MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by antics | 2025-10-30 00:32:42+00:00
I like this but based on what I am seeing here and the THRML readme, I would describe this as "an ML stack that is fully prepared for the Bayesian revolution of 2003-2015." A kind of AI equivalent of, like, post-9/11 airport security. I mean this in a value-neutral way, as personally I think that era of models was very beautiful.

The core idea of THRML, as I understand it, is to present a nice programming interface to hardware where coin-flipping is vanishingly cheap. This is moderately useful to deep learning, but the artisanally hand-crafted models of the mid-2000s did essentially nothing at all except flip coins, and it would have been enormously helpful to have something like this in the wild at that time.

The core "trick" of the era was to make certain very useful but intractable distributions built on something called "infinitely exchangeable sequences" merely almost intractable. The trick, roughly, was that conditioning on some measure space makes those sequences plain-old iid, which (via a small amount of graduate-level math) implies that a collection of "outcomes" can be thought of as a random sample of the underlying distribution. And that, in turn, meant that the model training regimens of the time did a lot of sampling, or coin-flipping, as we have said here.

Peruse the THRML README[1] and you'll see the who's who of techniques and modeling prodedures of the time. "Gibbs sampling", "probabilistic graphical models", and "energy-based models", and so on. All of these are weaponized coin flipping.

I imagine the terminus of this school of thought is basically a natively-probabilistic programming environment. Garden variety deterministic computing is essentially probabilistic computing where every statement returns a value with probability 1. So in that sense, probabilistic computing is a ful generalization of deterministic computing, since an `if` might return a value with some probability other than 1. There was an entire genre of languages like this, e.g., Church. And now, 22 years later, we have our own hardware for it. (Incidentally this line of inquiry is also how we know that conditional joint distributions are Turing complete.)

Tragically, I think, this may have arrived too late. This is not nearly as helpful in the world of deep learning, with its large, ugly, and relatively sample-free models. Everyone hates to hear that you're cheering from the sidelines, but this time I really am. I think it's a great idea, just too late.

[1]: https://github.com/extropic-ai/thrml/blob/7f40e5cbc460a4e2e9...
by rcxdude | 2025-10-30 00:33:13+00:00
The fact that there's real hardware and a paper doesn't mean the product is actually worth anything. It's very possible to make something (especially some extremely simplified 'proof of concept' which is not actually useful at all) and massively oversell it. Looking at the paper, it looks like it may have some very niche applications but it's really not obvious that it would be enough to justify the investment needed to make it better than existing general purpose hardware, and the amount of effort that's been put into 'sizzle' aimed at investors makes it look disingenuous.
by realityfactchex | 2025-10-30 00:33:41+00:00
Yeah, I find that I like to use uv for one thing, quickly/efficiently getting a Python into a new venv for some project. A la:

uv venv ~/.venvs/my_new_project --python 3.13 source ~/.venvs/my_new_project/bin/activate python3 -m ensurepip --upgrade cp -r /path/from/source/* . python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt

So here uv installs the Python version wanted. But it's just a venv. And we pip install using requirements.txt, like normal, within that venv.

Someone, please tell me what's wrong with this. To me, this seems much less complicated that some uv-centric .toml config file, plus some uv-centric commands for more kinds of actions.
by SurceBeats | 2025-10-30 00:34:02+00:00
/etc/hosts works until you need to change an IP across 10,000 servers in under a minute. Then you understand why DNS exists.

DNS isn't just name resolution, I'd say it's kind of load balancing, service discovery, caching, and dynamic configuration "all in one".

