MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eqvinox | 2025-05-31 10:21:59+00:00
It doesn't become subjective; things in -O3 can objectively be understood to produce equal or faster code for a higher build cost in the vast majority of cases, roughly averaged across platforms. (Without loss in correctness.)

If you know your exact target and details about your input expectations, of course you can optimize further, which might involve turning off some things in -O3 (or even -O2). On a whole bunch of systems, -Os can be faster than -O3 due to I-cache size limits. But at-large, you can expect -O3 to be faster.

Similar considerations apply for LTO and PGO. LTO is commonly default for release builds these days, it just costs a whole lot of compile time. PGO is done when possible (i.e. known majority inputs).
by CorrectHorseBat | 2025-05-31 10:22:31+00:00
If you go to the extreme, say you sample 100M people of 100M and 100M of 8B then the first number is exact and the second has a very small error. So the error is a function of sample size and population.

In not extreme cases when your population is much bigger than the sample size you're correct that it doesn't really make any difference.
by sailingparrot | 2025-05-31 10:23:16+00:00
> if your job is a necessary part of something generating revenue and your not easily replaceable.

First part of this statement is clearly false. People on the phone in a tech support company are very much necessary to generate revenue, people tending to field were very much necessary to extract the value of the fields. Draftsmen before CAD were absolutely necessary etc.

Yet technology replaced them, or is in the process of doing so.

So then, your statement simplifies to “if you want to be safe for replacement have a job that’s hard to replace” which isn’t very useful anymore.
by mariusor | 2025-05-31 10:24:02+00:00
Similar to your suggestion, I implemented a wrapper around retries in Go before and despite liking the lookup table version quite a lot, I think it's more important to be able to parametrize the initial duration of the back-off and also the rate at which it grows, so that's what I focused on.

I'm not sure how my example fares against on a simplicity scale, but it feels a little more readable to me:

Retry(5, BackOff(time.Second, Linear(1.4), func(_ context.Context) { // do stuff } )

Example cribbed from the documentation: https://pkg.go.dev/git.sr.ht/~mariusor/ssm#StrategyFn
by jpc0 | 2025-05-31 10:26:22+00:00
There are so many different flavours of C++ put there that this guide doesn’t exactly do itself the credit it deserves.

There are easy ways to implement stuff like enums with members in C++, just put an anonymous enum inside a class/struct, its possible but marked as not possible.

Likewise when discussing modules in rust while completely ignoring the existence of modules in C++ that is actually support by modern tooling.

There are other places where there are similar issues I have with the text (you can just add a compiler flag and get the same behaviour. Don’t even try and argue “but rust just does it out of the box”, I would need to rewrite my entire codebase vs just adding a few bits of text to my build system, these things are not equivalent)

They didn’t discuss much about FFI at all, generally sayings “theres a crate for that and if there isn’t let us know”, in my experience the crates are not amazing for esoteric things (anything graphics’s related, ffmpeg is another one) and are actually significantly more painful to use that just writing in a restricted version of C++.

Rust has a happy path, and they are broadening it incrementally, but theres is a lifetime of history before rust even existed in C++ that isn’t that easy to sweep under the rug.
by ben_w | 2025-05-31 10:26:45+00:00
> Although I would argue that the output AI makes still doesn’t match the complexity and nuance of an individual human being, though

LLMs are very good at nuance. Better than any human I've seen — so much so, I find it to be a tell.

> We have numerous ways of determining if a thing is human or not - biology, for one.

I don't care if the intelligence is human, I care if it's (1) (a) intelligent, (b) educated, and (2) has the ability to suffer or not so I know if it should have moral subject rights.

1a is slowly improving but we're guessing and experimenting: not really engineering intelligence, just scaling up the guesses that work OK. 1b was always easy, libraries fit "education" in isolation from the "intelligent" part of 1a. LLMs are good enough combination of (a) and (b) to be interesting, potentially even an economic threat, depending on how long the time-horizon between failures gets.

2 is pre-paradigmatic, we don't have enough understanding of the problem to ask the correct question — even ignoring AI for the moment, the same problem faces animal welfare (and why would the answer be the same for each of chimps, dogs, ravens, lobsters, and bees?) and even within humans on topics such as abortion, terminal stage of neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's, etc.
by lithocarpus | 2025-05-31 10:26:55+00:00
I'll guess it will be both at the same time with a far greater number of people going for the easier (latter) option, but still a real chunk of people going for what's real, and also a spectrum in between.

This is how it already is for most aspects of life that have, for many, been enshittified by progress. Sadly the shitty part is not entirely avoidable by choice.
by hoseyor | 2025-05-31 10:28:08+00:00
He also lived in a time when the intense importance and function of a moral and cultural framework for society was taken for granted. He would have never imagined the level of social and moral degeneration of today.

