MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by danielmarkbruce | 2025-10-13 22:47:06+00:00
Maybe spend more time reading a response than writing. Yellowcake doesn't know what you are talking about either (note the "pulling teeth" comment).

The examples you gave are a result of the embedding model in question not producing vectors which would map to most peoples conceptual view of the world. Go through that website you quote from and see for yourself - it's just element wise addition.

The examples I gave are entirely made up, 2 dimensional vectors to explain what plain old addition means (ie, plain old "add the vectors element wise") in the context of embedding models. And yes, it's the same as, because I defined it that way. Your website uses 300 dimensions, not 2.

As I mentioned, not all embedding models work the same way (or, as you've said, "this doesn't generalize"). They get trained differently, on different data. The word "similar" is used very loosely.

You even directly quote me and don't seem to be able to read the quote. The word "could" is there. You could end up with a model which had these nice properties.

The entire point of my post was to highlight that yellowcake's confusion arises because he assumes it's an esoteric definition of addition that results in your examples, when it's not that.
by skirmish | 2025-10-13 22:47:13+00:00
Since OpenAI tokenizer is estimated at ~4.2 characters per token, with your proposed "1 char per token tokenizer", the effective context length immediately becomes 4.2 times smaller, and generated output 4.2 times slower (since 4.2 times more tokens are needed for the same output). Doesn't look like a good tradeoff.
by jchanimal | 2025-10-13 22:47:40+00:00
We handle this in Fireproof with a deterministic default algorithm, in addition to having a hash-based tamperproof ledger of changes. Fireproof is not SQL based, it is more like CouchDB or MongoDB, but with cryptographic integrity. Apache 2.0 https://use-fireproof.com

In practice during CouchDB's heyday, with lots of heavy users, the conflict management API almost never mattered, as most people can make do with deterministic merges.
by golem14 | 2025-10-13 22:47:48+00:00
That is really long indeed. But John Cleese as Centurion teaching Brian how to graffiti "Romans go home" on the wall must remain my all time favorite.

CENTURION: What's this, then? 'Romanes Eunt Domus'? 'People called Romanes they go the house'?

BRIAN: It-- it says, 'Romans, go home'.

CENTURION: No, it doesn't. What's Latin for 'Roman'? Come on!

BRIAN: Aah!

CENTURION: Come on!

BRIAN: 'R-- Romanus'?

CENTURION: Goes like...?

BRIAN: 'Annus'?

CENTURION: Vocative plural of 'annus' is...?

BRIAN: Eh. 'Anni'?

CENTURION: 'Romani'. 'Eunt'? What is 'eunt'?

BRIAN: 'Go'. Let--

CENTURION: Conjugate the verb 'to go'.

BRIAN: Uh. 'Ire'. Uh, 'eo'. 'Is'. 'It'. 'Imus'. 'Itis'. 'Eunt'.

CENTURION: So 'eunt' is...?

BRIAN: Ah, huh, third person plural, uh, present indicative. Uh, 'they go'.

CENTURION: But 'Romans, go home' is an order, so you must use the...?

BRIAN: The... imperative!

CENTURION: Which is...?

BRIAN: Umm! Oh. Oh. Um, 'i'. 'I'!

CENTURION: How many Romans?

BRIAN: Ah! 'I'-- Plural. Plural. 'Ite'. 'Ite'.

CENTURION: 'Ite'.

BRIAN: Ah. Eh.

CENTURION: 'Domus'?

BRIAN: Eh.

CENTURION: Nominative?

BRIAN: Oh.

CENTURION: 'Go home'? This is motion towards. Isn't it, boy?

BRIAN: Ah. Ah, dative, sir! Ahh! No, not dative! Not the dative, sir! No! Ah! Oh, the... accusative! Accusative! Ah! 'Domum', sir! 'Ad domum'! Ah! Oooh! Ah!

CENTURION: Except that 'domus' takes the...?

BRIAN: The locative, sir!

CENTURION: Which is...?!

BRIAN: 'Domum'.

CENTURION: 'Domum'.

BRIAN: Aaah! Ah.

CENTURION: 'Um'. Understand?

BRIAN: Yes, sir.

CENTURION: Now, write it out a hundred times.

