MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vslira | 2025-12-20 22:22:13+00:00
> It’s art that bursts the seams, demanding that the world bend to it and not the other way around, refusing to comply with the arbitrary bounds of property law—those meaningless slips of paper meant to legally confer ownership of land, buildings, bridges, trains, and anything else that might serve as the artist’s canvas.

I won’t touch on the property issue because it’s really tiresome - sometimes I wish there were working communists countries so these people could simply go there and we wouldn’t have to suffer them.

But it’s really the first part of this quote that gets me: it’s precisely the fact that graffitti is forced on us that makes me despise it so much. Imagine having to listen to anyone aspiring artist’s bad poetry when you’re on and about. It’s not much better than appreciating strangers’ music taste on the street or public transit. It’s worse than advertisement: at least ads are bland and repetitive, you can easily filter them out.

> When I see DEFUND BPD hovering above North Avenue in enormous, spray-painted letters, I don’t see the opinion of one idealistic graffiti artist; I see someone expressing an increasingly common sentiment.

There are many graffitis out there asking non-politely that refugees go back to their homeland or that certain kinds of people are not welcome. I suppose, maybe unfairly, that the author would consider these demonstrations a noisy hateful minority speaking for themselves and their little minds. That’s the positive side of living in a democracy: we shouldn’t need to trust that rogue public demostrations, due to the central limit theorem or something, converge on the public sentiment. We have elections for that.

And I don’t disagree that graffitti has artistic merit, however illegal or unpleasant to my eyes. I’m not that egocentric. I just think there are things more important than art.
by Mawr | 2025-12-20 22:22:53+00:00
> this would allow them to move to a bump allocator like Java for super fast allocations and would make deallocation effectively "free" by only moving live objects

Ah, you've been misled as well. Super fast allocations is a meme. Yes, the very act of allocating is fast, great. Just like tossing trash on the floor. Super fast. Now you have a pile of garbage on the floor that you need to clean up. How fast are you going to end up being after the clean up?

In a design space as tightly constrained as a GC you can't just make something fast. You have to trade off something else to get it. So now that you have sacrificed something to make the act of allocating fast, you've also encouraged programmers using your language to allocate willy-nilly—it's fast after all. Now the pile of garbage is rising at an alarming rate and your self-gimped GC has to deal with it all.

Making allocations fast is a positive feedback loop that degrades GC performance. You want allocations to be slow and to leverage the leeway from that tradeoff to get a faster GC. Moreover, this will provide backpressure to the entire package ecosystem to limit allocations, further improving performance.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-12-20 22:23:07+00:00
> Like everything, it is always cheaper to do it (it being cooking at home, cleaning your home, fixing your own car, etc) yourself (if you don't include the cost of your own time doing the service you normally pay someone else for).

In a business context the "time is money" thing actually makes sense, because there's a reasonable likelihood that the business can put the time to a more profitable use in some other way. But in a personal context it makes no sense at all. Realistically, the time I spend cooking or cleaning was not going to earn me a dime no matter what else I did, therefore the opportunity cost is zero. And this is true for almost everyone out there.
by rolph | 2025-12-20 22:23:12+00:00
so much of this seems to have nothing to do with what is being held, it looks like gait and posture analysis, and guess what you do with instruments? you assemble them hold them to your eye to look at the alignment of the sections, and you sight through the holecover to look for gaps in the pads.

i believe it might be possible to trigger an alert with empty hands, based on analysis, as well as telescopes, maybe guitars, science class projects such as sextants, trigonometry exercises for those rare birds that do practical math lessons.

really the student manual should specify which gestures, and postures are prohibited AI triggers, akin to pulling a fire alam.

is drama or theatre still a thing in high school? that seems like a major issue there.

at the risk of repeating myself, if school is that dangerous, why are we sending children there?
by killerstorm | 2025-12-20 22:23:20+00:00
A bit of backstory:

I got really interested in LLMs in 2020 after GPT-3 release demonstrated in-context learning. But I tried running a LLM a year before: trying out AI Dungeon 2 (based on GPT-2).

Back in 2020 people were discussing how transformer-based language model are limited in all sorts of ways (operating on a tiny context, etc). But as I learned about how transformers work, I got really excited: it's possible to use raw vectors as input, not just text. So I got this idea that all kinds of modules can be implemented on top of pre-trained transformers via adapters which translate any data into representations of a particular model. E.g. you can make a new token representing some command, etc.

A lack of memory was one of hot topics, so I did a little experiment: since KV cache has to encode 'run-time' memory, I tried transplanting parts of KV cache from one model forward pass into another - and apparently only few mid layers were sufficient to make model recall a name from prior pass. But I didn't go further as it was too time consuming for a hobby project. So that's where I left it.

