MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rafa_rrayes | 2026-01-29 14:04:13+00:00
Thank you so much for taking the time to dig into the code and docs, it means so much to me!

Here’s the core idea behind how SHDL compiles to C.

At compile time, SHDL groups all gates of the same typea together and packs them into uint64_t bitfields. Each individual gate occupies exactly one bit. If there are more than 64 gates of a given type, multiple uint64_t's are used.

So for example, if a circuit contains: 36 XOR gates - 82 AND gates - 1 NOT gate

The compiler will generate: 1 uint64_t for XOR (36 bits used, rest unused) - 2 uint64_t's for AND (64 + 18 bits) - 1 uint64_t for NOT

Each of these integers represents the state of all gates of that type at once.

The generated C code then works lane-wise: during `tick()`, it computes the inputs for all gates of a given type simultaneously using bitwise operations, and then evaluates them in parallel. Because everything is packed, a single ~, &, |, or ^ operates on up to 64 gates at once.

So instead of iterating gate-by-gate, the simulation step becomes something like: build input bitmasks - apply one bitwise operation per gate type - write the result back into the packed state

In other words, a full simulation step can advance dozens or hundreds of gates using just a handful of native CPU instructions. That’s the main reason the generated C code is both simple and fast.

This also ties directly into the “anti-abstraction” idea sunce there’s no hidden scheduler, no opaque simulator loop, and no dynamic dispatch. The DSL maps very explicitly to bit-level operations in C, and you can see exactly how a logical structure becomes executable code.

The final result is a compiled C shared library, which we can interact from using python (or anything else if you want to build it)

I really appreciate you calling this out. Do you think I should make it clearer in the docs?
Thanks again for the comment!
by spmurrayzzz | 2026-01-29 14:04:15+00:00
Bits per weight, its an average precision across all the weights. When you quantize these models, they don't just used a fixed precision size across all model layers/weights. There's a mix and it varies per quant method. This is why you can get bit precision that arent "real" in a strict computing sense.

e.g. A 4-bit quant can have half the attention and feed forward tensors in Q6, and the rest in Q4. Due to how block-scaling works, those k-quant dtypes (specifically for llama.cpp/gguf) have larger bpw than they suggest in their name. Q4 is around ~4.5 bpw, and Q6 is ~6.5.
by tantalor | 2026-01-29 14:04:50+00:00
The standard is to add disclaimers like "Al responses may include mistakes." The chatbot they used to generate that text would have mentioned that.

To omit that disclaimer, the author needs to take responsibility for fact checking anything they post.

Skipping that step, or leaving out the disclaimer, is not carelessness, it is willful misrepresentation.
by flakeoil | 2026-01-29 14:05:10+00:00
If you look into the details, in the US, aviation fuel is taxed very low and for international flights not taxed at all.

"Kerosene-based jet fuel used for commercial aviation (transporting persons or property for hire) is taxed at a reduced rate of 4.4 cents per gallon." [0] That is $0.044 per galon.

For cars the tax is between $0.31-$0.74 per gallon depending on state + federal tax of $0.184 so in total somewhere between $0.494-$0.924.

That means aviation fuel is taxed 1/10-1/20 of what car fuel is taxed. So in essence aviation fuel is barely taxed.

For international flights it is tax free:
"The tax code provides statutory exemptions that result in zero or near-zero tax liability for specific fuel uses. Exemptions generally apply to fuel used in foreign international flights, military aircraft, governmental entities, farming, or by nonprofit educational organizations." [0]

[0] https://legalclarity.org/federal-jet-fuel-tax-rates-exemptio...
by lumost | 2026-01-29 14:05:14+00:00
Tech companies also benefit from over hiring. It gives them slack to absorb crises, and Fast Fuel to move quickly on new growth. Eliminating the fear of layoffs allows employees to take more risks and explore.

The current crop of tech companies cutting staff is going to lead to a large number of dead giants. The staff who services the layoffs will be risk averse, and defensible in a job cut situation. You see this in legacy firms where it takes 10 people to make a change because each person has a small slice of permissions required to effect the change. This pattern is by design as laying of any of the ten people on different teams would kill dozens of critical business processes.

