MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by msukhareva | 2025-11-08 11:12:59+00:00
Nvidia stock goes up because of Bitcoin.

How many times have you heard this phrase? And yet, ironically, crypto was never the main driver of Nvidia’s success.

At some point, mining Bitcoin on GPUs wasn’t the best method anymore.

The role of Nvidia in blockchain, crypto, and Bitcoin mining was bumpy. Their GPUs were repurposed by miners so heavily that Nvidia even introduced anti-mining measures in their hardware. The key reason for their success is that they placed their bets on optimizing GPUs for deep learning. They invested a lot into CUDA, the software stack that enables efficient computation for training and inference of LLMs. CUDA has no viable alternatives. And that is why over 90% of data center GPUs come from Nvidia, and their valuation is larger than the GDP of every country except the US and China.
by adrian_b | 2025-11-08 11:13:16+00:00
By "..._MAX" I assume that you mean the maximum value of a given integer type.

In a language where half-open intervals are supported consistently in all the places, this would be solved trivially, e.g. for a signed byte the _MIN and the _MAX values would be defined as -128 and +128, more intuitively than when using closed intervals, where you must remember to subtract 1 from the negated minimum value.

Even the C language has some support for half-open intervals, because the index pointing after the last element of an array is a valid index value, not an out-of-range value (though obviously, attempting to access the array through that index value would be trapped as an out-of-range access, if that is enabled).

Applied consistently, the same method would ensure that the value immediately above the last representable value of an integer type is valid in ranges of that type, even if it would be invalid in an expression as an operand of that type.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-11-08 11:14:01+00:00
Even though I am from in a different area of mathematics, I know quite many people who work(ed) in algebraic geometry (and at the university where I graduated there wasn't even an academic chair for (Grothendieck-style) algebraic geometry).

The amount of people I know who would love to learn this material is even many, many magnitudes larger (just to give some arbitrary example: some pretty smart person who studied physics, but (for some reasons) neither had any career prospects in research nor found any fullfilling job, who just out of boredom decided that he would love to get deeply into Grothendieck-style algebraic geometry).
by max_ | 2025-11-08 11:14:08+00:00
>Egalitarian Paxos introduced an alternative, leaderless approach, that allows replicas to order commands collaboratively.

This is exactly how bitcoin works.

Every 10 minutes the network elects a leader to assort & order transactions and also throw out fraudulent transactions.

If he fails to do this, he is not allow to claim his block reward (technically the "coinbase" transaction)

I keep telling people the future of politics is markets & Blockchains.

Its hard to explain comprehensively and what's strange is that no one has written a thorough book on the topic.

I am happy there are people actually writing such material on this topic.

Albeit its a bit too technical.

Computer science is the future of politics & governance. (I don't think AI is any useful but rather distributed systems)
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-11-08 11:16:01+00:00
What’s the average price of a laptop? Hint: it’s much less than $1000. Do you think that people are going to start buying more expensive laptops?

For the iPad, how have the convertible Windows Surfaces been doing?

You really don’t see a problem with creating a “token router”? He also wants to create a distributed CDN where every computer is a node - ignoring the fact that most people have asymmetric internet access with low upload speeds and the entire value proposition of a CDN is that there are colocated servers at ISPs. Bit torrent (basically what he is proposing) is not exactly fast.
by graemep | 2025-11-08 11:16:16+00:00
Given he said it in 2007, pretty much no evidence to back it up. Genetic differences between races are small compared to those within races, so much so that the concept of races does not really stand up scientifically.

He seemed to have been basing the comments on IQ tests, which are not really a good way of comparing groups of people with different cultures or education. They score an individual within a group of comparable individuals.

