MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pixelpoet | 2025-12-23 03:05:03+00:00
I don't understand what is going on with people willing to give up their computing sovereignty. You should be able to own and run your own computation, permissionlessly as much as your electricity bill and reasonable usage goes. If you can't do it today, you should aim for it tomorrow.

Stop giving infinite power to these rent-seeking ghouls! Be grateful that open models / open source and semi-affordable personal computing still exists, and support it.

Pertinent example: imagine if two Strix Halo machines (2x128 GB) can run this model locally over fast ethernet. Wouldn't that be cool, compared to trying to get 256 GB of Nvidia-based VRAM in the cloud / on a subscription / whatever terms Nv wants?
by ACAVJW4H | 2025-12-23 03:05:21+00:00
Related: pnut.sh https://github.com/udem-dlteam/pnut just released. It’s a self-compiling C->POSIX shell transpiler that outputs readable shell, aimed at live-bootstrap and reproducible build chains. The shell edition is auditable and can bootstrap a native compiler from just POSIX sh + coreutils. Very much in the spirit of stage0 / compile-from-nothing work.
by exmadscientist | 2025-12-23 03:05:23+00:00
> I don’t understand what point you’re trying to get across.

My point is twofold:

1. There are many niches. Your main needs are not the same as my main needs. And my needs are poorly met by existing products, so I want to see something better. (And I do buy chips.)

2. All of this is way, way harder than it needs to be. It could be easy, but it isn't. Everything is possible right now. But I wasn't random when I used the dreaded A-word ("Arduino"). Arduino is a kind of horrible product that did not make anything possible and did not really invent anything. It did not make anything really hard suddenly become easy. Hard things before Arduino were still hard after Arduino. It "just" made some things that used to be medium-hard pains-in-the-butt actually really quick and easy (at a little backend complexity cost: now you've got the Arduino IDE around, hope it doesn't break!).

It turns out that is very valuable.

And is what I would like to see happen with FPGAs: make them easy to drop in instead of pains in the butt. All pieces for this exist, nothing is new tech, no major revolutions need to happen. "Just" ease of use.
by scapbi | 2025-12-23 03:06:11+00:00
Thanks everyone for your kind words and advice. It really means a lot to me right now. I hope someday I can get over this and turn it into a lesson, and I will share what I learned so others can be more careful.

To @dang and the moderators: I honestly do not understand why this topic was flagged. This situation is real and very painful for my family, and it is beyond my imagination that sharing it would be a problem.
by rayiner | 2025-12-23 03:06:46+00:00
> Those priorities are reflected by the will of Congress, not the will of POTUS.

We’re talking about discretionary grants, where Congress gave the executive branch a bunch of money and said to spend it with some broadly defined purpose. “Decide how to use this big block of money to advance health” falls pretty comfortably within the scope of “executing the law” rather than “making the law.”

> That's why the legislative process is slow and POTUS doesn't get to make any laws, because otherwise it would be tyranny of the majority.

The presidency and Congress are both majoritarian institutions.

> it won't be long until a leftist POTUS comes in

It’s not symmetric, because government employees and government-funded NGOs aren’t power centers for the right, especially the new right. Is President AOC going to lay off all the staff at PBS making programming promoting conservative values? Or cut all the federal grants to Heritage and Fed Soc?

I’d be thrilled if AOC openly ran on extreme promises like Trump did (https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform) and then, if she won, started knocking them out. For one thing, I don’t think she could win by promising to open the borders, increase free trade, bring back racial preferences in small business loans, or put more power back in the hands of federal employees angling for jobs at companies they regulate. And if she runs and wins on something like breaking up big banks or raising taxes, then that’s fine.

