MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by btown | 2025-10-20 16:52:24+00:00
> far more cognizant of the last thing that the they want to say when they start

This can be captured by generating reasoning tokens (outputting some representation the desired conclusion in token form, then using it as context for the actual tokens), or even by an intermediate layer of a model not using reasoning.

If a certain set of nodes are strong contributors to generate the concluding sentence, and they remain strong throughout all generated tokens, who's to say if those nodes weren't capturing a latent representation of the "crux" of the answer before any tokens were generated?

(This is also in the context of the LLM being able to use long-range attention to not need to encode in full detail what it "wants to say" - just the parts of the original input text that it is focusing on over time.)

Of course, this doesn't mean that this is the optimal way to build coherent and well-reasoned answers, nor have we found an architecture that allows us to reliably understand what is going on! But the mechanics for what you describe certainly can arise in non-diffusion LLM architectures.
by neuroelectron | 2025-10-20 16:52:41+00:00
Sounds like a circular error with monitoring is flooding their network with metrics and logs, causing DNS to fail and produce more errors, flooding the network. Likely root cause is something like DNS conflicts or hosts being recreated on the network. Generally this is a small amount of network traffic but the LBs are dealing with host address flux, causing the hosts to keep colliding host addresses as they attempt to resolve to a new host address which are being lost from dropped packets and with so many hosts in one AZ, there's a good chance they end up with a new conflicting address.
by tifa2up | 2025-10-20 16:52:51+00:00
OP here. We've been working on agentset.ai full-time for 2 months. The product now gets you something working quite well out of the box. Better than most people with no experience in RAG (I'd say so with confidence).

Ingestion + Agentic Search are two areas that we're focused on in the short term.
by igouy | 2025-10-20 16:54:07+00:00
> And it doesn't really want to talk to the rest of the world—you can forget about calling a Squeak method from the Unix command line.

You seem absolutely certain!

Here's an example of a Pharo Smalltalk program call on the Ubuntu command line, with the calculation result written to stdout --

/opt/src/pharo-vm-Linux-x86_64-stable/pharo --headless nbody.pharo_run.image Include/pharo/main.st 50000000 -0.169075164 -0.169059907

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

~

Here's a corresponding Perl program --

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...
by Arathorn | 2025-10-20 16:54:10+00:00
So Aurora (https://github.com/element-hq/aurora) is a proof-of-concept we put together of rust-sdk on Web, using the new MVVM components from Element Web. However, the plan is likely not to actually switch base to Aurora, but instead migrate SDK within the existing app codebase eventually. (We might end up using Aurora for other purposes though). Either way, the ground work is the same: to split up the current app into MVVM components which can run on either js-sdk or rust-sdk.
by dangus | 2025-10-20 16:54:12+00:00
Notice there's no Linux version, maybe because nobody who uses Linux as a workstation would want this flavor of spaghetti.

The "why not use Docker?" question isn't really answered very well. If you're developing on Linux the obvious answer is that something based on containers is going to be a lot more robust and make more sense than this.

I could see this product being used by someone who is trying to untangle some legacy spaghetti, but to me it seems like if you introduced this to a new development workflow you'd be cementing some outdated and dangerous practices - a lot of stuff here happening outside of source control.
by greenhill32 | 2025-10-20 16:54:21+00:00
Creator here. I built IntentQL after watching AI agents spend 4+ seconds scraping websites to figure out what they can do.

The demo shows a side-by-side comparison: - Web scraping: 4.46s (parse HTML, find forms, click buttons, hope nothing breaks) - IntentQL protocol: 0.049s (fetch structured JSON from /agent.json)

91x performance improvement. The protocol is stable when sites update HTML.

The concept: websites expose capabilities via a standard file (like robots.txt for crawlers). Agents fetch it instead of scraping.

This is a working demo with real code. The JSON endpoint is live. Any agent can test it right now.

I'm working on formalizing the spec and would love feedback from the HN community—especially around standardization, auth, and multi-step flows.

