MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jcranmer | 2025-04-24 18:33:50+00:00
There's a category of autovectorization known as Superword-Level Parallelism (SLP) which effectively scavenges an entire basic block for individual instruction sequences that might be squeezed together into a SIMD instruction. This kind of vectorization doesn't work well with vector-length-agnostic ISAs, because you generally can't scavenge more than a few elements anyways, and inducing any sort of dynamic vector length is more likely to slow your code down as a result (since you can't do constant folding).

There's other kinds of interesting things you can do with vectors that aren't improved by dynamic-length vectors. Something like abseil's hash table, which uses vector code to efficiently manage the occupancy bitmap. Dynamic vector length doesn't help that much in that case, particularly because the vector length you can parallelize over is itself intrinsically low (if you're scanning dozens of elements to find an empty slot, something is wrong). Vector swizzling is harder to do dynamically, and in general, at high vector factors, difficult to do generically in hardware, which means going to larger vectors (even before considering dynamic sizes), vectorization is trickier if you have to do a lot of swizzling.

In general, vector-length-agnostic is really only good for SIMT-like codes, which you can express the vector body as more or less independent f(index) for some knowable-before-you-execute-the-loop range of indices. Stuff like DAXPY or BLAS in general. Move away from this model, and that agnosticism becomes overhead that doesn't pay for itself. (Now granted, this kind of model is a large fraction of parallelizable code, but it's far from all of it).
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-04-24 18:34:08+00:00
> Would you eat at a McD's where the "Happy Meal" has fentanyl in it?

This is largely a communication problem. Fentanyl is unacceptable, but a large subset of people would be glad to get food with CBD oil for free. Or caffeine - as last year's Panera charged lemonade scandal [1] revealed. Or alcohol, that's already very normal. Or monosodium glutamate, a personal favorite of mine which was once surrounded by negative press, or high-fructose corn syrup, or trans-saturated fats. Or maybe not an intentional part of the food, but traces of herbicides, pesticides, and antibiotics may end up in food, and microplastics or PFOS from packaging will be eaten as well. And I'm sure you've seen old advertisements for cure-all elixirs that contained cocaine.

Health experts know that certain ingredients are bad, and many others are regularly consumed in quantities far, far exceeding their safe levels, but you don't have to look too deeply at a grocery store shelf or fast food menu to realize that the contents are boycott worthy but normalized to the point of being inescapable.

People know even less about what Meta is doing with their data or what their addictive apps do to their brains, and are equally powerless to learn about it or change it.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/panera-charged-lemonade-drinks-ca...
by SpaceNoodled | 2025-04-24 18:34:35+00:00
I click them manually every month. It's kind of a holdover from when I needed to time things in order to keep my checking account in the black, but I kept the process as it helps me keep track of my bills and catch any errors or discrepancies, which does happen.

It certainly takes less time than writing a check and stuffing an envelope, though, what with saved credentials and smartphones; I can do this in a matter of moments while lying in bed every other Friday morning.
by kordlessagain | 2025-04-24 18:34:44+00:00
Honestly, most of the "real engineer" rhetoric is exhausting. Here's the thing: the people most obsessed with software craftsmanship, pattern orthodoxy, and layered complexity often create some of the most brittle, hostile, constantly mutating systems imaginable. You may be able to build abstractions, but if you're shipping stuff that users have to re-learn every quarter because someone needed to justify a promotion via another UI revamp or tech stack rewrite, you're not designing well. You're just changing loudly.

Also, stop gatekeeping AI tooling like it’s cheating. We’re not in a craft guild. The software landscape is full of shovelware and half-baked “best practices” that change more often than a JavaScript framework’s logo. I'm not here to honor the tradition of suffering through YAML hell or memorizing the 400 ways to configure a build pipeline. I’m here to make something work well, fast, and that includes leveraging AI like the power tool it is.

