MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rednafi | 2025-05-03 18:56:32+00:00
Relatable. I’ve been writing code for soulless corps for about seven years, and it can get exhausting. Add politics and the endless rat race for promotions, and you have a recipe for making good people either really bored or really unhappy.

I need the money to get by, but at the same time, it’s hard to get enthusiastic about writing yet another RPC service or RESTful CRUD. This is partly why ketamine-fueled principal engineers often decide to rearchitect the universe, add Rust to the network layer where it makes no sense, or go ham with SWIG interfaces.

A few things that have worked for me: switching stacks. I started in data science, moved to Python/Node backends, and then switched to distributed systems and databases using Go. Switching teams and companies can help, though more often you just end up trading one bad culture for another.

This is a hard problem to solve, and boredom is real. But the solution isn’t bringing in some funky, untested stuff just for the lolz. Too many teams allow engineers to make the stack look like a mandrill’s face and then suffer the consequences.
by kamranjon | 2025-05-03 18:56:34+00:00
That's really interesting! I didn't know that about the padding behavior here. I am interested to know which models this would include? I know Gemma 3 raw is bf16 - are you just talking about the quantized versions of these? Or are models being released purely as quantized versions these days? I know Google just released a QAT (Quantization Aware Training) model of Gemma 3 27b - but that base model was already released.
by accrual | 2025-05-03 18:57:15+00:00
GP is referencing how rumors of the remaster were spreading a few days before the official announcement. There were some early topics on Reddit at least.

Personally I doubt the "leaks" have anything to do with the release date. The game worked fine on day one for me. Yes there are some bugs, but none serious and none that made me think "this was rushed".
by nbadg | 2025-05-03 18:57:21+00:00
Hail protection nets are a COTS product. Full stop. Properly-designed nets are exceptionally strong; that's why we make "bulletproof" vests out of them (that's all they are, just a fiber net with a very tight weave).

Just because your local car dealership(s) didn't opt for hail protection nets isn't on its own evidence for or against their effectiveness. There are a great many factors that go into such a decision and, unless you were privy to the decisionmaking process itself, whether or not nets were considered -- much less their effectiveness -- is pure speculation on your part.
by palmotea | 2025-05-03 18:57:46+00:00
> And you don't think that this won't improve with better bots?

Actually, now that I think about it, yeah.

The whole purpose of the bots is to deflect you from talking to a human. For instance: Amazon's chatbot. It's gotten "better": now when I need assistance, it tries three times to deflect me from a person after it's already agreed to connect me to one.

Anything they'll allow the bot to do can probably can be done better by a customer facing webpage.
by hinkley | 2025-05-03 18:59:02+00:00
We don’t bond heat plates to the top of CPUs due to the coefficient of thrermal expansion right? Isn’t that why we need paste?

Because of CoTE was a non issue I would think we could dig heat dissipation channels into the top of chips, maybe Serpinski gasket style. A little proper lapping and you’d get an airtight seal with the heat sink.
by mrshadowgoose | 2025-05-03 18:59:55+00:00
I am entirely convinced that absent LEO comsat constellations, people who espouse this sentiment would likely be whining about "useless astronomy taking money away from helping poor people".

If you genuinely care about the field of astronomy, rest assured that the same falling launch costs that have enabled LEO comsat constellations, will enable the launch of fleets of space-based telescopes.
by ljosifov | 2025-05-03 19:00:06+00:00
This more than anything feels emblematic to me, that Apple executives are brain dead when it comes to software. AI seemingly being a step too far. (in the s/w direction.) While they could at some level grok classical s/w, NN-s are that Terra Incognita where Apple executives can not possibly follow in. It's just too strange and mysterious world for them to be able to effectively decide or execute on anything. Worked (20yrs ago) in an industrial R&D lab of a mostly h/w manufacturer for 3 years. It looked to me that the worlds of h/w and s/w, the mindsets, diverged pretty quickly on all important considerations of "what should happen next".
by pdabbadabba | 2025-05-03 19:00:29+00:00
Well, then let me clarify: I know that there are a lot of abuses in the U.S. prison system. It's a national embarrassment, and I would be in no way surprised if these or virtually any other allegations a person might make turned out to be true. It is also true, however, that there is a huge number of meritless suits regarding prison conditions.

I used to work in the federal court system so I've seen both sides of this close up. I've worked on cases (many of them) where prisoners' allegations of hideous abuse were extremely credible including cases where the plaintiffs went on to win at trial, get sizable settlements, etc. At the same time, our courthouse had an entire office dedicated to triaging the enormous number of suits filed by prisoners, only a small percentage of which had any merit. (And this office is, by and large, staffed with very compassionate attorneys who do that job because they're interested in helping prisoners--these are not, on average, people who want, or have any incentive, to just sweep things under the rug.)

That's why I believe both that our prison system is rife with abuse and that the average prisoner complaint has a good chance of being bogus.
by zozbot234 | 2025-05-03 19:01:14+00:00
Models may be released as unquantized (and even then they are gradually shifting towards lower precisions over time), but most people are going to be running them in a quantized version simply because that gives you the best bang for your buck (you can fit more interesting models on the same hardware). Of course this is strictly about local LLM inference, though one may reasonably assume that the big players are also doing something similar.
by sroussey | 2025-05-03 19:03:03+00:00
Not really. Apple software uses the neural engine all over the place, but rarely do others. Maybe this will change [1]

There was a guy using it for live video transformations and it almost caused the phones to “melt”. [2]

[1] https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/neural-engine-tra...

