MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrandish | 2025-05-20 23:25:30+00:00
> largely an artifact of luck.

I disagree with "largely". Luck is always a factor in business success and there are certainly some notable examples where luck was, arguably, a big enough factor that "largely" would apply - like Broadcast.com's sale to Yahoo right at the peak of the .com bubble. However, I'm not aware of evidence luck was any more of a factor in NVidia's success than the ambient environmental constant it always is for every business. Luck is like the wind in competitive sailing - it impacts everyone, sometimes positively, sometimes negatively.

Achieving and then sustaining substantial success over the long run requires making a lot of choices correctly as well as top notch execution. The key is doing all of that so consistently and repeatedly that you survive long enough for the good and bad luck to cancel each other out. NVidia now has over 30 years of history through multiple industry-wide booms, downturns and fundamental technology transitions - a consistent track record of substantial, sustained success so long that good luck can't plausibly be a significant factor.

That said, to me, this article didn't try to explain NVidia's long-term business success. It focused on a few key architectural decisions made early on which were, arguably, quite risky in that they could have wasted a lot of development on capabilities which didn't end up mattering. However, they did end up paying off and, to me, the valuable insight was that key team members came from a different background than their competitors and their experiences with multi-user, multi-tasking, virtualized mini and mainframe architectures caused them to believe desktop architectures would evolve in that direction sooner rather than later. The takeaway being akin to "skate to where the puck is going, not where it is." In rapidly evolving tech environments, making such predictions is greatly improved when the team has both breadth and depth of experience in relevant domains.
by lapcat | 2025-05-20 23:25:54+00:00
> it seems the internal calculus at Apple has shifted dramatically, and there’s genuine fear of the company and the executives being held accountable in a meaningful way

Indeed the judge already referred one Apple VP to the prosecutor for investigation of perjury. I'm guessing none of the other VPs want to step foot in that court.

Still, Apple has an appeal pending, so they could still ultimately overturn the judge's decisions.
by godelski | 2025-05-20 23:26:43+00:00
I haven't look at the post in the detail it deserves, but given your graphs the workload looks pretty bursty. I'd suspect there are some good I/O optimizations or some predication. Definitely that last void main block looks ripe for that. But I'd listen to Knuth, premature optimization and all, so grab a profiler. I wouldn't be surprised if you're nearing peak performance. Also NVIDIA GPUs have a lot of special tricks that can be exploited but are buried in documentation... if you haven't already seen it (I suspect you have), you'd be interested in "GPU Gems". Gems 2 has some good stuff on predication.

But also, really good work! You should be proud of this! Squeezing that much out of that hardware is no easy feat.
by k310 | 2025-05-20 23:26:45+00:00
> Our findings suggest that states would be better off pursuing policies grounded in religion-state separation, religious equality, and freedom of religion.

One can then ask how they become entangled. The relationship between the state (and its representatives) and religion varies. Politicians often see religion as justification for their actions, rightly or wrongly, and religions often benefit from being "recognized" explicitly or implicitly (as the U.S. does in its currency and symbols).

Both government and religion IMO exist to help a multitude of people. When they exist for their own preservation benefit instead, or chiefly for the power and wealth of leaders, they abandon their mission.

Sangharakshita writes, in a discussion of the Vimilakirti Nirdesa (The Transcendental Critique of Religion) [0]:

> We should never allow any of these things to become ends in themselves, should always remember that they are means to an end. If we can do this, then we will ourselves be living embodiments of the reality of religion.

People so often confuse the ends with the means, as in money as a means to achieve comfort and happiness or as a goal in itself, one that is never achieved as long as someone else has more, and you see that battle played out in society by billionaires. David Loy wrote several books on this topic.

[0] https://www.freebuddhistaudio.com/audio/details?num=146
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-20 23:27:29+00:00
Yeah, it's mind-blowing when it clicks, and makes the whole "exceptions vs. return types" discussion look like a quarrel of 3yos in a sand box. Error handling in other languages/runtimes just doesn't feel sufficient from now on.

