MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aerhardt | 2025-04-25 19:03:25+00:00
> how difficult good application of AI is.

The only interesting application I've identified thus far in my domain in Enterprise IT (I don't do consumer-facing stuff like chatbots) is in replacing tasks that previously would've been done by NLP: mainly extraction, synthesis, classification. I am currently working a long-neglected dataset that needs a massive remodel and I think that would've taken a lot of manual intervention and a mix of different NLP models to whip into shape in the past, but with LLMs we might be able to pull it off with far fewer resources.

Mind you at the scale of the customer I am currently working with, this task also would've never been done in the first place - so it's not replacing anyone.

> This can start looking less like pure AI and more like a mix of traditional software with some AI capabilities

Yes, the other use case I'm seeing is in peppering already existing workflow integrations with a bit of LLM magic here and there. But why would I re-work a worklfow that's already implemented and well-understood in Zapier, n8n or Python with total reliability.

> Knowledge of specific workflows also requires really good product design. High empathy, ability to understand what's not being said, ability to understand how to create an overall process value stream from many different peoples' narrower viewpoints, etc. This is also hard.

> My experience is that this type of work is a narrow slice of the total amount of work to be done

Reading you I get the sense we are on the same page on a lot of thing and I am pretty sure if we worked together we'd get along fine. I'm struggling a bit with the LLM delulus as of late so it's a breath of fresh air to read people out there who get it.
by dzaima | 2025-04-25 19:03:43+00:00
> Open source software is recompiled every week anyway.

Despite being potentially compiled recently, anything from most Linux package managers, and whatever precompiled downloadable executables, even if from open-source code, still targets the 20-year-old SSE2 baseline, wasting the majority of SIMD resources available on modern (..or just not-extremely-ancient) CPUs (unless you're looking at the 0.001% of software that bothers with dynamic dispatch; but for that approach just recompiling isn't enough, you also need to extend the dispatched target set).

RISC-V RVV's LMUL means that you get unrolling for free, as each instruction can operate over up to 8 registers per operand, i.e. essentially "hardware 8x unrolling", thereby making scalar overhead insignificant. (probably a minor nightmare from the silicon POV, but perhaps not in a particularly limiting way - double-pumping has been done by x86 many times so LMUL=2 is simple enough, and at LMUL=4 and LMUL=8 you can afford to decode/split into ups at 1 instr/cycle)

ARM SVE can encode adding a multiple of VL in load/store instructions, allowing manual unrolling without having to actually compute the intermediate sizes. (hardware-wise that's an extremely tiny amount of overhead, as it's trivially mappable to an immediate offset at decode time). And there's an instruction to bump a variable by a multiple of VL.

And you need to bump pointers in any SIMD regardless; the only difference is whether the bump size is an immediate, or a dynamic value, and if you control the ISA you can balance between the two as necessary. The packed SIMD approach isn't "free" either - you need hardware support for immediate offsets in SIMD load/store instrs.

Even in a hypothetical non-existent bad vector SIMD ISA without any applicable free offsetting in loads/stores and a need for unrolling, you can avoid having a dependency between unrolled iterations by precomputing "vlen*2", "vlen*3", "vlen*4", ... outside of the loop and adding those as necessary, instead of having a strict dependency chain.
by matltc | 2025-04-25 19:03:48+00:00
I'm looking to transition to web development role. Been learning for almost three years now and just getting to the point where I have a chance of landing a job.

The first two years were magical; everything was new and quite difficult. I was utterly driven and dug deep into docs and debugged everything myself.

I got a github copilot subscription about a year ago. I feel dumber, less confident, and less motivated now than I ever did pre-AI. I become easily frustrated, and reading docs/learning new frameworks feels almost impossible without AI. I have mostly been just hitting tab and using Claude edits for the past month or so; even typing feels laborious.

Worst of all, my passion for this craft has drastically waned. I can barely get myself motivated to polish my portfolio.

