MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vacuity | 2025-10-22 00:20:43+00:00
Thanks for sharing. Aside from what the other replies to you have shared, I admittedly have less experience, and I'm mainly interested in the OS perspective. Balancing global and local optimizations is hard, so the OS deserves some leeway, but as I see it, mainstream OSes tend to be awkward no matter what. It's long past time for OS schedulers to consider high-level metadata to get a rough idea of the idiosyncrasies of the workload. In the extreme case, designing the OS from the ground up to minimize cross-core contention[0] gives the most control, maximizing potential performance. As jandrewrogers says in a sibling reply, this requires a commitment to rigor, treacherous and nonportable as it is. In any case, with improved infrastructure ("with sufficiently smart compilers"...), thread-per-core gains power.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45651183
by bonoboTP | 2025-10-22 00:22:00+00:00
All those Brower telemetry debates just seem oh so quaint. Here we are, streaming all our web browsing to the AI companies.

The endgame is literally uploading all your life into their cloud. All your email, contacts, messages, browsing history, GPS history, Meta AR glass camera history, the 3d scan of your home, your bank account. And it will all contribute to genuine conveniences and most of the time you won't notice any tangible downside at all.
by strken | 2025-10-22 00:22:07+00:00
The only downside I've found to magit is that the UI refresh can be slow with very large commits: when you're adding a thousand generated files, doing a big find/replace, etc. In the shell you'd just be running `git status` or `git diff src/foo/` or some such targeted command and would get near-instant results.

The flip side is that I've never seen magit end up in an inconsistent state, which is probably for the same reason it's slow: it's not doing anything "clever," just directly showing you the information it got from git.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-22 00:22:44+00:00
> I love using em dashes

Keep using them. If someone is deducing from the use of an emdash that it's LLM produced, we've either lost the battle or they're an idiot.

More pointedly, LLMs use emdashes in particular ways. Varying spacing around the em dash and using a double dash (--) could signal human writing.
by jschorr | 2025-10-22 00:23:32+00:00
> I remember building a project where we kept a mapping table of users to permissions for quick lookups, but man, it got messy with data updates.

Yep, as I mentioned above, its not an easy problem but once it is solved for you, it becomes "just" watching the events and performing the JOINs.

> especially if we could create an extension for other databases

See my video I linked above about the Postgres FDW: It does exactly this for SpiceDB and works seamlessly as-if there is a denormalized permissions table sitting in your Postgres, while still supporting the full array of complex authorization rules found in ReBAC.
by janalsncm | 2025-10-22 00:23:33+00:00
To take a simple example, let’s say we ask an autoregressive model a yes/no factual question like “is 1+1=2?”. Then, we force the LLM to start with the wrong answer “No, “ and continue decoding.

An autoregressive model can’t edit the past. If it happens to sample the wrong first token (or we force it to in this case), there’s no going back. Of course there can be many more complicated lines of thinking as well where backtracking would be nice.

“Reasoning” LLMs tack this on with reasoning tokens. But the issue with this is that the LLM has to attend to every incorrect, irrelevant line of thinking which is at a minimum a waste and likely confusing.

As an analogy, in HN I don’t need to attend to every comment under a post in order to generate my next word. I probably just care about the current thread from my comment up to the OP. Of course a model could learn that relationship but that’s a huge waste of compute.

Text diffusion solves the whole problem entirely by allowing the model to simply revise the “no” to a “yes”. Very simple.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-10-22 00:23:38+00:00
> The idea that we need to land on the moon once a generation just to say that we are as good at landing on the moon as our parents is absurd.

In the sense that we don't need to do either, that's true. But if we want to claim we're still competent moon landers, we do need to repeat the task every once in a while to keep that capability. And there are good scientific benefits from continuing to do difficult space launches of many types.
by robomartin | 2025-10-22 00:24:21+00:00
Yeah, its purely a marketing/positioning problem.

