MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by defrost | 2025-11-02 07:11:29+00:00
> What I'm saying is that "world in crisis" is not a good reason for you to reduce the number of children you plan to have, if your personal preference is in fact to continue living in this "world in crisis" yourself.

I would suggest you have a poor grasp of the timescale of the "world in crisis" then.

The AGW threat, as put forward in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports is a slow boiling frog scenario, one that steadily gets worse as insulation in the atmosphere continues to increase.

A number of people may, and indeed do, consider that their lives from this time until their projected death assuming good health, will be pleasant enough, but that the lives of their children and potential grandchildren will be worse and might face a rapid decline in quality of life at some point.

Another group, with some overlap in the greater Venn diagram, might consider that one part of a solution includes decreasing overall consumption - and a reduction of numbers in high per capita consumption societies makes sense.

The reasoning of both groups is simple enough, little is achieved by killing themselves, something is gained by a reduction in human population, and hypothetic non existing grand children are spared a life much worse.

For most people, though, there's not neccesarily any clear decision, just behaviour that follows observations made decades past by Hans Rosling and others; as education and quality of life improve, so fall birth rates.
by almosthere | 2025-11-02 07:11:44+00:00
Well if I had started my comment with "Christians probably" a) far fewer downvotes for a thread that most people missed. b) People would be agreeing with me, for the most part, and c) it would have made zero sense.

As for "Jews Probably" show me a bunch of Jew lead terror attacks in germany that triggered WW2 - otherwise you're just calling everyone a nazi and a fascist again for no reason other than just trying not to be a "bad leftist".
by im3w1l | 2025-11-02 07:13:45+00:00
> All they have to do is make a virtual environment

Okay so to create a five line script I have to make a virtual environment. Then I have to activate and deactivate it whenever using it. And I have to remember to update the dependenceis regularly. For my five line script.

Seems to me the companies managing mloc-codebases pushed their tradeoffs on everyone else.
by joshdavham | 2025-11-02 07:14:06+00:00
Given that we're now in the year 2025 and AI has become ubiquitous, I'd be curious to estimate what percentage of developers now actually understand backprop.

It's a bit snarky of me, but whenever I see some web developer or product person with a strong opinion about AI and its future, I like to ask "but can you at least tell me how gradient descent works?"

I'd like to see a future where more developers have a basic understanding of ML even if they never go on to do much of it. I think we would all benefit from being a bit more ML-literate.
by andro_dev | 2025-11-02 07:14:51+00:00
Think of your 401k getting wiped out, they will let your 401k pay for these data centers. Think about it, these bonds have a 40-year lifespan.

"The social media group had hired Citigroup and Morgan Stanley to raise up to $25bn in debt, ranging from five to 40 years in maturity, "
by throwaway290 | 2025-11-02 07:15:12+00:00
I understand why ffmpeg does it. No one is expected to pay for it. Until this age of LLMs when bot traffic became dominant on the web ffmpeg site was probably acceptable expense. But they probably don't want to be unpaid data provider for big LLM operators who get to extract a few bucks from their users.

It's like airplane checkin. Are we inconvenienced? Yes. Who is there to blame? Probably not the airline or the company who provides the services. Probably people who want to fly without a ticket or bring in explosives.

As long as Anubis project and people on it don't try to play both sides and don't make the LLM situation worse (mafia racket style), I think if it works it works.
by gf000 | 2025-11-02 07:16:09+00:00
I am using Nix everywhere and have some packages contributed, so I do know how it goes - and there absolutely are cases like I have mentioned. Sure, apps can be patched, problems can be circumvented, but a fundamentally malicious/ignorant program can end up a pain in the ass for nix to manage (without bringing out the big guns like build FHS env)
by cantor_S_drug | 2025-11-02 07:18:33+00:00
It's like making a spider web diagram for each person. Then calculating the area under the polygon to make a decision. With the vertices of diagram weighted by your preference vector. Under normal circumstances, majority can match with majority like a lock and key combintation. This could be the reason why arranged marriages work. I don't think evolution would care for 100% maximum compatibility as a target.
by JonathanBeuys | 2025-11-02 07:20:18+00:00
I have not looked into Meta, but when I look at the growth of Alphabet's cloud revenue, it looks pretty solid:

https://x.com/JonathanBeuys/status/1984882268817519036

That is revenue from real world usage of their datacenters. Usage their customers would not pay for if it did not have a positive ROI.