Might just start turning off autocomplete, abandon edits, and just use AI as a tutor and search engine.
by rolph | 2025-04-25 19:04:09+00:00
i read the article, and i really think the combination of stated specialties, with dual-citizenship, sides up to a profile of concern.

-- thats not to say there should be concern. there are stereptypical profiles that ask the question, what is this person capable of doing? rather than, what does this person intend to do?

and thats the problem, its difficult to titrate intent, but capability is easy to asess
by geooff_ | 2025-04-25 19:04:12+00:00
The app can handle everyday shots, as you'd expect though, poor inputs produce poor outputs. Theres really two components to this question though:

1. Can the app differentiate one article of clothing from background / other articles 2. Can the app group together identical articles of clothing

To answer 1. The app has decent performance with test set pixel level mean accuracy of 0.80 and mIoU of 0.69, the test set is all real world fit pix from myself and friends. The 0.8 is a bit misleading though as the errors often occur at clothing boundaries so in poor lighting there can be some border gore.

As for 2. this remains to be seen. Currently clothing aggregation (Grouping together two segmentations of the same shirt) is manual. I'm doing some studies on tuning cosign-sim thresholds but I think long term there may need to be a more robust approach.
by didgetmaster | 2025-04-25 19:04:20+00:00
There are too many stories out there of highly successful people who got that way by going 'all in' on some rising technology.

This causes too many company executives to think 'if we go all in on [latest trend] then the same thing will happen to us'. Very little thought is given to whether the latest thing is a good fit for what you are building.

When it is a good fit, things can really work to your advantage. When it is not, it can just be a monkey on your back.
by adiabatichottub | 2025-04-25 19:04:27+00:00
I really enjoyed the deficit reduction game ("Deficit Reduction Options")

With only some moderate rate increases to taxes on business and top earners along with moderate spending cuts I was able to create a plan that reduced the deficit by 25% over 10 years without screwing over the poor and middle class.

When will a total Federal Government Simulator game be released?
by Mister_Snuggles | 2025-04-25 19:05:59+00:00
I see the carbon tax as a 'stick' (to penalize undesired behaviour, in this case emitting carbon), but it needs to be coupled with a 'carrot' to encourage the desired behaviours.

I'd like to see a carbon tax coupled with massive investments to make public transit legitimately good. There are too many places where there is no viable alternative to driving, a carbon tax will unnecessarily punish those people without giving them a reasonable alternative.
by hinkley | 2025-04-25 19:06:12+00:00
The problem with bench seating is not side impact but accidental steering wheel input during hard cornering. In the typical 10 and 2 hand position having your butt move makes your shoulders move, the shoulders make the hands move, and now you’re understeering. Understeering on a mountain road likely means death, and on other roads a ditch or hitting a phone pole.
by serial_dev | 2025-04-25 19:06:34+00:00
Net zero for security might be generous.

The way I assume it works in practice on a real team is that after some time, most of your team will have no idea how the WAF works and what it protects against, where and how it is configured… but they know it exists, so they will no longer pay attention to security because “we have a tool for that”, especially when they should have finished that feature a week ago…
by dylan604 | 2025-04-25 19:07:22+00:00
Being able to shoot a gun at a paper target in the safety of a gun range is one thing. It's a different thing to do that when it's a person in front on you. It's also a totally different thing when that person in front of you is persons plural in the form of a trained opposing force and the bullets are coming at you. It takes training to quell that fear and be able to react in a manner that does not end with you full of lead.

When I've discussed training in this thread in other comments, this is what I was considering. Not target practice. Not being able reload a weapon. Specifically about mentally holding it together to not freeze, or even loose your ability to aim at something not a paper target in a gun range.
by alistairSH | 2025-04-25 19:07:35+00:00
There's a 5-seat SUV version, so that expands the market a bit. I'm still not convinced it'll sell without beefing up the specs a bit while maintaining the price.