It is worth noting that if he had made the same statement in the first half of the 20th century it would have been mainstream science, but even then it was not so much supported by evidence but supported by a lack of evidence showing otherwise.
by joshstrange | 2025-11-08 11:17:56+00:00
My sister has run into this before as well. You have to be very careful because 99% of QR generators out there do something like that. I’ve found some that don’t for her to use but I really should just vibe code up a website for her that I know won’t do a bait and switch (obviously they can’t change old “pure” QRs but they could start doing redirects on new ones at any time).
by dudeinjapan | 2025-11-08 11:18:12+00:00
If there is one DSL which is a central abstraction of one’s entire app, used in 100s of places—this is fine.

If there is a DSL such as Rails’ URL routing, which will be the same in every app—this is also fine.

When one makes 100s of micro-DSLs for object creation, that are only ever used in one or two places—this is pure madness.
by 1718627440 | 2025-11-08 11:18:56+00:00
A system outputting correct facts, tells you nothing about the system's ability to prove correctness of facts. You can not assert that property of a system by treating it as a black box. If you are able to treat LLMs as a white box and prove correctness about their internal states, you should tell that to some very important people, that is an insight worth a lot of money.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-11-08 11:20:33+00:00
The HN hivemind on Hedy Lamar: she was not the first to think of the technique, only the first one to make it work.

The HN hivemind on Jurgen Schmidhuber: he was only the first to think of the technique, not the first one to make it work.

Yes, I'm a big ol' meanie.
by SleepyMyroslav | 2025-11-08 11:20:34+00:00
I am not sure if a slow pace is as beneficial as you say. I scrolled through the error handling issue brought up in this comment section ( https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/2647#issuecomment-2670... ) and its clear that only thing that happened there was communication on the issue was hindered. I come from C++ side and our "ISO C++ committee" language development process leaves a lot to be desired. Now look at error handling that they did passed in C++23 ( std::expected ). It raises some questions on how slow you can be while still appearing to be moving forward.

Disclaimer: I would like to see Zig and other new languages to become a viable alternatives to C++ in Gamedev. But I understand that it might happen way after me retiring =)
by FridgeSeal | 2025-11-08 11:22:35+00:00
> have userbase

> introduce feature

Phwoar, ground breaking UX design there!

> When they first introduced video calls, schools had to close for a day.

Which schools, where? Are they in the room with us now?

> For people who introduced themselves to tech with snap as one of their first apps, its the most intuitive thing ever

Point camera. Press button. Pick users.

Gotta try real hard to screw that one up, UI wise.
by patall | 2025-11-08 11:22:39+00:00
He probably made up his own 'evidence', like white boys performing better than black boys when ignoring socioeconomic background. Today, I, as a geneticist, am not aware of any links between race (in the american sense) and intelligence.

Jim Watson was, from my view, emotionally stuck in the fourties. Even if it was true, you wouldn't tell a female grad student to their face that they belong in the kitchen. Yet he did say that (less than 15 years ago) to one of my former colleagues.
by rcxdude | 2025-11-08 11:24:24+00:00
>When I generate a build package in Altium, it has complete lists of every part in the design, its MPN, at least one supplier to purchase it, and the SPN for that MPN. (Sometimes internal parts don't have suppliers assigned, but then they're tracked elsewhere in the project or company organization.) There are also assigned alternates in many cases, though they are typically inadequate. Larger projects should use entirely internal part numbering, but that's a real headwind for smaller stuff. All of this comes from a single master part database, plus a project part database, and never gets touched by hand after a library entry's birth.

Only if you've put in the effort to make that database in the first place, which Altium makes pretty annoyingly difficult. I really don't like Altium's mess of options for parts libraries, the defaults for which all suck and a sensible setup requiring a lot of fiddling. I haven't dived too deep into KiCad's setup here recently, but it'd have to try hard to be worse than Altium. The difference is cultural, not tooling.
by p2detar | 2025-11-08 11:24:40+00:00
Google Maps has a practical value. I know why I use it - I want to get to somewhere, I open the app, type my destination and I'm given a route. Most of the times it has worked very well, in numerous different countries that I visited.

