MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bicepjai | 2026-01-07 06:28:01+00:00
Hooker’s argument lands for me because it ties the technical scaling story to institutional incentives: as progress depends more on massive training runs, it becomes capital-intensive, less reproducible and more secretive; so you get a compute divide and less publication.

I’m trying to turn that into something testable with a simple constraint: “one hobbyist GPU, one day.” If meaningful progress is still possible under tight constraints, it supports the idea that we should invest more in efficiency/architecture/data work, not just bigger runs.

Disclosure: my proposed experiments: https://ohgodmodels.xyz/

Regarding this paragraph
>> 3.3 New algorithmic techniques compensate for compute.
Progress over the last few years has been as much due to algorithmic improvements as it has been due to compute. This includes extending pre-training with instruction finetuning to teach models instruction following ..., model distillation using synthetic data from larger more performant "teachers" to train highly capable, smaller "students" ..., chain-of-thought reasoning ..., increased context-length ..., retrieval augmented generation ...
and preference training to align models with human feedback ...

I would consider algorithmic improvements to be the following
1. architecture like ROPE, MLA
2. efficiency using custom kernels

The errors in the paper
1. Transformers for language modeling (Vaswani et al., 2023). => this shd be 2017
by esseph | 2026-01-07 06:28:36+00:00
I was probably 16 or 17 at the time when napster (himself) was hanging out on efnet/irc and working on the program that became Napster. It was wild to see that period play out like it did with a front row seat. That 98ish-2000 and early 2001 era felt like we were on the cusp of so many things with just cool computer technologies that were coming of age. And then 9/11 happened, and everybody's mood soured for quite awhile.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-07 06:28:40+00:00
> Why is that funny? What company gives you unlimited resources?

Anthropic has raised tens of billions of dollars of funding.

Their number of employees is in the thousands. This isn't like Google.

Claude Code is what they're developing. The company is obviously going to encourage them to use it as much as possible.

Limiting how much the Claude Code lead can use Claude Code would be funny because their lead dev would have to stop mid-day and wait for his token quota window to reset before he can continue developing their flagship coding product. Not going to happen.

I'm strangely fascinated by the reaction in the comments, though. A lot of people here must have worked in oddly restrictive corporate environments to even think that a company like this would limit how much their own employees can use the company's own product to develop their own product.
by m132 | 2026-01-07 06:28:41+00:00
All boils down to what kind of DPI you're trying to work around, but generally the most common encrypted or otherwise difficult to process protocols strike me as the most preferable.

RTP isn't a bad choice, especially the WebRTC flavor of it:

- it's UDP; there's no need to worry avoid the TCP meltdown

- it's most commonly used for peer-to-peer and PBX communication; packets going in and out, from and to random IPs are expected

- high bandwidth RTP traffic is normal, so are high irregularities

- it most often carries video; huge room for stenography

- WebRTC makes encryption mandatory

I've come across corporate networks that do block non-intranet WebRTC, however this probably isn't feasible at the Internet scale.

Other good choices are QUIC and WebSockets (assuming your network doesn't do MitM), and SSH, which by default comes with strong protection against MitM and actually has SOCKS5 tunneling built into the most popular implementations (try `ssh -D`). SSH is what some of my friends successfully use to bypass the Great Firewall.

That being said, the shift of client-to-server SMTP from a common part of everyday internet traffic to something rather esoteric may have created some potential for firewall misconfigurations, and those might result in it being passed with minimal inspection. All depends on your particular firewall in the end.
by zelon88 | 2026-01-07 06:28:47+00:00
To answer your question; it helps to explain what the upgrade process entails.

In the case of Linux DKMS updates: DKMS is re-compiling your installed kernel modules to match the new kernel. Sometimes a kernel update will also update the system compiler. In that instance it can be beneficial for performance or stability to have all your existing modules recompiled with the new version of the compiler. The new kernel comes with a new build environment, which DKMS uses to recompile existing kernel modules to ensure stability and consistency with that new kernel and build system.

Also, kernel modules and drivers may have many code paths that should only be run on specific kernel versions. This is called 'conditional compilation' and it is a technique programmers use to develop cross platform software. Think of this as one set of source code files that generates wildly different binaries depending on the machine that compiled it. By recompiling the source code after the new kernel is installed, the resulting binary may be drastically different than the one compiled by the previous kernel. Source code compiled on a 10 year old kernel might contain different code paths and routines than the same source code that was compiled on the latest kernel.

