MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pippy360 | 2025-11-11 22:45:43+00:00
yes! couldn't agree more with your long post. Especially this part: "(This is exacerbated when components of the automation require internal-only tooling—the poor data scientist now needs to go read through a bunch of half-written, out-of-date documentation about tools they simply don't care about to do a task that is not a core responsibility for them.)"

"Vertical integration" in my experience has just been turning a group of simple tools into a complex monolith that no one understands and is extremely difficult to debug
by Animats | 2025-11-11 22:45:44+00:00
> As someone who has some familiarity with this process, just like safety regulations are written in blood, Federal Acquisition rules are written in misuse of money, sometimes criminally.

This already started. "Trump Jr.-Linked Unusual Machines Lands Major Pentagon Drone Contract Amid Ethics Concerns"[1] It's for drone motors for FPV drones, which are usually cheap. The terms of the contract are undisclosed "due to the shutdown".

[1] https://dronexl.co/2025/10/25/trump-jr-unusual-machines-pent...
by braden-lk | 2025-11-11 22:46:11+00:00
These comments are rough. Some weird hostility to self-expression in here.

"Back in my day, laptops were about TECHNOLOGY! Where's the conservative stickers!?" Ok, put some "conservative stickers" on your laptop and submit a pic to the site-- no one's stopping you.

I was born in early 90s; all laptops in my memory have weird, silly stickers on them.
by lisbbb | 2025-11-11 22:46:34+00:00
I'll keep saying this until someone at Tesla sees it: They could clean up if they designed a hybrid Cybertruck II that was a bit more conventional looking. Build something cutting edge but actually useful, keep some of the edginess but tone it down just enough to bring in more sales.

The giant single wiper on the current Cybertruck is horrible, btw. Everything about that thing is horrible, actually.
by lukefleed | 2025-11-11 22:46:40+00:00
That's an interesting question. I don't have too much experience, but here's my two cents.

For matrix function approximations, loss of orthogonality matters less than for eigenvalue computations. The three-term recurrence maintains local orthogonality reasonably well for moderate iteration counts. My experiments [1] show orthogonality loss stays below $10^{-13}$ up to k=1000 for well-conditioned problems, and only becomes significant (jumping to $10^{-6}$ and higher) around k=700-800 for ill-conditioned spectra. Since you're evaluating $f(T_k)$ rather than extracting individual eigenpairs, you care about convergence of $\|f(A)b - x_k\|$, not spectral accuracy. If you need eigenvectors themselves or plan to run thousands of iterations, you need the full basis, and the two-pass method won't help. Maybe methods like [2] would be more suitable?

[1] https://github.com/lukefleed/two-pass-lanczos/raw/master/tex...

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.04390
by bborud | 2025-11-11 22:46:42+00:00
The MA-1 "works" under a relatively narrow set of conditions that I don't see most days. I tried. It is a miserable garment for how and where I live.

I'm not saying synthetic materials are always bad. I own a few jackets in synthetic materials that are good, but I have gone through a lot that are rubbish. For jackets it is more about the technical design than the exact material. I have had lots of expensive jackets that just don't work for my use cases. And a few that do. It is trial and error since I have no idea why some jackets just don't work.

I live in a place where it rains heavily, and in the winter it is often cold, and I spend a lot of time outside being physically active. This means that the challenge is to find jackets that can deal with heavy rain, cold, physical abrasion, and perhaps most important of all: moisture management.

If you spend a lot of time being physically active outside in all kinds of bad weather, you tend to start caring a lot about what materials you wear. Best case for sub-par garments: they start to smell. Worst case: you freeze because your clothes can't manage moisture.

But for what is more or less a glorified sock, at that price I am not buying a piece of plastic. I'd expect more pleasant natural materials.
by rchaud | 2025-11-11 22:47:04+00:00
How does one take a fraction of the world economy?

Microsoft sells services pretty much everywhere on earth and has a near-monopoly on PC OSes, enterprise email, productivity suites plus a giant cloud computing service....and their annual revenue last year was just $245 billion.

