MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by andersmurphy | 2025-05-31 13:52:47+00:00
Good, question. The simple answer is there already is such a construct on the JVM already: the semaphore. People just forget it exists. I wrote an article about it a while back[1].

1. Managing throughput with virtual threads (it's in Clojure, but it's using the underlying Java APIs)

https://andersmurphy.com/2024/05/06/clojure-managing-through...
by saghm | 2025-05-31 13:53:46+00:00
Okay, but what's the alternative to the "semantic approach"? People keep alluding to it in this thread, but no one seems to actually be explaining it.

I'd argue that the main part of the confusion here is that people don't seem to agree on what "food" means, and I'll personally admit that I don't have any confidence in my ability to define it in a clear way that would satisfy most people here. I don't have any particular strong feelings against what you're saying about animal proteins and plant consumption (despite knowing that I fall far short of what anyone on either side of that argument would consider a healthy diet), but that's because it's at least clear to me what you're arguing. The issue to me is that saying something edible is "food" or "not food" implies a binary that's really hard for me to wrap my head around, and it really doesn't seem like anyone is willing to define that in a way that I can understand; as soon as I try to ask questions to understand, it feels to me like the people using this stricter definition of "food" are the ones who get defensive. I want to keep an open mind, since I'm well aware of my lack of knowledge when it comes to nutrition, but it's hard not to feel confused when someone argues that there's a strict boundary where processing something makes it no longer food, but no one seems to be willing to elaborate on what it is. From my perspective, it seems like some people might have a more nuanced understanding of what they consider food, but because it's inconsistent with the previous idea I had of what "food" is, I don't have any way of understanding what their understanding is. If there are people treating nutrition the same way as politics and religion, it's the ones who make bold claims without further explanation and reject any disagreement as the result of illogical forces.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-05-31 13:54:03+00:00
No. The checks were mostly meaningless.

The near zero interest rates, pause on student loan payments, pause on rent payments, doubling of unemployment pay, and then the dustings of stimulus checks and bonus childcare checks, all while most white collar workers just continued working like nothing happened, created an incredibly cash rich environment that most people have never seen before.

And the PPP loans handouts to business owners just to throw more gas on the fire.
by lazide | 2025-05-31 13:54:09+00:00
Biological muscles come with a lot of baggage, very constrained operating environments, and limited endurance.

It’s not just that ‘we don’t know how to build them’, it’s that the actuators aren’t a standalone part - and we don’t know how to build (or maintain/run in industrial enviroments!) the ‘other stuff’ economically either.
by kragen | 2025-05-31 13:54:42+00:00
There are functions that are differentiable, but not Lipschitz, e.g. sin(1/x) on (0, ∞)). In this context the Lipschitz property allows you to do things that mere differentiability doesn't, and, in the context of assuming that your function is differentiable, the definition given for the Lipschitz property is correct. It's true that there are also functions that are Lipschitz-continuous but not differentiable, but in this context they aren't interesting.
by x-complexity | 2025-05-31 13:55:00+00:00
> Yes, and it belongs to us. It's not theirs to sell to the highest bidder.

Your attention belongs to you, until you give it to someone else.

The videographer has the right to sell sponsorships on their videos in exchange the attention they've attracted. It is also their right to do so.

> Not our problem. Business needs do not excuse it. Let all those so called innovators find a way to make it without an attention economy. Let them go bankrupt if they can't.

Your logic has already been tried: It's called Netflix. And it was overtaken by YouTube.

YouTube has been the wellspring for indie videographers because they have a platform that could (a) handle the video hosting for them for free, where (b) they could post their experiments on without an upfront cost & where an audience can be found because the platform's free.

Your idea seeks upfront payment, which increases the risk cost dramatically from 0 to a fixed value. One-shot experiments with 0 funds are killed under your scheme.

