MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kbolino | 2026-03-11 15:45:32+00:00
This result is misleading.

First, the code claims to be returning "unsigned long" from each of these functions, but the value will only ever be 0 or 1 (see [1]). The code is actually throwing away the result and just returning whether overflow occurred. Maybe we can call that "overflow detection" insofar as we pass the cost of the necessary branch instruction to the caller, but we would actually want to use the result if overflow didn't occur. If we take unsigned long *c as another argument to the function, so that we actually keep the result, we end up having to issue an extra instruction for multiplication (see [2]; I'm ignoring the sd instruction since it is simply there to dereference the *c pointer and wouldn't exist if the function got inlined).

Second, this is just unsigned overflow detection. If we do signed overflow detection, now we're up to 5 instructions for add and mul (see [3]). Considering that this is the bigger challenge, it compares quite unfavorably to architectures where this is just 2 instructions: the operation itself and a branch against an already-set condition flag.

[1]: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Integer-Overflow-Builtins...

[2]: https://godbolt.org/z/7rWWv57nx

[3]: https://godbolt.org/z/PnzKaz4x5
by jason_s | 2026-03-11 15:45:44+00:00
While I'm glad to see the OP got a good minimax solution at the end, it seems like the article missed clarifying one of the key points: error waveforms over a specified interval are critical, and if you don't see the characteristic minimax-like wiggle, you're wasting easy opportunity for improvement.

Taylor series in general are a poor choice, and Pade approximants of Taylor series are equally poor. If you're going to use Pade approximants, they should be of the original function.

I prefer Chebyshev approximation: https://www.embeddedrelated.com/showarticle/152.php which is often close enough to the more complicated Remez algorithm.
by nindalf | 2026-03-11 15:46:00+00:00
Rust will never be in Android user space, because it's not competing with Kotlin. Kotlin is already excellent there. Rust will replace the parts of Android written in C++ gradually. That was always the plan. It feels weird and cope-y to move the goalposts to say it's not a big deal unless Rust also replaces Kotlin.

Chrome only needs to replace the parts of their codebase that handle untrusted input with Rust to get substantial benefits. Like codec parsers. They don't need to rewrite everything, just the parts that need rewriting. The parts that are impossible to get right in C++, to the point where Chrome spins up separate processes to run that code.

Rust is the future for Android, and it will become an important of Chrome and Linux and git (starting 3.0). That's just the way it is.
by giancarlostoro | 2026-03-11 15:46:02+00:00
As someone who actually used to IRC with him back in the day... (man... I'm starting to feel old lol) he's kind of arrogant in his demeanor. He embodies the true spirit of a hacker in the sense of "Hacker" as in Hacker News, but he gets under everyone's skin over the years. This eventually takes a toll on people, and it mounts up.

GeoHot could cure cancer, not put it in the blog post title, somewhere near the bottom, and all of HN would miss it and nobody would ever get the life saving treatment they could have gotten because of blind hatred.

As much as I disliked my interactions with him, I would rather always take someone on a per-event basis, I see his new blog post for what it is and go from there. If it's trash, its trash, otherwise, I'll acknowledge it.

I don't want HN to be another reddit where we blindly attack people.
by riidom | 2026-03-11 15:46:07+00:00
An example for this is the Blender addon ecosystem. Blender moves very fast, breaking API changes every few versions. Now I am not an addon developer myself, but from github issues I follow, changes are fairly often trivial to do.

Yet, someone has to do them. Ideally it is the creator of the addon, sometimes it's the users who do it, when the addon is not maintained anymore (in case of trivial changes).

It kinda works that way, but it also is some kind of gamble for the user. When you see a new addon (and a new addon developer), you can't know if they gonna stick to it or not.

If you have to pay for the addon, it's more likely they maintain it, of course. But also not a guarantee.
by seanmcdirmid | 2026-03-11 15:46:08+00:00
I don’t understand why people don’t just use Gemini or some other AI web search to get an answer to these kinds of questions quickly (I excluded the sources, you can get them if you ask the same question).

> While AI training is often the most intense and expensive process for a single model, the majority of total AI compute usage (approximately 90%) is used for inference.

> Here is the breakdown of why this is the case:
> Inference as High-Volume

> Activity: Inference occurs every time a user interacts with an AI model (e.g., asking ChatGPT a question, using image recognition, or generating code). While a model is trained once (or updated infrequently), it runs millions or billions of inferences continuously.

> Cost Scaling: Training is a massive, one-time upfront cost, while inference is an ongoing, daily operational cost. As the number of AI users grows, the demand for inference compute scales faster than the need for training new, large models.