This is, of course, just a part of a larger whole - the fact that your Common Lisp program ships with a compiler it can access and effectively always runs in an edit-and-go debugger. Embracing this fact fully leads to a different workflow of software development.

Having done a bit of that, I found plenty of drawbacks of this approach, too - mostly various consequences of breaking the assumption that code that a program is running is the same as the code it was compiled from or that it started with. The aspect that annoyed me the most day-to-day was, basically, that whenever I fixed something on the fly through conditions and restarts and eval-ing code in a REPL, I never had a nice way to go back to that solution and port it to code. It was too easy to forget about a quick fix you did without thinking.

I now realized this should be easily fixable with external tooling - i.e. in Emacs/SLIME. What I think they need is a better way of keeping an audit trail. Capturing and persisting as much of the transient interactions you did as possible, letting you revisit them after and easily transfer into code or tests.
by LkpPo | 2025-05-20 23:28:50+00:00
You can watch https://www.red-by-example.org/

But no one has bothered to write a complete manual like Carl did for Rebol, and the language is a partial implementation in Rebol which has a hybrid Rebol/Red syntax that must ultimately be bootstrapped in Red. In short, you have the scaffolding around it and if you are not a total fan or a dev of the project it is not even worth it.
by j2kun | 2025-05-20 23:29:04+00:00
This has mirrored my experience attempting to "apply" topology in real world circumstances, off and on since I first studied topology in 2011.

I even hesitate now at the common refrain "real world data approximates a smooth, low dimensional manifold." I want to spend some time really investigating to what extent this claim actually holds for real world data, and to what extent it is distorted by the dimensionality reduction method we apply to natural data sets in order to promote efficiency. But alas, who has the time?
by nikeee | 2025-05-20 23:30:24+00:00
ZLinq relies on its own enumerable type called ValueEnumerable, which is a struct. While it would probably work when using this as a drop-in replacement and re-compiling, things will be more complicated in larger applications. There might be some code that depends on the exact signature of the Linq methods. This might not even be detectable in cases involving reflection and could break stuff silently.

Adding another enumerable type would be a very large change that could effectively double the API surface of the entire ecosystem. This could take some time. Some places still don't even support Span<T>. Also there were some design decisions related to Linq where the number of overloads were a consideration.

Adding this API to .NET could probably be done with that extension method that converts to ValueEnumerable. But without support for that enumerable, this would pretty much be a walled garden where you have to convert back and forth between different enumerable types. Not that great if you'd ask me, but possible I guess.
by duped | 2025-05-20 23:31:59+00:00
I would be against technology that freezes medicine at our current understanding and makes it economically unviable to develop new medicine.

I don't think it's worthwhile to explain the inherent value of human created art or that to learn how to do it one must put some effort into it. All I can say is, if you are one of those people who do not understand art, please don't build things that take away someone else's livelihood without very good reason.

I don't think the majority of AI generation for art is useful for anything but killing artists.
by akdev1l | 2025-05-20 23:33:43+00:00
I think this approach predates Vue.

I know of two examples:

1. Fedora in collaboration with GCC maintainers keep GCC on the bleeding edge so it can be used to compile the whole Fedora corpus. This validates the compiler against a set of packages which known to work with the previous GCC

2. I think the rust team also builds all crates on crates.io when working on `rustc`. It seems they created a tool to achieve that: https://github.com/rust-lang/crater

I would assume the .NET guys have something similar already but maybe there’s not enough open code to do that
by FunnyLookinHat | 2025-05-20 23:34:18+00:00
> And I'm actually quite happy that most Deno projects don't have a custom testing and linting setup.

I feel similarly. The standard configurations (e.g. tsconfig, linting, formatting) and bolts-included tooling (test, lint, fmt, etc.) are what make Deno so great for developers.

