MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-08-18 05:53:28+00:00
The vector based simd of RISC-V is very neat. Very hard but also very neat. Rather than having fixed instructions for specific "take 4 fp32 and multiply by 3 fp32" then needing a new instruction for fp64 them a new one for fp32 x fp64 them a new one for 4 x 4, it generalizes the instructions to be more data shape agnostic: here's a cross product operation, you tell us what the vector lengths are going to be, let the hardware figure it out.

I also really enjoyed Semantic Streaming Registers paper, which makes load/store implicit in some ops, adds counters that can walk forward and back automatically so that you can loop immediately and start the next element, have the results dropped into the next result slot. This enables near DSP levels of instruction density, to be more ops focused rather than having to spend instructions writing and saving each step. https://www.research-collection.ethz.ch/bitstream/20.500.118...

I still have a bit of a hard time seeing how we bridge CPU and GPU. The whole "single program multiple executor" waves aspect of the GPU is spiritually just launching a bunch of tasks for a job, but I still struggle to see an eventual convergence point. The GPU remains a semi mystical device to me.
by goku12 | 2025-08-18 05:53:48+00:00
Ridicule based on arbitrary and frivolous attributes are shaped by jealousy and the associated urge to eliminate social competition. That's why the highly talented kids (even adults at times) are bullied. Meanwhile, such peer pressure has an awfully powerful influence on emotions and decisions. Both are fundamental human behaviors and they're not going away. The only way to overcome it is to burn some social capital by calling it out and protesting it. If you're lucky, you may even earn some social capital.

> or how most westerners are very uncomfortable with "skin lightening" as a beauty thing

I'm not sure I catch the meaning (due to cultural differences). Could you elaborate?
by latentsea | 2025-08-18 05:54:13+00:00
If it's a given that it's a problem, and that we want to do something about it, then the discussion is what should we do about it? So we have to pick something.

The only suggestions I see are things like Chat Control and things like "how about be a better parent". In practice, neither of these work. Chat Control we lose out on too much privacy and get dangerously closer to 1984. "Just be a better parent" is basically the strategy we have now, and it isn't working. I wrote in another comment what happened to my niece, I won't repeat it, but TL;DR as a parent you don't know what you don't know and your best efforts can go in vain.
by yosefk | 2025-08-18 05:55:55+00:00
The examples are from the latest versions of ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Google AI Overview. I did not bother to list the full conversations because (A) LLMs are very verbose and (B) nothing ever reproduces, so in any case any failure is "abnormally bad." I guess dismissing failures and focusing on successes is a natural continuation of our industry's trend to ship software with bugs which allegedly don't matter because they're rare, except with "AI" the MTBF is orders of magnitude shorter
by protocolture | 2025-08-18 05:56:25+00:00
>just ends up with a prescription for some pharmaceutical that they can't ever get off of.

"Just"

Man it took me like 15 years to get my pharmaceutical. In terms of quality of life improvement the only thing I regret was not driving a bulldozer through the doctors office 14 years ago and demanding them at gun point. Instead I was forced through a dance of dumb shit like you suggest to prove I actually have a problem. If 10 dipshits promoting stupid wellness shit, and 1 bottle of my meds were in a house fire, I would save my meds.

I would tell you to go to therapy, but basic human decency has to be learned at a much younger age and I dont think you have a chance sadly.
by famouswaffles | 2025-08-18 05:57:44+00:00
I put the basic prompt to 5 medium thinking in the API (because most of the writing gains seems to be tucked away in the reasoning mode and because you can't trust the router for this stuff) and this is what i got. It's not flash fiction, more a short story, but i'm impressed.

https://pastebin.com/huGhbX7u
by godelski | 2025-08-18 05:57:52+00:00
> it just generates the same old fairy tale plots using the new words it has learned.

