MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by StrangeDoctor | 2025-09-06 22:35:36+00:00
Seems like it has 5 petaflops of compute from a SiPearl (French) designed Rhea-1

Edit: that might be speculative or a future addition cause they taped out less than 2 months ago https://www.eetimes.eu/sipearl-tapes-out-rhea1-processor-clo...

Which was delayed 2 years. I’m speculating this was supposed to be mostly or exclusively this but they needed a computer now. Or needed to spend the budget now.
by Difwif | 2025-09-06 22:35:39+00:00
It would be interesting to see two versions of a model. A primary model tuned for precision that's focused on correctness that works with or orchestrates a creative model that's tuned for generating new (and potentially incorrect) ideas. The primary model is responsible for evaluating and reasoning about the ideas/hallucinations. Feels like a left/right brain architecture (even though that's an antiquated model of human brain hemispheres).
by thayne | 2025-09-06 22:36:22+00:00
AFAIK, Mongo, Elastic, Redis, and Hashicorp were all doing fairly well financially when they did their "rug pulls". They maybe weren't doing as well as they wanted to, but they weren't on the verge of collapse either. In the case of Hashicorp, it was probably a strategy to sweeten the acquisition by IBM.
by nugzbunny | 2025-09-06 22:36:24+00:00
So, if you’re reading this post right now, it means my server is working, and that this site is being served by an iPad 2 from 2012, running iOS 6.1.3 and Insomnia to keep it connected to Wi-Fi.

When I pinged your domain it came back as CloudFlare. Did you mean

So, if you’re reading this post right now, it means this site is being served CloudFlare.

I jest. I imagine you did this to keep your IP address private? Just curious why it wasn't mentioned in the blog post? My original question was going to be if your ISP may have a problem with your set up (giving it's on the front page of HN and will be experiencing some traffic).
by toomuchtodo | 2025-09-06 22:36:30+00:00
Following on to this, enough sunlight hits the Earth in 30 minutes to power humanity for a year. So geothermal wouldn’t need to provide all of today’s human energy consumption, just that last bit that renewables, existing nuclear, transmission, storage, and demand response can’t provide for today.

(1GW of solar PV is deployed every 15 hours globally as of this comment)
by frumplestlatz | 2025-09-06 22:36:51+00:00
There is a valid argument that special protections afforded by the government, and traditionally only granted to common carriers — very limited liability for user speech — incur a moral responsibility for those receiving those protections to operate in a manner that does not interfere in their users’ free expression.

The U.S. Open is in no way similar. They are not a public platform, do not operate in any way resembling a public square or common carrier, and are solely responsible and liable for the content they distribute.
by kelnos | 2025-09-06 22:37:03+00:00
> Always surprises me as an American in the UK how hostile the UK is to paracetamol.

This is so funny because there's a post in another subthread by someone from the UK saying the same thing about Americans being hostile toward it.

I've only been to the UK a few times, but I feel like it's a funny meme that people in the UK unhesitatingly suggest and take paracetamol for everything. I guess that's not really true, or at least has some truth to it but is an exaggeration?
by d4rkn0d3z | 2025-09-06 22:37:48+00:00
This is a case of the metric becoming the target. The tools used to evaluate LLM performance are shaping the LLM. First you make your tools then your tools make you.

If we take a formal systems approach, then an LLM is a model of a complex hierarchy of production rules corresponding to the various formal and informal grammatical, logical, and stylistic rules and habits employed by humans to form language that expresses their intelligence. It should not be surprising that simply executing the production rules, or a model thereof, will give rise to sentences that cannot be assigned a meaning. It should also give rise to sentences that we cannot prove or make sense of immediately but we would not want to discard these due to uncertainty. Why? because every once in a while the sentence that would be culled is actually the stroke of brilliance we are looking for, uncertainty be damned. The citation here would be literally nearly every discovery ever made.

