MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yobbo | 2025-09-28 12:52:36+00:00
He laments youtube comments and health-gadget data in silos and walled gardens, but this is entirely congruent with the original http client/server concept.

The protocols created no incentives to protect data and identities from being walled off. The original system was not "really good" at anything and arguably succeeded because it could be adapted for so many different purposes.

In contrast, email has been more successful thus far at resisting being walled off.
by gf000 | 2025-09-28 12:52:57+00:00
Evolution is a single line, and if you touch it, you are out. But unless the environment becomes harsher (and the line moves), there is nothing making passing organisms more "efficient". You can clearly observe it with flightless birds on small islands.

And there is nothing as clear as human thinking (and all the behaviors this allows, like culture, social structures, colonies, etc) being many many orders of magnitude worthwhile compared to its "extra resource consumption". We are not some stationary organism living at the middle of a desert, and we have taken over Earth in seconds, compared to evolutionary timelines.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-09-28 12:53:11+00:00
They were listening to people through their wall art.

Leon Theramin had invented a radio-activated passive microphone that was used to listen to people from their furniture [0].

The fact that this was only (as far as we know) used to listen in to embassies is more about the economics of scale rather than imagining new technology that didn't exist at the time.

At that scale at that time it was cheaper to have neighbors name and shame people who complained about the government. But there is little really in 1984 that's about the future of technology in the same way Star Trek or even Brave New Word is.

[0] He had also invented a television in the 1920s, which is mostly just trivia related to this question.
by seanparsons | 2025-09-28 12:54:42+00:00
Not ignoring, I just didn't write an essay. In all that time working with TypeScript there was very little that I found to be gradually typed, it was either nothing or everything, hence my original comment. Sure some things might throw in a bunch of any/unknown types but those were very much the rarity and often some libraries were using incredibly complicated type definitions to make them as tight as possible.
by rexreed | 2025-09-28 12:55:57+00:00
Before I first used the Web in 1991, I was on Usenet and of course Telnet and email-based systems, and Gopher also emerged around the same time. So the web didn't come out of nowhere, but the IP behind what we're still using, HTML and HTTP, freed from CERN's IP clutches is a good thing. Interesting that it was freed in 1993, once the momentum of the Web was becoming clear.

Might something else have emerged instead if CERN had said no? Who knows. Without the Web, the Internet itself might have stayed in its primarily research and academic domain. The rapid growth of the Web is in part what motivated the commercialization of the Internet and the "Information Superhighway", and then came the entrepeneurs and VCs, and well, here we are.

Could it have all happened based on Gopher instead? Who knows.
by nchmy | 2025-09-28 12:56:05+00:00
Yeah, I have no doubt that he's got some good insights, but its crystal clear that he's just hyping it all up as part of a grift. I get serious Alex Jones vibes from him

I've tried to listen to a few podcasts and read some articles, and its just unbearable. Moreover, I find the main point that he harps on about - that none of the AI stuff is financially sustainable - to be largely unimportant. Like, if they want to burn their money, go for it.

The real issues - intellectual property, implications for the future workforce, environmental costs, or even that the money really ought to be invested in something else, whether public funds are going towards it, if taxes are being avoided etc - seem to be, at best, tertiary concerns for him. He only seems to be "mad as hell" that they're wasting money and no one else is talking about it.

He's also just plainly wrong when he keeps saying things like there's been zero discernable benefit to AI, as if it is just a creepto scam.
by smokel | 2025-09-28 12:56:08+00:00
Agreed. I remember back then thinking what the fuss was all about. There already was Gopher and FTP, and connecting these two occurred at least in my mind back then, so it should have been trivial to most people :)

The important thing for it to succeed was to have a large enough group of people using the same standards. That was probably a (very) hard thing to accomplish, and perhaps Berners-Lee played a large role in that?
by firesteelrain | 2025-09-28 12:57:04+00:00
Claims of an EPA “publication freeze” look overstated. Two staffers say they were told to pause, HQ flatly denies it, and no memo has surfaced. Most likely it is a clearance bottleneck tied to the reorg that killed ORD. To staff it feels like censorship, to leadership it is process. Until documents leak I treat this as local slowdown, not agency-wide gag. The bigger story is the reorg itself which centralizes control and raises interference risk.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-09-28 12:57:05+00:00
I think that question would take a book to answer, and I'm not aware of anyone having written that book yet. (I'm certainly not the right person to write it.) It's not that hard to work this stuff out for yourself, but…

Trust not your self; but your Defects to know, Make use of ev'ry Friend——and ev'ry Foe. A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring: There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain, And drinking largely sobers us again.

