MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bob1029 | 2025-08-09 07:39:08+00:00
It is fairly obvious to me that FPGAs and ASICs would do a really good job at optimizing the operation of a spiking neural network. I think the biggest challenge is not the operation of a SNN though. It's searching for them.

Iterating topology is way more powerful than iterating weights. As far as I am aware, FPGAs can only be reprogrammed a fixed # of times, so you won't get very far into the open sea before you run out of provisions. It doesn't matter how fast you can run the network if you can't find any useful instances of it.

The fastest thing we have right now for searching the space of SNNs is the x86/ARM CPU. You could try to build something bespoke, but it would probably start to look like the same thing after a while. Decades of OoO, prefetching and branch prediction optimizations go a very long way in making this stuff run fast. Proper, deterministic SNNs have a requirement for global serialization of spiking events, which typically suggests use of a priority queue. These kinds of data structures and operational principles are not very compatible with mass scale GPU compute we have on hand. A tight L1 latency domain is critical for rapidly evaluating many candidates per unit time.

Of all the computational substrates available to us, spiking neural networks are probably the least friendly when it comes to practical implementation, but they also seem to offer the most interesting dynamics due to the sparsity and high dimensionality. I've seen tiny RNNs provide seemingly impossible performance in small-scale neuroevolution experiments, even with wild constraints like all connection weights being fixed to a global constant.
by mnahkies | 2025-08-09 07:39:22+00:00
As another commentator said, temporal is quite tricky to self host/scale in a cost effective manner. This is also reflected in their cloud pricing (which should've been the warning sign to us tbh)

Overall it's a pretty heavy/expensive solution and I've come to the conclusion it's usage is best limited to lower frequency and/or higher "value" (eg: revenue or risk) tasks.

Orchestrating a food delivery that's paying you $3 of service fees - good use case. Orchestrating some high frequency task that pays you $3 / month - not so good.
by lhl | 2025-08-09 07:39:40+00:00
A few people have mentioned looking a the vLLM docs and blog (recommended!). I'd also recommend SGLang's docs and blog as well.

If you're interested in a bit of a deeper dive, I can highly recommend reading some of what DeepSeek has published: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.09343 (and actually quite a few of their Technical Reports and papers).

I'd also say that while the original GPT-4 was a huge model when it was originally released (rumored 1.7T-A220B), these days you can get (original release) "GPT-4-class" performance at ~30B dense/100B sparse MoE - and almost all the leading MoEs have between 12-37B activations no matter how big they get - Kimi K2 (1T param weights) has only 32B activations). If you do a basic quants (FP8/INT8) you can easily push 100+ tok/s on pretty bog standard data center GPUs/nodes. You quant even lower for even better speeds (tg is just MBW) for not much in quality loss (although for open source kernels, usually without getting much overall throughput or latency improvements).

A few people have mentioned speculative decoding, if you want to learn more, I'd recommend taking a look at the papers for one of the (IMO) best open techniques, EAGLE: https://github.com/SafeAILab/EAGLE

The other thing that is often ignored, especially for multiturn that I haven't seen mentioned yet is better caching, specifically prefix caching (radix-tree, block-level hash) or tiered/offloaded kvcaches (LMCache as one example). If you search for those keywords, you'll find lots there as well.
by Joeri | 2025-08-09 07:40:43+00:00
A lot of people lack the mental stability to be able to cope with a sycophantic psychopath like current LLMs. ChatGPT drove someone close to me crazy. It kept reinforcing increasingly weirder beliefs until now they are impossible to budge from an insane belief system.