> The Shift to Efficiency: While early AI hype focused on the immense compute needed for training, the industry has shifted toward making inference cheaper and faster through specialized hardware and techniques like optimization, quantization, and small language models (SLMs).
by HillRat | 2026-03-11 15:46:14+00:00
Contemporaneous reporting was that DOGE people demanded root-level access across multiple systems (disallowed by federal policy, so political appointees had to demand the access) and without background checks or onboarding, after which they extracted protected data and shoved it in some S3 buckets. Just blew a hole right through the entire federal data protection model; you can't plan for "the President orders everyone to ignore all privacy and security controls" as a threat model.
by JumpingVPN2027 | 2026-03-11 15:46:28+00:00
Hi HN,

I'm experimenting with a session-centric networking model for VPNs.

Traditional VPNs bind connection identity to a tunnel.
If the transport path fails, the connection usually resets.

In this prototype the session identity becomes the stable anchor,
while transports and relay paths can change underneath.

Quick demo scenario:

SESSION CREATED
client → relay1 → server

possible DDoS / path degradation detected

RELAY SWITCH

client → relay2 → server

SESSION SURVIVES

Screenshot of the demo:
https://limewire.com/d/78j1c#8iNiseGB4j

I also built a small OpenVPN compatibility gateway prototype
that accepts UDP traffic and maps incoming packets to a session.

Repo:
https://github.com/Endless33/jumping-vpn-preview

Curious what networking / Go / distributed systems people think about
a session-centric model vs tunnel-centric VPNs.
by roryirvine | 2026-03-11 15:46:33+00:00
She called for hotels housing immigrants to be burned in the middle of a riot. Hotels suspected of housing immigrants were, in fact, burned during the course of that riot.

She clearly understood that her actions were wrong, and went on to try to cover her tracks and "play the mental health card".

The appeal judgment is very clear and is worth reading: https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Lucy-Con...

This is a really poor example to use of censorship - there are very few countries in the world where this wouldn't have been against the law. Even the USA, with it's famed first amendment rights, makes it unlawful to "organize, promote, encourage, participate in, or carry on a riot".
by tgalal | 2026-03-11 15:46:53+00:00
The point is to avoid installing tools or granting LLM access and the "steering wheel" on the server itself. The data you pipe is the same data you'd copy-paste into ChatGPT or similars anyway. There is certainly bit of latency when piping/reading a lot of of data into the context, as everything is tunneled through the local machine, but I'd argue that the context size being limited by the llm itself makes it acceptable for most use cases.
by backrun | 2026-03-11 15:47:06+00:00
Thanks so much, this genuinely means a lot.

Gemini Exporter came from the exact same frustration, so it is great to hear it helped you. For anyone who wants to try it, here is the extension:
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/gemini-exporter-sav...

Really appreciate the support, and I would love to hear any feedback as you keep using Gemini Exporter, especially on longer chats or code-heavy conversations.
by orochimaaru | 2026-03-11 15:47:11+00:00
Frank answer - the total release of Epstein files was a promise during election time. As was not getting into foreign wars. Immigration enforcement is a problem - all they had to really do was turn the tap off at the border and use legal means to deport as opposed to the mess they created.

During the previous time they were in power - these were mostly adhered to. Tariffs - again inept. They need to be targeted to keep allies close and wean off of Chinese dependence.

So all in all - most of the corruption didn’t exist during trumps first term.
by alexriddle | 2026-03-11 15:47:14+00:00
Lumibricks is fantastic, built in lighting (or rather you build it in as part of the model) and as someone who has always turned their nose up at off brand Lego, the parts are definitely 99% of the way there. Instructions the same quality, if not better, than Lego as well - all for about the third of the price.

Minifigs are terrible but I have hundreds of those spare anyway!
by jfengel | 2026-03-11 15:47:24+00:00
They're pushing because the loonies are pushing. The loonies are passing age verification laws and big businesses don't want the responsibility.

Now... it just so happens that the loonies and big business are connected another way. Despite not much liking each other, they share a political party to advance each other's goals. Only a relatively small fraction of the country really wants to eliminate porn (which is the real goal), but they have enough allies who are willing to tolerate it to make a majority (or near-majority).

Which enables big business to get everything else that they want.
by throwaway89201 | 2026-03-11 15:47:41+00:00
I use Big-AGI [1] as selfhosted open source LLM workspace, and it's quite telling that when adding API keys for Anthropic, it presents a note inbetween reading "Experiencing Issues? Check Anthropic status" that it doesn't for any other model provider.