Full spec: https://intentql.dev GitHub: https://github.com/greenhill32/intentql

Happy to answer technical questions.
by jrowen | 2025-10-20 16:54:37+00:00
They're speaking literally. When talking to someone (or writing), you ultimately say the words in order (edits or corrections notwithstanding). If you look at the gifs of how the text is generated - I don't know of anyone that has ever written like that. Literally writing disconnected individual words of the actual draft ("during," "and," "the") in the middle of a sentence and then coming back and filling in the rest. Even speaking like that would be incredibly difficult.

Which is not to say that it's wrong or a bad approach. And I get why people are feeling a connection to the "diffusive" style. But, at the end of the day, all of these methods do build as their ultimate goal a coherent sequence of words that follow one after the other. It's just a difference of how much insight you have into the process.
by terminalshort | 2025-10-20 16:55:05+00:00
> kids have to be taught “‘fair’ is what the market will bear”

Because it seems like the normal default for humans is that "fair" means when I sell something I take the highest offer I can get, but when I buy things the seller should give me the lowest offer he can while meeting his expenses or he is being "greedy." If you don't believe me just read the HN comments on any financial topic.
by tomkarho | 2025-10-20 16:55:11+00:00
I use git hooks in professional setting to prefix every commit message with the ticket the commit belongs to (this is done by extrapolating the ticket id from the feature branch name). It works pretty well and has saved my bacon a couple of times when I needed to figure out the provenance of a particular commit. Especially useful when I had to ask why that particular change was necessary.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-10-20 16:55:18+00:00
People don't come up with things their brain does.

Words rise from an abyss and are served to you, you have zero insight into their formation. If I tell you to think of an animal, one just appears in your "context", how it got there is unknown.

So really there is no argument to be made, because we still don't mechanistically understand how the brain works.
by literatepeople | 2025-10-20 16:55:33+00:00
Ed has constantly done this, and it's a shame because it has taken the air out of the room for real AI criticism. Most of Ed's criticism comes from a place of giving a narrative to people who are wishing for a magic bullet that makes ChatGPT vanish tomorrow rather than actually pressuring companies about the harms this technology can cause. This in part is why his writing so often focuses on perceived financial issues (despite his lack of credentials in financial journalism) rather than the social harms the technologies cause today (slop, delusions, manipulated truth).
by kepano | 2025-10-20 16:55:47+00:00
> Unfortunately for the Obsidian team the main result of this blog post has been to draw people’s attention to some long standing concerns about their plugin system.

As someone on the Obsidian team I don't consider that unfortunate at all. On the contrary, I feel incredibly lucky that anyone cares! Obsidian has followed complaint-driven development from the start [1]. I'd be more worried if people stop complaining.

There will always be some set of things that bubbles up to the top of the community's priority list. The plugin ecosystem has bubbled up to the top of the list, so you can expect to see improvements. The solutions we have in mind are sourced from the many smart people in the community who are also invested in this challenge.

Of course the bottleneck is that Obsidian only had two developers, now four. So there are only so many things that can be improved every year. It's fun to go back through shipped items on the Obsidian roadmap [2] to see a reflection of what the community was complaining about at the time. Obsidian has come a long way.

I also think it's good that people are becoming educated about the tradeoffs between safety and freedom. Obsidian is incredibly malleable and powerful, but that comes at a cost. It's tricky to make a chainsaw that cuts trees but not arms.

What this blog post highlights is that the landscape has radically changed since 2020 when Obsidian launched. It's now viable to use Obsidian without plugins, and if you want to add functionality yourself, it's become trivial to add a feature using LLMs, and have the code completely in your control.

[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/complaint-driven-development/

[2] https://obsidian.md/roadmap/
by alganet | 2025-10-20 16:56:21+00:00
I think this has applications in virtual fences. For example, if you want to restrict someone's behavior to a certain pattern.

Also, you can think of it as the subject (or subjects) programming the modeling agent: if the modeled mind is able to recognize it's being modeled, it's reasonable to consider the possibility that it can influence how those inferred scripts are created just by shaping its own behavior.