To seek their bankruptcy is nothing short of a fetishistic desire for your ideals to trample on others your your own gloating. Go back to the DVD era.
by adrian_b | 2025-05-31 13:55:22+00:00
Not being able to auto-vectorize is not the fault of the IEEE standard, but the fault of those programming languages which do not have ways to express that the order of some operations is irrelevant, so they may be executed concurrently.

Most popular programming languages have the defect that they impose a sequential semantics even where it is not needed. There have been programming languages without this defect, e.g. Occam, but they have not become widespread.

Because nowadays only a relatively small number of users care about computational applications, this defect has not been corrected in any mainline programming language, though for some programming languages there are extensions that can achieve this effect, e.g. OpenMP for C/C++ and Fortran. CUDA is similar to OpenMP, even if it has a very different syntax.

The IEEE standard for floating-point arithmetic has been one of the most useful standards in all history. The reason is that both hardware designers and naive programmers have always had the incentive to cheat in order to obtain better results in speed benchmarks, i.e. to introduce errors in the results with the hope that this will not matter for users, which will be more impressed by the great benchmark results.

There are always users who need correct results more than anything else and it can be even a matter of life and death. For the very limited in scope uses where correctness does not matter, i.e. mainly graphics and ML/AI, it is better to use dedicated accelerators, GPUs and NPUs, which are designed by prioritizing speed over correctness. For general-purpose CPUs, being not fully-compliant with the IEEE standard is a serious mistake, because in most cases the consequences of such a choice are impossible to predict, especially not by the people without experience in floating-point computation who are the most likely to attempt to bypass the standard.

Regarding CUDA, OpenMP and the like, by definition if some operations are parallelizable, then the order of their execution does not matter. If the order matters, then it is impossible to provide guarantees about the results, on any platform. If the order matters, it is the responsibility of the programmer to enforce it, by synchronization of the parallel threads, wherever necessary.

Whoever wants vectorized code should never rely on programming languages like C/C++ and the like, but they should always use one of the programming language extensions that have been developed for this purpose, e.g. OpenMP, CUDA, OpenCL, where vectorization is not left to chance.
by BoingBoomTschak | 2025-05-31 13:55:26+00:00
The quite cool journey of a hacker trying to find his favourite SSG itch scratching position.

What inspired me to post it is that I cobbled a fun HTML preprocessor using cpp to someone today: https://git.sr.ht/~q3cpma/html-cpp (I use a Common Lisp contraption for myself).
by lazide | 2025-05-31 13:56:42+00:00
Making your enemy spend $50m to defend against something you spent $500k on is a viable strategy for crushing your enemies economy. It works even better when you turn around and do it 100 times. If the enemy still can’t actually prosecute the offensive successfully to actually get out of the mess.

The US never wanted Russia to ‘lose’ the Ukraine war. They wanted them stuck in a never ending Vietnam, grinding their economy and a generation of young men (young men they were already in short supply on!) into paste for nothing. And it’s been working.
by arjunbajaj | 2025-05-31 13:56:49+00:00
I recommend trying Javy[0]. Javy allows you to build a WASM file that includes Javy's JS interpreter along with your JS source code. Note that Javy is a heavily sandboxed environment so it doesn't have access to the internet, or npm modules, a desirable feature for running user code.

We're building an IoT Cloud Platform, Fostrom[1] where we're using Javy to power our Actions infrastructure. But instead of compiling each Action's JS code to a Javy WASM module, I figured out a simpler way by creating a single WASM module with our wrapper code (which contains some further isolation and helpful functions), and we provide the user code as an input while executing the single pre-compiled WASM module.

[0] https://github.com/bytecodealliance/javy

[1] https://fostrom.io
by ajross | 2025-05-31 13:58:15+00:00
That is the "tuning" solution. And mostly it works by limiting scope of execution ("just don't do that") and if that doesn't work by having some kind of recovery method ("push this button to reset", probably along with "use this backup to recalibrate"). And it... works. But the bug is still a bug. In software we prefer more robust techniques.