More generally, I think a lot of our political dysfunction comes from the fact that, regardless of who wins the election, the government is run by the PMCs. No matter who you vote for, what you’ll actually get is managerial neoliberalism with a side of identity politics and mass immigration. Instead, Democrats should run on stuff openly, then get what they want if they win. Republicans should run on stuff openly, then get what they want if they win.
by class3shock | 2025-12-23 03:07:19+00:00
I don't think it was a miscalculation, it was big business interests winning over geopolitical considerations. Of course, with some added hubris when it came to opinions on the ability of third world countries to develop into competitors and willful ignorance of the direction things were going over the years. But I do think it was all quite calculated, specifically to make the line go up for the shareholders.
by martythemaniak | 2025-12-23 03:08:02+00:00
You can't understand technology without understanding the people behind it. I always wonder about all these non-bot people who support her: is it that they're in on the grift and everyone understands that she's just there as a wink-wink-totaly-not state censor, or do they genuinely fall for her schtick? Is there something else? I never quite get it.

A once-reasonable friend of mine genuinely thinks RJK is just some dude who tries his best, and doesn't consider him a crazy anti-vaxxer. Crazy
by lucas_membrane | 2025-12-23 03:08:13+00:00
About 30 years ago, buying compilers retail went from the common route for beginners to more expensive than most beginners wanted to spend. And specialized professional software engineering became pretty damned expensive, too. The first of those changes made python comparatively attractive to every programmer starting out before the last 30 years who did not yet work as a programmer. The second of those changes made python comparatively attractive to every domain expert with a computer already on their desk working in an organization of any size who could not get their desired or imagined super simple and easy high-value application funded by said organization. Inevitable.
by ratmice | 2025-12-23 03:08:16+00:00
I would also say there is a 3rd class, which are distributed capabilities.

When you look at a mobile program such as the GadgetBridge which is synchronizing data between a mobile device and a watch, and number of permissions it requires
like contacts, bluetooth pairing, notifications, yadda yadda the list goes on.

Systems like E-Lang wouldn't bundle all these up into a single application. Your watch would have some capabilities, and those would interact directly with capabilities on the phone. I feel like if you want to look at our current popular mobile OS's as capability systems the capabilities are pretty coarse grained.

One thing I would add about compilers, npm, pip, cargo. Is that compilers are transformational programs, they really only need read and write access to a finite set of input, and output. In that sense, even capabilities are overkill because honestly they only need the bare minimum of IO, a batch processing system could do better than our mainstream OS security model.
by nradov | 2025-12-23 03:08:30+00:00
As I stated above, economic central planning can never work over the long term. The USSR didn't last very long, and it turns out that most of their economic statistics were fake anyway. Communists always lie about everything.

China still doesn't exert much power in world affairs. And their economic successes over the past few decades have come about by embracing free market principles. The stuff they tried to centrally plan has largely failed.
by therobots927 | 2025-12-23 03:08:37+00:00
Is that really how it should be judged? If I need to get data from state A to state B, SQL is the most elegant and efficient way to do it. If I need to modify the states, or break them up to optimize for memory, SQL is the easiest way to do it. It’s been around for over 50 years and no one’s come up with anything better.
by D-Machine | 2025-12-23 03:09:28+00:00
Definitely mostly just a practical thing IMO, especially with modern attention variants (sparse attention, FlashAttention, linear attention, merged attention etc). Not sure it is even hardware scarcity per se / solely, it would just be really expensive in terms of both memory and FLOPs (and not clearly increase model capacity) to use larger matrices.

Also for the specific part where you, in code for encoder-decoder transformers, call the a(x, x, y) function instead of the usual a(x, x, x) attention call (what Alammar calls "encoder-decoder attention" in his diagram just before the "The Decoder Side"), you have different matrix sizes, so dimension reduction is needed to make the matrix multiplications work out nicely too.

But in general it is just a compute thing IMO.
by sfRattan | 2025-12-23 03:10:47+00:00
>Ignorance is one thing, but maybe it could seem like negligence to others.

In person I've found the difference to be usually very clear. It's why I distinguish between the sympathic attitude of "I don't know where to start" and the contemptible reaction that "therefore I will act as if nothing is wrong, or write it off as someone else's fault."

>Would there be some possible solutions or approaches you or others could offer here to help parents build the skills that lead to not giving up? Sincerely curious where folks see the starting point of these skills.

