MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-12-06 21:19:49+00:00
I agree with regards to the actual work being done by the systolic arrays, which sort of are VLIW-ish & have a predictable plannable workflow for them. Not easy, but there's a very direct path to actually executing these NN kernels. The article does an excellent job setting up how great at win it is that the systolic MXU's can do the work, don't need anything but local registers and local communication across cells, don't need much control.

But if you make it 2900 words through this 9000 word document, to the "Sample VLIW Instructions" and "Simplified TPU Instruction Overlay" diagrams, trying to map the VLIW slots ("They contain slots for 2 scalar, 4 vector, 2 matrix, 1 miscellaneous, and 6 immediate instructions") to useful work one can do seems incredibly incredible challenging. Given the vast disparity of functionality and style of the attached units that that governs, and given the extreme complexity in keeping that MXU constantly fed, keeping very tight timing so that it is constantly well utilized.

> Subsystems operate with different latencies: scalar arithmetic might take single digit cycles, vector arithmetic 10s, and matrix multiplies 100s. DMAs, VMEM loads/stores, FIFO buffer fill/drain, etc. all must be coordinated with precise timing.

Where-as Itanium's compilers needed to pack parallel work into a single instruction, there's maybe less need for that here. But that quote there feels like an incredible heart of the machine challenge, to write instruction bundles that are going to feed a variety of systems all at once, when these systems have such drastically different performance profiles / pipeline depths. Truly an awe-some system, IMO.

Still though, yes: Itanium's software teams did have an incredibly hard challenge finding enough work at compile time to pack into instructions. Maybe it was a harder task. What a marvel modern cores are, having almost a dozen execution units that cpu control can juggle and keep utilized, analyzing incoming instructions on the fly, with deep out-of-order depenency-tracking insight. Trying to figure it all out ahead of time & packing it into the instructions apriori was a wildly hard task.
by Someone | 2025-12-06 21:19:59+00:00
https://support.apple.com/en-us/105120:

“Lockdown Mode is an optional, extreme protection that’s designed for the very few individuals who, because of who they are or what they do, might be personally targeted by some of the most sophisticated digital threats. Most people are never targeted by attacks of this nature.

When Lockdown Mode is enabled, your device won’t function like it typically does. To reduce the attack surface that potentially could be exploited by highly targeted mercenary spyware, certain apps, websites, and features are strictly limited for security and some experiences might not be available at all.”
by WalterBright | 2025-12-06 21:21:43+00:00
The borrow checker is there as experimental, it is not an official part of the language. It is unfinished due to lack of interest in it by the D community.

I don't understand the special purpose behind Zig's allocators. It's just an interface. I make custom allocators in D all the time, it's trivial.

Dip1000 is also an experimental feature and is not part of the core language.

On a more pragmatic note, D has a notion of "sinks", aka output ranges. They provide a simple interface that accepts input, which is appended to the output range. Since the user of the sink has no idea what the sink is doing, just that it accepts input. This is a fun and very practical way to move the choice of how to allocate memory to the caller rather than the callee.

gdc and ldc offer top notch D support for the Mac.
by _dain_ | 2025-12-06 21:21:51+00:00
>Better to stay out of that game

The Russians are making incursions into Irish waters and airspace, it's just a brute fact. So either they play the game, or Britain plays it for them. They don't get to sit aloof above it all, that's not how reality works.

They are a protectorate in all but name, it's disgraceful.
by XenophileJKO | 2025-12-06 21:22:23+00:00
I just got the model to generate a spider without a leg by saying "Spider missing one leg" and it did it fine. It won't do it "every time", (in my case 1 out of 2), but it will do it. I used the GPT-image-1 model in the api. I don't think they are actually running a full end to end text/image model sequence model. I don't think anyone really is commercially, they are hybrids as far as I know. Someone here probably has better information on the current architectures.
by rels25 | 2025-12-06 21:22:23+00:00
"you don't need the sophisticated hardware, anyway."

