MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tsurba | 2025-05-27 21:03:47+00:00
1.5-2 years ago I did some training for a ML paper on 4 AMD MI250x (each is essentially 2 gpus so 8 in total really, each with 64GB VRAM) on LUMI.

My Jax models and the baseline PyTorch models were quite easy to set up there, and there was not a noticeable perf difference to 8x A100s (which I used for prototyping on our university cluster) in practice.

Of course it’s just a random anecdote, but I don’t think nvidia is actually that much ahead.
by alephnerd | 2025-05-27 21:04:23+00:00
> Bringing this back to startups, which hubs seem likely to benefit most from this policy direction?

China (Beijing, Hangzhou, Shanghai, Greater Bay Area), India (Bangalore, Hyderabad, NCR, Mumbai), and South Korea (Seoul) - which represent the bulk of international student admissions in the US - especially at Ivy tier and T10 STEM programs, where the majority of grad and professional students tend to have studied in their home country for undergrad.

Those same students who would have done an PhD in CS at Stanford or an MBA at HBS will now do an MSCS or an MBA at their domestic equivalent, or most likely go straight into the workforce or start their own company with the equivalent amount of capital.

> places like London, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Vancouver could take up some of the tech-trajectory students

Canadian, Singaporean, and British universities that aren't Oxbridge haven't done so hot with the top tier cream of the crop for undergrad.

If you are good enough to get into an undergrad program at a Tsinghua, IIT Delhi, or SNU tier program you tend to attend those instead of studying abroad because you can command a European salary with Asian CoL, and can anyhow study at a top tier program for graduate school.

Furthermore, top universities in China, India, and South Korea have been attracting Chinese, Indian, and Korean faculty from abroad with tenure track deals and/or significant subsidizes, seed grants, and labs for several years now.

It's also extremely difficult to immigrate to Singapore or the UK as a student AND THEN gain residency (the US was significantly easier until today, but is now on par with both those countries).

The cream of the crop of Chinese, Indian, and South Korean graduates already largely stopped immigrating to the US by the 2020s due to EU-level domestic salaries, more financing options for creating a company, and onerous visa programs.

That said, Singapore will remain a target destination for incorporation because of it's Bilateral Investment Treaties with China, India, and the US thus making it easier to access global capital, but the bulk of operations will continue to occur in China and India.
by robocat | 2025-05-27 21:04:23+00:00
> accidental complexity

Haven't we found a better term for that yet?

It is intentional, designed complexity...

There's no accident about it: engineers or management chose it.

Recent discussion on accidental versus essential (kicked off by a flagged article): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44090302 (choosing good dichotomies is difficult, since there's always exceptions to both categories)
by pixelready | 2025-05-27 21:05:14+00:00
The versioned docs for both MUI and Tanstack Query have been very helpful in recent projects I’m working on. Obviously versioned docs are only valuable against major / breaking changes. Changelog is sufficient for non-breaking stuff.

I also really like sites that have site wide settings for code examples in different available languages, package managers, etc. I know this must be a maintenance burden on the teams of those projects but boy do I appreciate it as an implementer.
by SoftTalker | 2025-05-27 21:05:19+00:00
My school did that too, but the rental was substntially cheaper than the cost of buying one. There was a deposit too, to encourage returning them, which may have encumbered more money than a new one cost but if you returned it clean it was cheaper than buying and you didn't have to deal with it over the summer.

Mini-fridges are so cheap now it probably doesn't make much economic sense to rent one.
by amluto | 2025-05-27 21:05:32+00:00
But I want a file per range! I’m already writing out an entire chunk of rows, and that chunk is a good size for a Parquet file, and that chunk doesn’t overlap the previous chunk.

Sure, metadata in the Parquet file handles this, but a query planner has to read that metadata, whereas a sensible way to stick the metadata in the file path would allow avoiding reading the file at all.
by harrisreynolds | 2025-05-27 21:05:56+00:00
Nice! I am currently writing a new version of my no-code platform, WeBase [1], to use AI to generate and edit applications.