You can completely destroy a community if you've found some of the fundamental principles, but not those which counterbalance them. (And you don't even need a formal position of power to accomplish this.) It's this partial understanding that I was referring to, in that last paragraph. In the absence of a good book, I don't think a moderator can learn these things without good mentors, a rogues gallery, and many mistakes – but those mistakes can prove fatal without good mentors to fall back on.
by jdiff | 2025-09-28 12:58:16+00:00
No, it's rhetorical to ask you "Why are you framing it as if it ever was?"

If happiness were a competition we should all be lining up for lobotomies and buying/finding as much sand as we can to bury our heads as deep as we can. But it's not. Conservatives haven't cracked any sort of code, and this line of questions was intended to draw you to this realization of your own accord. Instead, this.
by luckylion | 2025-09-28 12:58:52+00:00
Minitel in France, Btx in Germany and undoubtedly other system already had millions of users when the WWW was "invented", and were arguably what it was the next generation of. It was quite the improvement, but yeah, the article sounds too much like "there was nothing, then I came along and now we have the WWW, so listen to me".
by nobody9999 | 2025-09-28 12:59:18+00:00
>> How is that not the case now?

>The protocol allows servers, rather than users, to ban other servers. Servers should be only the dumbest of pipes.

A fair point. A good fix for this is to have individual clients that can federate/post/receive/moderate/store content. IIUC, there is at least one client/server hybrid that does this. It's problematic for those who don't have the computing power and/or network bandwidth to run such a platform. But it's certainly something to work towards.

>> Are you suggesting that since ActivityPub isn't perfect, it should be discarded?

>I'm saying that by the time something like this has billions of users the protocol is going to be a lot harder to change, so you should fix the problems without delay instead of waiting until after that happens and getting deja vu all over again.

I'm still not seeing the "problems" with server usage you're referencing. Federation obviates the need for users to be on the same server and there's little, if any, monetary value in trying to create mega servers. Discoverability is definitely an issue, but (as you correctly point out) should be addressed. It is, however, a hard problem if we want to maintain decentralization.

>The thing that should be in your threat model is Gmail and Chrome and old school Microsoft EEE. Somebody sets up a big service that initially doesn't try to screw everyone, so it becomes popular. Then once they've captured a majority of users, they start locking out smaller competitors.

Given the landscape of the Fediverse, that seems incredibly unlikely. Perhaps I'm just pie in the sky on this, but those moving to ActivityPub platforms do so to get away from such folks.

Adding to that the ability to manage one's own content on one's own hardware with one's own tools, it seems to be a really unlikely issue.

Then again, I could absolutely be wrong. I hope not. That said, I'm sure that suggestions for changes along the lines you suggest to the ActivityPub protocol[0][1][2] as a hedge against making it fall into a series of corporate hell holes, as you put it, "impossible," would be appreciated.

[0] https://github.com/w3c/activitypub

[1] https://activitypub.rocks/

[2] https://w3c.github.io/activitypub/

Edit: Clarified my thoughts WRT updates to the ActivityPub protocol.
by behringer | 2025-09-28 12:59:44+00:00
The internet is like a world of a few huge Megalopolises with branches out to smaller cities followed by rural communities and then thousands of miles of natural beauty and cottages dotted about.

Parent reminds me of the city slicker in his 1 bedroom closet of a condo in one of the many sterile towers shouting how the world has been destroyed and will never be nice again.
by eulgro | 2025-09-28 13:00:25+00:00
The system I have experience with and the one that's recommended in Jenkins "Humanure Handbook" is a simple bucket.