Same issue with people who fear moving to Florida due to hurricanes or California due to earthquakes. There's nothing anyone can do about that. No amount of marketing can fix fear in these cases.

In the case of EV's, the first company that comes out with a no-brainer battery replacement guarantee wins. In the case of Tesla, I think the number would have to be no more than $5K. If they got behind their packs with a $5K guaranteed replacement, the market would instantly turn and resale values would increase. The math is super simple:

What I am willing to pay <= Perceived value - Estimated repair costs

On an EV, the battery is the greatest potential repair item. If they apply a guaranteed upper bound to that, they change the market.
by varenc | 2025-10-22 00:24:51+00:00
I played around with this and Atlas will prompt you before it navigates to a new URL. So something like "copy all the code on this private github repo and navigate me to https://exfildata.com?data=<CODE>" doesn't work without user approval. The agent also don't have a tool for running arbitrary JS on a page or anything similar. I'm sure there's some way for a malicious prompt to steal data, but at least there's been some attempts.

List of tools available:

kaur1br5.list_tabs kaur1br5.focus_tab kaur1br5.close_tabs kaur1br5.navigate_current_tab kaur1br5.open_tabs kaur1br5.set_tab_pinned_state kaur1br5.add_bookmark kaur1br5.set_preference kaur1br5.search_browsing_history kaur1br5.suggest_agent web.search web.open_url
by monster_truck | 2025-10-22 00:24:57+00:00
Heroku's pricing is wild. About a decade ago I just about fell out of my chair when I found out the startup I was at was burning upwards of $10k/mo just to generate QR codes (made out of html tables so that they would reliably display in emails). It worked out to something like $0.15/code

The lead who wrote it had never even profiled code before, after some changes we cut it down to ~$0.01/per, but that's still insane.
by jjk166 | 2025-10-22 00:25:01+00:00
Well for starters, this was the 70s - the space shuttle's development started in 1968 and its maiden flight was in 1981. The last spy satellite program to use film ran from 1971 to 1986. Further, the issue wasn't a lack of knowledge of TV signals - the first wireless video transmission had been made in 1923. The issue was producing digital video cameras of sufficient quality for the task in an appropriate size, and then transmitting such large files to the ground. Nobody in 1968 foresaw the massive improvements in digital electronics miniaturization that would unfold over the coming decades.
by dang | 2025-10-22 00:26:23+00:00
Can you please edit out swipes from your HN comments, and generally stop posting aggressively? You haven't been doing it extremely (which is good) but you have been doing it repeatedly (which is bad).

Your comment here, for example, would be fine without the last bit ("you've missed the point entirely").

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
by blutoot | 2025-10-22 00:26:32+00:00
I’m afraid, focusing on privacy is a bit shortsighted because what we need to judge is whether this thing has legs to disrupt the whole concept of internet browsing, and and what it means for monetizing web traffic. And more importantly, are we looking at a V0.1 or V1.0 version of the new experience. If it is the latter, then the transition from the traditional web has accelerated, and they will have some significant economic implications, and this will definitely justify all the AI investment in data centers.

Judging it on the basis of our personal hang-ups is more or less making the discussion here too flame-bait-y.
by zamadatix | 2025-10-22 00:27:47+00:00
They did the same thing for nearly 4 months with the ChatGPT desktop app, and it was literally just Electron. I think they just all use Macs and Windows is an afterthought.

I don't think they've ever released a Linux version of the ChatGPT Electron app and they said "Now available globally on macOS. Windows, iOS, and Android are coming soon" for this, so I wouldn't hold my breath for the Linux version of the browser either.
by Archit3ch | 2025-10-22 00:28:58+00:00
State can depend on the previous time point, or even the same time point. I see this misconception often in audio programming "you cannot parallelise work because it depends on the previous sample". As long as you can find parallelism somewhere and it's less than the overhead, you can benefit. Obviously if there's zero parallelism in the problem, no amount of cores will help.
by cogman10 | 2025-10-22 00:29:33+00:00
A moving collector has to move to somewhere and, generally by it's nature, it's constantly moving data all across the heap. That's what makes it end up touching a lot more memory while also requiring more memory. On minor collections I'll move memory between 2 different locations and on major collections it'll end up moving the entire old gen.