BRIAN: Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Hail Caesar, sir.

CENTURION: Hail Caesar. If it's not done by sunrise, I'll cut your balls off.
by o11c | 2025-10-13 22:48:08+00:00
Off the top of my head: stream count is static (an extension exists nowadays, but it's still usually unsupported), startup requires requires excessive round trips, and it's unfixably insecure (TCP actually shares this last flaw - you can only detect, not discard, injected packets - and this causes massive reliability problems in the real world). Some of the default tools were also horribly flawed even by 1990s standards (e.g. a shell script which uses $* instead of $@) last I checked.

Certainly there are things that could be done to improve the ecosystem - but why bother when you can just use a reliability layer on top of UDP instead? And these days there's a "standard" solution so you don't even need to compare choices or worry about design flaws affecting just your program: just use QUIC, everybody uses it and if something goes wrong the world will scream and the shared library will be upgraded by the distro.
by omer_k | 2025-10-13 22:48:32+00:00
Hypothesis:

Could texting alone be a viable way for patients to get real medical help and prescriptions? Could we build it lean and bootstrap our way in a space full of billion-dollar incumbents?

Result:

Short answer is yes, in 10 months we hit profitability. We now have 500+ reviews across both app stores with a 4.9 star average rating, and patients seem to love the simplicity of chat and privacy of not showing their face on video.

Our Story:

When I get sick, I usually just text my best friend who's a doctor. One day I asked him... why isn't this experience available to everyone? That's where the idea was born.

How we approached it:

Business model: $24 per visit — no recurring fees, no insurance required

Ops: started in California, now live in 15 states (TX, FL, NY etc)

Why it worked:

The majority of visits are for simple conditions (prescriptions, refills, minor issues) that don't need video. Texting keeps costs low and frictionless for both sides.

We're Hiring:

Looking for doctors and growth marketers.

Also, if you're curious about how we scaled a healthcare company to profitably from scratch. Happy to share lessons learned in the comments.
by mgh95 | 2025-10-13 22:48:52+00:00
> And you know all this because of your deep study, in the original language of course, of the CPC, their internal factions, and the collected writings in their leading policy journals, I assume, yes?

Perhaps not original language, but per Qiushi, the CPCs theoretical journal on their ideology, an official[translation of a speech by Xi Xinping](https://en.qstheory.cn/2025-07/28/c_1110292.htm):

> Marxist ideas and theories are wide-ranging and profound and maintain relevance through constant study. In the new era, we Chinese Communists still need to study Karl Marx, study and practice Marxism, and continually draw on its powerful knowledge and theories. In this way, we will uphold and develop Chinese socialism in the new era with more resolve, confidence and wisdom. It will support the coordinated advance of the Five-sphere Integrated Plan and the Four-pronged Comprehensive Strategy and ensure that we always stay the course towards national rejuvenation as we break the waves and sail ahead.

If it says its a duck...
by matu3ba | 2025-10-13 22:49:52+00:00
Is this your last design iteration? Benchmarks would be great and some performance justification based on the design (techniques).

Are all possible memory problems checked, which to me include those listed in https://matu3ba.github.io/articles/optimal_debugging/#practi... (OOB, null, type confusion, integer overflow, invalid stack access, UUM, data races, illegal aliasing/provenance, stack overflows, ..) ?
by SeanAnderson | 2025-10-13 22:49:55+00:00
yes to both.

absolutely requires longer training time and more compute.

once trained, predictions need to hold through many more steps because each step processes one token. if a token early in a sentence heavily implies a token will occur later in the sentence then that awareness needs to be maintained while processing each intermediary token and each step is a bit lossy. the fewer steps you need to take before leveraging that knowledge the better the prediction.

if you had infinite compute and data for training then performance would be equivalent though, i think.
by cat_plus_plus | 2025-10-13 22:50:30+00:00
End to end training is a different beast, but finetuning and inference of impressive LLMs like QWEN3 can be done on pretty run of the mill hardware like Apple Silicon macs and gaming PCs if anyone wants a personalized assistant with character. Just ask AI how to finetune AI using unsloth (if using NVIDIA) or MLX (for apple) and it will give you ready to run python scripts.
by Moral_ | 2025-10-13 22:51:26+00:00
SEAR and the Apple team does an excellent job of security on iOS, and should be commended greatly on that.

