MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by godelski | 2025-10-04 02:51:10+00:00
> An optimization with a universal >=0 speedup across your entire suite of tests is a really hard thing to come by. Something is always going to have a negative speedup.

Maybe a common example of this is that people can write matrix matrix multiplication kernels that outperform standard implementations (also in BLAS for CPU). But that's not a General Matrix Matrix multiply. Is the speedup still there for spare matrices? Larger ones? Small ones? Ones that aren't powers of 2? Non-square? And so on. You can beat the official implementation in any one of these but good luck doing it everywhere. In fact, you should beat the official method because you don't have the overhead to check which optimization you should use.

It's easy to over simplify a problem and not even realize you have done so. There's always assumptions being made and you should not let these be invisible.
by airhangerf15 | 2025-10-04 02:52:26+00:00
Signal (Open Whispers) is likely CIA funded. It's like TOR (made by the Navy/DARPA): make something that works so your own operatives can hide behind it too

https://www.kitklarenberg.com/p/signal-facing-collapse-after...

https://yasha.substack.com/p/signal-is-a-government-op-85e

https://bigleaguepolitics.com/court-docs-show-fbi-can-interc...
by ManuelKiessling | 2025-10-04 02:53:47+00:00
I really really love this, but it would benefit tremendously from one simple, but maybe not easy to implement, feature: movie posters. For someone like me who watches A LOT of movies, it’s sometimes hard to remember a movie based on its title alone, and seeing the official movie poster would make it so much easier.

But I guess implementing this would take away a lot of the current implementation‘s simplicity? Are these available without violating copyright left and right? Is there even a straightforward way to map movie titles to, say, their primary IMDB poster image?
by drnick1 | 2025-10-04 02:54:47+00:00
I still don't understand how this project meaningfully addresses the problem of identity and data ownership.

When it come to identities, either you have your own domain, or you use someone else's domain (say, Bluesky). Most people don't have domains, and so their identity will be owned by a third party.

You also have the same problem when it comes to the data itself. The moment Bluesky or some other server bans you, your repo is shut down and you lose the ability to move the data somewhere else.

In short, this is exactly like email. Unless you have your own domain and server you don't control anything.
by mrexroad | 2025-10-04 02:57:51+00:00
Tangentially, I enjoy reminding my kids how long it takes our star to complete a rotation around the Milky Way, and then also point out that we can go to a museum and see fossils of what life looked like one galactic rotation ago. It gives the right amount of backward and forward perspective about the rock we live on that I want them to keep tucked away in the corner of their mind.
by Spunkie | 2025-10-04 02:58:17+00:00
In general the Tahoe update has been awful for all my end users that decided to update.

It's not just electron apps that are the issue btw, just yesterday we ran into an issue with Zoom.

It was breaking prompts/popups and by extension the system settings, the Mac app store, iTouch, and a ton of other random stuff was broken in silent and inconsistent ways.

Also all my 8gb users are noticing significantly higher memory usage compared to their previous macOS versions.
by MountDoom | 2025-10-04 02:58:21+00:00
Yeah, but net worth is weird because for most people, it just measures age. When you're young, you have nothing in your 401k and you have a brand new mortgage, so you're worth around $0. Negative if you have any student loans.

When you're in your 50s or 60s, the mortgage is repaid, and if nothing blew up, you probably also have a million or two in your 401k, so at that point, it's actually not that hard for a person who had a decent career in the SF Bay Area to be worth $4M+. And many FAANG retirees will probably flirt with $10M+ if they don't spend too much.
by infamouscow | 2025-10-04 02:59:22+00:00
Saying California has churches is like saying a desert has cacti—it's true, but it misses the point.

Texas' religious density, from Austin's sprawling non-denominational hubs to its Catholic and Protestant strongholds, isn’t just a headcount of steeples, it's a cultural force that outmuscles the state’s flimsy, election-timed gestures.