Spray sawdust on top after use and close the lid. Dump the bucket in compost bin when full, which should happen every 1-2 days in a household with a few people.

Barely any smells, no insect problems, cost is very low.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-09-28 13:00:48+00:00
> Two staffers say they were told to pause, HQ flatly denies it

Presenting these two pieces of evidence in juxtaposition, as if they are equally trustworthy, is a bit misleading:

I think we're all well aware that pretty much any given career scientist, particularly one who has chosen to dedicate their lives to public service, is more trustworthy than the current administration, which is on record with tens of thousands of lies, most so lazily told as to convey contempt for the listener: They either think you're stupid enough to believe them, or don't care whether you do.

To take just one characteristic example out of the tens of thousands: the person ruling over the administration infamously hand-edited a weather map with a marker, to lie to the public about the path of a hurricane, then lied to the public about the markup itself to conceal the previous lie. Notably, they never even acknowledged either lie, much less apologized, meaning they still think it was a good idea, and still think that sort of blatant, shameless lying is ok.

That's to say nothing of the disdain the administration has for government and science in general: the long, strong track record there belies any claims of good faith, and indicates that actions they take which worsen one or both, do so with that as the primary motivation.
by elondaits | 2025-09-28 13:01:46+00:00
It’s very hard for me to interpret the idea that the www was “given away from free” from anywhere but a very contemporary mindset. Back in the early days of the Internet all popular protocols were free/open (ftp, irc, smtp, usenet, gopher, dns, etc.) (sorry if any of these examples was actually under a patent… I remember multiple free clients for all of these)… there was no chance for anything else, since there was no infrastructure for online payments yet, and platforms were very fragmented.

The WWW wasn’t a closed online dial up service, a BBS, or HyperCard. So to ever be the WWW, it needed to be free and open.

What would be the first propietary/closed popular internet service? ICQ?
by zelphirkalt | 2025-09-28 13:02:46+00:00
I think this pipeline implementation does some things different from what I wanted (but did not precisely describe. It seems that each step is run right away, as it is "added", rather than collected and run when `terminate` is called. Also each step can only consume the result of the previous step, not the results of earlier steps. This can be worked around, by ending the pipeline and then starting multiple pipelines from the result of the first pipeline, if needed. I think you would need to import Generic and write something like `class Pipeline(Generic[T]):` as well? Or is `class Pipeline[T]:` a short form of that?

In my experiment I wanted to get a syntax like this:

pipeline = Pipeline() ...some code here... pipeline.add_step(Step(...some meta data..., ...actual procedure to run...))

So then I would need generics for `Step` too and then Pipeline would need to change result type with each call of `add_step`, which seems like current type checkers cannot statically check.

I think your solution circumvents the problem maybe, because you immediately apply each step. But then how would the generic type work? When is that bound to a specific type?
by nh2 | 2025-09-28 13:03:30+00:00
Then:

* Give users a config options so I can adjust it to my use case, like I can for TCP. Don't just hardcode some 2 MB (which was even raised to this in the past, showing how futile it is to hardcode it because it clearly needs adjustments to people's networks and and ever-increasing speeds). It is extremely silly that within my own networks, controlling both endpoints, I cannot achieve TCP speeds over SSH, but I can with nc and a symmetric encryption piped in. It is silly that any TCP/HTTP transfer is reliably faster than SSH.

* Implement data dropping and retransmissions to handle blocking -- like TCP does. It seems obviously asking for trouble to want to implement multiplexing, but then only implement half of the features needed to make it work well.

When one designs a network protocol, shouldn't one of the first sanity checks be "if my connection becomes 1000x faster, does it scale"?
by softwaredoug | 2025-09-28 13:03:32+00:00
No. Of course we shouldn't "place faith in our institutions" but there is a degree of "If Gorman is going to burn, let it burn all the more brightly". You can galvanize a lot of individual / collective action without the government when people see consequences enabled by authoritarian structures.