When I recall information and use it, when I "think", I don't just produce sentences by the rules, formal and informal, I don't consider at all how often I have seen one word precede another in past, rather as I meandre the landscape of a given context, a thought manifold if you will, I am constantly evaluating whether this is in contradiction with that, if this can be inferred from that via induction or deduction, does this preclude that, etc.. That is the part that is missing from an LLM; The uncanny ability of the human mind to reproduce the entire manifold of concepts as they relate to one another in a mesh from any small piece of the terrain that it might recall, and to verify anew that they all hang together unsupported by one's own biases.

The problem is that just as the scarcity of factual information in the corpus makes it difficult to produce, so is actual reasoning rarefied among human language samples. Most of what appears as reasoning is language games and will to power. The act of reasoning in an unbiased way is so foreign to humans, so painful and arduous, so much like bending over backwards or swimming upstream against a strong current of will to power, that almost nobody does it for long.
by heavyset_go | 2025-09-06 22:38:35+00:00
You still have to adhere to license and copyright terms after first sale.

You can't sell a Bluray disk to a movie theater and give them the right to charge an audience to watch it in the theater later.

If rightsholders are worried about certain uses of their IP being found to be fair use, they might then change the terms of release contractually to stop or at least partially prevent training.
by KaoruAK | 2025-09-06 22:38:35+00:00
Preprint proposing an analytical approximation to Euler’s totient function φ(n) when n = pq with large primes. While not exact, the method (the “Kaoru Method”) shows decreasing relative error as n grows and p, q are more balanced. Given the central role of φ(n) in RSA, the question is whether such approximations could have cryptographic consequences or remain purely of number-theoretic interest.
by kelnos | 2025-09-06 22:39:33+00:00
I'm by no means an expert in assessing OTC drug safety, but your efficacy window feels... fine... to me? I feel like it shouldn't be hard to avoid taking 3-4 times the effective dose of something? But I guess people still do it, and mess up their liver anyway.

I'm always very torn on how to best protect people from being stupid. The label on the bottle says not to use the drug for longer than a certain period. Sure, people might not read it, or might not understand the risks and ignore it. Sure, someone might be too dumb / in denial to realize they might be pregnant, and take inappropriate medication. I do really want to protect these people from themselves, but I also don't want to go to the doctor every time I have the common cold to get a prescription for one of the only things that clears up my symptoms enough so I can sleep.
by johnneville | 2025-09-06 22:39:47+00:00
I think it's a coincidence. The Hong Kong CHOICE article is from 2020. The Australian CHOICE article is from 2025. I don't think there's any connection between the two publications other than the name and their general purpose.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Council

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choice_%28Australian_consumer_...
by unyttigfjelltol | 2025-09-06 22:40:06+00:00
That’s very interesting! I’ve been sleuthing for personal reasons and I’ve recently arrived at the central nervous system element called the nucleus of the solitary tract (NTS), which integrates sensory processes including pain reception. I’m tracing a particular activator of the mineralocorticoid receptors for which NTS has special relevance, but the end target overall seems to be mTOR in the NTS, which isn’t so niche and is studied in autism.
by lucb1e | 2025-09-06 22:40:44+00:00
> your ISP may have a problem with your set up (giving it's on the front page of HN and will be experiencing some traffic).

The page is like 30KB + that 3 MB image. The avg ~two hits per second that you get from a HN top position iirc (this is fairly old data though) is 6MB/s for a few hours, say 6 hours, that's 130GB. Unless it's hosted via a wireless uplink (4g/satellite/..), I don't think there's an ISP in the world that cares about using 130GB extra during a random month. Even in Belgium I think the caps were around twice that ten years ago
by LexiMax | 2025-09-06 22:40:49+00:00
Someone on this forum might be one of the lucky 10,000. They also made their own texture conversion tool, which might save someone some time and effort.

Of course, they might have written the blog post with the intention of drawing attention to themselves and being noticed. These days, I can't bring myself to be upset about that sort of thing - if the content is good, better self-promotion than AI slop or hyping up the next hot investment vehicle.
by didibus | 2025-09-06 22:42:11+00:00
Off course, 100% prediction accuracy cannot be achieved.

I just mean that, if you're an ML scientist team, you don't just go, we got 76% accuracy, let's close shop, mail in your resignation, job over.