These communities don't just exist—they act, relentlessly, weaving safety nets that endure beyond the next ballot. California's churches, where they stand, are drowned out by a secular dogma that kneels to bureaucracy over human need. If they were enough, San Francisco wouldn't be playing whack-a-mole with encampments while Houston houses people and moves on.
by komali2 | 2025-10-04 03:01:28+00:00
> “In Sweden, we pay digitally to a large degree and the use of cash is low. The general public being able to pay by card for example for food and medicines even in the event of a serious breakdown in data communication, that is offline, is a milestone in our intensified efforts to strengthen emergency preparedness”, says Governor Erik Thedéen.

I understand that it's very normal to use a CC in Sweden (and many places), but it feels grim to me that the thought towards major telecommunications breakdown is, "oh no, how will we make sure that people can keep credit card companies and banks informed that they need food and medicine if the internet is down?" I feel like "reversion" to the solved problem of offline transactions - cash payments - would be a more reasonable default assumption, and in the case of catastrophic infrastructure breakdown, simple expropriation.
by solid_fuel | 2025-10-04 03:01:54+00:00
I don't understand some parts of this, the writing doesn't seem to flow logically from one thought to another.

> Second, we are going to have to somehow make money for video generation. People are generating much more than we expected per user, and a lot of videos are being generated for very small audiences. > We are going to try sharing some of this revenue with rightsholders who want their characters generated by users. > The exact model will take some trial and error to figure out, but we plan to start very soon. Our hope is that the new kind of engagement is even more valuable than the revenue share, but of course we we want both to be valuable.

The first part of this paragraph implies that the video generation service is more expensive than they expected, because users are generating more videos than they expected and sharing them less. The next sentence then references sharing revenue with "rightsholders"? What revenue? The first part makes it sound like there's very little left over after paying for inference.

Secondly, to make a prediction about the future business model - it sounds like large companies (disney, nintendo, etc) will be able to enter revenue sharing agreements with OpenAI where users pay extra to use specific brand characters in their generated videos, and some of that licensing cost will be returned to the "rightsholders". But I bet everyone else - you, me, small youtube celebrities - will be left out in the cold with no controls over their likeness. After all, it's not like they could possibly identify every single living person and tie them to their likeness.
by thewebguyd | 2025-10-04 03:02:10+00:00
Those on the left also quite often suffer from letting perfect be the enemy of good. I've had a few friends over the years who would seem to prefer nothing be done rather than make incremental progress. I.e., how people will be critical of a carbon tax to help reduce emissions simply because it's not good enough, even if its a step in the right direction. We've seen it with health care as well. It's "medicare for all or bust."

I appreciate the sentiment of wanting the right/perfect solution, but the perfect solution doesn't happen all at once. Often times a compromise is needed in order to help people right now, not hypothetically in the future. Sometimes that means you end up being less inclusive, but so be it if shit gets done.
by Tiktaalik | 2025-10-04 03:02:35+00:00
nah this is nonsense.

News flash: churches exist even in the left coast.

One of the biggest non profit organizations that helps people in Vancouver's DTES is Union Gospel Mission and the Salvation Army.

Nonetheless severe poverty has persisted in this city my entire life. The churches hand out food and run some shelters but it's a band aid.

The solution would start with housing, but the government refuses to spend the money to build it. So the status quo persists, with non-profits, many of them religious, step into the void just to keep people alive.
by bjornsing | 2025-10-04 03:05:09+00:00
Swedish banks (even the Riksbank linked above) regularly refuse to turn cash into digital money unless you can ”prove” where you got it from. It’s not sufficient to say (with immense credibility) that you worked hard all your life and saved it. Entire inheritances are regularly wiped out due to this, when high denomination bills are obsoleted by the Riksbank. So I’d say it’s not only a common sentiment but also government policy.
by mmastrac | 2025-10-04 03:06:20+00:00
"While it does not have the aggressive optimization stance (or complexity) of larger compilers such as LLVM or gcc, its output is often not too far off: the same paper showed Cranelift generating code that ran ~2% slower than V8 (TurboFan) and ~14% slower than an LLVM-based system."