I find it hard to extract the same practical value from YouTube. There have been cases where I would see how people repair stuff and to some degree it has been useful but it is hard to find that "useful" type of video you look for among all the noise. Product review videos are always kind of fishy, because reviewers are mostly sponsored. So I can't quite get to extract anything of great value from YouTube.

Btw, thank you for the Organic Maps tip. Looks really really cool!
by jiggawatts | 2025-11-08 11:24:54+00:00
Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/605/

That paper used a horribly faulty logical argument because it has been well known for quite a while that most of the time evolution is quite slow, but there are short bursts of rapid change. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium
by idle_zealot | 2025-11-08 11:25:00+00:00
The real smokescreen is this freedom vs security false dichotomy. If you give up freedom for the promise of security, you get neither. Look at the App Store. It's full of harmful garbage designed to extract value and waste your time by any trick necessary. It's one step short of ransomware. Oh, unless you use an app for your important documents, then it comes under new management and demands you start paying monthly or lose your stuff. Suddenly that lack of freedom to continue using an old version of the app or to dig around its internals and pull out your data becomes a loss of security. It's fine though, because this type of ransomware is totally legal and inline with your benevolent platform dictator's policies.
by SurceBeats | 2025-11-08 11:25:12+00:00
Google used to proudly say "Don't be evil"... But they just forgot to add "let us take that part".

When tech giants start deciding what technical knowledge is too "dangerous" for users to access, we've crossed into a different kind of territory. Installing an OS on your own hardware is now physical harm? That's some creative interpretation of their policies. The irony is that this kind of censorship just validates why people want to bypass these systems in the first place, nobody wants corporations deciding what they can and can't do with their own machines.
by stevoski | 2025-11-08 11:30:26+00:00
Off-topic, but unlike the example pricing plans, don’t make your SaaS’s “standard” plan $10/month. If you want a place to start, start with $50/month.

Or, as Patrick McKenzie used to tell us over and over, “charge more”.

(Yes, yes, I know some situations, customers, product, thinking, etc are different. But with broad brushstrokes, my advice is to not even entertain such a low price.)
by jsiepkes | 2025-11-08 11:30:38+00:00
While some of the features the author references are really interesting, personally I don't see how any of that would justify creating a new memory unsafe language in 2016. I thought it was pretty obvious by now [1][2][3] memory safety is best left to tooling / compilers and not to programmers.

[1] https://research.google/pubs/secure-by-design-googles-perspe...

[2] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/msrc/blog/2019/07/we-need-a-...

[3] https://www.cisa.gov/case-memory-safe-roadmaps
by Ekaros | 2025-11-08 11:30:40+00:00
Personally I might choose to leave too. I just don't feel like taking responsibility of something iterated with AI. Something I will take the blame when it goes wrong.

This especially so after I have seen someone trying to use AI after I had provided simple and clear manual steps. Instead trying to do something different with very unfitting scenario. Where also the AI really did not understand that the solution would not have even worked.
by whamlastxmas | 2025-11-08 11:30:44+00:00
This is the exact billboard that came to mind for me, I drove by it daily for a long time

https://old.reddit.com/r/Israel/comments/1bmdy03/someone_in_...

There were many other similar ones, especially on the smaller digital ad spaces that were basically just TVs on the side of roads. And those ones were more specifically calling for empathy for the deaths occurring to Israeli people during the war on Palestine
by txrx0000 | 2025-11-08 11:31:19+00:00
It's a problem we chose to create for ourselves by inventing and socially normalizing 99% effective birth control. We've given ourselves the freedom to make the choice to have children consciously, but not without consequences, some of which have already caught up to us.

In the past, natural selection had no reason to distinguish between the drive to have sex and the drive to have children because they have the same effect. If we abruptly take away the former as a reliable enough mechanism to propagate the species, we should expect much fewer children. And that is exactly what happened when the pill was introduced a few decades ago: it cut the birth rate in half in developed countries almost instantly.