This is not how you make high growth firms.
Show HN: FAF – The package.json for AI context (IANA registered)
by wolfejam | 2026-01-29 14:05:17+00:00
AI kept changing my auth system - wrong assumptions, no context.
Built this to fix it. project.faf sits between package.json and README.md
(alphabetically and conceptually).

IANA registered the media type. Anthropic merged it into MCP.
21k faf eco-system npm downloads, MIT licensed.

Happy to answer questions about the format or the IANA process.
by RickJWagner | 2026-01-29 14:05:17+00:00
Well, that is cool.

I’ve been a back porch musician for quite a while, but retired last year and have upped my game to include bluegrass jams. This bit of public exposure has motivated me to better my understanding of music. I especially crave the ability to improvise quickly, to play by ear.

That in turn took me straight into music theory and fretboard mathematics. You can use math to tell you where to find notes up and down the fretboard, and you can use math to anticipate which notes you’ll need based on chord progressions. ( Of course you can tell when you’ll need them by counting and properly subdividing the beat. )

We need to teach more music early in schooling.
by AnimalMuppet | 2026-01-29 14:05:28+00:00
What's the cost of a programmer-quality laptop, with two large monitors, plus licenses for all the software that they need? That's 2-3K.

Does anyone know what the typical tool cost is for a factory worker?

(And the tool cost for a factory worker can be zero if you're hiring for a second shift - they would use the same tools as the first shift, just at different times. In contrast, I don't think there are very many places that ask programmers to use the same laptop in shifts.)
by chickensong | 2026-01-29 14:05:42+00:00
> I have the impression that's exactly what people do in the USA?

It's not a great idea to make general assumptions about such a large and diverse country. Some drugs may be over prescribed, I have no idea if Ambien is one of them, but trying to fit 340 million people across 50 states into the same box isn't going to be very accurate.
by tedsanders | 2026-01-29 14:05:46+00:00
I disagree with the author that there’s no automated solution for getting spoiler-free help. I have found ChatGPT excellent for getting minor help without spoilers while playing Blue Prince. I can ask it things like “I’m playing Blue Prince and I want to avoid all spoilers. <question>? Use search. Answer only ‘yes’ / ‘no’ / ‘clarification needed’.”

Perhaps one difference between the author and me is that I usually have closed-ended questions rather than open-ended questions like “give me a minimal clue that’s helpful but not obvious”, for which I’d trust ChatGPT far less.
by freedomben | 2026-01-29 14:05:47+00:00
Agreed. A friend of mine is a primary care doctor, and it's remarkable how often people come in for depression and after examination and labs it turns out their depression is heavily influenced by other issues, especially low testosterone or hypothyroid. A lot more people have issues with these than most people realize. There have also been people he has seen who were reporting depression, often where nearly every anti-depressant had been tried, where getting treatment for ADHD massively improved their case and was life changing. As much as people like to hate on Adderall nowadays, for people with ADHD it is miraculous.

Getting treatment for "depression" doesn't always mean SSRIs etc. Sometimes it means treating the underlying condition(s) that are having downstream affects. I would suggest everyone gets their Testosterone levels checked among other common things.
by ycombiredd | 2026-01-29 14:06:12+00:00
Tangentially related, I once wanted to render a NetworkX DAG in ASCII, and created phart to do so.

There's an example of a fairly complicated graph of chess grandmaster PGM taken from a matplotlib example from the NetworkX documentation website, among some more trivial output examples in the README at https://github.com/scottvr/phart/blob/main/README.md#example...

(You will need to expand the examples by tapping/clicking on the rightward-facing triangle under "Examples", so that it rotates to downward facing and the hidden content section is displayed)
by pelasaco | 2026-01-29 14:06:37+00:00
yeah yeah, we heard it million times. Noble lies.