"third car" for people with money to spare.

Yeah, but the same ~$20k - $30k buys you a heck of a lot more ICE. A new Maverick XLT starts in that range. Or a Lariat trim at $34k. And if this is just a toy, that same money gets you in a new base or very high-spec used Miata.
by skydhash | 2025-04-25 19:07:39+00:00
But it takes longer. People taking a proper course in software engineering or reading a good book about it is like going through a game tutorial, while people going through LLMs skip it. The former let you reach faster to the intended objectives, learning how to play properly. You may have some fun doing the latter, but you may also spend years and your only gain will be an ad-hoc strategy.
by voidspark | 2025-04-25 19:07:48+00:00
You are being weirdly pedantic and arguing to the point of absurdity. At some point you just have to accept basic logic and common sense.

Apple has never been an "ad company". They sell computers, software, subscriptions, and they take a cut of the App Store revenue. Ads are a tiny part of their revenue now. Doesn't make them an "ad company" like Google, where ads are their primary revenue source.

I bought a lot of Apple products. They made their money from the high margin in the purchase price, not ad views which I have never seen anywhere on my Macs and maybe seen a couple of the ads on the app store on my phone. They earned about 1 cent on those two ad views, and thousands of dollars from the hardware sales and iCloud subscription.
by cruzcampo | 2025-04-25 19:07:55+00:00
They're building concentration camps in El Salvador.

ICE is gearing up to be the Gestapo.

They're arresting judges.

Now they're building an AI-powered dissident hunting machine.

Don't believe for a second this is only for immigration enforcement. It is for you and me and anyone else they don't like.

This is what fascism looks like.
by sroussey | 2025-04-25 19:08:06+00:00
True, but their research did include running on 5080 local.

The big take away, in my opinion, is that their technique for LUTs etc could also be applied to lossy quants as well. Say maybe you get 5bit accuracy in size of 4bit?

I don’t know, but maybe? Also their two stage design might make current quantized you kernal designs better.
by adverbly | 2025-04-25 19:08:08+00:00
You are correct that most consumption taxes are intrinsically regressive, but you can turn pretty much any consumption tax into a progressive one by simply taking the money and redistributing it at a flat amount per person.

I believe this would be more fair to children who are the ones who will be most impacted by climate change in the end.

I believe there are even some governments that use this approach, but many of them don't make it feel as significant as it should. You should get a big fat cheque in the mail every month as if you won the lottery.
by noboostforyou | 2025-04-25 19:08:11+00:00
> But what happens with generations that will grow up with AI readily available? There is a good chance that there will be a generational skill atrophy in the future

Spot on. Look at the stark difference in basic tech troubleshooting abilities between millennials and gen z/alpha. Both groups have had computers most of their lives but the way that the computers have been "dumbed down" for lack of a better term has definitely accelerated that skill atrophy.
by 9x39 | 2025-04-25 19:08:26+00:00
Consider the ones you don't get: ones where PCs have to be wiped from customization gone wrong, politics and productivity police calls - "Why is Bob gaming?", "Why is Alice on Discord?".

It's about the transition from artisanal hand-configuration to mass-produced fleet standards, and diverting exceptional behavior and customizations somewhere else.
by californical | 2025-04-25 19:09:17+00:00
Think about how much easier that is to game though.

The original suggestion could be collected at point-of-sale for carbon emitting products. Gasoline, airplane tickets (based on average for the flights), even electricity are easy to measure and charge at the point of sale.

In your example, the person has to prove how much they didn’t emit, which is way harder in practice, to get the credit.
by godelski | 2025-04-25 19:10:08+00:00
> After due process via courts, deportation is justified.

Yes?

>> if (person.citizenStatus == illegal && person.citizenStatus in police.knowledge()) { deport(person, police)

After due process citizen status is in police knowledge, right? So they're illegal, ICE knows it, and our flow chart says... deport.

