Unlurker

Jemalloc 5.4.0 (github.com/jemalloc)

Ok. Why both the homepage and its Github repo doesn't make a single mention of Jason Evans? I know he stepped down but surely it is at least worst mentioning it? Is Meta still using it and developing it? If not who are the driving force behind it now? I just checked there wasn't a release since 2022 and then we have this now. Something changed? Just wish we have a little bit of context. But it is also great it is continue being maintained. It makes a huge difference for Ruby on Rails Apps.

I always wondered, is it French? "Je m'alloc du memory"

Rather a tradition to call a malloc by the initials of the implementer: Jason Evans malloc (jemalloc), Poul-Henning Kamp malloc (phkmalloc), Doug Lea (dlmalloc). P.S. I also wondered whether systemd had any cultural reference to Système D aka Système Débrouillard, but Pottering does not seem to engage in word play, so probably not.

Why is this on the HN front page? Is there something particularly noteworthy about this release?

I upvoted it because I benefit from jemalloc in my stack (RoR) and I am tired of AI taking over HN front page. Let the hacker spirit be back!

In the Before Times, the vast majority of software was written in garbage collected language where a working knowledge of the relative merits of C memory allocators is not useful or particularly relevant. Why would the scads of people writing JavaScript, Java, python, go, rails, etc need to be aware of jemalloc?

TL;DR: Because the runtime of most GC:d languages uses malloc for its internal data structures. I work for the runtime team of JPG @ Oracle. We use malloc in Hotspot, quite a lot actually! Providing your JVM with a good malloc can improve the performance of the runtime, both in terms of CPU and memory, by quite a bit. I don't think you need the details, but it's good to be aware that some mallocs are better than others, and there are multiple of them. Being aware of jemalloc is a good way of being aware of the facts I just mentioned :-).

I'd happily see performance, latency and stability of your allocators in massively multithreaded, long-living programs with workloads where hundreds or thousands of parallel threads continuously create and destroy short-lived small and medium objects. Writing allocators for domain-specific access patterns is easy. Writing a general-purpose high performing, stable allocator with bounded P99 latency is hard. Give your friend, Dunning–Kruger, some better pills to keep him from speaking through you.

Not everything needs to be general purpose. Allocation can be as easy as bumping a pointer, and it's hard to beat that.

The scourge of x86 emulation (fex-emu.com)

Great article ! This is the kind of content I always hope to find on HN's front page. I really wonder how things are organized at Apple to allow for vertical integration to work so well. That feature alone must have involved so many people from so many different teams.

For reference , Fex is a translation framework for x86 to ARM much like Apple’s Rosetta2 and Microsoft’s Prism. Valve sponsor development as it’s also the way the new Steam Frame supports x86 games. It’s also being used (as a fork) in Crossover Beta to replace the use of Rosetta2.

Why doesnt Stream require their binaries to be compiled to some bytecode and transpiled during the install ? THen they wouldnt require any emulator for any new compiles.

Several games in their library are actually just game updater/launcher binaries, which manage their associated game assets and binaries externally.

> Why doesnt Stream require their binaries to be compiled to some bytecode and transpiled during the install ? They still have to support the entire back-catalog. It's not reasonable to expect thousands of existing games to port to ARM

I don't know, but assumed that Valve doesn't require studios to recompile their software or use any special tooling, it's basically just packaging of existing executables. This is also why they do Windows on Linux emulation.

Existing games will not be recompiled for the new bytecode target, and they want all of those games to work regardless.

Waymo in Singapore (waymo.com)

They are car lite. You need to purchase a CoE before you buy a car, those last 10 years, and are auctioned off. Current prices are ~133k sgd for a CoE not including the car which can often be 100k+

I think you might not have read the rest of what I wrote. Just because cars are super expensive doesn't mean people don't buy them or don't use them. People regularly take out 7-year loans to finance the car + COE + ARF + VES. My point is that the land use in Singapore truly shows where LTA's priorities are. Look at Tengah or Bidadari, both brand-new neighbourhoods. Huge, wide 6+-lane dual-carriageways with hardly any traffic on them. My family has a car in Singapore that has about 70000 km on the odometer after about 6 years of driving, which is quite a lot for purely urban driving. The fact is I can get to most of destinations in about half or a third the time it takes on public transport. It is primarily why I drive if I have to get there quicker.