It's a hard problem. I've spent a lot of time thinking about it, and almost as much time talking to relatives with children. I have come to no happy, easy answers.

Carey Parker's Firewalls Don't Stop Dragons is a good starting point to Security and Privacy, but not really how computers work. There are various books I remember from childhood about how computers work, but I don't really remember the process of coming to understand computers distinctly because it was both early and continuous over a long period.

I think the best we'll do as a species is one-to-three computer people per extended family. And I think the key will be teaching those people how to be of service to their families. But there's not really an existing framework for a "computer court wizard" in each family nor for what maxims and/or proscriptions such a person might teach computer illiterate family members in order to use computers safely and protect the family's children from the worst of dark algorithms, surveillance, and abuse/predators online.

It's completely uncharted territory.
by ch4s3 | 2025-12-23 03:11:55+00:00
California is very arid, when water evaporates it rains out over the ocean or farther north. The upper mid-west is very wet and the evaporated water will come back down over the Great Lakes watershed which is enormous.

> This is actually a problem in parts of Oregon

The problem in that part of Oregon was preexisting contamination in the drinking water.

"the county’s underground water supply had been tainted with nitrates — a byproduct of chemical fertilizers used by the megafarms and food processing plants where most of his constituents worked."

Discharging a little data center water back into lake Michigan isn't going to make any difference. The entire discharge of ever data center in the world wouldn't register.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-12-23 03:12:02+00:00
> What nuclear waste? Where is it?

Good question! Since you asked: it is largely in cooling pools and piling up in empty lots around nuclear power plants, waiting for safe, secure storage to appear.

> Something is either highly radioactive for a short amount of time, or not very radioactive for a long amount of time.

This is not true at all, unless you consider "short amount of time" to include decades to centuries to millenia.
by PhotonHunter | 2025-12-23 03:12:04+00:00
The Clinton era was the golden age for life sciences (can’t speak to others) and it’s been a decline since then, either stagnant or a sharper downturn. Now? Complete operational collapse, a completely different animal altogether, and it’s not one agency it’s all agencies. You seem to be saying that chasing grants is not unprecedented, which has been true since Galileo and the patron system, but that isn’t a profound observation it’s the status quo. What I and others on the ground are saying is that now is a sudden and profound shift, having committed funding pulled or applications in process effectively frozen and simultaneously new awardees decimated, in a way that is impossible to sustain the basic and translational research enterprise. And outside of the feds, there isn’t a viable source of patient capital to turn to on the scale we’ve been operating.
by 15155 | 2025-12-23 03:12:37+00:00
This is your job, and it really shouldn't feel difficult. This is really not tedious: the minimum board design for these chips literally consists of just power, JTAG pins, and a clock (if the internal oscillator isn't good enough.)

The Gowin FPGAs are available (at a massive premium) from Mouser, just like whatever MCU you are already using. Many are available for <$1-2 in China. Efinix are available from DigiKey, with some SKUs under <$10.

All of the Gowin documentation is available on their site with a free, approval-less email login and no NDA, or via Google directly (PDFs, just like Xilinx, even numbered similarly.)
by Workaccount2 | 2025-12-23 03:12:47+00:00
Heat is the graveyard of energy. Everything that uses energy, or is energy, is actually just energy on it's way to the graveyard.

The energy of the universe is a pool of water a top a cliff. Water running off this cliff is used to do stuff (work), and the pool at the bottom is heat.

The "heat death of the universe" is referring to this water fall running dry, and all the energy being in this useless pool of "heat".
by m0llusk | 2025-12-23 03:12:55+00:00
Or possibly under regulated. Where exactly is all the radioactive waste going to go? Especially the spent fuel rods pose major disposal challenges. The one site that was looking hopeful appears to have been discarded. It is a bit late in the game to be pending basic stuff that is piling up. Most nuclear power plants are not well sited for long term disposal, though that is what is happening.
by canucker2016 | 2025-12-23 03:13:08+00:00
FTA:

On Thursday afternoon, Bauer raced the LRT from Humber College, in the city’s northwest, to Finch West Station (a distance of 10.27 kilometres). Bauer, a sub-2:50 marathoner, said he completed the run in 46 minutes (elapsed) through ice and snow. The train, meanwhile, took an hour and four minutes. That’s 4:30 marathon pace.