Which condition do you believe is not satisfied? Do you believe the status of the person is not "illegal"? If so, why would we deport them? Or do you believe that the police are not aware of the person's citizenship status? If so how could we deport them?

> ICE is not the police. Police (noun) [0] 1 a: the department of government concerned primarily with maintenance of public order, safety, and health and enforcement of laws and possessing executive, judicial, and legislative powers b: the department of government charged with prevention, detection, and prosecution of public nuisances and crimes United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (aka ICE) [1] a federal law enforcement agency under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

ICE is a LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCY, they are de facto "police." I think you are confusing the fact that "police" is a broad term and because it is less common to deal with federal law enforcement you have a higher frequency of hearing local law enforcement being referred to as "the police". But they both are. "Police" == "Law Enforcement"

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/police

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Immigration_and_Customs_E...
by lliamander | 2025-04-25 19:10:19+00:00
No, you made up a hypothetical scenario that was highly sympathetic to your position. I am saying that we should not let edge cases (real or hypothetical) dictate general policy on how we handle immigration law enforcement, and that any outrage we feel at the tragedies that result from such enforcement should be directed toward the people that allowed these situations to develop in the first place.
by dylan604 | 2025-04-25 19:11:05+00:00
While I'm not familiar with all 50 governors, I'm wondering if there might not be some Republican governors that think things have gone too far as well. Being a Republican does not mean you are in favor of autocracy. It just looks like that right now because nobody is sticking their necks out, but I'm holding onto hope that if it does get to that point, further resistance might come out.
by jimbokun | 2025-04-25 19:11:24+00:00
Yes, but "no devices allowed sitting exams" address all of the ChatGPT cheating concerns.

But that does nothing for homework or long term projects where you can't control the student's physical location for the duration of the work.

You could do a detailed interview after the work is completed, to verify the student actually understands the work they supposedly produced. But that adds to the time spent between instructors and students making it harder to scale classes to large sizes. Which may not be a completely bad thing.
by Aurornis | 2025-04-25 19:11:48+00:00
> I don't think small cars are getting made for the US because of SUV mania and something like a 67 MPG requirement for the Honda Fit based on it's build.

The famous 67MPG requirement was for a hypothetical 2026 model year car

But Honda discontinued the Fit in the United States in 2020, long before the hypothetical 2026 target.

The reason is consumer demand. People weren't buying them. There are thousands of lightly used Honda Fits on the used market for reasonable prices, but they're not moving.

Yes, the regulations are flawed, but that doesn't change the lack of consumer demand.
by km144 | 2025-04-25 19:11:51+00:00
> If you love coding, it’s not just about outputting features faster - it’s also about preserving the craft and joy of problem-solving that got you into this field in the first place.

This is nonsense. The author implies importance of skill atrophy in the context of a job, and then claims that we ought to care if we "love coding"!

Jobs are vehicles for productivity. Where did we go wrong thinking that they would serve as some profound source of meaning in our lives? One of my hopes is that this societal self-actualization will be greatly accelerated by the advent of AI. We may have to find meaning in something other than generating clever solutions for the problems facing the businesses that pay us for that privilege.

On a related note, I am constantly annoyed by the notion that LLMs are somehow "good" because they allow you to write more code or be more productive in other ways. As far I can tell there is nothing inherently "good" about productivity in the modern economy. I guess general prosperity is a public good? But most software being written by most people is not benefitting society in any profound or meaningful way, and that's generally the first productivity gain mentioned. Either I'm completely missing something or people just don't want to think critically about this sort of thing.
by UncleMeat | 2025-04-25 19:12:13+00:00
I'll adjust my phrasing.

As a user, building with thin-lto vs full-lto generally produces pretty similar performance in no small part because a huge amount of effort has gone into making the summaries as effective as possible for key performance needs.

