MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Doug_Bitterbot | 2025-12-09 21:33:25+00:00
We’ve been working on Federated Learning (FL) for autonomous agents and hit a hard bottleneck: standard FL (sending gradients back and forth) is bandwidth-heavy and requires massive edge compute.

We wrote this paper to propose an architectural shift we call Fluid Federated Learning (FFL).

The core engineering contributions are:

Prism Protocol: We implemented a "Software-Defined Memory" architecture. It uses io_uring to stream sparse, random projections of model weights directly from NVMe storage to the GPU.

This allows us to process "Virtual Batches" of terabyte-scale models on commodity hardware by exploiting the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma (Holographic Slicing).

Federated State-Space Duality (F-SSD): Instead of averaging gradients (which is slow and leaky), we exploit the duality between Transformers and SSMs (like Mamba) to federate the Recurrent States.

The Result: We can run massive foundation models on edge devices with limited VRAM by treating the SSD as a "slow" memory tier without destroying optimization fidelity.

I’m curious if anyone here has experimented with io_uring for model serving? We found the async I/O overhead to be negligible compared to the memory gains, but wondering if there are better ways to handle the sparse projections.

Happy to answer questions on the implementation.
by FloorEgg | 2025-12-09 21:33:48+00:00
I agree generally with what you're saying as a good rule, I would just add one exception.

If you've seen multiple doctors, specialists, etc over the span of years and they're all stumped or being dismissive of your symptoms, then the only way to get to the bottom of it may be to take matters into your own hands. Specifically this would look like:

- carefully experimenting with your living systems, lifestyle, habits, etc. best if there are at least occasional check-ins with a professional. This requires discipline and can be hard to do well, but also sometimes discovers the best solutions. (Lifestyle change solves problem instead of a lifetime of suffering or dependency on speculative pharmaceuticals)

- doing thoughtful, emotionally detached research (reading published papers slowly over a long time, e.g. weeks, months) also very hard, but sometimes you can discover things doctors didn't consider. The key is to be patient and stay curious to avoid an emotional rollercoaster and wasting doctor time. Not everyone is capable of this.

- going out of your way to gather data about your health (logging what you eat, what you do, stress levels, etc. test home for mold, check vitals, heart rate variability, etc.)

- presenting any data you gathered and research you discovered that you think may be relevant to a doctor for interpretation

Again, I want to emphasize that taking your health matters into your own hands like this only makes sense to do after multiple professionals were unhelpful AND if you're capable of doing so responsibly.
by sofixa | 2025-12-09 21:34:06+00:00
I'm guessing this is the USA with the absurd healthcare system, because otherwise this part is wild:

> You need to go to the emergency room right now".

> So, I drive myself to the emergency room

It is absolutely wild that a doctor can tell you "you need to go to the emergency right now", and that is an act left to someone who is obviously so unwell they need to go to the ER right now. With a neck so stiff, was OP even able to look around properly while driving?
by dwa3592 | 2025-12-09 21:34:30+00:00
"In a full description of the structure in a paper submitted in August 1953 and published in 1954, Crick and Watson did attempt to set the record straight17. They acknowledged that, without Franklin’s data, “the formulation of our structure would have been most unlikely, if not impossible”, and implicitly referred to the MRC report as a “preliminary report” in which Franklin and Wilkins had “independently suggested that the basic structure of the paracrystalline [B] form is helical and contains two intertwined chains”."

What Rosalind Franklin truly contributed to the discovery of DNA’s structure - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01313-5
by morshu9001 | 2025-12-09 21:35:10+00:00
I figured this out diagnosing car trouble. Tried a few separate chats, and my natural response patterns were always leading it down the path to "your car is totaled and will also explode at any moment." Going about it a different way, I got it to suggest a simple culprit that I was able to confirm pretty thoroughly (fuel pressure sensor), and fixed it.
by giancarlostoro | 2025-12-09 21:35:15+00:00
My Macbook Pro with an M4 Pro chip can handle a number of these models (I think it has 16GB of VRAM) with reasonable performance, my bottleneck continuously is the token caps. I assume someone with a much more powerful Mac Studio could run way more than I can, considering they get access to about 96GB of VRAM out of the system RAM iirc.
by IAmBroom | 2025-12-09 21:35:40+00:00
I agree that it oversimplifies.

The extra space produced a visually "extra" pause.

Just as these blank lines produce an even greater separation. It's about emphasis, and it's going away (IMO) because it's a nicety, not an obligatory part of clarity and communication. Also, because early editing software wasn't complex enough to correctly distinguish between a sentence end and "Dr. Edward Jones". [EDIT: the gd HN editor removed my extra space!!!]
by mardariya | 2025-12-09 21:35:42+00:00
Stealth AI Startup | Full-time | SF | onsite | Founding engineer

We are looking for engineers (ML & backend) to join a startup where we’re building LLM-based forecasting systems that output calibrated probability distributions (not just answers) and improve daily based on new observations. It’s a founding role with substantial equity and total compensation $200k-$500k/year.