Bauer told Canadian Running he had a friend riding the train to track its progress, and it was so far behind he ended up passing the train in front of it, which had a 12-minute head start. Another friend drove the same route to pick him up afterward; the car completed the trip in 37 minutes.
by wahnfrieden | 2025-12-23 03:13:37+00:00
There's a cohort here who impulsively downvote anything critical of the prez or a couple other such subjects. A small group is able to spoil the ranking determined by a much larger number of people upvoting.

Flags are weighted much more heavily than upvotes. So as long as there's a flag-happy minority cohort around, they have their way.
by wkat4242 | 2025-12-23 03:13:41+00:00
This article is so dumb. It totally ignores the memory price explosion that will make large fast memory laptops unfeasible for years and states stuff like this:

> How many TOPS do you need to run state-of-the-art models with hundreds of millions of parameters? No one knows exactly. It’s not possible to run these models on today’s consumer hardware, so real-world tests just can’t be done.

We know exactly the performance needed for a given responsiveness. TOPS is just a measurement independent from the type of hardware it runs on..

The less TOPS the slower the model runs so the user experience suffers. Memory bandwidth and latency plays a huge role too. And context, increase context and the LLM becomes much slower.

We don't need to wait for consumer hardware until we know much much is needed. We can calculate that for given situations.

It also pretends small models are not useful at all.

I think the massive cloud investments will put pressure away from local AI unfortunately. That trend makes local memory expensive and all those cloud billions have to be made back so all the vendors are pushing for their cloud subscriptions. I'm sure some functions will be local but the brunt of it will be cloud, sadly.
by ndriscoll | 2025-12-23 03:14:19+00:00
They go to class. Teachers should not be helping students outside of school hours. They should have a life and meet their own needs as humans. For that matter students shouldn't be doing more than 6-7 hours of school work per day, which they already get at school. Students have no need to turn in assignments outside of normal hours, and it's unhealthy to encourage them to do so (this is where uni professors really need to stop setting computers to accept work at midnight. Horrible habit to build that needs to be untaught when people start working).
by CamperBob2 | 2025-12-23 03:14:55+00:00
Because Greenpeace and other powerful lobby groups convinced Americans that nuclear power was more dangerous than fossil fuels.

I'm not one of those tinfoil hatters who rants about how the anti-nuclear movement was seeded and sponsored by the Soviets... but I will say that if they didn't do that, they overlooked some of the most useful idiots at their disposal.
by goosejuice | 2025-12-23 03:15:35+00:00
> But then I don't know what you're trying to imply with the loss of life to protect material objects comment. Seems like an attempt to troll, because nobody is talking about that.

From the thread (edited for clarity):

-> I've seen a phone jacking in this exact scenario and nobody moved to stop the guy running. Nobody on the train can help cause the doors have closed, and nobody on the platform has any idea anything just happened, or if they do the guy is well gone before they can put two and two together.

-> I'm not worried about the laptop. Pretty much everyone knows that any valuable laptop is a tracking device anyway. You should be worried about getting actually robbed, or even being attacked for no reason, while you're not paying attention.

-> Are you looking for examples? Off the cuff, in the past 2 years we've had 2 high-profile incidents: Jordan Williams and Daniel Penny.

Theft -> examples of loss of life during "successful interventions".

> That's exactly what a successfully stopped threat looks like.

We might be getting caught up on how to define successful here. If by successful you mean that the outcome was legal then I agree, and would say the outcomes of these trials were likely the appropriate outcome.