Over the years, academic researchers got through same ideas as I had and gave them names:

* arbitrary vectors injected in place of fixed token embeddings are called a "soft prompt" * custom KV-prefix added before normal context is called "prefix tuning" * "soft prompt" to generate KV prefix which encodes a memory is called "gisting" * KV prefix encoding a specific collection of documents was recently called "cartridge"

Opus 4.5 running in Claude Code can pretty much run an experiment of this kind on its own, starting from a general idea. But it still needs some help - to make sure we use prompts and formats which actually make sense, look for best data set, etc.
by oh_my_goodness | 2025-12-20 22:23:26+00:00
You've put a lot of words in my mouth, and I don't know why.

What do I suggest? I suggest that big organizations have pockets of careful, competent folks. But in general a large company tends to be all fouled up. They do a lot of things pretty much randomly. Some stuff happens the way a new graduate has a right to expect, and the way many HN commenters insist it has to go.

But a lot of other shit just ... happens. People get promoted because they have another offer from another fouled-up company, or because the boss thinks they're awesome (but sometimes the boss is dumb), or because they talk the talk exceptionally well, or because they happen to get the attention of someone 2 or 3 levels up, or whatever.

Is any of that controversial? What am I missing here?

Do people not still read Catch-22? Or has it been proved wrong or something? Or take that mysterious cactus that you mentioned in connection with large companies. What's that about? Because the cactus sounds bad.
by RossBencina | 2025-12-20 22:24:32+00:00
> Analog signal processing is clearly less memory than a register, no?

You are going to have a hard time doing analog signal processing with memoryless elements. In the linear domain all you can do is apply gain and mix signals together. If you work with memoryless nonlinearities you can do waveshaping, which is generally only useful when applied to special signals (e.g. sine waves).

Any time you want to do frequency-dependent behavior (filtering, oscillation) you need energy storing elements, usually capacitors, sometimes inductors. A capacitor is just like a register: it stores charge, similarly, inductors store energy in the magnetic field. Needless to say these devices are not memoryless. In fact, since the quantity that they remember is a continuous variable, they store a lot of information.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-12-20 22:25:14+00:00
I am not clear what your point is. The parent's point stands. A double colon only represents zeros (that were compressed and are not displayed).

Your link does not show different addresses from a valid compression, it shows different addresses from an invalid compression. The link examples what we don't do.

Conversely, if we compress the expanded addresses in your link, we will get 2 different compressed addresses.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-12-20 22:25:25+00:00
You could model a specific instance of using your computer this way, but you could not capture the fact that you can execute arbitrary programs with your PC represented as an FSM.

Your computer is strictly more computationally powerful than an FSM or PDA, even though you could represent particular states of your computer this way.

The fact that you can model an arbitrary CFG as an regular language with limited recursion depth does not mean there’s no meaningful distinction between regular languages and CFG.
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by Nitromax | 2025-12-20 22:25:43+00:00
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by why-o-why | 2025-12-20 22:26:38+00:00
Oh, kconifg is great. Do you think arduino is better? lolno. Check out NXP or STM's solution, and kconfig makes way more sense. Again, my opinion.

>> You don't allocate a separate thread stack for something you do once an hour - not unless it's a high-criticality task. You don't constantly poll a sensor that consumes 10mA on a device that has 10µA idle consumption budget.

I know. But you said you were TRYING to do that. You invent a scenario then you explain why it is wrong.

I don't like to argue for the sake of arguing. Peace out.
by adrian_b | 2025-12-20 22:27:43+00:00
This just provides the means for accurately measuring frequencies in the THz range.

This is important because previously it was possible to measure accurately either lower frequencies, until a few hundred GHz, or higher frequencies, from infrared to ultraviolet, i.e. from tens of THz to hundreds of THz.

Measuring accurately frequencies allows accurate spectroscopy in this frequency range, which can provide information about the chemical composition of materials.

'Frequency combs" are devices that can do at much higher frequencies what digital frequency dividers can do at low frequencies, and this frequency division function is what allows frequency measurement, by converting the high-frequency signals into low-frequency signals, whose frequency can be measured with the classic methods.

The method described in the article has the additional advantage of high sensitivity, i.e. it can measure very weak signals, which could not be distinguished from noise by less sensitive methods.
by randerson | 2025-12-20 22:27:45+00:00
If they were to catch and jail just 1% of license-less drivers, in a visible way, it would be a deterrent to the other 99%. But the rate of being caught & punished is negligible (at least in the states I've lived in) so people know they'll get away with it.

