skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
correct, I just spent $4k on an "AI" machine to do stuff. 96GB ram, ryzen 9 9950x 16 core, 4TB nvme, 24tb hdd, rtx 4090.

If this thing was available six months ago I would have bought it instead!
Not to discredit the author, there are some smart thoughts in there... but I can't help but feel like: yeah of course this is very elegant — but the complexity is not gone, it is elsewhere. And they are not showing that elsewhere.

Namely the parsing code.
nice. had no idea about that connnotation :) ... goes with black swan event as a saying that's ill fitting for these parts (in southern Australia all we have are black swans).
As an infosec guy, I used to spend alot time writing and optimizing own projects in C. This was because C was regarded as the language of elite hackers. As a novice I took it seriously.

At some point Python became really popular in infosec and practically all tools were written in it. It was also used by malware authors. This got me to learn the language and realize that it can do everything for me I need C for, while being a lot faster to develop.

So I mostly left C for Python and later for other higher level labguages.

Nowadays at $WORK I occasionally read and fuzz C code. But don't write it at all.

On my own projects I use C#/Elixir/Python/Perl as they let me make the most of my limited free time.
Consteval is usable today for a lot of scenarios that would require code generation tooling in years past.
This is totally what jwz needed for xmas...
The paper has an exciting conclusion, at least to this non-expert:

"Here, we show that rock types similar to those found at Oldowan archaeological sites can be distinguished by chimpanzees (Plummer, 2004; Braun et al., 2008, 2009b; Plummer et al., 2023). The patterns of selection by the chimpanzees at Bossou show levels of selectivity that are similar to those identified in the earliest hominin toolmakers (Fig. 10). In fact, selection for pounding tools in the Oldowan archaeological record (Lokalalei 2C) shows lower levels of selectivity than that seen in chimpanzees (although the reasons for selection may be governed by different activities that hominins at Lokalalei 2C were engaged in)."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004724842...
There are no good react developers because react encourages you to abstract things into 1000s is tiny files.
That sounds horrible, I hope we prevent this before seeing the negative impacts!
> Programs are not text

Wow. It's amazing to see the beast laid out so clearly before me.

As someone who grew with the mantra "a program is a piece of text", my jaw dropped when I read this post and realized that it was not written in jest. Of course the mantra is still deeply entrenched in my mind, it's too late to remove it now; but I feel as if the world is crumbling around me. What other sacred beliefs will fall? Why doesn't everybody realize that the text file is one of the finest inventions of the third millennium?

Maybe it's just another period in the eternal cycle of fashion trends... programs as free-form text files were an exhilarating liberation from the crufty, fixed-form structures of older languages. Now, we are not only going back to write our code starting at column 4 (like in punched cards), but we still want to add even more structure to it! Maybe in forty years we will go back to free-form text and cherish it again.

Reading the sentence "programs are not text" was the first time I felt old in my life.
Show HN: Collate – Offline PDF Summarizer Using Llama 3.2
Hi HN!

I’m excited to share Collate, a macOS app I built that lets you chat with PDFs, generate summaries, and read documents—all offline. It runs entirely on-device using Llama 3.2 quantized models, ensuring privacy without compromising on capability.

Features:
• Ask Questions: Interact with PDFs to extract key insights or answers without manual searching.

• Summarize: Generate concise summaries from long documents in seconds.

• Privacy-First: Built with on-device processing—your data never leaves your machine.

• Offline-Ready: Works without an internet connection, powered by efficient quantized models.

Under the Hood:

• Runs Llama 3.2 quantized modelels.

• Optimized for macOS to provide a seamless offline experience.

The app is free and available on the macOS App Store.

Demo: https://collate.one/get-started#features

Download: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/collateai/id6447429913

I’d love your thoughts on features, performance, or ideas to make this better. Thanks for taking a look!