So yeah, you can keep polishing the turd pile of over-engineered “real” systems. The rest of us will be using AI to build, test, and ship faster than your weekly stand-up even finishes.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-04-24 18:35:35+00:00
I also prefer fixed width. At least in C++, all of the padding, alignment, etc is automagically codegen-ed for the register type in my use cases, so the overhead is approximately zero. All the complexity and cost is in specializing for the capabilities of the underlying SIMD ISA, not the width.

The benefit of fixed width is that optimal data structure and algorithm design on various microarchitectures is dependent on explicitly knowing the register width. SIMD widths aren’t not perfectly substitutable in practice, there is more at play than stride size. You can also do things like explicitly combine separate logic streams in a single SIMD instruction based on knowing the word layout. Compilers don’t do this work in 2025.

The argument for vector width agnostic code seems predicated on the proverbial “sufficiently advanced compiler”. I will likely retire from the industry before such a compiler actually exists. Like fusion power, it has been ten years away my entire life.
by immibis | 2025-04-24 18:35:37+00:00
Don't forget the next part: whenever you point out that Discord requires you to give them your phone number, hundreds of Agent Smiths appear in the replies to say that actually you don't. Who are we to believe - the repliers, or our own lying eyes?

(The Agent Smith effect is something conspiracy theorists made up to explain why every time they show off their conspiracy theory in public, every single person around them suddenly gains the same opinion of them. I'm using it humourously)
by fryz | 2025-04-24 18:35:54+00:00
Yeah great question

We based our hallucination detection on "groundedness" on a claim-by-claim basis, which evaluates whether the LLM response can be cited in provided context (eg: message history, tool calls, retrieved context from a vector DB, etc.)

We split the response into multiple claims, determine if a claim needs to be evaluated (eg: and isn't just some boilerplate) and then check to see if the claim is referenced in the context.
by conductr | 2025-04-24 18:36:19+00:00
The best retention incentive is paying good people well to begin with. And, it doesn't have to be huge. Paying people 10% above market when you know they are a strong asset defends you from that person ever wanting to leave. [Aside - but, Budget's should be offensive versus defensive so the whole retention bonus strategy should be an exception (unplanned) in my opinion. Granted that's from an operational view. From a cash flow planning view, the CFO knows it's going to spend money somewhere and probably needs to account for that somehow in their financial plan, but it's best to keep it out functional budget - otherwise department heads will be tempted to spend it, or repurpose it on something else.]

Instead, companies try to hire people 10% below market, end up passing on high quality talent that knows their worth, and obtaining talent that is effectively only delivering 70% or less than the high performer would. A lot of companies rely on HR or recruiters to do the initial 'expectation within budget' screen, so the hiring managers never even see the talent that gets turned away or disinterested by a potentially small budget discrepancy. Also, budgets almost always have exceptions especially for outstanding talent that may come along so really think this is unnecessary sacrifice.
by Kirkman14 | 2025-04-24 18:36:19+00:00
Yes, the Music Creator has been very tricky to run in emulation on my Mac. Originally, I could not get the installer to work in DOSBox, but it did work in QEMU.

After installing the TMC software to a hard disk image, it ran for me in both emulators. However, it wouldn't play music in QEMU -- though the same hard drive image will play music for me in DOSBox!

So, yes, it works for me locally in DOSBox. But for reasons I don't understand, the music does not play in the Internet Archive’s version of DOSBox.

The original installer files can be downloaded here: https://breakintochat.com/blog/2022/11/29/unearthed-kirschen...
by aaronbaugher | 2025-04-24 18:36:24+00:00
At least once a day, I type up a comment somewhere, proofread it, think about whether I really want/need to post it, and then hit the back button. I figure that next-to-last step of asking myself whether it's really something I want out there is a good habit, and if the answer is always yes, I probably haven't thought about it enough.
by sgrove | 2025-04-24 18:36:57+00:00
I think it's not going well? I keep getting to the start a new call page, it fails, and takes me back to the live page. I assume your servers are on fire, but implementing some messaging would help ("come back later") or even better, a queueing system ("you're N in line") would help a lot.

Really looking forward to trying this out!
by kstrauser | 2025-04-24 18:37:41+00:00
Me too. Right now Safari is damming that river of awfulness because no one wants to break their site for iPhone users. So many of the new Chrome "features" sound like end-user nightmares that I want no part of, like:

Chrome: Our new feature lets websites write files directly to your desktop without user intervention!