From that angle, it's not odd at all that the team just continues working and now see if they can achieve greater than 76%.
by AnIrishDuck | 2025-09-06 22:42:42+00:00
> They don't work by merely taking a straw poll. They effectively build the joint probability distribution, which improves accuracy with any number of sensors, including two.

Lots of safety critical systems actually do operate by "voting". The space shuttle control computers are one famous example [1], but there are plenty of others in aerospace. I have personally worked on a few such systems.

It's the simplest thing that can obviously work. Simplicity is a virtue when safety is involved.

You can of course do sensor fusion and other more complicated things, but the core problem I outlined remains.

> If you are so worried, override the AI in the moment.

This is sneakily inserting a third set of sensors (your own). It can be a valid solution to the problem, but Waymo famously does not have a steering wheel you can just hop behind.

This might seem like an edge case, but edge cases matter when failure might kill somebody.

1. https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/9827/if-the-space-...
by randomname4325 | 2025-09-06 22:42:54+00:00
I don't personally have any regrets, because I'm that kinda person. But there are people who prioritized travel, dating, health and personal experiences who have better stories from that period than I do knocking out bugs or shipping a feature that no one ever used. I bought into the mission of the founder. Sure he remembered me when he saw me, but I doubt he thought of me once in the period in between. I remember feeling pretty disappointed after that encounter. Like I bought in, put in the work, it didn't work out and the guy that I followed didn't even remember my name. Prior to that encounter I shared that experience as a badge of honor. After reading this thread and posting here I can't help but think what a waste of time...
by pdonis | 2025-09-06 22:43:08+00:00
> the alternative being that there is no entity able to regulate

No, the alternative is for people to realize that "regulation" provided by government doesn't work--that the only way to effectively regulate a market is for the market participants to do it by the transactions they choose to make and the transactions they choose to refuse. As long as people won't do that--as long as, for example, people continue to believe the fantasy that a valuable service like web search can be provided by Google for free with no downsides, or that everything can be magically cheaper on Amazon without them bullying their supply chain in all kinds of underhanded ways and treating their employees like shit--we're doomed. Government regulation can't save people from themselves. These big companies can only get away with what they do because we keep feeding the monsters.
by terribleperson | 2025-09-06 22:43:59+00:00
The thing that annoys me is that I could see value in AI moderation. Instead of scanning every post with AI with overly-broad criteria (and probably lower-power models), use AI to prescreen reports and determine whether they're worth surfacing to a human. IT could also be used to put temporary holds on material that's potentially criminal or just way over the line, but those holds should go to the very front of the human review queue to either be lifted or the content deleted.

Real moderation actions should not be taken without human input and should always be appealable, even if the appeal is just another mod looking at it to see if they agree.
by bee_rider | 2025-09-06 22:44:23+00:00
Sunscreen is probably better than nothing.

But, it seems very prone to inducing overconfidence… It has to be reapplied more than you expect. You need more of it than you expect. It is less waterproof than you expect.

I mean, to preemptively retreat to the obviously defensible position: I’m not saying it is negative, but it is better to just cover up and avoid staying in the sun for too long, right?
by nine_k | 2025-09-06 22:45:08+00:00
This is a recurring idea: "Parse, don't validate". Previously:

https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2019/11/05/parse-don-t-va... (2019, using Haskell)

https://www.lelanthran.com/chap13/content.html (April 2025, using C)
by immibis | 2025-09-06 22:45:44+00:00
Those people don't announce what they did traceably to their real name and address, because they know if they do, they'll go to jail.

The police and the judge and the jury don't care what colour fabric you put on your head this morning. They (in theory) care if you committed a crime and they can prove it. Which you did and they can, since you confessed. So you go to jail for a long time.
by kelnos | 2025-09-06 22:45:54+00:00
Right, I think this falls under the "broken clock correct twice a day" saying. RFK Jr says a lot of crazy things, but he probably does occasionally say something that makes sense, through no skill of his own.