Let me know if you’d like further refinements!
There's a titanic market with people wanting some uncensored local LLM/image/video generation model. This market extremely overlaps with gamers today, but will grow exponentially every year.
Considering how quickly the definition of "AI" changes (several times per decade now ?), and what happened to smartphones, it's possible that she becomes right in a few years...
Very interesting, thanks!

32gb for the 5090 vs 128gb for digits might put a nasty cap on unleashing all that power for interesting models.

Several 5090s together would work but then we're talking about multiple times the cost (4x$2000+PC VS $3000)
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42619139
> No JavaScript! Ignore the fact that you need a complex backend in a separate language

Backend in a language that isn't JavaScript is a feature.

Also, a backend where you just serve a template instead of full layout (server-side rendered app) or JSON (client-side rendered app) is not more complex in most of scenarios.
How big is that market you claim? Local LLM image generation already exists out off the box on latest Samsung flagship phones and it's mostly a Gimmick that gets old pretty quickly. Hardly comparable to gaming in terms of market size and profitablity.

Plus, YouTube and the Google images is already full of AI generated slop and people are already tired of it. "AI fatigue" amongst majority of general consumers is a documented thing. Gaming fatigues is not.
Raspberry Pi's RP2350 microcontroller introduced a multitude of new hardware security features over the RP2040, and included a Hacking Challenge which began at DEF CON to encourage researchers to find bugs. The challenge has been defeated and the chip is indeed vulnerable (in at least one way). This talk will cover the process of discovering this vulnerability, the method of exploiting it, and avenues for deducing more about the relevant low-level hardware behavior.

The RP2350 security architecture involves several interconnected mechanisms which together provide authentication of code running on the chip, protected one-time-programmable storage, fine-grained control of debug features, and so on. An antifuse-based OTP memory serves as the root of trust of the system, and informs the configuration of ARM TrustZone as well as additional attack mitigations such as glitch detectors. Raspberry Pi even constructs an impressive, bespoke Redundancy Coprocessor (RCP), which hardens execution of boot ROM code on the Cortex-M33 cores with stack protection, data validation, and instruction latency randomization.

Since there are many potential incorrect guesses to be made about where problems might lie, here I begin with the most fundamental features of the chip logic, including the reset process. Even small oversights at this level can entirely defeat sophisticated security efforts if higher-level mechanisms place complete trust in seemingly simple hardware operations. I show how cursory research into the design details of IP blocks used in the SoC can help inform an attack, and demonstrate the importance of fully testing new features which are built atop older IP. Ultimately, the significant amount of luck (or lack thereof) involved is a reminder of the need to meticulously understand and validate complex systems.
The Linux kernel license requires Nvidia to disclose their Linux kernel sources and Nvidia open sourced their kernel driver.

That said, you can probably boot a Debian or Gentoo system using the Nvidia provided kernel if need be.
Zig doesn't instantiate anything the doesn't get called. So, it doesn't have to generate a whole bunch of templated functions and then optimize down to the ones that actually get used.

The upside is that if you only call a generic function with a u32, you don't instantiate an f32 as well. The downside is that when you do decide to call that function with an f32, all the comptime stuff suddenly gets compiled for the f32 and might have an error.

In practice, I feel that I gain way more from the fast compile than I lose from having a path that accidentally never got compiled as my unit tests almost always force those paths to be compiled at least once.
"Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX" by Eric Berger documents how SpaceX employees poured their blood, sweat, and tears into launching a cost-effective rocket at a time when legacy operators dominated the space market with their costly cost-plus-fee contracts.
This book mostly follows the journey of employees and (thankfully) doesn't resolve to Elon praise too much.
There is a continuation to this book called "Reentry" but I haven't read it yet.
I have this feeling that at some point it will be very advantageous to have personal AI because when you use something that everyone can use the output of this something becomes very low value.