If we wanted to ameliorate the demographic issues caused by this, we just have to restrict the supply and availability of birth control pills and similar surefire methods like IUDs, just enough such that the birth rate is pegged at 2.1 children per woman.

But this is difficult to achieve in democratic societies because the people that want sex without reproduction make up a significant portion of the population. But we have to fill the labor gap somehow. The solutions we've come up with are mass immigration, and soon, AI. Of course, these solutions create new problems that we'll have to deal with later, but such is life.
by namewyf | 2025-11-08 11:31:49+00:00
For those looking to optimize their learning, using tools like the AI Anki Generator can be a game changer. It helps automate the creation of flashcards, turning key concepts from discussions or articles into spaced repetition tasks. This approach not only reinforces the material over time but also saves the effort of manually organizing study notes, allowing you to focus more on understanding the content rather than memorization. Integrating this with discussions can ensure that the information sticks and that you're consistently engaging with the material in a meaningful way.
by enether | 2025-11-08 11:33:09+00:00
Exactly. "a properly-configured Kafka cluster" implies you have very properly configured your clients too, which is almost never the case because it's practically very hard to do in the messy reality of a large-scale organization.

Even if you somehow get everyone to follow best-practices, you most likely still won't get to saturate the network on "minimal hardware". The number of client connections and requests per second will likely saturate your "minimal CPU".

It's true that minimal hardware on Kafka can saturate the network, but this mostly happens in low-digit client scenarios. In practice, orgs pushing serious data have serious client counts.
by SurceBeats | 2025-11-08 11:34:17+00:00
Suffered that back in the day with an Electron desktop app. Not to mention that the notarization and signing integration itself is completely broken. The first time you submit a binary it can take DAYS to process, and setting everything up to work properly with GitHub Actions CI/CD is absurdly time-consuming. It's ridiculous, and if you add this new notarial verification policy on top of that... In the end it's just Apple being Apple.
by pols45 | 2025-11-08 11:36:41+00:00
They should feel some pressure but the language and framing is a bit over the top. These probs are not going to be solved without these kinds of systems.

The UN's sustainability development goals/WHO data shows most countries in the world hardly have ~1 therapist for every hundred thousand citizens.

The goal they set was ~15 per 100K. Barely a handful meet the goal and even then the quality of care in urban and rural areas is night and day. So we are such a long way away from actually providing mental health to the majority.

OpenAI type systems can really change the story. So good to see them releasing data about what is going on at population scales. Try getting data out of a therapists and priests about how many people they have actually helped and how many they could not. If you can't get it, labelling what they do as "an uncontrolled social experiment" doesn't do anything useful, because in many cases there is no one else stepping up to the plate.
by enether | 2025-11-08 11:37:27+00:00
These are real trade offs!

Client impl. can be re-created once in a library/extension and be done with.

The network effect of Kafka is the hardest to topple. The API is standard. If you need that connectivity, then use Kafka.

An alternative idea I did not mention is to use a Kafka API proxy on top of Postgres. Tansu is developing this (amongst other pluggable backends) - https://github.com/tansu-io/tansu; That solution would retain both the client implementations and tools (network effect). But it comes at extra complexity
by KronisLV | 2025-11-08 11:37:46+00:00
The Cerebras GML-4.6 post might also be of (some?/more?) interest to the people here, since it's more useful for programming: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45852751

I don't think that this is a dupe or anything and 3000 t/s is really cool, the other post just has more discussion of Cerebras and people's experiences with using GLM 4.6 for software development.
by traceroute66 | 2025-11-08 11:38:27+00:00
Headline at the top of the Cerebras page linked to by the OP "Cerebras Raises $1.1B Series G at $8.1B Valuation".

If you're going after the AI money gravy train then you need to wave the "we have $n registered users" carrot on your PPT slides for the investors because registered user == monetization opportunity.

I'm not defending it. I hate being forced to register for shit when I just want to try it or use the free tier.

