MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sdenton4 | 2025-11-22 04:04:21+00:00
A somewhat more beautiful matmul for neural networks is given by the Monarch paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.00595

Generally, low-rank and block-diagonal matrices are both great strategies for producing expressive matmuls with fewer parameters. We can view the FFT as a particularly deft example of factorizing one big matmul into a number of block-diagonal matmuls, greatly reducing the overall number of multiplications by minimizing the block size. However, on a G/TPU, we have a lot more parallelism available, so the sweet spot for size of the blocks may be larger than 2x2...

We can also mix low-rank, block diagonal, and residual connections to get the best of both worlds:

x' = (L@x + B@x + x)

The block-diagonal matrix does 'local' work, and the low-rank matrix does 'broadcast' work. I find it pretty typical to be able to replace a single dense matmul with this kind of structure and save ~90% of the params with no quality cost... (and sometimes the regularization actually helps!)
by Brajeshwar | 2025-11-22 04:04:28+00:00
Oh, absolutely true about finding stuff, and I go like, “Ah! I wrote about that.” I got my search working (abandoned for a long time) and a list of all post archives just so I can find them easier.

Btw, I have had a to-do item for quite a while to copy your blog’s yearly archive link style in the footer. I haven’t figured out a way to make it simpler and I don’t have to deal with it for a long time. :-)
by kentonv | 2025-11-22 04:04:53+00:00
> BTW here's Deno saying Deno Deploy is process-per-deployment with seccomp.

And that part isn't open source, AFAICT.

> Because you can't, in the general case, recreate the setup on a different platform?

You also can't recreate Lambda on Google Cloud since Lambda's scheduler is not open source.

But you can use Google Cloud Functions instead.

None of these schedulers are open source. Not Deno Deploy, not Supabase, and yeah, not ours either. Standard practice here is to offer an open source local runtime that can be used with other schedulers, but not to open source the cloud scheduler itself.

> Pretending you don't see the whole argument for why people want the option of self-hosting the whole real thing

Yes I get that everyone would like to have full control over their whole stack and would like to have it for free, because of course, why wouldn't you? I like those things too!

But we're a business, we gotta use our competitive advantage to make money.

The argument that I felt mariopt was making, when they said "being tied to only 1 vendor is problematic", is that some proprietary technology locks you in when you use it. Like if you build a large application in a proprietary programming language, then the vendor jacks up the prices, you are stuck. All I'm saying is that's not the case here: we've open sourced the parts needed so that you can switch vendors. The other vendor might not be as fast and cheap as us, but they will be just as fast and cheap as they'd have been if you had never used us in the first place.

I will also note, if we actually open sourced the tech, I think you'd find it not as useful as you imagine. It's really designed for running a whole multi-tenant hosting service (across a globally distributed network) and would be massive overkill for just hosting your own code. workerd is actually better for that.

> Durable Objects

I want to be forthright and admit my argument doesn't currently hold up here. workerd's implementation of Durable Objects doesn't scale at all, so can't plausibly be used in production. We actually have some plans to fix this.
by HeinzStuckeIt | 2025-11-22 04:07:06+00:00
> Every blog is a niche blog because blogging is a niche. It never was and never will be mainstream.

Content creation is indeed something a minority of society practices, but that can still be mainstream. In the first decade of the new millennium, the Movable Type and Wordpress ecosystem was active enough among ordinary people, not just nerds, that it led to things like local politicians being ousted, religious denominations’ leadership being shook up. All the drama now associated with Twitter/X happened on blogs before that.

Watch the last episode of The Onion’s series Sex House from 2012. A joke about everyone focusing on blogging is used multiple times. Even after the rise of Web 2.0 social media platforms, social media and blogs still coexisted for a time. It wasn’t until just after this that Google began deranking niche sites, and social media platforms sought to keep people on their sites for maximum engagement.
by stackedinserter | 2025-11-22 04:07:49+00:00
Why would I let anyone brainwash my kids with opinions that I don't like? Why do my kids have to be bullied by these problem children?