I will not go into specifics because the authoritarians still disagree and think everything is fine with degenerative debauchery and try to abuse anyone even just pointing to failing systems, but it all does seem like civilization ending developments regardless of whether it leads to the rise of another civilization, e.g., the Asian Era, i.e., China, India, Russia, Japan, et al.

Ironically, I don’t see the US surviving this transitional phase, especially considering it essentially does not even really exist anymore at its core. Would any of the founders of America approve of any of America today? The forefathers of India, China, Russia, and maybe Japan would clearly approve of their countries and cultures. America is a hollowed out husk with a facade of red, white, and blue pomp and circumstance that is even fading, where America means both everything and nothing as a manipulative slogan to enrich the few, a massive private equity raid on America.

When you think of the Asian countries, you also think of distinct and unique cultures that all have their advantages and disadvantages, the true differences that make them true diversity that makes humanity so wonderful. In America you have none of that. You have a decimated culture that is jumbled with all kinds of muddled and polluted cultures from all over the place, all equally confused and bewildered about what they are and why they feel so lost only chasing dollars and shiny objects to further enrich the ever smaller group of con artist psychopathic narcissists at the top, a kind of worst form of aristocracy that humanity has yet ever produced, lacking any kind of sense of noblesse oblige, which does not even extend to simply not betraying your own people.
by diggan | 2025-05-31 10:29:08+00:00
> The most important AI applications being deployed in enterprise today—agents, code generation, and complex reasoning—are bottlenecked by inference latency

Is this really true today? I don't work in enterprise, so don't know how things look like, but I'm sure lots of people here do, and it feels unlikely that inference latency is the top bottleneck, even above humans or waiting for human input? Maybe I'm just using LLMs very differently from how they're deployed in a enterprise, but I'm by far the biggest bottleneck in my setup currently.
by bonki | 2025-05-31 10:29:21+00:00
My thoughts exactly. I think this has mostly to do with marketing because pretty much nobody uses Wordpad and most people hate it, while everybody uses Notepad or a replacement (Notepad++ or similar) which usually already has a lot more features, including markdown support. So from their perspective I can understand this decision, even though I don't think that this is where Notepad should be heading. On Windows, I use NP++ and other tools if I need more features, but I specifically use Notepad for when I don't want fancy stuff and slow startup times, often for the sole reason of getting rid of formatting of copy'n'pasted text. Notepad is stupid, but that can be a good thing. If I want something else I use something else.
by chicken465 | 2025-05-31 10:29:38+00:00
It both sounds and is exploitive and bad, but to add color to this:

- poultry farming dictated by the big guys like this has been going on for decades.

- it’s provided structure for entrepreneurs in rural areas that had land, some money, and a willingness to work.

You could similarly say some fast food franchises or businesses can result in some form of exploitation, because not all result in good conditions and opportunities for growth of their workers.

Some may then extrapolate to say “all business is bad”, but it’s a spectrum; it may be providing work and income where there was none before, and that could be seen as a good thing. Or maybe the risks are too high and/or conditions are terrible, and that’s a bad thing.

I’d argue that finding that balance in business is why religion and capitalism spread together.

Hundreds of years ago, slaves kept spirits up through their religion and those exploiting them were more likely to keep working conditions better than they would’ve been because of their beliefs; slavery was pure evil, and religion didn’t enable that. It did improve a terrible situation, though I know the Marxists may say the opposite.

Today, religion is waning. If the people exploiting others do so without morals, we risk evil beyond what’s discussed in this article. We feel like technology must be there to save workers from being exploited, but it’s an uphill battle, and money/power may win.
by godelski | 2025-05-31 10:29:51+00:00
> it seems fairly apparent now that AI has largely hit a brick wall in terms of the benefits of scaling

What's annoying is plenty of us (researchers) predicted this and got laughed at. Now that it's happening, it's just quiet.

I don't know about the rest, but I spoke up because I didn't want to hit a brick wall, I want to keep going! I still want to keep going! But if accurate predictions (with good explanations) aren't a reason to shift resource allocation then we just keep making the same mistake over and over. We let the conmen come in and people who get too excited by success that they get blind to pitfalls.

And hey, I'm not saying give me money. This account is (mostly) anonymous. There's plenty of people that made accurate predictions and tried working in other directions but never got funding to test how methods scale up. We say there's no alternatives but there's been nothing else that's been given a tenth of the effort. Apples and oranges...
by flomo | 2025-05-31 10:31:33+00:00
Yeah they definitely did that.

But this AI diarrhea is so awful, I honestly can't see any angle in giving me tons of bad results about a minor feature of my car. (I should sell it and use waymo??) Maybe the really sharp monopolists ran for the hills when the DOJ sheriffs showed up, and now Google Search is being run by former Yahoo execs.
by motorest | 2025-05-31 10:32:04+00:00
> Why is it completely unacceptable that those trillion dollar corporations (...)