-- https://cranelift.dev/
by peterpeppers | 2025-10-04 03:07:07+00:00
I love the moral outrage about “getting clicks”

Journos wouldn’t have to get clicks, if you people (yes, you people) would pay for journalism but no lets continue to post archive links on HN.

I’m throughly disappointed by the pampered, know-it-all tech class who continually complain about the world but refuses to make investments or engage in collective bargaining to force the tech billionaire class.

Apparently all it takes to sell one’s soul is the feeling of superiority, $150k+ wages and stock options.
by AstroBen | 2025-10-04 03:07:17+00:00
How would it be doable to make them open? I think this is a fundamentally different thing than LibreOffice vs Excel. These things are incredibly expensive to train and run, and doing it as a FOSS project for anyone to clone and run locally means they'd never make their investment back

Open models exist but they're not very useful compared to the latest. Hopefully that'll change but who knows
by mmcromp | 2025-10-04 03:08:21+00:00
For saas as a solo dev, Rails would be faster for you to get up and running, rails also specifically caters to solo SaaS devs. but python is much more popular (you can look up the yearly stack overflow survey for more info) and you'll find developers much more easily. Consider Django, a similar MVC batteries included framework. I say this unbiased as a ruby and python hater lol
by inkyoto | 2025-10-04 03:08:46+00:00
1.5%-2.5% card surcharges (both, debit and credit) are a commonplace in Australia as well.

Visa and Mastercard have successfully lobbied and conspired with local banks in both countries to bury EFTPOS, which were national debit card payment systems with a flat transaction fee ranging between 10 and 50 cents per transaction (depending on the bank).

A while back, Visa/MC realised that debit card transactions, being on the rise, were a highly lucrative market to tap into that they had been missing out on, so they set out on a war of attrition and conspired with the local big banks to phase out EFTPOS cards in favour of Visa/MC debit cards, where the cost of transaction was to be passed on to the card user. Tiered debit cards quickly followed (Platinum, etc.), that attracted higher fee percentages for Visa/MC – payment network commission fees are published on the respective payment network websites. Other than consumers, all parties involved (big banks, payment networks) became moist with excitement at getting a huge slice of the card transactions pie.

But there is the light at the end of the tunnel (other than the light of the oncoming train) – the RBA has moved to ban all card surcharges from July 2026.
by inetknght | 2025-10-04 03:08:54+00:00
Not really.

There's agricultural subsidies that help farmers to nominally ensure that the US doesn't need to import foodstuffs. That practically guarantees that food is available, but it isn't "single payer" in terms of obtaining that food.

That "single payer" for obtaining food is food stamps. You have to be poor, to very poor, to qualify. But you get stamps, you bring to your grocery store, and you get free essentials, paying with food stamps. The market then redeems the food stamps to the government to get paid. And, guess who prices these essential products? Well let's just say that the government is generally rather stingy about it, but markets that sell these essential items are practically required to accept food stamps, even if only to keep products moving so they don't rot on the shelves.
by saxonww | 2025-10-04 03:10:28+00:00
I'm not really disagreeing with you, but I think it's more about salesmanship than anything else. "We released v1 and copyright holders immediately threatened to sue us, lol" sounds like you didn't think ahead, and also paints copyright holders in a negative light; copyright holders who you need to not be enemies but who, if you're not making it up, are already unhappy enough to want to sue you.

Sam's sentence tries to paint what happened in a positive light, and imagines positive progress as both sides work towards 'yes'.

So I agree that it would be nice if he were more direct, but if he's even capable of that it would be 30 years from now when someone's asking him to reminisce, not mid-hustle. And I'd add that I think this is true of all business executives, it's not necessarily a Silicon Valley thing. They seem to frequently be mealy-mouthed. I think it goes with the position.
by inetknght | 2025-10-04 03:11:37+00:00
> Genuine question, what do you think is missing?