OAI can't get anywhere close to that, not least because they have multiple competitors and several large corporations (MSFT, Google, Meta) would rather dogfood their own solutions than use a rival's.
by GabrielTFS | 2025-11-11 22:47:10+00:00
A solution definitely ought to be found. Google putting up a few millionths of a percent of their revenue or so towards fixing the bugs they find in ffmpeg would be the ideal solution here, certainly. Yet it seems unlikely to actually occur.

I think the far more likely result of all the complaints is that Google simply completely disengages from ffmpeg and stops doing any security work on it. I think that would be quite bad for the security of the project - if Google can trivially find bugs at a high speed such that it overwhelms the ffmpeg developers, I would imagine bad actors can also search for them and find those same vulnerabilities Google is constantly finding, and if they know that those vulnerabilities very much exist, but that Google has simply stopped searching for them upon demand of the ffmpeg project, this would likely give them extremely high motivation to go looking in a place they can be almost certain they'll find unreported/unknown vulnerabilities in. The result would likely be a lot more 0-day attacks involving ffmpeg, which I do not think anyone regards as a good outcome (I would consider "Google publishes a bunch of vulnerabilities ffmpeg hasn't fixed so that everyone knows about them" to be a much preferable outcome, personally)

Now, you might consider that possibility fine - after all, the ffmpeg developers have no obligation to work on the project, and thus to e.g. fix any vulnerabilities in it. But if that's fine, then simply ignoring the reports Google currently makes is presumably also fine, no ?
by jazzyjackson | 2025-11-11 22:47:38+00:00
The CGW-50 Cosmo Phase is impressive on that end for displaying realtime planet positions in 1989, now of course it's just another watch face to choose from on Apple.

Still I bet the Casio works offline longer :p

I'll have to revisit the sensor watch, I'd love to hit a button for sunrise and moonrise
by bigiain | 2025-11-11 22:47:58+00:00
Somewhat related, there are people doing amazing things by modifying VHS players and tapping into the raw output from the tape heads (bypassing all of the player's other electronics), and then using modern signal processing techniques to extract unbelievable great footage from old tapes.

Check out this extraction/decoding of a 1987 VHS recording of The Cure:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ks1wE_NXWv8

Play if full screen at whatever the highest resolution your screen can take advantage of, It's amazing! Check out the quality of the big headshots of Robert Smith, the resolution of stuff like his hair is way beyond what I believed VHS to be capable of - based on growing up recording similar music acts in the 70s and 80s.

Here's the software (and descriptions of the hardware and VHS player mods) they use:

https://github.com/oyvindln/vhs-decode

I suspect the recording technique/format on those is a similar analog signal on the tape - and from The Reg's article (quoting various sources) it sounds like they're already planning on similar approach:

"The software librarian at the CHM is the redoubtable Al Kossow of Bitsavers, who commented in the thread that he is on the case. On the TUHS mailing list, he explained how he plans to do it:

taping off the head read amplifier, using a multi-channel high speed analog to digital converter which dumps into 100-ish gigabytes of RAM, then an analysis program Len Shustek wrote: https://github.com/LenShustek/readtape

It is a '70s 1200ft 3M tape, likely 9 track, which has a pretty good chance of being recoverable."
by taradinoc | 2025-11-11 22:48:12+00:00
Right - that's because ZIL was more or less a _superset_ of MDL.

ZILCH (Infocom's compiler) provided all the functions of MDL, _plus_ a bunch of new ones that manipulated data structures which were then used to generate assembly code for the Z-machine.

One of those new functions, ROUTINE, accepted code written in a domain-specific language resembling a stripped-down MDL, which was then translated into Z-machine instructions. But that domain-specific language isn't synonymous with ZIL: other functions that were inarguably part of ZIL, like OBJECT and SYNTAX, are not part of that domain-specific language.

IMO, the only reasonable definition of ZIL is "the language accepted by a ZIL compiler", which (depending on whether you look at ZILCH or ZILF) is either a superset of MDL or an overlapping set.
by SR2Z | 2025-11-11 22:48:30+00:00
I have read the article. The expectation for a tool like ffmpeg is that regardless of what kind of file you put into it, it safely handles it.

This is an actual bug in submitted code. It doesn't matter that it's for some obscure codec, it's technically maintained by the ffmpeg project and is fair game for vulnerability reports.