If you’ve worked on calibration/uncertainty quantification, forecasting benchmarks, prediction markets, or agentic monitoring pipelines - write me!

Contact: mardariya@gmail.com
by serf | 2025-12-09 21:35:45+00:00
>At what point of optimization does it turn into 'real' high performance programming?

somewhat past optimizing the frame count of an entirely empty scene.

on that matter : is it a game engine if there isn't a game?

I totally agree with other comments though -- if there is no pressure to meet specific metrics or accomplish certain things with the product then there is no real pressure to improve past a window or framebuffer drawn to video, just declare it's a game engine that makes a million FPS and throw it on the portfolio.

game engine work gets tough (and rewarding) with 1) goals and 2) constraints -- without those two it's more or less just spherical-cow style work that is too ambiguous or vague for real application.
by hansmayer | 2025-12-09 21:36:03+00:00
> "If you read nothing else, read this: do not ever use an AI or the internet for medical advice. Go to a doctor."

Yeah, no shit Sherlock? I´d be absolutely embarrassed to even admit to something like this, let alone share the "wisdom perls" like "dont use a machine which guesses its outputs based on whatever text it has been fed" to freaking diagnose yourself? Who would have thought, an individual professional with decades in theoretical and practical training, AND actual human intelligence (Or do we need to call it HGI now), plus tons of experience is more trustworthy, reliable and qualified to deal with something as serious as human body. Plus there are hundreds of thousands of such individuals and they dont need to boil an ocean every time they are solving a problem in their domain of expertise. Compared to a product of entshittified tech industry which in the recent years has only ever given us irrelevant "apps" to live in, without addressing really important issues of our time. Heck, even Peter Thiel agrees with this, at least in his "Zero to one" he did.
by observationist | 2025-12-09 21:36:11+00:00
It might be a side quest, or it could be an elegant way to frame a category of problems that are resistant to the ways in which transformers can learn; in turn, by solving that structural deficiency in order to enable a model to effectively learn that category of problems, you might empower a new leap in capabilities and power.

We're a handful of breakthroughs before models reach superhuman levels across any and all domains of cognition. It's clear that current architectures aren't going to be the end-all solution, but all we need might simply be a handful of well-posed categorical deficiencies that allow a smooth transition past the current jagged frontiers.
by letmeinhere | 2025-12-09 21:36:11+00:00
If you want to get to a higher level compiler, prompt fondling will not suffice; you need to master formal specification. Then machine learning algorithms can do the program synthesis to implement the spec. But just talking out your vague software requirements with a chatbot is not analogous to programming.

Also, like others said, even once you have your formal spec, C is a particularly bad choice (unless you want to specify quite a bit more). You want the program implemented in a language with as many safety constraints on it as possible, not one where you have to mentally track memory.
by DemocracyFTW2 | 2025-12-09 21:36:38+00:00
FWIW I used to use https://pgtap.org for a short while but then switched to 'invariant testing' (my word for it) where I basically write DDL for views that collect rows that don't look like I expect them to look like.

I since moved to SQLite in NodeJS and one of the things I just implemented is views that look at strategic points in the DB—where data is ingested—and tests whether all text fields are Unicode-normalized; for this I can use the JS `String::normalize()` method I previously didn't even know of. Stuff like this makes me easily forget the many advanced feautures of PostgreSQL and forgive SQLite its quirks because the overall experience is that much more enjoyable. And, to answer directly: I can write unit tests for SQL in the same file and using the same code that I use for all my unit tests. Yay!
by netfortius | 2025-12-09 21:36:46+00:00
The part about retirement is total BS. I worked hard to FIRE in my mid 50s as I had already over 300 books still to read by then, min 20 countries I still wanted to visit, two additional languages to learn enough to be able to read in original some of the books not having been translated in the languages I already know, and update my physics and math college knowledge from when I was younger. None of this was possible while working. And quite a few years later I now have over 500 books left (the original ones had tons of references which expanded a lot of books to a few more), still places to see, even in countries which I crossed out from the original list, but I could not completely traverse, or languages not yet mastered to the level I need.
by colechristensen | 2025-12-09 21:36:48+00:00
Speaking of things that are only real in your mind...

Am I outraged?

And yes, there absolutely was a vocal group of a certain type of programmer complaining about high level languages like C and their risks and inefficiency and lack of control insisting that real programmers wrote code in assembly. It's hard to find references because google sucks these days and I'm not really willing to put in the effort.
by chrilleweb | 2025-12-09 21:36:55+00:00
Thanks you for the comment :)

I am currently working on a turbo mono repo frontend on my work with maybe 20-25 different env variables. Here the dotenv-diff is really a game changer, but yea for smaller projects, i might be a bit overkill.