See my reply to the comment next to yours.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45462739

> No keypad, no pageup/pagedown/home/end/delete (I use all of them very frequently), arrow keys are misplaced and tiny (also use them a lot), no F1-F12 keys, no screenshot button, funky command key instead of using control key like any sane OS, and the command key is where the option key belongs, blah blah.

I had all of those keys when I was using Mac OS 9, 25 years ago.
by thewebguyd | 2025-10-04 03:12:49+00:00
More importantly what that did was split the working class. Even in this very thread there's people referring to the "working class" as if they also aren't in it.

If you aren't a billionaire capital owner, you are working class. If your primary income comes from a job, you are working class.

If we want solidarity again we need to dispel the notion of working class meaning poor, blue collar workers. We've been pitted against ourselves, our divide shouldn't be left v. right it should be ALL working class against the ultra-rich.
by inetknght | 2025-10-04 03:12:59+00:00
> that prevents powers users from even trying to migrate?

Prevents? No. Hinders? Absolutely.

I only have a mac because it was issued by work as a loaner while they set up my new Linux laptop. I wouldn't want to use it as a daily driver at all because I still exclusively use Linux at home, and likely would never get over the keyboard differences.
by scarmig | 2025-10-04 03:13:08+00:00
The emptying of institutions in California happened long before that, in the late 60s and through the 70s; it became very hard to commit anyone, which justified further cuts.

If you pass a bill that destroys mental health systems for the sake of civil libertarian concerns, "its issues weren't magically fixed through half a century later, which was totally unforeseeable" is not a good excuse.
by jlaternman | 2025-10-04 03:13:23+00:00
It does make sense with a wider context. In short, he was miserable, and he always planned to go out on his own terms when he felt he'd reached the end of the path (I imagine influenced by seeing his father die painfully through disease as a young man). He documented both well. Having his family in the house at the time, and to be on the phone to his wife, was likely to let them know the nature of it, a kind of act of transparency and trust. It makes sense in the context of his beliefs and nature. Also, he would have always been in the middle of something, work wise.
by altairprime | 2025-10-04 03:13:58+00:00
Appreciation isn’t the certain source of joy for hobby projects that most users think it ought to be. If you’re intrinsically motivated enough to create something like this, then you’re intrinsically bored by it, too. Appreciation does not necessarily have any bearing on that, no matter that your users hope otherwise, especially in fields like tech where neurodivergence is a local norm. May their departure serve as a beacon for others to leave behind the unrewarding.
by elbasti | 2025-10-04 03:14:48+00:00
About 40% of AI infrastructure spending is the physical datacenter itself and the associated energy production. 60% is the chips.

That 40% has a very long shelf life.

Unfortunately, the energy component is almost entirely fossil fuels, so the global warming impact is pretty significant.

At this point, geoengineering is the only thing that can earn us a bit of time to figure...idk, something out, and we can only hope the oceans don't acidify too much in the meantime.
by colechristensen | 2025-10-04 03:16:02+00:00
Cut the top 20 salaries in half and fire 10% of the staff who are not directly involved in academics (must teach, learn, or research) for starters. Sever any major athletics organization (i.e. football, basketball, etc) into a separate legal entity with something like a license fee to the university based on team revenue as a percentage so funds flow exclusively in one direction.

University admin work expands to the available workforce and I've heard first person accounts from long time senior university staff about admin employees who literally didn't do anything of any conceivable consequence.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-10-04 03:17:01+00:00
I've looked at Yggdrasil multiple times now, and I always end up backing away because it's security critical software intentionally facing the public internet and talking to untrusted peers, but it's a smaller project with no security audit. In contrast, wireguard has a lot of eyes on it, simpler code that does less, only exposes a listen-only invisible UDP port to untrusted parties, and uses formal verification to ensure that its smaller codebase is secure. Perhaps I'm paranoid, but it's a really hard sell for me to use anything but wireguard:\
by thewebguyd | 2025-10-04 03:18:22+00:00
> The solution would start with housing

This is the answer. Housing cannot be both an investment and broadly affordable. Our society needs to choose.