> As a parent

I guess you still want them to go to a good school, not a ghetto one. And most likely you don't want them to be brainwashed with ideas that you personally don't like.
by refurb | 2025-11-22 04:08:42+00:00
> the insane frothing hype behind AI is showing me a new kind of market failure

I see people using "market failure" in weird ways lately. Just because someone thinks a use for a product isn't important, doesn't mean it's a market failure. It's actually the opposite - consumers are purchasing it at a price they value it.

Someone who doesn't really need 128GB of ram won't pay the higher cost, but someone who does need it will.
by retrac | 2025-11-22 04:08:49+00:00
I'm not sure about daily. But yes, human sacrifice was practiced in predynastic China. At least one polity in the late Shang (c. 2000 BC) seems to have staged enormous mass executions as public spectacles.

One of the questions sometimes posed to the ancestors on the Oracle Bone inscriptions (the earliest known form of Chinese writing) are questions like: is today an auspicious day to sacrifice the prisoners?

> A sizable portion of the oracle bones uncovered in Shang archaeological sites contain script specifically concerning human sacrifice (see figure 2 above).These written records are also corroborated by the discovery of numerous sacrificial mass-graves in those sites. In most Shang sacrificial rituals, only animals and valuable chattels (such as bronze wares) would be used as offerings. There were only two exceptional circumstances where human sacrifices were made: xunzang 殉葬 and renji 人祭. Xunzang 殉葬 (lit. “burial sacrifice”) refers to the practice in which personal slaves and servants of Shang king, upon their master’s death, were expected to commit ritual suicide or to “volunteer” themselves to be buried alive alongside with their master. While the practice of committing ritual suicide upon the master’s death has lingered throughout Chinese history, the second type of human sacrifice, renji 人祭 (lit. “human offering sacrifice) is practiced only during the Shang dynasty period, and also the most massive in scale in terms of number of people killed in a typical renji ceremony. The demographic pattern of Shang sacrificial victims is also quite interesting. Xunzang victims (or “volunteers”) were mostly personal slaves (i.e. house servants), and therefore in xunzang burial sites we could find a pretty even mix of male and female human remains. Renji victims, on the other hand, appears to be predominately male. [0]

[0] https://sites.psu.edu/kerenw/?p=102
by burnt-resistor | 2025-11-22 04:09:19+00:00
So it appears to have trolled mainstream media as an effective guerrilla marketing by arbitrary discrimination to manufacture controversy. And a bar next door should have a "No gingers past 22:00" sign to poke fun at the stupidity of this if it were serious.

Might as well turn it into a member's only social club that requires a subscription and board approval to keep "the other" out if this were actually a serious, lame "short cut" policy.

An open society comes with burdens like maintaining security staff to deter and cease maladaptive behavioral outbursts of people individually in preference to trotting out mean, naive, footgun policies like "no blacks", "no singles", or "No men".
by lisbbb | 2025-11-22 04:09:21+00:00
My family and I ate at one this evening. My son wanted to try to the McRib. I'm not sure he loved it, but it looked fine. My wife and I both had the $5 McValue meal, and we got a free medium fry because it was Friday. We shared one of the drinks because I'm not supposed to be eating lots of sugar. Some McD's don't have a drink station in the public seating area anymore, but the one we go to does. All in all, it was not a bad meal for like $15. I don't see any degradation in their quality at all. I think that quality is highly dependent on which one you visit and how well it is managed.
by freddie_mercury | 2025-11-22 04:09:50+00:00
The minimum price is enforced by Substack, unfortunately. You can make everything free but you can't charge, say, $1/month. It definitely pushes the platform toward writers who think "I want to make this my full-time job & income". It also definitely suffers from, to a lesser extent, the Medium problem of way too many people thinking it is some kind of get-rich-quick thing. Somehow the Reddit algorithm started showing me the substack reddit, which seemed to mostly be pretty new authors complaining that they aren't making much money from Substack.
by el_benhameen | 2025-11-22 04:11:26+00:00
This is true, but it’s also true that the money buys all of those extra activities and services. At my kids’ school, the garden program, music program, arts program, and teachers aides are all funded by the PTA. The field trips are funded by the students families so must be calibrated to their budgets. There are also volunteers associated with all of those programs, but they wouldn’t exist without the money.