I previously lived in a country where the cops set up random roadblocks to check everyone's license & registration and look for signs of intoxication. When there's a real risk of waking up in a jail cell you're less likely to order that third beer. But in the US when renewing my tabs I feel like the joke's on me because half the cars here seem to have expired tabs or illegal plates and nobody ever checks.
by oraphalous | 2025-12-20 22:27:51+00:00
I think the west is in for a rude shock when it finally realises how fast China is developing technologically.

I was there a few months ago in Guangzhou, it was stunning to see how many EVs were on the road. You can tell too - because they have a distinctly coloured license plate.

The scale that China can achieve is just mind boggling. We went into a giant mall - 7 levels. And it was all just jewellry. A whole mall! Blew my mind. Apply that sort of scale to technological development. They can do things other countries just can't because of that scale. Here's another example of a data center they just built:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUVF8crDZ7g

I get the sense that some people are just starting to really cotton on about what China is really becoming - for example that recent review from Marques Brownlee of the Xiaomi EV.

But still - most of the narrative in the west seems to be doomerism about their demographics and real-estate over investment. We will see.

It's going to be interesting to see if China can offset its oncoming demographic challenges with their technological progress.
by secretsatan | 2025-12-20 22:29:21+00:00
Graffiti is often framed at taking back the space. I think i’m rather lucky to live in a place where advertising seems somewhat more limited, with considerable space given to more local events, although i do have a giant billboard outside my flat.

There’s also a lot of space given over to graffiti, some more industrial spaces have completely embraced it, with whole lengths of walls and buildings allowing it. sharing with communal spaces such as as music venues and skate parks.

I think every underpass is also allowed, and fresh work appears every so often.

All the street furniture throughout the city, electrical boxes etc, are all uniquely decorated and it still cheers me when i see a new one.
by canyp | 2025-12-20 22:31:35+00:00
A company talking big about privacy generally comes across as dishonest, and you'd have to get all the details right to avoid unleashing the Internet's wrath. It looks like you screwed up between the server logs and Cloudflare. Unfortunate, but it seems to me that it reflects a lack of experience more than ill intent (I do not have such experience myself either.)

Honest question, but did you add the Cloudflare proxy to solve an actual problem, or did you deploy it a priori without an actual justification?
by wrxd | 2025-12-20 22:31:40+00:00
As much as I would like my job to be exclusively about writing code, the reality is that the majority of it is:

- talking to people to understand how to leverage their platform and to get them to build what I need

- work in closed source codebases. I know where the traps and the foot guns are. Claude doesn’t

- telling people no, that’s a bad idea. Don’t do that. This is often more useful than an you’re absolutely right followed by the perfect solution to the wrong problem

In short, I can think and I can learn. LLMs can’t.
by krackers | 2025-12-20 22:31:45+00:00
> you can execute arbitrary programs with your PC represented as an FSM

You cannot execute arbitrary programs with your PC, your PC is limited in how much memory and storage it has access to.

>Your computer is strictly more computationally powerful

The abstract computer is, but _your_ computer is not.

>model an arbitrary CFG as an regular language with limited recursion depth does not mean there’s no meaningful distinction between regular languages and CFG

Yes this I agree. But going back to your argument, claiming that LLMs with a fixed context-window are basically markov chains so they can't do anything useful is reductio ad absurdum in the exact same way as claiming that real-world computers are finite state machines.

A more useful argument on the upper-bound of computational power would be along the lines of circuit complexity I think. But even this does not really matter. An LLM does not need to be turing complete even conceptually. When paired with tool-use, it suffices that the LLM can merely generate programs that are then fed into an interpreter. (And the grammar of turing-complete programming languages can be made simple enough, you can encode Brainfuck in a CFG). So even if an LLM could only ever produce programs with a CFG grammar, the combination of LLM + brainfuck executor would give turing completeness.

Edit: There was this recent HN article along those lines. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46267862.
by constantcrying | 2025-12-20 22:31:50+00:00
I think that modern CAD software, like Onshape or Fusion 360 is quite easy to learn. I have no doubt that AutoCAD is difficult to grasp, but it is not a good representative of what is possible.

>It's extremely easy to pick up if you have programming experience and it might even be a good thing to learn before moving onto more professional CAD software.

No, it definitely is not. OpenSCAD makes you think exactly the wrong way about CAD, because it forces you to reason explicitly about your model, when that is something which you need to let the CAD Software do for you. Modern Parametric CAD works by the user defining constraints, which the Software uses to derive the shape of the model, this is not something which conceptually exists in OpenSCAD.