Compiling source code is incredibly taxing on the CPU and takes significantly longer when CPU usage is throttled. Compiling large modules on extremely slow systems could take hours. Managing hardware health and temperatures is mostly a hardware level decision controlled by firmware on the hardware itself. That is usually abstracted away from software developers who need to be able to be certain that the machine running their code is functional and stable enough to run it. This is why we have "minimum hardware requirements."

Imagine if every piece of software contained code to monitor and manage CPU cooling. You would have software fighting each other over hardware priorities. You would have different systems for control, with some more effective and secure than others. Instead the hardware is designed to do this job intrinsically, and developers are free to focus on the output of their code on a healthy, stable system. If a particular system is not stable, that falls on the administrator of that system. By separating the responsibility between software, hardware, and implementation we have clear boundaries between who cares about what, and a cohesive operating environment.
by dang | 2026-01-07 06:28:55+00:00
HN hasn't changed in this respect in a good 10 years, and no one who sees what gets posted here need fear that criticism is verboten. It isn't, and will never be. We do need to do something about shallow cynicism though (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46515507 from earlier today, if curious).
by iqp | 2026-01-07 06:29:07+00:00
Beautifully written, a joy to read but, sadly, it feels like something from a bygone era. Nobody chants "Developers! Developers! Developers!" anymore now that everything is dominated by AI, and the joy of coding is gone too. People like Steve Yegge, who I used to aspire to be like back in 2006, when I started my career as a developer, now writes about how he uses 10+ concurrent LLM agents to code, review, and ship & doesn't even bother to even look at the code being produced anymore. Just today, I implemented 2 features using Cursor & GPT-5.1 Codex-Max & I didn't have to write a single line of code myself. But it felt wrong. It makes me think, "What am I even doing here - Why not just let the product manager prompt the LLM?".
by ngcc_hk | 2026-01-07 06:30:32+00:00
Olympus is one of the few camera (I literally have hundreds as this is my side hobby) I love to use. Until every time I want to change anything. As a guy who can do 8x10, gfx, 907x, z9 etc I still find the menu system totally confusing.

It is not the hardware, it is the software …
by tripletao | 2026-01-07 06:30:51+00:00
I think those optoisolators are indeed sold mostly for switching power supplies. That's probably why someone cared enough about aging to write an app note, since the ambient temperature is high there and the exact CTR matters more when it's in that analog feedback loop. I've also seen them for digital inputs in industrial control systems, where speeds are slow and the wires might be coming from far away on a noisy ground.

That said, I believe optical isolation is typical for these "data diode" applications, even between two computers in the same rack. I don't think it provides any security benefit, but it's cheap and customers expect it; so there's no commercial incentive to do anything else.
Show HN: Interactive visualizations of PostgreSQL internals(MVCC, B-trees, etc.)
by solo_leveller | 2026-01-07 06:31:11+00:00
I'm a frontend engineer who is learning Postgres and realized I couldn't hold the mental models in my head. So I built interactive visualizations for the concepts I found hardest to internalize.

15 episodes covering: pages and tuples, WAL, buffer cache, MVCC (why UPDATE doesn't block reads), B-tree traversal, query planning, isolation levels, lock queues, VACUUM, XID wraparound, connection pooling, replication, partitioning, and sharding.
by our79511 | 2026-01-07 06:32:00+00:00
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by jmyeet | 2026-01-07 06:32:45+00:00
This article reads like propaganda to keep the worker bees slaving away until they die. But I have a few things to say about this and Sergey Brin in particular.

In the early days, many considered Sergey Brin to be the soul or the conscience of Google. He was reportedly the driving force in Google originally pulling out of China rather than capitulating to the censorship regime [1]. This was also after the apparent state-sponsored hack of Google in China [2] so perhaps the motivations were mixed? I don't know.

But Sergey I think is a good example of someone for whom his creation outgrew him. I'm reminded of an old Jeff Atwood blog post where he quoted Accidental Empires [3]. Sergey was a commando. By 2010 Google needed an army. Now? Police.

GoogleX has Sergey's playground but if you look at the track record, possibly the only success I think is Waymo. Glass (mentioned in the article) was not a success and his affair with a subordinate also destroyed his marriage [4].

To me it felt like Sergey was drifting many years before he stepped away. His stepping away felt more like formalizing something that had already happened.

I'm not a billionaire. Not even close. Honestly, I think I'm glad about that because it seems like despite being surrounded with unimaginable wealth, many such people end up isolated and rudderless, desperately dsearching for meaning and connection. Or maybe that's just cope (from me).

The article mentions Gates and how he keeps busy with his philanthropy. Well, there's another piece of common ground between Gates and Brin: Jeffrey Epstein [5]. That's not intended as an implicit or explicit accusation of child predation by Gates or Brin or even of either having knowledge of such malfeasance, to be clear.

