MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by albertzeyer | 2025-08-18 19:51:40+00:00
I thought that is what you mean when you said "a lot of interesting bits about the history of the development of neural networks (including backpropagation) can be found in the book Talking Nets", that there is some relevant reference to backprop which is missing here in the linked article.

I don't really understand your negativity here, and what you are reading into my comment. I never asked you to do a research project? I just thought you might know some other references which are not in the article. If you don't, fine.

Note that I don't expect that any relevant reference is missing here. Schmidhuber always try to be very careful to be very complete and exhaustive cite everything there is on some topic. That is why I was double curious about the possibility that sth is missing, and what it could be.
by godelski | 2025-08-18 19:51:46+00:00
They have some fire tweets, especially when people say they write things from scratch or boast about how much money they make with ffmpeg wrappers

https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1775178803129602500

https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1856078171017281691

https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1950227075576823817

Oh, and here's one making fun of HN comments. Hi ffmpeg :) https://x.com/FFmpeg/status/1947076489880486131
by floxy | 2025-08-18 19:52:03+00:00
> Assuming superconductors aren't figured out any time soon, this appears to be an impossible solve, which cuts their consumer market significantly.

I don't think superconductors solve anything in the EV charging space, and certainly wouldn't make L2/L1 charging easier to install for shared parking / street-side parking. An L2 charger uses something like a electric clothes dryer circuit, with 240V at 40A. Or somewhere in the 6-10 kW range, to recharge you overnight.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-08-18 19:52:05+00:00
NiMH https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Prius_(XW30)

NiCads suck, you find NiCads in like old AA rechargeables and cheap toothbrushes.

I don't know for sure if NiMH last longer than Li-Ion but I've had much the same experience with my Prius - Old as hell and everything but the battery failing
Show HN: I built a toy TPU that can do inference and training on the XOR problem
by evxxan | 2025-08-18 19:52:14+00:00
We wanted to do something very challenging to prove to ourselves that we can do anything we put our mind to. The reasoning for why we chose to build a toy TPU specifically is fairly simple:

- Building a chip for ML workloads seemed cool - There was no well-documented open source repo for an ML accelerator that performed both inference and training

None of us have real professional experience in hardware design, which, in a way, made the TPU even more appealing since we weren't able to estimate exactly how difficult it would be. As we worked on the initial stages of this project, we established a strict design philosophy: TO ALWAYS TRY THE HACKY WAY. This meant trying out the "dumb" ideas that came to our mind first BEFORE consulting external sources. This philosophy helped us make sure we weren't reverse engineering the TPU, but rather re-inventing it, which helped us derive many of the key mechanisms used in the TPU ourselves.

We also wanted to treat this project as an exercise to code without relying on AI to write for us, since we felt that our initial instinct recently has been to reach for llms whenever we faced a slight struggle. We wanted to cultivate a certain style of thinking that we could take forward with us and use in any future endeavours to think through difficult problems.

Throughout this project we tried to learn as much as we could about the fundamentals of deep learning, hardware design and creating algorithms and we found that the best way to learn about this stuff is by drawing everything out and making that our first instinct. In tinytpu.com, you will see how our explanations were inspired by this philosophy.

Note that this is NOT a 1-to-1 replica of the TPU--it is our attempt at re-inventing a toy version of it ourselves.
by legitster | 2025-08-18 19:52:25+00:00
> In 2010, everyone complained that Adobe was ripping their users off charging them every month for software which basically doesn’t change (which was and is correct).

I don't know if this is strictly true. Photoshop between 2010 and 2025 has substantially changed.

