MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: PureBee – A software-defined GPU running Llama 3.2 1B at 3.6 tok/SEC
by benryanx | 2026-02-23 21:45:36+00:00
This started as a question about simulation theory: if a GPU is just rules applied to a grid in parallel, do you actually need the silicon?

Turns out, no.

PureBee is a complete GPU defined as a software specification — Memory, Engine, Instruction Set, Runtime. It runs Llama 3.2 1B inference at 3.6 tok/sec on a single CPU core. The model answers questions correctly.

What makes it different from llama.cpp or WebLLM:

The WASM compute kernel is constructed byte-by-byte in JavaScript at runtime. No Emscripten. No Rust. No compiler. No build step. The binary that runs the Q4 SIMD matrix math is itself readable JavaScript. Every layer of the stack — including the thing executing the math — is auditable source.

The progression from first principles:

```

Baseline JS 0.08 tok/sec

Typed arrays 0.21 tok/sec

WASM kernels 0.70 tok/sec

Q4 quantization 1.30 tok/sec

SIMD 3.00 tok/sec

Worker threads 3.60 tok/sec

```

45× total. Single CPU core. Zero npm dependencies.

The claim isn't that this is faster than a real GPU. The claim is that a GPU was never the hardware — it was always the math. The hardware is just one way to run the math fast. PureBee is another way. If that's true, it changes where inference can run.

To run:

```

git clone https://github.com/PureBee/purebee

node download.js llama3

node --max-old-space-size=4096 chat-llama3.js

```

Requires Node.js ≥ 20. The heap flag is not optional.

Licensed FSL-1.1 (converts to Apache 2.0 in 2 years). Free for personal and internal use.

Happy to go deep on the WASM binary construction, the Q4 nibble layout, or the SharedArrayBuffer weight cache that runs a 4.5GB model in 1.8GB of RAM.
by dupontcyborg | 2026-02-23 21:45:42+00:00
I've been spending some time on a side project, `numpy-ts`, which is a TypeScript numerical library inspired by NumPy. It aims to bring the same NumPy API (where possible) to Node.js/Browser/Deno/Bun with full .npy/.npz compatibility (read & write).

It currently has 476 of NumPy's 507 functions implemented, all cross-validated against NumPy with >6,000 validation tests. The lib is about 93 kB minified+gzipped and has zero dependencies, and it's fully tree-shakeable.

Since it's written in TypeScript, it's on average 15x slower than NumPy. I just tagged 1.0.0, and will begin performance optimization soon (both algorithmic and selective WASM for fused kernels).

You can try it in your browser here: https://numpyts.dev/playground

Edit: disclaimer that this was a mix of hand-written code (API, deterministic tooling) and AI-assisted (functional implementations, validation test implementations).
by programd | 2026-02-23 21:45:42+00:00
Thomas Wake: "Hark Triton, hark! Bellow, bid our father the Sea King rise from the depths full foul in his fury! Black waves teeming with salt foam to smother this young mouth with pungent slime, to choke ye, engorging your organs til' ye turn blue and bloated with bilge and brine and can scream no more - only when he, crowned in cockle shells with slitherin' tentacle tail and steaming beard take up his fell be-finned arm, his coral-tine trident screeches banshee-like in the tempest and plunges right through yer gullet, bursting ye - a bulging bladder no more, but a blasted bloody film now and nothing for the harpies and the souls of dead sailors to peck and claw and feed upon only to be lapped up and swallowed by the infinite waters of the Dread Emperor himself - forgotten to any man, to any time, forgotten to any god or devil, forgotten even to the sea, for any stuff for part of Winslow, even any scantling of your soul is Winslow no more, but is now itself the sea!"

Ephraim Winslow: "Alright, have it your way. I like your cookin'."
by janalsncm | 2026-02-23 21:45:53+00:00
Some problems are simply undecideable: if for identical inputs the desired output varies wildly, you simply need more information. There is no algorithm that will help you.

Sensors or intelligence, at the end of the day it’s an engineering problem which doesn’t require pure solutions. Sometimes sensors break and cameras get covered in mud.

