MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alsetmusic | 2025-10-20 17:00:10+00:00
I believe `?` is considered a reserved word (coming from a Bash background)? I might have that terminology wrong, but I’m remembering `[` (single bracket) as a reserved word that equals `test`, or something close to that. Someone may be able to clarify mistakes in my attempt to get into the details with accuracy regarding terminology.

At the very least, it’s a wildcard. I think you’re not wrong about setting an alias (I have an alias for `??` to link as `$?`, for example). I just think the single character usage will create conflicts and unexpected outcomes.

Cool tool, OP. I’ve marked it to check out when I’m at my computer at home.
by jsrozner | 2025-10-20 17:00:12+00:00
Let's just not call it planning.

In order to model poetry autoregressively, you're going to need a variable that captures rhyme scheme. At the point where you've ended the first line, the model needs to keep track of the rhyme that was used, just like it does for something like coreference resolution.

I don't think that the mentioned paper shows that the model engages in a preplanning phase in which it plans the rhyme that will come. In fact such would be impossible. Model state is present only in so-far-generated text. It is only after the model has found itself in a poetry generating context and has also selected the first line-ending word, that a rhyme scheme "emerges" as a variable. (Now yes, as you increase the posterior probability of 'being in a poem' given context so far, you would expect that you also increase the probability of the rhyme-scheme variable's existing.)
by anonymars | 2025-10-20 17:00:29+00:00
I didn't mind it in isolation, but it really didn't respect Tron Legacy.

And it was completely unambitious in exploring the implications of AI coming to life and existing in the real world, their experiences, etc.

Which very much could have happened had they followed up on Tron Legacy

I guess I'd sum it up as a coherent, but forgettable spectacle
by DonHopkins | 2025-10-20 17:00:50+00:00
Coco Conn and Paul Rother wrote this up about what they did with FORTH at HOMER & Assoc, who made some really classic music videos including Atomic Dog, and hired Charles Moore himself! Here's what Coco Conn posted about it, and some discussion and links about it that I'm including with her permission:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36751574

Mitch Bradley came up with a nice way to refactor the Forth compiler/interpreter and control structures, so that you could use them immediately at top level! Traditional FORTHs only let you use IF, DO, WHILE, etc in : definitions, but they work fine at top level in Mitch's Forths (including CForth and Open Firmware):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38689282
by rpdillon | 2025-10-20 17:01:01+00:00
I asked because I used the term self-host for both my services that I run on a VPS I rent from Dreamhost, as well as services that I host on my homelab and expose over tailscale. I don't have a good set of terminology to differentiate between the two, so I call both of them self-hosting. I was a bit surprised you felt so strongly about it.
by renshijian | 2025-10-20 17:01:05+00:00
This game is like a popcorn machine at your fingertips! Every time you smash a brick, it feels like playing percussion. The ding-dong sound of the bricks, accompanied by the colorful ribbons in the sky, is like giving your brain a rainbow spa. Play a game while waiting for the bus, and even stray cats on the street will come to watch the electronic fireworks bloom on the screen
by watwut | 2025-10-20 17:01:06+00:00
My understanding of NSFW is that it means "not safe for work" and in the contexts I was in, bible was safe for work. I have yet to see an angry atheist demanding that bibles cant be seen on account of Ezekiel chapter 23 like content. As funny as gotcha of "bible contains stories about sexuality" is, back in real world, I have yet to meet someone who would equate it with erotics.

And yes, you can talk about books and movies in which comparable scenes appear in work too.
by palmotea | 2025-10-20 17:01:51+00:00
>> People laughed and some said something like "well, if something like AWS falls then we have bigger problems".

> They’re not wrong though. If AWS goes down, EVERYTHING goes down to some degree. Your app, your competitor’s apps, your clients’ chat apps. You’re kinda off the hook.

They made their own bigger problems by all crowding into the same single region.
by BizarroLand | 2025-10-20 17:01:58+00:00
Google also shot itself in the foot with manifest v3 killing ublock origin. I almost liked Chrome for a while until they got rid of the only thing that made it usable for me.