Users: Yay, I can get daily newsletters right where I want them!

Safari: That's a terrible idea. Now any website can write ads or malware to your desktop.

Users: Why is Safari so outdated? Chrome's had this new feature for a week now!

a week later

Users: Why is my desktop filled with ads?

Chrome: It's a mystery unto the ages! Hey, did I tell you about our new API for allowing advertisers to watch you while you sleep?

Users: LOL, Safari is so far behind that they'll probably never even implement this.
by gruez | 2025-04-24 18:37:51+00:00
I'm surprised how many upvotes this got (40 points as of me writing this comment), given how little "meat" is actually in this article. The author presents a graph where views for a given user dropped precipitously after a "feud with musk". That's certainly suspicious, and was worth bringing up, but the rest of the blog is just pontificating about "social engineering" and "perception cascades", backed by absolutely nothing. Are people just upvoting based on title and maybe the first paragraph? This post could have been truncated to the graph and very little would be lost.
by fryz | 2025-04-24 18:38:20+00:00
Yeah thanks for the feedback.

We think we stand out from our competitors in the space because we built first for the enterprise case, with consideration for things like data governance, acceptable use, and data privacy and information security that can be deployed in managed easily and reliably in customer-managed environments.

A lot of the products today have similar evaluations and metrics, but they either offer a SAAS solution or require some onerous integration into your application stack.

Because we started w/ the enterprise first, our goal was to get to value as quickly and as easily as possible (to avoid shoulder-surfing over zoom calls because we don't have access to the service), and think this plays out well with our product.
by mcphage | 2025-04-24 18:39:09+00:00
> The word missing from the abstract is 'PornHub', of course. They're not just studying “a dominant online platform”. The fact that it is PornHub seems relevant enough not to hide it in the abstract to me.

The fact that it was PornHub is mentioned repeatedly in the paper itself. Leaving it out of the abstract seems fair—they picked PornHub because it was a site that deleted 80% of their content, not because they're specifically interested in studying PornHub.

And, they study several of MindGeek's sites, not just PornHub exclusively.
by HideousKojima | 2025-04-24 18:39:27+00:00
>Every single country in the world that is on metric today had to switch from something else at some point in the past. Why overfocus so much on UK when you have literally a hundred successful examples?

A huge percentage of those countries didn't have established industrial bases, infrastructure, etc. And also no educated general populace that needed reeducating. And often those countries were effectively forced into adopting metric through colonization and/or invasion.
by a_c | 2025-04-24 18:39:56+00:00
Neuro network mimics human brain, what fires together wires together. X mimics human psychology (still brain). Call it halo effect, appeal to authority, selection bias. Some say it is a bug, some say it is a feature, a feature in decision making that developed under limited time and energy. Selecting X, but not other social network, as the subject of the article is a selection bias, it is also a feature, so is X's selection of sorting criteria
by FireBeyond | 2025-04-24 18:40:12+00:00
> Tesla literally did come weeks away from bankruptcy on a few occasions in the 2010s as he often put the cart before the horse.

Yet another thing Tesla should have faced sanctions on - you'd never have known this by listening to any earnings call or looking at any financial filings from Tesla at that time (and at one point I think the number was <10 days).
by CamperBob2 | 2025-04-24 18:40:55+00:00
From the article:

Of course, there’s another possibility that takes us far beyond astronomy when it comes to making use of this important length: creating and measuring enough spin-aligned hydrogen atoms in the lab to detect this spin-flip transition directly, in a controlled fashion. The transition takes about ~10 million years to “flip” on average, which means we’d need around a quadrillion (1015) prepared atoms, kept still and cooled to cryogenic temperatures, to measure not only the emission line, but the width of it. If there are phenomena that cause an intrinsic line-broadening, such as a primordial gravitational wave signal, such an experiment would, quite remarkably, be able to uncover its existence and magnitude.

