MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by connorbrinton | 2026-02-20 12:48:17+00:00
Speculative decoding takes advantage of the fact that it's faster to validate that a big model would have produced a particular sequence of tokens than to generate that sequence of tokens from scratch, because validation can take more advantage of parallel processing. So the process is generate with small model -> validate with big model -> then generate with big model only if validation fails

More info:

* https://research.google/blog/looking-back-at-speculative-dec...

* https://pytorch.org/blog/hitchhikers-guide-speculative-decod...
by randusername | 2026-02-20 12:49:01+00:00
Can you share some sources that give a more complete overview of it?

I got out my 4e Stroustrup book and checked the index, RAII only comes up when discussing resource management.

Interestingly, the verbatim introduction to RAII given is:

> ... RAII allows us to eliminate "naked new operations," that is, to avoid allocations in general code and keep them buried inside the implementation of well-behaved abstractions. Similarly "naked delete" operations should be avoided. Avoiding naked new and naked delete makes code far less error-prone and far easier to keep free of resource leaks

From the embedded standpoint, and after working with Zig a bit, I'm not convinced about that last line. Hiding heap allocations seems like it make it harder to avoid resource leaks!
by musebox35 | 2026-02-20 12:50:01+00:00
Similar trend in open text-to-image models: Flux.1 was 12B but now we have 6B models with much better quality. Qwen Image goes from 20B to 7B while merging the edit line and improving quality. Now that the cost of spot H200s at 140GB came down to A100 levels, you can finally try larger scale finetuning/distillation/rl with these models. Very promising direction for open tools and models if the trend continues.
by rounce | 2026-02-20 12:51:10+00:00
> It would refuse to chamfer or bevel edges for no apparent reason that other CAD software wouldn't have issues with.

I'm guessing you're trying to set a fillet which would completely consume one of the faces adjacent to the edge being filleted. In these cases I've found that a workaround is to make the fillet 0.001mm smaller than the size which would consume the entire face. You end up with a very very small amount of flat area but it's so small it doesn't show up during machining or 3d printing.
by aurareturn | 2026-02-20 12:51:28+00:00
It’s just dumb to think that one chip per model is their plan. They stated that their plan is to chain multiple chips together.

I was indeed wrong about 10 chips. I thought they would use llama 8B 16bit and a few thousand context size. It turns out, they used llama 8B 3bit with around 1k context size. That made me assume they must have chained multiple chips together since the max SRAM on TSMC n6 for reticle sized chip is only around 3GB.
by aurareturn | 2026-02-20 12:52:17+00:00
I was indeed wrong about 10 chips. I thought they would use llama 8B 16bit and a few thousand context size. It turns out, they used llama 8B 3bit with only 1k context size. That made me assume they must have chained multiple chips together since the max SRAM on TSMC n6 for reticle sized chip is only around 3GB.
by ii41 | 2026-02-20 12:52:19+00:00
> disparity between I can’t afford a car, and I will never be able to afford a car is vast

There's no disparity. Either way you're not going to own a car any time soon.

You're not freer when the legal system prevents you to do something because you don't have enough money than when the legal system prevents you from doing that thing for other reasons.
by Stratoscope | 2026-02-20 12:52:19+00:00
It's really quite easy to keep your fingers on the home row and avoid bending your wrists. I've done it for decades without any wrist problems.

It's even easier than the bent wrist position. Take a look at your hands. What is the shortest finger? Your pinky.

The straight wrist position lets you put your pinkies on the home row without the unnatural stretching that the bent wrist requires.

Try it: Keep your wrists straight and start by placing your index fingers and pinkies on the home row. Then let your middle and ring fingers settle into place.

You may notice that your middle and ring fingers arch higher than the index fingers and pinkies. That's fine!

Then start typing. If you're used to the bent wrists, the keys above and below the home row may not be where your muscle memory is used to. Keep at for a while and your fingers will re-learn where the keys are. Just don't let yourself slip back into the bent wrist position, and you will be back up to speed in no time.

Here's a comment from years ago with some crude ASCII art illustrating the difference:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20663540
Ask HN: How do you prevent retry cascades in LLM systems?
by amabito | 2026-02-20 12:52:48+00:00
We ran into a retry amplification issue in one of our LLM agents recently.