It depends on what kind of map you are building for which use cases and how passive you want it to be. Sure, you can use an iPhone or Android device but its not very passive (requires starting up, etc.) and it will quickly overheat when it gets hot. We tried it, and most people gave up after a few weeks given the fact that its not passive.

For most commercial fleets there is real value in the services we provide, eg monitoring, accident detection, remote video retrieval in case of accident, ELD compliance, etc.

You should read the article about rewards/incentives as it talks about that.
by teekert | 2025-12-06 21:23:20+00:00
I love technology but avoid all the smart stuff because it's all shit, all spyware, all will eventually show ads. Its a perversion of something that could have been so nice.

I have Philips Hue lights, it started out great, now every time I open that app it slaps an ad in my face. I paid hundreds of euros for that system. Never again.
by ithkuil | 2025-12-06 21:23:47+00:00
Or it just shows that it tries to overcorrect the prompt which is generally a good idea in the most cases where the prompter is not intentionally asking a weird thing.

This happens all the time with humans. Imagine you're at a call center and get all sorts of weird descriptions of problems with a product: every human is expected to not expect the caller is an expert and actually will try to interpolate what they might mean by the weird wording they use
by aaravchen | 2025-12-06 21:24:38+00:00
Furilabs was just in the news here because they discontinued their device models from a few years ago, and released a new device for a big price bump with _significantly worse_ hardware.

I know I would love to give them a try, but a 720 screen is an absolute non starter for me. It would be hard for anyone to sell me on just a FullHD (1080) screen in the era of QHD (2K) being industry standard. Additionally, I believe their FAQ even admits that their already low power devices only get a few hours of battery life.
by cdilld | 2025-12-06 21:25:01+00:00
I think Ireland's commitment to pacifism and neutrality is laudable. Too few people live here to be able to defend against attacks from a larger power, and Ireland's strong suit has always been diplomacy, anyway. That obviously annoys people who either (for some unfathomable reason) like war or stand to gain personally from increased defence spending. Fortunately, there is little appetite for the kind of militarisation that the author of this article is hoping for. I'll add, too, that societies organised around the sort of violence, hostility, aggression, and cynicism that go hand in hand with powerful militaries don't seem to be very nice places to live.
by stack_framer | 2025-12-06 21:25:03+00:00
Should the Rust community take a lesson here, and maybe the Zig community to an extent?

To me it seems that some in the Rust community in particular, perhaps because they're just the most vocal, are tightly coupled to progressive, social activism.

I guess in general I just find myself wishing that political and social issues could be entirely left out of technical communities.
by rcxdude | 2025-12-06 21:26:54+00:00
Yeah, but you can complain that it kinda sucks as an experience. Autocorrect is generally speaking the better option, and it generally just means a different kind of error is more prevalent.

(you seem to be arguing that autocorrect is somehow an option that means that you don't pay attention to what you're typing. This is an orthogonal issue, and you can be lazy and error-ridden with and without autocorrect)
by wdr1 | 2025-12-06 21:27:11+00:00
> Time to ban all adverts everywhere. I'm not the only one who is fed up with ads.

This is a terrible idea. Users should have choice & control.

I'll say something that on the surface level seems controversial, at least to HN: Some users prefer ads. And those users should be allowed that choice.

Ads are part of a value exchange. It's disingenuous, imho, to frame the question as "Do you want 'X' with or without ads?" Absent any other criteria most people would naturally say without ads. But I feel it's disingenuous because it overlooks the value exchange.

A better example: Would you prefer Netflix with ads for $7.99/month with ads, or $17.99/month without ads?

A lot of people are choosing the ads tiers. It's the fastest growing tier. Personally, I have the ads-free tier, but I can make that choice for myself. The people wanting the ads tier should be able to make that choice too. I don't see the value in taking it away from them.

I don't deny there are bad experiences. I do think Samsung is making a mistake & damaging customer trust with the refrigerator thing. I likely won't be buying one in the future.