A few (much wealthier) towns over, the district wide PTA raises millions of dollars yearly to support additional programs and facilities, and the district can offer higher salaries because of the larger tax base. Again, lots of parent involvement, but there’s also more to be involved in.
by unsungNovelty | 2025-11-22 04:11:26+00:00
I wrote about it when I started as well:

Why do I host a website? - https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/11/2019/why-do-i-host-a-...

And state of blogging: https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/10/2024/life-of-a-blog-b...

I started this journey from scratch. Despite not pushing for numbers and regular schedule, my website still have 20k viewers since I added analytics (didn't have analytics for 2 years in the beginning). That might be a small number for most, but it means that there are people who want to read what I write. That is all that matters. Atleast to me.
by arjie | 2025-11-22 04:12:02+00:00
I fully expected this. I really wanted to get the Snapdragon X Elite Ideacentre just because I wanted an ARM target to run stuff on and if I'm being honest the Mac Minis are way better price/performance with support. Apple Silicon is far faster than any other ARM processor (Ampere, Qualcomm, anything else) that's easily available with good Linux support.

I am so grateful to the Asahi Linux guys who made this whole thing work. What a tour de force! One day, we'll get the M4 Mac Mini on Asahi and that will be far superior to this Snapdragon X Elite anyway.

I remember working on a Qualcomm dev board over a decade ago and they had just the worst documentation. The hardware wouldn't even respond correctly to what you told it to do. I don't know if that's standard but without the large amount of desire there is to run Linux on Apple Silicon I didn't really anticipate support approaching what Asahi has on M1/M2.
by refurb | 2025-11-22 04:12:17+00:00
> If a big company and a few small companies all have identical costs for producing a product, society is better served by having it produced by the few small companies than the one big company.

How so? Costs will be higher with multiple small products, resulting in higher costs for customers. That's the opposite of "society is served better".

We draw the line at monopolies, which makes sense.
by tonyarkles | 2025-11-22 04:13:24+00:00
That’s very much the trick. Apple is actually exceptionally good at making CPUs. Look at these single-thread benchmarks: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/single-thread/ Similarly, if you look for the M4 in this list and then look for other ARM chips, you’ll have to look quite a ways down the list: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/multithread/mobile
by thway15269037 | 2025-11-22 04:17:13+00:00
I had a simple proxmox/k8s cluster going, and fitting RAM for nodes was the last on my list. It was cheapo ol' DDR4.

Where I live price for my little cluster project gone up from around ~400 usd in july (for 5 node setup) to almost 2000 usd right now. I just refreshed page and it's up by 20% day-to-day. Welp. I guess they are going to stay with 8gb sticks for a while.
by rramadass | 2025-11-22 04:17:31+00:00
Read the article first before you comment;

The pair found work as contractors for a cleaning service. On Nov. 5, they were tasked with cleaning the windows of a recently constructed model home that is part of a new housing development directly east of Andersen’s house, court documents say.

Shortly before 7 a.m., Ríos Pérez de Velásquez and her husband were standing on the front porch of what they believed was the house they were meant to clean, court records say. Given that it was a model home, the records say, they thought no one was living there and observed no lights on inside or cars in the driveway. The pair started trying the keys.

Note: Given that it was a model home, the records say, they thought no one was living there and observed no lights on inside or cars in the driveway.

They were told it wasn't occupied and were given keys to enter and clean. Those were the instructions they followed.