The provider returned 429s for a short period.
We had per-call retry limits in place.
We did NOT have containment at the request-chain level.

Because calls were nested and spread across multiple workers,
retries multiplied in ways we didn’t anticipate.

Per-call limits were not enough.

For those running LLM systems in production:

– Do you implement chain-level retry budgets?
– Shared circuit breaker state?
– Per-minute cost ceilings?
– Cost-based limits (tokens/$) rather than retry count?
– Or is exponential backoff usually sufficient in practice?

I’m trying to understand what actually works at scale,
beyond monitoring dashboards that tell you after the fact.
by ch4s3 | 2026-02-20 12:53:05+00:00
No my point is that the idea that the protests aren’t organic is deeply fucking ignorant and gross. It’s this whole line of thinking that everything turns on US action in the world, which is how 19 year olds think after they read Howard Zin or some essay by Chomsky for the first time. It’s unserious on top of robbing a lot of brave people of their own agency.
by dennysora | 2026-02-20 12:53:24+00:00
I’ve heard that, at companies developing AI right now, the core R&D staff are mostly ethnic Chinese. I’m not sure whether that’s accurate.

I’ve also heard that meetings are conducted in English, but that all private discussions happen in Chinese, so managers have no idea what they’re talking about.

That said, Chinese really is hard… In contrast, English is simple enough, so it’s more efficient to learn, and it’s easier to attract talent.

As for whether this “stifles” anything, I think China mainly relies on its own people. Most of the talent who go to China still speak English anyway.

On top of that, China’s speech control is genuinely annoying. Though I also find it annoying that Threads arbitrarily suppresses speech, too.

In areas like energy, semiconductors (Taiwan—although some production/deployment is currently in China, but it’s hard to say what might happen and when), and AI, China does feel unsettlingly powerful right now.

In democratic countries, just getting approval for a new energy facility can turn into years of arguing; in China, they can build several in the same time.

By the way, I’m Taiwanese.
by ben_w | 2026-02-20 12:53:47+00:00
Kinda irrelevant, given that the go-to examples I see on Hacker News of this happening in the EU and UK are either actual death/violence threats etc. (which are also not protected speech in the USA) or also not upheld in higher European courts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
by Bender | 2026-02-20 12:54:08+00:00
Personal Blog Should Have Comments

A spammer would agree. Trolls most certainly agree. If I was to add the function to comment it would use local storage. [1] not my repo

If I wanted interaction from visitors I would make one of my forums public. They would at least have to register and they would be subject to normal moderation. As a new member only I would see their comments until their rank moves up from Guest, thus weeding out most low effort trolls and grifters.

[1] - https://github.com/tessalt/echo-chamber-js
by johnisgood | 2026-02-20 12:54:24+00:00
That makes it even worse! If it is not submodules, then it is just copying a file into a repo with no version tracking against upstream, no update path, and no way to even know when there is a security fix.

Package managers already use git where appropriate under the hood. Arch's PKGBUILD sources pull from git repos, FreeBSD's ports can fetch from git, Gentoo ebuilds support git-r3. The fetching is not the hard part. What a package manager gives you on top of that is dependency resolution, version constraints, conflict detection, reproducible builds, and clean removal. "git push" gives you none of that.

If your workflow does not need any of those features, then yeah, sure, but then you are not solving C's "package management problem", you are just ignoring it.
by Gareth321 | 2026-02-20 12:54:47+00:00
I think the next major innovation is going to be intelligent model routing. I've been exploring OpenClaw and OpenRouter, and there is a real lack of options to select the best model for the job and execute. The providers are trying to do that with their own models, but none of them offer everything to everyone at all times. I see a future with increasingly niche models being offered for all kinds of novel use cases. We need a way to fluidly apply the right model for the job.
by wolvesechoes | 2026-02-20 12:55:05+00:00
I like your comment.

I made many critical comments about Julia here, on this website, but they mostly boil down to clumsiness of Julia.