Like anything, advertising can be done well or it can be done badly. I don't use Instagram myself, but I have a lot of friends who love fashion who do & say they're on their to follow brands & find deals. They find the ads a good way to discover some new fashion product & snag a good discount.

Likewise Amazon sent a catalog to my house. My kids are using it to think of what they want to ask Santa. A catalog is basically a book of ads.
by ifh-hn | 2025-12-06 21:27:33+00:00
All sorts. Having a full bootable OS on a CD or USB was always cool. When I left the military and was a security I used to use them to boot computers in the buildings I worked in so I could browse the internet.

Before encryption by default, get files from windows for family when they messed up their computers. Or change the passwords.

Before browser profiles and containers I used them in VMs for different things like banning, shopping, etc.

Down to your imagination really.

Not too mention just to play around with them too.
by Jascon71 | 2025-12-06 21:28:00+00:00
This working paper develops the mathematical core of Resolution Cosmology by deriving the full Schwarzschild spacetime metric from informational and thermodynamic principles, without invoking the Einstein field equations. Starting from the postulate that proper time is accumulated resolution, combined with Landauer’s bound, the Unruh effect, and the Newtonian limit, the framework shows that the Tolman temperature relation emerges as a consistency condition rather than an input from General Relativity. This closes the circularity present in earlier drafts and yields both the weak-field and strong-field Schwarzschild metric purely from resolution dynamics.

The paper also sketches a cosmological extension in which dark energy is interpreted as the late-time acceleration of geometric resolution as thermal cost declines, naturally dissolving the Coincidence Problem and leading to testable predictions for the evolution of the dark energy equation-of-state parameter w(z). This document is intended as a technical companion to the main “Resolution Cosmology v5.2” framework and is released as a work in progress, open to comment and critique.
by bobbob1921 | 2025-12-06 21:28:57+00:00
Ive been seeing more of those prove your human pages as well, but I generally assume they are there to combat a DDOS or other type of attack (or maybe ai/bot). I remember how annoying it was combating DDOS attacks, or hacked sites before Cloudflare existed. I also remember how annoying capcha s were, everywhere. Cloudflare is not perfect but net, I think it’s been a great improvement.
by chamomeal | 2025-12-06 21:29:52+00:00
When I’m working from home and the internet goes down, I don’t care. My poor private-equity owned corporation, think of the lost productivity!!

But if I was trying to buy insulin at 11 pm before benefits expire, or translate something at a busy train station in a foreign country, or submit my take-home exam, I would be freeeaaaking out.

The cloudflare-supported internet does a whole lot of important, time-critical stuff.
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-06 21:30:12+00:00
You know... When I see something that crosses my threshold of clickbait on my YouTube feed, I just select "Not interested" or "Don't recommend channel".

Given the contrast between my usual logged-in Youtube feed, and the rampant sea of unfettered clickbait I see when I've been logged out on any particular device.

He who clickbaits is therefore demoted to the role of seldom or never being seen [by me] at all.

This makes sense: If the algorithm exists to increase viewership and engagement, then the algorithm therefore serves to show me stuff that I'll watch. It does not serve to present to me things that I will not watch.

And it works. I can't even find any clickbaity material right now to reference.

It's pretty great.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-12-06 21:31:23+00:00
And now days I can't put in my card's pin without 10 overhead cameras aimed at the register area. All the cameras of which are network-connected, video stored persistently, and high res/fidelity enough to here the little beeps as I press the keys, and to know that I've hit the enter because the screen indicates it immediately. But then Dell cared about its own security, and the grocery store doesn't give a single shit about whether my life is ruined by identity theft.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-06 21:32:39+00:00
Exactly. For consulting company, you have to track how much time you spent on a project. I am allocated for a project for 100% for a week, sure we are going to bill for that week. But we don’t get paid until the project requirements are met. The client isn’t going to audit every hour. They are going to sign off based on results.