The "robots will do the manual work" story sounds comforting, but it’s not how automation usually spreads in a capitalist economy like ours. Capitalism automates where the return on investment is easiest and fastest, not where society most needs relief. That’s why AI is hitting creative and white-collar work first: you can replace or augment digital labor from a data center, scale instantly through subscriptions, and avoid the slow, expensive realities of manufacturing, maintenance, and safety certification.

Physical robotics is a very different game. Even if the software improves dramatically, real-world robots are bottlenecked by supply chains for actuators, sensors, batteries, precision parts, and the teams needed to deploy and maintain them. We are running out of Material to build just CPU/GPU/RAM, imagine complex Boston Dynamics robots..
by palata | 2026-01-29 14:06:52+00:00
Phishing will always exist. If a system is very secure, the easiest way to attack it is to phish the human that has control over it. Complaining about that is weird... what do the people who complain want? One of those two:

- "Please make the system less secure, so that the attackers don't have to attack the human because they can just compromise the system directly"

- "Please keep making the system secure, and keep removing rights from the users, because the users prove over and over again that they cannot be trusted with anything"

You see where I am going. If you only optimise for security, then you remove all the freedom. But we obviously want freedom. So it's a compromise.

Now this compromise is a choice, and different systems can make different compromises. The freedom I want is the freedom to choose my system. I want to be able to install GrapheneOS on my phone. Complaining about macOS not being Linux would be weird: if I want Linux, I use Linux. If I use macOS, well then I have to live with the design choices of Apple.
by marcd35 | 2026-01-29 14:07:03+00:00
Thank you for the blog post! I live in New England and always had the winter blues, always just assumed it was because of the weather but never acted on it.

About a week ago, there was a reddit post claiming it's actually geographically impossible for anyone where I live to produce enough Vitamin D naturally from the sun alone, due to the shorter days and lower angles throughout the day. I had no idea.
by bob1029 | 2026-01-29 14:07:54+00:00
I think that supercompensation is not as strong an effect in amateurs and that this is the #1 driver of injury.

I've long suspected there is a range of exertion that is net negative with regard to injury risk. No exercise at all means no exercise related risk. However, I strongly disagree that an extreme amount of exercise is the riskiest. I think the most dangerous level of exertion sits right in the middle somewhere. That special zone where you are grinding down your bones a bit but your hormones and other compensation mechanisms don't react accordingly because you aren't going quite hard enough.
by bborud | 2026-01-29 14:07:56+00:00
If this was the case you'd expect a noticeable difference between ICE cars and EVs in the statistics. According to the statistics, EVs are a mixed bag. For instance the Mini Cooper SE and Audi Q4 E-tron have very low defect rates (3.5-4%). Overall defect rates for 2-3 year old EVs seem to be close to that of ICE cars.

Since Tesla have very high failure rates they may be dragging the overall EV numbers down. So the sensible thing to do would probably be to look at reliability of EVs with the Teslas taken out of the dataset and look at what it does to the overall reliability numbers for EVs. I have a feeling it might nudge EVs ahead of ICE cars more clearly.
by sejje | 2026-01-29 14:07:56+00:00
> When Mom can dispatch the family car to pick up the kids from school.

Tech level, I agree--that's FSD.

But even if we had that tech today, Mom ain't sending the car without getting a police visit.

You can't even let your kids go to the local playground alone anymore. They're not going to be captain and first mate alone in a vehicle if the Karens have anything to say about it.
by armoredkitten | 2026-01-29 14:08:03+00:00
I don't really feel any sort of "phantom obligation" about RSS feeds. But I can certainly say it rings true in other areas of my life: Steam games, movies and TV shows, podcasts, books...everything is this growing list of things to do, that I keep adding to even as I'm trying to get through what I've already got in the queue. For video games, people often talk about their "backlog", as if it's important that they churn through all the games they've bought.

I have tried to remind myself in the past that literally nobody cares if I am behind on the TV shows I'm wanting to watch. Just me. So...I like the term "phantom obligation". I'll definitely tuck that away in my brain for later use.
by thyristan | 2026-01-29 14:08:20+00:00
Worn brake disks are a manufacturing problem. Nominally my VW needs new brake disks every 100Mm. Practically it needs new ones every 40Mm, because VW makes them from shitty steel that rusts and wears like hell, especially when there is salt on the roads in winter.