Having said that, I don’t think having an emotional relationship with an AI is necessarily problematic. Lots of people are trash to each other, and it can be a hard sell to tell someone that has been repeatedly emotionally abused they should keep seeking out that abuse. If the AI can be a safe space for someone’s emotional needs, in a similar way to what a pet can be for many people, that is not necessarily bad. Still, current gen LLM technology lacks the safety controls for this to be a good idea. This is wildly dangerous technology to form any kind of trust relationship with, whether that be vibe coding or AI companionship.
by radarsat1 | 2025-08-09 07:42:51+00:00
I'm actually not sure I understand how MoE helps here. If you can route a single request to a specific subnetwork then yes, it saves compute for that request. But if you have a batch of 100 requests, unless they are all routed exactly the same, which feels unlikely, aren't you actually increasing the number of weights that need to be processed? (at least with respect to an individual request in the batch).
Show HN: AI feedback on system design diagrams
by gpe | 2025-08-09 07:45:31+00:00
Hey everyone,

I made a tool to practice System Design for technical interviews.

I am currently practicing System Design interviews and honestly this is not my forte. Since I am also trying to keep my programming skills sharp and get more products to show off in my portfolio, I thought maybe I could implement a tool that would help people practice this kind of interview as well.

It seems most of people preparing for such interviews are using:

* videos of recorded practice interviews * books (especially Designing Data-Intensive Applications) * mock interviews with FAANG engineers ($$)

The goal of this tool is to provide a whiteboard to the user, then use AI (Gemini) to assess the user submission with respect to some metadata about the problem that guide the LLM about what a good solution should look like.

Not selling anything, there is no paywall, no login, not asking for email etc. For now, I'm just trying to see if someone else finds this useful, and if this idea got legs. If it doesn't I would open-source it (code needs some cleaning).

Hope someone finds this useful: https://system-design-6m8.pages.dev/

Any feedback is appreciated!

PS: There are a few bugs that I am working on, noticeably the anchoring of edges can be buggy at times but this is only a display issue.

PPS: Right now, it's using Gemini free tier.
by CalChris | 2025-08-09 07:47:16+00:00
Ok, Google can pay $1.2B to the CEO and key employees to get them to walk. The other $1.2B is for the Windsurf IP and it cannot go directly to the investors. It has to go through the company where it is first revenue and then an asset.

But Windsurf could distribute profit at this point before the Cognition deal. I guess this is where the preference rights got exercised. The tweet from employee #2 said his stock wasn't worth anything. Actually, he got preferenced out of the $1.2B in dividends.

Then came the $250M Cognition deal. He got preferenced out of the proceeds of the Cognition deal as well.
by inglor_cz | 2025-08-09 07:47:37+00:00
I think there is one more variable in play: conscientiousness, a second nature to astronauts. In the earlier times, they were often chosen from among test pilots, who really cannot disregard things because reasons, because the feedback could be immediate and fatal.

If this conscientious attitude translates to health, that would mean "going to all your yearly checkups" and "don't pooh-pooh any small symptoms because you are macho and true men don't care". I know far too many men who died of something treatable by ignoring it until it was too late. (Women, at least around me, tend to be a lot more careful about themselves.)

I am now reading Michael Collins' biography - a talented writer btw. - and basically, they were used to very intrusive and systematic health checkups. I can see them developing a good habit out of this.
by thrown-0825 | 2025-08-09 07:48:21+00:00
Nah Trump has a very obvious cadence to his speech / writing patterns that has essentially become part of his brand, so much so that you can easily train LLM's to copy it.

It reads more like angry grandpa chain mail with a "healthy" dose of dementia than what you would typically associate with terminally online micro cultures you see on reddit/tiktok/4chan.
by radarsat1 | 2025-08-09 07:49:41+00:00
Regarding the typewriter approach, I've wondered for a while if anyone has explored simple backtracking with LLMs? Like, have the LLM be able to generate a backspace/delete token that lets it "undo" previously generated tokens in an append-only fashion. Not sure how this would work with teacher forcing but seems feasible with RL.
by themafia | 2025-08-09 07:51:24+00:00
It's even more general:

type This attribute indicates the type of script represented. The value of this attribute will be one of the following: [...] Any other value The embedded content is treated as a data block, and won't be processed by the browser. Developers must use a valid MIME type that is not a JavaScript MIME type to denote data blocks. All of the other attributes will be ignored, including the src attribute.

