MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: I built GPT from scratch to understand how it works
by pythongiant | 2026-01-14 08:49:01+00:00
If you’ve ever been curious about how GPT actually works under the hood, I built a small project you might find interesting. I implemented a GPT-style transformer from scratch in a single notebook—covering tokenization, embeddings, causal self-attention, training, and autoregressive text generation without relying on high-level abstractions. The focus was on mechanistic clarity rather than scale or performance, and the notebook is structured to read more like a technical walkthrough than an experiment log. Feedback from people who’ve built or studied transformers would be very welcome.
by bigfatkitten | 2026-01-14 08:49:21+00:00
ROM bootloader loads a second stage bootloader (e.g. [1]). The ROM bootloader verifies that the second stage loader is signed with keys fused into the MCU. The second stage bootloader in turn verifies application images shipped by the vendor, using a different set of keys.

When the vendor discontinues support for the device, they make available to their customers an optional update to the second stage bootloader that allows any application image to run, not just images signed by the vendor. This updated second stage loader is signed with the keypair fused into the MCU, and so it will run as per normal. They make it so this update can only be installed with some sort of local interaction with the device, not automatically over the air.

Devices in the field running ordinary OEM firmware continue to be protected from malicious OTA updates. Customers who wish to unlock their devices also have the means to do so.

This is very technically straightforward to implement, but it needs to be considered when the device is designed. Regulations would be required to make sure that happens.

[1] https://www.trustedfirmware.org/projects/mcuboot/
by Terr_ | 2026-01-14 08:49:28+00:00
Even when 100% issue-oriented (that is, spending no time on editor-customizatons or developing other skill and toolkits) consider the difference between:

1. This thing at work broke. Understand why it broke, and fix it in a way which stays and has preventative power. In the rare case where the cause is extremely shallow, like a typo, at least the fix is still reliable.

2. This thing at work broke. The LLM zigged when it should have zagged for no obvious reason. There is plausible-looking code that is wrong in a way that doesn't map to any human (mis-)understanding. Tweak it and hope for the best.
by exceptione | 2026-01-14 08:50:11+00:00
> Someone who knows C++ or Java has a much bigger gap to jump to pick up Haskell than to pick up Python.

True, they are all imperative c-style languages.

> Python doesn't require you to understand monads to write useful Python.

If that is the concern I would recommend anyone interested to dabble with F#. Part of its design philosophy is to keep the complexity out wrt type systems. It offers a vast vetted library¹, better dependency management², it is truly multi-paradigm (imperative, functional and oop), vastly better performance, and it is strongly typed without requiring type annotations³.

I know I am not going to sell it to monogamous devs, but those that are open minded should give it a try.

___

¹ This is something people will start to appreciate once they get serious about the risk of supply chain attacks.

² Python developers feel they are doing fine with pip or uv, at least in my experience, but then I find they haven't dealt with package mgmt in alternative languages.

³ Types in python are a hack, bolting on something afterwards will not reach what is possible with a language that has been designed with types as core element.
by teiferer | 2026-01-14 08:52:37+00:00
> Plastic ones are almost 100% recyclable

Nope, that's a myth. Plastic is essentially unrecyclable. Some types of plastic can be made into "lower" quality types with lots of effort, but there is no circular reuse. The oil and plastic industries want to make you believe that this is all a solved problem, but it very much is not.

In contrast, paper and wood products just rot away at the end of their life, and a new tree grows in their place.
by defalcon47 | 2026-01-14 08:53:07+00:00
> I've been inside the conference

Unlikely. Everyone who visits the conference, which is on an interdimensional craft only visible to Donald Hoffman and Federico Faggin who have dreamed it up, is replaced by a mind-replicant whose memory of the conference has been wiped, right before their original self starts to play a 1234.567 hour game of Rummikub, where there are no rules and you must guess all of the tiles, on the way to a virtual conference in a space station mirage outside of what you call KOI-94 in the Exosyzygy system, because they have a nice spa there and there is a convenient proprietary video conferencing system for this part of the universe.