I mean, he rails against processed food and color/dye additives, some of it being stuff that other countries with reputable FDA-analogues have banned. There could be something to that, even though I can confidently assume his opinions don't come from any sort of scientific rigor.

Some blue states are even (quietly?) jumping on the "MAHA" bandwagon on some issues. Not to categorically say "blue states right, red states wrong", but if your polarized political opponents are putting some of your ideas into practice, maybe not all your ideas are bad, regardless of how unscientifically you may have come by them.
by Animats | 2025-09-06 22:48:14+00:00
Found a geothermal potential map of the US.[1] Utah is in a different basin, but Colorado has a nice big hot spot.

It's not a fully renewable resource. It's possible to pull out too much heat too and deplete the resource. The entire geothermal heating of the planet is only 50 terawatts, which seems big, but it's spread over 500 million square kilometers. Or 100KW/km^2, which is not much. Solar is orders of magnitude larger.

[1] https://www.britannica.com/science/geothermal-energy
by Ken_At_EM | 2025-09-06 22:48:20+00:00
Super glad to be a part of this. Our MicroPulse Measurement While Drilling Systems have been used to drill numerous wells for Fervo. We also developed a first of its kind navigation system for the first full scale Eavor loop in Germany.

Heres a presentation we did on the system last year alongside Schlumberger. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kfOGKfEoPb0?t=7852s Potatoe quality but my part starts at 2:10:52.

It’s absolutely awesome deploying our super rugged, super high temp drilling technologies for GeoThermal.

If you’re interested in working on this kind of tech we’re hiring.
by microtherion | 2025-09-06 22:48:48+00:00
> but then the challenge is reconciling disagreements with calibrated, and probabilistic fusion

I keep reading arguments like this, but I really don't understand what the problem here is supposed to be. Yes, in a rule based system, this is a challenge, but in an end-to-end neural network, another sensor is just another input, regardless of whether it's another camera, LIDAR, or a sensor measuring the adrenaline level of the driver.

If you have enough training data, the model training will converge to a reasonable set of weights for various scenarios. In fact, training data with a richer set of sensors would also allow you to determine whether some of the sensors do not in fact contribute meaningfully to overall performance.
by XorNot | 2025-09-06 22:49:21+00:00
The point is you sell a product, it better be what it claims to be.

I didn't buy SPF30, I bought SPF50. When I made that choice, I expect at least SPF50.

But you are also dismissing a 25% difference in total transmitted UV - and that's before degradation in the field due to usage and practical concerns, which is why we want SPF50 in the first place.
by daemonologist | 2025-09-06 22:49:47+00:00
If you have a "100 unit" light bulb, and a material that blocks 98% of the light it emits, 2 units of light are getting through. If you have a material that blocks 99% of the light, only 1 unit - half as much - is getting through.

(This is why the SPF scale is inverted/measures transmittance. SPF 50 sunscreen theoretically allows through 1/50th of the UVB radiation (or whatever wavelengths are specified by your local regulator).)
by jmyeet | 2025-09-06 22:51:01+00:00
So this is interesting from a technical perspective. Some of this infrastructure is used by pen testers and the likes, which just goes to show that there is no such thing as a defensive weapon. I'll let you ponder why that might be pertinent.

Unfortunately, it quickly turns into a discussion of how bad NK and China are and how China shouldn't support NK (because, again, they're bad).

I'll offer two words to expose the hypocrisy of this: Stuxnet, Pegasus.
by tialaramex | 2025-09-06 22:51:29+00:00
You don't need a doctor. In the UK today there are pathways for Advanced versions of several non-doctor careers which get you either limited, or in some cases full blown unlimited prescribing rights. I think ordinary Advanced Midwife is just a set of common pregnancy drugs, stuff so you can keep down food, sleep properly and so on despite some of the nastier but still non-critical pregnancy side effects, but Advanced Nurse Practitioner and Advanced Pharmacist are both full blown prescribing rights.