I've started using Deno in my spare time for various projects - and it just _feels_ more productive. I go from idea to testing TypeScript in minutes - which never happened in Node land.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-20 23:35:05+00:00
> Likewise NT has very little to do with Win32 API in its fundamentals but Win2k feels the same to the user as WinME, but under your framing, you'd same-bucket those.

I probably would, in this context. Well, maybe not WinME, because that was a dumpster fire. But any Windows coming down from NT line, which is what's relevant in the past 20 years, sure. Same bucket.
by Clamchop | 2025-05-20 23:35:17+00:00
The article is a touch confusing, but I'm pretty sure I agree that they meant the 640 kilobyte limit of the OG PC architecture. The Pentium II dates from 1997, the NV1 to 1995, and the new PCI bus with its whopping 32-bits to 1992. 640MiB would have been a prodigious amount of memory at the time of launch.

I don't think any mathematical relationship between the address bus and either 640KiB or 640MiB was intended, it was just the anchor point for how huge 4GiB of addressing was viewed at the time.

The article then goes on to say that the NV1 used 23 bits of the address bus but adds in the next paragraph that 16 bits remained to use for data. That math isn't working out for me.

Actually, I'm really struggling to understand how this scheme would work at all. It strongly implies open addressing with no other MMIO devices to conflict with, but that's just not how I thought PCI worked. Maybe someone who knows more can explain it to me.
by ValentineC | 2025-05-20 23:36:11+00:00
> The reason that you don't lose access to accounts when losing your MFA apps is that you took down the emergency backup codes and you committed them to paper, or some other durable medium, in a place where they can easily be accessed during a crisis. You did this scrupulously with each MFA activation, didn't you? Didn't you?

Not all TOTP implementations, especially indie PHP websites, are robust enough to have implemented backup codes.
by smaudet | 2025-05-20 23:36:15+00:00
Safe encrypted group chat with stangers is an oxymoron.

Locking down a platform is not an acceptable solution to the above conundrum - it doesn't matter if the user is using an official device/app whatever if they are untrusted. They can always turn around and leak everything you say without any technical measures.

Should we have no security? No, if you want to color messages differently based on perceived platform, fine. This is just an illustration that no technical measures can replace the fundamental trust necessary in these types of situations.
by asdff | 2025-05-20 23:36:32+00:00
I wonder how much households can really save here. Most "luxury" items using electricity don't really use much e.g. a modern laptop or modern smartphone. The stuff that does use a lot of electricity are things like your AC unit or your electric heater and electric stove. Seems there is little wiggle room there to me, people might end up just getting saddled with higher bills especially if slightly more efficient home appliances are out of reach (or not purchased by the renter at all). And for people who might get strongly affected out of their budget by these things for lack of income there are usually subsidies to help pay for their energy usage, which might further stymie market forces from changing behavior. Seems most high energy use consumers are high enough income where they won't be much affected by increased power costs like how we see them unaffected by water restrictions and higher fees for high water usage already.

Maybe that says the fees aren't yet high enough for high income people to change behavior, but I'm willing to bet they never truly will be due to the influence this subset of the population holds over politics.
by tptacek | 2025-05-20 23:37:50+00:00
We have... never done that? Like ever? LiteFS is interesting for some read-heavy use cases, especially for people who are doing especially edge-deployed things, but most people who use databases here use Postgres. We actually had a managed LiteFS product --- LiteFS Cloud --- and we sunset it, like over a year ago. We have a large team working on Managed Postgres. We do not have a big SQLite team.

People sometimes have a hard time with the idea that we write about things because they are interesting to us, and for no other reason. That's also 60-70% of why Ben does what he does on Litestream.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-05-20 23:40:12+00:00
Total time would include the time I wasn't at work and some of the time I was. My kids lived under 24/7 adulting, moving from one adult-curated, adult-populated box to the next.

My mom parented between zero and few hours a week. Both her time and mine were representative of our respective generations. The major difference was her time spent was unchanged since before history.