Given that Google is also a major contributor to open-source video, this is more like a food manufacturer making sure that grocery stores are following health code when they stock their food.

Mind you, the grocery store has no obligation to listen to them in this metaphor and is free to just let the report/CVE sit for a while.
by immibis | 2025-11-11 22:48:34+00:00
There's probably not as much advantage to HTTP as you think.

The simplest RPC protocol is where you connect to a TCP socket, send a newline-terminated string per request, and get a similar response back. You don't need HTTP for that - you might still want to use JSON. What does HTTP give you in addition?

It's presumably still not something Erlang directly supports.
by ssl-3 | 2025-11-11 22:48:53+00:00
Home Assistant does great at tying all kinds of things together.

People had a habit of leaving the basement lights on here. Now they turn themselves off after a timer expires, and also whenever nobody's home. Using HA and a cheap Shelly relay (chosen for form factor), I was able to do this while retaining the existing lighting circuits, light switch, and the lights themselves.

It works perfectly, is completely local, and the end-user UI is completely natural. Toggle the same plain-Jane light switch that has always been there at the top of the basement stairs and the lights change state. (UI doesn't get more intuitive than that.)

Or: Fans. This house has a good furnace and central aircon, but the ductwork doesn't really extend upstairs. By default, this makes the upstairs-parts very hot in the summer and cooler than I'd like in the winter -- even though it's nice downstairs during all seasons.

I fixed that to my satisfaction by putting a fan on the landing that is controlled by an inexpensive smart switch, just to improve circulation. HA runs this show; the fan runs when the HVAC is doing something, and whenever people are home and it is either too hot or too cold upstairs (based on a temperature sensor). It's not a perfect solution, but it's kept the temperatures sane (and provided logging to prove it), it was cheap to implement, and it is cheap to run.

I already had the parts kicking around; it just took software and time.

(The best option for efficiency and comfort is probably installing mini-splits up there, but... sheesh, that's into the realm of orders-of-magnitude more expensive. Maybe some day.)
by lotsofpulp | 2025-11-11 22:48:59+00:00
> As long-time industry researchers, we understand that drug affordability is a complicated problem with many cooks in the kitchen that can impact the end cost of a medicine.

As someone who can look up double digit profit margins for Eli Lilly/J&J/Pfizer/Novartis/Novo Nordisk/Abbvie/Merck/etc, it doesn’t look like a complicated problem.
by kube-system | 2025-11-11 22:49:04+00:00
Yes, there are plugins (e.g. widevine) that do DRM and they have/had varying browser/os compatibility.

But ultimately, Netflix is just trying to check a box in their contractual obligations, and/or prevent high-schoolers with chrome dev tools from sending movies to all their friends. They're not really interested in spending large sums of money to figure out your browsing history. It's just not relevant to their revenue stream.

>> tracking people on the web is a multibillion dollar industry

> Of which Netflix is a part of.

I was referring to businesses that do web activity tracking as their primary business. Facebook and Google's primary business is advertising, which isn't the same thing, and they control enough products that they don't actually have to do very much fingerprinting in order to target ads effectively. Most of their data, people voluntarily hand over. I was getting more at the big ecosystem of commercial tools that others can implement that do these sorts of things. e.g fingerprint.com and many others.
by Sesse__ | 2025-11-11 22:49:04+00:00
It seems the DNS servers for lukefleed.xyz are subtly misconfigured, causing occasional connectivity problems:

https://dns.squish.net/traverses/de494a9fe3310415f30369a9cb1...

Or more precisely, lukefreed.xyz has NS records pointing to ns[1234].afraid.org, and the DNS servers for _afraid.org_ are subtly misconfigured (one of the six nameservers for afraid.org is evergreen.v6.afraid.org, and since you are trying to look up something in afraid.org but you already trying to resolve afraid.org, you'll need some extra “glue records” as part of the NS response, which is missing for that specific server).
by jasonwatkinspdx | 2025-11-11 22:49:04+00:00
No, GPUs are not a particularly ideal architecture for AI inference, it's just inference needs way more memory bandwidth than a general purpose CPU's memory hierarchy can handle.

> What does an ASIC for matmul look like?

A systolic array, and ultimately quite different than a GPU. This is why TPUs et all are a thing.