The FAANGs do minimize external DNS calls, but they run massive internal DNS infrastructures because the alternatives (config management pushing files) are actually slower and more fragile at scale.
by hackingonempty | 2025-10-30 00:34:58+00:00
PIO is great but the competition has working silicon and SDK for all of the common peripherals while RP gives you crappy example code. Want to connect to an audio codec with I2S? Almost every MCU has this built in but for RP2040/RP2350 you'll have to roll your own production quality version from a demo that only shows how to send. Years after release.
by ilove196884 | 2025-10-30 00:35:12+00:00
We know it can't be used in a fab because the mask in EUV scanners is in a hydrogen ambient to protect the optics and masks whereas the synchrotron is in a perfect vacuum. Now EUV has tons of problems with stochastics and as the wavelength decreases these errors increase. Second 13.5nm has optics with highest reflectivity which lower or higher wavelengths do not. It was tried by IBM but it failed and many in IBM and AMD's lithography team ended up at ASML.
by davemp | 2025-10-30 00:35:45+00:00
> Paradox of Tolerance, which you alluded to. Just as a tolerant society cannot tolerate intolerance without eventually just becoming intolerant

I’ve always thought this was hand wavy nonsense. Tolerance and tolerating is so ill defined in these discussions that they end up pointless.

I’m also not sure game theory supports that intolerance wins out if you view it as repeated instances of the prisoner’s dilemma.
by clafferty | 2025-10-30 00:35:57+00:00
Declarative workflows is such a good idea, fantastic, and I love the AI first principles where pipeline creation and editing the pipeline can be done with AI too.

The declarative style keeps the workflow detail at a high enough level to iterate super quick - love that. More important to me is that it’s structured and seems like it would be more testable (I see validation in your docs).

Zooming in to the pipe/agent steps I can’t quite see if you can leverage MCP as a client and make tool calls? Can you confirm? If not what’s your solution for working with APIs in the middle of your pipeline?

Also a quick question, declarative workflows won’t solve the fact that LLMs output is always non deterministic, and so we can’t always be guaranteed the output from prior steps will be correct. What tools or techniques are you using/recommending to measure the reliability of the output from prior steps? I’m thinking of how might you measure at a step level to help you prioritise which prompts need refinements or optimisations? Is this a problem you expect to own in Pipex or one to be solved elsewhere?

Great job guys, your approach looks like the right way to solve this problem and add some reliability to this space. Thanks for sharing!
by arbuge | 2025-10-30 00:35:57+00:00
> Tunisians and Algerians can understand Maltese quite well.

Not in my experience. Not at all actually. My experience with Arabic speakers is that they think they're understanding when you speak Maltese, because it sounds kind of familiar, but in actual fact they're not understanding much at all.

Which is not surprising after a thousand years of divergence.
by kaydub | 2025-10-30 00:36:20+00:00
Then they architected and built it out wrong.

It's pretty simple to run low cost services in AWS. If you're small enough that an $800 desktop on a home internet connection will handle it, surely you could run it completely serverless for much less.

I'm surprised how many people I see wanting to go on-prem vs AWS/public cloud. Feels penny smart and pound foolish to me. Lots of people too deep into the technical side of things that they don't even understand the business side.
by bonsai_spool | 2025-10-30 00:36:41+00:00
> We're so used to argument that criticizing logic is taken as criticizing the conclusion.

This may be so, but his examples are so poor that one is distracted from any type of subtle claim he would make. They are bad in obvious ways (every cancer patient is staged, but we pretend in the article like staging is ancillary to researching survival rates).
by rhetocj23 | 2025-10-30 00:37:20+00:00
Lol what? You need to do more research fella. Did it not ever occur to you that Jobs got the recording industry to dance to his tune to offer music for under a dollar? He did the same with the iPhone - smashing the control cellular network providers had over handset producers.

"This is the guy who had everyone here rooting for him when the OpenAI board tried to kick him out."

Finally... oh this is just funny. Who rooted for S Jobs when he was kicked out of Apple, and cheered for him on his return?

.....
by UniverseHacker | 2025-10-30 00:37:46+00:00
The free will question seems to be a red herring- philosophers and physicists can argue all they want about if something like free will is physically possible or not, but for all intents and purposes, even without free will, the path of someone overcoming, e.g. alcoholism after using these methods requires using them in a way that is challenging, and if you decide on the nihilistic stance that there is no free will so there is no point in ever trying to do anything, then you are guaranteed an undesirable outcome.