Currently just using foundation models from OpenAI and Gemini but will be very interested to try this out.

My current approach is to just completely overwrite files with new updated version but I am guessing using something like Relace will make the whole process more efficient... is that correct?

I'll watch your video later but I would love to learn more about common use cases. It could even be fun to write a blog post for your blog comparing my "brut force" approach to something more intelligent using Relace.

[1] https://www.webase.com (still points to the old "manual" version)
by jszymborski | 2025-05-27 21:05:57+00:00
In terms of software, I currently donate to:

- Servo: Because I think browser engines are critical infrastructure for the web, and we are in dire need of one that is easily maintained, secure, embeddable, and isn't beholden to Google.

- Signal Foundation: Because our chat platforms and governments are spying on us, and Signal offers an alternative.
by indoorcat | 2025-05-27 21:06:00+00:00
As a PSA: if you’re in North America, do not handle bats. They are the primary rabies vector and due to their tiny sharp teeth, it is possible to be bitten unknowingly. Rabies is (almost) 100% fatal once you have symptoms. Leave it to the professionals who are vaccinated and know how to handle them safely. In the US, local animal control can usually help.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-27 21:06:04+00:00
Generally, when I go into the sporting goods store, I look around at everything mechanical that may need maintenance, and I get the sense that whatever I chose, after the season is over, the company will discontinue the model, and spare parts will be unobtainable, and I wouldn't find a shop with the tools or knowledge anyhow.

Shoe repair is hit-or-miss. I contacted one who said it would be a 2 month turnaround time.

I purchased an item from a church supply and noticed that it included a molded plastic insert that I'd be removing to clean once in a while. So I contacted the vendor and asked whether I could purchase some spare inserts. "well, our supply chains are challenged right now, and this is made in Italy..."

I advise my friends, if they're purchasing any electronics, like a notebook, you may as well bundle some accessories and spare parts right away, like an extra battery or power supply or the component that's most likely to go bad, because in 5 years when you need it, they'll be sold out.

In fact, in all of those markets I've listed above, I've purchased something, unbox it at home, only to find out that it is lacking accessories, isn't a complete set, or part of it is unfit for purpose, and in fact the manufacturer just gets things onto store shelves while incomplete, so they can sell you more things out of their catalog [iPhones without chargers; shipping beta software...]

I just finished carefully cleaning the sponge filter on my vacuum cleaner. One day I'll visit their website to see if there are any spare accessories still available for it. Good luck!
by farceSpherule | 2025-05-27 21:06:41+00:00
Down vote me all you want. You all can piss off.

One of my family members - a successful General Dynamics mid-level exec - made a business out of horse racing and his handicapping strategy.

He set up an LLC, paid a software engineer to, at that time, write a software program that would download horse and track stats from all of the available sources. The software would also ask for betting and other strategies from my family member.

He would go to the track, bet his strategy, and leave.

He easily made ~$100,000 a year from this venture. He also took full advantage of the the tax benefits because he made it look and act like a business.
by tombert | 2025-05-27 21:07:20+00:00
I can generate a picture in stable diffusion in about two seconds with my GPU. Running a GPU for two seconds doesn't take much energy, almost certainly less than 2500kcal. Back of napkin math for a 250W GPU spending about 4 seconds at full blast says it would take about 1000 joules, which dividing by 4184 to get it into kcal, would be roughly ~0.24kcal. It is literally 10000x less energy than the number you provided me.

Even if my math is off by a bit, let's assume that it's off by two orders of magnitude, it would still only use 1% of the energy compared to a human.

So the basic math you gave me supports what I said. Unless you find an error, which I don't think you will because this math is trivial.

This isn't counting the energy cost of training and gathering the data, which sure might be expensive, but if we assume the models already exist then the energy cost of generating a single image is pretty negligible.