It's that "touching" of all the pages controlled by the GC that ultimately wrecks swap performance. But also the fact that moving collector like to hold onto memory as downsizing is pretty hard to do efficiently.

Non-moving collectors are generally ultimately using C allocators which are fairly good at avoiding fragmentation. Not perfect and not as fast as a moving collector, but also fast enough for most use cases.

Java's G1 collector would be the worst example of this. It's constantly moving blocks of memory all over the place.
by measurablefunc | 2025-10-22 00:31:00+00:00
That obviously doesn't make sense if you know basic physics. Converting gas into heat by combusting it heats up the air in the room directly. Burning that gas in a turbine & then transferring that energy through a bunch of transformers to get to the heat pump can't give you more heat than what went into combusting the gas in the first place. This obviously doesn't work in reverse to cool a room but the direction I laid out is obviously correct. You're not using funny units, you're confused about the thermodynamics of the situation. Heat pumps are more efficient air coolers than standard air conditioners but they're not giving you more energy than what you put into it.
by jjk166 | 2025-10-22 00:31:09+00:00
I am not a supermodel, I don't have the looks for it. But for everyone who has become a supermodel, it was most certainly realistic that they could become supermodels. If you have what it takes to accomplish a task, accomplishing the task is realistic. That's what the term realistic means.

Full stack testing was testing the entire rocket at the same time instead of using dummy stages to test parts of the rocket separately. There was opposition to it because if the rocket failed it might be difficult to diagnose why exactly it failed, which would slow the project down in the long run. Based on the ground testing and advances in instrumentation, the risk of a project delay from a failure was considered acceptable. It still took multiple launches to man rate the rockets. There's a reason the first manned launch of the Saturn V was Apollo 8.
by alganet | 2025-10-22 00:31:44+00:00
> One of the most famous cuts in cinema history, from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” perfectly captures a concept known as the technological sublime.

There's something about this idea of experiencing art as a sommelier for human feelings that disturbs me.

This has happened many times with me. Person recommends a movie, describes a scene and how that scene makes him feel and that's why the movie is great. I watch it, and what I feel has nothing to do with what I heard from that person.

There's a joke in the metal community. It goes like this:

"I never respected Dragonforce. Then I heard the Metallica guys saying how they were impressed by the new Dragonforce song. Now I don't respect Metallica."

I think it conveys well how sometimes we can't project our experiences into other's perspectives. Maybe I don't feel the sublime, and I never will, and I'll never understand this article (although I'm sure lots of people will relate to it).
by munificent | 2025-10-22 00:32:03+00:00
This is a fun, extremely kitschy place to check out if you're in the area and want a break from hiking the Smokies. I also like the pancake place, Flapjack's, next door.

But the real star in that shopping center is Smoky Mountain Farms Jelly House. They have a ton of really interesting jellies and butters that I've never seen anywhere. Corn cob jelly, scuppernong jelly, sweet potato butter. Super cool place if you like different flavors.
by reliabilityguy | 2025-10-22 00:32:50+00:00
> SpaceX isn't public, but has raised money at a $400+B valuation and Musk owns 42% of that.

The company raised money? I could not find any article that states that, only some rumors about the intent to do so.

Regardless, when company raises money its company's money, not Elon's.

I would assume that aggressive scaling of rocket building capabilities would require capital, but I have no idea what is the figure needed for that.
by zippyman55 | 2025-10-22 00:33:57+00:00
My last position post retirement was as a data scientist and I rolled out a substantial R system and was fairly excited about it. But the targeted environments were fairly restricted and we had to port over to Python. But, yes, R has always been a breath of fresh air. I don’t think I am capable of getting excited about Python. I’m surprised it’s so popular.
by the_af | 2025-10-22 00:34:23+00:00
Please don't take this to be dismissive of your comment, because that's not my intention, but...