Perhaps beforehand it was somehow "pre-determined" which of these attitudes and paths you would take, but that is completely irrelevant for the individual just living life, they have no way to know that one way or another, or any reason to actually care, as they still need to act exactly like they have free will and made the right choice to actually play out a future as the type of person pre-determined to have a desirable outcome.

It doesn't actually feel any easier or less painful to accomplish something difficult, even if free will is some sort of illusion when looked at from the outside perspective. You still experience, e.g. trying and failing over and over and never giving up until you succeed.

I can buy that, for example perhaps there is something outside our control that decides if you are capable of never giving up, but you still cannot know until you decide to never give up and try it- so it literally does not matter except as a philosophical curiosity.

I think a more interesting biological (and philosophical) question is why and how exactly do these GLP-1 drugs work, and why exactly are they so shockingly effective? Maybe they do somehow act on the brain to offer exactly the same psychological benefits as the stoic approach I am talking about, by the same or related underlying mechanism, and they're essentially interchangeable but work more often?
by pranavvishnu | 2025-10-30 00:37:55+00:00
Hi - Pranav from the ChatGPT Atlas team here. Appreciate the discussion and feedback here. Just wanted to correct a few specifics so there’s no confusion:

- We have tried to make Atlas a great way to browse the open web, and invested heavily in the search experience as we covered in the livestream. When I test typing “taylor swift" into Atlas I see links to the website in the autocomplete carousel, at the top of the results page, in inline citations within chat, and in the Search tab. We’re also working on making these faster and more prominent when we’re sure you want a link, for ex. you’ll see a large vertical list of links at the top of the chat response when you type in something like “gmail”. - Browser memories are opt-in, and by default we don’t train on the contents of pages you browse—even when memories are enabled. Keeping the Ask ChatGPT sidebar open has no bearing on what gets sent to us. Webpages are clearly displayed as attachments you can disable in the chat, and only sent to us when you submit the prompts. - Ask ChatGPT and Agent mode are not workarounds to user or publisher training settings. Even if a user has training enabled, we will still respect publisher preferences to block GPTBot in their robots.txt and do not train on that content.
by ederamen | 2025-10-30 00:38:08+00:00
Uv is so good. I'm a curmudgeon about adopting new tooling, and tried uv with a lot of skepticism, but it was just better in every way. And even if it wasn't so polished and reliable, the raw speed makes it hard to go back to any other tool.

Uv combined with type hints reaching critical mass in the Python ecosystem, and how solid PyLance is in VSCode, feels so good it has made me consider investing in Python as my primary language for everything. But then I remember that Python is dog slow compared to other languages with comparable ergonomics and first-class support for static typing, and...idk it's a tough sell.

I know the performance meta in Python is to...not use python (bind to C, Rust, JVM) - and you can get pretty far with that (see: uv), but I'd rather spend my limited time building expertise in a language that isn't constantly hemorrhaging resources unless your code secretly calls something written in another language :/

There are so many good language options available today that compete. Python has become dominant in certain domains though, so you might not have a choice - which makes me grateful for these big steps forward in improving the tooling and ecosystem.
by terminalshort | 2025-10-30 00:38:10+00:00
No it can't. It must comply with other constitutional obligations like the equal protection clause and 1A. Basically any action to revoke the charter of a single corporation (or group of corporations) for any reason other than violating pre-existing law is going to be very hard to justify in court. And threatening to leave the state is clearly not against the law (nor could it ever be because that law would violate 1A). Furthermore, even if a state is able to revoke a corporate charter, it can't stop it from re-incorporating in another state and continuing to do business in the original state under its new charter (commerce clause).
by user3939382 | 2025-10-30 00:38:14+00:00
Apparently earthworms are a problem here. The saplings need the brush to protect them and the worms which are non native are mulching it. IIRC. If half of what I hear is happening in the Canadian forests or Amazon is true it’s sickening. Of course you have the naive and confused among us who debate or defend this abhorrent and unnecessary exploitation.
by arbuge | 2025-10-30 00:38:25+00:00
Calling BS on this one. I'll let ChatGPT handle it... it says it better than I could:

can arabic people understand maltese?