Maybe it will still make sense to have your personal AI in some data center, but on the other hand, there is the trend of governments and mega corps regulating what you can do with your computer. Try going out of the basics, try to do something fun and edge case - it is very likely that your general availability AI will refuse to help you.

when it is your own property, you get the chance to overcome restrictions and develop the thing beyond the average.

As a result, having something that can do things that no other else can do and not having restrictions on what you can do with this thing can become the ultimate superpower.
Why ask for 15/30? My schedule right next door for the Berlin subway is 3/10. During peak hours, you don’t even check when the next train runs. And they’re all full. I do believe Boston has more inhabitants than this small city.
I hope Canada gets some strong leader now that Trudeau is out!
Sure, but those developers will create functionality that will require advanced GPUs and people will want that functionality. Eventually OS will expect it and it will became default everywhere. So, it is an important step that will push nvidia growing in the following years.
If you're surprised by Zig's comptime, you should definitely take a look at Nim which also has compile-time code evaluation, plus a full AST macro system.
DiceBench: A Simple Task Humans Fundamentally Cannot Do (But AI Might)
Author here. I think our approach to AI benchmarks might be too human-centric. We keep creating harder and harder problems that humans can solve (like expert-level math in FrontierMath), using human intelligence as the gold standard.

But maybe we need simpler examples that demonstrate fundamentally different ways of processing information. The dice prediction isn't important - what matters is finding clean examples where all information is visible, but humans are cognitively limited in processing it, regardless of time or expertise.

It's about moving beyond human performance as our primary reference point for measuring AI capabilities.
As proven by C++ with modules and binary libraries, compile times can be better in C++.

Rust suffers because they compile everything from source, and the frontend sends piles of unprocessed LLVM IR to the traditional slow backend.

This can be improved with better tooling, one example is the Cranelift backend, there could be an interpreter, and so on.

Examples of languages that don't send compile times to the moon with similar polymorphic power, Standard ML, OCaml, Haskell, D, Ada.
San Francisco currently has ~54% of its eligible population having cars registered to them. There are a lot of one-car families as well as e-bike families who don't want a car.

If that increased to 100%, you wouldn't be able to park anywhere without paying a lot, and getting anywhere would be super slow.

It might make sense on a per-individual or per-trip basis to say that you prefer using a car, but if everyone makes that choice (old used cars are fairly cheap), it's a problem.
I think a slightly better term is "discrete" vs "continuous". Some analog clocks are discrete, some are continuous. Some digital clocks operate on a resolution so fine that they appear to move continuously. It's quite lovely to find those that invert your expectations when out in the real world.
Rereading the previous comments, I agree you're right. Good analogy.
With a much better ecosystem, 40 years of IDE tooling, frameworks, OS support.

Which is what people always forget when comparing language grammars.
Don't most art museums have free days for city residents, etc.?

Almost every game requires an expensive hardware purchase and often a separate $60-$70 for the game itself
Regex isn't (necessarily) turing complete :)

> Because our program just consists of a sequence of regular expressions, you can't loop at all! That, technically, means we can't actually perform Turing Complete But we can do any bounded computation by just unrolling any loops we may have.

Although some (most?) implementations may be. Though by the above quote, the author didn't make use of that.
No, it's hyped by people like me, who were writing web applications more than 25 years ago. We want to do backend because a big part of frontend is complex for no good reason.
> demonstrated that printf() is Turing complete and wrote a first person shooter in ...

Not gonna lie, I thought that sentence would end with the FPS being done in printf.
While interesting, this is one of the cases, where I agree with "D did it first" kind of comments.
Dupe (200 points, 2 days ago, 28 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42599971
My Dell Dimension XPS P166s from 1996 sure was fashionable in all that beige
Inference presumably will run faster on a 5090. If the 5x memory bandwidth figure holds, then token generation would run 5 times faster. That said, people in the digits discussion predict that the memory bandwidth will be closer to 546GB/sec, which is closer to 1/3 the memory bandwidth of the 5090, so a bunch of 5090 cards would only run 3 times faster at token generation.
Meh, car proponents fight against any concession. You’re proposal is no different. Consider how in these comments people are even mad about being unable to park their SUV in a crosswalk (new daylighting policy in SF).