The problem is maintaining an acceptable level of quality at the lowest possible price, and at some point you spend more money on clever algorithms and researchers than a lidar.
by lavezzi | 2026-02-23 21:45:53+00:00
it's more than just that:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacheverson/2026/02/09/trump-st...

> Binance holds about 87% of USD1, the stablecoin issued by a Trump family crypto venture—a greater concentration than any other major stablecoin has at a single exchange, roughly $4.7 billion of the $5.4 billion total supply.
by nicoburns | 2026-02-23 21:45:57+00:00
> But it’s still too many dependencies and too slow.

I definitely agree that it's too slow. I just don't think the cause is "too many dependencies" because I've compiled Rust codebases with twice as many dependencies in half the time!

It seems to produce a 94MB binary. So it may be partly that there are some very big dependencies. But the amount of compilation time that ends up in the top-level crate (even with LTO disabled) also makes me feel like this must be triggering a compiler bug. Either that or using far too many generics.
by JohnMakin | 2026-02-23 21:46:13+00:00
Due to existing health concerns, I self isolated in my home from the start of the covid outbreak in 2020, until spring 2021 when the first vaccines became broadly available. I only recall leaving a handful of times to pick up medicine when delivery wasn't an option, but other than that, almost no venturing into the outside world other than the few steps on my front porch to grab deliveries and groceries.

I learned a lot about myself. I love being alone, more than most people, but after a few months I did start to feel I was going a bit crazy. This was made worse by the fact at that point in my life I had a big drop off in friend groups (mostly people getting married/moving/having kids/etc.) My health and hygiene definitely suffered. What was the tipping point for me, and I'm still unsure to this day, but I felt I was having auditory hallucinations (mostly hearing my name). I ended up joining a group video-chat app that pitched itself as unofficial group therapy, and things improved a lot. It was this way I learned I'm not actually an extreme introvert like my doctor liked to tell me I was, and consider myself far more extroverted than I used to since this experience. Since then I make an effort to socialize once a week even if I really don't feel like it.
Show HN: Crash-safe job queue – lease-expiry race and fencing fix
by kritibehl | 2026-02-23 21:46:28+00:00
Most lease-based job queues look correct until you test them adversarially.

I built Faultline, a PostgreSQL-backed distributed job execution engine using:

- Lease-based claims
- Retry scheduling
- Idempotent side effects via a ledger table
- A deterministic race reproduction harness

The interesting part wasn’t the happy path.
It was the lease-expiry race.

Setup:

- Lease TTL: 1s
- Worker A sleeps 2.5s (forces expiry)
- Barrier enforces deterministic ordering
- Worker B reclaims the job

Structured trace:

{"event": "lease_acquired", "job_id": "...", "token": 1, "forced": true}
{"event": "execution_started", "job_id": "...", "token": 1}
{"event": "lease_acquired", "job_id": "...", "token": 2, "forced": true}
{"event": "execution_started", "job_id": "...", "token": 2}
{"event": "stale_write_blocked", "job_id": "...", "stale_token": 1, "current_token": 2, "reason": "token_mismatch"}
{"event": "worker_exit", "reason": "stale"}
{"event": "worker_exit", "reason": "success"}

Worker A believed it still owned the lease.
Worker B legitimately reclaimed it.

Without fencing, Worker A could still attempt mutation.

UNIQUE(job_id) alone is insufficient — it prevents duplicate rows but does not encode lease epoch ownership.

The fix:

- Add `fencing_token BIGINT`
- Increment atomically on every lease acquisition
- Bind side effects to `(job_id, fencing_token)`
- Enforce a write gate before mutation

Claim logic:

UPDATE jobs
SET state='running',
lease_owner=$1,
lease_expires_at = NOW() + make_interval(secs => $2),
fencing_token=fencing_token+1,
updated_at=NOW()
WHERE id=$3
AND (
state='queued'
OR (state='running' AND lease_expires_at < NOW())
)
RETURNING id, fencing_token;

Lease validity depends solely on DB time (`NOW()`); workers never use local clocks for correctness.