FWIW, my memory is that this was exactly what happened with Apollo 13. It lost its gyro calibration after the accident (it did the thing that was the "just don't do that") and they had to do a bunch of iterative contortions to recover it from things like the sun position (because they couldn't see stars out the iced-over windows).

NASA would have strongly preferred IEEE doubles and quaternions, in hindsight.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-05-31 13:58:19+00:00
Work from home was the wrench in the governments plan. If the pandemic happened in 2000, the stimulus would have been needed, as the tools for remote work were way too poor back then.

But instead all the productivity workers just switched to their home office and things just kept working. The stimulus should have been shut off in early-mid 2021 when this was abundantly clear. But the government let it run because people were so jubilant in the money shower.
by dahart | 2025-05-31 13:58:54+00:00
The spec doesn’t prevent auto-vectorization, it only says the language should avoid it when it wants to opt in to producing “reproducible floating-point results” (section 11 of IEEE 754-2019). Vectorizing can be implemented in different ways, so whether a language avoids vectorizing in order to opt in to reproducible results is implementation dependent. It also depends on whether there is an option to not vectorize. If a language only had auto-vectorization, and the vectorization result was deterministic and reproducible, and if the language offered no serial mode, this could adhere to the IEEE spec. But since C++ (for example) offers serial reductions in debug & non-optimized code, and it wants to offer reproducible results, then it has to be careful about vectorizing without the user’s explicit consent.
by jwrallie | 2025-05-31 13:59:25+00:00
That’s good advice. You need to see the costs that are not so obvious including your own time.

You might as well profit a bit in exchange of the extra work and to cover some losses as others mentioned.

Eventually if demand is sustained, you will see clones pop up on AliExpress or the likes of it very cheap anyway. The design is open source after all, and this is plenty of generosity already.

You can consider making a discount if someone ask for it with a university email or something.
by apgwoz | 2025-05-31 13:59:34+00:00
> Why would HashiCorp provide free hosting of providers and modules for projects competing, using HashiCorp's own code at that?

If you recall, my point is that “providers were in danger,” and this is a reason in support of that. HashiCorp, of course, has no obligation to host providers for competitors. But, this is one more reason OpenTofu succeeded!

> Terraform Community Edition is still free and usable for anyone as long as you don't sell it to compete with HashiCorp.

Except, it’s rather unclear what “compete with HashiCorp” means, and there’s very little assurance that if you stick with terraform community edition you won’t get screwed over and be forced to pay in 6 months.

You can make all the arguments about “needing to make money”, “free loaders”, etc. HashiCorp is not unique in changing licenses and getting backlash.

But, as someone who joined HashiCorp, in part, because of our open source strategy, and hearing over and over, for years, how it was the reason we were so successful…
by mindslight | 2025-05-31 13:59:49+00:00
> We anonymize IP addresses by replacing the last octet with an asterisk, effectively grouping the same subnet under a single account

So as a user, not only do I have to suffer your blockwall's false positives based on "data center IPs" (ie most things that aren't naively browsing from the information-leaking address of a last-mile connection like some cyber-bumpkin). But if I do manage to find something that isn't a priori blocked (or manage to click through 87 squares of traffic lights), I still then get lumped in with completely unrelated address-neighbors to assuage your conscience that you're not building a user surveillance system based on nonconsentually processing personal information.

Just please make sure you have enough of a feedback process that your customers can see that they are losing real customers with real dollars.
by Swizec | 2025-05-31 14:00:46+00:00
> No you wouldn’t. Obesity rates back then were near zero.

Define back then. My great grandma lived from 1910’s to 1990’s. I believe she got indoor plumbing and electricity sometime in the 1950’s or 60’s.

Because everyone grew their own food, supermarkets were mostly for sugar, salt, and such. Vegetable oils and margarine started becoming popular in the 70’s as a healthy alternative to lard.

From what I remember visiting those farms as a kid, the farm guys all had big bellies. Maybe from the alcohol? They weren’t american fat, true, more like power lifter fat.