Just rip the bandage off already.
Oh it's really easy to extrapolate stuff. But perhaps they shouldn't. A lot of papers I've seen recently have wild romantic extrapolations based on cherry picked correlations.

Some of the social sciences are terrible at this. A former partner was a researcher in one of what I now consider to be less respectable fields and she would come up with a feely conclusion and fit the data to it and publish it. Wanted me to co-author one with her and do the statistical analysis. Told her I don't want to be on Retraction Watch.
I've done some research about how to build the long-awaited Internet Trust Layer. The white paper outlines the results.

There's also a now-archived OSS project: findy-network.github.io, that might serve as a starting point for experimenting on the ideas presented in the paper.
It would be nice to have a more indepth discussion of the issues that have been found with compile-time programming, rather than uncritical acclaim. Staged programming is not new, and people have run into many issues and design tradeoffs in that time. (E.g. the same stuff has been done in Lisps for decades, though most Lisps don't have a type system, which makes things a bit more complicated.)

Some of the issues that come to mind:

* Implementing generics in this way breaks parametricity. Simply put, parametricity means being able to reason about functions just from their type signature. You can't do this when the function can do arbitrary computation based on the concrete type a generic type is instantiated with.

* It's not clear to me how Zig handles recursive generic types. Generally, type systems are lazy to allow recursion. So I can write something like

type Example = Something[Example]

(Yes, this is useful.)

* Type checking and compile-time computation can interact in interesting ways. Does type checking take place before compile-time code runs, after it runs, or can they be interleaved? Different choices give different trade-offs. It's not clear to me what Zig does and hence what tradeoffs it makes.

* The article suggests that compile-time code can generate code (not just values) but doesn't discuss hygiene.

There is a good discussion of some issues here: https://typesanitizer.com/blog/zig-generics.html
Pricing seems off!
If that is the worst complaint anyone had, that’s basically - any time there is a bunch of people around?
Show HN: Multiply your binary math skill with 24bitsa.day
A fun little game idea I had last year after building a personal kb based bit manipulator to have a better sense of the binary space. All sounds and graphics are my own.
The Different Types of Radiation
The book looks incredibly comprehensive, but how much is complete? I clicked on a few sections that caught my eye and two of them were not yet completed.
Centuries are also 50 years late on average... And everyone is on average 6 months older than they say.

Also moving the rounding 1 place down doesn't solve anything. Now your second-resolution clock is on average 500ms late unless you move the decimal 1 place down again.
Is this sci-fi book, tech manual, anthology, where can we sign up to read your final product?
A slightly related thing I think about someone's, is if I look at the time and it's 13:05 and then I do a task and when I finish a task it's 13:10, you could say that took 5 minutes, but because we can't see the seconds each time could be up to a minute out. So a total of 2 minutes error! Quite big if you're timing something small like 5 minutes!
Page title: The Electromagnetic Spectrum