Also, in 2010, the Master Collection was $2600 ($3800 in today's dollars). And an upgrade was something like $800. In the long run users may pay a bit more, but I think it's fair to say that making the costs really easier to ingest does create a lot of growth in the same way that financing increases car sales.
by bpcrd | 2025-08-18 19:52:42+00:00
Thank you. As an inference-based detection platform, our models go into every scan with the assumption that all files are both not the original/ground truth AND the files have been likely transcoded. We never say something is 0% or 100% fake because we don’t have that ground truth. That said, our award-winning models are able to say, with a confidence score of 1-99% — the higher being likely manipulated — which, in turn, is sent to the team using said detection to action as they will. Some use it as one of many signals to make an informed decision manually. Others have chosen to moderate or label accordingly. There are experts who’ve been called to testify on matters like this one, and some of them work on these very models.

As for synthetic content that is undetectable to the naked eye or ear, we are already there.
by p1necone | 2025-08-18 19:52:58+00:00
> Is it that you need to support both 640x480 and 640x400

Probably.

A lot of software back then was rendering UIs with box drawing characters, doing complicated layout etc - it's probably much easier to retrofit existing software to output the exact same thing in a slightly higher resolution font than to make the display logic support different resolutions properly.
by WillAdams | 2025-08-18 19:54:34+00:00
For Mac OS System 7 and apparently the context is the Mac OS on iPad Pro from the discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44942954

as much as I love to run Macromedia Freehand MX, I'd be hard put to choose running it in an emulator rather than a native application such as Serif's Affinity Designer

https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/designer/ipad/

which is apparently quite nice w/ an Apple Pencil.

That said, I'd be interested in a similar overview of contemporary vector drawing programs for Mac OS X and the iPad, since Windows 11 has me wanting an alternative to my Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360 and Wacom EMR stylus and toggling the Windows Setting which allows me to run Freehand....
by JdeBP | 2025-08-18 19:54:45+00:00
You won't find it in the hier(7) manual pages on BSDs, either.

* https://man.openbsd.org/hier

* https://man.netbsd.org/hier.7

* https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=hier&sektion=7

* https://man.dragonflybsd.org/?command=hier&section=7

There was a long time when the Linux world held /opt in disfavour, because officially it required either a stock market ticker name or some other corporate identity to make a subdirectory legitimate. You can still see traces of this in the Solaris descendant operating systems, where pkginfo(5) talks about package names using corporate stock ticker names.

* https://illumos.org/man/5/pkginfo

/opt/SUNW* used to be a very familiar thing to a lot of people.

Maybe enough time has passed for anti-corporate memory to fade. Maybe there's enough corporate backing in the Linux world now to resurrect the idea regardless.

Maybe /opt/RHT* is the shape of things to come. (-:

I've never over the years seen the systemd people advocate for /opt, though.
by zzo38computer | 2025-08-18 19:56:51+00:00
I think it is not so right. It can be useful to exclude some kinds of dynamic files, files with redundant pieces in URLs (e.g. a query string for files that do not require it; if you could reasonably do it (which in many cases you unfortunately can't), you might make it never crawl URLs with a query string), to set crawl delays, etc. (You might also want to e.g. use other ways of mirroring some files; e.g. for a version control repository, you do not need to crawl the web pages and you can just clone the repository instead. This way, you will only need to clone the new and changed files and not all of them.)

Robots.txt should not be used for preventing automated access in general or for disallowing mirrors to be made.

Someone else wrote "I actually don't care if someone ignores my robots.txt, as long as their crawler is well run." I mostly agree with this, although whoever wrote the crawler does not know everything (but neither does the server operator).

In writing the specification for the crawling policy file for Scorpion protocol, I had tried to make some things more clear and avoid some problems, although it is not perfect.
by lolive | 2025-08-18 19:56:54+00:00
Let me give you an example.

Some Lovecraft letters were translated into french some weeks ago. Great reading! There, Lovecraft gives his opinion about the litterature and art of his time.

And he mentions Nicolas Roerich. No idea who this guy was, but hey pretty interesting painter (thank god Google Images!). Ok, let's check on AA if there is a definitive book about his art.

No luck, but that very same guy wrote many books about Hindouism and eastern asia. After a few downloads on AA, no big deal, I am not so fond of them. Except for one that I knew nothing about (the name is Altai Himalaya, and I have absolutely no clue why this one is picking my attention, but it does).