>From a teaching perspective, being able to have almost immediately-useful output is priceless

Which is something which modern CAD does just as well.
by fsckboy | 2025-12-20 22:31:57+00:00
>Pure Silicon Demo Coding: No CPU, No Memory, Just 4k Gates

ok, but silicon is doped so it's slightly impure, and CPUs are also silicon and memory is also silicon.

you actually meant "4K gates, no clock, no synchronization, no timing" and maybe a little "not exactly sure when the output is rea... is rea... is ready"
by rolph | 2025-12-20 22:32:07+00:00
watch out for the students that have chemistry, and shop classes, they might just build a flintlock inside the school.

in my youth a number of fellow students constructed miniature crossbows, utilizing things issued by the school, and pilfered from the building. they could penetrate office dividers, and were tipped with exacto blades ! it was a badge of how "cool" you were.
by throwuxiytayq | 2025-12-20 22:32:12+00:00
Oh I fully agree with you. I'd get rid of it all if it was up to me.

Let's be honest: most graffiti we see every day is not art made in good faith. It's vandalism. And I'm not absolutist about it: I can appreciate a beautiful urban painting, just not when it's on the wall to someone's house or shop. Usually a few rude words scribbled in an emotional outburst, or - contrary to the article's point - somebody's literal signature. It's ugly, and its point is to annoy you, or at least annoy someone.

At the same time, billboards and advertisements are a cancerous growth that we don't have the courage to excise. And where we do, such as in protected historic areas, the landscape becomes beautifully transformed. I guess most people don't care, they just eat it up and accept the reality as it is - or rather, as it is forcefully pushed down their throats by corporations and aesthetically bankrupt business owners.
by chrneu | 2025-12-20 22:33:06+00:00
this argument is so tired.

most artists dont really care about streaming or selling their music. most of their real money comes from touring, merch, and people somehow interacting with them.

most musicians just want to make music, express themselves, and connect with folks who enjoy their stuff or want to make music with em.

Even some of the largest artists in the world only receive a few grand a year from streaming. Only the top 1% or so of artists get enough streams to even come close to living off it. It isn't that big of a deal. Music piracy isn't the theft people think it is, lars.

youtube is kind of the same way. the real money comes from sponsorships which come from engagement. nobody on youtube is upset that their video got stolen because that mentality was never sold to us to justify screwing us over. musicians, however, were used as pawns so music labels could get more money.

now folks will say stuff like "this is theft" which is just a roundabout way of supporting labels who steal from the artists. so, it's just a weird gaslighting. there's a reason folks turned on metallica over the napster stuff. metallica were being used to further the interests of labels over the interests of fans. and now you're doing the same thing :) It's a script we hear over and over again yet people keep falling for it.
by jmull | 2025-12-20 22:33:23+00:00
I encourage people to think a few moments about what to log and at what level.

You’re kind of telling a story to future potential trouble-shooters.

When you don’t think about it at all (it doesn’t take much), you tend to log too much and too little and at the wrong level.

But this article isn’t right either. Lower-level components typically don’t have the context to know whether a particular fault requires action or not. And since systems are complex, with many levels of abstractions and boxes things live in, actually not much is in a position to know this, even to a standard of “probably”.
by potwinkle | 2025-12-20 22:33:32+00:00
I mean... not really? Not much music is Spotify exclusive (at least from the 99.6% of what people listen to mentioned in the article), and from friends in the industry I can guarantee you all major content platforms (Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, a large chunk of YouTube) have already been completely copied without a business agreement with the rightsholders by AI startups and big-name players.
by echelon_musk | 2025-12-20 22:33:33+00:00
I still think graffiti is cool, but my enthusiasm has waned as I've aged.

Not a chance I'm going to read this insanely long essay.

As I grew up I read Subway Art, Spraycan Art and watched Style Wars. Played Jet Set Radio and Marc Ecko's Getting Up. As well as watching whatever AEROHOLiCS releases I could find uploaded to P2P sites.

I would photograph the graffiti whenever I went on a holiday and took SLR photos in my city.

I still get excited when I see bombed cargo trains on my commute to $DAYJOB. But sadly that rush of excitement is gone.
by ziml77 | 2025-12-20 22:33:42+00:00
Their explanation of the reason for VRR is bad. The primary reason people want it is gaming where the game is not locked to a specific frame rate. Without VRR, the timing of a frame being delivered isn't necessarily going to match when the display is expecting a new frame. This leads to one of two effects. Either the display is forced to hold an old frame for longer and pick up the new frame on the next refresh cycle, which creates stutter. Or the display switches which frame its using partway through the refresh cycle, which creates a visual tear in the image.