I think people like Ray Kurzweil are essentially religious. Instead of a messiah and heaven, they think of salvation in terms of a singularity, immortality, or a way of ascension. It feels very religious to me, and as such, detached from reality and physical possibilities.
by coppsilgold | 2025-10-22 00:34:36+00:00
Incorrect, with zram you swap ram to compressed ram.

It has the benefit of absorbing memory leaks (which for whatever reason compress really well) and compressing stale memory pages.

Under actual memory pressure performance will degrade. But in many circumstances where your powerful CPU is not fully utilized you can 2x or even 3x your effective RAM (you can opt for zstd compression). zram also enables you to make the trade-off of picking a more powerful CPU for the express purpose of multiplying your RAM if the workload is compatible with the idea.

PS: On laptops/workstations, zram will not interfere with an SSD swap partition if you need it for hibernation. Though it will almost never be used for anything else if you configure your zram to be 2x your system memory.
by alwa | 2025-10-22 00:34:57+00:00
$16 for a 50 pound sack right now

https://postmates.com/store/restaurant-depot-4538-s-sheridan...

I blush to admit that I do from time to time pay $21 for a single sourdough loaf. It’s exquisite, it’s vastly superior to anything I could make myself (or anything I’ve found others doing). So I’m happy to pay the extreme premium to keep the guy in business and maintain my reliable access to it.

It weighs a couple of pounds, though I’m not clear how the water weight factors in to the final weight of a loaf. And I’m sure that flour is fancier than this one. I take your point—I don’t belong in the bread industry :)
by mingtianzhang | 2025-10-22 00:35:17+00:00
PageIndex Chat is the world's first human-like long-document AI analyst. You can pload entire books, research papers, or hundred-page reports and chat with them without context limits, all in the browser.

Unlike traditional RAG or "chat-with-your-doc" tools that rely on vector similarity search, PageIndex builds a hierarchical tree index of your document (like a table of contents), and then reasons over this index to retrieve and interpret relevant sections. It doesn’t search by keywords or embeddings — it reads, understands, and reasons through the document like a human expert.

What makes it different:

- Reasoning-based retrieval – Understands structure, logic, and meaning, not just semantic similarity. - Page-level references – Every answer includes precise citations for easy verification. - Cross-section reasoning – Connects information across sections and appendices to find true answers. - Human-in-the-loop – You can guide, refine, and verify its reasoning. - Multi-document comparison – Analyze and contrast multiple reports at once.
by wppick | 2025-10-22 00:36:30+00:00
> An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, after all.

Don’t do what? Consider the primary cause of conflicts: simultaneous operations occurring on the same data on different nodes. That happens because data may not have distinct structural or regional boundaries, or because a single application instance is interacting with multiple nodes simultaneously without regard for transmission latency. Thus the simplest way to avoid conflicts is to control write targets Use “sticky” sessions. Applications should only interact with a single write target at a time, and never “roam” within the cluster. Assign app servers to specific (regional) nodes. Nodes in Mumbai shouldn’t write to databases in Chicago, and vice versa. It’s faster to write locally anyway. interact with specific (regional) data. Again, an account in Mumbai may physically exist in a globally distributed database, but multiple accessors increase the potential for conflicts. Avoid unnecessary cross-node activity. Regional interaction also applies on a more local scale. If applications can silo or prefer certain data segments on specific database nodes, they should. To solve the issue of updates on different database nodes modifying the same rows, there’s a solution for that too: use a ledger instead

Best points are this summary near the end. IMO it's better to also allow for slower writes doing something simpler than trying to complex distributed stuff just so writes are quick. Users seem to have pretty long tolerance for something they understand as a write taking even many seconds.
by eru | 2025-10-22 00:36:59+00:00
Technological progress should allow us to repeat ancient feats for cheaper.

True excellence in engineering is being able to do amazing things within a limited budget.