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
BOLO: Mirai Attack Against IoT Devices (2025)
This was an incredible piece of art, and I say this unironically. Absolutely incredible.
Not really. It does, however, include ideas such as "perhaps we should learn to correct genetic diseases directly in the reproductive cells", which is a rounding error away from someone saying something like you just did.
A permit is literally about seeking permission to do something from an authority - the absence of which, makes the activity illegal.
I am not a genius but have a couple of decades experience and finally started using LLMs in anger in the last few weeks. I have to admit that when my free quota from GitHub Copilot ran out (I had already run out of Jetbrains AI as well!! Our company will start paying for some service as the trials have been very successful), I had a slight bad feeling as my experience was very similar to OP: it's really useful to get me started, and I can finish it much more easily from what the AI gives me than if I started from scratch. Sometimes it just fills in boilerplate, other times it actually tells me which functions to call on an unfamiliar API. And it turns out it's really good at generating tests, so it makes my testing more comprehensive as it's so much faster to just write them out (and refine a bit usually by hand). The chat almost completely replaced my StackOverflow queries, which saves me much time and anxiety (God forbid I have to ask something on SO as that's a time sink: if I just quickly type out something I am just asking to be obliterated by the "helpful" SO moderators... with the AI, I just barely type anything at all, leave it with typos and all, the AI still gets me!).
I could have phrased it as "convinced themselves they had an original thought" but that sounded too cynical even for me.
Just advertise it as guaranteed 0% false positive detections and you're good-to-go!
Hi, my name is Alvin Pang, and I’ve submitted my application for this position. I currently reside in Edmonton and am unable to relocate at this time, but I have no issue working remotely. I strongly believe my skills and experience make me an excellent fit for this role. Could you let me know if my location would be a concern?
I wonder if this is inspired by LLMs which similarly do tons of repetitive processing most of which is unrelated to the final answer.
Which seems to have inconvenienced the government enough they had an outsized reaction, yes?
Inclined to agree with this. It didn't fall, just sort of withered into other cultural ideologies and empires.

Some of it was also fucking bananas which didn't survive enlightenment.
The nuance here is that the Governor General by convention follows the advice of the PM, who establishes their continuity plan at the start of their government (IIRC it’s a standard party document and they just update the names).

It’d cause a crisis with the monarchy but they’re not legally bound to appoint the deputy. Like you said it only applies to special circumstances, I was just addressing the legal mechanism by which it happens (as the OP talked about a PM dropping dead).
Repelling birds from rice farms with smart gadgets
You can cheese the start by making the window really small, which makes the dvd logo bounces happen really fast!
I see a lot of people in the comments basically saying "well X did it first" and that it's not worth talking about. This missed the point for me, zig is an interesting one personally and not out of semantics of std lib or anything really, it's just something nice to play around with so far. I think with the above attitude we probably could have stopped systems programming at c++, that wouldn't be too fun at all, what we all do without java to laugh at?
Right?

Did we forget Spring was a thing?

Did someone solve async Rust?

And the only thing more numerous than JS frameworks is new databases.

Let’s not kid ourselves, this has always been hard.
Zig is lazy, and C++ is eager. I can define an infinite set of mutually recursive types in Zig, and only the ones I actually use will be instantiated (not an everyday need, but occasionally interesting -- I had fun building an autodiff package that way with no virtual function overhead, and the set of type descriptors being closed under VJP meant that you could support arbitrary (still only finite) derivative-like tensors, not just first and second order).
My ancedotal experience of driving around London once or twice a year for the last ten years is there hasn't been a huge change. I don't trust TFL data on this as the authorities are incentivised to report figures to support the gathering of the additional revenue stream.

At least this study [1] suggests a mild improvement but interestingly replacing one pollutant with another (due to diesel exemptions).

In my opinion, we should primary focus on improving the standards of public transport. Safety, cleanliness, punctuality and price. I'm a car owner living 15mins drive from downtown of a European capital city, and I refuse to drive near the city because the parking is expensive, there's always roadworks but primarily the public transport is excellent and comfortable.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01660...
How does consteval interact with thread_local? Defined (although I'm not sure what definition could make sense), error, or the dreaded "No diagnostic required"?
Interesting,

When I make word clock, I make it change from "SATU LEBIH DUA" ("ONE PLUS TWO", 01:02:00) to "SATU LEBIH TIGA" ("ONE PLUS THREE", 01:03:00) at 01:02:30.

But if I make digital clock, I make it change from 01:02 to 01:03 at 01:03:00.
First Bird Flu Death in U.S. Reported in Louisiana
Dupe (49 points, 10 hours ago, 49 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42615945
If you hire someone to so a job for you, you are accountable. Unless they bring their own car and accept liability.