Either that or I’m getting it mixed up with another conference.
by joe_mamba | 2026-01-14 08:55:20+00:00
>Well on a positive note, it may eventually lead to a union or works council for technologists.

Good luck fighting offshoring.

> It shows that people are slowly chipping away at the capital class and sooner or later they will have to throw us some breadcrumbs.

That means nothing.
I'd be surprised if he can implement 10% of what he promised in his campaign or if he's just gonna be another plant of the capital class that promises impossible things but then ends up doing nothing when the finances hit the road.
by ben_w | 2026-01-14 08:55:24+00:00
Anyone can present a model at any time, the question is if Grok meets the requirements to match Agent-2; given Musk's long history of over-promising and under-delivering AI, there's no reason to trust Grok is as capable as he says, and even if it was:

Agent-2, more so than previous models, is effectively “online learning,” in that it’s built to never really finish training. Every day, the weights get updated to the latest version, trained on more data generated by the previous version the previous day.
by linuxhackerman | 2026-01-14 08:56:17+00:00
It's definitely a powerful approach; I don't think it's particularly viable for the sort of use cases where you're throwing secrets around in a shell:

- It's not supported natively by most software (if I wanted to use it with `curl` for example, it would only be able to replace the `rbw` example since I still need to pass the secret to curl somehow);

- I don't think it's likely to gain widespread adoption, due to being a linux-specific API;

- The API itself suffers from some poor design choices, imho; it is not currently possible to set an expiry on a keyring entry without an intermediate state where the data is loaded but no expiry is set: https://lore.kernel.org/keyrings/ygar0hbrm05.fsf@localhost/T...

It's really nice as a concept and when you're developing an application where you control the entire flow of the secret data, but I don't see much practical value in it for general use cases. Exposing it as a filesystem could be a potential bridge for application support (something like `curl -H @</proc/self/keyring/@u/gitlab-authorization-header`?), though I suspect that wouldn't fly upstream because files aren't generally treated as carefully as explicit secret things. Non-enumerability (`-r` on `/proc/self/keying` and `/proc/self/keyring/*`) would help here, but I still seriously doubt that the keyring maintainers would find this to be a sane proposition :)
by laken | 2026-01-14 08:56:21+00:00
Outdoor cafes/restaurant terraces that allow smoking effectively are marketing to smokers. Smokers generally stay longer (therefore may order more), and basically are giving themselves dopamine at this venue, therefore creating associations to possibly draw them back in the future. These places could just not provide ashtrays and could just not allow smoking, but they do allow it, because it's good for business.

If you really don't like it, you could just not visit these establishments. To these businesses, the benefit of allowing smoking doesn't outweigh the negatives (some people not liking it). Obviously you don't not like it enough to just not go there. Not a smoker, but i've never understood this puritanical attitude towards smoking and only smoking. Yeah, it's not great to breathe in an enclosed space, but in an outdoor space, I don't see how much worse it is than car exhaust, air quality, etc.
by uoaei | 2026-01-14 08:56:25+00:00
Human abstract language, particularly the English language, is a pretty low-fidelity way to represent reality and in countless instances it can fail to represent the system to any useful or actionable degree.

Interfaces are hard, abstraction is hard. Computer science has been working on making these concerns easier to reason about, and the industry has put a lot of time and effort into building heuristics (software / dev mgmt / etc frameworks) to make achieving an appropriate abstraction (qua ontology) feasible to implement without a philosophy degree. We, like biological systems, have settled on certain useful abstraction layers (OOP, microservice arch, TDD, etc.) that have broad appeal for balancing ease of use with productivity.

So it should be with any generative system, particularly any that are tasked with being productive toward tangible goals. Often the right interface with the problem domain is not natural language. Constraining the "information channels" (concepts/entities and the related semantics, in the language of ontology) to the best of your ability to align with the inherent degrees of freedom, disambiguated as best as possible into orthogonal dimensions (leaning too hard on the geometric analogy now). For generating code, that means interacting with tokens on ASTs, not 1D sequences of tokens. For comprehending 3D scenes, a crude text translation from an inherently 2D viewpoint will not have physics, even folk physics, much in mind except by what it can infer from the dataset. For storing, recalling, and reciting facts per se, the architecture shall not permit generating text from nonverifiable sources of information such as those vector clouds we find between the layers of any NN.

