Hacker News Reader

tompon Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++

Did you ever actually program in Rust?

In my experience, a lot of the code is dedicated to "correctly transforming between different Result / Error types".

Much more verbose than exceptions, despite most of the time pretending they're just exceptions (i.e. the `?` operator).

Why not just implement exceptions instead?

(TBH I fully expect this comment to be downvoted, then Rust to implement exceptions in 10 years... Something similar happened when I suggested generics in Go.)

tompon Show HN: Real-time AI Voice Chat at ~500ms Latency

If your model is fast enough, you can definitely do it. That's literally how "streaming Whisper" works, just rerun the model on the accumulated audio every x00ms. LLMs could definitely work the same way, technically they're less complex than Whisper (which is an encoder/decoder architecture, LLMs are decoder-only) but of course much larger (hence slower), so ... maybe rerun just a part of it? etc.

tompon Corporation for Public Broadcasting Statement Regarding Executive Order

> They are opposed to any social progress and want to go back.

I see it as exact opposite.

The "left" parties have long abandoned social progress and are now regressing. Support or racism (affirmative action), terrorism, violence against women, violence against Jews, violence and rioting in general, denial of science, against meritocracy, against freedom of speech.

Technically, while going back to meritocracy, equality, freedom of speech is "reactionary", I'd definitely term it progress.

tompon Judge rules Apple executive lied under oath, makes criminal contempt referral

All those are awesome features, and I use them all the time.

But that's no reason to prevent them from being opt-out. It should be possible to not use OAuth, integrated billing, social media tracking etc.

tompon Berkeley Humanoid Lite – Open-source robot

LeRobot is 6DoF.

How much does this matter in practice vs 7DoF arm?

tompon FTC takes action against Uber for deceptive billing and cancellation practices

Last time I tried to cancel a service (mobile phone, Three, in the UK) they offered me the service for 5£ (it's normally 20£ or more).

I should (pretend to) cancel more often!

tompon NSF halts grant awards while staff do second review

Not really, I've been opposing sexism, racism, political correctness, science denial (yes, burn it all down!) and supporting meritocracy and freedom of speech since early 2010s, way before it became big in the media.

tompon NSF halts grant awards while staff do second review

were you equally opposed to leftwings deleting concepts such as "git master" and "quantum supremacy"?

tompon NSF halts grant awards while staff do second review

I doubt that would be unbiased.

The answer would be, any description that doesn't lean right nor left. Maybe "technologist", "entrepreneur", "startup founder", "industrialist" etc.

tompon NSF halts grant awards while staff do second review

> The National Science Foundation (NSF) has put a cork in its grantmaking pipeline after BILLIONAIRE Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) set up shop at the agency this week.

Really, "billionaire", that's what you're going with (emphasis mine)?! Isn't it more relevant that he founded and runs 2 biggest startups (as in, high velocity, high growth companies) in the world (Tesla & SpaceX) that run circles around both legacy companies and government agencies? So, yeah, if you want things to radically improve fast, of course you call someone like Elon.

It's sad that "unbiased news" basically no longer exists.

tompon US Government threatens Harvard with foreign student ban

Not entirely uncharted.

I'm not sure how it was done legally, but when the Supreme Court ruled that Biden administration's student loan forgiveness was unconstitutional, Biden (or rather, his team) found another way to forgive loans.

I expect Trump's administration to similarly find legal workarounds.

tompon Open guide to equity compensation

> when your options vest, is that you are essentially allowed to make an equity investment

isn't the idea that you buy shares at book value, which is way less than "last round valuation"? so you're getting a discount.

I mean, hopefully that's how it works, I never put enough money when exercising my option to care...

tompon $70M in 60 Seconds: How Insider Info Helped Someone 28x Their Money

Is it any different, in principle, to what congressmen (and women) have been doing for decades? Insider trading, corruption, etc. has all been normalized.

tompon $70M in 60 Seconds: How Insider Info Helped Someone 28x Their Money

“My side is the truth, your side is partisan propaganda.”

Bottom line is, people see goals / intentions differently, especially in politics!

tompon $70M in 60 Seconds: How Insider Info Helped Someone 28x Their Money

You’re forgetting that the previous government was losing at least 2 wars (in Ukraine and against Houties) and destroying the United States - trying to jail political opponents, subverting elections, destroying the country’s borders, erasing meritocracy, instituting censorship and ignoring Supreme Court rulings.

tompon The Llama 4 herd

> individual tokens are routed to different experts

that was AFAIK (not an expert! lol) the traditional approach

but judging by the chart on LLaMa4 blog post, now they're interleaving MoE models and dense Attention layers; so I guess this means that even a single token could be routed through different experts at every single MoE layer!

tompon AI 2027

No, the entire point of this article is that when you get to self-improving AI, it will become generally intelligent, then you can use that to solve robotics, medicine etc. (like a generally-intelligent baby can (eventually) solve how to move boxes, assemble cars, do experiments in labs etc. - nothing special about a human baby, it's just generally intelligent).

tompon AI 2027

Did we read the same article?

They clearly mention, take into account and extrapolate this; LLM have first scaled via data, now it's test time compute, but recent developments (R1) clearly show this is not exhausted yet (i.e. RL on synthetically (in-silico) generated CoT) which implies scaling with compute. The authors then outline further potential (research) developments that could continue this dynamic, literally things that have already been discovered just not yet incorporated into edge models.