The only thing which I think Advanced Practitioner doesn't get you is going entirely off piste, like fuck it, maybe this untried drug will fix your cough. But the person with their name on the pharmacy paperwork can sign off any ordinary stuff, far beyond just "common cold" treatments, anti-nausea, anything a doctor signs on an average day unless they're in some weird research field. The idea isn't that you'd need a GP appointment but that probably it shouldn't be with the bubblegum and cornflakes in the supermarket without even talking to a professional.
by perrygeo | 2025-09-06 22:51:32+00:00
Great framing of the problem. I do think it's a culture issue with "Agile" practices in particular - By design, there is no time budgeted for reading, writing, reflection, or discussion. Sprint, sprint, sprint.

In organizations that value innovation, people will spend time reading and writing. It's a positive feedback loop, almost a litmus test of quality of the work culture.
by jongjong | 2025-09-06 22:52:07+00:00
This sucks. As a developer who puts a lot of effort on security, I hate that companies can get away with such negligence.

I hope people invent AI bots which uncover vulnerabilities and make them available publicly for free, in real-time. This would create the right incentives for companies.

Modern software has become a giant house of cards, under the control of foreign powers who possess asymetric knowledge. This is because our overarching legal system protects mediocrity and this gives nefarious skilled people with a massive upper hand, while hurting well-intentioned skilled people who try to build software the right way.

The nefarious skilled people don't need to ask for permission and don't need to convince anyone to make money from their schemes... Well-intentioned skilled people build products which are impossible to sell or monetize because nobody cares enough about security... Companies mostly externalize the consequences of vulnerabilities to their users and leverage market monopolies to keep them.
by wakawaka28 | 2025-09-06 22:52:57+00:00
>The anti-woke stuff was overplayed in 2016, and it's even more tiring and stupid now. You're free to think it's "important", but it's not. It's just lazy shit he does instead of actual "journalism" (which I suppose is what he calls it).

The woke stuff directly affects my job prospects and quality of life. That makes it important. I've been suffering because of it every since 2012. It escalated between 2016 and 2024, and only now is the pendulum swinging the other way.

>We don't "all" think that. Pretending to be upset over a trans person working on software or purposefully misgendering people is not something I have ever really wanted to say, and even if I did I would just fucking say it instead of parasocially bonding with some wish.com wannabe demagogue.

He finds much more lurid stories to report than "mere" misgendering nonsense. The pronoun thing is just a litmus test to see whether someone is in a woke cult or not. He reports on actual interesting stories, like lawsuits, new software, outsourcing, layoffs, drama in various communities, etc. (some of which occasionally involves pronouns, yes, but it's no exaggeration to say that these woke people want you banished or even dead if you refuse to go with their delusions).

>Big tech companies hire a lot of very stupid people.

It happens. I don't think Lunduke is stupid though. He is in PR more than pure tech. That doesn't make him stupid. Neither does him being conservative.

>I don't buy the conspiracy theory that conservative voices are "persecuted" in tech spaces.

It's not a theory. He regularly reports on awful treatment of conservatives. You'd be surprised at how malicious some of these woke people are. People have been banned from conferences for being seen on Twitter wearing a MAGA hat. They have been fired for being lukewarm about woke shit. I don't blame you for being out of touch, since only Lunduke seems to be willing to report the stuff, and you refuse to watch. But closing yourself off to all evidence against your views and saying "No you guys are just imagining it!" is the actually dishonest take.

>Lunduke goes a step further by being outwardly hostile towards LGBTQ groups, and then pretends he's not doing that. This is why he's been considered so unbelievably insufferable in the tech world: his entire way of speaking is dishonest.

He is not speaking to them or about them in the way they demand, you mean. People have a right to simply refuse to engage in the constant celebration of certain lifestyles and worldviews. Going to work should not require being lectured about how awesome it is for people to engage in abnormal sexual behaviors, or celebration and advancement of people based on their race or sex alone. Liberals have no problem demanding such things on a constant basis, ostracizing and seeking to banish anyone who disagrees even 5%, and that is exactly why we need people like Lunduke to bravely issue scathing critiques of these practices. Besides that, his tech news is kind of interesting and unique, and he has a good sense of humor.