It can't be like an EEG, right? "Please be quiet and predictable while I model you, sir".

Of course, what humans think of predictability might not hold water. One could think he's behaving in a random way but in reality following well-known patterns (unknown to him).

It's an interesting problem. Absolutely terrifying stuff.
Ask HN: Should search platforms harden themselves against false ad claims?
by underlipton | 2025-10-20 16:56:40+00:00
I've lost complete faith in the notion that search engines actually return results for the query I've submitted. If this were ever proven to be so, I wonder if it would open companies up to claims of false advertisement. It wouldn't be a matter of the results being "good" or "accurate", but of the company falsely promising to run a query that it has no intention of running.
by quickthrowman | 2025-10-20 16:56:42+00:00
I’m not sure there are enough .. well.. fetishists to support this subscription service. I assume there’s a market, but at a lower price point with no subscription.

What a weird product, I don’t want anyone examinining my feces remotely unless I give them a sample myself.

Strangely enough, the Secret Service goes to great lengths to intercept and dispose of the President’s bodily waste (like disconnecting the black water pipe and connecting a temporary tank to collect waste). I believe Putin has his waste collected as well, probably other world leaders too.
by spicyusername | 2025-10-20 16:56:47+00:00
What?

This is one of those comments that evokes an emotional response, but is devoid of actual content.

Is there some sinister plot involving activist beachgoers!?

What kind of data would anyone even have on whether or not climate change activists own oceanfront property and what percentage they own?

What would it even matter?

If anything, one would imagine that oceanfront property owners would in fact care more about the effects of climate change because they are most impacted, lol.
by nunez | 2025-10-20 16:57:19+00:00
I completely believe it. The critical paths in critical software operated by every major company or governmental entity that you deal with were written in COBOL/Fortran/Progress and run on IBM mainframes (hence why they are still a tech titan and will probably remain so for the foreseeable future). And they aren't moving away any time soon because they are too important to fail.

Things that are largely or entirely done on mainframes today:

- Airlines: ticket reservations, crew management, route planning, critical flight operations, some parts of traffic control

- Banking: money movement, loan origination (though some of this has moved off over the years), account management (most of the slick frontends you use on the daily are just wrappers around mainframe programs)

- Government: So much state government stuff (licenses/registrations, tax systems)

I haven't personally done a lot of work on the mainframe, but as I understand it, they are still unbelievably robust machines that are extremely redundant and reliable and still have unmatched uptime guarantees.
by Noaidi | 2025-10-20 16:57:46+00:00
I wonder how many activists own ocean front properties? Not of course counting wealthy people who are concerned about climate change but are not activists.

But you should start worrying now. As someone who has been exposed to the environment all over the United States the change is here. And farmers are already adapting to it, they just do not believe it is caused from humans.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-do-farmers-t...
by nemo44x | 2025-10-20 16:57:47+00:00
> The model suggested that ice from Antarctica alone — before any additions from Greenland, mountain glaciers or thermal expansion — could raise the seas by more than a meter by 2100.

> In a 2021 update that incorporated additional factors into the simulations, DeConto and colleagues revised that estimate sharply downward, projecting less than 40 centimeters of sea-level rise by the century’s end under high-emission scenarios.

In essence, they have no idea.
by f1shy | 2025-10-20 16:58:06+00:00
Maybe. But seems to me there should be better ways to organize the code. In the case you mention there will be many places where you have to cleanup (that is what the article is about) so the code will be hell to debug: multithreaded, with multiple exit points in each thread… I have done relly tons and tons of multithreading and never once needed such a conplicated thing. Typically the code which gets run in parallel is either for managing one resource type OR number crunching w/o resource allocation… if you are spawning threads that do lots of resource allocation, maybe you have architecture problems, or you are solving a very niche problem.
by mindcrash | 2025-10-20 16:58:24+00:00
Happily want to give some options:

* DIY w/ KVM/Xen

* DIY w/ OpenStack - https://www.openstack.org/

* ProxMox - https://www.proxmox.com/en/

* Paid OpenStack through one of their partners - https://www.openstack.org/marketplace/consulting/

* OpenNebula - https://opennebula.io/

* Nutanix - https://www.nutanix.com/

If you want a solution that "just works", is simple to manage and can even extend to public cloud infrastructure when needed I can really, really recommend Nutanix. Migrating from VMWare is also really simple, they have a tool which makes that very easy. Do note that they use a heavily modified KVM as hypervisor.
by card_zero | 2025-10-20 16:58:37+00:00
I'm trying to imagine the chain in reverse order, and without reference to money but just to things people want. So Pfizer has this idea to organize people to make more medicines. But this is slightly risky, because it's not a shoe-in that people want more medicines. So they need permission, and lenders can grant that, but only if the lenders' other, um, projects have been successful recently, which equates to "consumer confidence", and that is due to millions of flower arrangers (or equivalently frivolous businesses) successfully pleasing flower-likers. It seems to amount to: if people are generally making one another happy in small silly ways, they have the courage and imagination necessary to try doing bigger stuff. If not, they're all like "I didn't even get to see any pretty flowers this week, I'm in survival mode now", which means they aren't throwing much permission to do stuff (money) around, and consequently there's no will to try anything, and that's a depression.

I note that Pfizer's new factory is a venture, and although it's medical it's debatably not necessary for survival: it's not part of homeostasis.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-10-20 16:58:45+00:00
>You 100% do pronounce or write words one at a time sequentially.

It's statements like these that make me wonder if I am the same species as everyone else. Quite often, I've picked adjectives and idioms first, and then fill in around them to form sentences. Often because there is some pun or wordplay, or just something that has a nice ring to it, and I want to lead my words in that direction. If you're only choosing them one at a time and sequentially, have you ever considered that you might just be a dimwit?

It's not like you don't see this happening all around you in others. Sure you can't read minds, but have you never once watched someone copyedit something they've written, where they move phrases and sentences around, where they switch out words for synonyms, and so on? There are at least dozens of fictional scenes in popular media, you must have seen one. You have to have noticed hints at some point in your life that this occurs. Please. Just tell me that you spoke hastily to score internet argument points, and that you don't believe this thing you've said.
by lordnacho | 2025-10-20 16:58:45+00:00
It's a spectrum that has been illuminated by time. In the old times you had to do all these. Now you can cut this somewhere:

- Power + cooling, physical security, network. (Old school LAN party)

- Can you access the bare metal OS? (Hetzner/OVH bare metal)

- Can you access a VM and decide what runs on it? (EC2 + associated services, K8s, etc, etc)

- Can you run a function? (Lambda for example)

So the meaning has wandered to something between the first and second, IMO.
by lurquer | 2025-10-20 16:58:52+00:00
> it's just hard to go up.

Eh. Going up is easy. A Frenchman, a sheep, duck, and rooster solved the whole ‘up’ thing over two centuries ago.

But going DOWN? That’s far more difficult. What wonders may lie beneath our feet: vast caverns, ore, underground oceans… hard to get to though.
by FabHK | 2025-10-20 16:59:01+00:00
Somewhat related thought:

World power consumption is around 20 TW (of which around 3 TW electricity), that's very roughly 2 kW per person (obviously not equally distributed).

A human consumes around 8600 kJ of energy in their food per day, or roughly 100 W (search for "basal metabolic rate"). Most of that is needed just to keep the body running, but around a quarter or so can be converted to physical work: an average human can perform some 75 W of physical work over an 8h shift (75 W for 1/3 the time, so 25 W on average).