And sometime between her gen and mine, US childhood was mostly eradicated.
by nine_k | 2025-05-20 23:41:06+00:00
The nobility used to be the dedicated warrior class, the knights. This secured their position in the society and allowed them to rule, by coercion when needed.

Once they ceased to exercise their military might, some time around 17th-18th century, and chose to live off the rent on their estates, their power became more and more nominal. It either slipped (or was yanked) from their hands, or they turned capitalists themselves.
by jasonthorsness | 2025-05-20 23:41:16+00:00
This is great. I've worked on production .NET services and we often had to avoid LINQ in hot paths because of the allocations. Reimplementing functions with for-loops and other structures was time-consuming and error-prone compared to LINQ method chaining. Chaining LINQ methods is extremely powerful; like filter, map, and reduce in JS but with a bunch of other operators and optimizations. I wish more languages had something like it.
by light_hue_1 | 2025-05-20 23:41:31+00:00
"I looked at the representations of a network and I don't like them".

Great! There's no mathematical definition of what a fractured representation is. It's whatever art preferences you have.

Our personal preferences aren't a good predictor of which network will work well. We wasted decades with classical AI and graphical models encoding our aesthetic into models. Just to find out that the results are totally worthless.

Can we stop please? I get it. I too like beautiful things. But we can't hold on to things that don't work. Entire fields like linguistics are dying because they refuse to abandon this nonsense.
by steppi | 2025-05-20 23:43:48+00:00
If I had to give a loose definition of topology, I would say that it is actually about studying spaces which have some notion of what is close and far, even if no metric exists. The core idea of neighborhoods in point set topology captures the idea of points being nearby another point, and allows defining things like continuity and sequence convergence which require a notion of closeness. From Wikipedia [0] for example

The terms 'nearby', 'arbitrarily small', and 'far apart' can all be made precise by using the concept of open sets. If we change the definition of 'open set', we change what continuous functions, compact sets, and connected sets are. Each choice of definition for 'open set' is called a topology. A set with a topology is called a topological space.

Metric spaces are an important class of topological spaces where a real, non-negative distance, also called a metric, can be defined on pairs of points in the set. Having a metric simplifies many proofs, and many of the most common topological spaces are metric spaces.

That's not to say that topology is necessarily the best lens for understanding neural networks, and the article's author has shown up in the comments to state he's moved on in his thinking. I'm just trying to clear up a misconception.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_topology
by zamalek | 2025-05-20 23:44:13+00:00
In theory .Net 10 should make this obsolete, the headline features[1] are basically all about this. In practice, well, it's heuristics, I'm adding this to a particularly performance sensitive project right now :)

Edit: what's also nice is that C# recognizes Linq as a contract. So long as this has the correct method names and signatures (it does), the Linq syntax will light up automatically. You can also use this trick for your own home-grown things (add Select, Join, Where, etc. overloads) if the Linq syntax is something you like.

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/whats-new/dotn...
by _annum | 2025-05-20 23:45:41+00:00
Failed classes are not specific enough; it could simply be an IQ-related or something else entirely. Many people with ADHD-related symptoms are able to pass courses, especially pre-college, and sometimes with perfect grades. Their personal life or ability to function outside of an academic structure may tell a different story.

Adults don't need "legitimate" reasons, especially ones as nebulous as the strawmen listed above. Amphetamines have therapeutic potential for a range of conditions and are fairly benign if used responsibly and ideally temporarily. It's ridiculous that people have to jump through hoops (often quite expensive) or feign a specific illness for access to a better coffee substitute. With that said, 30mg+ dosages and the dominant prescription regimen (every day, no breaks, or you risk being cut off) are probably excessive for most individuals without extreme impairment.