I think you're leaving out the best part! I don't want to spoil it, it's a short story. Classic trope, but still. Story here[0]

On another note, as an avid SciFi lover I have always found it interesting that in books, movies, and shows there have been many machines that talk and do complex tasks yet no one ever thought they were alive. Just take Star Trek. The simulations in the Holodeck are highly realistic and intended to mimic real humans. Or even the computer is able to speak and write code as requested. Far more advanced than our systems today. There's even that famous episode in TNG with Data where they are questioning if he is actually alive or not. Not such an easy thing but yet every viewer probably thought he was and recognized the difference between him and the computer and Holodeck[1]. Though my favorite version of that question is in Asimov's The Positronic Man (basis of the movie Bicentennial Man and yes, Asimov is why Data has a Positronic brain). These are fiction, but I find this so interesting. I feel like our LLMs look much more like the computer from Star Trek than the Holograms let alone Data. Yet, I think there's a lot of disagreement about the level of intelligence of these systems and it makes me wonder why someone would say the computer in Star Trek isn't intelligent but the LLM is (I'm sure there's retconning too).

[0] https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com/sffaudio-usa/mp3s/Someda...

[1] Well there is Voyager. And that episode from TNG. But go read [0] ;)
by bob1029 | 2025-08-18 05:58:13+00:00
I cut my power bill significantly by moving 70 miles from the ERCOT region to the MISO region. This wasn't the reason for the move, but it was a happy side effect.

MISO/Entergy has some of the cheapest power out of all the US regions [0]. The heavy, fully-amortized coal mix combined with the Mississippi River makes for a hell of a combo. Barges can deliver fuel at a 2-3x lower cost than rail per ton-mile.

[0] https://www.entergytexas.com/wp-content/uploads/eti_rs.pdf
by otherme123 | 2025-08-18 05:59:08+00:00
IMHO it is a good choice. You shouldn't have variables around that are different only on one cased character, or because one is snake_case and the other is camelCase. It also avoids the contamination of your code when using for example a C library in snake_case while your library uses camelCase. And finally, you can refactor a library in snake_case to camelCase without breaking dependent code.
by unignorant | 2025-08-18 05:59:21+00:00
In another reply I gave an example of something you can do: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44937774

I enjoy writing so a system like this would never replace that for me. But for someone who doesn't enjoy writing (or maybe can't generate work that meets their bar in the Ira Glass sense of taste) I think this kind of setup works okay for generating flash even with today's models.
by thinkzilla | 2025-08-18 05:59:27+00:00
While the post uses DPO to illustrate RL and RLHF, in fact DPO is an alternative to RLHF that does not use RL. See the abstract of the DPO paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18290, and Figure 1 in the paper: "DPO optimizes for human preferences while avoiding reinforcement learning".

The confusion is understandable. The definition of RL in the Sutton/Barto book extends over two chapters iirc, and after reading it I did not see how it differed from other learning methods. Studying some of the academic papers cleared things up.
by tygra | 2025-08-18 06:01:50+00:00
I don't think we're comparing apples to apples here. Using a mobile browser certainly opened the door to more tracking, but at the end of the day it was mostly about ads and profiling. With AI, the scale is very different. These systems can learn far more about you from the questions you ask and the data you provide. That makes privacy and data protection a much bigger concern than ever before.
by gigatexal | 2025-08-18 06:03:24+00:00
Oh cool a blockchain crypto thing that will actually be compliant and do KYC and such and not take forever to settle things.

If crypto destroys the fx money changer companies that charge egregious fees and makes it such that I can send money to friends and family without delay and fees I’d be all for that.

Maybe sane officials will let the US Federal Reserve launch a digital dollar and finally fix all the middle men sucking no-value-added rents out of the financial system
by camillomiller | 2025-08-18 06:04:08+00:00
Look, if criticizing Meta because they enabled genocide in Myanmar and induce depression in teenage girls (as per their own admission) is booing, I don’t know what to say. The question was clear: Meta has been proven beyond doubt to be a company led by people who couldn’t care less about their impact on society. Therefore, here’s the question, what makes you still work for them apart from money, if you have any sliver of ethics.
by lelanthran | 2025-08-18 06:04:41+00:00
> Does "career development" just mean "more money"? If so, why not just say "there are opportunities to make more money"?