A pretty stable growth of 30% per year for the last 5 years. At a current level of about $50B per year.

What is the value of it, if it continues like this for another decade? Revenue would be at roughly $1T/year then.

In the face of this real usage and the growth of it, spending tens of billions of dollars on building out infrastructure looks ok to me.
by gchadwick | 2025-11-02 07:20:21+00:00
Karpathy's contribution to teaching around deep learning is just immense. He's got a mountain of fantastic material from short articles like this, longer writing like https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/ (on recurrent neural networks) and all of the stuff on YouTube.

Plus his GitHub. The recently released nanochat https://github.com/karpathy/nanochat is fantastic. Having minimal, understandable and complete examples like that is invaluable for anyone who really wants to understand this stuff.
by aniviacat | 2025-11-02 07:20:31+00:00
They do use SubtleCrypto digest [0] in secure contexts, which does the hashing natively.

Specifically for Firefox [1] they switch to the JavaScript fallback because that's actually faster [2] (because of overhead probably):

> One of the biggest sources of lag in Firefox has been eliminated: the use of WebCrypto. Now whenever Anubis detects the client is using Firefox (or Pale Moon), it will swap over to a pure-JS implementation of SHA-256 for speed.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/SubtleCrypt...

[1] https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis/blob/main/web/js/algorit...

[2] https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis/releases/tag/v1.22.0
by throwaway7356 | 2025-11-02 07:20:32+00:00
> my point is it would be more sensible to say "I'm going to introduce an oxidized fork of apt and a method to use it as your system apt if you prefer" and then over the next year or so he could say "look at all these great benefits!" (if there are any). At that point, the community could decide that the rust version should become the default because it is so much better/safer/"modern"/whatever.

That's not how open source software development works.

I wasn't asked by Linus whether ipchains should become the default over ipfirewall nor whether iptables should become over ipchains.

I wasn't asked whether GCC should use C++ instead of C as the language to build GCC itself.

I can go on with lots of examples.

Why should APT be different and require the maintainers to fork their own project do introduce changes? Why should an undefined "community" (who is that? apparently not the APT developers...) decide? Does this have to be done for every code change in APT?
by drnick1 | 2025-11-02 07:20:44+00:00
> I recently upgraded from a UniFi Dream Machine to a UniFi Dream Router 7

What do these devices do that can't be accomplished by an OpenWrt One + an external AP for less money and fully FOSS?

Another option would be a mini-PC running Linux, but it's perhaps overkill for a domestic router.

Edit: Actually the OpenWrt One does have built-in WiFi, so you don't even need the external AP.
by drivebyhooting | 2025-11-02 07:21:55+00:00
I have a naive question about backprop and optimizers.

I understand how SGD is just taking a step proportional to the gradient and how backprop computes the partial derivative of the loss function with respect to each model weight.

But with more advanced optimizers the gradient is not really used directly. It gets per weight normalization, fudged with momentum, clipped, etc.

So really, how important is computing the exact gradient using calculus, vs just knowing the general direction to step? Would that be cheaper to calculate than full derivatives?
by mgh95 | 2025-11-02 07:25:13+00:00
> But with more advanced optimizers the gradient is not really used directly. It gets per weight normalization, fudged with momentum, clipped, etc.

Why would these things be "fudging"? Vanishing gradients (see the initial batch norm paper) are a real thing, and ensuring that the relative magnitudes are in some sense "smooth" between layers allows for an easier optimization problem.

> So really, how important is computing the exact gradient using calculus, vs just knowing the general direction to step? Would that be cheaper to calculate than full derivatives?