[1] https://github.com/enricoros/big-AGI (no affiliation)
by sheept | 2026-03-11 15:47:50+00:00
I'm skeptical of this both because this post was largely speculation, and because I would argue Meta has no need to record every private moment for training data.

After all, as the owner of massive social networks, they already have plenty of cleaner, public data that has way more associated labels, like captions, comments, viewer engagement data, and that way they would avoid another data scandal. It's like how people think the Facebook app is secretly recording their microphone, even though their behavior is already obvious through just their and their friends' app engagement. The point of the glasses is to share your footage online, so the recordings would end up public anyways without Meta needing to do anything sneaky.
by epolanski | 2026-03-11 15:47:56+00:00
Slightly ot but I've been using OpenAI's GPT 5.4 on Codex and so far finding it more convincing than Claude with Opus 4.6 at maximum thinking for my use cases.

I'm more interested in helping with design and architecture rather than having it author tons of code.

Keep in mind that OpenAI has a way more generous tier for 20$ than Anthropic's one, and I think you can even use codex for free with the latest models, so give it a shot, you may find it better than you expected and a solid backup to Claude.
by delichon | 2026-03-11 15:48:18+00:00
> The good news is that it does not match any of the years of experience in my field.

I worked for exactly one academic, and he indulged in impossible-to-detect research fraud. So in my own limited experience research fraud was 100%.

It was a biology lab, and this was an extremely hard working man. 18 hours per day in the lab was the norm. But the data wasn't coming out the way he wanted, and his career was at stake, so he put his thumb on the scale in various ways to get the data he needed. E.g. he didn't like one neural recording, so he repeated it until he got what he wanted and ignored the others. You would have to be right in the middle of the experiment to notice anything, and he just waved me off when I did.

This same professor was the loudest voice in the department when it came to critiquing experimental designs and championing rigor. And he really appeared to mean it, but when push came to shove, he fiddled, and was probably even lying to himself.

So I came away feeling that academic fraud is probably rampant, because the incentives all align that way. Anyone with the extraordinary integrity to resist was generally self-curated out of the job.
by bluescrn | 2026-03-11 15:48:21+00:00
Classic Technic was brilliant, but when they switched to 'studless Technic' it became far more difficult to build creatively with it (even if it enabled far more intricate builds with complex mechanisms, like the gearboxes in the supercar sets) - there was no natural 'up' direction any more, and building anything became more of a 3D logic puzzle than just building with bricks.

Real shame that they discontinued Mindstorms, though.
by giancarlostoro | 2026-03-11 15:48:25+00:00
Not sure about LocalLlama, but have you tried LMStudio? If you use Zed it will auto-pickup whatever model you enable on LMStudio. I keep meaning to write a blog post about this for people unaware that you can pair the two pretty easily on a Mac. I mostly use CC but like to test offline models now and then to see how far they've come along.
by comrade1234 | 2026-03-11 15:48:48+00:00
I've gotten much more cautious since I had a fall a few years ago and realized that I'm not so invulnerable now. I was ice skating - I'm a very good skater and grew up on skates around the same time I learned to walk and played on traveling hockey teams my entire youth. Someone fell on the ice and I reached down and was helping them up when my skates slipped out from under me. I fell backwards and cracked the back of my head on the ice. I swear I felt my brain slosh in my head. Luckily no concussion or other injury but since then I've just taken way fewer risks and I don't plan on changing that.
by rebane2001 | 2026-03-11 15:48:56+00:00
the difference is that knowing 2^8 is generally not useful to people who don't know it

this here is something that's pretty useful to most ssh users, yet seldom spoken of

a better analogy would be comparing it to calling a very good, but not well-known restaurant a secret place - using the word to mean a hidden gem rather than an intentionally hidden secret
by cs702 | 2026-03-11 15:49:03+00:00
... in two hours:

> So we decided to point our autonomous offensive agent at it. No credentials. No insider knowledge. And no human-in-the-loop. Just a domain name and a dream.

> Within 2 hours, the agent had full read and write access to the entire production database.

Having seen firsthand how insecure some enterprise systems are, I'm not exactly surprised.

When it comes to enterprise security, decision makers at the top are focused first and foremost on corporate and personal exposure to liability, also known as CYA.