Now, a counter point you could make is that since it's so low-effort to generate an image with Stable Diffusion, and since the image might not be very good, you might end up generating thousands of images compared to the one you would have paid a human to do, and yeah those numbers get more complicated, but that wasn't what you claimed, you claimed "if you were to generate one piece of AI art, the energy expended is several magnitudes higher" which is trivial to prove wrong with basic math.

But also, counting calories like this is bad anyway, because it's making an assumption that all energy is equally damaging to the environment, which is not true. If the energy used to generate these images was coming from a centralized electrical plant, particular something using solar or nuclear, that is considerably less bad for the environment than a human eating meat. The world beef industry has millions of cows that are all farting and burping and shitting methane that is destroying our climate.

That's what I was getting at when I said the numbers aren't as cut and dry as people keep asserting.

Feel free to check my math and prove me wrong, I'm a grown up, if you find concrete evidence that I'm wrong I'll read it.

ETA:

Also, did you make an account literally just to respond to me? Goons are following me around now?

Another ETA:

I forgot to point out that even if the electrical plants are coming from fossil fuels, which is still annoyingly prevalent in the US, having the energy production centralized means that we're much more easily able to capture pollutants compared to something like cow fart or a cow burp, which pretty much immediately goes straight into the atmosphere as methane.

Now, an argument you could make is that AI art is shit so any amount of energy expended on it is a waste of energy, and that's a better argument than the stupid and objectively wrong one you made.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-05-27 21:07:57+00:00
Handling a Bitcoin transaction is two things:

- Broadcasting the transaction throughout the network so that all nodes (including miners) are aware of it

- Miners confirming transactions by solving a block

When a miner solves a block, they earn both the block reward (Which will eventually become zero) and the fees paid by the sender.

Theoretically, as time goes on an the value of Bitcoin goes up, the value of the fees will be high enough that it will make up for the lack of the block reward.

So the original question of "Does handing transactions require similar amounts of power to mining?"

The answer is basically yes. Mining is what confirms transactions. A new block is added to the chain, with each block containing several transactions.
by ericmay | 2025-05-27 21:08:32+00:00
Whenever we give things away, we do one of two things:

1. We donate to an appropriate organization that tends to specialize in donations for the specific items we're donating. I.e. work clothing for university students. 2. We list an item for free, but pickup only. Confirm a day/time, and then said item is set outside for the individual to pick the item up. If they don't show, or something happens no big deal.
by pjmlp | 2025-05-27 21:09:09+00:00
Kudos for going down the WebGL route and not the Chrome only WebGPU approach that most likely some people expect.

It is going to take at least yet another year, for WebGPU 1.0 to be available on stable versions on other browsers, Chrome still hasn't stable WebGPU on GNU/Linux, and it is already much far ahead with extensions that most likely won't be on the 1.0 MVP of the other browsers.

Interesting article.
by madaxe_again | 2025-05-27 21:09:16+00:00
Oh, I have a Kentish cow story, too, except this cow had been hit by a train and was quite dead.

Just past six AM, winter, somewhere near Godmersham, we’re sat there, the conductor is saying it could be a while before anyone can come to clear the line… so, this being the days of slam-doors, out bundled a dozen besuited commuters, yours truly included, to manhandle a bloody heavy and rather messy deceased bovine out of the way, and off we went. We were only 20 minutes late into Cannon Street, which is essentially on time for that line.

I’m pretty sure it was the only time anyone on that train actually talked to one another.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-05-27 21:09:21+00:00
The problem is that in Windows, the taskbar is the only place where there’s any kind of grouping. This greatly limits what you can do with windows belonging to an application.

You can’t hide, minimize, or restore all windows belonging to an app for example, and you can’t move all windows belonging to an app to a different virtual desktop, either, all of which macOS is capable of. The per-app grouping also enables OS-provided tabbing for apps that want it, giving you browser-style tabs in non-browser apps with the ability to merge all windows into a single tabbed window.