Do not condone or excuse Murder.
by wahnfrieden | 2025-11-22 04:18:52+00:00
Lots of followers of capitalism fancy themselves capitalists, as supporters of a system that could enable them to themselves own capital - which feels like an even playing field in terms of possibility for the future. But they are not capitalists and have nothing in common with the ones they idolize. There is an in between sense of the word where people apply the label aspirationally.
by awill | 2025-11-22 04:19:00+00:00
I have a super high opinion of Valve. Sure, they have loot crates. But sensible people don't buy them. I guess you could blame them for having it in the first place. That's fair I guess. But I've never for a second considered buying any of that junk.

I just buy single player offline games with no IAP, and Steam is amazing. It's a million miles ahead of the competitors, and it's really surprising that EA/Ubi etc.. try to compete but don't get the reason they're losing. They screw customers and then act surprised that customers hate them.
by drtgh | 2025-11-22 04:19:23+00:00
It is even worse than that.

Have you seen those movies where a small town in the US holds a festival or carnival with heavy floats on top of a car? That is the UI they've implemented in Win11, one interface mounted on top of another, therefore overwhelming slowness, a botched job that only shows disinterest, perhaps with the aim of forcing users to upgrade by investing as few resources as possible in it.

Linux is the antithesis of this, with a long history of slow file explorers/managers that finally stand out today in terms of speed and features, fortunately. (this is to support the other user's comment about Dolphin (my choice when Linux) and Nautilus.
by tiagod | 2025-11-22 04:19:34+00:00
Honestly, in a purely technical sense, I do find it beautiful how you can take matrix multiplication and a shit-ton of data, and get a program that can talk to you, solve problems, and generate believable speech and imagery.

There are many complications arising from such a thing existing, and from what was needed to bring it into existence (and at the cost of whom), I'll never deny that. I just can't comprehend how someone can find the technical aspects repulsive in isolation.

It feels a lot like trying to convince someone that nuclear weapons are bad by defending that splitting an atom is akin to banging a rock against a coconut to split it in two.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-11-22 04:20:10+00:00
Here's an idea.

There have been over a dozen commits in the last 2 hours. If you are actually "vibe coding" a Prolog, then post the prompts you have used in the last 2 hours here.

If it helps to have a specific starting point, commit 7bbe652[0] is as good as any.

0 - https://github.com/nlothian/Vibe-Prolog/commit/7bbe652eaf0b0...
by sbuttgereit | 2025-11-22 04:24:10+00:00
You know, I'm relatively social and I don't even go to school let alone a public school! How do I manage it? I engage with social groups in other ways.

Homeschooling doesn't necessitate going into a dark room somewhere and closing/locking the door. Sure, some may do that... but majority simply don't. Suggesting that there aren't paths to good socialization outside of public school is just rationalizing a position and ignoring the reality that many home schoolers don't operate in isolation. We're a social species and we tend to seek out others. This is even true for homeschoolers who can collaborate or engage in all manner of social opportunities that exist amongst a coalition of homeschoolers or they can take advantage of the social activities which are available in most communities of any size. Again, we're social creatures and we'll give into that impulse. To suggest that has to be nurtured by a public institution or is somehow unavailable outside of a public school just isn't credible on its face.

As others have said all up and down the thread, you take measures to build that social circle and interaction. And I can tell you from direct personal experience... a public school offers positive interaction opportunities to some, but wholly negative and even damaging to others... public schools absolutely offer a social experience. Whether that's good or bad in my experience is at best a case-by-case call.
by tomhow | 2025-11-22 04:25:20+00:00
And several of your comments before that were upvoted. Are we to regard those as suspicious?

Of the recent downvoted comments, one was a complaint about moderation that anyone who has paid attention to dang's track record here over more than a decade knows is baseless. (And if you think the top comment on any thread is a bad one, you can always choose to be a helpful contributor to the community and email us to let us know).

Of the other two of your downvoted comments, none were downvoted by the same users.