Honestly its time to rip the bandaid off here with housing. Build, build, build. Fuck the NIMBYs, use eminent domain and buy them out. Build up, not out, and start driving prices down.

We need to stop making real estate an investment vehicle and an endlessly appreciating asset. "Line must go up" is fine for the stock market and a company's profit, it need not apply to a basic human need.
by tim-- | 2025-10-04 03:19:12+00:00
I don't disagree with any of your points.

> They retire. They disappear. They get hit by a bus.

Then maybe a better NC license should be designed specifically for hardware? The Creative Commons license isn't fantastic, for all the reasons that you suggest.

Just because the hardware is licensed by default as NC, doesn't mean that there can not be other providers of parts, a dual licensed open source hardware project if you will.

You get the GPL-like CC NC license for general use, the tinkerers have the plans so they can modify the hardware.

Then the commercial suppliers of replacement parts can pay a small percentage of their sales to the group that made the original designs, so they can continue to build new designs and improve existing ones.

Someone who just carbon copies a design and makes a profit of it, without giving back anything to the community is hard to avoid in the open hardware space.
by ineedasername | 2025-10-04 03:20:23+00:00
These attempted limitations tend to be very brittle when the material isn’t excised from the training data, even more so when it’s visual rather than just text. It becomes very much like that board game Taboo where the goal is to get people to guess a word without saying a few other highly related words or synonyms.

For example, I had no problem getting the desired results when I promoted Sora for “A street level view of that magical castle in a Florida amusement area, crowds of people walking and a monorail going by on tracks overhead.”

Hint: it wasn’t Universal Studios, and unless you know the place by blind sight you’d think it had been the mouse’s own place.

On pure image generation, I forget which model, one derived from stable diffusion though, there was clearly a trained unweighting of Mickey Mouse such that you couldn’t get him to appear by name, but go at it a little sideways? Even just “Minnie Mouse and her partner”? Poof- guardrails down. If you have a solid intuition of the term “dog whistling” and how it’s done, it all becomes trivial.
by bjt | 2025-10-04 03:21:55+00:00
> You might want to think about why Petersen wants you to think you’re the Nazi. What change is he trying to effect in our culture, and how does that belief support his desire? Rhetoric always aims to effect some change in the attitude of the listener, and never without some benefit of the speaker.

What benefit do you think he's trying to get from it? I'm honestly trying to figure out the nefarious angle and coming up blank.

It seems to me like a very similar sentiment to that great "are we the baddies?" sketch from Mitchell and Webb. [1] I see both as an exercise in moral humility.

See the Milgram experiment, or the Asch experiment. Most people do cave to pressure from authorities and the group. Everybody believes they're they exception. Statistically, most of them are wrong.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-10-04 03:22:44+00:00
> If you engage in behavior with known and predictable risks, which then kills somebody, it is manslaughter.

> That sometimes your behavior doesn’t kill people is immaterial — manslaughter is being intentionally risky in your actions which leads to a death.

I was thinking more about laws enacted in the last couple of years in various US states which have guaranteed a rise in pregnancy-related deaths[0].

0 - https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/04/u-s-pregnancy...
by azakai | 2025-10-04 03:24:49+00:00
The Cranelift website does have that quote, but the linked paper says

> The resulting code performs on average 14% better than LLVM -O0, 22% slower than LLVM -O1, 25% slower than LLVM -O2, and 24% slower than LLVM -O3

So it is more like 24% slower, not 14%. Perhaps a typo (24/14), or they got the direction mixed up (it is +14 vs -24), or I'm reading that wrong?

Regardless, those numbers are on a particular set of database benchmarks (TPC-H), and I wouldn't read too much into them.