skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With AGI and Singularity speculation issues again being the leading posts on HN I think it is time to lighten things up a little and drag out this older post, which seems as relevant today as it was when I wrote it 16 months ago.
Smallest Pacemaker Could Be Revolutionary for Babies with Heart Defects
1,2,3 are also true in Shenzhen. It's 4 that's different here.
Developer of River here ( https://riverqueue.com ). I'm curious if you ran into actual performance limitations based on specific testing and use cases, or if it's more of a hypothetical concern. Modern Postgres running on modern hardware and with well-written software can handle many thousands or tens of thousands of jobs per second (even without partitioning), albeit that depends on your workload, your tuning / autovacuum settings, and your job retention time.
> Why the fuck is everyone in VC land trying to change the true definition of open source?

They want the marketing benefits without the costs.
I mean Stripe has gotten bazillions in VC money allowing it to take huge losses in order to grow to its point.

Gumroad is tiny and does not have the economies of scale of Stripe, without knowing their financials this does not say anything at all.
Ok, I guess you shouldn't complain that you really got exactly what you wanted.

However, your writing style implied that the result was somehow better because you were otherwise an experienced engineer.

Even your clarification in the post sits right below your statement how your experience made this very smooth, with no explanation that you were going to be happy with bad code as long as it works.
> Adequate clothing is actually a very important in war. Frostbite, sunburn, heat exhaustion, cuts and scrapes (which can lead to infection), trench foot, etc. are all conditions that can be mitigated through clothing.

Which is why all US military clothing is mandated to be domestically produced (Berry Amendment).

But how much industrial capacity do you want to take up making clothing? Or do you want to concentrate your finite workforce in perhaps being able to produce (say) artillery shells or cruise missiles?

Which is another ironic/sad part of Trump and Ukraine: a large portion of the US money 'sent' to UA actually went to the American military industrial complex. Helping UA was actually helping the US in being better prepared from a military supply chain POV.

Similarly, by alienating NATO allies, they're now less inclined to purchase US military gear, and so there will be lower economies of scale for fighters and missiles and such.

The icebreaker agreement (ICE Pact) would have caused investment in US shipyards:

* https://canadiandefencereview.com/davie-will-soon-establish-...

* https://gcaptain.com/polar-icebreakers-may-be-key-to-jumpsta...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICE_Pact
This is a great point, and really meshes with my experience as well. We've had some great salespeople but deficiencies in the product (mainly lack of certain enterprisey features) made it very hard to sell. They worked their asses off and closed almost no deals. And our product was good and really close to what the market wanted. Contrast that with most startups which not only have to convince you to open your wallet but also to do so for a solution to a problem you don't currently have (or at least, don't know you have).

If you have an excellent sense for products then the model might work, but I've seen some of the smartest people I've ever met walk right into a wall, even when doing everything they can to reach/verify the fit. It's an incredibly hard problem
As I understand it, the problem building high speed rail in California isn't that people are trying to stop it, but rather that everybody who has the power to throw up roadblocks realizes that they can use it to extract something from the state.
Isn't this essentially what Sparkfun and Adafruit do? There's very little margin in the components & kits, and the market is very tiny. Also if you're looking to make this computer "more powerful" you should look at something else. The specs for this are a toy computer, barely enough to demo the basic functions.
The US doesn't have an equivalent to VAT. Sales taxes at are at the level of states and cities. VAT would be in effect a federal sales tax, which the US doesn't have.

Since different states had widely varying sales taxes (ranging from 0% to 8%), for people living close to state lines, it sometimes makes sense to buy items just across the line to avoid sales tax. Although some business/individuals would get in trouble for deliberately evading sales taxes, as you are technically supposed to report on taxes.

This created a problem with online retailers, who were essentially avoiding sales taxes. Legislation in the mid 2010s changed that, the law is somewhat complicated but generally the sales tax is collected where the business "resides", which could be multiple jurisdictions. If there is any "office" in a state, all purchases originating from within that state have to pay that states sales taxes.
And there was another protest

https://www.theverge.com/news/643777/microsoft-bill-gates-st...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43586727
Which is likely one reason among many why Biden didn't cancel the Trump v1 tariffs. Instead the IRA included a good chunk of money to invest in green infrastructure. We had Trump sticks and Biden carrots working somewhat harmoniously, and a smooth transition.
Launch: Atlas-Core – Open-source geographic data API for developers and AI
We're launching Atlas-Core today, an open-source API built in Go that provides comprehensive country data and geographic insights through a clean, RESTful interface.
Atlas-Core is the result of our work at DoROAD building travel technology. We found ourselves constantly needing reliable geographic data, and existing solutions were either unreliable, limited, or required piecing together multiple APIs.
Key features:

Comprehensive country data (demographics, geography, currencies, languages)
Flexible querying by name, codes, currency, language, capital, region
Optimized field filtering to reduce payload size
Built for AI integration with consistent data structures
Fast and reliable (Go-powered)

We've made it available through multiple channels:

Self-host it yourself (MIT License)
Use our managed API at api.doroad.dev (free tier available)
Source code: https://github.com/DoROAD-AI/atlas-core

While the open-source version focuses on country data, Our full Atlas product adds airports, visa requirements, and more advanced features.
We'd love feedback from the HN community on what you'd like to see in future versions!
Thanks. Explanation much appreciated!
My 2012 macbook pro would have still been working today had an unfortunate water damage incident not happen a couple years ago. It was theseuses macbook in a way. Trackpad had been replaced. Microphone replaced. Battery replace. RAM upgraded to 16gb. SSD upgrade. Disk drive swapped out and replaced with hard drive caddy making use of that extra SATAIII. It was no slouch. Sure it was only a dual core but 2.5ghz is plenty for a lot of things and most software doesn’t even make much use of multithreading anyhow. Not anything I’d try and run on that computer at least. It could handle creative suite and that was enough. Older games like TF2 worked great too like 80 or 100fps with a little config wonking. I can’t even get my replacement m3 pro running TF2 that well albeit over wine because valve doesn’t like arm.
> But one comment ago the subject was social security, and I don't think the charge of hypocrisy sticks on that one.

But that difference is the hypocrisy!

"I get to have this… because it was taken from me! No, that doesn't apply to your thing, because… uh..."
Most of our choices aren't thought out and logical. Our emotions and lizard brain drive most of our actions, but some of us are very good at quickly coming up with justifications and rationalizations for what we've just done that are plausible enough that we end up feeling in control.
I agree that we don't have any good statistical models for this. If AI development were that predictable we'd likely already be past a singularity of some sort or in a very long winter just by reverse-engineering what makes the statistical model tick.
It doesn't sound incredibly atypical. It actually sounds pretty typical to the areas I know, which are several of the largest metro areas in the US.
That's an interesting perspective, and yes wholly foreign to my very American economics influenced background.

Are the origins the same when looking at other intellectual property like patents?

How did they deal with quoting and/or critiquing other's ideas? Did they allow limited quotation? What about parody and satire?
I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at. "Induced demand" isn't a policy paradigm; it's just the observation that if you make it easier for more people to get somewhere, then more people will go there. Without congestion pricing, the only equilibrium (until you exhaust all demand, which isn't going to happen in hot metro areas) is the one where the roads are congested enough to deter the next marginal person from using them. With congestion pricing, you can choose a different equilibrium without the deadweight loss of people stuck in traffic. The question of how much to invest in infrastructure, and what kinds, can then be addressed separately in whatever way makes sense given local conditions.
You've left out:

3. American workers have more productive uses of their time.
Sure, that is what I said as an argument. Free speech being a right means there is no merit to it being a consequence.

Being in a car crash might be the consequence of driving a car. But if someone drives at high speed in the wrong lane and then crashes into you it is a consequence of them not respecting traffic laws and not of you just being in a car. That is why we have traffic laws, so you are able to be in a car without someone crashing into you.

You could never be in a car, and you could also never speak. But then you wouldn't need free speech. Free speech exist so you can speak. In the US without consequences from the government. If you then speak the consequences of that speech aren't a consequence of you speaking but of the government not respecting free speech. Because to not have consequences you would have to not speak and then you wouldn't have free speech.

Someone getting deported by the democrats once they get into power would now be a predictable consequence. They then equally can't say "Sure, we were assholes to the other 50% of the population, but your response is worse". So then you have no free speech.
Is it so hard to imagine areas of the software industry that produce real measurable harm? One doesn't even need to go so nuanced as gambling or other such things - how many software engineers does the 'defence' industry employ?
This is a great predictive piece, written in sci-fi narrative. I think a key part missing in all these predictions is neural architecture search. DeepSeek has shown that simply increasing compute capacity is not the only way to increase performance. AlexNet was also another case. While I do think more processing power is better, we will hit a wall where there is no more training data. I predict that in the near future we will have more processing power to train LLM's than the rate at which we produce data for the LLM. Synthetic data can only get you so far.

I also think that the future will not necessarily be better AI, but more accessible one's. There's an incredible amount of value in designing data centers that are more efficient. Historically, it's a good bet to assume that computing cost per FLOP will reduce as time goes on and this is also a safe bet as it relates to AI.