I’ll keep Jira updated at the end of the day because the PMO organization needs that for tracking and even we need that for coordination. But I am going to put in 40 hours at the end of the week.

No I’m not going to track hours I spent on internal meetings, conducting interviews and the other internal minutiae that takes up my day.

The company only makes money when I’m billing a client - that’s what I’m tracking - my results. Is the company making money on me and am I getting positive feedback from sales, my teammates and the customer.
by desmoulins | 2025-12-06 21:36:00+00:00
By acquiring a duplicate of the original, you're no longer depriving someone of property in the way you would be with theft. If you steal an apple, that's one less apple that the store has to sell to someone who is willing to pay for an apple, and the store will still owe the orchard the cost of the apple you took. In contrast, pirating a movie doesn't remove any physical copies from shelves. The problem comes down to what you believe the cost of piracy actually is, and who bears that cost, which gets complicated in the case of digital goods and subscription models. If the argument is that piracy lowers demand in general, then you'd have to account for the effect of libraries, the secondhand market, and competition from other media. The practical evidence that pirates are outnumbered by paying customers suggests that on the balance, the system is capable of supporting some freeloaders without collapsing. To extend the apple analogy, it would be similar to people coming to the orchard after the harvest and gleaning the leftover apples instead of buying them from the store. Can you argue this diminishes apple sales? of course. Is it theft? yes, and the orchard owners have their right to insist it's a crime and all apples must be paid for, but if the apples were going to rot anyways the harm is minimal. Would it completely destroy the apple market and leave all apple growers destitute? I don't think so.
by awesome_dude | 2025-12-06 21:36:39+00:00
What I am loving about this comment, and the downvotes, is the idea that blockchains can escape things like basic laws of the universe.

> confirmation times are very long, like any other on-chain transaction

Yes. synchronisation is where everything breaks down because you have to get everyone to agree to the new state.

edit: Sorry, not everyone, but a consensus, and that consensus is then what everyone agrees is the state.
by rybosworld | 2025-12-06 21:36:54+00:00
Respectfully, I think you should do more research.

The OMSCS program is well known and well respected in the tech industry. It's a masters degree from the currently 8th ranked computer science school in the U.S.

The university make no distinction between students who take the courses online, vs in person. I.e., the diploma's are identical.
by colesantiago | 2025-12-06 21:38:56+00:00
> If there is a bug, I fix it right then and there. Security? Who cares.

> Security? Who cares.

And there it is.

Would you use a vibe coded accountancy software that stores your credit card, business data, identity information in plain text on a insecure server somewhere?

I know I wouldn't at all even if I made it, there are companies that go through audits and have certifications which cannot be vibe coded.
by gurmeetsaran | 2025-12-06 21:39:24+00:00
I built a small open-source tool called sqltesting to test SQL transformations using mock tables + assertions. It works with BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, Athena, Trino, and DuckDB. Also made mocksmith library to generate realistic test data by simply adding mockable annotation on existing classes

Curious how others test SQL logic today. Do you write tests, or just rely on warehouse runs?
by thetruthinside | 2025-12-06 21:39:28+00:00
I have experienced the corporate world, then the startup world, and now the corporate world again. This raised a question for me: why do so many companies ignore continuous improvement?

Based on my work with scaled lean agile practices, I developed this SaaS idea. I would love your feedback: where do you see flaws, risks or reasons why this might be a bad idea? Please do not hold back, I am looking for brutally honest input.
by dana321 | 2025-12-06 21:40:04+00:00
I remember the first time a saw Perl, it looked like some kind of alien language from outer space, all the symbols it used looked insane.

But once you get it, its pretty intuitive to use.

The worst part about it was the syntax for object oriented programming, which in raku (perl 6) is a lot better and intuitive.

Raku has some great ideas like grammars, but has a lot of new magic symbology and lost what i thought was an intuitive way of regular expressions in Perl 5.