These considerations early in the project massively reduce the resource requirements for training at the expense of SME time and wages to build a system that constrains where there are constraints and learns where there are variables.
by Animats | 2026-01-14 08:56:28+00:00
"if you had to meet a stranger in New York City on a specific day, with no way to communicate beforehand, where would you go?"

The answer to that in San Francisco was once "meet me by the clock", which is in the lobby of the St. Francis Hotel.[1]

"There’s no easy way to sugarcoat this, so I’ll just come out and say it: it is possible that the entirety of California is built on top of one immensely large organism, and the particular spot in which the Westin St. Francis Hotel stands—335 Powell Street, San Francisco, 94102—is located directly above its beating heart."

That clock is a master clock, synchronizing the other clocks in the hotel. In the past, the synchronizing signals from that clock drove some other clocks in the downtown area. So it really is the beating heart of the city.

The clock was recently overhauled, and is acting as the master clock again. For years, the hotel's time signals were coming from an electric motor clock and then a quartz time standard. But they've reverted to the pendulum clock. Error is about 5 seconds a month.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGK_OaMVPUs
by torginus | 2026-01-14 08:57:03+00:00
I've had a bad experience with this just a couple years ago. I have an old DVD/CD player which at some point I realized I had no way of connecting to my new TV. The old one was a decent looking premium unit, that I got from my parents (who paid good money for it),

The industry has collectively decided that since CDs/DVDs are just about converting digital bits into other bits deterministically, there's no value left to differentiate, and everyone started selling absolutely nasty plasticky junk.

The new Sony unit I got was a loud rattly garbage, that even though it did the things it needed to do, made such an awful noise that I had to take it back. The other one I got (don't remember the brand) was no better.

I took that one back too, and I shelved the issue, but it was kind of remarkably terrible experience for me.
by dev_hugepages | 2026-01-14 08:57:39+00:00
Nicotine itself is carcinogenic in the mouth:

> Nicotine in tobacco can form carcinogenic tobacco-specific nitrosamines through a nitrosation reaction. This occurs mostly in the curing and processing of tobacco. However, nicotine in the mouth and stomach can react to form N-nitrosonornicotine, a known type 1 carcinogen, suggesting that consumption of non-tobacco forms of nicotine may still play a role in carcinogenesis
by menaerus | 2026-01-14 08:59:11+00:00
Focus? You asked me for an evidence. I provided you with the one. And with the one which has a big weight on it. If that's the focus you're looking for then sure. Take it as you will, I am not here to convince anyone in anything. Have a look in the past to see how Transformers have solved the long standing problems nobody believed they are tractable up to that point.
by louiskottmann | 2026-01-14 08:59:57+00:00
First of all, ruby-lsp does a great job at this, and the recent Herb helps with frontend templates.

This is enough to navigate between controllers, models and libs, unless you're trying hard to be clever which you shouldn't.

Then, in Rails, things have a canonical place in the codebase, that is consistent between codebases.

This is in contrast to languages and frameworks where every codebase is setup differently, but the static typing helps find code wherever it's hidden without pain, and thus without need for cleanup and thoughtful design.

To each their own, I prefer power for me, and pain for whoever drifts from the convention.
by Timon3 | 2026-01-14 09:00:48+00:00
This is 100% a real factor in shaping opinions. Every piece of information we encounter affects us - that's how we're built & how we can learn. But this also makes us easy to influence by consistently repeating lies, like we've seen with the "Flood the zone" technique, as well as basically the whole rise of the right over the last decade. It's all lies and misinformation, but it works because of how we're built & because there are not enough counter operations.
by trinix912 | 2026-01-14 09:02:59+00:00
If you just want to do a one off track for a party or something with AI sure go for it, but don't expect others to call you an artist.