I don't care if Google was trying to do something good. Good things accomplished through evil means are evil.

After all, it isn't as if Google isn't already tracking us itself, selling the data it has gleaned from us to advertisers, and then helping the advertisers specifically target us based on its insane amount of data on each of us.

So whinging about how one thing that might have been a little better died due to their evil overlords's middle managers mismanaging it is a waste of energy.
by fellowniusmonk | 2025-10-20 17:02:34+00:00
We can't ex ante compute what humans activity is critical for the forward preservation and growth of humanity.

We can do targeted resource allocation for what we deem promising threads.

We can identify simple failure states to avoid for known recurring issues (plant food now or starve next year.)

But for the vast majority of areas a new venture is required by new people creating new things.

Humans don't simply find, but generate meaning (some that coheres only in imagination, some that coheres to facts in the larger world, some that do both over time.) human meaning generation is a kind of random walk where each human is the write head for a path, the causal chain is too complex for any given discovery or "economically" useful thing to be easily predicted.

Destroy art and maybe people will become too depressed to do anything, or will lack enough noise/inspiration in their thinking to have an insight.

Many of these things are impossible to unwind.
by daemonologist | 2025-10-20 17:02:57+00:00
I concur:

The big LLM-based rerankers (e.g. Qwen3-reranker) are what you always wanted your cross-encoder to be, and I highly recommend giving them a try. Unfortunately they're also quite computationally expensive.

Your metadata/tabular data often contains basic facts that a human takes for granted, but which aren't repeated in every text chunk - injecting it can help a lot in making the end model seem less clueless.

The point about queries that don't work with simple RAG (like "summarize the most recent twenty documents") is very important to keep in mind. We made our UI very search-oriented and deemphasized the chat, to try to communicate to users that search is what's happening under the hood - the model only sees what you see.
by SebastianKra | 2025-10-20 17:03:08+00:00
It's not automatic though. Theres function calls() and you must createSignal for every derived value.

When you ignore the performance aspect, React has the objectively least amount of boilerplate for reactivity.

The question, that I genuinely don't know the answer to, is a) whether the performance improvement is worth it, and b) whether that's still the case after the compiler.
by ibejoeb | 2025-10-20 17:04:24+00:00
libcurl dealt with this a few months ago, and the sentiment is about the same: thread cancellation in glibc is hairy. The short summary (which I think is accurate) is that an hostname query via libnss ultimately had to read a config file, and glibc's `open` is a thead cancellation point, so if it's canceled, it'll won't free memory that was allocated before the `open`.

The write-up is on how they're dealing with it starts at https://eissing.org/icing/posts/pthread_cancel/.
by latexr | 2025-10-20 17:04:29+00:00
> No, words have quite definite meanings.

Were that the case, “literally” would not literally mean both itself and its opposite.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/misuse-of-literally

Words change meaning frequently throughout history, depending on how they are (mis)used. Or they can change meaning depending on context or part of the country/world.

https://www.vox.com/2015/11/29/9806038/great-british-baking-...

Sometimes drastically.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TooAfraidToAsk/comments/kc41mu/why_...

> Otherwise, they are not an aid to communication.

I do agree with you that it makes it harder, but communication does depend on more than just the words.
by steveklabnik | 2025-10-20 17:05:24+00:00
> so actual dollars out rather than some imaginary cost per token is the metric that matters.

Even if we take this as true, the point is that this is different than "the cost of inference isn't going down." It is going down, it's just that people want more performance, and are willing to pay for it. Spend going up is not the same as cost going up.

I don't disagree that there are a wide variety of things to talk about here, but that means it's extra important to get what you're talking about straight.
by maxbond | 2025-10-20 17:05:27+00:00
This is a bit of a "no true Scotsman" issue. Almost no one working as a journalist is given the resources to do that. Even if they have access to those resources, they don't necessarily have access to them for every story. And how are you supposed to become a senior journalist who has developed sources and gained enough trust/reputation to have resources invested in them - without being a junior journalist who is only given the leftover scraps?