That’s a really interesting question — and the answer is: *partially, but not easily.*

Here’s why:

### Linguistic roots

Maltese is a *Semitic language*, and its *core grammar and basic vocabulary* come from *Arabic*, specifically from *Siculo-Arabic*, the dialect of Arabic spoken in Sicily and Malta about 1,000 years ago. Because of that, *many Maltese words sound familiar* to Arabic speakers — especially from the *Maghrebi (North African)* or *Levantine* dialects.

For example:

| Maltese | Meaning | Similar in Arabic | | ------- | ------- | ----------------- | | Dar | house | دار (dar) | | Kelb | dog | كلب (kalb) | | Seba | seven | سبعة (sabʿa) | | Xemx | sun | شمس (shams) |

### Influence from Italian and English

However, over the centuries, Maltese absorbed *a lot of Italian (especially Sicilian)* and *English* vocabulary — so modern Maltese is *a hybrid*. Roughly:

* 30–40% of its vocabulary is Semitic (Arabic origin), * 40–50% is Romance (mostly Italian/Sicilian), * and the rest is English and other sources.

That means Arabic speakers might *recognize some words and structures*, but they’ll *struggle to understand full sentences*, especially because:

* Pronunciation has changed, * Grammar evolved differently, * Many everyday words are not Arabic anymore.

### Summary

So:

* *Yes*, Maltese and Arabic share a deep connection — like cousins. * *No*, they’re *not mutually intelligible* today. An Arabic speaker might catch words here and there, but a real conversation would be hard without studying Maltese.

The above is exactly my experience with Arabic speakers by the way. Again, not surprising after 1k years of divergence.
by rcxdude | 2025-10-30 00:39:01+00:00
I've seen it as well. One thing that's universally true about potential competitor startups in the field I work in is that the ones who don't actually have anything concrete to show have way nicer websites than ours (some have significantly more funding and still nothing to show).

I have a passing familiarity with the areas they talk about in the paper, and it feels... dubious. Mainly because of the dedicated accelerator problem. Even dedicated neural net accelerators are having difficulty gaining traction against general purpose compute units in a market that is ludicrously hot for neural net processing, and this is talking about accelerating Monte-Carlo processes which are pretty damn niche in application nowadays (especially in situations where you're compute-limited). So even if they succeed in speeding up that application, it's hard to see how worthwhile it would be. And it's not obvious from the publicly available information whether they're close to even beating the FPGA emulation of the concept which was used in the paper.
by WarLord81 | 2025-10-30 00:41:23+00:00
Hey, I am building something similar. Want to collaborate?

Built The Daily News - an AI-powered news platform with personalized recommendations - based off of Hacker News RSS.

Features:

AI "For You" feed that explains why each article matters to you

Insights dashboard showing your reading patterns, category trends, and emerging interests

8+ responsive news layouts (magazine, grid, masonry, etc.) that rotate dynamically

Reading streaks and like tracking

Advanced search, filtering, and category deep dive

What sets it apart:

The AI explains why articles matter to you and learns from your reading patterns.

Built for people who care about tech quality and personalized content. Would love feedback from the community.

jypi News

https://news.jypi.org/
by strcat | 2025-10-30 00:41:24+00:00
APEX modules have their changes released as part of AOSP quarterly and yearly releases. There were also monthly releases with the new features distributed in the monthly mainline updates until recently. GrapheneOS is entirely capable of signing APEX modules with cross-device keys and distributing updates in our App Store, but we have very frequent OS updates and little need for APEX modules. APEX modules require a reboot to kick in so we prefer doing everything via OS releases which already only have to ship changes due to delta (incremental) updates. APEX modules are only relevant to us through how they've made the code more modular and created API boundaries between modules which are stable within major releases. It creates a bit more work for us to maintain some of our changes since we need to change the defined APIs but beyond that it's largely the same as before.
by iLemming | 2025-10-30 00:42:59+00:00
I'm not making shit up on the spot nor am I attributing any metrics to vim or emacs specifically or how riced should they be, I'm simply telling you the facts to counter-argue your point of: "hasn't ever led to quality software in any shape or form, neither it ever will".