The choice is yours to make an effort to observe the guidelines and be a positive contributor to HN, or alternatively to keep using HN for political/ideological battle and complain to the moderators when things don't go your way, but it's clear what others in the community want to see.
by ajuc | 2025-11-22 04:28:30+00:00
> The left love to imagine that homeless people are just down-on-their-luck people who just missed out on a mortgage payment or a rent payment.

> No. They are 98% drug addicts or mentally ill people.

Drug addicts and mentally ill people can be down-on-their luck. That somebody is mentally ill or have an addiction does not mean that society should discard them.

BTW addiction is very rarely the root cause of a wasted life. It's usually a failed coping strategy.

> It's well known that the money that gets given out attract more homeless people.

Homeless people are not infinite resource. You can solve homelessness on the country level, not only on the state level, and then it doesn't matter which state attracts more homeless people - because there's very few of them in the whole country.

> It's insane that left-wing governments think that spending MORE money will solve the problem when in fact it is the cause of the problem.

Poor countries in Eastern Europe does not have this problem. Maybe instead of pretending US is the whole world and if it can't deal with something - it's impossible to deal with it - try to listen to what people did elsewhere?
by valec | 2025-11-22 04:28:49+00:00
ssris are known to unmask or precipitate manic episodes in people with family history of bipolar or schizophrenia.

> I'm speculating here but I'm pretty sure if you did an MRI on my brain you'd see lesions from the mixing of mdma and sertraline

ssris actually block the serotonergic effects of mdma and similar.
by itsalwaysgood | 2025-11-22 04:31:22+00:00
That's a very meta view. There's levels to consciousness for sure, due to intelligence and perception.

But, my mind never leaves my skull so it's definitely bound to my brain and nothing else (ignoring electrical fields).

We can imagine what it's like to be other things, but we can never be sure (and almost certainly would not accurately match reality). Our imagination is bound to our senses, so it's limited. I can't even be sure that the color red that comes to my mind is the same color you see in your mind. As long as our imaginations paint the same color every time red is perceived: we'd be none the wiser and would go on thinkong we see the same thing. And also consider animals that can perceive colors and sounds beyond human range. Does this say anything more about consciousness?

An electron almost certainly is not thinking or aware, but does it perceive? Does a thermostat on a wall perceive temperature? Do AIs perceive anything?

Is perception even useful to think about when trying to define consciousness?

I'm rambling off topic... going back to your points: if something is sufficiently intelligent to understand the workings of a thing: does this automatically place the understood thing in a lower consciousness?

Could a diety, or a force of nature have a higher consciousness than us? Or are we above the force, in terms of consciousness? It doesn't even seem useful to make these comparisons....
by tomhow | 2025-11-22 04:31:36+00:00
WTF? You cannot comment like this on HN, no matter what you're replying to or how wrong you think they are. We've had to ask you before to avoid abusive comments. We have to ban accounts to do this repeatedly, and it's only because the parent comment was pretty bad too that I'm not banning you this time. Please take a moment to remind yourself of the guidelines and avoid ever commenting like this again if you want to keep participating here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by nodesocket | 2025-11-22 04:32:57+00:00
I am fascinated with 3D/Gaming programming and watch a few YouTubers stream while they build games[1]. Honestly, it feels insanely more complicated than my wheelhouse of webapps and DevOps. As soon as you dive in, pixel shaders, compute shaders, geometry, linear algebra, partial differential equations (PDE). Brain meld.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@tokyospliff
Ask HN: How to generate flipbook-style animations from video?
by meerab | 2025-11-22 04:32:58+00:00
I’ve been seeing a lot of hand-drawn flipbook animations on YouTube/TikTok. For example:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Ub_ZmzOrh5g

The creators say they spend 3-5 days drawing this. How do I generate this animation say in Python? Any recommended models, libraries, or workflows?

I am thinking ffmpeg to extract images -> pose estimation -> Line art -> Assemble into Video