Not only are they willing to develop hardware features and plumb that throughout the entire stack, they're willing to look at ITW exploits and work on ways to mitigate that. PPL was super interesting, they decided it wasn't 100% effective so they ditched it and came up with other thigs.

Apple's vertical makes it 'easy' to do this compared to Android where they have to convince the CPU guys at QC or Mediatek to build a feature, convince the linux kernel to take it, get it in AOSP, get it in upstream LLVM, etc etc.

Pointer authentication codes (PAC) is a good example, Apple said f-it we'll do it ourselves. They maintained a downstream fork of LLVM, and built full support, leveraged in the wild bypasses and fixed those up.
by cyberax | 2025-10-13 22:52:03+00:00
> You raise reasonable points. It seems like a common trend is that housing prices go up anyway due to outside investors buying up property, high income workers moving in and wanting luxury apartments, etc.

Yes. And there will always be something else explaining the rising costs. You ban foreign investors (see: Vancouver)? You get local investment companies buying the properties instead. You start doing rent control? You get tons of dilapidated housing with generational poverty, among other skyrocketing market-based housing.

> Seems like we need to solve the demand part of the puzzle as well. There’s definitely no single easy solution here.

There actually is. Stop trying to make density happen. Instead, promote suburbs and smaller cities. It's as simple as that.

> I don’t think the idea of “just let the population go down” is a reasonable approach.

You don't get other options.

> Especially since it will be poorer people pushed out, even lifelong residents who are displaced by highly paid newcomers.

"Poor people" are the ones suffering from urbanization the most.
by phil21 | 2025-10-13 22:52:07+00:00
> Is US leadership that bad that they failed to address this risk?

I mean, quite obviously? Borne by the simple fact of... here we are discussing it?

It doesn't matter how easy, quick, or hard it is right now. What matters is leadership is so bad it was allowed to reach this point to begin with, and even a decade ago it was immediately obvious that it was a giant vulnerability that has not even started on beyond corrected in any meaningful way.
by einpoklum | 2025-10-13 22:53:42+00:00
Software is too important for people not to _share_. And too important for people to have to waste endless resources in re-developing in multiple closed contexts.

As for "communism" - if by whiskey, I mean if by Communism you mean soviet-union-style social arrangements, then I'm pretty sure they had closed-source software which the government controlled and people could not use and alter freely; but if you mean "communism" as in software being a "commons", then, yeah, free software will win when that is again the case.
by BoredPositron | 2025-10-13 22:54:20+00:00
You are the CEO of company that works in the hypermedia space. You are starting flamewars with other companies/projects in the space. It's blunt and obnoxious. No need to put on a mask in some threads or interviews we've all seen your real face. Nobody needs people like you in steward ship of projects. I would love to see you play the nice guy in a room with potential sponsors must be hilarious.
by zahlman | 2025-10-13 22:54:44+00:00
Can you show that they have arrested US citizens without reasonable suspicion? Can you otherwise show that law is not being followed? From what I can tell, they are legally allowed to wear masks for this. ICE's webpage also is adamant that they legally do not always require a warrant (https://www.ice.gov/immigration-enforcement-frequently-asked...), and Snopes agrees (https://www.snopes.com/news/2025/06/21/ice-arrest-people-war...).

Entering private property without a warrant does seem like it would be unlawful, yes. Fourth Amendment, yes? Do you know of court cases scheduled to make this argument?

Regarding protests and the response, that very much contradicts the video evidence I've seen.

There is no rhetoric, as far as I can tell, about "how democrats are terrorists", except in the sense that there equally is rhetoric about "how republicans are fascists". There is rhetoric about antifa, no quotes, because (among other things) of the demonstrable existence of protesters using black bloc tactics, explicitly describing themselves with that label, and explicitly stating a goal of countering supposed "fascism".