Some manufacturers use better steel and therefore have a longer disk lifetime.
by markstos | 2026-01-29 14:08:20+00:00
It depends on the intensity level. In the pandemic of 2020, I ran 26.2 mile runs at an easy effort for 5 weekends in row in the spring and 6 in the fall, generally with my easy effort getting faster as I went. Rather than the sequence of big runs wearing my out, I was getting stronger.

Now, if I had tried to run every one at "race pace", I would likely be trashed or injured by the end from insufficient recovery.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-29 14:08:31+00:00
> I won the SSRI lottery I guess,

From reading internet comments you’d think so, but your experience is more typical than anything.

Depression is deceptively common. As a consequence, SSRI use over a lifetime is also more common than most would assume. Any drug will come with negative side effects for some portion of its users. Multiply that by the high number of people who have ever taken an SSRI and it starts to become obvious why there are so many Internet anecdotes about SSRIs not working.

Meanwhile, most people who take SSRIs successfully aren’t going around and advertising the fact that they’re on psychiatric medications. There is less stigma now than there was in the past, but it’s still not something most people like to broadcast to the world. For patients on long term SSRIs in stable states, the SSRI is just a routine thing they take in the background and don’t really think about. There’s no reason for it to come up in conversation.
by bayindirh | 2026-01-29 14:08:57+00:00
Yes, but if a car is using regenerative braking 99% of the time, the car should track this and use brakes occasionally to "polish and maintain" them. It's not hard, and if the pads are running out, it should warn the user. Tesla does neither AFAIK.

You should check your tires, yes. At least while changing from winter to summer and vice versa, however if the cars torque profile is too aggressive and it's eating tires, you should note it at the user's manual that thread wear should be checked more frequently with respect to other cars.

> how is that to do with Tesla manufacturing standard?

My friend's Toyota Auris needs new discs every 100,000KM, new pads every 60,000KM. I change discs around 60,000KM (heavier car, mostly rush-hour traffic, hilly city, automatic transmission), and never failed an inspection w.r.t. braking power.
by padjo | 2026-01-29 14:09:01+00:00
An 18% failure rate on a one year old model Y under "suspension and steering". This is absolutely shocking.

For comparison the ID4 had 0 failures at this age for this category, and for a much larger sample size.

I assume these are all taxis as they're being tested so early. This implies there a ton of unsafe privately owned Model Ys on the road.
by senordevnyc | 2026-01-29 14:09:21+00:00
Yeah, but your "cameras" also have a bunch of capabilities that hardware cameras don't, plus they're mounted on a flexible stalk in the cockpit that can move in any direction to update the view in real-time.

Also, humans kinda suck at driving. I suspect that in the endgame, even if AI can drive with cameras only, we won't want it to. If we could upgrade our eyeballs and brains to have real-time 3D depth mapping information as well as the visual streams, we would.
by palata | 2026-01-29 14:09:29+00:00
> What I'm not ok with is not being able to flash whatever I want to run on it later without unlocking and wiping.

The wiping is a security feature: if someone installs a new random system ("random" being defined as "not signed by the same entity"), then they can modify the system in order to attack it. The whole secure boot idea is worthless if you allow that.
by ahartmetz | 2026-01-29 14:09:45+00:00
>I think that technological measures cannot fix a social problem

The absence of technological measures used to implement societal problems totally does help though. Just look at social media.

I fear the outlaw evil maid or other hypothetical attackers (good old scare-based sales tactics) much less than already powerful entities (enterprises, states) lawfully encroaching on my devices using your technology. So, I don't care about "misunderstandings" of the TPM or whatever other wall of text you are spewing to divert attention.
by stetrain | 2026-01-29 14:09:56+00:00
They built production capacity for 125,000-250,000 units per year. They are selling around 20,000 units per year.