I don't get what's the point of Waymo in cities like Singapore or Tokyo with perfect public transport, one can understand appeal in US, but in Europe or Eastern Asia? Heck even here in Prague with less than perfect public transport I don't get people using taxi/uber, only reasonable scenarios to me are multiple people with lots of baggage on the way from airport or people going in night from pub/event after most of the public transport stopped operating (though buses/trams run 24/7, just less frequent in night). In ~10 years living in Prague I used taxi I think only twice - with wife delivering baby on the way to hospital and with wife returning with newborn back home from hospital.

I don't think you're factoring in the weather: Tokyo is incredibly hot and humid in Summer (even more than Singapore, but there it's like that all year round), has a long rainy season in late-spring/early-summer and regular typhoons in late-summer/early-fall. Basically, for more than half of the year you're severely pondering the convenience of taking a cab over walking in the heat/rain. Even then, the vast majority of people taking taxis regularly are business people going to and from business meetings and expensing it away, as evidenced by the heavily targeted ads for BtoB SaaS playing on the screens in the back of Tokyo taxis.

Waymo are working towards Tokyo as well. I'm worried. Living in here, I've noticed that the taxi industry acts as an unintentional social support system. Many taxi drivers are in-between jobs or stages in life, or simply didn't fit in to the corporate life. It doesn't pay well, but it's a decent job all things considered. I worry the death of the taxi industry means even less avenues for these people to escape to. Of course the argument here is "well Japan should fix the corporate situation" but the current prime minister seems to be hellbent on the opposite. I think this will suck for a lot of people.

I have to admit I haven't taken a taxi in Tokyo but my impression was that it was a fairly high-end service akin to London black cabs and relatively pricey.

> business profits should rise It's the snake eating it's tail. For business profits to rise, people need to to have disposable income. If you replace enough people with AI, the average disposable income comes down to a point that businesses can't be profitable. We are already seeing a localized version of this with restaurants in large cities.

For business profits to rise, people need to to have disposable income Does it matter, if the business pays employees who then use their salary to buy goods from the business or if the government collects taxes and uses that to pay for the goods? The government could also give the taxes to the people, so they have disposable income. Imagine an island with two people on it and there is one tree that grows apples. And every other day, one of the two people climbs the tree and picks apples so they both have something to eat. Then the next day, the other person owes to climb on the tree because they are in debt to the first person. Now, let's say one day, one of them discovers, hey, we can just give the tree a kick and the apples fall down on their own! With the perspective you are proposing, the other one would have to say: Oh my God, don't do it! We will be out of work and starve!

Tax rates for wealthy folks are what, 10%? It makes a big difference if the majority of money that is made is distributed to the people via salaries, or whether it's profits and only 10% makes its way to the people.

Doesn't Tokyo have very low unemployment? According to Wikipedia: Japan 2.5%, Singapore 3.2%, USA 4.1%, EU 5.2%. I expect Tokyo is probably even lower than the national average. Visiting just as a tourist it seems like Japan is quite good at creating, I don't want to say bullshit jobs, but perhaps not-that-necessary jobs? Jobs which mainly serve to give something to do to (usually) elderly. My understanding was that the idea is to make them feel to be a contributing part of the society(?) I mean all the people controlling the pedestrians or acting like "human signs" and such. Am I getting it wrong?