Does it solve "two language problem"? Kinda, but through this it is less convenient to use than Python, and harder to reason about performance of the particular piece of code than C. Yes, there is a big chance that idiomatic, straightforward Julia code will run pretty fast, but there is also big chance that it will run unexpectedly slow, and you need to know fair bit to be able to debug this... so kinda like going from Python to C?

Is dynamism and interactivity useful? Immensely, but Julia pays for it with poor AOT support (yes, even with juliac and, still experimental, --trim option).

There is also stuff that I consider unacceptable. Debugger being a separate package you need to download, and it even cannot debug compiled code so it needs its custom interpreter? This piece of crap that is Base.@enum, so anyone that wanting proper enums need to install EnumX.jl? And why the hell StaticArrays.jl even exists as a separate package if Julia puts so much focus on numerical applications?

And then we come to tooling and IDE support. Oh, boy - Julia VSC extension is such a miserable experience, and there is not much else out there.

Julia is incredibly fun to play and tinker with solo, and some stuff from SciML is straight-up awesome, but overall it is wasted potential, killed by thousand cuts.
by bsenftner | 2026-02-20 12:55:43+00:00
No, AI is plastic, and we can make it anything we want.

It is a coworker when we create the appropriate surrounding architecture supporting peer-level coworking with AI. We're not doing that.

AI is an exoskeleton when adapted to that application structure.

AI is ANYTHING WE WANT because it is that plastic, that moldable.

The dynamic unconstrained structure of trained algorithms is breaking people's brains. Layer in that we communicate in the same languages that these constructions use for I/O has broken the general public's brain. This technology is too subtle for far too many to begin to grasp. Most developers I discuss AI with, even those that create AI at frontier labs have delusional ideas about AI, and generally do not understand them as literature embodiments, which are key to their effective use.

And why oh why are go many focused on creating pornography?
by audunw | 2026-02-20 12:55:45+00:00
Models don’t get old as fast as they used to. A lot of the improvements seem to go into making the models more efficient, or the infrastructure around the models. If newer models mainly compete on efficiency it means you can run older models for longer on more efficient hardware while staying competitive.

If power costs are significantly lower, they can pay for themselves by the time they are outdated. It also means you can run more instances of a model in one datacenter, and that seems to be a big challenge these days: simply building an enough data centres and getting power to them. (See the ridiculous plans for building data centres in space)

A huge part of the cost with making chips is the masks. The transistor masks are expensive. Metal masks less so.

I figure they will eventually freeze the transistor layer and use metal masks to reconfigure the chips when the new models come out. That should further lower costs.

I don’t really know if this makes sanse. Depends on whether we get new breakthroughs in LLM architecture or not. It’s a gamble essentially. But honestly, so is buying nvidia blackwell chips for inference. I could see them getting uneconomical very quickly if any of the alternative inference optimised hardware pans out
by thevillagechief | 2026-02-20 12:55:53+00:00
This is fine. If successful, the next administration can just leverage it for a different kind of agenda. In fact, by the time we know whether it's successful, this admin will likely be gone.
I'm a bit conflicted though. I hated the last admin's censorship efforts for wrong think. Now, looking at the online discourse landscape, I'm starting to think we might have thrown out the baby with the birth water. Why can't we just be normal!
by boutell | 2026-02-20 12:56:22+00:00
The speed is ridiunkulous. No doubt.

The quantization looks pretty severe, which could make the comparison chart misleading. But I tried a trick question suggested by Claude and got nearly identical results in regular ollama and with the chatbot. And quantization to 3 or 4 bits still would not get you that HOLY CRAP WTF speed on other hardware!

This is a very impressive proof of concept. If they can deliver that medium-sized model they're talking about... if they can mass produce these... I notice you can't order one, so far.
by jungard | 2026-02-20 12:56:42+00:00
Peter Steinberger — the creator of OpenClaw, formerly Moltbot — put it bluntly at the first ClawCon event in San Francisco this February, where 700 developers showed up (compared to 20 at the inaugural meetup just weeks earlier): it’s about building systems that do things on your computer. Not chat. Not suggest. Do.