It was supposed to cost $39k at the low end and have 500 miles of range at the high end. This drove the hype and high reservation numbers.

In reality it costs $79k and offers up to 325 miles of range. Doubling the price is going to significantly limit the reach of the product.
by dig1 | 2026-01-29 14:10:22+00:00
> it assumes companies that are replacing labor with LLMs are willing to pay as much as (or at least a significant fraction of) the labor costs they are replacing.

And it’s worth reiterating that most (all) of these LLM/AI providers are currently operating at significant losses. If they aim to become even modestly profitable, prices will have to increase substantially.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-29 14:10:46+00:00
That’s a large enough error that it calls the rest of the writing into question, in my opinion.

Also, be careful taking 5000 IU/day of Vitamin D. I did this for a few months and it was enough to send my blood levels over the top of the range, even in winter.

Too much Vitamin D is not good for you. The supplement fans have gone too far in recommending too high of dosages. My doctor said she’s seeing a lot of people with excessively high Vitamin D levels now that it has become popular.
by Finnucane | 2026-01-29 14:10:56+00:00
This was pretty much inevitable. The real death-blow was the collapse of the independent distributors. The effect of centralized buying and distribution was fewer slots for 'midlist' books and more slots for lead titles, so for most books, it was harder to push out enough copies to actually make any money. Print runs declined and unit costs rose. It was easier to sell trade paperbacks in traditional bookstores, then ebooks came and ate the bottom of the market.
by cameronh90 | 2026-01-29 14:11:08+00:00
I suffer from severe crippling OCD and anxiety. Years of therapy and psychoanalysis have failed to find any cause, and, if anything, made it worse. The best explanation has been it's probably because I'm autistic, and these things tend to happen to autistics.

Luckily, sertraline was an almost instant cure.

I can come off it for periods, but it tends to reoccur after a while. So, it does mean I have to take a drug indefinitely, but is that really a problem? It turns my life into one worth living.

The reason we can't take sleeping pills daily is because they stop working in fairly short order. But if, like antidepressants (typically), they didn't lose their effectiveness over time, would there even be a problem with using sleeping pills if you had trouble sleeping?
by re-thc | 2026-01-29 14:11:08+00:00
The point is it doesn't work like that. Check out all the special purpose vehicles, loans and fund raises going around in that space. Deals claiming for $x billion in funds only got millions + GPU rentals in special deals. And the offering of those deals still hinges on the top 3 said customers buying to float things up.

i.e. whether you go for "only inference" or "both" it'll work out similar somewhere.
by markstos | 2026-01-29 14:11:45+00:00
I've been running about the same amount of years, starting at age 38, including sometimes as many as 14 runs of 26.2 or longer in a year.

Keeping 80% or more of the volume at an easy effort is part of that. I think diet helps, because depending on what you eat, you are could be contributing to more or less inflammation in the body, which both could make injury more likely and recovery slower. I eat whole-food, plant-based.

I expect a good stretching routine would also aid injury prevention, but I've been pretty lousy about that most of the time.
by lurk2 | 2026-01-29 14:12:18+00:00
> Its cultural diversity is a plus for most people

Cultural diversity is not a draw. Africa, Latin America, and Central Asia are all culturally and ethnically diverse. No one moves to any of these places.

The primary draw of a city like London is economic prosperity, which is ironically usually only made possible by ethnic homogeneity. This is the case in Britain’s former colonies (USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand), China, Saudi Arabia, etc.

Target cities become “culturally diverse” due to the arrival of migrant labor. The migrant labor itself is not seeking this diversity out for its own sake. New migrants have their movements facilitated by networks of already-landed migrants, who provide knowledge of the immigration process, employment opportunities, and material assistance to their coethnics.

These people are not moving to London because they can find people like themselves there (there are already plenty in their country of origin), nor are they moving to London because they want to experience other cultures (this was a form of conspicuous consumption that went out of fashion years ago). At best you could say they hope that the relative ethnic heterogeneity will distract from their own foreignness, but that still doesn’t amount to being drawn to diversity.