You might argue the ONLY progress -- in the US -- is not at all from the gov't but from private players genuinely caring about the issue. A lot of people wake up in the morning and decide they'd rather work on an important issue, like climate, than squeezing a tiny bit more profit for some soulless corporation.
by bossyTeacher | 2025-09-28 13:03:58+00:00
You mentioned church, so I assume you mean rituals or activities based on the religion of Christianity, what exactly is deep about those rituals or activities? You also mention true addiction, do you mean physical addiction (as opposed to psychological)? Also, regarding what addicts need, are you not just extrapolating based on your experience? It is certainly possible that what worked for you won't work on everyone else
by giantg2 | 2025-09-28 13:04:29+00:00
I feel like a lot of those other uses are more aligned to the three letter agencies for intelligence and influence if were talking mostly about gen AI. I assume the next best place (excluding munitions and their delivery systems) would be cyber operations. But this realm is touchy and the leaders don't want to start a shooting war with cyber retaliation/strikes. The oversite, need for human in the loop, and aversion to collateral damage make AI weapons difficult to develop and deploy, especially if we earent counting older computer vison etc. It's no surprise the military is having trouble developing and deploying AI weapons in that environment.
by bookshed | 2025-09-28 13:05:05+00:00
> Is any of this overhead really needed?

Moderation is needed, but often abused and used as a tool to create echo chambers.

> What does it accomplish?

As mentioned above, It accomplishes one thing: creating an echo chamber.

Echo cambers are useful, because it shows "wide support" from the community while ignoring the fact that the "community" has been reduced to just the "right people".

For example, in a room there are 100 people, three that have been elected / selected to lead the 97. The three, censor / kick / eliminate 90 people because of their dissenting opinions. Now, the majority (3+7=10) can rule in peace. Quite simple actually.

It's basically authoritarianism that breeds fascism. This is usually a product of the death of objective truth.

Oh! and this is not a LEFT vs. RIGHT problem. Here is a good read: https://danielmiessler.com/blog/bad-governments-on-the-left-...
by ashvardanian | 2025-09-28 13:05:09+00:00
Compared to Rayon or Taskflow, the biggest initial win is cutting out heap allocations for all the promise/result objects — those act like mutexes once the allocator gets hammered by many threads.

Hard to rank the rest without a proper breakdown. If I ever tried, I’d probably end up writing a paper — and I’d rather write code :)
by Ygg2 | 2025-09-28 13:06:32+00:00
> When casey muratori of the handmade network said the same thing I remember agreeing and he got made fun of for it.

Casey Muratori, while a great programmer in his own right, often disregards the use cases, which leads to apple-to-orange comparisons. E.g., why is this ASCII editor from 40 years ago much faster than this Unicode (with full ZWC joining emoji suite) text editor?
by hackinthebochs | 2025-09-28 13:06:37+00:00
You guys are being obtuse. Engineering is turning a spec into a more technical artifact, whether that's source code, machine code, physical hardware or something else. Reverse engineering is then reserving the process of engineering, recovering the semantic artifact from the engineering artifact. That the OP is using the term in the sense of recovering the semantic insights from the cuda kernels is a fine application of the concept.
by T-800Rad | 2025-09-28 13:06:44+00:00
I used to think that too. AI can already do better at screening mammography than a radiologist with a lower miss rate. Given that, insurance rates to cover AI should be even lower than for a radiologist, lawsuits will happen, but with a smaller number of missed cases the number should go down.

Paul Kedrosky had an interesting analogy when the automobile entered the scene. Teamsters (the men who drove teams of horses) benefited from rising salaries, even as new people declined to enter the "dead end" profession. We may well be seeing a similar phenomenon with Radiologists.

Finally, I'd like to point out that rising salaries mean there are greater incentives to find alternative solutions to this rising cost. Given the erratic political situation, I will not be surprised to see a relatively sudden transition to AI interpretation for at least a minority of cases.
by Balinares | 2025-09-28 13:07:11+00:00
:param and :rtype are type hints, just type hints that cannot be validated by tooling and are guaranteed to go out of sync with the code eventually.