But even with a fraction of the DoJ's documents disclosed as well as from the Epstein estate, we can begin to paint a macabre picture of the connections between rich and powerful people that for some reason always seem to have Jeffrey Epstein at their nexus and that means something though we don't really know what.

Has Sergey had a substantial impact on Gemini? Will he? I have no idea. I do wonder if someone worth $100 billion really has the perspective and drive to move something like this. Google has a deep bench of talent and one thing Google is very good at is optimizing code that runs at scale by making their own networking, servers, racks, data centers, data center operating system (ie Borg) and code and efficiency is going to be a huge deal in the LLM space for the foreseeable future.

[1]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704266504575141...

[2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-11920616

[3]: https://blog.codinghorror.com/commandos-infantry-and-police/

[4]: https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2014/04/sergey-brin-amanda-...

[5]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/lolita-passports-and-m...
by renewiltord | 2026-01-07 06:33:00+00:00
It's insufficient on this site to be right, so I'd leave that aside. For months, referencing the Somali autism scam would have gotten you flagged reliably. Now, Tim Walz is not going to run for governor because of it. Things can be real and you can be downvoted.

There's a tweet that illustrates the idea, though the consequences on this site are minor:

> A black woman invented the telescope. You might disagree. You might even have some evidence to the contrary. But you have to ask yourself: is this really worth losing my job over? A black woman invented the telescope.
by globular-toast | 2026-01-07 06:34:18+00:00
Yeah, it's crazy. Imagine if you let people into your home every day to slap advertising posters on to your walls. This is obnoxious shit and I don't understand how people tolerate it.

I'm beginning to wonder if many people are not comfortable with simply being content. They actually want someone to come and tell them why they aren't happy. Ads do that for them.
by Mountain_Skies | 2026-01-07 06:38:12+00:00
Because the excesses are well documented and the proponents of it are constantly disingenuous about the issues that make it widely hated everywhere except in SV and in C-suites. It's at risk of being eliminated completely because those who abuse the system are spoiled brats that melt down over any hint of reform. When reform isn't possible, elimination becomes the only choice to make the excesses stop. Pretending not to understand this only makes it that much more likely that it will be eliminated entirely. The time for getting away with playing dumb is long gone. All it accomplishes is making the program even more hated.

The temporary program from three decades ago to bring in some extra help until the industry could ramp up training programs to develop domestic talent isn't temporary after three decades and the industry has made clear as long as it exists, there will be no honest attempts at developing talent instead of going for the lowest cost global source. All of the above will of course fall on deaf ears, with all the usual intellectually dishonest deflections and outright lies being brandied about. This once again guarantees that reform will be impossible and elimination the only solution.
by zamadatix | 2026-01-07 06:38:19+00:00
Again, unless you're actually planning on sending "real" SMTP traffic to other "real" SMTP servers from your own "real" SMTP server operating on the same address, then getting put on SpamHaus (or other DNSBLs) for having the port open w/o rDNS or etc configured is irrelevant. Like you say, there is a decent chance your ISP just blocks the port anyways and makes such a setup unfeasible though, but that's why the readme says to host this on a VPS which allows the port.

Any time you have any externally open TCP port (home or VPS) you should expect to get scanned to shit by Shodan and millions of other bots. It doesn't matter if it's the default port for SFTP, DNS, SMTP, HTTP, Minecraft, or whatever - all of them are great targets for malicious actors and as soon as the bots detect one open port they'll scan everything on that IP harder. I once forgot to disable certain default enabled login types and failed connection/authentication logging when exposing SSH/SFTP externally and ended up with GBs of logs in just one week.
by dang | 2026-01-07 06:38:19+00:00
I hear you! I didn't read the entire article but I agree it doesn't exactly pattern-match to very good. We highly prefer articles that respect the reader's intelligence; they aren't always easy to come by.

The lede is that Sergey is back full-time at Google and I haven't happened to see any other post about that, let alone a good one. If there's a better article, we can consider changing the link.

(and in any case, people still should not be posting things like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46452725 to HN, no matter how bad an article is—so the moderation point stands.)
by p0w3n3d | 2026-01-07 06:38:31+00:00
Sent through Gemini to blur my monitor

Blurring is never the solution as it can be unblurred in most cases (look up Mr whirlwind). Also Gemini sounds like overkill for the task of burring in general. Inkscape and gimp can do it for free (providing that you have a computer, not an iPad for example)
by dagss | 2026-01-07 06:38:45+00:00
E.g., when coding they are solving "novel, unsolved problems" related to coding problems set up.