Isn't that basically an H-maser? Not something found every day on eBay, but not really all that exotic either. Every VLBI site has one or more.

Given a suitable state selection mechanism, which is what masers rely on, I don't see why it would be necessary to flip the states "manually" through ionization or any other mechanism. Keeping the state-selected atoms away from the container walls is the real trick.
by janalsncm | 2025-04-24 18:41:09+00:00
The low effort boosting replies are what get me. A lot of tech billionaires (who supposedly work harder than any mortal) spend a ton of time with one word / emoji replies.

At least this is visible boosting. The next step is to boost behind the scenes, entirely unauditable. All of the power (and more) of an editor, none of the accountability.
by seer | 2025-04-24 18:41:19+00:00
If your loyalty is to your team / admin people, it could be quite profitable.

Plenty of examples of people (me included) that when their superior changes projects or leaves the company etc, they know and trust you and they want to move you with them.

I for example managed to switch from a dull team that drove me to almost the verge of quitting to a very exciting skunkworks team that I had a blast working in for almost 2 years, let alone doubling my compensation.

That happened because I was loyal to my SEM, in the sense of giving extra time if he was on the line, giving honest feedback and generally trying to make them “succeed”, the moment a risky and important project was on the table at the org he was like - “let’s organize a crack team” and invited me on board … and it was such a cool experience.

“The company” itself doesn’t “feel” anything towards the people working for it, it’s the people behind it that are influenced by such things.

The best orgs would have those personal loyalties also align with the orgs mission, but they are still personal - given from humans to humans.

Of course there is a fine line in “being a good resource” and “sucking up”, but good managers usually know the difference.
by HeyLaughingBoy | 2025-04-24 18:41:20+00:00
> it's interesting to talk about how "act your size" can also be wrong. Sometimes fake-it-til-you-make-it is the goal.

And sometimes they can both be useful at the same time. A while back I was contacted by a Fortune 500 company to build them some custom hardware. I'm the proverbial "one guy in a basement" so I could respond quickly to change requests without having to go through multiple meetings and their engineers appreciated that.

OTOH, as we got deeper into it, when I realized that they were planning to do most transactions by Purchase Order, I was really concerned about scaring them off by telling them I was really just one person, so I very quickly spun up an LLC in an attempt to look larger, at least to their Purchasing Dept. At the time I didn't realize that you can get an EIN (Employer Identification Number) while being a Sole Proprietorship, but creating the LLC just took a few minutes on the state Attorney General's site anyway.
by BoostandEthanol | 2025-04-24 18:41:21+00:00
Can agree that it’s good at finding books. I was trying to find a book (Titanic 2020) I vaguely remembered from a couple plot points and the fact a ship called Titanic was invoked. ChatGPT figured it out pretty much instantly, after floundering through book sites and Google for a while.

Wonder if books are inherently easier because their content is purely written language? Whereas movies and art tend to have less point by point descriptions of what they are.
by riffic | 2025-04-24 18:41:29+00:00
It’s hilarious to look back at old threads on the orange site where people made wild claims, like calling Twitter a “public utility” without much thought. But honestly, I always saw the company as vulnerable to these issues. That’s why Masnick’s article “Protocols not Platforms” is still so spot-on.

https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...
by araes | 2025-04-24 18:41:42+00:00
Little confused. So you're mostly giving credit to a demo that then inspired your own demo?

Either way, both demos are fairly interesting, especially since there's so little exploration of sailing and the physics involved most of the time.

The second sailrhythm demo seems rather high quality and a better representation of the physics involved. Not sure if you're planning to work on it further, yet putting the rudder heading up near the top would be helpful, maybe with a circular dial you can select like the compass or broad reach displays. Kinda weird when the boat flips completely around to head left.

Some kind of visual representation on the Boom Vang, Cunningham, Outhaul, Backstay, and Jib Lead would also be helpful, since it's really difficult to tell if they're actually doing anything. Maybe a transparent deformation magnified overlay showing the sail profile surface deformation extended away from the actual sail in extreme distortion. Otherwise the changes are so minute its challenging to perceive.