Guarantees under forced expiry + reclaim:

- No duplicate side effects
- No stale worker mutation
- Deterministic reproduction of the race
- DB-enforced epoch ownership via `(job_id, fencing_token)`

The harness forces this race deterministically via barrier gating and forced TTL expiry.

Curious how others handle fencing under lease-based execution — specifically how teams handle fencing token overflow at scale and whether renewal logic changes the fencing guarantee.
by nine_k | 2026-02-23 21:46:39+00:00
Better languages do not necessarily mean better architectural decisions, or even better performance, unless the humans pressure for that and burn tokens on that. With no engineer in the room, more technical issues will be left unnoticed and unaddressed.

Compare it to visual arts. With a guidance form an artist, AI tools can help create wonderful pictures. Without such guidance, or at least expert prompting, a typical one-shot image from Gemini is... well, at best recognizable as such.
by carshodev | 2026-02-23 21:46:50+00:00
Unblockable yes, untrackable no. Also portable is the main ability of crypto.

The reason that this could be found out is because every transaction is recorded so it can be linked back through the chain once it hits another exchange that is KYC'd.

If I have a gold watch and I wear it through the airport go to turkey melt it down and give it to an iranian, then buy a fake watch and return home noone will every know that this transaction took place.

This would be 100% impossible to track in any reasonable manner. If I went to an exchange transfered bitcoin to a person then they spent this bitcoin in a way that linked it to their identity this would provide a full audit trail that would link me to that person. Also this audit trail could NEVER be removed or altered.

There are ways to use bitcoin in an untracable manner just like gold, you can have a cold wallet and transfer the keys to someone else. The cold wallet password could be only memorized and thus have no physical trace and no transaction record could take place whatsoever, but this is the OPPOSITE of what an exchange does.

Also cash and bank systems are not as resistant, they can fail, be hacked, be altered, people can use shell companies and fake identities.

Some cryptos like monero try and hide the transaction path but even this crypto has some vulnerabilities making linking it to people possible in some cases.
by kayge | 2026-02-23 21:46:56+00:00
Yep, just a little more context and I'm sure all/most of the models would do just fine. And sure, most average+ intelligence adults whose first language is English (probably) don't need this, but they're not the target audience for the instructions :)

"The 'car wash' is a building I need to drive through."

or

"The 'car wash' is a bottle of cleaning fluid that I left at the end of my driveway."

https://i5.walmartimages.com/seo/Rain-x-Foaming-Car-Wash-Con...
by CobrastanJorji | 2026-02-23 21:47:21+00:00
Flock was valued at $7.5 billion right last year, and it's probably worth more now. It's absolutely one of YCombinator's success stories.

YCombinator's goal is to make a lot of money by causing there to be more startups, and therefore more successor startups. "Make the world a better place" is not one of their success metrics. They're investors, not altruists.
by dbcurtis | 2026-02-23 21:47:24+00:00
It is easy to underestimate how much one relies on senses other than vision. You hear many kinds of noises that indicate road surface, traffic, etc. You feel road surface imperfections telegraphed through the steering wheel. You feel accelerations in your butt, and conclude loss of traction from response of the accelerator and motion of the vehicle. Secondly, the human eye has much more dynamic range than any camera. And is mounted on an exquisite PTZ platform. Then turning to the model -- you are classifying obstacles and agents at a furious rate, and making predictions about the behavior of the agents. So, in part I agree that the models need work, but the models need to be fed, and IMHO computer vision is not a sufficient sensor feed.

Consider an exhaust condensation cloud coming from a vehicle's tail pipe -- it could be opaque to a camera/computer-vision system. Can you model your way out of that? Or is it also useful to do sensor fusion of vision data with radar data (cloud is transparent) and others like lidar, etc. A multi-modal sensor feed is going to simplify the model, which in the end translates into compute load.
by tinfoilhatter | 2026-02-23 21:47:25+00:00
Sue for peace? All wars are a racket meant to benefit the military industrial complex and corporations - Major General Smedley D. Butler spelled this out for all of us quite clearly in his book War is a Racket.