> Doesn't Tokyo have very low unemployment? According to Wikipedia: Japan 2.5%, Singapore 3.2%, USA 4.1%, EU 5.2%. Singapore's unemployment statistic only counts people who are looking, not people who are retired or have given up [1]: > A person is considered unemployed if he or she is: > • not working; > • actively seeking work; and > • available for work I don't know if the other countries follow the same methodology. [1] https://stats.mom.gov.sg/iMAS_PdfLibrary/mrsd_qtlmr182_Technical_Note.pdf

Don't make the mistake to think these jobs are just there to keep bored retirees active. The basic old age pension (kokumin nenkin - for sole-proprietors and people who have worked in non-permanent positions or small companies) is significantly below the poverty line at 70,600¥ per month -- that's $450 and that's if you've worked for 40 years without any gaps. The vast majority of old people working these jobs, e.g. construction site security, do so because they would likely starve without it.

State pensions everywhere tend to assume home ownership. I haven't been to Japan since they started doing wild funny money stuff, so I don't know what that's doing to local prices/economies, but not that long ago $450 + home ownership would have been completely fine in many areas.

Unfortunately the nearest MRT station is at least a 30 mins walk from where we live.

That sounds mildly disingenuous. Surely there are buses nearby that connect to the MRT station?

Singapore is a controlled economy, and has a large workforce for Taxi Drivers and part-time drivers through Grab. I am not sure how the entrenchment of robotaxis like Waymo (and future tesla) is going to play with the general population. My guess, they will co-exist as the government wont jeopardize the living of the taxi-driver-complaining uncles. Also, I notice a lot new SF based AI companies have started establishing their offices in Singapore too. Sierra, and Fireworks coming to my mind. As government plays a huge part in Singapore, I guess, government noticing these as necessary investments for the future of Singapore.

> Also, I notice a lot new SF based AI companies have started establishing their offices in Singapore too. Sierra, and Fireworks coming to my mind. As government plays a huge part in Singapore, I guess, government noticing these as necessary investments for the future of Singapore. Mostly sales offices (and of course, "forward deployed engineers"). We don't usually see exciting tech projects being assigned to Singapore teams, especially with our huge timezone difference with the Bay Area.

Singapore wants to _look_ modern, and Waymos with the spinning lidars are such icons of futurism that Singapore cannot afford to lose out (as compared to Pony.ai's AV fleet, which is already deployed but not very eye catching). But the best part of that control is the free market is only free to the extent the government allows it. There is plenty of time for the taxi drivers to retire. In fact, I believe the average age of taxi drivers are close to 70, so this is forward looking to address an incoming cab driver shortage. Singapore really wants to look like Season 3 of Westworld. A shame the Marina Bay flying drone taxi service looks completely dead.

> Singapore really wants to look like Season 3 of Westworld. Some scenes in Westworld season 3 were filmed in Singapore: https://www.timeout.com/singapore/film/11-places-in-singapore-featured-in-westworld-season-3

If you never needed a car in Singapore then why is the COE so expensive? COE price is determined from a bidding process.

The price is high because there is sustained demand. Hah! No but seriously. For a variety of reasons, owning a car in Singapore is a step change in QoL. Infrastructure reasons: - abundant parking at destinations (e.g. malls), home (HDB flats, condominiums) due to fairly generous car park lot mandates. IIRC, HDBs, where 85% of Singaporeans live, have until fairly recently had a 1:1 unit:lot ratio. Similarly for condominiums. A lot of these are progressively being scaled down especially near train stations, but buildings and giant multi storey parking lots are fixed infrastructure that will be around for decades. Abundant parking will be available for decades still. - roads are wide and well maintained and well connected. The experience: - because the number of cars on the road are controlled through the COE system, the experience of driving is good. We get slow traffic but it is extremely rare that we get the kind of multi-hour jams that other countries experience. - the door-to-door experience saves tons of time. In public transport, I walk (7m), wait for the train (3m), sit on the train (36m), get out at the interchange and walk to another platform (2m), wait for the train (2m), sit on the train (12m), exit and walk to my destination (11m). Total time: 1h14m. In a car, I walk to my car (2m), drive to my destination (35m), walk from the car park to my destination (1m). Total time: 38m. x2 for the return trip, and the car saves you a whole hour a day. - the public transport experience is not so good if you have a family or are disabled. Don't even mention cyclists, culturally we spit on them here. The status: - it's true, the car is a status symbol. You don't know it until you get into conversations where driving a "mere BMW" as opposed to a mercedes is looked down on, or when someone mentions that driving a hatch is "not appropriate" (to station). Sedans are still popular here because they're "executive". Yes, these are all real conversation points I've been in. Combine all of the above and owning a car in Singapore means you save tons of time, is technically "affordable" after loans, and you get to feel like you made it. So there's huge pressure to get a car. And once you're hooked, it is very difficult to give it up. Then you have other reasons, like Taxis and Grab compete with individuals for the COE, and parents who "made it" in the boom years buying cars for their kids, and foreign money coming in. But I don't know how big these effects are.