I think a common misconception with the future of AI is that it will be centralized with only a few companies or organization capable of operating them. Although tech like Apple Intelligence is half baked, we can already envision a future where the AI is running on our phones.
I should have specified "nodejs", as that has been my most recent difficulty. The challenge, specifically, with that prompt is that Google has at least four nodejs libraries that are all seem at least reasonably capable of accessing text embedding models on vertex ai (@google-ai/generativelanguage, @google-cloud/vertexai, @google-cloud/aiplatform, and @google/genai), and they've also published breaking changes multiple times to all of them. So, in my experience, GPT not only will confuse methods from one of their libraries with the other, but will also sometimes hallucinate answers only applicable to older versions of the library, without understanding which version its giving code for. Once it has struggled enough, it'll sometimes just give up and tell you to use axios, but the APIs it recommends axios calls for are all their protobuf APIs; so I'm not even sure if that would work.

Search is totally reasonable, but in this case: Even Google's own documentation on these libraries is exceedingly bad. Nearly all the examples they give for them are for accessing the language models, not text embedding models; so GPT will also sometimes generate code that is perfectly correct for accessing one of the generative language models, but will swap e.g the "model: gemini-2.0" parameter for "model: text-embedding-005"; which also does not work.
The way the license is written is similar to https://polyformproject.org/licenses/noncommercial/1.0.0/
> They are much better at the thing they are good at, and there are some new capabilities that are big, but they are still fundamentally next-token predictors.

I don't really get this. Are you saying autoregressive LLMs won't qualify as AGI, by definition? What about diffusion models, like Mercury? Does it really matter how inference is done if the result is the same?
2^48 is 2^16*2^32 = 65536*4GB, not 256*4GB
No, but it was a bad example because I was thinking only of the authorship point of view.

A better example would have been the complaint tablet to Ea-nāṣir. We're pretty sure it's real; there might still be people alive that remember it being discovered. But in a hundred years, people with gen AI have created museums of fake artifacts but plausible, can future people be sure? A good fraction of the US population today believes wildly untrue things about events happening in real time!
Damn, I never did the math on this. I have always been of the opinion that racism drives a lot of political behavior but this really drives home how close my US is to an even darker racist past.
that was a waste of time to read. I'm glad it was short. "I'm bored of all the talk and conversation that other ppl find extremely interesting, new, revolutionary, mind-blowing, etc"...like... okay? Well no one is forcing him to do anything. He should go outside, go to the gym, go to a bar, go to a library, read a book, there is literally an infinite number of productive things he could have done instead of whine online about how he's "bored" of the (by everyone else's account) insane happenings in the world(s) of the things(s) that he so "cleverly" was able to describe without actually saying "its" name. Hopefully he has a change of attitude and retracts his pointless, bitter rant.
They didn’t realised vibed code had to be deployed.
> I was a programmer at Apple and have to really scratch my head to think of any way I might have even slightly worsened someone's life.

If you were responsible for itunes I could give you a few examples.
I’m talking to a group of people I assume to be substantially software developers, and the facts on the ground are that many of us are attracted to this field by logic, and we are all encouraged in college and for a few years after to invest every spare moment into CS and not any other endeavors. Don’t socialize without an agenda, don’t develope your EQ, just computers and logic all the time.

That consumes most of the years when your prefrontal cortex is still malleable.

Once you understand that, the consequences are everywhere you care to look.

And while it’s true we have twice the density of the general population of neurodivergent people, we nearly all of us make ourselves neurodivergent in the pursuit of this field, whether we are born with it or not. When we eventually find time for hobbies and charities we find out we don’t think like everyone else, and often not in a good way. We have “missed out” on experiences others take for granted.
"Given this code, extract all entities and create the database schema from these", "write documentation for these methods", "write test examples", "write README.md explaining how to use scripts in this directory", "refactor everything in this directory just like this example", etc etc

Everything boring can be automated and it takes five seconds compared to half an hour.
How much of the budget is police, parks, and roads?

When the budget is questioned the response is always the most popular examples and ignore everything else.

When was the last time you used a sociology research grant? Or an ICBM?
TechGlich – Quick, visual tech news on Instagram
I recently started TechGlich, an Instagram page where I post short, visual updates about AI, startups, and all things tech. The idea came from realizing how many people want to stay in the loop but don’t always have time (or patience) for long reads.
If you want to use something that is currently approved by the OSI, but at the same time is crafted to drive revenue, you can use the AGPL.
In almost a year and a half.

https://www.npr.org/2016/02/15/466848438/why-president-how-t...