PS: sausages are extremely calorie dense. A good blutwurst will pack about 1000 calories in 1 portion.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-05-31 14:02:03+00:00
The trouble with looking at past examples of new tech and automation is that those were all verticals - the displaced worker could move to a different, maybe newly created, work area left intact by the change.

Where AI will be different (when we get there - LLMs are not AGI) is that it is a general human-replacement technology meaning there will be no place to run ... They may change the job landscape, but the new jobs (e.g. supervising AIs) will ALSO be done by AI.

I don't buy this "AGI by 2027" timeline though - LLMs and LLM-based agents are just missing so many basic capabilities compared to a human (e.g. ability to learn continually and incrementally). It seems that RL, test-time compute (cf tree search) and agentic application, have given a temporary second wind to LLMs which were otherwise topping out in terms of capability, but IMO we are already seeing the limits of this too - superhuman math and coding ability (on smaller scope tasks) do not translate into GENERAL intelligence since they are not based on general mechanism - they are based on vertical pre-training in these (atypical in terms of general use case) areas where there is a clean reward signal for RL to work well.

It seems that this crazy "we're responsibly warning you that we're going to destroy the job market!" spiel is perhaps because these CEOs realize there is a limited window of opportunity here to try to get widespread AI adoption (and/or more investment) before the limitations become more obvious. Maybe they are just looking for an exit, or perhaps they are hoping that AI adoption will be sticky even if it proves to be a lot less capable that what they are promising it will be.
by bgwalter | 2025-05-31 14:04:02+00:00
> They are performing close to or in some cases even beating the standard expert-optimized production kernels shipped in PyTorch.

The PyTorch code base is NOT written by performance experts in any way. This is the wrong base line. Nothing about that code base is clean or hand optimized .

The "AI" generation methodology seems to give many instructions and even descends into instruction trees, manually throwing away results etc. So it requires, as usual, extreme guidance.
by pclmulqdq | 2025-05-31 14:04:21+00:00
-ffast-math is actually something like 15 separate flags, and you can use them individually if you want. 3 of them are "no NaNs," "no infinities," and "no subnormals." Several of the other flags allow you to treat math as associative or distributive if you want that.

The library has some merit, but the goal you've stated here is given to you with 5 compiler flags. The benefit of the library is choosing when these apply.
by bentley | 2025-05-31 14:04:32+00:00
> I don’t understand why people are ok with Google scraping their site (when it is called indexing), fine with users scraping their site (when it is called RSS reading), but suddenly not ok with AI startups scraping their site.

I’m pretty open‐minded about AI, and have no visceral objection to AI scraping in theory. However… the rise of AI scrapers is the first time in twenty years of running tiny websites that my servers—all my servers, consistently—hit CPU and bandwidth usage levels far above baseline, and even brush against my hosts’ monthly limits. When I check server logs, the traffic is largely bots repeatedly trawling infinite variations of version control history pages. Googlebot never crawled these enough to become a problem; Internet Archive never crawled these enough to become a problem. But the current scrapers are, and literally everyone I talk to who hosts their own VCS webservers is having the same problem right now. Many are choosing to reduce the problem by injecting Cloudflare or Anubis, which I as a user hate, and refuse to do myself—but what alternative can I propose to them? People running these servers are just users of Gitea and CGit and whatnot, they’re not capable of rewriting the underlying tools to reduce the CPU usage of diff generation.
by atomman747 | 2025-05-31 14:04:46+00:00
I get that the author “doesn’t care anymore”, but I saw Google, ripe.net, and semrush in the banned IPs.

Of these, I certainly wouldn’t ban Google, and probably not the others, if I wanted others to see it and talk about it.

Even if your content were being scraped for some rando’s AI bot, why have a public site if you don’t expect your site to be used?

Turning the lights off on the motel sign when you want people to find it is not a good way to invite people in.
by kragen | 2025-05-31 14:04:49+00:00
Marshall Brain, who recently committed suicide, wrote a book in 02003 about this; it's called "Manna". Unfortunately, before he killed himself, he removed it from his website. Fortunately, he didn't remove it from the WABAC machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20040903175746/http://marshallbr...