> Also, COE wasn’t always $100K, many people are still on legacy COE when it was $30-$50K What vintage was that?

Apparently it's cyclic, every 10 years a lot of cars reach 10 years, the market is flooded with COE and it gets cheaper.

Really? I would have expected CoEs to be roughly evenly staggered. Also keep in mind that when lots of CoEs expire at the same time, you'll also have more demand in the market from those people whose CoE just expired, but who still want a car.

I'm not sure that's a good lens to look through: the total number of cars in Singapore is fixed, and ownership cost adjusts (via the CoE auction) to balance supply and demand. So there's no drop in total car ownership to explain: that one is held fixed. What we'd need to explain is why comparatively more older people and fewer younger people drive.

The total number of cars is fixed. Singapore's population has exploded in the past 20 years, almost doubling due to immigration. Native birth rate has collapsed. Many relatively wealthy foreign individuals have moved to Singapore, disproportionately middle aged and above. These folks also compete in buying car quotas. They can also buy more than one car. Their demand is more inelastic. Younger folks, local or foreign born are priced out.

That seems like a plausible hypothesis. Btw, I don't think you need the assumption that the rich people's car demand is inelastic.

Condos are for the middle class. Landed property is the status symbol (but, alas, it doesn't start with a C.) Btw, the cab obviously need to bid for CoE as well.

In the 80s and 90s when the housing market was more immature, I believe condos and landed property were around the same price, and condos were seen as somewhat more prestigious because it came with private facilities.

Probably. The classic 5 Cs are quite out of date in general: a credit card is no longer a status symbol, when anyone can get one.

Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek (linguisticdiscovery.com)

From what I understand, and I might be oversimplifying here; many of the differences between Indo-European languages today are a result of the languages that were there before. So the reason Proto-German and Latin were different is in part because of the pre-IE languages in each of those regions. But we don’t have a ton of information on those languages, so scholars are not sure. Of course there were other reasons languages changed, and the inheritance is only one factor. But in some sense there are many lost languages hiding inside contemporary ones.

You can see the same with the word "sea". Its German equivalent See still mainly means "lake", even though in some fixed expressions it can be translated as "sea" (e.g. Nordsee, Ostsee).

I remember reading that, in middlelow German the meanings were swapped “See” meaning the ocean and “Meer” meaning large body of standing water. That’s probably why the lake is called “Steinhuder Meer”. In low German the word for ocean still is “See”.

Der See - the lake Die See - the ocean

As a Dutch person, we were taught German in secondary school and Meer/See were the textbook example of false friends: het meer - der See - the lake de zee - das Meer - the sea I don't remember being taught "die See" but I also dropped my German course after one year (which I now regret). Anyway, I always thought this was an interesting development in our languages.

Neither Buck nor Pokorny are regarded today as worth citing except for historiographical reasons. Their work is obsolete by many decades.

Could you recommend a book or reading material that reflects recent developments in PIE research? I have a few books but they’re quite old.

Hacking OpenAI (hacktron.ai)

The immediate worry isn't superintelligence, it's scalable/bruteforce "good enough" intelligence.

$6.5K bounty when OpenAI raised $122 billion yesterday...if anyone at OpenAI is reading this, come on...do the right thing here

A $6500 bounty is insulting.