Most software is not written using "some" text editor, I would love to see maniacs writing kernel patches in notepad.exe or nano. Tools are tools - disputing that vim or emacs are not great tools is plainly dumb, obviously there must be something about them for why they've remained a popular choice among highly skilled pros for decades.

Of course, simply picking up a tool isn't enough - I can perfectly write shitty code equally well in Emacs, InteliJ or VSCode, yet saying good stuff never ever got done there is just disingenuous - it was, it is, and it will be. Of course, ricing the editor and terminal doesn't guarantee amazing shit, but the opposite is also equally true - you can't magically build some awesome sauce by paying for proprietary, sophisticated IDE that "just works" either.
by noir_lord | 2025-10-30 00:43:41+00:00
I was an industrial electrician before I was a paid programmer.

I worked with engineers, what we generally do isn’t engineering by the standards of those engineers.

Which isn’t to say that all software development isn’t.

People writing avionics software and medical software etc are doing what I’d recognise as engineering.

It’s about the process more than anything.

Software in the wild is simply a young field and we aren’t there yet widely.
by evanelias | 2025-10-30 00:43:43+00:00
Putting aside the fact that replication and backups are separate operational topics -- even if a company has no competent backend engineers, there are plenty of good database consultancies that can help with this sort of thing, as a one-time cost, which ends up being cheaper than the ongoing markup of a managed cloud database product.

There's also a big difference between incompetent and inexperienced. Operational incidents are how your team gains experience!

Leaning on managed cloud services can definitely make sense when you're a small startup, but as a company matures and grows, it becomes a crutch -- and an expensive one at that.
by westurner | 2025-10-30 00:44:06+00:00
> What are good metrics for evaluating WAFs?

TPR: True Positive Rate (Detection Rate), TNT: True Negative Rate, FPR: False Positive Rate ("ROC Curve")

Accuracy = TP + TN / # Requests

Latency / Detection Time as percentiles

Throughput: response time in ms given requests per second

Time to Virtual Patch, and CI/CD rule deployment integration

DDoS Response Time: How quickly does the WAF mitigate a Layer 7 (application) DDoS attack?

... Rule Management Overhead: MTTT: Mean Time To Tune, Policy Complexity; CI/CD, SIEM/SOAR integration; https://gemini.google.com/share/0d2d1c53bfb0
by Karliss | 2025-10-30 00:44:24+00:00
> 1. super unique experiences that are really only possible from mixing the physical and digital in this way. Does the site not make that clear to you?

Yes most of those game don't look like they significantly add anything to the experience over similar already existing games that have or easily could have tablet versions. Even if they are doing a bit more website makes them look like cheap versions of well established computer games.

Bloogs -> that's just lemmings

Spycraft -> doesn't look like something you couldn't design touchscreen controls with little effect on puzzles

Omakase -> you are selecting positions + direction within grid, don't see why press and swipe on touchscreen wouldn't work

Mushka -> the tamagochi style game. All that the special pieces achieve is select an action which could easily be done with touchscreen menu and afterwords positioning it with finger

Cosmic crush -> again one more game where all you do is move single game piece per player on a grid

Space rocks -> asteroid like spaceship shooter

Snek -> just point the finger directly on touchscreen without special game pieces

Out of all them maybe 2 look like they are trying to consider unique strengths of the physical game pieces. The cooking game and 3d block game. And even for those it feels questionable whether it provides sufficient improvement compared to existing games.

By it's nature product like this means that you get worst parts of niche gaming console and a physical board game. Niche console means that the set of available games will be very limited with many of them either being ports from other platforms using generic pieces (meaning you can just play them on those other more popular platforms) or the gameplay isn't as good due too limited budget. Hardly any developer is going to spend years to design unique game for niche platform with very limited player base. And like with physical board games you need to buy the pieces in physical store or have them delivered.

Tilt-5 also tried to fill the gap between digital and physical board games. They had much more interesting value add but that wasn't enough.