But it is what it is.
by morgengold | 2025-11-08 11:39:27+00:00
thanks graemep andand patall for taking the time. It is amazing to see a man of high intelligence like Watson is not able to base is views on the evidence.

For me, I work usally with the assumption: "Even if there existed small differences IQ between races explained by genetics, it never tells you something about the individual before you."

Would you say this is a valid belief?
by roenxi | 2025-11-08 11:39:38+00:00
I find it actually quite an interesting exercise to compare all their politics headlines [0] with the fact that apparently Kier Starmer is polling numbers like 73% feeling he is doing "badly" [1] and there is some obscure group called "RFM" who have popped onto the scene and are polling well compared to everyone else (with a strong showing by the Greens) [2].

I mean I'd probably say this for any cat story in politics; but this really does seem like a moment where the British media should be making serious attempts at facilitating a national discourse. The stats suggest something is going wrong in the political system that needs to be talked out. Just eyeballing the politics headlines I'm not convinced the Guardian has their finger on that pulse.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics

[1] https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/keir-starmer-p...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_U...
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-11-08 11:40:33+00:00
Well, there is a difference between "this is a socialist country" and "I am a socialist".

Granted though, that under a functioning democracy, there will be overlap: if the country is x then most likely at least a plurality of voters support x. It doesn't mean that "all citizens support x" or "any specific citizen supports x and self identifies themself an x-ist".
by cluckindan | 2025-11-08 11:40:52+00:00
For those who don’t know, the main difference between craft store paints and artist grade paints are:

- ratio of pigment to binder (craft store paints have less pigment)

- pigment quality (craft store paints are usually larger grain and may sometimes use unsafe pigments)

- color purity and consistency (craft store paints may contain traces of unintended pigments and may vary between batches)

- color variety (craft store paint manufacturers are NOT going to be paying extra for rare pigments)

- lightfastness (craft store paints may fade quicker due to lack of UV protectant additives)

- binder quality (craft store paints may use cheaper, more toxic binders)

Otherwise they are the same stuff, it’s kinda hard to screw up mixing acrylic binder with a pigment.

Check that your paint has the ACMI Approved Product seal.

https://www.acmiart.org/acmi-seals
by wakawaka28 | 2025-11-08 11:41:30+00:00
>How do you know this? Just because some people have written dissertations on compilers and didn't find work?

Yes, I said exactly that. It's because virtually nobody who studies compilers ever has a job doing that, and this is a girl literally from MIT we're talking about. It's not as much about expertise as about the hiring end of things IMO. I could be wrong but I'm just connecting dots and making educated guesses here.

>OP seems very talented.

As a human being, or perhaps even as a generic new grad, sure. She might also be more studious than I'm expecting. She said she wrote a novel, which is cool. How much time did she spend doing that versus actually studying compilers? I'm comparing her to the kinds of people I would expect to be doing compiler work.

>And doing compiler work for a blockchain is not the most competitive position. I did the same thing for a while, and I don't even have a computer science degree (nor do I "check HR boxes")

There's always an exception to the rule. For what it's worth I would not expect you to be a competent compiler engineer either, especially without a degree or killer experience. I might believe it if given enough evidence but first impressions say no.
by xiffle | 2025-11-08 11:42:02+00:00
Tanenbaum was right, the future of the Linux kernel is dire, and it's been a huge setback to operating systems research in practical terms.

Fortunately, vendors are gradually moving away from Linux, having been hamstrung by its failures. Google is planning to move to a capability-based microkernel in the coming years for Android and ChromeOS, and Huawei has already done so with HarmonyOS.

In a hundred years, Linux will be a footnote in computing history.
by 1718627440 | 2025-11-08 11:42:54+00:00
In the general case yes, but "C/C++" became an idiom for the stance, that C and C++ are essentially the same, that C++ is a superset of C or that C++ is just the replacing successor of C and it should be treated as superseded. This is quite wrong and thus there is a lot of rightful intervention to that term. Personally I use "C, C++" when I want to talk about both without claiming, that they are the same language.