So I will assume you mean within maths, science etc?

Well 99.9% of humans cannot solve novel, unsolved problems in those fields.

Humans spend years getting to a place where a few does that.

Meanwhile LLMs are constrained by their context windows. And their "thought processes" are not several orders of magnitude quicker than humans.

If LLMs get 1000x as large context window and get to sit and think with themselves for a full year, it does not seem out of the question they could come out with novel research?

I am mainly interested in the question "will LLMs in ten years have replaced a lot of human jobs" and in THAT context I will say there is a good chance LLMs are reasoning as well as humans.

For other kinds of tasks, at least larger context windows and advances on context management and the agent loop is needed first.

My point is that how LLMs fundamentally work isn't to me objectively obviously qualitatively different from humans.

What I would say is the big difference isn't lack of reasoning, but that LLMs cannot learn. The are trained once, and that is it. Obviously that training isn't good enough to solve novel math problems. But I do not think it is for lack of some "reasoning" quality, you may not be able to prove that humans possess such a quality?
by cookiengineer | 2026-01-07 06:38:48+00:00
Well, agents can't discover bypass attacks because they don't have memory. That was what DNCs [1] (Differentiable Neural Computers) tried to accomplish.

Correlating scan metrics with analytics is btw a great task for DNCs and what they are good at due to how their memory works. Not so much though at understanding branch logic and their consequences.

I currently believe that forensic investigations will change post LLMs, because they're very good at translating arbitrary bytecode, assembly, netasm, intel asm etc syntax to example code (in any language).

It doesn't have to be 100% correct, that's why LLMs can be really helpful for the discovery phase after an incident. Check out the ghidra MCP server which is insane to see real-time [2]

[1] https://github.com/JoergFranke/ADNC

[2] https://github.com/LaurieWired/GhidraMCP
by strbean | 2026-01-07 06:38:49+00:00
> The early web very quickly gave rise to curated directories of information and stopped working on word of mouth.

Weren't those better before ads got involved?

> Web rings were a thing

Aren't those literally word of mouth?

> Otherwise you get things like youtube "review" channels that are just paid reviews.

That would be illegal under the laws we are discussing, presumably.
by nerdsniper | 2026-01-07 06:39:16+00:00
Number of aircraft don’t seem to contribute to whether or not it’s classified as “hostilities”, much less “invasion”. Is this ridiculous ? Certainly. But it’s fairly par for the course in terms of politically complex issues in the USA.

The War Powers Resolution (WPR) of 1973 sets a 60-day limit for U.S. forces in hostilities without a formal declaration of war or congressional authorization, allowing for a potential 30-day extension for withdrawal, totaling 90 days, after which the President must remove troops.

Airstrikes on Libya (2011): Obama administration argued they did not need Congressional authorization because the operations did not constitute "hostilities" as defined by the War Powers Resolution. Therefore, the Obama administration argued, the 60-day clock never started.

The bombings involved 26,500 sorties over eight months, including 7,000 bombing sorties targeting Gaddafi's forces.
by breput | 2026-01-07 06:39:55+00:00
This feels like the desperate, look at me! post, which is the exact opposite of Andrej Karpathy's recent tweet[0] about feeling left behind as a programmer, as covered on Hacker News[1].

I guess would want to see how sustainable this 5 parallel AI effort is, and are there demonstrably positive outcomes. There are plenty of "I one-shotted this" examples of something that already (mostly) existed, which are very impressive in their own right, but I haven't seen a lot of truly novel creations.

[0] https://x.com/karpathy/status/2004607146781278521

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46395714
by Mountain_Skies | 2026-01-07 06:41:57+00:00
As Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

There is nothing you can post that will change this. The people openly abusing the intent of the program are growing too wealthy for them to even pretend to understand the negative effects. Don't expect them to accept there ever being any consequences for themselves for what they have done. Cutting them off cold turkey and enforcing the laws they've been breaking is the type of ice water shock they need to come back down to reality.
by tmerr | 2026-01-07 06:42:02+00:00
This is interesting to hear, but I don't understand how this workflow actually works.

I don't need 10 parallel agents making 50-100 PRs a week, I need 1 agent that successfully solves the most important problem.

I don't understand how you can generate requirements quicky enough to have 10 parallel agents chewing away at meaningful work. I don't understand how you can have any meaningful supervising role over 10 things at once given the limits of human working memory.

It's like someone is claiming they unlocked ultimate productivity by washing dishes, in parallel with doing laundry, and cleaning their house.

Likely I am missing something. This is just my gut reaction as someone who has definitely not mastered using agents. Would love to hear from anyone that has a similar workflow where there is high parallelism.