Very. In high dimensional space, small steps can move you extremely far from a proper solution. See adversarial examples.
by solidsnack9000 | 2025-11-02 07:25:48+00:00
What are those mistakes?

It seems like Ada more or less has to have memory safety bolted on -- that is what SPARK does -- and it's not clear that Ada's bias towards OO is better than Rust's bias towards functional programming.

Are you talking about features like type inference (so the Rust code could be less clear, since types are not always written out)?
by stale2002 | 2025-11-02 07:26:41+00:00
> The moat is around capital.

Not really. I can run some pretty good models on my high end gaming PC. Sure, I can't train them. But I don't need to. All that has to happen is at least one group releases a frontier model open source and the world is good to go, no feudalism needed.

> What is more likely, that LLMs lead to the flourishing of entrepreneurship and self determination

I'd say whats more likely is that whatever we are seeing now continues. And that current day situation is a massive startup boom run on open source models that are nearly as good as the private ones while GPUs are being widely distributed.
by leoedin | 2025-11-02 07:27:41+00:00
> The person who makes the software has the duty to fix the security issues in their own code, nobody else, no matter how big they are.

That’s just clearly untrue for freely available software. So every person that ever published a hobby project on GitHub has a duty to fix security issues in it?

The organisation who ships software to paying customer may have a duty to fix security issues. If they didn’t, it could be seen as negligent, violate regulations or the contract they have with their customers. But there’s no contract with the free software developers. No duty of care from them to end users. Absolutely no duty.
by lock1 | 2025-11-02 07:29:38+00:00
> I'd like to see a future where more developers have a basic understanding of ML even if they never go on to do much of it. I think we would all benefit from being a bit more ML-literate.

Why "ML-literate" specifically? Also, there are some people against calculus and statistic in CS curriculum because it's not "useful" or "practical", why does ML get special treatment here?

Plus, I don't think a "gotcha" question like "what is gradient descent" will give you a good signal about someone if it get popularized. It probably will lead to the present-day OOP cargo cult, where everyone just memorizes whatever their lecturer/bootcamp/etc and repeats it to you without actually understanding what it does, why it's the preferred method over other strategies, etc.
by refurb | 2025-11-02 07:29:40+00:00
“In Fiscal Year 2023, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers in the Cincinnati area alone intercepted and identified more than 6,800 fraudulent, counterfeit, or stolen documents.”

https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/local-media-release/cincinnati-...

That ONE CBP office in the US. And it’s not even in a state with a high population of illegal aliens. There are 20 offices in the US.

And sure creating fraudulent documents from scratch isn’t easy. But it’s not that hard to use someone else’s identity to get documents that support US citizenship. Hell, a paper social security card is proof as long as it doesn’t say “NOT WORK AUTHORIZED on it.

So it wouldn’t even be that unusual to locate an alien that the database says (correctly) has a deportation order but for them to claim US citizenship and even produce a document that looks like they are.

You can even read a nice CBP report on the problems they have with fraudulent documents.

https://www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/assets/2025-09/O...
by dafi70 | 2025-11-02 07:29:52+00:00
Two years ago, for personal reasons, I had to abandon development of my commercial application, VisualDiffer, which was only available on the Mac App Store. I had a lot of success with it, but I couldn't follow up on the user reports that deserved respect, so I removed it from the store and continued to provide support to those who asked.

Today, I rewrote 99% of the code in Swift 6.2, still using AppKit, which I deeply love, and I released the source code.

There will be regressions, new bugs, and old bugs, but I hope to improve it with the help of other "crazy people" like me.
by tavavex | 2025-11-02 07:29:57+00:00
It's not just "not wanting" something, the original comment wasn't nearly that mild. It's being enraged by it to the extent of making petty, low, personal attacks on someone who steps just barely out of line of their preferred behaviors.