Do you otherwise disagree about the general principles of setting and enforcing rules for immigration?
by jrowen | 2025-10-13 22:56:17+00:00
I was watching a clip from the The Lost World (1925) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chwzrwHnCtk] the other day. I was struck by the silly (to my ears) orchestral fanfare scoring such a dramatic scene, and the fact that almost all of the men are wearing nearly identical outfits. It's still pretty much the same 20 years later in this video. The timbre of the voice of the narrator is another thing, so universal in media from that time and comically foreign today.
by SeanAnderson | 2025-10-13 22:56:25+00:00
or a typical CRUD app architecture, or a common design pattern, or unit/integration test scaffolding, or standard CI/CD pipeline definitions, or one-off utility scripts, etc...

Like 80% of writing coding is just being a glorified autocomplete and AI is exceptional at automating those aspects. Yes, there is a lot more to being a developer than writing code, but, in those instances, AI really does make a difference in the amount of time one is able to spend focusing on domain-specific deliverables.
by dawnofdusk | 2025-10-13 22:56:34+00:00
>what this routing mechanism is (heating a substrate, maybe?)

You can engineer a waveguide if you understand the nonlinear theory they propose. There's no heat exchange involved, which is easy to get confused on because the writing in the article does not really understand "optical thermodynamics".

>if the routing is dynamically changeable

At this point probably not, it requires a finely engineered waveguide which has a well-defined "ground state"

>it works in reverse, eg light coming in can be routed to one of several output ports

In theory it works in reverse, as everything in this system is time-reversible (i.e., the "optical thermodynamics" is just an analogy and not real thermodynamics, which would break time reversibility). This is demonstrated via a simulation in the SI, but experimentally they did not achieve this (it may be difficult, I am not an experimentalist so cannot comment).
by like_any_other | 2025-10-13 22:57:10+00:00
> But the irony is that when a non-European entity were to do something like this, e.g. nationalize their oil or mining etc. industry or a firm, the whole hell would brake loose.

As far as I understand, Samsung, TSMC, and SMIC are all closely guarded by their respective governments. And China doesn't (didn't?) allow foreign companies to operate in China without a local partner at all. So I don't see the irony - everyone practices protectionism, some are just more subtle about it than others. Some China-specific examples:

tmnvix points out the perfectly analogous Chinese restriction of rare earth exports: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45572420

China imposes more trade and investment barriers, discriminatory taxes, and information security restrictions than any other country by a vast margin. - https://ecipe.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/DTE_China_TWP_R...

As with most countries, China has adopted some policies aimed at protecting or promoting its domestic industries, including targeted quotas, subsidies to certain key industries and rejection of patents in critical industries. - https://www.rfa.org/english/news/afcl/fact-check-china-prote...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025 - government plan with securing first local, and the global key markets, for indigenous firms, the acquisition of foreign technology companies, and independence from foreign suppliers, as explicit goals.
by hoten | 2025-10-13 22:58:55+00:00
I just recently upgraded[1] a JIT that essentially compiled each bytecode separately to one that shares registers within the same basic block. Easy 40 percent improvement to runtime, as expected.

But something I hadn't expected was it also improved compilation time by 40 percent too (fewer virtual registers made for much faster register allocation).

[1] https://github.com/ZQuestClassic/ZQuestClassic/commit/68087d...
by emeraldd | 2025-10-13 22:59:29+00:00
This is still a complete pain to work with. Virtualenv in general is a "worst of worlds" solution. It has a lot of the same problems as just globally pip installing packages, requires a bit of path mangling to work right, or special python configs, etc. In the past, it's also had a bad habit of leaking dependencies, though that was in some weird setups. It's one of the reasons I would recommend against python for much of anything that needs to be "deployed" vs throw away scripts. UV seems to handle all of this much better.
by petepete | 2025-10-13 22:59:44+00:00
There’s a blurred line between self-hosting and homelabbing.

I’d classify myself in the former camp, with a small server that runs TrueNAS and serves media, runs VMs and a few apps I use for work - and a Unifi network for my home and security cameras and VPN.

I’m positive there are people with very similar setups who call it a homelab. I don’t really experiment with mine, it’s set up and works in the background for months on end.
by owlbite | 2025-10-13 23:00:16+00:00
Oh yes, from an actual implementation POV you can just apply some transpose and ordering transforms to convert from row major to column major or vice-versa. cblas is pretty universal though I don't think any LAPACK C API ever gained as wide support for non column-major usage (and actually has some routines where you can't just pull transpose tricks for the transformation).

