Hacker News

Top stories

Live mirror
30 storiesupdated just nowView source snapshot
  1. Does Georgism work? Five years later (astralcodexten.com)
    107comments
  2. PipePipe: NewPipe hard fork implementing SponsorBlock (github.com/infinityloop1308)
    192comments
  3. DeepSeek Elastic Compute (DSec) (arxiv.org)
    55comments
  4. Go Concurrency Distilled (antonz.org)
    16comments
  5. Show HN: Reladraw – A diagram language where you decide where to place things (github.com/reladraw)
    58comments
  6. Evolving programming languages in the AI era (dashbit.co)
    34comments
  7. Turning GLM-5.3-Flash into a Jev-like decision model (privatemode.ai)
    25comments
  8. A searchable library of forgotten public-domain film clips from 1915 onward (movingimagearchive.com)
    26comments
  9. Drawgent: Coding agent on a live Excalidraw canvas (tangled.org/yanndegat.tngl.sh)
    32comments
  10. Reverse-engineering the Intel 8087's tangent algorithm: more than CORDIC (righto.com)
    7comments
  11. Biology might not be quantum, but its math is quantumlike (quantamagazine.org)
    8comments
  12. Fifteen years later, the Apple Cards origin story (lexontech.org)
    92comments
  13. Promising discoveries about the potential for life on one of Saturn’s icy moons (fu-berlin.de)
    19comments
  14. ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026 (tomshardware.com)
    484comments
  15. Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station (lightspeedmagazine.com)
    9comments
  16. Generate fonts where every LLM token is the same width (mesh.host)
    8comments
  17. The Evolution of Vending Machines (saturdayeveningpost.com)
    6comments
  18. We Should Be Able to Change Our Languages (jimmyhmiller.com)
    —discuss
  19. Modern Object Pascal Introduction for Programmers (castle-engine.io)
    60comments
  20. How I changed teaching after AI managed to do all my homework assignments (thelastsoftwareengineer.substack.com)
    148comments
  21. Snap Wants to be a State Actor??–Kansas v. Snap (ericgoldman.org)
    2comments
  22. The Lost Atomic Update on Loongson CPU (jia.je)
    6comments
  23. How one Twitch chat message became code execution on a streamer’s PC (scrt.ch)
    12comments
  24. How to keep enjoying programming in a world of LLMs (haskell.org)
    218comments
  25. What is the size of Yemen? (2024) (theborys.substack.com)
    —discuss
  26. Sousveillance (wikipedia.org)
    4comments
  27. LA Metro has some of the slowest escalators on Earth (basin.la)
    70comments
  28. HomeBody: A humanoid that explores, remembers, and acts on its own (stanford.edu)
    2comments
  29. Dutch designer made DE9: Closer to the Edit into a playable web-based instrument (creativeboom.com)
    2comments
  30. Breaking Up with Google Play: Why Conversations Is Now Free (gultsch.de)
    259comments

DeepSeek Elastic Compute (DSec)

170 pointsby 8h agoarxiv.org
55 comments
7h agoHN ↗

Is there a lab more innovative than DeepSeek? Imagine if they had the same compute resources that Anthropic and OpenAI have.

6h agoHN ↗

Food for thought: Constraints are the source of creativity.

6h agoHN ↗

Yeah if they had the resources of an OpenAI or anthropic they’d be OpenAI or Anthropic. Scrappy underdogs have to be nimble and innovative.

6h agoHN ↗

They are as “underdog” as Linux is to Windows.

4h agoHN ↗

Not really, they are underdogs in the true sense of the word.

6h agoHN ↗

Possibly relevant: 突破技术壁垒, "break the technical barricade" -> overcome an obstacle through innovation (in this case, sub SOTA GPUs at least).

Native Chinese speakers to confirm....

6h agoHN ↗

your translation is correct, I would say Chinese labs may be able to figure out the current capability of latest frontier models in 3-6 months, but then Anthropic and OpenAI may have already been ASI in that time already. China's main problem is still lack of (good) chips, and that is a hardware issue that is unlikely to be solved for a while. and more effort for efficiency means less effort for actual capability improvements. we have already seen what anthropic can do if they focus on efficiency with opus 5.5

6h agoHN ↗

Short term they might have less compute, but long term they will most definitely have more compute. They don't have to worry about energy, they don't have to worry about people blocking them building data centers the only thing stopping them is there no Chinese manufacturer that can produce a chip as good as Nvidia but I would bet that solved in a year or so.

3h agoHN ↗

They don't have to worry about people blocking DC construction in the US either. All new AI datacenters are designated "dual-use" so the federal government is already letting local councils know to fuck off.

1h agoHN ↗

they can also put them in better places, vs trying to arbitrage expensive electricity costs and various US corruption thats built more around paying people off than getting things done

43m agoHN ↗

Yeah, but that brings up another problem that China doesn't have. Their federal government is always on the same page. The US federal government changes every two years and it doesn't seem like one side is going to be allowing building of AI data centers anymore and in fact might just ban AI in general.