This whole comment chain solidifies my opinion that disgust is one of the driving human emotions. People feel initial, momentary disgust and only then explain it using the most solid justification that comes to mind, but the core disgust is unshakable and precedes all explanations. No one here has managed to procure any argument for why seeing a basic sketch in a certain style is objectively bad or harmful to someone, only that it's "weird" in some vague way. Basically, it goes against the primal instinct of how the person thinks the world "ought to work", therefore it's bad, end of story.

To me it seems obvious. The anime art style is in, especially in Western countries, especially^2 among younger people, and especially^3 among techy people. Ergo, you may see a mascot in that style once in a while in hobbyist projects. Doesn't seem like anything particularly objectionable to me.
by ianpenney | 2025-11-02 07:30:35+00:00
Silicon Valley didn’t ruin the internet on its own; it just magnified a culture of deregulation and quick profit that has shaped U.S. policy for decades.

It’s worth asking what might have happened if the web had started somewhere else, in a place that treated it as a public utility instead of a private marketplace.

Would we still have ended up with the same mess of ads, data collection, and walled gardens?

Maybe America’s real contribution to the web wasn’t technology at all, but the story that innovation excuses everything.

I recommend reading Mark Carney’s writings before taking Doctorow’s stuff at face value.
by yawpitch | 2025-11-02 07:30:45+00:00
I can’t show you a bunch of Jew-“lead” (sic) terror attacks in 1920s-30s Germany because the vast majority of them only existed within the fevered imagination of the actual Nazis and Fascists of the day, much as the vast majority of Islamic-led attacks in the UK since 2007 exist only in the fevered imagination of the would-be Nazis and Fascists of today.

Having undoubtedly spent way more time in Doncaster and on that specific train line than you, and having actually been in the UK with a functioning memory of events here, and having been a victim of the actually extremely small amount of violent crime here, I’m going to assume that this very centrist is much more well-informed on the matter than an actually and demonstrably racist individual engaging in overtly fascistic rhetoric.
by joshdavham | 2025-11-02 07:31:29+00:00
I take your point in that they are mostly orthogonal in practice, but with that being said, I think understanding how these AI's were created is still helpful.

For example, I believe that if we were to ask the average developer about why LLM's behave randomly, they would not be able to answer. This to me exposes a fundamental hole in their knowledge of AI. Obviously one shouldn't feel bad about not knowing the answer, but I think we'd benefit from understanding the basic mathematical and statistical underpinnings on these things.
by Slothrop99 | 2025-11-02 07:33:26+00:00
Great to see some 3letter guy into this. This might be one of those rando things which gets posted on HN (and which doesn't involve me in the slightest), but a decade later is taking over the world. Rust and Go were like that.

Previously there was that Rust in APT discussion. A lot of this middle-aged linux infrastructure stuff is considered feature-complete and "done". Not many young people are coming in, so you either attract them with "heyy rewrite in rust" or maybe the best thing is to bottle it up and run in a VM.
by ssivark | 2025-11-02 07:33:48+00:00
> So really, how important is computing the exact gradient using calculus, vs just knowing the general direction to step? Would that be cheaper to calculate than full derivatives?

Yes, absolutely -- a lot of ideas inspired by this have been explored in the field of optimization, and also in machine learning. The very idea of "stochastic" gradient descent using mini-batches basically a cheap (hardware compatible) approximation to the gradient for each step.

For a relatively extreme example of how we might circumvent the computational effort of backprop, see Direct Feedback Alignment: https://towardsdatascience.com/feedback-alignment-methods-7e...

Ben Recht has an interesting survey of how various learning algorithms used in reinforcement learning relate with techniques in optimization (and how they each play with the gradient in different ways): https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~brecht/l2c-icml2018/ (there's nothing special about RL... as far as optimization is concerned, the concepts work the same even when all the data is given up front rather than generated on-the-fly based on interactions with the environment)
by procaryote | 2025-11-02 07:35:04+00:00
If big pizza franchises wanted HPOP they could just make it the api by which their apps talk to their backend. New cross-pizza-place-apps and tools would pop up within a month

Really, they could each do their own bespoke thing as long as they didn't go out of their way to shut out other implementers.