Claude Code handles your codebase — reading files, writing code, running tests, managing git. It lives in your terminal. OpenClaw handles everything else — email triage, calendar management, messaging, browser automation, smart home control. It lives in your messaging apps, running as a persistent daemon with long-term memory.
by andai | 2026-02-20 12:57:55+00:00
>Founded 2.5 years ago, Taalas developed a platform for transforming any AI model into custom silicon. From the moment a previously unseen model is received, it can be realized in hardware in only two months.

So this is very cool. Though I'm not sure how the economics work out? 2 months is a long time in the model space. Although for many tasks, the models are now "good enough", especially when you put them in a "keep trying until it works" loop and run them at high inference speed.

Seems like a chip would only be good for a few months though, they'd have to be upgrading them on a regular basis.

Unless model growth plateaus, or we exceed "good enough" for the relevant tasks, or both. The latter part seems quite likely, at least for certain types of work.

On that note I've shifted my focus from "best model" to "fastest/cheapest model that can do the job". For example testing Gemini Flash against Gemini Pro for simple tasks, they both complete the task fine, but Flash does it 3x cheaper and 3x faster. (Also had good results with Grok Fast in that category of bite-sized "realtime" workflows.)
by ohbleek | 2026-02-20 12:57:57+00:00
The tone of their writing and their descriptions of the agents behavior lead me to believe they are lying about the level of direction they provided to the agent. They clearly want to appear to be more clever and ingenious than their skills will allow. They’re minimally admitting to a narrow set of actions to make it seem as if they have cleverly engineered an intelligent agent, but it too closely resembles their own personality to be anything beyond an agent that rephrases the operator’s own remarks and carried out the specific actions it was directed to do. Anything they admit to here we can safely speculate that they actually went 2-3 steps further.
Show HN: ClawShip – Deploy OpenClaw to the cloud with one click
by emirce | 2026-02-20 12:58:04+00:00
Hello HN-Friends!

I wanted to share ClawShip with you, a platform that allows non-technical people to deploy their 24/7 OpenClaw agent to the cloud with one click.

All of the technical stuff such as setting up a VPS, firewalls, SSH, Docker, API keys etc. is taken care of. Deployment ready in no time.

Let me know what you think :)

URL: http://useclawship.com
by ozgrakkurt | 2026-02-20 12:58:38+00:00
Great! Jens is a legend for writing modernC book. It was a great source for me to get into c programming recently.

I also keep coming back to it when I need to figure something out.

I am using clang so conpiler side is good but some of the c23 functionality depends on libc

One trap about c23 is bitint.h isn’t implemented in musl yet and isn’t implemented for bit precise types in llvm-libc yet. So people might need to implement it inside their projects by copying from glibc.
by graemep | 2026-02-20 13:00:49+00:00
> First off, the UK isn't in the EU

I would guess that is why the GP said "EU and UK"

> ot a single website is blocked for me here in the Netherlands, quite literally none

One EU country. At the very least I know you have censored search results as that is an EU wide requirement of the right to be forgotten.

> I can pirate anything I want from anywhere etc.

Multiple EU countries are blocking pirate sites. https://torrentfreak.com/european-isps-complain-about-dispro...

Some countries have very broad definitions of hate speech.

There are definitely American sites that block EU visitors because of the cost/risk of GDPR compliance.
by iso1631 | 2026-02-20 13:01:08+00:00
You can only decode those https certificates if you are mitming them (and have a compromised certificate)

A copy of the certificate and private keys won't help thanks to the magic of Diffie–Hellman, you can't passively (assuming you haven't got a practical quantum computer)

Your company will have deployed root certificates to devices and run as a MITM. This is standard corporate firewall behaviour.
by anyonecancode | 2026-02-20 13:01:32+00:00
If the goal is to reduce the need for SWE, you don’t need AI for that. I suspect I’m not alone in observing how companies are often very inefficient, so that devs end up spending a lot of time on projects of questionable value—something that seems to happen more often the larger the organization. I recall at one job my manager insisted I delegate building a react app for an internal tool to a team of contractors rather than letting me focus for two weeks and knock it out myself.

It’s always the people management stuff that’s the hard part, but AI isn’t going to solve that. I don’t know what my previous manager’s deal was, but AI wouldn’t fix it.
by microtonal | 2026-02-20 13:01:55+00:00
It's on-par with Pixel 7 and significantly less expensive than the standard Pixel 10.

