I apply it when I am teaching someone in-person.

I also did a lot of online group-studies. These are really really great. All you need is a Discord server or email group, and Google Meet. This approach is better than the usual MOOC setup.

I also deeply value cohort-based MOOCs with video meetings (like Neuromatch Academy) or without (like Complexity Explorer).

And I agree with your sentiment against 2-4 minute videos; slow web design, sometimes requiring interventions with mouse is not something I cherish in some MOOCs.