In general with a systolic array you get a quadratic speedup. For example with a 256x256 array, it takes 256 cycles to shift operations in and out, but in doing that you accomplish 65k MACs in 512 cycles for a speedup of 128x over serial.
by bsder | 2025-11-11 22:49:11+00:00
It sure would be nice to have some concrete numbers from those projects to compare to for example ...

Note the discussion about "Incremental Build (libghostty-vt)" https://mitchellh.com/writing/zig-builds-getting-faster

https://biggo.com/news/202506090712_Zig_x86_Backend_Performa...
by david_nepozitek | 2025-11-11 22:49:17+00:00
Well, the X engineering team literally says it is E2EE (https://x.com/XEng/status/1971739456857145574). Just to be clear, I'm talking about the new X Chat feature, not the original DMs.

"People just need to know that." was one of the reasons why I wrote the article, so I can reference it when people claim how super secure it is:)
by bird0861 | 2025-11-11 22:50:06+00:00
Pretending 16 samples is authoritative is absolutely hilarious and wild, copium this pure could kill someone. Also working on a codebase you already know biases results in the first place -- they missed out on what has become a cornerstone of this stuff for AISWE people like me: repo tours; tree-sitter feeds the codebase to the LLM and I get to find all the stuff in the code I care about by either a single well formatted meta prompt or by just asking questions when I need to.

I'll concede one thing to the authors of the study, Claude Code is not that great. Everyone I know has moved on since before July. I personally am hacking on my own fork of Qwen CLI (which is itself a Gemini fork) and it does most of what I want with the models of my choice which I swap out depending on what I'm doing. Sometimes they're local on my 4090 and sometimes I use a frontier or larger openweights model hosted somewhere else. If you're expecting a code assistant to drop in your lap and just immediately experience all of its benefits you'll be disappointed. This is not something anyone can offer without just prescribing a stack or workflow. You need to make it your own.

The study is about dropping just 16 people into a tooling they're unfamiliar with, have no mechanical sympathy for, and aren't likely to shape and mold it to their own needs.

You want conclusive evidence go make friends with people who hack their own tooling. Basically everyone I hang out with has extended BMAD, written their own agents.md for specific tasks, make their own slash commands, "skills" (convenient name and PR hijacking of a common practice but whatever, thanks for MCP I guess). Literally what kind of dev are you if you're not hacking your own tools???

You got four ingredients here you have to keep in mind when thinking about this stuff: the model, the context, the prompt, and the tooling. If you're not intervening to set up the best combination of each for each workflow you are doing then you are just letting someone else determine how that workflow goes.

Universal function approximators that can speak english got invented and nobody wants to talk to them is not the scifi future I was hoping for when I was longing for statistical language modeling to lead to code generation back in 2014 as a young NLP practitioner learning Python for the first time.

If you can't make it work fine, maybe it's not for you, but I would probably turn violent if you tried to take this stuff from me.
by Marshferm | 2025-11-11 22:50:15+00:00
This is pie in the sky swing for the hills nonsense that lumps everything into space. First world models are oxymoronic. Ecological principles, processes and material outcomes eschew models, they’re unnecessary because they’re provided for in the exchange between DNA, biology, bauplan, brain and environment as fast acting optic flow. Any animal relying on anything as preposterous as a world model is dead, splat, drowned etc. world models and survival are incompatible.

The notion it is reducible to spatial ‘intelligence’ is just another case of flavor of the month in AIs contraction and desperate search for success and funding.

That a world model as inconsistent and inaccurate as storytelling is given here as a premise to hoist cash for flavor of the month spatial details how desperate the search has become in Frontierland.
by ErroneousBosh | 2025-11-11 22:50:29+00:00
I had my blood pressure tested several times over the course of the month and each time it was high, weirdly high, like 160/100. If I drove in, weirdly high. If I cycled in, weirdly high. If I got another reading after sitting quietly in the waiting room reading my book for half an hour, weirdly high.

They wanted me to start on all sorts of medications immediately.

The second-last time, they got a reading of 220/130, and were going to get an ambulance to take me into hospital immediately.

Er, hang on a minute, folks.

That's beyond "hypertension crisis" and well into "incompatible with life" levels. That's the kind of pressure I see in hydraulic servo feedback channels, not living things.