Certain layouts have performance advantages for certain operations on certain microarchitectures due to data access patterns (especially for level 2 BLAS), but that's largely irrelevant to historical discussion of the API's evolution.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-10-13 23:00:21+00:00
> The main reason that it's mostly China producing them may simply be due to the fact that the volumes are so small that building your own industry is not really worth it.

There's also an element of their production generating pollution and us preferring to think of ourselves as cleaner than that. We only use the rare earths.

Compare how desalinization is very cheap, but California prefers constant screaming about drought.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-10-13 23:00:54+00:00
>Is the population too stupid to be permitted general purpose computers?

I'm strongly against this Android change (for a simple reason written below) but the answer to this is a resounding yes! The general population is a complete security disaster with unsigned software! The latest generations being brought up within abstracted mobile ecosystems are no improvement either on that front (probably worse).

That said - and I think this is a key point in this debate - sideloading apps is already a fringe part of the Android ecosystem. The vast majority of average Android users will never interface with this functionality. Well there is still obviously a security risk as with any time unsigned software is offered, it doesn't seem to me to be a major issue in the ecosystem. This is clearly about control, not security. Let's say there is more antitrust action and Google loses more control over their preferred forced storefront monopoly within the ecosystem. With this change, at least according my understanding of it, they are still the arbiter of what is allowed on the platform and not even if an app comes from another app store.
by ahartmetz | 2025-10-13 23:01:42+00:00
It is a very, very easy mistake to make though. Nothing except edge-triggered I/O multiplexing makes it a problem not to read everything you possibly could, and it is often convenient to read less and let some other part of the code handle the rest. Forgot to call that part somehow? Oops, I/O on that socket is now screwed forever.
by dennis_jeeves2 | 2025-10-13 23:02:03+00:00
Look at some wild life videos and you will see animals caring (or attempting to care) for the wounded and sick. Is it fair to extend the concept ( which I'm calling it as common sense knowledge) and infer that humans lived in a similar manner in the past? Some thing similar goes for current hunter gatherers.

And yes before anyone brings up - both animals and humans, both current and past are capable of extreme brutality also under the 'appropriate' circumstances.
by phil21 | 2025-10-13 23:02:49+00:00
Ancestors didn't have the hyper-scheduled calendar controlled lives of two working professionals plus child rearing. Something has to give in such situations.

Priorities are 100% it. My parents were able to raise me on a single income where any processed foods were a special treat maybe once per quarter. We were quite poor compared to our peers, and a lot of our veggies came directly from our own urban garden. Staples in bulk from the food co-op in 50lb bags, and at least a few hours per day was spent on meal prep from base ingredients.

There is no way you are getting that out of the general population these days without wholesale changes to the entire economy. We are built to keep every working adult busy 24x7.

That's before you get into the inanity (or insanity if you prefer) of social expectations these days re: child rearing.
by fragmede | 2025-10-13 23:02:52+00:00
It seems contradictory to say that Tilt is an abstraction over kubernetes and say that won't work at scale, but then volunteer ops to be a layer of abstraction over kubernetes as a solution.

FWIW, Skaffold.dev is similar to Tilt, and has been working out great. "skaffold dev" on the cli or the corresponding button in the users IDE starts up a local kube cluster (minikube), the dev code in a container, any other configured containers, optionally opening a port to attach a debugger, and watches the code for changes and restarts the container with the dev code when there's changes. Developers aren't beholder to the capacity of whoever's on call on the ops team to manage the containers they need to be productive. The details of pods and CRDs and helm and ArgoCD and kubectl are abstracted away for them. They just run "skaffold dev" and edit code. Ops gets to run "skaffold render" to build and tag images, and generate the corresponding kubernetes manifest.
by hn_acc1 | 2025-10-13 23:03:11+00:00
For a few hundred dollars, given heavily-VC-subsidized hardware that is probably partially funded by nvidia and various AI companies, etc.

Can I run it on my local hardware (nvidia consumer card, AMD cpu)? No. When could that corporation cut off my access to that hardware if I did anything it didn't like? Anytime.

Lots of things have started off cheap / subsidized to put competitors out of business, and then the prices go up, up and up..