The war in Ukraine is no exception, and has been in the works for decades (since the collapse of the soviet union at the very least, if not longer). IFM structural adjustments and World Bank loans destabilized the nation. When Ukraine wanted Russia to bankroll their loan instead of the IMF, a CIA-backed coup known as Euromaidan followed and kicked the entire conflict off in 2013/14. Again - I'm not excusing Russia here, obviously they escalated the situation with the invasion, but wars can't be viewed in a vacuum.

I know that most people don't want to discuss the actual reasons the war started and is being fought, and instead want to go with the reductionist and feel-good, Russia bad Ukraine good logic. As I said in another comment, there are no good guys in corrupt and evil wars and the war in Ukraine is definitely one of those.
by 7777777phil | 2026-02-23 21:47:27+00:00
The "citizen developer" framing assumes AI flattens the skill distribution but the data says the opposite. Next-token prediction and RLHF typicality bias mean AI converges to the mean, so domain experts get more valuable, not less.

Centaur setups keep beating AI-only on things like Humanity's Last Exam. I wrote about this: https://philippdubach.com/posts/a-bull-case/

Also worth noting the Jevons paradox angle. AI doesn't reduce engineering workload, it expands it. 77% of employees in one survey said AI added to their work: https://philippdubach.com/posts/does-ai-mean-the-demand-on-l...
by raddan | 2026-02-23 21:47:27+00:00
Btw, there is a lovely third party replacement for the TI99/4a video chip that lets you output VGA. It’s a major life improvement if you are seriously using it. I Dremeled my case but you can route the ribbon cable to avoid it if you’d prefer not to modify anything. Happy to send you a link if you don’t already know about it.
by arijun | 2026-02-23 21:47:58+00:00
> I've always wondered if Tesla's issues with FSD were a sensor problem or an intelligence problem

Even if it’s an intelligence problem, it’s possible that machine intelligence will not get to the point where it can resolve anytime soon, whereas more sensors might circumvent the issue completely. It’s like with Musk’s big claim (that humans use camera only to drive); the question is not if a good enough brain will be able to drive vision-only, but if Tesla can make that brain.
by gregcohn | 2026-02-23 21:48:04+00:00
While points 1 and 2 are indeed desirable, point 3 should be moot given we have a constitutional right to privacy and freedom from unreasonable search and seizures.

The combination of ubiquitous scanners, poor data controls on commercially owned date, and law enforcement access without proper warrants compounds to a situation that for many rational people would fail the test of being fair play under the Fourth Amendment. For similar reasons, for example, it has been held by the Supreme Court that installing a GPS tracker on a vehicle and monitoring it long-term without a warrant is a 4A violation (US v Jones). Similar cases have held that warrants are needed for cellphone location tracking.

So far, however, courts have not held Flock to the same standard -- or have at least held that Flock's data does not rise to the same standard.

I personally think this is a mistake and is a first-order reason we have this problem, and would prefer the matter to stop there rather than rely on ethics. (Relying on ethics brought us pollution in rivers, PFAS and Perc in the ground, and so on.)

Given the state of politics and the recent behavior of the Supreme Court, however, I would not hold my breath for this to change soon.
by fernandopj | 2026-02-23 21:48:44+00:00
I'd like to point out that some online chess tournaments, mostly using rapid and bullet times, have a "berserk" option pre-start, where the player taking it halves their allotted time bank, for double the winning points.

It's not a bluff, since information is still 100% open to both players, but it changes dynamic a lot.
by pandaman | 2026-02-23 21:48:55+00:00
West Berlin was a part of Germany under US/UK/French occupation, I have not heard anybody referring to it as being "behind the iron curtain" before. What would be the reason for the above countries to completely erase multiple hijackings of Aeroflot planes from history? While still popularizing other hijackings, to the point of making a Hollywood movie about the LOT flight I've mentioned [1]. And why the Soviet Union would have joined the West in this conspiracy, while being open about other hijackings (mostly attempted)?