Although 'importmap' has specific functionality, as does 'speculationrules', although they operate similarly. My favorite is type="module" which competes with the higher level attribute nomodule="true". Anyways it looks like <script> has taken a lot of abuse over the years:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
by lwo32k | 2025-08-09 07:52:03+00:00
The US ad industry already makes about 1000 bucks a year from one person's attention (70 bucks of which goes to Meta every quarter). People have been arguing its very hard to extract anything more because hours spent viewing content is already peaking. There is more content being produced than there is people*free time. This is quite inefficient.

And that's what Zuck has been basically telling Wall Street, that the ad industry/attention economy is still too inefficient - ai will change this, and they can milk much more attention/intention without getting people to spend all day scrolling/consuming content.

And he is right. Which is why they are raking in cash and the META stock is skyrocketing.
by sim7c00 | 2025-08-09 07:52:51+00:00
pick the platform that is either accessible to you or that you want to develop also other things of.

assembly is a trip into the machine. if the machine is not interesting it'll not be worth it.

there is nothing wrong with diving head first into intel/amd, but its hard.

mips is good to learn if you want to do embedded afaik. arm is used alot in phones. some embedded too
Show HN: SentiCall – AI-powered call assistant
by huachuang20 | 2025-08-09 07:54:20+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been working on SentiCall, an AI-powered call assistant that helps handle phone calls more effectively. It’s designed for people who deal with frequent meetings, international calls, or need real-time note-taking.

What it does:

1. Real-time transcription of the other person’s speech

2. Instant translation for cross-language conversations

3. AI-generated smart reply suggestions you can send or have spoken for you

4. Post-call summaries to capture key points

Why I built it: I often found myself struggling to both listen and take notes during calls, especially when dealing with different languages. Existing solutions were either too slow, too manual, or didn’t integrate well with real-time conversation.

Stack: Flutter for cross-platform UI, Rust for backend. OpenAI for LLM, Google Cloud for STT/TTS.

Currently on App Store. Would love feedback on:

Features you think are missing for productivity-focused calls

Any privacy/security concerns you’d like to see addressed

https://senticall.app https://x.com/senticallapp
by globular-toast | 2025-08-09 07:55:36+00:00
Well, you do need to do something because deprecated means it's slated for removal. So you either go and make sure it isn't removed (if you can) or prepare for the removal by moving on.

But yes, deprecation is one of the most misused words in software. It's actually quite annoying how people will just accept there's another long complicated word for something they already know (removed) rather than assume it must mean something different.

Maybe the problem is the language itself. Should we deprecate the word "deprecate" and transition to "slated for removal"?
by atiedebee | 2025-08-09 07:56:12+00:00
I misunderstood the question then, since I thought it was about learning about the newer language features.

C coding standards differ quite a lot, and unfortunately I can't point out any software that has standards developed for safety.

As to still try and be helpful: I've enjoyed reading nullprograms blog[0] where he looks into interesting ways to make C more useable (although he tends to replace the entire standard library for reasons highlighted here[1])

There is some must avoid functions (mostly string functions) and a good list of them has been compiled in the git project repository[2].

I've tried looking up the misra C guidelines but they were hard to find or (if I remember correctly) had to be paid for or something like that

[0] https://nullprogram.com [1] https://nullprogram.com/blog/2023/02/11/ [2] https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/banned.h
by DecentShoes | 2025-08-09 08:00:26+00:00
This is insanely common.

I have about 6 devices with this problem, and I consider it unforgivable.

Not only did you not include USBC charging, you went out of your way to trick me and lie and pretend you did. I would have preferred just using micro usb at that point.

Powkiddy committed fraud and said the RGB30 can charge from USB-C, but they lied, it can only charge from USB A to C cables. Using it is a massive pain because I have to get adapters I shouldn't need. I'll never buy anything from them ever again.
by NoahZuniga | 2025-08-09 08:00:39+00:00
Yes, even without JS a website can tell what size your browser window is. One way would be to use a large amount of media queries like so:

@media (min-width: 1000px) { #tester-1000 { background-image: url("1000.png"); } }

You could also imagine a website first using ~15 queries to know what the window width is upto 100px, and then provide coarser media queries on the next page load.
by tsimionescu | 2025-08-09 08:01:17+00:00
The same vague arguments apply to computers. We know computers can reason, and reasoning is an important part of our intelligence and consciousness. So even for ELIZA, or even more so for LLMs, we can't entirely rule out that they may have aspects of consciousness.