That was not my takeaway, because earlier he alluded (twice) to the fact that titles are a thing:

1. A senior technical person who can't turn on a computer and an analyst not being able to speak english,

2. `I have met no less than 6 (six) people with the title "head of architecture".`

So I am guessing that is what he means by "career development"; you can acquire impressive titles.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-08-18 06:05:13+00:00
What I've read is that C++'s biggest compiling problem is specifically that the language is difficult to parse. You can't compile without parsing, so no, they're not orthogonal problems. Compiling is a parsing step followed by an emission step.

(And just to be completely clear, I'm not saying that the difficulty of parsing C++ makes it miserable to write a compiler. I'm saying that the difficulty of parsing C++ makes it miserable to run a compiler.)
by yawaramin | 2025-08-18 06:05:56+00:00
You are missing the point. We are talking about not even parsing the Markdown. We are talking about reading it raw. Literally raw-dogging it. At that point it doesn't even matter, we just want a format that's brain-dead simple.

HTML transformation is a bonus on top of that. If we want that we will mandate a specific Markdown engine with a strict parser.
by edg5000 | 2025-08-18 06:05:57+00:00
Can we build a blockchain/P2P-based web crawler that can create snapshots of the entire web with high integrity (peer verification)? The already-crawled pages would be exchanged through bulk transfer between peers. This would mean there is an "official" source of all web data. LLM people can use snapshots of this. This would hopefully reduce the amount of ill-behaved crawlers, so we will see less draconian anti-bot measures over time on websites, in turn making it easier to crawl. Does something like this exist? It would be so awesome. It would also allow people to run a search engine at home.
by delusional | 2025-08-18 06:07:22+00:00
The problem with a good "blockchain crypto thing" is that if they were going to be good anyway, there are much better/cheaper technologies for doing banking.

Blockchain technology is not just a scam industry by happenstance. The technology is so bad at what it usefully does that it necessitates being a scam industry. If it was to compete with mainline banking, it would lose 10 times out of 10.
by lifthrasiir | 2025-08-18 06:08:14+00:00
> This is because an "agglutinative" language is one in which syntax markers are more or less independent of any other syntax markers that may apply to the same word†, which means it's always possible by definition to consider those markers to be "words" themselves.

I think SIL's definition is, while robust, not the usual definition because English can be regarded as agglutinative in this definition. This is particularly visible from the statement that most European languages are somewhat fusional [1], which is okay under their definitions but not the usual way we think of English.

In my understanding, the analyticity is a spectrum and highly analytic languages with most (but not necessarily all) words containing just one morpheme are said to be isolating. Words in agglutinative languages can be, but not necessarily have to be, analyzed as a main morpheme ("word") with dependent morphemes attached ("affixes"). Polysynthetic languages go further by allowing multiple main morphemes in one word. As languages tend to become synthetic (as opposed to analytic), the space-separated "word" is less useful [2] and segmentation gets harder and harder. reST's failure to support those languages is all about a bad assumption about segmentation.

[1] https://glossary.sil.org/term/fusional-language

[2] So much that several agglutinative languages---in which space-separated words can still be useful---don't even think about spacing, e.g. Japanese.
by somat | 2025-08-18 06:08:56+00:00
Best guess, high altitude atomic oxygen.

Based on the wikipedia aurora article it sounds like the lower atmosphere has a more mixed bag of gasses, so it glows white, while in the upper atmosphere atomic oxygen(note that oxygen lower down is all diatomic and glows green) is able to showcase it's characteristic red glow.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora#Colours_and_wavelengths...

But now I am wondering about the green(oxygen?) and yellow(sodium?) atmospheric bands visable. The green one is interesting because it may tear apart my atomic oxygen theory. why would a green diatomic band be above the red atomic sprite flare?
by nradov | 2025-08-18 06:09:21+00:00
You are overstating the benefits of fasting. While it can be an effective weight loss strategy for some people, for those of us at a healthy weight there is no reliable evidence that it will improve lifespan compared to eating the same nutrients spread out across multiple meals.

I'm a large man and fairly active so I have to consume ~3000 kcal/day to maintain weight. If I try to eat that much in one meal it will make me physically sick. My digestive system just can't handle that much in one bolus.
by rootsudo | 2025-08-18 06:09:50+00:00
Government = USA Blocking Export.