That's definitely what I call serendipity.

And that thing happens a lot when you have a full access to whatever content is available. [and you are curious by nature]

In the end, retrospectively, such widespread access permits serendipity at a level that is absurdly miraculous !
by stronglikedan | 2025-08-18 19:58:07+00:00
> did not buy enough generator capacity to run everything

Maybe they can cap it for most cases - we'll turn it off for n number of days max - so that companies have a target to prepare for (or maybe that was already mentioned). Of course, no one can prepare for anything, but if it's longer than that then most other things are probably also affected anyway and no one is worried about their favorite data center.
by legitster | 2025-08-18 19:58:39+00:00
Even if you go straight to the website and read the fine print, this is pretty transparently a rip-off. They don't really bother to justify it. https://www.volkswagen.co.uk/en/connected-services/upgrades-...

And honestly, locking horsepower behind a paywall is more justifiable than some of the other features you have to unlock - like activating your own headlight features or climate control. They are literally installing the physical components into your car and charging you to activate them.
by bgnn | 2025-08-18 19:58:51+00:00
Everyone in the comments rightly complaining about this being am extortion, which it is! But tge more interesting part is the source of this behaviour: stock markets.

Tesla market cap was so high that any other normal producer felt the pressure. Simply designing and delivering good cars won't do it, because then you aren't a service company. Investors want you to exploit the customers to the last drop financially. You should try to make the product a service, because products are so 20th century! You shouldn't stop there though, you should also exploit their data. Because that's where the money is, because how else would you get ad revenue.

This is not meant to be satirical btw. It's really what's going on. VW tried to build a tech company as Cariad, which imploded because it's an old school industrial production company. They keep trying to throw tech at it but they can't do it like Tesla. They can build good EVs if they wanted, but they can't focus because imvesters are pulling them to ten different directions. One day it's software stack, the other day it's zonal architecture. It's sad to see them die a painful death like this.
by nwallin | 2025-08-18 19:58:59+00:00
Another datapoint that supports your argument is the Grand Theft Auto Online (GTAO) thing a few months ago.[0] GTAO took 5-15 minutes to start up. Like you click the icon and 5-15 minutes later you're in the main menu. Everyone was complaining about it for years. Years. Eventually some enterprising hacker disassembled the binary and profiled it. 95% of the runtime was in `strlen()` calls. Not only was that where all the time was spent, but it was all spent `strlen()`ing the exact same ~10MB resource string. They knew exactly how large the string was because they allocated memory for it, and then read the file off the disk into that memory. Then they were tokenizing it in a loop. But their tokenization routine didn't track how big the string was, or where the end of it was, so for each token it popped off the beginning, it had to `strlen()` the entire resource file.

The enterprising hacker then wrote a simple binary patch that reduced the startup time from 5-10 minutes to like 15 seconds or something.

To me that's profound. It implies that not only was management not concerned about the start up time, but none of the developers of the project ever used a profiler. You could just glance at a flamegraph of it, see that it was a single enormous plateau of a function that should honestly be pretty fast, and anyone with an ounce of curiousity would be like, ".........wait a minute, that's weird." And then the bug would be fixed in less time than it would take to convince management that it was worth prioritizing.

It disturbs me to think that this is the kind of world we live in. Where people lack such basic curiosity. The problem wasn't that optimization was hard, (optimization can be extremely hard) it was just because nobody gave a shit and nobody was even remotely curious about bad performance. They just accepted bad performance as if that's just the way the world is.