It's a disturbingly prescient read, and unfortunately I don't find the optimistic ending plausible.
by JadeNB | 2025-05-31 14:05:43+00:00
> Robotics seems harder, though, and has been around for longer than LLMs. Robotic automation can replace blue collar factory workers, but I struggle to imagine it replacing a plumber who comes to your house and fixes your pipes, or a waiter serving food at a restaurant, or someone who restocks shelves at grocery stores, that kind of thing. Plus, in the case of service work like being a waiter, I imagine some customers will always be willing to pay for a human face.

Wouldn't you have struggled to imagine most of what LLMs can now do 5 years ago?
by bubbleRefuge | 2025-05-31 14:05:54+00:00
There is no proof that higher interest rates lead to greater unemployment. In fact, macro employment kind of boomed during the referenced period. I'd posit that higher rates actually boosted macro employment stats . Why ? Because higher rates = higher income to rich people via interest income channel = higher fed budget deficits ( gov is net payer of interest) = higher GDP = lower unemployment ceterus paribus.
by cowanon2222 | 2025-05-31 14:06:08+00:00
> if a perfectly symmetrical interior (& exterior - anything contributing to resonances) wouldn't sound better

I'm guessing it would likely look more pure on a frequency plot, but sound sterile if things were perfectly symmetrical. The little imperfections, materials, and design tradeoffs give each instrument its unique tone color (timbre). Often, musicians will chase a certain builder and year, and even within that, only a few instruments will be considered "great". For example, guitarists chasing the perfect Les Paul or most classical violinists chasing a Stradivarius.
by 29ebJCyy | 2025-05-31 14:06:15+00:00
I know this is somewhat antithetical to this article, but I’ve gotten similar vibes recently from Astro. Yes, I had to relearn some stuff, but once your brain starts thinking the Astro way, it mostly just works and feels closer to rails (but with the ability to craft weird fun JS experiences) than any JS tool I’ve used since Rails 4.
by dahart | 2025-05-31 14:06:16+00:00
The bigger problem there is the language not offering a way to signal the author’s intent. If an author doesn’t care about the order of operations in a sum, they will still write the exact same code as the author who does care. This is a failure of the language to be expressive enough, and doesn’t reflect on the IEEE spec. (The spec even does suggest that languages should offer and define these sorts of semantics.) Whether the program is specifying an order of operations is lost when the language offers no way for a coder to distinguish between caring about order and not caring. This is especially difficult since the vast majority of people don’t care and don’t consider their own code to be a specification on order of operations. Worse, most people would even be surprised and/or annoyed if the compiler didn’t do certain simplifications and constant folding, which change the results. The few cases where people do care about order can be extremely important, but they are rare nonetheless.
by gcanyon | 2025-05-31 14:06:23+00:00
The article seems more about the underlying causality, and less about the charts' specific role in misleading. To pick one example, the scatterplot chart isn't misleading: it's just a humble chart doing exactly what it's supposed to do: present some data in a way that makes clear the relationship (not necessarily causality!) between saturated fat consumption and heart disease.

The underlying issue (which the article discusses to some extent) is how confounding factors can make the data misleading/allow the data to be misinterpreted.

To discuss "The Illusion of Causality in Charts" I'd want to consider how one chart type vs. another is more susceptible to misinterpretation/more misleading than another. I don't know if that's actually true -- I haven't worked up some examples to check -- but that's what I was hoping for here.
by mrkeen | 2025-05-31 14:06:38+00:00
> Also, framing it as "us vs them" misses the point. For instance,

We would never use Spark or Kafka for small data, not like them. Their choices are misguided.

Their data teams are too big, ours are the right size.

Fwiw, I use Kafka regardless of scale. It's the only mainstream system out there that doesn't encourage throwing away your receipts. It's the programming equivalent of "accountants don't use erasers".