The Redis licensing rug pull affects the whole community, not just strawmen villains. Random weekend warriors who occasionally spin up a container might not care. Anyone who trusted a FLOSS project to play a key role in their company's infrastructure will unavoidable have risk mitigation meetings where the name Redis is brought up.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-05-31 10:32:39+00:00
> then sell it themselves.

One word: “Distribution.” (The Graduate reference).

Distributors hold the most powerful hands in selling physical goods. You can’t sell something, if you can’t get it to market. These cartels (and you are hearing about them, all over. See "Big Potato"), are getting strangleholds on distribution. Amazon has turned distribution as a goad into a dark art.

That’s one reason that the Internet has upended so many industries. It’s democratized distribution of digital goods, and digital goods have become a lot more valuable (sometimes, because of the Internet). With digital goods, advertising and promotion are the new Distribution. You can’t sell your apps/music/images, if no one can find out about them.
by pona-a | 2025-05-31 10:32:39+00:00
Why are they doing it? Google Meet is an organizational conference app, Duo is a one-on-one dialer. If they wanted to have one app for everything, Hangouts would have served that, but they killed it for the organizational Google Chat. Do the people making these decisions do it blindfolded, guided by a two-sentence summary of each product?
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-05-31 10:33:48+00:00
First to get this out of the way, I do not support the destruction of USAID and I definitely do not support the death of 300,000 people.

This study brings to light a hidden problem of countries and individuals dependent on foreign aid. There should’ve been plans in place to reduce foreign aid dependency over time. Yes provide aid as needed & appropriate, but work out what it’ll take for the country to not need it and try to get there.. Otherwise a sudden halt of aid can lead to, well, exactly this.

It seems from the outside there was just “money from the sky” from USAID. Without strings attached you’d expect systems to organize to grab free money and countries become dependent..

Is there something I don’t know?
by david-gpu | 2025-05-31 10:34:11+00:00
> For a processor with well-documented microarchitecture, for which a programmer or a compiler can deterministically write an optimal program

You severely underestimate the landscape of possible implementations for these kernels. There are many ways of performing a matrix multiplication and predicting which one will perform best without running them all is nontrivial, even with perfect knowledge of the underlying system.

This is just a completely incorrect take, speaking as a former insider.
by godelski | 2025-05-31 10:34:20+00:00
As prototypes, yes. But that's like pointing to Japanese robots in the 80's and expecting robot butlers any day now. Or maybe Boston dynamics 10 years ago. Or when OpenAI was into robotics.

There's a big gap between seeing something work in the lab and being ready for real world use. I know we do this in software, but that's a very abnormal thing (and honestly, maybe not the best)
by coderatlarge | 2025-05-31 10:34:20+00:00
from the intro:

“This Best Current Practice document describes techniques for producing random quantities that will be resistant to attack. It recommends that future systems include hardware random number generation or provide access to existing hardware that can be used for this purpose. It suggests methods for use if such hardware is not available, and it gives some estimates of the number of random bits required for sample applications.”
by emn13 | 2025-05-31 10:34:20+00:00
I get the feeling that the real problem here are the IEEE specs themselves. They include a huge bunch of restrictions that each individually aren't relevant to something like 99.9% of floating point code, and probably even in aggregate not a single one is relevant to a large majority of code segments out in the wild. That doesn't mean they're not important - but some of these features should have been locally opt-in, not opt out. And at the very least, standards need to evolve to support hardware realities of today.

Not being able to auto-vectorize seems like a pretty critical bug given hardware trends that have been going on for decades now; on the other hand sacrificing platform-independent determinism isn't a trivial cost to pay either.

I'm not familiar with the details of OpenCL and CUDA on this front - do they have some way to guarrantee a specific order-of-operations such that code always has a predictable result on all platforms and nevertheless parallelizes well on a GPU?
by hnlmorg | 2025-05-31 10:34:42+00:00
Their point wasn’t that it’s not useful. It’s that it isn’t artificial intelligence like the masses consider the term.

You wouldn’t say Intellisense isn’t useful but you also wouldn’t call it “AI”. And what LLMs are like is basically Intellisense on steroids (probably more like a cocktail of speed and acid, but you get my point)
by hoseyor | 2025-05-31 10:35:34+00:00
You seem to be a symptom of the problem. I called the government lying and murderous because that is what it is, on account of all the lying and murdering, and I highlighted the hypocrisy of lamenting division while calling people moron, not something that leads to unity. They are categorically different matters.

What are you not comprehending, let’s work it out together.
by rapnie | 2025-05-31 10:36:39+00:00
There is a proliferation of sync tools and little standardization. Here some in local-first space [0]. Martin Kleppmann in his talk last year spoke [1] the need for a generic sync protocol, which was very interesting.