I don't disagree with limiting its administration to children, but this should be handled by professionals on a case-by-case basis.
by infamouscow | 2025-05-20 23:45:47+00:00
You're right that the DEA's quota system prioritizes diversion control over access, and it's clearly stuck in a bygone era unfit for todays demand growth. But it's baffling that Big Pharma, with its lobbying muscle, hasn't pushed Congress to modernize this bottleneck. Surely they'd profit from looser quotas.

Instead of hoping for a Trump EO to nuke the DEA (literally or figuratively), why not redistribute Controlled Substance Act enforcement? Agencies like the FBI or HHS already handle overlapping domains. The DEA's rigid gatekeeping, especially on research and quotas, stifles innovation more than it curbs abuse.
by colah3 | 2025-05-20 23:47:41+00:00
See https://transformer-circuits.pub/2022/toy_model/index.html#m...

If you're new to this, I'd mostly just look at all the empirical examples.

The slightly harder thing is to consider the fact that neural networks are made of linear functions with non-linearities between them, and to try to think about when linear directions will be computationally natural as a result.
by rangestransform | 2025-05-20 23:48:33+00:00
They move to where the jobs are but the ones left behind without a big-city job have disproportionately large political power and disproportionately little education. Letting land vote was a generationally catastrophic mistake, the US has a political system suited for an agrarian/early-industrial/frontier society rather than an urban industrialized society that also happens to be hegemon of the world.
by foldr | 2025-05-20 23:50:21+00:00
>Go is unsound (Go slices...)

What are you referring to here? Go's current slice implementation could only possibly introduce unsoundness via data races. Even there, I think you might actually need to muck around with an interface value rather than a slice to demonstrate unsoundness of the type system (rather than just memory corruption or unsafe memory access).

Typescript's type system is just deliberately unsound by design (for defensible reasons). It's a whole nother level of unsoundness in comparison to Go.
by jbm | 2025-05-20 23:51:58+00:00
I am 100% on the side of reducing pollutants — but this was never publicly seen as a major issue and I'm suspicious about the timing.

The oil industry is a conglomerate of degenerates spamming boomer logic all the way down to the workers. Their memes propagate throughout society and lead to the other boomer characteristic of rewriting personal and societal history.

The finger waggers now are being programmed to pretend they talked about tire particulates and the carheads are being programmed to pretend they never cared about 0-60. This another "We have always been at war with Eastasia", just like they all opposed the Iraq war from day 1 and didn't cancel the Dixie Chicks, et cetra.

This may have been discussed in specialist literature somewhere but even when I did ecology courses in university circa 2001ish, I never heard about tire particulates, while I did hear a lot about greenhouse gasses.

It's a concern but not a civilization ending concern like climate change. I low key resent these attempts to move goalposts to satisfy the writer's urge for negativity.
by smaudet | 2025-05-20 23:52:21+00:00
I'm more of the opinion that developers will make smart choices, when motivated.

Sure, punching buttons for money is a widespread issue in the industry, but devs also like convenience.

Security has the hard problem that it's infuriatingly difficult to troubleshoot (ever tried to write security policies for an app or figure out how to let an app through a firewall, or set of firewalls?), and there's a bit of a culture of "security by obscurity".

So it's kind of expected that this is the behavior...

Sure some people will really just not care, mistakes will be made, but secure defaults, easy to configure and simple to understand are features not often seen from security products generally. This is driven by poor motivations from security folk who want to protect their industry...
by vincent-manis | 2025-05-20 23:52:43+00:00
If I were asked this question, except as a piece of trivia exchange, I wouldn't want to work for them. There are arguments in favour of many OSes (including those that I used in the long-ago past on long-forgotten iron), and many against those same systems. Using any OS is generally a trade-off; so if asked `what OS do you use?', I would answer `whatever is suitable for the problem and equipment at hand'. If asked `what is the best-designed OS you have ever seen', I'd instantly respond `Plan 9', which I have never actually used.

As it so happens, I recently transitioned my daily driver laptop from Debian to Debian running under WSL2 on Windows. I had good reason for doing it. But I guess running that makes me a double loser.