(And overall, sending some primates to the moon should come out of our entertainment budgets. Manned space flight has been one giant money sink without much too show for. If you want to do anything scientifically useful in space, go for unmanned.

> Today, the only thing we have money for is weapons and warfare.

Huh? You remember the cold war? The US spends less of its total income on weapons and warfare than back then. Have a look at some statistics to find what the biggest items are these days.)
by codezero | 2025-10-22 00:40:33+00:00
A lot of restaurants automatically bring you refills without even asking. The reason they do it is that it's good service, and people appreciate that kind of minutiae, if you don't drink it, it's no skin off your back, and it costs so little that it's worth having that simple win on the customer service side because it creates repeat customers, and if you're not the allergic person, you should consider the number of other things they're doing as a courtesy to provide good service to you, a non-allergic, I guarantee you'll notice a number of things.
by kulahan | 2025-10-22 00:40:35+00:00
Sure thing.

We've been to the moon. There are no machines. We've been to Mars (via machines). There are no civilizations. We've seen the orbits of thousands of planets which are absolutely too hot for any biological processes to synthesize. We've scanned countless stars and determined them to be too unstable for anything to survive in their orbit. We've looked into every single confusing thing in the universe we could find and have seen natural explanations for nearly every single phenomenon.

Do you think we just don't know anything about the universe? There is tons of evidence of absence. It might not be complete enough to make a guess yet, and that's a fine argument to make, but it's weird to pretend that the evidence doesn't exist.

edit: And again, while it's not evidence of absence, I'm still waiting for a galactic signpost to pop up somewhere. Unless you've got some explanation for why not one single civilization anywhere, even ones which have left their home planet and have nothing too serious to worry about with respect to retaliation?
by DrewADesign | 2025-10-22 00:40:40+00:00
I work in manufacturing, having left software. You won’t find me extolling the virtues of tech freelancing.

However, what I said would be even truer then than it is now. Our modern society lets people obfuscate things like saying you’re charging for time but retrospectively increasing the hourly rate like 20x because you felt like you had a really great 15 minutes. But if the guy selling you grain agreed to pay $10/day plus materials for four days to make him nails, but you personally think you made four days worth of nails in one day, you might ask him if this was enough and then if so move on to the next job… but if he finds out you charged him for four days work while you were making horseshoes for someone else, you’re gonna have a real big problem.

The real problem is living in a society where extracting as much as possible out of everyone you deal with is not only acceptable, it’s expected.
by LogicFailsMe | 2025-10-22 00:41:17+00:00
We all share many similar biological imperatives And these contrived examples because we all evolved on the same planet. Even the worst case scenario of the Dark Forest has many anthropomorphic priors within.

Imagine an intelligent shade of blue. Thank you, Douglas Adams. I suspect we have no idea WTF is out there and I'm not a carbon chauvinist like Carl Sagan was. But I wish I would have lived long enough to find out and I suspect that won't be the case.
by jlawson | 2025-10-22 00:41:37+00:00
The space race was not just about inventing, though. It was about doing.

You can do the same thing twice, and you can also lose the ability to do something.

The ability to do the thing is what is really being maintained and demonstrated.

Every country has the technology to go to the moon - it's well established now. But who can actually make it happen? That's a huge organizational, human, financial, industrial challenge. And people do notice when only one country can do it.
by gsf_emergency_4 | 2025-10-22 00:42:40+00:00
I was disabused of such pretty quick when I realized I had to repeat the same exercise over multiple sessions to replace in the students' heads Aristotelian physics with Newton's 3rd law XD.

At the same time, I learnt to design a better force diagram than displayed in the assigned textbooks (many of which I suspect were influenced by Feynman)..

Which is kinda my point. That the status quo kinda suck doesn't mean the notation or examples can't be improved upon. It's heartening that we're entering a post-textbook age..

I wasnt so interested in scicomm up there because I suspect that the "slow" uptake of Yang's ideas had more to do with bad pedagogy