The president as a title was meant as a diminutive relative to the Congress. The capitol building is at the precise center of Washington DC - literally and for a reason. The Supreme Court is across the street and for many years was inside the capitol.

The White House is in the middle of no where with a direct line of sight to Thomas Jefferson looking into the presidents bedroom. These are not accidents. Next time you’re there read what is written on the walls surrounding Jefferson and the architectural decisions made make a lot of sense and should be a warning to anyone sleeping in that bedroom.

Congress ceded power over time to the executive proactively as presidents subsequent to Washington emulated his integrity.

They have the ability to remove all of the power of the president, whose role, officially, is to merely preside. All you say? Crazy. But they’re the only body that can pass amendments to the constitution.

So, we don’t need to wait for the next presidential election if we don’t choose to. It’s up to we the people to choose.
You can create metrics for whatever you want! Go ahead!

But cuda is not a black box math accelerator. You can stupidly treat it as such, but that doesn’t make it that. It’s an entire ecosystem with drivers and contexts and lifecycles. If everything you’re doing is synchronous and/or you don’t mind if your metrics include totally unrelated costs, then time.time() is fine, sure. But if that’s the case, you’ve got bigger problems.
Appeals court revives lawsuit alleging IBM bilked pensioners
First, what is a "fact"? For example, is climate change a fact? Prominent members of the current administration do not seem to think so; they're basically a step removed from labeling it woke and DEI.

As for things that aren't "facts," but are nonetheless extensively studied and have wide consensus: should universities, for example, teach that the Civil War was actually about states' rights and that slaves benefitted from slavery? There is no historical evidence for these claims, yet a large percentage of the public believes them due to punditry, party loyalty, and other truth-distorting forces.

> In 2023, Florida banned DEI initiatives in its public university system. The ban resulted in changes to the state’s African American history curriculum, including a reinterpretation of the effects of chattel slavery to include that enslaved people gained beneficial skills.

Should universities fall in line with this kind of thinking, or is there a moral imperative for educators and academics to push back against propaganda? I think it's clearly the latter. Otherwise, the university system just becomes a Soviet-style state organ, good for only certain kinds of STEM.

Second, you said:

> As to what universities should have done, the answer is “just dribble.” Universities should be places that are just as eager to research effective approaches to mass deportations as all the DEI stuff they do.

That sounds like you're saying that universities should be blank slates, essentially devoid of values. But they should also kowtow to the values and ideology of the public...? So which is it?

In my opinion, given that academia is (by definition) the vanguard of knowledge, it must hold to its own set of internal values and principles, not ones delivered by outside forces. Pursuit of knowledge should be the primary driving force and not, for example, commercial pressure to bolster "clean coal" at the expense of sustainable energy.

Third, I should remind you that, in all likelihood, at least 50% of the population believes that universities today are pursuing activities consistent with their values and ideology. They pay taxes, too — perhaps even more taxes than conservatives. In a democracy, the plurality should not have dictatorial control over things like university policy; it's tantamount to taxation without representation. These things must be decided by consensus-building, not royal decree.

Also, as an aside, I suspect that when affirmative action was first introduced, a majority of the public still opposed civil rights and desegregation. Was that "DEI"? Barring direct state intervention, should universities have acquiesced to the masses? I stand by what I said: popularity is a poor barometer for educational value and policy.
4TB RAM, yet an OOM Error? Debugging a Spark Memory Mystery
Again with the pointless discussion about what the "widely regarded definition of open source" is. The source is there. That's it.
> I already mentioned the budget. If Republicans want to pass any actual tax cuts, that's another opportunity.

Not really, given the budget reconciliation process and its applicabilty to that: bypasses the filibuster entirely and only a simple majority is needed with a 20-hour capped debate time ij each house.
If thats the case, why not just register a business, and make a bunch of purchases so you don't have to pay VAT?
Isn't the main announcement of the article CuTile? Which has not been released yet.

Also the cuda-core JIT stuff has nothing to do with Python's new JIT, it's referring to integrating nvJitLink with python, which you can see an example of in cuda_core/examples/jit_lto_fractal.py
The point of the quotes was that we wont see the outcome of these decisions until years from now. Which is why today it is still OK but its like the car speeding and then jumping off the cliff. Will it reach the other side or fall to its doom? Too early to tell, we are still watching.
And were instantly promoted to Pastor of Muppets?
> We have millions of teachers going above and beyond expectations. We have mothers and caregivers. We have comedians crafting jokes for comedy and they have no ability to protect those jokes. We have brilliant chefs creating recipes after years of work, experience, and effort and they too don't have protections.

I agree with this, but why is your proposed solution to remove protections from everyone instead of giving everyone else protections? People who put in work should be rewarded.