[0] Oh god it was 4 years ago: https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-GTA-Online-loading-times...
by doodlebugging | 2025-08-18 19:59:07+00:00
We're near DFW. Mom is north of us by a bit. We lost power too, for days. Towards the end we had rolling outages that were predictable so we prepped anything that needed heat or power and as soon as the lights came on we made fresh coffee and tea and water for oatmeal or whatever and recharged the water supply since we are on a private well. Our power bricks handled most of the phone/laptop power delivery so we basically topped off the charge on the bricks whenever we had power. My greenhouse is solar/battery powered though I did use 1 lb propane cylinders for the coldest periods since the heater in the greenhouse was way too small to manage temps that went below 10F. I lost some things but I learned some things too. We are much more resilient today.
by jrflowers | 2025-08-18 19:59:57+00:00
> I find it extremely hard to believe that most consumers have a strong enough moral compass to go out of their way to buy something they already have access to

I like the idea that consumers only buy stuff out of moral obligation.

Like if you went to your ethical friend’s house and saw that he had empty book cases and no art on his walls because he hasn’t yet been imbued with the requisite moral fervor necessary to buy anything. It’s hard for him to be sure what he’s obligated to buy or that he’s obligated to buy anything since it would be wrong of him to know what’s inside any book without buying it first.

And then you went to your no-good, dirty, downright despicable friend’s house and it’s full of books and art because for every 20 books he pirates he buys one, and because he’s just so darn unethical he pirates a lot of books
by stronglikedan | 2025-08-18 20:00:47+00:00
I used to do that with games back when I played. I was always a staunch advocate of, if it's good, people will pay, and I didn't want to be a hypocrite despite refusing to buy most games because they could not be returned afterwards. Even newer services that offer refunds make it more difficult than I'm willing to put up with. If I played it most of the way through, I bought it.
by pyman | 2025-08-18 20:00:56+00:00
> the report does not mention the leading causes of death for American children, which are firearms and motor vehicle accidents.

I'm honestly tired of seeing all these AI wannabes bragging on Twitter and LinkedIn about how they've built a tool that does "10x better" than something else, and how they only hire people willing to work 80 hours a week, with no life and no need for money. They're trying to normalise tech sweatshops because their VCs told them that being a psychopath is the fastest way to get a return on investment. These founders are so driven and so dumb that I have more respect for flat-earth conspiracy theorists than for this new wave of brainless, heartless founders.

And I don't buy into their Mother Theresa's story either, that they'll exploit people for decades, cash out billions, and then magically turn into philanthropists to fix all the harm they caused.

This is the time to use technology to solve real problems. That's the mission, that's why we're here. The leading causes of death for American children are firearms and motor vehicle accidents. The Volvo engineer who invented the seatbelt is a hero because he saved millions of lives.

We need to stop these shallow founders from destroying the reputation of our industry.

(Sorry for the rant)
by southernplaces7 | 2025-08-18 20:01:22+00:00
>What mainly interests me is how much money they are actually making, I suspect it's very profitable.

Well, it's about calculating their site support, storage, server and bandwidth costs. What might those be? Aside from these, I've seen them claim they use volunteers for much of their site support and certainly don't pay, or need to pay, anything for marketing since the word of mouth (partly through notoriety and partly through uniquness coupled with extreme usefulness) is more than enough to keep them famous.
by BurningFrog | 2025-08-18 20:01:32+00:00
Did you miss that the author is criticizing these talking points?

> This is the new guidance we’re tossing at young men. It’s the equivalent of taking away GPS from a driver and handing them a map scrawled by a half-blind cartographer tripping on acid.

> The obvious result is getting disastrously lost; the only question is which type of lostness will impact a man.
by computerdork | 2025-08-18 20:01:47+00:00
Very interesting report, and am not discounting it, but another factor is that maybe the pricing affect is already baked in from years of piracy. For example, back in the early 2000's, when P2P file sharing was being used to download music, then to compete, the music industry had to resort to iTunes store, which allowed users to buy just one song for a dollar, instead of the entire album (and then later on, to music streaming services). The damage was done decades ago, and eventhough P2P file sharing isn't big today, it's effects are still with us today (no music executive is going to go back to forcing people to buy an entire album to get just one or two songs).