Proper type hints are typically very easy to add if the codebase is not a mess that passes things around far and wide with no validation. If it is, the problem is not with the type hints.
by lproven | 2025-09-28 13:08:48+00:00
Across the northern hemisphere, the abnormally hot dry summer has resulted in bumper yields of many tree seeds. It also resulted in lots of forest fires. You can help. Gather acorns, chestnuts, horse chestnuts, & other big, easy-to-recognise tree seeds, and scatter them on wasteland, scrub, patches of thorn bushes, brownfield sites and so on.

As forest fires grow in number, isolated trees and small groups are more likely to survive.
by jmchambers | 2025-09-28 13:09:05+00:00
I grew up a short walk from where he lived, in Bolton, and you'd often see him setting up all the gear, solo, at the base of one of the local chimneys. We'd pull over on our bikes and shout "Is it coming down Fred?". He never failed to stroll over and have a chat about what he was doing. A genuinely nice chap.
by RickJWagner | 2025-09-28 13:09:57+00:00
I just made the decision to buy a car, my 2005 CRV was starting to require a lot of upkeep.

I strongly considered used EVs, but reliability concerns scared me. I like to keep cars a long time, and the idea of a battery or motor going out in a 9 year old car was a consideration.

I ended up going with a Corolla hybrid, getting 50+ mpg with every tank. Maybe next time I’ll buy electric.
by ashvardanian | 2025-09-28 13:10:03+00:00
Wow, I didn’t realize someone had integrated it into their project before I even tried it in mine — thanks for the trust and for sharing!

I completely agree that tuning is needed for better CPU sleep scheduling. I’m hoping to look into it this October, ideally on some Alder Lake CPUs with mixed Performance/Efficiency cores and NUMA enabled.
by therobots927 | 2025-09-28 13:11:15+00:00
Most HN criticism of Zitron appears to fall into one of two categories:

1) He uses expletives and is “too angry” 2) He runs a PR firm and has no experience working with LLMs

Which I think says a lot more about his detractors than it does about him. Time will tell all, and I think he will be remembered as a prescient individual. It’s undeniable that these financial games that OpenAI, Oracle, and now Nvidia are playing are unsustainable and indicative of a large upcoming crash.
by siliconpotato | 2025-09-28 13:11:42+00:00
Still, it adds an air of arrogance to the whole post. For a while the only pytorch code that worked on newly released hopper GPUs we had was the Nvidia ngc container, not Pytorch nightly. The upstream ecosystem hadn't caught up yet and Nvidia were adding their special sauce in their image. Perhaps not stupidity but lack of docs from nvidia
by mwcz | 2025-09-28 13:11:52+00:00
I would argue that financial incentives explain the Web's walling-off, and the inverse for email. There's just not that much money to be made, comparatively, from email.

But after some thought I'm coming around to your suggestion that the protocols were compatible with this outcome from the beginning. With email protocols, the messages themselves are sent from one system to another. With the web's protocols, the body of an HTTP request could be anything, or crucially it could be nothing. Walled gardens choose nothing. If email providers did the same, it wouldn't be email anymore.
by scosman | 2025-09-28 13:12:20+00:00
Models have changes worthy of semver style major changes. Tokenizer, tool support, tool format, JSON modes, etc. Pipelines absolutely must change when these change.

This thread is more about the minor number: not incrementing it when making changes to the internals is painful for dependency tracking. These changes will also break apps (prompts are often tuned to the model).
by tom_m | 2025-09-28 13:12:25+00:00
You don't want to discard prior information though. That's the problem with small context windows. Humans don't forget the original request as they ask for more information or go about a long task. Humans may forget parts of information along the way, but not the original goal and important parts. Not unless they have comprehension issues or ADHD, etc.

This isn't a misconception. Context is a limitation. You can effectively have an AI agent build an entire application with a single prompt if it has enough (and the proper) context. The models with 1m context windows do better. Models with small context windows can't even do the task in many cases. I've tested this many, many, many times. It's tedious, but you can find the right model and the right prompts for success.