[0] https://localfirstweb.dev/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMq0vncHJvU&t=1016s
by SkiFire13 | 2025-05-31 10:37:25+00:00
It's not just space overhead, it requires you to recursively walk the argument of the application and replace all variables with fresh ones, once for every occurrence of the function argument. This means that function application is no longer O(size of the function) but rather O(size of the function + occurrences of the argument * size of the argument). If the size of the argument is big this makes the function application much much slower.
by Kwpolska | 2025-05-31 10:42:14+00:00
Google recently started showing me their AI bullshit. This made me pull the trigger and switch to DuckDuckGo as the primary search engine.

That said, some niche stuff has significantly better results in Google. But not in the AI bullshit. I searched for a very niche train-related, the bullshit response said condescendingly "this word does not exist, maybe you meant [similarly sounding but completely different word], which in the context of trains means ...". The first real result? Turns out that word does exist.
by sofixa | 2025-05-31 10:43:08+00:00
> Additionally, HashiCorp changed the terms of service on the registry, making it only acceptable to use the official terraform binaries to download modules or providers.

Why would HashiCorp provide free hosting of providers and modules for projects competing, using HashiCorp's own code at that? Multiple entire companies exist doing little more than providing wrappers around stuff HashiCorp develops. HashiCorp has no obligation to give them everything so they have an easier time at undercutting them (because they don't have to actually develop the main stuff).

> But the point here is that Hashicorp took steps that caused the community of terraform users to recognize that closing off the ecosystem would have a tremendous impact on devops.

The community of people using alternative products off HashiCorp's efforts, code, and money. Terraform Community Edition is still free and usable for anyone as long as you don't sell it to compete with HashiCorp.
by motorest | 2025-05-31 10:43:08+00:00
> I honestly think most people don't care.

I don't think this opinion is realistic or grounded in reality. Any company goes through license reviews when discussing which project to adopt. You may not care what software you run on a weekend project, but everyone working in a professional setting goes through a long bureaucratic song and dance act with legal representatives to verify if they can or cannot use a dependency.
by nickjj | 2025-05-31 10:43:17+00:00
I had an experience the other day with ChatGPT and some Python code.

I wanted to modify Gunicorn's logger class so I can filter out specific URL paths. Given it's a hot code path (running on every request) I told it I made 3 solutions and was looking to see which one is the fastest. I used a list + loop using startswith, compiled regex and also used startswith while passing in a tuple of paths.

It produced me benchmark code and also benchmark results which stated the regex solution was the best and fastest solution using Python's standard library.

I didn't believe it so I ran the benchmark myself and the tuple version was over 5x faster than the regex solution.

I then told it I ran the benchmark and got different results and it almost word for word said something like "Oh right, thank you for the clarification, the tuple version is indeed the fastest!". It saved me a few minutes writing the benchmark code but yeah, I rarely trust its output for anything I'm not 100% on.
by meheleventyone | 2025-05-31 10:43:38+00:00
You said the organizers couldn't agree on what it means. I'm just stating that doesn't seem to be true and I didn't give my definition of Zionism but what it seemed to be based on the article. Finally I used the words 'in this sense' to recognise that it was a particular, local definition. Quoting a dictionary definition doesn't change the fact that words in it can have very different meanings in different contexts. So your attack on my premise is flawed.
by zipmapfoldright | 2025-05-31 10:44:14+00:00
Am I in the minority that finds these slides hard to parse?

One stylistic quirk is its liberal use of `=` and `+` for things that aren't equivalence or summation, which keeps throwing me off.

Does she ever do a presentation of these, talking through / commentary on the slides? If a recording of that, I'd 100% clear half a day's worth of meetings to watch it.
by dagw | 2025-05-31 10:44:26+00:00
You either have to work for a living or you don’t

The words 'have to' are doing a lot of work in that statement. Some people 'have to' work to literally put food on the table, other people 'have to' work to able to making payments on their new yacht. The world is full of people who could probably live out the rest of their lives without working any more, but doing so would require drastic lifestyle changes they're not willing to make.

I personally think the metric should be something along the lines of how long would it take from losing all your income until you're homeless.
by Out_of_Characte | 2025-05-31 10:44:34+00:00
As conspiratorial as this sounds, alot of successfull non-profit organisations have a vested interest in becoming a critical part of their infrastructure so that funding cuts would be a humanitarian disaster in of itself which neccecitates the continuation of the organisation.

Foreign aid has always been a double edged sword when it comes to self-reliance and lasting change
by martythemaniak | 2025-05-31 10:46:13+00:00
> Is there something I don’t know?

How do you know that the people and countries dependent on this aid were also not working on making themselves less dependent? Are you aware that poverty is decreasing world wide and many countries have successfully developed over the last several decades? How do you know that USAID did not accelerate this processes by helping take care of vulnerable people, so the less vulnerable would have more resources to develop faster?