> Until two months ago, any user or OpenAI employee logging into OpenAI’s own help forum (community.openai.com) could have had their ChatGPT and Codex accounts taken over. Hey, it's their call to decide the value of their entire user base.

I used to share that perspective until very recently, but today I think it's an outdated way to think of the cutting-edge LLMs. There is so much more going on, with MOEs, internal loops, guardrails and tools that I suspect we're dealing with something that's a little more than the sum of its parts. Not intelligent in the way we recognize in biological organisms, but certainly something beyond a mere Markov chain.

Make no mistakes. LLMs are language model, and nowhere in their code you can find actual reasoning. Re-reinforcement is not magical process that builds conscience or emotions. We are talking about probability built on statistics, with extea steps. Stop humanizing LLMs.

> I don’t think it means the model has internalised the meaning of it (as witness when you talk to an llm how often it forgets what you recently told it was important etc). Humans forget stuff all the time anyway. Would you give them the same diagnosis? Btw, what you describe about 'the most probably next token' would be true for a model that only went through pre-training where they only train on exactly that task. But there's a lot of re-inforcement learning afterwards.

> But there's a lot of re-inforcement learning afterwards. That just shifts the distribution of tokens produced. Ultimately they are still just next token predictors. Like, even "reasoning" models basically work by generating more tokens at inference time, and using them to shift the distribution towards more useful outcomes (in some cases).

Absolutely. If someone makes the weights do continuous learning etc then perhaps an llm can internalise morals. Of course, just like a human, it will be possible to talk it out of those morals. Another recent thread about this is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49744420

If I repeatedly call an LLM in a loop with a markdown document it can edit, would that make it qualify for you? If I give an LLM to compact its context window, so the context it carries can evolve iteratively over time as more and more things come in, is that enough? Compacting the context is really a very, very interesting example here. The "next token predictor" is telling an external tool to change all "previous" tokens. So an LLM + a harness that allows compacting the context is no longer just a token predictor at all! You don't need continuous learning to get interesting dynamics. You just need feedback loops.

Why would the model not find the vulnerability during implementation or testing before release? If it requires a lot of compute and trying, this is something that could be provided for common software.

The surface of potential issues is growing with complexity of all connected parts of the system. That applies to not only software. To prevent issues you either spend proportional amount (dollars, tokens, hours) on testing or reduce complexity of the system.

The path to vast OpenAI profitability is trivial: advertising. Monetizing several hundred million users = $100+ billion ad network. 900 million active weekly users. Silicon Valley can do ad networks extraordinarily easily. Anybody doubting the ability of OpenAI to build an ad network around GPT will likely be embarassed in the near future. The path to substantial profitability for Anthropic is questionable. The Chinese LLMs threaten them by far the most of the three major US LLMs. The money for Anthropic is certainly not in $20-$200 subscriptions. And they don't have anywhere near the consumer potential that GPT does, in terms of unleashing an ad spigot. So how far will the API money scale while being undercut by China. OpenAI has to fight with Google for the ad business, they're specifically building Gemini to focus on consumer + search. Anthropic's business looks cute next to Google's search ad business (which is entirely at risk in this inflection). Meta looks like the biggest potential loser right now, ad dollars will be sucked out of the rotting Facebook network (not Instagram) and redirected to the rapidly expanding, hyper rich context LLM interaction. Advertising on Facebook will feel like running dumb banner ads on Excite in a few years, compared to what GPT will know about its users. People that think Chinese LLMs are a general threat, don't understand consumer destination services, which is what GPT's future is. China currently has nothing to threaten with in that realm. There is half a trillion dollars of advertising up for grabs.