Instant messaging used to work like this until everyone wanted to own their customer bases and lock them in, for the time-wasting aspect
by iansteyn | 2025-11-02 07:35:08+00:00
It’s a real pity to me that em-dashes are becoming so disliked for their association with AI. I have long had a personal soft spot for them because I just like them aesthetically and functionally. I prided myself on searching for and correctly using em, en, and regular dashes, had a Google docs shortcut for turning `- - -` into `—` and more recently created an Obsidian auto-replacement shortcut that turns `-em` into `—`. Guess I’ll just have to use it sparingly and keep my prose otherwise human.
by NoiseBert69 | 2025-11-02 07:36:37+00:00
(TLDR: if you want to use bleeding edge technology you must use bleeding edge drivers and firmware blobs)

We have tested WiFi-7 gear in our lab: from the cheapest TP Omada EAP783 to the latest most expensive Cisco AP+Controller.

Our findings:

- Driver quality from the modems is still below average on Linux. If you want to test Wifi-7 go with the Intel BE200 card - most stuff works there. Warning: this card does not work with AMD CPUs.

- We have seen quite a bit of problems from Qualcomm and Mediatek cards. Either latency issues, weirdo bugs on 6GHz (not showing all SSIDs) or throughput problems

- Always go with the latest kernel with the freshest firmware blobs

- MLO is difficult to get running properly. Very buggy from all sides. Also needs the latest version of wpa_supplicant - otherwise it will not come up. And be aware: there are several MLO modes and not all of them offer "two links for twice the bandwidth".

Also expect to hit problems from AP side. If you read the TP Omada firmware changelogs you see that they are still struggling with a lot of basic functionality. So keep them updated to the latest beta versions too.

I use a Qualcomm QCNCM865 in my privat setup with an AMD CPU. Feels like the latest firmware blobs and kernel drivers brought stability into their components.
by hubraumhugo | 2025-11-02 07:37:03+00:00
What's the endgame of this increasing arms race? A gated web where you need to log in everywhere? Even more captchas and Cloudflare becoming the gateway to the internet? There must be a better way.

We're somehow still stuck with CAPTCHAs (and other challenges), a 25 years old concept that wastes millions of human hours and billions in infra costs [0].

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.10911
by petesergeant | 2025-11-02 07:37:54+00:00
I guess I'm not seeing the special category that an anime cat girl sits in. Is there some kind of sex implication I'm just not aware of? Linux has a penguin, FreeBSD has a devil(!), OpenBSD has a blowfish, Go has the weird Gopher thing, Gnome has a foot...

Wikipedia suggests that there's an association with queer and trans youth, is that what's meant to make the cock-and-balls comparison work? But it also says it has a history back to 17th century Japan...
by input_sh | 2025-11-02 07:38:33+00:00
I posted an investigation done by a group of professional journalists, you posted an anonymous HN comment leading to another anonymous HN comment which says "it's NSA actually". Just to make it a full circle, the author of that original comment "proves it" in the replies with that same god damn investigation I posted right here, and that investigation claims no NSA connection (only Europol).

Your media literacy skills are truly non-existent.
by julian-klode | 2025-11-02 07:39:14+00:00
It's not like I'm in a hurry to switch to Rust and will spend full steam on it. It's amongst the lowest priority items.

A lot of the Rust rewrites suffer a crucial issue: they want a different license than what they are rewriting and hence rewrite from scratch because they can't look at the code.

But here we're saying: Hey we have this crucial code, there may be bugs hidden in it (segfaults in it are a recurring source of joy), and we'll copy that code over from .cc to .rs and whack it as little as possible so it compiles there.

The problem is much more there on the configuration parser for example which does in a sense desparately need a clean rewrite, as it's way too sloppy, and it's making it hard to integrate.

In an optimal world I'd add annotations to my C++ code and have a tool that does the transliteration to Rust at the end; like when the Go compiler got translated from C to Go. It was glorious.