That means that everyone has (on average) around 80 "people" worth of energy working for them (2000 W of energy consumption per person / 25 W of average usable energy output per person).
by isoprophlex | 2025-10-20 16:59:05+00:00
are you glossing over the whole "aws bill isnt structural infra spend" thing?!

they spend 104% of revenue on ONE cloud provider and costs scale linearly with revenue growth. assume zitron didn't pull these numbers out of his ass.

educate me how this isnt selling $20 bills for $5. you're a smart dude; i myself aint seeing the "sustainable business practices" here
by amlib | 2025-10-20 16:59:08+00:00
I do something like this for my old game consoles, except that I pipe them trough an old analog video capture card that supports 240p60 and use the video processing module in Retroarch to do the capture with minimal lag. After adding some fancy CRT shaders and other image adjustment carefully tailored for this, the image comes out looking great! I sometimes toggle the shaders off and wince at the "raw" digital capture. I actually bought this capture card back in 2008 for this purpose but detested using it until around 2018 when I started using it in conjunction with retroarch and CRT shaders.

For that period it even shaped my perception that analog video and specially n64 graphics were always bad, but all that was vindicated by those shaders, it really does make a big difference, and made me find a new appreciation for n64 graphics in particular.

There is some internet misconception that the inherently "blurry" output of an n64 is bad (And sure, some games are just ugly/bad from an artistic standpoint), but it's actually the smoothest image any analog console will ever produce when hooked up to a proper CRT or CRT shader, and it's consistent across all games because of "forced" high quality AA in all games. Even the next generation of consoles seldomly used AA.
by x0x0 | 2025-10-20 16:59:11+00:00
Right, but if I understand you, the counterargument is dumb since the context in which we are discussing is business viability (vcs investing in businesses where the unit economics require inference cost decreases), so actual dollars out rather than some imaginary cost per token is the metric that matters.

Inference is getting so much cheaper that cursor and zed have had to raise prices.
by switchbak | 2025-10-20 16:59:11+00:00
It is an odd category, and Japan is often considered to be "Western" - these days at least. That certainly wasn't the case even a few generations ago.

I think it's ostensibly supposed to be more about shared cultural values, but even that is a pretty weak way to divide countries. Perhaps "an ally of the United States" is a little more accurate?

Any societal dividing line like this is bound to hit on problems once subjected to the real world.
by Aspos | 2025-10-20 16:59:12+00:00
As a child growing up in Central Asia, I saw people piling up stones, sticks, and other debris along the ancient lines people used to control herds and wild animals. The ones built for hunting often had a narrow, funnel-like end, while those meant for managing herds could take on almost any shape. One of the photos in that article looks exactly like the walls I remember from my childhood.
by dack | 2025-10-20 16:59:23+00:00
I didn't like that there was a long delay after you move your mouse, and since all the calculation happens on the frontend, i figured you could easily make it ~instantly update and follow you around. So i (well, claude) made a version that does that and i think it's more fun. here's the code you can paste into the console at pointerpointer.com: https://pastebin.com/f7YqQNxg
by everforward | 2025-10-20 16:59:46+00:00
Yeah, I think this. I've asked this in interviews before, and it's less about who has done the most complicated thing and more about the candidate's ability to a) identify complexity, and b) avoid unnecessary complexity.

I.e. a complicated but required system is fine (I had to implement a consensus algorithm for a good reason).

A complicated but unrequired system is bad (I built a docs platform for us that requires a 30-step build process, but yeah, MkDocs would do the same thing.

I really like it when people can pick out hidden complexity, though. "DNS" or "network routing" or "Kubernetes" or etc are great answers to me, assuming they've done something meaningful with them. The value is self-evident, and they're almost certainly more complex than anything most of us have worked on. I think there's a lot of value to being able to pick out that a task was simple because of leveraging something complex.
by rini17 | 2025-10-20 16:59:52+00:00
Diodes have quite big forward voltage, like 0.5V, depends on current but in any case it means lots of wasted energy. FETs got highly optimized over time, can be switched on with only minuscule resistance and also can be miniaturized.

Modern FETs are capable of switching spot welding currents without getting destroyed, while in thumbnail-sized package, imagine that. My grandpa was an electrical engineer and would be completely blown away by such a component.