A journalist deprived of resources might regress to what you call a tabloid writer, sure. But my issue is with framing it as a moral failing on their part, that they're too lazy or stupid or arrogant to get the facts right. Surely there are people like that, but it isn't most of them. This is a systemic issue. As a society we have failed to fund these activities.
by VirusNewbie | 2025-10-20 17:05:30+00:00
I have sat with these numbers for a great deal of time, and I can’t find any evidence that Anthropic has any path to profitability outside of aggressively increasing the prices on their customers to the point that its services will become untenable for consumers and enterprise customers alike.

This is where he misunderstands. Enterprise companies will absolutely pay 10x the cost for Claude. Meta and Apple are two large customers, you think they won't pay $500 a month per employee? $1000 a month per employee? Neither of those are outrageous to imagine if it increases productivity 10%.
by watwut | 2025-10-20 17:05:45+00:00
> They're more offensive than hardcore porn.

No they are not. Not unless you are intentionally taking in super weird definition of "offensive" or "hardcore porn". And I am saying that as someone who is not Christian and finds a lot of what Christianity stands for off-putting or even unethical. There is a reason people who want quick individual fun go for porn and not for a bible.
by rpdillon | 2025-10-20 17:05:49+00:00
I didn't realize, but apparently this is a long-standing argument. I did just a tiny bit of digging because I'm sort of into self-hosting and I ran across the selfhosted Reddit's wiki on the topic.

https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/wiki/selfhosted

TLDR: they don't differentiate on whether you own the hardware or not.
by refulgentis | 2025-10-20 17:06:00+00:00
I’m confused: the blog shows they A) predict the end of line 2 using the state at the end of line 1 and B) can choose the end of line 2 by altering state at end of line 1.

Might I trouble you for help getting from there to “such would be impossible”, where such is “the model…plans the rhyme to come”

Edit: I’m surprised to be at -2 for this. I am representing the contents of the post accurately. Its unintuitive for sure, but, it’s the case.
by titzer | 2025-10-20 17:06:30+00:00
Despite this comment being an ignorant throwaway, the irony is that markets can sometimes force the price of scarce natural resources up, which attracts investments because the goods are becoming scarce. In the short term, it could cause a spike in coastal property prices that would cause superficial analyses to conclude that there is no problem whatsoever, further fueling an exploitative short term bubble.

What will definitely be affected is insurance prices. Those are a better gauge of what the actuaries think is going to happen. We are already seeing that in Florida today and on the eastern seaboard, as insurance prices have skyrocketed. Some places are not even insurable.
by serf | 2025-10-20 17:07:28+00:00
It's easy to guess that an opponent that is focusing on information control and theatre above all else is doing so for reasons.

> Everything they do must either be a lie or just stolen American technology

as an aviation enthusiast for 30+ years this claim , while deliberately blunt, is not far from the truth -- the truth being that half of their hardware was stolen Russian design, too.

Let's consider : The KJ-600, the J-31, J-10, H-6, Z-20, J-7, J-15, J-11.

If it isn't a direct shape-to-shape knockoff like the J-31 it's either a licensed reproduction from Russia or something derived from a reverse engineering effort like the Su-33 prototype they got from Ukraine. Similar story with their Ghost Bat knockoffs.

There are very few novel designs. I'm not faulting the methodology -- the shape of the thing w.r.t. aircraft is half (if not more) of the struggle.

It's a tremendous advantage to start from a known good shape and go from there. If I were the boss I would do exactly the same thing when trying to bootstrap an aerospace industry.

>as if there's something inherently special about Americans that no one else has.

the US has proven numerous times that this is exactly the case.
by muddi900 | 2025-10-20 17:08:13+00:00
I do. I don't know what gave people the impression that I was born an American and went to their schools. In "open societies" like the US, the form information control are rather sophisticated, but they are there. However, I grew up in a one TV channel country. I learned to never trust the news. This immunizes me from state propaganda a little bit.