The Win+number key shortcut for cycling through app windows is better than nothing, but falls short in that it’s only reasonable to remember the shortcut for apps pinned to your taskbar, since non-pinned apps will shift around, it’s limited 10 apps, and is awkward to use for numbers in the middle. Command-` doesn’t have these issues.

For closing inactive windows, if its corner is peeking out is behind your other windows, you can hold down Option and click the close button to close it without bringing it forward. This isn’t very helpful for users who keep their windows tightly tiled and is more aligned with the style that the Mac desktop has always been developed around, which is to let windows pile up organically and be sized to fit their content rather than keeping every pixel of the screen filled at all times.
by armchairhacker | 2025-05-27 21:11:17+00:00
Some people go to college to learn, some go just to get a job. I think colleges should still exist for the former, but the latter should be able to instead use online resources then get accredited (which they'd do if it gave them the same job prospects).

That would also let professors devote more time towards teaching the former, and less time grading and handling grade complaints (from either group, since the former can also be graded by the accreditation and, if they get a non-academic job, in their probationary period).
by johnea | 2025-05-27 21:11:46+00:00
To cite integrative-psych:

https://www.integrative-psych.org/resources/confabulation-no...

"...this usage is misleading, as it suggests a perceptual process that LLMs, which lack sensory input, do not possess."

They prefer the word "confabulation", but I would also differ with that.

They define confabulation: "the brain creates plausible but incorrect memories to fill gaps".

Since, as with the lack of perceptions, LLMs are not retaining anything like a memory, I would also argue this term is inappropriate.

In terms of differentiating error categories, it's straightforward to specify, math error, spelling error, grammatical error, when those occur.

In the case of syntactically correct, but factually incorrect output, the word "wrong" describes this specific error category much more accurately than "hallucinate", which carries a host of inaccurate psychological implications.

This also speaks to a main point of my original post, that the use of "hallucinate" is euphemistic.

When we use a s/w tool for the input of human language questions, with the objective of receiving correct human language answers, just having a syntactically correct answer is not sufficient.

It needs to be emphasized that answers in this category are "wrong", they are not factually correct.

Using the word "hallucinate" is making an excuse for, and thus obfuscating, this factual error generated by the s/w tool.
by randcraw | 2025-05-27 21:12:06+00:00
A good start for this debate would be to reconsider the term "AI", perhaps choosing a term that's more intuitive, like "automation" or "robot assistant". It's obvious that learning to automate a task is no way to learn how to do it yourself. Nor is asking a robot to do it for you.

Students need to understand that learning to write requires the mastery of multiple distinct cognitive and organizational skills, only the last of which is to generate text that doesn't sound stupid.

Each of writing's component tasks must be understood and explicitly addressed by the student, to wit: (1) choosing a topic to argue, and the component points to make a narrative, (2) outlining the research questions needed to answer each point, and finally, (3) choosing ONLY the relevant points that are necessary AND sufficient to the argument AND based on referenced facts, and that ONLY THEN can be threaded into a coherent logical narrative exposition that makes the intended argument and that leads to the desired conclusion.

Only then has the student actually mastered the craft of writing an essay. If they are not held responsible for implementing each and every one of these steps in the final product, they have NOT learned how to write. Their robot did. That essay is a FAIL because the robot has earned the grade; not they. They just came along for the ride, like ballast in a sailing ship.
by elif | 2025-05-27 21:12:14+00:00
Look into "buy nothing" groups. We have given away about a dozen things we once cared about with like an 80%+ certainty it's not going to a landfill.

Even if someone is breaking the rules and just refinishing furniture to resell, to be honest that benefits me because they are motivated to come get things fast, and my goal of not making trash is not only satisfied, but there is surplus enjoyment from being part of creating new value in an item.
by cyberax | 2025-05-27 21:12:18+00:00
> "Water vapor in the nano-pores radiates its heat into the material and comes out to the surface as liquid water."

Then the _material_ is a store of energy. Once it's exhausted, the condensation will stop.

> So you don't believe that the researchers correctly described what was going on when it did what it did?