=~ vs ~~
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-12-06 21:40:23+00:00
I think it's worth pointing out that Python only became popular after Google started using it. Remember when every nerd on the web was an ardent defender of Google? When people wanted to reach for a new language (say, for data science, also a new thing at the time) they reached for that slightly obscure yet easy to learn language that the cool tech company used. Schools adopting it exposed it to more people, but they picked it up, again, cuz Google used it and it was easy to learn.

Nowhere in that decision-making process is there the consideration of if it's actually a good language, more efficient, more flexible, more powerful, faster, etc. It was ease of use and "the cool kids are using it".
by adastra22 | 2025-12-06 21:41:28+00:00
I get the argument that pulling from a distribution is a form of curve fitting. But unless I am misunderstanding, the claim is that it is a curve fitting / interpolation between the training data. The probability distribution generated in inference is not based on the training data though. It is a transform of the context through the trained weights, which is not the same thing. It is the application of a function to context. That function is (initially) constrained to reproduce the training data when presented with a portion of that data as context. But that does not mean that all outputs are mere interpolations between training datapoints.

Except in the most technical sense that any function constrained to meet certain input output values is an interpolation. But that is not the smooth interpolation that seems to be implied here.
by Sammi | 2025-12-06 21:41:38+00:00
There's is no fair comparison to be made here with how + and * work is most languages, precisely because + and * work the same in most languages, while whatever perl is doing here is just idiosyncratic.

Even C gets it's fair share of flack for how it overloads * to mean three different things! (multiplication, pointer declaration, and dereference)
by seeknotfind | 2025-12-06 21:41:55+00:00
Do you mean like ghosts or like quantum randomness and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle?

We cannot compute exactly what happens because we don't know what it is, and there's randomness. Superdeterminism is a common cop out to this. However, when I am talking about whether something is computable, I mean whether that interaction produces a result that is more complicated than a turing complete computer can produce. If it's random, it can't be predicted. So perhaps a more precise statement would be, my default assumption is that "similar" enough realities or sequences of events can be computed, given access to randomness, where "similar" is defined by an ability to distinguish this similulation from reality by any means.
by asa400 | 2025-12-06 21:42:07+00:00
> Erlang is, by my accounting, not even a functional langauge at all.

How do you figure?

The essence of FP is functions of the shape `data -> data` rather than `data -> void`, deemphasizing object-based identity, and treating functions as first-class tools for abstraction. There's enough dynamic FP languages at this point to establish that these traits are held in common with the static FP languages. Is Clojure not an FP language?

> It takes more than just having immutable values to be functional, and forcing users to leave varibles as immutable was a mistake, which Elixir fixes.

All data in Elixir is immutable. Bindings can be rebound but the data the bindings point to remains immutable, identical to Erlang.

Elixir just rewrites `x = 1; x = x + 1` to `x1 = 1; x2 = x1 + 1`. The immutable value semantics remain, and anything that sees `x` in between expressions never has its `x` mutated.

> Erlang code in practice is just imperative code written with immutable values, and like a lot of other modern languages, occasional callouts to things borrowed from functional programming like "map", but it is not a functional language in the modern sense.

I did a large amount of Scala prior to doing Erlang/Elixir and while I had a lot of fun with Applicative and Monoid I'm not sure they're the essence of FP. Certainly an important piece of the puzzle but not the totality.
by themanmaran | 2025-12-06 21:42:39+00:00
Unfortunately, it's not even close. Maybe 1-2% in a highly optimistic scenario.

- 20k square meters of hull space

- If fully covered with solar panels, on a sunny day, you could expect 1-2 MWh (when averaging in night time)

- Current diesel engines typically output 60MWh continuously while underway.

And that's not factoring in the solar panels getting covered in salt over time and losing efficiency. Plus preventing the ship from actually loading / unloading cargo efficiently.

It's not just a matter of panel efficiency either. If we had magic panels that could absorb 100% of the suns power over the 20k sqm deck, it would only equate to about four times as much (8% of the overall power need).