I like the projects you have linked, i will try to see if they have any need to have features that i could use

in `dotenv-diff` you also have the --compare option which will compare your .env whit your .env.example to keeping them in sync, while also have the amount of scanning features that keeps the project safe.
by littlestymaar | 2025-12-09 21:37:07+00:00
> Frankly, unless you rewrite your models you don't really have a choice but using nVidia GPUs, thanks to, ironically, Facebook (authors of pytorch). There is pytorch/XLA automatic translation to TPU but it doesn't work for "big" models. And as a point of advice: you want stuff to work on TPUs?

I don't understand what you mean, most models aren't anywhere near big in terms of code complexity, once you have the efficient primitives to build on (like you have an efficient hardware-accerated matmul, backprop, flash attention, etc.) these models are in the sub-thousand LoC territory and you can even vibe-convert from one environment to another.

That's kind of a shock to realize how simple the logic behind LLMs is.

I still agree with you, Google is most likely still using Nvidia chips in addition to TPUs.
by cheald | 2025-12-09 21:37:27+00:00
I think the author took the wrong lesson here. I've had doctors misdiagnose me just as readily as I've had LLMs misdiagnose me - but I can sit there and plug at an LLM in separate unrelated contexts for hours if I'd like, and follow up assertions with checks to primary sources. That's not to say that LLMs replace doctors, but that neither is perfect and that at the end of the day you have to have your brain turned on.

The real lesson here is "learn to use an LLM without asking leading questions". The author is correct, they're very good at picking up the subtext of what you are actually asking about and shaping their responses to match. That is, after all, the entire purpose of an LLM. If you can learn to query in such a way that you avoid introducing unintended bias, and you learn to recognize when you've "tainted" a conversation and start a new one, they're marvelous exploratory (and even diagnostic) tools. But you absolutely cannot stop with their outputs - primary sources and expert input remain supreme. This should be particularly obvious to any actual experts who do use these tools on a regular basis - such as developers.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-09 21:37:35+00:00
Someone on hackernews iirc had wrote something which I am paraphrasing but let me try to share what they said

```

I used to spend hours debating on comment forums etc. and spending time on these platforms (iirc) But If someone important enough were to happen, I would know it myself if it might impact me.

```

This isn't to say that not knowing anything at all is good but rather that you would most likely be prepared to deal with every thing and that if you still wish to spend time on these things then having a better signal:noise ratio then jeez twitter would be great.

Personally I believe that HN kinda holds that threshold of political talks where I do not feel alienated by what's happening but I am also not too invested.

Atrioc (youtuber) is another source I have and that's about it and this is coming from the guy who was obsessed with news of sorts watching geopolitics happen live lol

Also, if someone is on twitter or reminisces it. Do not. I personally wasn't really ever on twitter I guess but I watch Dolan Darkest and maybe hackernews might find it cringy but he summarizes in 1-2 minutes everything happening in twitter of sorts (freeien's reddit pic on twitter going viral or something and similar?)

Like I spent a lot of time today on hackernews but mostly watching atrioc + dolan can be 20 mins and I kinda enjoy it and that's about it. Not sure how much about hackernews since my consumption of hackernews goes through periods...
by bee_rider | 2025-12-09 21:38:00+00:00
Maybe we could set it up so the “spirits” can just talk to the “living” when the latter start the conversation. That seems like a reasonable way of setting things up.

It’s all a bit fanciful of course—we’d basically be setting up an emulation of various spiritual beliefs, and there’s no reason to believe anybody would go along with the constraints. But it is fun to think about.
by lumost | 2025-12-09 21:38:09+00:00
Companies with strong distribution have an option to be the "last" player in a market and simply force their way in. If Apply makes a "default" LLM which is as good or better than all premium LLM options... then you would obviously choose to use that over paying for a ChatGPT subscription. Apple could probably upcharge the phone by $200 for this privilege. Alternatively, they may do what they did with search and just get paid not to add an LLM chat functionality.
by forgotpwd16 | 2025-12-09 21:38:19+00:00
Also, the recently discussed[0], HN Simulator: https://news.ysimulator.run/news. Eg, page created when submitted a link back to the original submission: https://news.ysimulator.run/item/2944.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46036908
by CodingJeebus | 2025-12-09 21:38:23+00:00
> Put us in computers. We’ll stick around as digital ancestor spirits. Just to see how it goes.

It's cute to think that simply creating some digital representation of us would be a solution to such a problem when one of the founders of the internet has spoken at length about the dangers of hardware compatibility and media obsolescence putting much of today's data at risk from being inaccessible tomorrow.[0]

Nothing, and I mean nothing, is immune to the decay of time.