Smuggling = Hiding GPU Video cards in anything to bypass restriction.

Corruption = ???? USA and China are in some chip war for some time now so that.

China companies/people want to buy, can't, some guy takes video in Hong Kong/China and USA and interviews random people.

--

Sometimes I wonder what it'd take to make a video about stuff, but I didn't think the bar was this low - maybe because I do travel to USA, China and Japan quite often as well as other South East Asia and do pop into data centers/tech circles but this just seems like someones vlog about current affairs in USA.
by renewiltord | 2025-08-18 06:10:15+00:00
You can disconnect from the grid but just like having a lawyer on retainer cost something so does having the power company on retainer.

It's why cloud servers cost so much more than your own on-prem solution, and on-demand offices more than your own.

And if you want an engineer on call it's gonna cost you. If you work in software, think about it, how much would you charge for a job where they could call you anytime and expect you to start work.
by sho | 2025-08-18 06:10:26+00:00
Ah, you put me on the spot! Here's what i can dig up in short order.

Reed, Thomas C. At the Abyss: An Insider's History of the Cold War. Presidio Press/Ballantine Books, 2004

relevant quote (from 1992):

> The Soviets were well aware of nuclear weapon safety issues. Even though that subject touches on the internals of weapon design, they were willing to talk and seek advice. They discussed the merits of their transportation containers, which they felt to be superior to U.S. models, and they confirmed that their weapons were “disabled” when in storage, whatever that meant. On the other hand, security (preventing theft or misuse) was a new subject to them. Throughout the Soviet system nuclear weapons had been secured by operational means: people watching people who watched still other people. The Soviets confirmed that there were no electronic or mechanical locking devices on their weapons (as there are in the U.S.), a subject that grew to be of enormous concern as the KGB disappeared, the army disintegrated, and well-financed terrorists infiltrated the country.

RAND corp - From Testing to Deploying Nuclear Forces The Hard Choices Facing India and Pakistan (1998) - https://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP192.html

> There are two ways to do this. One way is to use a mechanical device, which prevents the arming of the weapon unless the proper code is entered. In the United States, such devices, used extensively on U.S. weapons, are called Permissive Action Links (PALs). The other way is to use specially selected personnel in an organization separate from the military to maintain weapons control. This method was used in the old Soviet Union and is still used by Russia. India must decide on the combination of these two methods that it wants to use.

Interesting report from Sweden's defense research agency in 2005 - concluding that no-one knows if Russia's tactical nukes have PALs (majority of warheads in UA were tactical) - https://www.foi.se/rest-api/report/FOI-R--1588--SE

I hope this at least shows that it's not quite as settled a question as some make out! And I realize these aren't quite as "primary" as I had remembered; I thought they had more direct quotes, but I do find these sources quite credible.
by marxism | 2025-08-18 06:10:33+00:00
Why a relay server? I want an app to just work with no fuss while running an AI agent on arbitrary consumer hardware. Having both the mobile app and agent wrapper process connect outwards through any firewalls and networks to a third computer on the public internet is the most boring and dumb way for it always to work.

Plus I wanted a system that did not require the app and the computer running the AI agent to both be online at the same time. Having a third computer act as a dumb mailbox handles some corner cases I care about.

I've been trying to surreptitiously get claude code and an oven specific MCP server to run on my friend's smart oven for a prank. However this oven enters a low power state when you don't interact with it; killing the network connection. My vision is to queue up commands via the mobile app with fuzzy logic, and then have the oven make weird noises as determined by claude code at some later point when they go to make a pizza or something.
by whacked_new | 2025-08-18 06:12:52+00:00
so is this something like core's interpretation of things like ztellman's manifold (https://github.com/clj-commons/manifold)?

EDIT:

gpt says,

Choose core.async.flow when you want a declarative, monitorable process graph over channels (pause/resume, error channel, flow monitor).