They grudgingly agreed that someone with high blood pressure probably ought not to be making as much sense as I was, although what would I know about it, they're the professionals, etc etc.

The next time I noticed the automatic blood pressure cuff had a fresh new calibration sticker on it.

130/90. Not bad, for a reading taken at the doctor's surgery.

I wonder how many people are on medication they just plain don't need because of a plainly faulty sphyg though?
by jasonwatkinspdx | 2025-11-11 22:51:23+00:00
You are entirely mistaken. The TPU and GPU are organized very differently particularly with how the memory subsystem works.

In the big picture, TPUs are systolic arrays. They don't have threading, divergence, or similar.

GPUs in the big picture are SIMT, a hybrid of SIMD and multithreading where individual data streams in SIMD are relaxed to allow them to diverge somewhat.

Memory Wise the TPU can keep the partial products right in the array. Parameters and weights are held in large on die scratch memories, and backing those are streams coming from the HBM. The TPU acts as a single giant CISC coprocessor, and has much more predictable memory and communication patterns vs a GPU, which its design exploits for higher efficiency at inference vs GPUs.

So even if they use the word "tensor" and both have HBM based memory systems, how those are actually architected is very different.
by InexSquirrel | 2025-11-11 22:51:52+00:00
Hired for ultimately a fairly narrow field of expertise. But do need support in the sense of building the right thing, ensuring that thing aligns with business objectives, that constraints and requirements and customer needs have been communicated.

So in that light - either you give engineers the support they need (which can be quite a lot, more than I think most care to admit), or accept they're going to get a lot of stuff wrong. Probably technically correct and good, but still wrong.
by Alupis | 2025-11-11 22:52:07+00:00
The problem clearly is, once a need is identified - it can be costly or ruinous to wait 20+ years to realize the solution. The DoW is clearly signaling they want the "Need -> Solution" loop tightened, significantly, sacrificing cost for timeliness.

That puts the US on good footing, ready to face peer and near-peer, next-generation warfare.

If Ukraine has taught us anything, it's off-the-shelf - ready today - weapons are needed in significant quantity. Drone warfare has changed almost everything - we're seeing $300 off-the-shelf drones kill millions of dollars of equipment and personnel. If the military needs anti-drone capabilities, it can't wait 20+ years to field them.

We don't just need to pick on new/next-generation military technologies either. The US currently produces between 30,000-40,000 155mm artillery shells a month, but Ukraine (at peak) expended 10,000 per day[1]. The loop is far too long...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/ukraine-...
by alexfoo | 2025-11-11 22:52:11+00:00
White coast hypertension isn't just about a clinical setting, it's more generally about the worry about the results of having your BP measured. [EDIT] OK, well maybe there's another type of hypertension which is related to anxiety about a high result regardless of the measurement setting.

I have to take daily BP measurements during titration for ADHD medication. (Using an _A&D UA-611 Plus_ machine at home.)

I can put the cuff on my arm and sit at my desk for 20 minutes to be nicely rested and calm, and then take 5 different measurements with a few minutes between each one. They'll vary quite wildly (anything from, say, 115/75 to 135/90) despite not moving between measurements or having any reason to be more or less agitated. I generally just ignore the low/high outliers and average the others. There's no pattern either, sometimes the outliers are first, sometimes last.

Also it's not just the monitor I have at home, the same is true of a probably more trustworthy machine in a clinical setting. I mentioned this to my doctor when I last visited and we saw the same thing with multiple measurements using a more sophisticated machine at the clinic.
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-11-11 22:52:51+00:00
You might be interested in ExponentialUtilities.jl then. Julia has a really unique ability to make high performance linear algebra look like the math. See https://github.com/SciML/ExponentialUtilities.jl (specifically src/kiops.jl and src/krylov_phiv.jl) for an example of a good matrix exponential operator in ~600 lines of code+comments.
by lmm | 2025-11-11 22:53:05+00:00
> That sounds like an ad-hoc planning for a single issue, which you could also just do for a subset of the open issues, every, lets say, 2 weeks.

So you'd require the whole team to spend time on matters that interested only a subset, and you'd do this in a blocking way rather than asynchronously? What possible benefit would that have?