0: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/02/13/386000092...
by keeda | 2025-12-09 21:38:24+00:00
Yes, self-reported productivity is unreliable, but there have been other, larger, more rigorous, empirical studies on real-world tasks which we should be talking about instead. The majority of them consistently show a productivity boost. A thread that mentions and briefly discusses some of those:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45379452
by wat10000 | 2025-12-09 21:38:41+00:00
It seems absurd to argue that death is necessary or good when there is exactly zero experience with the alternative.

Imagine a society where everyone has a ball and chain permanently attached from birth. It would be just a part of life. Some thinkers might write articles about how much better things would be if a way could be found to get rid of the ball and chain. Others would come up with arguments for why the ball and chain is actually good, or even necessary. The limitation on movement gives life a purpose. The resistance helps build strength.

Looking at such a society from the outside, we'd find the latter arguments ludicrous. How can it possibly be better to stuck with a major physical restriction your entire life? If anyone said we should start doing this to all our children, they'd be run out of town.

If humanity does solve the problem of death, I doubt it will be absolute, in any case. Aging might be stopped, maybe added resistance to disease and injury, but nothing is going to allow you to survive hugging a detonating nuclear bomb, or any number of other physically extreme events. If you decide forever is not for you, then you'd be able to make that choice.
by flakiness | 2025-12-09 21:38:51+00:00
So I'll focus on the block's contribtution, which is goose: https://github.com/block/goose

Has it gotten better and good enough? I tried it a few months back and it was pretty crappy. And it's not because of bad models (I used it with the latest Claude at that time) but because of poor harness implementation and UI.

Is it worth trying the latest version to see how it compares with Claude Code? I want OSS, model agnostic implementation to win but I felt the odds are off then. I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
by kens | 2025-12-09 21:38:52+00:00
Stack-based architectures have an appeal, especially for mathematics. (Think of the HP calculator.) And the explanation that they didn't have enough instruction bits also makes sense. (The co-processor uses 8086 "ESCAPE" instructions, but 5 bits get used up by the ESCAPE itself.) I think that the 8087's stack could have been implemented a lot better, but even so, there's probably a reason that hardly any other systems use a stack-based architecture. And the introduction of out-of-order execution made stacks even less practical.
by BobaFloutist | 2025-12-09 21:38:53+00:00
You know how it's recommended to sell employee stock grants asap, so your not over indexed into your employer? I.E. if the company you're working for performs poorly or goes under, you don't want to lose your job and wealth, and if it does well, you'll keep making money at your job anyway, so there's no advantage to investing more of your personal capital into your employer than you would if they weren't employing you (barring insider trading).

It's funny that people rarely seem to apply the same reasoning to their dwelling place.
by asdff | 2025-12-09 21:39:10+00:00
>Apple watch

Iphone on your wrist. Most people I know with one have it for two years then once the battery goes they throw it in a drawer and don't buy another one. Most were actually gifted it.

> airpods

They just took the same old earpods they used to give you for free due to ewaste concerns and forced you to buy the disposable bluetooth version if you want to charge your phone and listen to music at the same time.

>homepod

I'm into tech and I'm not sure what this even does. Apple doesn't advertise it at all that's for certain. Its basically a sonos with siri I guess. I know no one with one. I just looked it up. It looks like a chinese air filter, absolutely no signature design language.

>ipad

No one knows why they need one. They get one because there's hype. They use it for three years to look at instagram then its put in a drawer forever. "ipad for education" is a scam/failure; just give kids macbook airs so I don't have to teach new hires what a file is anymore.

All of this is a farcry from the ipod and I feel like apologists like you understand that too.
by nylonstrung | 2025-12-09 21:39:23+00:00
Absolutely. A language being well suited to static analysis and "compiler driven development" matters a lot more with LLMs than with humans IMO

We're at the point of diminishing returns from scaling and RL is the only way to see meaningful improvements

Very hard to improve much via RL without some way to tell if the code works without requiring compilation

Logic based languages like Prolog take this to the logic extreme, would love to see people revisit that idea
by shortrounddev2 | 2025-12-09 21:39:23+00:00
To be honest, I am pretty embarrassed about the whole thing, but I figured I'd post my story because of that. There are lots of people who misdiagnose themselves doing something stupid on the internet (or teenagers who kill themselves because they fell in love with some Waifu LLM), but you never hear about it because they either died or were too embarrassed to talk about it. Better to be transparent that I did something stupid so that hopefully someone else reads about it and doesn't do the same thing I did
by heavyset_go | 2025-12-09 21:39:35+00:00
> But chin up, he's really old, and he doesn't seem very healthy or he'd be out there leading the charge throwing those rallies every weekend of which he used to be so fond.

At this point in time, his whimsy is the only thing holding back younger, more extreme acolytes from doing what they want. Once he's gone, lol.