Just like we don't call anyone who can use a microwave a chef. The chef may use a microwave, but they don't use it exclusively and they've spent the time to learn other tools and techniques.
by dust42 | 2026-01-14 09:03:20+00:00
If I followed the links correctly this benchmark was made on a 16xH200. At current prices I'd assume that is a system price of around $750,000.

The year has 86400*365 = 31536000 seconds. Thus 63072000000 tokens can be generated. As pricing is usually given per 1M tokens generated, this is 63072 such packages.

Now lets write off the investment over 3 years, 250,000/63072 = 3.96. So almost $4 per 1M tokens generated with prompt processing included.

Model was a Deepseek 671B 32B MoE.

Looks to me that $20 for a month of coding is not very sustainable - let's enjoy the party while VCs are financing it! And keep an eye on your consumption...

Electricity costs seem negligable with ~$10,000 per year at 10cts per kWh but overall cost would be ~10% higher if electricity is more like 30cts like it is in Europe.

Edit: like it is pointed out by other commenters it is 2200t/s per single GPU thus the result needs to be divided by 16: $4/16 = $0.25. This actually somewhat matches the deepseek API pricing.
Show HN: Abuse Signals API – deterministic domain/email abuse indicators
by analyses-web | 2026-01-14 09:03:31+00:00
Hi HN,

I built *Abuse Signals API*, a small API that returns *deterministic, signals-only* abuse indicators for a domain or an email (domain extracted). It’s meant for signup/onboarding pipelines where you want a transparent triage signal without a black-box model.

What it does:
- Input: `domain=...` or `email=...` (exactly one)
- Output: `abuseScore` (0–100), `abuseLevel`, a list of triggered `signals`
- Optional `explain=1`: returns per-signal explanations (severity + category + note)
- Fixed OpenAPI contract (`v1`): stable schema for integrations

Why I built it:
- I wanted something deterministic and explainable (same input → same output), with explicit “lookup_failed_*” transparency signals when external lookups time out.

Endpoints:
- `GET /abuse-signals`
- `GET /usage` (monthly quota usage for the API key)

Quick try (requires an API key):
curl "https://abusesignalsapi.analyses-web.com/abuse-signals?domai..." \
-H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY"

Example response (truncated):
{
"input": { "email": null, "domain": "fake-buy-info-product-example.shop" },
"abuseScore": 75,
"abuseLevel": "high",
"signals": ["disposable_domain_pattern","low_domain_age","many_hyphens_or_digits","lookup_failed_rdap"],
"version": "v1",
"meta": { "cached": false, "processingMs": 944, "cacheHours": 24, "scoringPolicy": "2026-01" },
"explanations": [
{ "signal": "disposable_domain_pattern", "severity": "high", "category": "risk", "note": "Matches disposable/temporary patterns." },
{ "signal": "lookup_failed_rdap", "severity": "info", "category": "warning", "note": "RDAP/WHOIS lookup failed; no score impact." }
]
}

Docs / Pricing / OpenAPI:
- Docs: https://abusesignalsapi.analyses-web.com/docs.html
- Pricing: https://abusesignalsapi.analyses-web.com/pricing.html
- OpenAPI (fixed contract): https://abusesignalsapi.analyses-web.com/openapi.yaml

Examples repo (Node / Python / C#):
- https://github.com/ulissse/abusesignalsapi-examples

Limitations (by design):
- This API provides automated indicators based on infrastructure signals only.
- It is not a verdict, not a probability, and does not provide advice.

I’d love feedback on the contract shape, the “explain mode” format, and whether the signals list/bands are useful for real-world signup abuse triage.
by SilverElfin | 2026-01-14 09:03:44+00:00
Airlines aren’t exactly where the best software engineer talent goes. They have low margins and cannot compete with high paying companies probably. And Alaska was an airline under pressure on top of all that.

They’re now trying to revamp themselves with the Hawaiian airlines merger and new long distance 787 flights. But between this loyalty theft issue and other software glitches that affected flights (cancellations/ delays) in 2025, I get the impression that their IT team is in a state of neglect and barely holding things together.
by qcnguy | 2026-01-14 09:04:06+00:00
> One of the fundamental equations of macroeconomics: savings == investment

That's not a "fundamental equation", that's merely the hope savers have. Sometimes the hope turns out to be futile and you get bank runs or financial crises.