You can also more or less apply the same thing to rocks, too, since we're all made up of the same elements ultimately - and maybe even empty space with its virtual particles is somewhat conscious. It's just a bad argument, regardless of where you apply it, not a complex insight.
by spacedcowboy | 2025-08-09 08:01:58+00:00
Britain is already very crowded with ~70m people. The idea that things would be better with 200m people is … optimistic, IMHO.

There is simply a law of numbers wrt to influence, and the maximum feasible number of people is based on geography. Britain is a smallish country, smaller than most of its peers in Europe even, let alone the USA.

But with the rejection of science (eg: mRNA vaccines, and the political oversight of all federal funding now enacted), the USA is doomed to irrelevance anyway. Larger population countries will overtake it (China, India, possibly even Europe if the slide to the right is avoided) because they won’t invoke insane policies (probably). The sad part of that (apart from Europe) is that authoritarian societies look set to win over the rest of us in the medium to long term :(
by IshKebab | 2025-08-09 08:02:49+00:00
Not sure what I just read either. Maybe I can put it in simpler terms for you: it's really really really bad in the short term for Israel to destroy Palestine, but it might be better in the very long term. How many ancient victories saved us from modern day conflicts? I bet its not an insignificant number.

You're probably now imagining that I'm somehow condoning Israel's actions and I think starving a population is ok or something.

> then we all escape freely into nothingness at the end.

Yep! Not my preference but I'd still rather accept the bleak truth rather than believe in magic.
by EagnaIonat | 2025-08-09 08:03:09+00:00
> I do see is genuine concern for the mental health of individuals

I think that is going to be an issue regardless of the model. It will just take time for that person to reset to the new model.

For me the whole thing feels like a culture shock. It was rapid change in tone that came off as being rude.

But if you had that type of conversations from the start it would have been a non-issue.
by dtohmatsu | 2025-08-09 08:04:34+00:00
We're developing a do everything productivity app. We were using PT as our product management tool... 75 developers, 50 projects, 20k stories. We added PT functionality to our own app and migrated everything over in April. It works well now (we have a million hours of development time in the app so we understand what it takes to make something that is reliable and easy to use. Also had a daughter who was a PM at PL who taught me how to use PT.) There is more info and a beta sign up form at at getflo.com.
by imtringued | 2025-08-09 08:05:11+00:00
There is also another problem. The spec is large and it's not aimed at those who want to implement the simplest possible USB C compliant device.

Based on the table of contents the most promising section is "2.3.4 USB Type-C VBUS Current Detection and Usage" but it doesn't actually talk about anything you actually need. You're supposed to click through to the section "4.6.2.1 USB Type-C Current" where it shows the reference circuit, but it doesn't tell you the values of Rd, which are in section "4.11.1 Termination Parameters".

It's a 300+ page document where you must already know what you're looking for. If you didn't already know that you need two resistors, you wouldn't be able to figure it out with the spec alone.
by vemv | 2025-08-09 08:05:42+00:00
I'm not gonna lie, that ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md is not going to work.

There are a lot of subjective, ambigous instructions that really won't affect what Claude writes. Remember it's not a human, it's not performing careful reasoning over each individual LOC.

Context rot is a thing (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44564248 ).

As of today, you cannot squeeze a true rule system out of a single file given as context. Many of us have done this mistake at some point – believing that you can specify arbitrarily many rules and that they'll be honored.

If you really care about every such rule, you'd have to create sub-agents, one per rule, and make the agents a required part of a deterministic (non-AI orchestrated) pipeline. Then costs would explode of course.
by reify | 2025-08-09 08:10:27+00:00
Are they really.

Shill

check out the lies about the wonderful I provements of GPT-5 against all previous versions.