> Silicon Valley can do ad networks extraordinarily easily. This is just not true, building an effective advertising platform costs significant amounts of money, time and people. Remember that you need to hire a sales force for this, and sales scales linearly rather than sub-linearly like engineering. Additionally, you need to spend a lot of money dealing with fraud, fake and malicious ads. Furthermore, you need to figure out where to put the ads and how to rank them. Finally, advertising is a zero sum game (given that the internet has already killed lots of print & OOH advertising), so the only way to win is to better better/cheaper (preferably both) than Google/Meta/Amazon. Best of luck with that (although to be fair to OpenAI they did hire Fidji who knows a lot of this stuff from her time at Facebook). They don't have a Sheryl Sandberg type figure, and she was also really important in selling FB ads to large advertisers. Just looking at their leadership team I don't see anyone with a background in (successful) ads companies, so I'm pretty sceptical that they can build this out quickly enough to matter.

Minimal Phone 2 (minimalcompany.com)

This is great. I really like the “dumb phone” movement. Sadly for now they’re too expensive to buy just as an experiment.

It's still full Android. You could get part of the way there by just installing a different launcher.

my question is why is it soo expensive if you are just making a dumb phone, give me a 100-200$ option with less ram and storage i'll be all in

It's kind of cool, I like that there are people trying to do something else, but I don't how it's "minimal" or discourages heavy use. It's an Android phone, with pretty decent specs. Nothing is stopping you from installing social media apps and doomscrolling all day and night, and chances are you will do that if that's what you do with your phone, just as you can just delete social media apps from your current phone. The custom UI and physical keyboard are innovative though, I don't think I've seen a physical keyboard with touch support before, and I wish them the best.

Perhaps that's good, though. The market for truly minimal phones seems to be rather small. I've had a chance to buy a new Commodore phone and they are really cool, but in the end I decided against it because I wasn't even sure my banking apps were going to run on it and I do need some social media on my phone even if I don't use them often. For example, everybody uses Whatsapp where I live. If you need to buy another phone to complement your minimal phone, it's kind of pointless.

Absolutely agree. Note that modern flip/soapbar phones (Commodore, KaiOI) usually support some social media, including WhatsApp. Banking apps are a problem though, and really contribute locking everyone in the iOS/Android duopoly, and that sucks.

I don't get why having a keyboard is minimal.

I don't think that's a core part of the minimalism. It's about the overall aims (less interruption etc) and their Minimal OS (based on Android) and the fairly simple launcher.

I read that as "minimum standard", not "minimal" as in "not possible to make it have anything less". People need a keyboard and the screen keyboard on iPhones today isn't pleasant, at least for me. I'm not saying that this keyboard will be better, it may suck even worse, but the lack of a good keyboard experience is the main reason I don't do much with my phone other than order Ubers when I'm on vacation.

I see. The way I use my phone--mostly for reading--in my case just means that most of the time I would have this thing I don't need taking up space. But I guess it's good to have alternative, people use things in different ways.

The single input box with different prefixes for actions - @people, #call, - todo etc is very nice. I wish I could have such a powerful input box in my Home Screen. iPhone or even a trimmed down android with such an interface would be cool. I’m not a fan of the physical keyboard, the broad shape(they say one handed use immediately followed by a video of someone using both hands to type). I’m okay with the candy bar all screen phones of today. The UX is pretty cool if I can have it on my “regular” phone.. Anybody have an idea if it is doable on an iPhone or an android phone?

I've been using keyboard-based launchers for a couple years now, I really like it. None quite yet feel perfect to me, but Olauncher has lasted the longest: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.olauncher If you set up a swipe to launch another launcher, you can have all your widgets there, as sometimes that's nice for a multi-app overview of Stuff™ at a glance.

I just wish I could get an answer from them on why a brand new phone is missing some pretty important LTE/5G bands in the US

Well because the phone is not supposed to be used for mindless doomscrolling but calling. Highspeed not needed.

i really feel like the website for a minimal phone should be at least somewhat viewable without javascript.

Minimal ≠ simple

Minimalist phone, maximalist website.

I did that and now constantly check hacker news

Do you? If you disable all notifications you have to make a conscious effort to open a time sink. In time you'll start to forget, esp if you get busy with something. And HN is arguably better than doomscrolling TikTok or Facebook, even with the current LLM/Rust/LLM in Rust spam.