But, maybe this report is taking this into account too??
by Spunkie | 2025-08-18 20:02:07+00:00
> However, the majority of games that have invasive anti-cheat requirements cannot simply remove the requirement, pass off the company's (usually paid!) moderation duties to a bunch of volunteers, and call it a day.

Bull, they 100% absolutely can do that and their communities would be better off.

> Yeah, if you could just ban cheaters forever, all would be well!

Again the only reason you think this is even necessary is because of giant corporate servers where players have very little to no control over who they play with.

I used to fund, run, and moderate private/community server across many many games. I can tell you from experience, being able to ban someone for even just 5-10 minutes is more than enough to send 99.5% of hackers fleeing to another unmodderated server, aka leaving your server, players, and friends alone to have hacker free fun.
by tonyarkles | 2025-08-18 20:02:18+00:00
Yeah I've actually built a system like this before. The nodes didn't have power supplies with strong storage capacity but did have an infinite source of limited energy harvesting (they could extract a tiny amount of power from the environment they were monitoring).

With the walkie-textie type system you're making a different tradeoff here though that would have to be measured and assessed. Now you've got a couple of knobs to twiddle with:

- What's the max acceptable latency between sending a message and receiving it? That determines your beacon interval and becomes the factor that determines your battery life (effectively your Rx duty cycle + Tx beacon energy).

- Does transmitting the beacon at your beacon interval and only having the receiver run in a limited window around that beacon result in a larger or smaller net power consumption? That's going to depend significantly on your transmit power vs. receiver power.
by spacecadet | 2025-08-18 20:03:08+00:00
I was involved with the Quake/HL modding community in the late 90s and I fully agree! I hate matchmaking, but I get it too... but nothing compares to finding that dedicated server and joining regularly until you notice other regulars, and then you have friends... Shout out to #PVK and #Mastersword, great mods that had awesome dedicated server based communities.
by klaff | 2025-08-18 20:03:19+00:00
When I was a kid ('70s/'80s) a car engine might die due to cylinder wear, burning oil and losing compression. I wonder if those might have been noticeably inefficient (say one cylinder of eight still ingesting fuel but not compressing fully and leaking exhaust products into the crankcase). Now I have an EV (fairly new) and an ICE car w/ 220k miles. The ICE car is leaking oil and needs some suspension work but I think it's efficiency is pretty much the same as it has always been.
by buran77 | 2025-08-18 20:03:25+00:00
What about when devices come with such a "feature" baked in? Android has Magic Cue, Windows has Recall. How long until they're opt-out, or "accidentally" enabled with an update, or just on at all times? And "sensitive" can be wherever details I want to share with that friend. It can be as benign as giving them an address or phone number, or maybe a medical diagnosis, or a crypto wallet number.

Is your position that anyone who's not tech savvy enough to constantly fight the onslaught of shady business practices and dark patterns that most tech companies throw at them is not worthy of their friends' trust?

For most people asking them to guarantee their own devices won't spy on them is a tall order.
by pkamb | 2025-08-18 20:03:54+00:00
Does Anna's Archive or a similar site host, say, the complete New York Times (pre-1930) as a full PDF download set? And every other newspaper too?

Tons of public domain sources are locked into websites like Newspapers.com or the nearly-dead and now completely unsearchable old Google News / Newspaper.

It would be nice if the massive pursuit of AI training data resulted in some fully-legal open source alternatives to these proprietary, outdated, or abandoned sites. I know some of it is available via the Internet Archive, etc., but something new with an AI-powered search and finding aid sounds so useful.
by dataflow | 2025-08-18 20:04:08+00:00
Wow, this is the first time I'm hearing such a thing. For clarity:

I pasted the output so a ton of people wouldn't repeat the same question to ChatGPT and burn a ton of CO2 to get the same answer.

I didn't paste the query since I didn't find it interesting.

And I didn't fact check because I didn't have the time. I was walking and had a few seconds to just do this on my phone.

Not sure how this was rude, I certainly didn't intend it to be...