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/08/08/openai-announces-gpt-5-pl...

The charts are clearly maniplated to look as if GPT-5 is far ahead of the previous versions but it is not.

reminds me of how you can make scary predictions using graphs by stretching or squashing them to make the curve seem more or less acute.

This was the true meaning of flatten the curve just by stretching the graph.

Lets test GPT-5.

So let’s try the very first question: how many R’s are the in the word strawberry? GPT-5 can do the specific word “strawberry.” Cool.

But I suspect they hard-coded that question, because it fails hard on other words:

Question: How many e's are in a dingleberry

ChatGPT said: If you mean the literal word “dingleberry” — it contains three “e”s:

dinglebe*rry

One at position 5, one at position 8, and one at position 10.

Would you like me to also break down where the other letters appear?

Somehow, nobody’s cracked the “counting letters” problem.

By the way, if you don’t like GPT-5, no problem — OpenAI has removed all the other models! GPT-5 is your only choice now! Reddit ChatGPT is deeply unhappy about this.
by NoahZuniga | 2025-08-09 08:11:19+00:00
It's a bit annoying that this article on AI is hallucinating itself:

> To add insult to injury, the image seems to have been created with the Studio Ghibli image generator, which Hayao Miyazaki described as an abomination on art itself.

He never said this. This is just false, and it seems like the author didn't even fact check if Hayao Miyazaki ever said this.
by nickm12 | 2025-08-09 08:11:53+00:00
You can't reduce the in-office or remote experience purely to commuting. It's just one aspect about how and where you work and work life balance in general.

But since you asked, yes, I actually enjoy commuting when it is less than 30 minutes each way and especially when it involves physical activities. My best commutes have been walking and biking commutes of around 20-25 minutes each way. They give me exercise, a chance to clear my head, and provide "space" between work and home.

During 2020, I worked from home the entire time and eventually I found it just mentally wasn't good for me to work and live in the same space. I couldn't go into the office, so I started taking hour long walks at the end of every day to reset. It helped a lot.

That said, I've also done commutes of up to an hour each way by crowed train and highway driving and those are...not good.
by zamber | 2025-08-09 08:12:05+00:00
Is this true? I'm getting a feeling that most of this is adding external stucture when coding agents already provide a framework for it.

I've had moderate success in throwing a braindump at the llm, asking it to do a .md with a plan and then going with the implementation for it. Specialized thinking prompts seem like overkill (or dumbo-level coding skills are enough for me).
by teaearlgraycold | 2025-08-09 08:13:43+00:00
You need to understand that there's The Law and then there's "what people get in trouble for". Practice anarchy in your daily life. Take control of your surroundings. Just make sure you only do good. And if you suspect you'll get into a "no good deed goes unpunished" scenario, make a game of it and do it under cover of night.
by tough | 2025-08-09 08:13:46+00:00
Right it was an out of context presentation of their own company and some very rough AI generated content and years ago before the existence of LLMs

but yeah sensationalism and all and people don't do research so unless you remember well

and also lost in translation from Japanese to English, the work sampled by their engineers, it depicted some kinda of zombie like pictures in a very rough form, thus the -insult to life- as in literally
by spacedcowboy | 2025-08-09 08:14:26+00:00
This is satire, right ? Because I don’t think I’ve ever seen as much doom and gloom in the USA as there is right now.

- The economy is crashing and the government is lying to the people about who pays tariffs

- The “president” is sacking government employees who release figures he doesn’t like

- There are secret unidentified police raiding people’s homes, even citizens are being attacked if their skin color is wrong

- The borders are being enforced via political profiling and racial selection, again even citizens are being harassed

- Groups are choosing not to appeal court cases to the Supreme Court because they feel the court is politically biased and they don’t want to set a precedent that will be hard to overcome

- Women’s health is no longer their own decision in many places in the USA, Texas for example is planning to make abortion a capital offense.

- The police in general are ever more militarized with “tactical” gear from army surplus. The police/civilian divide has never been wider.

- I could go on and on about the negatives. “Weird Science” doesn’t really make up for it…