Here the Pixel 10 and 10a are exactly the same price (both 549):

https://tweakers.net/pricewatch/zoeken/?keyword=pixel+10

Of course, the Pixel 10 is 6 months into its cycle and heavily discounted. The Pixel 10a does not differ much from the 9a (due to keeping the same SoC, same amount of RAM, etc), and is only 369 Euro (with a low of 338).

tl;dr Pixel 9a and Pixel 10 are the good deals now, at least in Europe.
by bdcravens | 2026-02-20 13:02:04+00:00
It's not so much that they'll leave, as much as some percentage will abandon during the signup flow. I know somewhere out there are statistics on those who have to click a link in an email only to get distracted by other emails, to say nothing of the time to fill out forms, create a password, save to password manager, open your 2FA app for the more advanced users, etc.
by hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm | 2026-02-20 13:02:53+00:00
Vague reports like these are how you get people who drag themselves by the feet to go to gym and sit on a machine or do a random set of jumping jacks on the sled track. Taking up a sport and making it part of your lifestyle will be much more beneficial than telling people to do "moderate level exercise" because most people don't even know what that means and will never enjoy it.

If you actually get into a sport there will be second order effects such as better diet and possibly finding others with interest in such activities as you will invest more time into it.
by soleveloper | 2026-02-20 13:03:22+00:00
There are so many use cases for small and super fast models that are already in size capacity -

* Many top quality tts and stt models

* Image recognition, object tracking

* speculative decoding, attached to a much bigger model (big/small architecture?)

* agentic loop trying 20 different approaches / algorithms, and then picking the best one

* edited to add! Put 50 such small models to create a SOTA super fast model
by 47282847 | 2026-02-20 13:03:26+00:00
> AIs don't have souls. They don't have egos.

You could argue the same for humans. Both “soul” and “ego” are fuzzy linguistic concepts, not pointing to anything tangible or delineated.

“Don’t create things which are not there” https://isha.sadhguru.org/en/wisdom/article/what-is-ego
by jcgrillo | 2026-02-20 13:03:42+00:00
Part of what made Blender accessible around 2001-2002 when I was using it regularly was a really great paperback book[1] that served as a tutorial and reference. The UX was strange to be sure but after reading through the ~200 pages and getting acclimatized, it all began to feel sensible. If not for that book I would have bounced off Blender and never looked back.

[1] https://www.abebooks.com/Blender-Book-Carsten-Wartmann-Starc...
by greggoB | 2026-02-20 13:04:01+00:00
It is evidently an indicator of a sea-change - I don't get how this isn't obvious:

Pre-2026: one human teaches another human how to "interact on Github and write a blog about it". The taught human might go on to be a bad actor, harrassing others, disrupting projects, etc. The internet, while imperfect, persists.

Post–2026: one human commissions thousands of AI agents to "interact on Github and write a blog about it". The public-facing internet becomes entirely unusable.

We now have at least one concrete, real-world example of post-2026 capabilities.
by brnt | 2026-02-20 13:05:18+00:00
> includes the very society he [..] live in.

He lives in a very different society from you and me. Not saying you don't know this, but it's staggering that so many people don't realize how different the world is for billionaires and the rest. I know few can experience this first hand, but it's not difficult to read/see/understand that the difference is vast.

If and when aliens ever land, I think the difference between them and us will be smaller than between us and the 0.01%.
by ThePhysicist | 2026-02-20 13:05:56+00:00
This is really cool! I am trying to find a way to accelerate LLM inference for PII detection purposes, where speed is really necessary as we want to process millions of log lines per minute, I am wondering how fast we could get e.g. llama 3.1 to run on a conventional NVIDIA card? 10k tokens per second would be fantastic but even at 1k this would be very useful.
by lazide | 2026-02-20 13:06:17+00:00
LLMs are fundamentally not deterministic or predictable the way people think they are, and it shows up pretty clearly in situations like this. It isn’t even as deterministic or predictable as a human. And humans aren’t particularly deterministic or predictable.

Grok, like Tesla FSD, is also kinda half assed, so it shows up even more prominently on that front.