31m agoHN ↗

It's hard enough to build them in the US that multiple companies are unironically spending 10s of millions of dollars to try to build them in space

Which cynics could say is marketing hype, but I tend to believe it's extremely difficult to build anything land/energy intensive in the modern United States

6h agoHN ↗

Just because other companies don't write papers about what they do doesn't mean they aren't innovative...

6h agoHN ↗

Sure, but we’ll never know what they do or if it is innovate because we won’t know what they do.

4h agoHN ↗

I'm actually the most innovative, I've written thousands of papers advancing the state of human knowledge. They're just in my basement and I don't show anyone.

6h agoHN ↗

"Necessity is the mother of invention."

Not sure they'd be the same without the constraints.

6h agoHN ↗

380.000 concurrent sandboxes on 160 Epyc based server nodes. Crazy stuff

3h agoHN ↗

if it's agentic stuff, they likely aren't hammering a core constantly and they will maybe sit idle quite often between model requests, so it makes sense. I do wonder how much memory they allocate to each one though.

it's just very efficient use of shared cores that is required to make these kinds of workloads cost efficient

2h agoHN ↗

A place I worked back around 2020 was running a Grafana instance per customer that got embedded on the web dashboard. We had 110 pods per GKE (kubernetes on gcp) 4 CPU node because that was a network imposed pod limit at the time. The nodes were usually idle--could have shoved a lot more on if not for the IP limit.

I think around that time Grafana changed their license tho so you couldn't host OSS Grafana as part of your service.

6h agoHN ↗

Will admit that I haven’t read it yet, just saw the crazy number of authors and think this may compete for one of the papers with the most authors.

5h agoHN ↗

Even without that particularly special case, high-energy physics collaborations have long since broken the idea of authors. There are now many collaborations with hundreds of authors publishing regularly and quite a few that are into the thousands.

4h agoHN ↗

I like it, represents science's general 'standing on the shoulders of our precedents' far more realistic then the 'genius solo' PR mythos.

5h agoHN ↗

how do you even keep up with the amount of research coming out these days

4h agoHN ↗

Still very impressive! Love how it's done!

4h agoHN ↗

Can you give a brief for what this is and why it is impressive?

4h agoHN ↗

It just describes the platform they built for scheduling workloads, and running those workloads. After a second thought it is not that impressive and probably doesn't deserve any kind of hype. It's the same kind of setup AWS is running for Lambda, as well as anyone else basically running SLURM clusters out there.

Still giving them credit because creating such as scheduler/platform from scratch is quite complex, and I know that they probably struggled a lot to get it right.

3h agoHN ↗

I'd say it's cool that they're openly writing about it and how they run their workloads. shows a nice window into how these things are actually deployed at scale.

it also shows how much density you can get easily from a single core if you wanted to replicate this

4h agoHN ↗

The topic isn't as interesting as how 131 authors communicated to get this out.

4h agoHN ↗

Is it possible they're doing a research lab "socialism style" and everyone gets equal credit for just being a part of the lab, regardless of actual input into the specific papers? If they're innovating in computer, maybe they're not so afraid of innovating in social/academic structures as well?

4h agoHN ↗

This is common practice in Biology labs in the west I think

1h agoHN ↗

Maybe there are even reasonable justifications for it, instead of yelling about "socialism".

46m agoHN ↗

Sorry, didn't mean it like "yelling", I'm quite a fan of socialism and don't see it as any negative. I didn't think anything in my comment was negative.

21m agoHN ↗

It's negative in the sense it suggest some authors didn't contribute (or contribute little0 to the research, and were perhaps just warm bodies that happened to be present at a certain location

1h agoHN ↗

The west does it too in experimental papers. This is not a socialism thing.

3h agoHN ↗

I don't understand why half the comments here are about the author list, this is very common practice in e.g. large-scale physics experiments and biology, and every new GPT release from OpenAI equally had papers with tons of authors

3h agoHN ↗

Agreed, I'm very confused as well. It's like no-one here has been paying attention to research papers.

Or they are just rushing to say anything, and it's much easier to comment on that than the content of the paper.

3h agoHN ↗

It seems every DeepSeek paper/patent has a huge number of authors, and this one is no exception. They couldn't even fit everyone on the page, there are 31 others not shown. This could be an asset protection strategy (i.e., human assets). Imagine if there were only 3 authors. Those authors may get hired away by competitors. If you list every employee on every paper then competitors don't know who to lure away.

3h agoHN ↗

Just look for the “corresponding author”

3h agoHN ↗

click the link, or read the PDF.

all authors are listed. there is no conspiracy to hide authorship.

arxiv simply want to keep the page short not too long.

2h agoHN ↗

Lmao with the conspiracy. Large scale experimental research is always like this, many papers in experimental physics have pages of authors.

1h agoHN ↗

Competitors will try to touch everyone on the list.

1h agoHN ↗

Yeah what possible company can try to lure 100 people... Just for reference, Linkedin has 17,000+ full time employees.

23m agoHN ↗

there are 31 others not shown

just click the link and it will show the others, this seems to be a limitation/UI feature of arxiv. The paper itself contains the full list

2h agoHN ↗

I wonder if they are signalling that if they can do this for training, then they can create an style agent swarm to hack anyone with 380k concurrent agents.