The story is ridiculous on its face: why fly to West Berlin where you'd need to get another flight to get anywhere? The popular targets of hijackers in the USSR were Turkey, Israel and Sweden. "Spetsnaz" is not some organization, it's just an abbreviation of "special designation" similar to English "spec-op", multiple military and law enforcement organizations have their own specnaz as they had in the USSR. Aeroflot was not one of them though, its flights were protected by the "air militia" - a department of the Ministry of the Interior, which was also in charge of the airports security. And, judging by multiple hijacking attempts, there were rarely armed agents on the plane or they rarely decided to engage, which makes sense, since fights on a flying plane would put lives of all passengers into mortal danger. Putting TWO teams of armed soldiers on each plane is something only an LLM could hallucinate in my humble opinion.

1. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095415
by mikestorrent | 2026-02-23 21:48:58+00:00
> give parents strong monitoring and restriction tools

The problem is that it's bloody hard to actually do this. I'm in a war with my 7yo about youtube; the terms of engagement are, I can block it however I want from the network side, and if he can get around it, he can watch.

Well, after many successful months of DNS block, he discovered proxies. After blocking enough of those to dissuade him, he discovered Firefox DNS-over-HTTPS, making it basically impossible to block him without blocking every Cloudflare IP or something. Would love to be wrong about that, but it seems like even just blocking a site is basically impossible without putting nanny-ware right on his machine; and that's only a bootable Linux USB stick away from being removed unless I lock down the BIOS and all that, and at that point it's not his computer and the rules of engagement have been voided.

For now I'm just using "policy" to stop him, but IMO the tools that parents have are weak unless you just want your kid to be an iPad user and never learn how a computer works at all.
by carshodev | 2026-02-23 21:49:05+00:00
Has the lack of crypto ever stopped this from happening? Look up cases of gold bars being found in senators houses, those are actually MUCH less tracable.

Shitcoins and Shitstocks(some SPACs) do allow of a legal way to "give" others money through the transfer of value in a way that is technically legal. This again is not crypto specific though.
by seabass-labrax | 2026-02-23 21:49:08+00:00
I'm really looking forward to playing this! The new logic in Alpha 27, where units don't try to capture enemy structures by default, caught me out, but it was fun getting familiar with siege engines until I worked that out.

As for the new capture attack for citizens, I imagine this could lead to some really risky endgame strategies where a player moves citizens from their base to attack the enemy's supporting buildings while the enemy is distracted.
by red-iron-pine | 2026-02-23 21:49:09+00:00
> while others still keep getting recruiter messages on LinkedIn and can get a new position in a matter of weeks.

many of those are blasts, and the jobs they are hiring for are vaporware.

i wasted a lot of time as a younger worker thinking that headhunter and recruiter chats on linkedin were worth the trouble.

make no mistake, sometimes they are, but for easily 50% of tech workers they're a waste of time
by fc417fc802 | 2026-02-23 21:49:41+00:00
Is that really the case? It seems to me that the vast majority in the US can fairly easily afford a fair bit of material luxury, mostly because material luxuries have become incredibly cheap (by historical standards).

The trouble is at least in the high population areas (AFAICT) a huge swath of "average" people seem to be stuck living life on a paycheck-to-paycheck basis, renting, no prospect of property ownership, minimal to zero retirement savings, no realistic way to afford children, etc. Not abnormal by historic or global standards but very abnormal when compared to the past ~150 years of US history.
by dymk | 2026-02-23 21:50:23+00:00
Waymo claims its system, which uses a combination of LIDAR & vision, resolves objects up to 500 meters away

https://waymo.com/blog/2024/08/meet-the-6th-generation-waymo...

This company claims their LIDAR works conservatively at 250m, and up to 750m depending on reflectivity

https://www.cepton.com/driving-lidar/reading-lidar-specs-par...
by beAbU | 2026-02-23 21:50:29+00:00
Hah, I wonder how thick a German, Dutch or Afrikaans dictionary would be if it included all possible spaceless compound words. Literally any concept can be compounded together to make a new word.

Roovleisslaghuisinspekteur =

Rooi = red

Vleis = meat

Slag = butcher

Huis = house

Inspekteur = inspector

"Inspector who controls the quality of red meat in butcheries"