But if by successful you mean the best outcome, which is what I take it to mean, then I disagree. A successful intervention would be one where no-one was injured. I've spent years riding trains in Chicago where there's a pretty regular cohort of individuals suffering from various mental illness. I even lived in a building that partially served as a half-way house for such individuals. I've seen people do what Jordan Neely was claimed to do a couple dozen times without altercation. I've also seen people assaulted and knifes get pulled. There are ways to de-escalate a situation that doesn't result in a lethal outcome. That should be the definition of successful here.

> Random passerby are not law enforcement professionals, they're untrained and therefore can't be held to such standards.

The standard is the law. Vigilantism doesn't get a pass on the law just because it was good natured. Perhaps the law gives good natured people caution, but the alternative is much worse. "Legal hell" as it was put, is appropriate when involved in the death of an individual. That's just a consequence of living in a society that values human life.
by fennecbutt | 2025-12-23 03:15:36+00:00
It's basically because they're so locked down, hard to get docs, stupid toolchains and ides like others have mentioned.

It's like fpga companies don't want people using them, much like others like the pixart sensor I wanted to use: NDA because some parasite dipshit executive or manager thinks that register layouts are extremely sensitive information.

I've had dozens of uses for an fpga...but every single time I just can't be bothered. Why, when they make it a pain in the ass on purpose.
by anima-core | 2025-12-23 03:16:26+00:00
This paper introduces a minimal benchmark for testing whether an RL agent can learn a permanent safety constraint from a single catastrophic event.

The protocol uses standard MiniGrid LavaCrossing environments, fixed seeds, and forbids any training or gradient updates after the first failure. The key metric is whether the agent ever steps into lava again on unseen layouts.

A public benchmark harness is included so others can test their own agents under the same constraints.
by bigiain | 2025-12-23 03:19:07+00:00
And my guess is we only ever find out about some probably very small percentage of the abuses by police, at least in theory having rules and oversight of their use of these systems.

What are the chances that nobody at Flock has ever abused their access?

Cynical-me assumes that if you're the sort of person who'd take a job at a company like Flock, which I and evidently a lot of other people consider morally bankrupt, then you are at least as likely as a typical cop to think that stalking your exes or random attractive people you see - is just a perk of your job, not something that should come with jail time.
by throw5g4e567 | 2025-12-23 03:19:07+00:00
It was big at the time, but ended up being a minor blip, and from what I read, there were no actual deaths caused by the police.

There was one guy who fell down a high rise garage and there was a street cleaner who was killed by the protesters.

Compare that to when the British were taking over Hong Kong, and hundreds of protesters were killed.

I’ve always wondered what would have happened if the pandemic didn’t occur soon after.

What’s crazy is the trigger was a Hong Kong national who killed his girlfriend in Taiwan. Taiwan wanted to extradite him but there was no law in place to do so. Apparently the killer is still free today.
by ewoodrich | 2025-12-23 03:19:40+00:00
I've gone down that route already with Roo/Kilo Code and then OpenCode, but OpenCode with the z.ai backend and/or the CC z.ai Anthropic compatible endpoint although I've been moving to OC in general more and more over time.

GLM 4.6 with Z.ai plan (haven't tried 4.7 yet) has worked well enough for straightforward changes with a relatively large quota (more generous than CC which only gets more frustrating on the Pro plan over time) and has predictable billing which is a big pro for me. I just got tired of having to police my OpenRouter usage to avoid burning through my credits.

But yes, OpenCode is awesome particularly as it supports all the subscriptions I have access to via personal or work (Github Copilot/CC/z.ai). And as model churn/competition slows down over time I can stick which whichever end up having the best value/performance with sufficient quota for my personal projects without fear of lock-in and enshittification.
by nonethewiser | 2025-12-23 03:19:40+00:00
Agree completely. It's already been like this for 1-2 years even. Things are finally starting to get baked in but its still early. For example, AI summaries of product reviews, gemini youtube video summaries, etc..

Its hard to quantify what sort of value those examples generate (youtube and amazon were already massively popular). Personally I find it very useful, but it's still hard to quantify. It's not exactly automating a whole class of jobs, although there are several youtube transcription services that this may make obsoete.