Real-world data confirms their thesis - there have been a lot of sceptics about AI scaling, somewhat justified ("whoom" a.k.a. fast take-off hasn't happened - yet) but their fundamental thesis has been wrong - "real-world data has been exhausted, next algorithmic breakthroughs will be hard and unpredictable". The reality is, while data has been exhausted, incremental research efforts have resulted in better and better models (o1, r1, o3, and now Gemini 2.5 which is a huge jump! [1]). This is similar to how Moore's Law works - it's not given that CPUs get better exponentially, it still requires effort, maybe with diminishing returns, but nevertheless the law works...

If we ever get to models be able to usefully contribute to research, either on the implementation side, or on research ideas side (which they CANNOT yet, at least Gemini 2.5 Pro (public SOTA), unless my prompting is REALLY bad), it's about to get super-exponential.

Edit: then once you get to actual general intelligence (let alone super-intelligence) the real-world impact will quickly follow.

tompon US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU

The limits are conveniently set so that the law doesn't apply to most EU companies. Only 4/25 included companies are EU (and 3/4 of those are porn, Booking.com isn't).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Services_Act#Large_onl...

Edit: it's definitely worse if you go deeper into the rabbit hole. Sister legislature, Digital Markets Act:

Booking.com insisted on the fact that it is one of the only European companies that is a global success and that as they are not the most dominant actor in this sector, they should not be disincentivized while competing with bigger companies.

So yeah, "please only punish non-EU companies" definitely sounds like a trade barrier.

tompon US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU

In fact, every EU big tech company has already been fined a trillion EUR! All 0 of them.

tompon US Administration announces 34% tariffs on China, 20% on EU

For what it's worth, I bought a $2000 robotic hand from US a year ago, and paid about €400 in VAT and €32 (so like 2%) in import duties / tariffs.

Obviously VAT isn't a "trade barrier", if anything it's a "consumption barrier" and it's the same for every business that EU citizens give money to (i.e. if I bought a robot hand that cost $2000 to make from an EU company, I'd likewise be paying €400 VAT on top of that).

tompon A filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's self-image

To be honest, I don't really care, neither about your verbal assaults nor about your mental gymnastics.

Until you propose solutions to rising crime, rape and fracturing societal trust, then I'll listen.

tompon A filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's self-image

So? If non-Western immigrants cannot integrate and earn a decent income and instead resort to crime, that to me is still an argument that we should stop importing them.

tompon Utah becomes first US state to ban fluoride in its water

Definitely not.

IMO the most distinct parts of the Swiss health insurance system is that (1) copay is obligatory but limited (i.e. healthcare isn’t free but it’s not expensive either), and (2) it’s individual, companies cannot pay for it, so there’s no US-like extreme benefit of having a good job.

tompon A filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's self-image

Of course they do, because there’s way more local citizens than immigrants.

But non-Western immigrants are more likely to commit crimes (i.e. on a per-capita basis).

This blog post goes into some detail, and also adjusts by sex & age (also important!).

https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-effects-of-immigration-in-...

You can easily confirm the basic “Danish origin vs non-Western immigrants” statistics by doing simple math from official sources.

https://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/sociale-forhold/krimin...

Persons of Danish origin commit 75% of crime yet represent 84% of the population. Immigrants are only 16% of population yet commit 25% of crime.

Or is official Danish statistics lying?

tompon A filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's self-image

I don’t think that anyone minds immigration of highly educated people from advanced civilized countries that have aligned values and respect local cultures.

But illegal and legal immigrants from other countries mainly consume taxpayer resources and spread crime and violence.

tompon A filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's self-image

The main drive of who you call “far right” is precisely to import less people that want to throw gays off roofs.

tompon LED's Efficiency Exceeds 100% (2012)

perpetuum mobile anyone?

LED produces light 230% of power put in, convert that back to electricity with PV (47.6% efficiency) to get 109.48% of electricity you put in, while conveniently cooling the surroundings.

email me to invest in my startup!

tompon Gemma3 – The current strongest model that fits on a single GPU

Any below 7B you'd recommend?

IME Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct (or even 1.5B) have been quite remarkable, but I haven't done that heavy testing.

tompon An update on Mozilla's terms of use for Firefox

> This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content.

I actually disagree, fundamentally.

This is digital content, so "ownership" isn't the same as for physical stuff.

Lets look at analogies: "piracy isn't theft" (because the original owner still keeps their copy!). Also, surely if Mozilla can sell your data, they must have owned it first! But you also keep your data!

So clearly, to "own" digital stuff is different from "owning" physical stuff.

Then, how do we define "own" for digital stuff? I'd say a sufficient definition would be, "possess and can do whatever".

So when Mozilla says "nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license [...] necessary to operate Firefox", and then in subsequent paragraphs argue that selling ads is necessary to operate Firefox... Yes, we can add two and two together.

Now, apologists will claim that the literal statement in new terms is "nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox", but obviously, the DO NOT NEED A LICENSE for doing as you request in Firefox (i.e. sending POST requests directly to third parties), so clearly there's some shady business involved.