I think I was more referring to general abundance of credulity that is thrown at all AI stories at HN. There are a lot of skeptics when an Ed Zitron blog is shared. But every time a "ChatGPT was worried about being shut down" story is shared, it gets hundreds of upvotes. This story is just as ridiculous. AliBaba claims to reduce usage of equipment from a business that is being banned by their government. Magically. And during a trade war.
by BobaFloutist | 2025-10-20 17:08:14+00:00
Why is the most likely time right now? What makes right now more likely than in five minutes? I guess you're saying if there's nothing that makes it more likely to fail at any time than at any other time, right now is the only time that's not precluded by it failing at other times? I.E. it can't fail twice, and if it fails right now it can't fail at any other time, but even if it would have failed in five minutes it can still fail right now first?
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-20 17:08:22+00:00
> Good for you! This of course doesn't help in the situation where a dependency author retroactively changes the licensing state of a component, or reconfigures the project to rely on a new external dependency with differing license states (experienced both of these too!).

No, but I also don't see why that matters a lot. Once you adopted a third party project as a dependency, you also implicitly sign up to whatever changes they do, or you get prepared for staying on a static version with only security fixes you apply yourself. This isn't exactly new problems nor rocket science, we've been dealing with these sort of things for decades already.

> There are loads of ostensibly open source projects out there whose real goal is to drive sales of associated software and services, often without which the value of the opensource components is reduced, especially in the developer tooling space.

Yeah, which is kind of terrible, but also kind of great. But in the end, ends up being fairly easy to detect one way or another, with the biggest and reddest signal being VC funded with no public pricing.
by grafmax | 2025-10-20 17:08:24+00:00
There’s really nothing lazier than making money simply by owning more than others. Such a person doesn’t have to produce anything of value. They can simply just use their outsized wealth to buy something others need, then charge money for access to it. This drains cash from those who have no other option than working for a living while their own coffers grow. Not just lazy, this actively makes the economy less efficient by increasing the cost of living and necessitating higher wages from employers simply to finance parasitism, which means value-producing businesses become less competitive also.
by the_duke | 2025-10-20 17:08:31+00:00
For interrupting long-running syscalls there is another solution:

Install an empty SIGINT signal handler (without SA_RESTART), then run the loop.

When the thread should stop:

* Set stop flag

* Send a SIGINT to the thread, using pthread_kill or tgkill

* Syscalls will fail with EINTR

* check for EINTR & stop flag , then we know we have to clean up and stop

Of course a lot of code will just retry on EINTR, so that requires having control over all the code that does syscalls, which isn't really feasible when using any libraries.

EDIT: The post describes exactly this method, and what the problem with it is, I just missed it.
by chriswarbo | 2025-10-20 17:09:03+00:00
Your filesystem question is actually far from simple, due to all manner of edge-cases. In particular, since you say things like "globally accessible to be read and written to by all programs", I'll assume we're not talking about chroot, bind-mounts, etc. I'll also ignore the case where we open a file path, then delete the path, then open the path again; since that gives us two separate files, though the first can no longer be accessed via its original path (we can hand-wave these by pretending the path has moved to /proc/<pid>/fd or something).

If we ignore those, and just stick to normal FS operations in an ordinary Linux process, then those filesystem objects are globals, since the filesystem is a global namespace: a name (or path, in this case) will always refer to the same filesystem object (modulo the caveats above).

---

> If I am understanding you correctly, you are stating that a given shell, specifically a subshell -- may not in some cases see the same shell variables as other shells...

No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm talking about env vars: bound via `execve`, stored near the spawned process's stack). Not shell variables, or any other language-specific/internal variables (whether a shell, like Bash, or otherwise). That's the entire reason why my code example used `export`.
by scottyah | 2025-10-20 17:09:34+00:00
Also spend will drop dramatically if the models level out a bit more. The training is what's compute heavy, and if you aren't having to retrain every month, but able to use things like Skills to stay competitive your costs will drop a lot.