As a compiler developer, especially when developing static analysis warnings rather than optimization passes, the number of cases where I've run into "this would be viable if we had full-lto" has been pretty high.
by steveklabnik | 2025-04-25 19:13:08+00:00
So the thing is that false means thinlto is used depending on other settings, see https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/profiles.html#lto

> false: Performs “thin local LTO” which performs “thin” LTO on the local crate only across its codegen units.

I think this is kind of confusing but whatever. I should have been more clear.
by vizzah | 2025-04-25 19:13:09+00:00
Be aware that OpenAI API credits expire after a year. I've added $5 year ago expecting to use the API, but only consumed $.02 or something. The API started throwing out "Too many requests" HTTP error when I needed it again and ooops!.. there were nothing left. All credit has gone.

Wouldn't have expected that from a honest player.
What If Hacker News Was a Spreadsheet?
by annamonaco | 2025-04-25 19:13:13+00:00
What if Hacker News was a spreadsheet?

Well now it is:

We've been reimagining the spreadsheet for live data at Paradigm.

As a fun side project, we asked ourselves: what if HN itself was a sheet?

So we built it!

https://app.paradigmai.com/sheets/public/57563f21-e243-44a6-9a5e-dafe3337bc97

A live, filterable sheet of the top HN posts, updated daily.

You can:

- Sort by upvotes/hour - Search across titles - See what’s trending right now Paradigm setup:

- Pull live data from HackerNews API - Add all of the columns you want auto enriched - Connect the data to the Paradigm via webhook - Sort and filter by most recent HN posts Link to sheet in comments. Free to copy and remix it however you want.

What other data sources would you like to see as a live sheet?
by singron | 2025-04-25 19:13:43+00:00
It's interesting you say that, since this turned an infra scaling problem into a worker problem for us. Previously, we would get terrible head-of-line throughput issues, so we would use an egregious number of partitions to try to alleviate that. Lots of partitions is hard to manage since resizing topics is operationally tedious and it puts a lot of strain on brokers. But no matter how many partitions you have, the head-of-line still blocks. Even cases where certain keys had slightly slower throughput would clog up the whole partition with normal consumers.

The parallel consumer nearly entirely solved this problem. Only the most egregious cases where keys were ~3000 times slower than other keys would cause an issue, and then you could solve it by disabling that key for a while.
by x436413 | 2025-04-25 19:14:03+00:00
you're not a rural person, c'mon, you're a wealthy cornell tech with a vanity farm. ithaca is dollar horse country, everyone knows that, so yeah i totally buy that in your fairly unique circumtances running a horse business off a back of a ford focus works. i read you as suggesting that the rest of the industry is silly for buying trucks, and you've got it figured out, but you simply punted on the hauling problem.
by chmorgan_ | 2025-04-25 19:14:04+00:00
I follow Vinay Prasad (https://substack.com/@vinayprasadmdmph) to keep up on these topics. It feels like getting a portal to the future in some way as he's on the cutting edge of analyzing the quality of the analysis in a ton of papers. You get to see what conclusions are likely to change in the next handful of years as the information becomes more widespread.
by ein0p | 2025-04-25 19:14:54+00:00
Note that this is _way_ slower at small batch sizes you'd need for interactive use. At batch size 1 this seems to run at 1/3rd the speed of bf16 (so about 1/6th the speed of fp8 you'd realistically be using) if figure 5 is to be believed. This is actually a pretty impressive feat in itself if you know anything about GPU kernel programming, but it is much slower nevertheless. For this to work at "wire speed" it'd need hardware support, which takes years. Their "baseline" elsewhere in the paper is CPU offloading, which is dog slow and can't be made fast due to PCIe bottleneck.
by almostnormal | 2025-04-25 19:15:44+00:00
> Meanwhile jet fuel for private jets is (and remains) not taxed at all, even in the EU.

Not correct. Fuel for private aviation is taxed, including jet fuel and avgas. However, there are very few "private" jets, most are operated by some company, and therefore not private. Jet-A1 for a truely privately operated C172 with a diesel engine is taxed.