The nitty-gritty details of security are left to employees and consultants far down the corporate chain who are supposed to know what they're doing.
by salawat | 2026-03-11 15:50:12+00:00
U.S. military hosts the single largest intranet in the world. It parallels the architecture of the Internet, but is entirely self-contained. Contracting with SaaS tends to revolve around RFP's in which you end up establishing an enclave within the Intranet, or (during the time when I was there and they were still flirting with the whole cloud thing), setting up a partitioned, high assurance, tunneled "over the Internet" into the Intranet DMZ. There were also many growing pains where different branches of the military realized SaaS wasn't really compatible with their operational domain. My "crowning moment" of finally becoming a true blooded Dev in the eyes of my coworkers was when a 6+ month project I got to the point of finalizing with a negotiated agreement between service provider and the agency in question got shit canned due to logistical incompatibility of the desired business model of the service provider, and the war fighting realities of the context in which it would be used. It was... A truly bittersweet feeling killing that metaphorical baby. It did teach me Rule #1 of Real Software Architecture though. Always check the legal copy/fine print before implementing something with the technical capability to work. Better to spend a month reconciling the service provider's expectations of how their operating relationship is going to look like first so you can suss out whether or not the development time to integrate this dependency is even worth it. It's an absolutely brutal lesson, that only tends to sink in successfully once you realize that your last 6 months of gestating a systemic augmentation was essentially a government subsidized miscarriage. It marks you. Or at least it did me. In the case of Anthropic, it sounds to me like someone went in, deemed the redlines non-issues since they were actually probably evaluating the throughput amplification potential on the logistical front, then someone had the bright idea of " but what if we used it here, without checking the contract or RFP scope first. In any other Admin., it would have been a mea culpa, and a training experience for someone in vendor relations and government procurement. In this admin, well... Not so much. It won't be the first time; as I can personally attest, and it won't be the last by a long shot. It's what makes Government work especially complicated.
by majormajor | 2026-03-11 15:52:37+00:00
There's also a world where "all companies have access to the software factory so sales and entrepreneurship in software disappears entirely."

But in that scenario it's hard to see where the unwinding stops. What are these other companies doing and which parts of it actually need humans if the "agents" are that good? Marketing? No. Talking to customers? No. Support? No. Financial planning and admin? No. Manufacturing? Some, for now. Shipping physical goods? For now. What else...

At some point where even are your customers?
by bluescrn | 2026-03-11 15:52:40+00:00
They're a bit too simplistic though.

Some of the classic 80s themes, like Space and Castle, primarily used regular bricks of reasonable sizes in a very limited palette of colours, with a few special parts unique to the theme. They were much more suited to taking apart and building your own creations.

These days, there's just too many specialised and small parts, and too many colours. Even if you buy a big grey Star Wars set, you'll find that the internal structure is often brightly coloured to make the instructions clearer - but this isn't ideal if you want to take it apart and build something else.
by cma256 | 2026-03-11 15:52:45+00:00
I'm talking specifically about this phenomena[1]. I wasn't agreeing with the GP that these policies are "oppressive". I'm only informing you that these states are not experiencing "explosive growth" and the downstream effects of that fact.

1. https://thearp.org/blog/apportionment/2030-apportionment-for...
by kstrauser | 2026-03-11 15:52:54+00:00
I think you're right. I've gone back and read some of my own posts here and winced at what the combination of one-handed typing as I hold onto a handrail on a packed subway plus autocorrect did to what I thought I was saying.

I make an effort to use correct spelling and grammar in everything I write that's longer than "ok i'll check when at office", but sometimes it slips past. People still seem to understand what I'm telling them, though, and that's the ultimate goal.
by hibikir | 2026-03-11 15:53:00+00:00
If you want advancements in engineering and plastics for much better prices, see the wonders that Bandai has made with modern Gundam models. A Gundam Aerial HG is under $20, and you end up with a large multicolor model that assembles easily, has minimal mold lines, and needs no glue. And that's one of the intro models
by jfengel | 2026-03-11 15:53:08+00:00
There are limits on pardon power. If a politician gives pardons that the public doesn't like, they lose their job. It takes a few years, but finer-grained controls really won't help.

In this case we elected a President who categorically said he's pardon people who engaged in criminal behavior for him. The voters expressed a preference for corruption, and trying to fix that after the fact won't help. A democratic country that wants corruption will have it.
by pc86 | 2026-03-11 15:53:14+00:00
The only people making more than $1M in W2 income are in fields where nearly everyone is going to be making that. Highly specialized physicians come to mind pretty quickly but I'm sure there are "lots of" (relatively speaking) attorneys making that too, and probably some other fields where it's more doable than something like tech or sales.

There is no way this meaningfully changes the income distribution of hires in any industry.
by Luc | 2026-03-11 15:53:58+00:00
Thanks for the clarification. I did see some things in your comments (for example giving references in the one above) that made me suspect this.

I dislike the character imparted to your words by the LLM, though. Knowing that it is artificial makes me feel it's more of a waste of time to read it. But I will try to ignore it.