Choose Manifold when you need deferreds/streams as general primitives, precise per-op backpressure, error-aware chaining, or you’re in the Aleph/Netty stack.

very abstract but based on this, the answer is no.
by topato | 2025-08-18 06:13:19+00:00
Oh yeah, that IS a good point, this verification technique is even stupider than CC number validation in the late 90s!

Then again, these laws aren't about censoring children's access, they're about censoring EVERYONE'S access (and it blows my mind that conservative leaders will come right out and say it, but the average layperson doesn't seem to care or comprehend what a massive slippery slope censorship is -- porn is just the start)
by adityaathalye | 2025-08-18 06:17:25+00:00
A better source: 2024 survey analysis (and results): https://clojure.org/news/2024/12/02/state-of-clojure-2024

- 2024 Highlights - Trends Over Time - 2024 New Users - Previous Results

Now... If we are pointing out isolated facts to make an argument, I would caution that survey popularity (sensitive to timing, duration, outreach etc.) is less telling---and less statistically significant---than isolated facts like this:

> Clojure versions

> Clojure 1.12.0 was released in September 2024 and the survey showed rapid uptake, with 58% already using it, and 65% developing or deploying with the prior versions 1.11, and a steep drop-off after that. Clojure’s focus on stability and avoiding breaking changes makes upgrades safe and easy.

> Trends (use at work, hobby, and study have all up-trended)

> https://clojure.org/news/2024/12/02/state-of-clojure-2024#tr...

> Because this survey has been running since 2010 (thanks to Chas Emerick originally!), we have lots of great longitudinal data and it’s interesting to compare some of the answers over time.

> Looking at the question of how Clojure developers use Clojure, we can see this has generally trended more towards using it at work. However, this year we saw an uptick of people using it for hobbies or in their studies:
by tdeck | 2025-08-18 06:17:26+00:00
> manufacturing in the U.S. is fine. It's just highly, highly automated.

It's interesting that you mention this because most of the small-time inventors I've seen online in the electronics space either build things in their garage by hand or have them fabricated in China (or occasionally another poor country like Vietnam). Custom PCB production and assembly at places like JLCPCB and PCBWay (both in China) appears to be highly automated. But getting the same thing made in the US in smaller quantity is going to cost not a little bit more, but often ten times as much. And it will require "relationship building" with a job shop, rather than just uploading something to a website and paying for airmail delivery. And will likely have a longer lead time. To say nothing of the fact that most of the components you're buying are made in China anyway.

So it may be fine to manufacture a large run finished consumer product in the US, but it's very capital intensive. For new products that aren't attached to an existing massive corporation with domestic production capability, you basically have to outsource to be price competitive and do any kind of volume beyond your own garage. I would be love to be proven wrong and learn about other options in the US but when I looked around I wasn't too impressed.
by AnonC | 2025-08-18 06:17:35+00:00
Sorry to get on to a related topic, since the NextDNS team may be looking at these comments. Is there any plan at all to revive the iOS app (last updated in 2020) so that the toggle in the app actually works? I don’t like installing a NextDNS profile because it doesn’t offer the flexibility to turn it off or on as needed. The app used to work pre-2020, but doesn’t now.

On my iPhone, at any given date and time, it’s just a random occurrence of whether NextDNS (with the app) works or not. Visiting test.nextdns.io may show “unconfigured” or a NextDNS endpoint.

Various posts on the forums by several people over the years have not been responded to.

I’d like to know if the team is ever going to work on this. If not, just remove the app from the App Store so that people don’t assume that it works when it doesn’t.
by topato | 2025-08-18 06:18:16+00:00
Ive had massive amounts of trouble convincing people that pornography is just the tip of the iceberg. That's why it's such an effective tool for broaching massive-scale surveillance: the architects of these laws have said that they want to be able to police all content with these laws, and anyone who tries to speak out against them can be painted as a pervert who hates the safety of kids.
by nl | 2025-08-18 06:20:31+00:00
I have a relative with a 30kWh battery on Amber. They spent AU$10k for it after subsidies.

They don't expect to ever pay for electricity again - instead their biggest problem with Amber is what to do when they are overproducing. They got charged $2.50 the other day when they didn't curtail production and had to dump power into the grid!