Otherwise, it's a cool demo, and seems to be (from a not especially experienced sailor) relatively realistic of the forces involved. Suggested extension would be showing the wind flowing off the sails and how the forces transition. Also, showing other boats, particularly something complicated like a Windjammer [1], Full-Rigged Ship [2] or Schooner [3] varieties.

Also cool, simply because so few submissions seem to deal with sailing, boats, and generally water transport principles. Lots of possible VC ideas related to sails and sailboats. MarineTraffic [4] is currently tracking 300,000 ships out on the world oceans, and surprisingly small number use any form of sail based propulsion. Route planning and "this much cargo to this area with this speed of delivery" estimation relative to money spent on oil and fuel for a normal ship would likely be possible. From this Quora answer (suggested by Google) a small container ship (something with 15000 kW, 2000-3000 TEU capacity, maybe a Feedermax ship) might use 2000 tons of fuel crossing the Pacific (maybe $500,000 to $1,000,000 of fuel) [5]. This paper [6] has a much more complicated breakdown if you're interested in those types of calculations.

Also quite a bit with drones, and automated sailing. [7][8] Even a decent amount with land propulsion [9] that's been explored occasionally and there's even a tiny amount with space probes and planetary rovers as concepts [10].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windjammer

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full-rigged_ship

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schooner

[4] https://www.marinetraffic.com

[5] https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-fuel-a-cargo-...

[6] https://www.man-es.com/docs/default-source/document-sync/pro...

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmanned_surface_vehicle

[8] https://www.saildrone.com/

[9] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_sailing

[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zephyr_(rover)
by camel-cdr | 2025-04-24 18:41:58+00:00
> we somewhat maxed out at 512 bits

Which still means you have to write your code at least thrice, which is two times more than with a variable length SIMD ISA.

Also there are processors with larger vector length, e.g. 1024-bit: Andes AX45MPV, SiFive X380, 2048-bit: Akeana 1200, 16384-bit: NEC SX-Aurora, Ara, EPI

> no way around this

You rarely need to rewrite SIMD code to take advantage of new extensions, unless somebody decides to create a new one with a larger SIMD width. This mostly happens when very specialized instructions are added.

> In my experience, dynamic vector sizes make code slower, because they inhibit optimizations.

Do you have more examples of this?

I don't see spilling as much of a problem, because you want to avoid it regardless, and codegen for dynamic vector sizes is pretty good in my experience.

> I don't think SVE delivered any large benefits

Well, all Arm CPUs except for the A64FX were build to execute NEON as fast as possible. X86 CPUs aren't built to execute MMX or SSE or the latest, even AVX, as fast as possible.

Anyway, I know of one comparison between NEON and SVE: https://solidpixel.github.io/astcenc_meets_sve

> Performance was a lot better than I expected, giving between 14 and 63% uplift. Larger block sizes benefitted the most, as we get higher utilization of the wider vectors and fewer idle lanes.

> I found the scale of the uplift somewhat surprising as Neoverse V1 allows 4-wide NEON issue, or 2-wide SVE issue, so in terms of data-width the two should work out very similar.
by johnmaguire | 2025-04-24 18:42:21+00:00
I haven't dug into these, so apologies for the naive question, but for a multi-tenant service like WordPress.com, can you effectively limit which WordPress blogs can WebMention you? If the allowlist is formed on the domain, this seems limiting.

Perhaps more advanced URL regex can achieve more fine-grained control but I do still see advantages in pubkey auth (especially if people want to move their content.)

Still, I do find myself wishing for a lighterweight-than-ActivityPub middleground.
by aengelke | 2025-04-24 18:42:24+00:00
Thanks, I misremembered. However, the microarchitecture is a bit "weird" (really HPC-targeted), with very long latencies (e.g., ADD (vector) 4 cycles, FADD (vector) 9 cycles). I remember that it was much slower than older x86 CPUs for non-SIMD code, and even for SIMD code, it took quite a bit of effort to get reasonable performance through instruction-level parallelism due to the long latencies and the very limited out-of-order capacities (in particular the just 2x20 reservation station entries for FP).