I suppose that's the pessimistic-on-AI side. On the other hand, once you create God little things like money are meaningless.
by alexjplant | 2025-10-20 17:09:52+00:00
It was solidly OK in my opinion.

The primary beefs seem to be with the supposed plot holes and one-dimensional characters. I won't argue that this movie is perfect because it isn't but IMO the proliferation of video essays on film has turned everybody into a critic. Many now think that narrative works have to fit into a "hero's journey" template where we have to identify with extensively-developed characters just because some guy with a beard on YouTube cut together some clips from "Raiders of the Lost Ark" while ranting loudly and quickly about the Platonic form of narrative structure as executed by blockbuster 80s films. These people clearly don't understand that large swaths of narrative entertainment don't fit this mold and Tron is one such franchise. Complaining about the admittedly-cheesy MacGuffin and Jared Leto's wooden acting in this movie is tantamount to saying that there weren't enough car chases in "Pride and Prejudice". It's a feature-length music video with sci-fi themes, not a modern epic. Enjoy it for what it is.

I'll never see this movie again but I was satisfied with what my $17 bought. I'd recommend seeing it in IMAX before it goes away because the experience won't translate at home.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-10-20 17:10:33+00:00
But they aren't keeping up

They are lauded for the ability to cost ratio, or their ability to parameter ratio, but virtually everyone using LLMs for productive work are using ChatGPT/Gemini/Claude.

They are kind of like Huffy bicycles. Good value, work well, but if you go to any serious event, no one will be riding one.
by roryirvine | 2025-10-20 17:10:39+00:00
Are non-profits in the US allowed to hoard cash long-term?

In the UK, spending on furthering their charitable purpose is expected to roughly match income over the medium term. There are carve-outs for specific types of "permanent endowment" (and even there, spending is meant to match the investment income) but it wouldn't cover anything like Mozilla's commercial agreement with Google.
by swyx | 2025-10-20 17:10:56+00:00
the entire point is that stressing sustainable business practices here at this point in a startup's life is extremely short sighted and is the kind of shitty analysis that gives HN a bad rep.

pull up Uber's financials leading up to IPO. unsustainable and everyone knew it. they work it out after because they burned money and eventually achieved a sustainable moat. this is why venture exists. HN doesnt like venture which is, well, ironic given the domain we're on.

a better negative argument i'd rather see looks like this - "ive run these aws numbers against the typical spend path of pre IPO startups who then later improved their cost baseline and margin profile and even after accounting for all that, Anthropic ngmi". thats the kind of minimum sophistication you need here to play armchair financial analyst. ed zitron, and everyone involved in this entire thread, incl myself, have not done that because we are lazy and ignorant and dont actually care enough about seeking the truth here. we are as unprepared to analyze this AWS spend as we are to understand their 1b -> 10b revenue ramp in 2025. you havent done the work and yet you sit here and judge it unsustainable based off some shitty "leaks". dont pretend that ed's analysis is at all meaningful particularly because he conveniently stops where it supports his known negative bias.
by natrys | 2025-10-20 17:11:18+00:00
Qwen's max series had always been closed weight, it's not a policy change like you are alluding.

What exactly is Huawei's flagship series anyway? Because their PanGu line is open-weight, but Huawei is as of yet not in the LLM making business, their models are only meant to signal that it's possible to do training and inference on their hardware, that's all. No one actually uses those models.
by gmuslera | 2025-10-20 17:11:41+00:00
You need to have extreme weather into account. Global sea rise is a slow process, it won't happen overnight, and even with an accelerated, but not catastrophic, melting of some of the fragile glaciers in Antarctica it will take years.

Extreme weather, in the other hand can affect big areas for extended amount of time, right now. In 2022 a third of Pakistan ended flooded, in 2024 there were big floods in parts of Europe and South America. Droughts, extended forest fires, tornadoes and similar has been changing in area patterns and strength in the last years. And things may get extremer in the coming years