Chinese investments aren't investments as would be understood in a free system. They have private investors, but when the government subsidizes industries they're force feeding money to things private investors passed up (or they rig the market so private investors pile in even though it doesn't make sense to do so absent the manipulations).

Think about it like this: imagine the government stole your savings and then gave it all to Sam Altman to spend on OpenAI. You might object on several grounds:

1. It's morally wrong to steal people's money.

2. OpenAI probably isn't a viable business.

3. OpenAI will use those savings to give random strangers free chats.

4. If OpenAI implodes or becomes a zombie firm that makes losses forever, the government won't hold itself accountable.

5. In the likely event of negative RoI you won't have any ability to retire anymore.

It's obvious why this scheme is bad and why people who actually do understand economics want governments to stay well away from "investments" of any kind.
by nodesocket | 2026-01-14 09:04:08+00:00
Lol what world do you live in? In Sweden killing political adversaries? I've lived in Sweden winter (Stockholm 2 months) and summer (1 month) and made many friends. None, have talked about killing political coupes like you say. I'm actually pro US gaining controller of Greenland (it would open up enormous economic tailwinds)... Business.. Actual property rights, instead of government owned land with leases. US owning Greenland would be a crazy boom to their economy. I for one, would buy land.
by bob1029 | 2026-01-14 09:04:09+00:00
The only GitHub identifier Ive ever bothered to store explicitly (I.e., in its own dedicated column) is an immutable URL key like issue/pr # or commit hash. I've stored comment ids but I've never thought about it. They just get sucked up with the rest of the JSON blob.

Not everything has to be forced through some normalizing layer. You can maintain coarse rows at the grain of each issue/PR and keep everything else in the blob. JSON is super fast. Unless you're making crosscutting queries along comment dimensions, I don't think this would ever show up on a profiler.
by lyu07282 | 2026-01-14 09:04:12+00:00
The philosophy department of our post-political/ly illiterate community seem to mostly boil down to the question if his vile opinions and speech should matter, failing to comprehend the associated real world consequences of this bigotry. Particularly ironic considering he died of an illness he refused to be treated for due to his anti-scientific bogus medical beliefs, presently mirrored by the person in charge of health care in the fascist US government.
by PetitPrince | 2026-01-14 09:04:14+00:00
Man, is this still sexy science !

In a parrallel universe, I am still be working in that domain (I was in Silvestro Micera's lab (he did similar kind of feedback for the hand) for my Master's thesis - also a long time ago; it didn't go so well due to an expectation mismatch from both myself and my supervisor)(I now work as a software engineer... pay and oppotunities are better).

If I understand correctly (I only skimmed your paper), the method you used is to take a muscle, cut it in two lengthwise, use those as a pair of muscle to graft, then put two nerves close to it and pray for re-inervation. Then you use EMG as a basis for your signals.

- Help my brush up my EMG knowledge: what's the tradeoff in choosing the muscle ? For a human case such as the one provided in the link, do you have the same signal quality choosing a smaller or bigger muscle ?

- I assume you're using intramuscular EMG (you're doing surgery anyway, so you might as well put some electrodes). How does this behave over time ? I had some experience in brain-computer interface, and I know scar tissues and the like is a real issue that can come up over time.
by nottorp | 2026-01-14 09:04:45+00:00
Heh. I am in the EU. For washing machines specifically, I get a tiny discount when I buy a new one for having them pick up the old one for recycling. Possibly for freezers too, but for some reason my washers break but the freezer doesn't.

Not all stores do that though, if I buy from one that doesn't I can call my local recycling center and they'll eventually get around to picking up the old appliance from your home.

However, this is not done by the manufacturer or importer, as the OP suggested. There are separate organizations and it's paid for via a tax on new device purchases.

Which means a new washing machine manufacturer doesn't need to worry about having their own recycling infrastructure. And I move that the recycling tax I pay for national level recycling adds less to the price than $NEW_COMPANY building their own, just for their models.