The article is very low-quality. They must understand that their work implies the conservation law violations, so there must be some unaccounted source of energy. But they have not attempted to find it.

And it can be as simple as energy from the moving air. Or maybe an electrostatic charge, or something similar.

Once the energy source is identified, they should have calculated the efficiency of their setup, compared to regular dehumidifiers.
by pjmlp | 2025-05-27 21:13:56+00:00
CUDA dominates and almost no one cares about OpenCL, exactly because it is stuck on C99 model, never cared for Fortran, they only adopted a bytecode format when the war was already lost, SYCL/DPC++ is mostly an Intel thing and after they acquired CodePlay, Intel/AMD kind of always fail on delivering good OpenCL tooling, now they decided to reboot the whole oneAPI effort as UXL Foundation,....

NVidia has a lot to thank the competition why they happen to dominate the market.
by jiggawatts | 2025-05-27 21:14:01+00:00
Are you worried that this ability will become less valuable because the AIs are also wide but shallow?

I noticed colleagues calling me a lot less with questions that only I can answer. Several admitted to me that they now use AI for the same kind of “find me some obscure vaguely specified thing”. It is one of the few things the AIs do really well.
by throwawaymaths | 2025-05-27 21:14:05+00:00
I think in the base2 reformulation I propose we do not know for certain if the list of numbers terminates, as all Fermat primes are in the set and we don't know if there are infinitely many Fermat primes.

For base-10 and the original rules the set is provably closed.

"Drilling through zeros" makes the branching unbounded.
by anigbrowl | 2025-05-27 21:14:38+00:00
We don't have to do anything, Craigslist already exists and works great. I've bought stuff from departmerting college students, the transaction is as simple as showing up and saying 'hi, are you X? Great, here's $50, thanks for The Thing'.

Some people just cannot be bothered, and if they're wealthy they simply may not care about concepts like wasting money - doubly so if they grew up with money and have never had to ration it for basic items. This isn't a market in search of a tech solution, any more than people who put out working items on the street with a sign saying 'free' because they don't want to go through the hassle of conducting a transaction for pocket money.
by freetime2 | 2025-05-27 21:15:13+00:00
In Japan “recycle shops” are ubiquitous. There’s a chain called “Off House” that will buy just about anything, and also operates branches that specialize in used books, electronics, outdoor goods, etc. There’s another chain called “2nd Street” with a few branches nearby. They’ll appraise your items on the spot - usually takes 15 minutes or so during which I’ll browse the store - and pay cash. They typically buy for about 50% of what they intend to sell for, which is quite fair IMO.

I can think of about 10 locations off the top of my head in my city, and there are probably more than that. I never throw away things that are in a usable condition - better to get a little money back and it feels better knowing someone else might use it. I’ve also bought quite a bit of 2nd hand stuff - bikes and skis for the kids, clothing, etc.

When living in the US I used to make use of a local consignment shop. Pawn shops are also pretty ubiquitous, although I never actually tried selling anything there. And there’s always Goodwill and Salvation Army if you just want to conveniently get rid of stuff and avoid waste. Goodwill (and other charities as well, I assume) can write you a donation receipt that you can use to claim a tax deduction (although I never bothered).
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-05-27 21:15:27+00:00
> You didn't answer the question.

It DID answer the question.

> The real answer hinges on the leverage of mining one hash to certify multiple transactions.

That's exactly how mining works.

A block is mined when all the data for a block (which includes all the transactions of the current block) plus a nonce gets hashed and the resulting hash has a value that satisfies the current mining difficulty level. If hash doesn't satisfy it, you try a new nonce. Mining hardware just tries millions/billions of nonces per second.

It's possible (though extremely unlikely) that you could solve a block in only a single hash.

I think what a lot of people don't understand is that the difficulty scales with the amount of hashing power on the network. If blocks are being solved too quickly, the difficulty rises. If they're too slow, it goes down. Difficulty really just changes the odds that your hash meets the requirement. It doesn't change the actual difficulty of computation, just the odds of success.