[2] https://x.com/mattmireles/status/1916874296460456089
Show HN: I built a game where you guess which startup idea succeeded
by Belsonsan | 2025-05-03 19:03:15+00:00
I’ve been studying real-world SaaS ideas — some that took off, others that failed hard. I turned it into a small side project: StartUp or Flop?

You get two real startup ideas. One became successful, the other didn’t. You guess which is which, then you get the actual answer plus a short explanation of what made it work (or not).

It’s a lightweight way to learn from real startup outcomes, uncover the patterns behind success and failure, sharpen your product instinct — and maybe even confront some of your own startup biases along the way. It’s surprising, humbling, and kind of addictive.

Would love your feedback! https://www.startuporflop.com/
by accrual | 2025-05-03 19:03:29+00:00
This topic always leads me back to reading about the Darién Gap [0]. When eradication was working successfully, they had managed to push the screwworm population all the way back to the Gap and keep it out of major population/agriculture areas. There were (or are) yearly efforts to perform the sterile insect technique [1]. Expensive to perform, but worth it for all the damage they'd otherwise cause if left unchecked.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dari%C3%A9n_Gap

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterile_insect_technique
by trafficante | 2025-05-03 19:03:30+00:00
Eye of the Temple has some of the coolest VR-specific movement tricks I’ve ever seen.

If you’re getting close to your IRL boundary, it sets up a rolling log as part of a puzzle. To stay on a real forward-moving rolling log, you have to walk backwards to maintain balance. So in context of the game, you’re convincingly moving “forwards” while in reality you’re walking backwards.

Pretty sure I took off the headset and geeked out at everyone in the house first time I realized what was happening.
by amos-burton | 2025-05-03 19:03:35+00:00
I cant tell if the first video is true not, my brain somewhere screams to the fake, i could search, can i trust ? hard to tell. I can only share the thrill it give me, my surprise to see those cars moving around, emptiness of those places, as if they had too much of this already. feels good, nobody can deny that.

of course, everything else is troubling the mind. we reflect on what it shows, we did not really want that, it was all fantasy. as we told each other all along, this is only fiction.
by 1718627440 | 2025-05-03 19:03:40+00:00
This is just my own understanding, but doesn't a webpage consist of a bunch of nodes, which can be combined in any way. And an html document is supposed to be a complete set of nodes, so a combination of those won't be a single document anymore.

Nodes can be addressed individually, but a document is the proportion for transmission containing also metadata. You can combined nodes as you like, but you can't really combined two already packed and annotated documents of nodes.

So I would say it is more due a semantic meaning. I think there was also the idea of requesting arbitrary sets of nodes, but that was never developed and with the shift away from a semantic document, it didn't make sense anymore.
by Multiplayer | 2025-05-03 19:04:25+00:00
I've spent a lot of time in NOLA over the past 5 years as I have some investments here. The quality/price of housing and quality of life in the Uptown and Audubon Park areas is fantastic. I'm very surprised more remote engineers/workers haven't discovered it. Yes, hurricanes are a thing.

I would consider raising a family in those areas as well. Beautiful and walkable.

I live here part time now. I tell people New Orleans is a different country - has to be experienced.
by smpanaro | 2025-05-03 19:05:32+00:00
Not a public follow-up but the iOS 17 speech-to-text model has a clever approach to KV caching that works within the ANE’s constraints (fixed size inputs).

I wrote about it here[0] but the gist is you can have a fixed size cache and slide it in chunks with each inference. Not as efficient as a cache that grows by one each time of course.

[0]: https://stephenpanaro.com/blog/inside-apples-2023-transforme...
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-03 19:07:12+00:00
> When the GPL was first released, its requirement that all linked modules be GPL-licensed wasn't so different from what the SSPL enforces today at the network level

The “all linked modules” thing does not appear in the text of the GPL as first released or any subsequent version (it is in some versions of the GPL FAQ, but arguably is contradictory to the text of the corresponding license in view of copyright law.)

But that at least was tied to a (even if actually wrong) remotely defensible as good faith interpretation of the boundary of a single work under copyright, and not an attempt to impose licensing terms on unrelated works that merely happened to be used together. And, also, was restricted to a document that purported to interpret the license in th context of the law, even if it arguably did so incorrectly, and not part of the license itself.
by rurban | 2025-05-03 19:07:59+00:00
A bit overly complicated. I have to do such things pretty often, esp. with cygwin codebases and sloppy maintainers.

find . -name *.py -exec expand -t4 '{}' \;

git commit -am'chore: expand all py tabs to spaces'

and this for all branches. Usually also clang-format and dos2unix.

No need for .gitattribute filters. And no magic rewrites, just a commit.
by 8f2ab37a-ed6c | 2025-05-03 19:08:17+00:00
I always run across great quotes from Warren Buffett, but I never spent any time actually reading any of his writings or anything written about him. What's the best place to start to absorb some of his wisdom? Anything that's applicable to startups, tech, and life in general, beyond being the CEO of a holding company?
by Tallain | 2025-05-03 19:08:22+00:00
Again, we're talking about blogging, not business sites or SSR or CMS tooling. Very different needs with very different solutions.

I personally don't think it's that much work, and definitely not complicated, to keep my software up to date. And as a blog all I need to do is cache / throw behind a CDN and I'm golden. Nothing complex going on here. No headaches, no late nights, not even a wink of worry.
by RainyDayTmrw | 2025-05-03 19:09:57+00:00
For "regular" dilution, the way it works is that there's a pre-money and post-money valuation. If a company is worth 1M pre-money, and an investor puts in 1M, then the company is worth 2M post-money. Someone who owned 1% before (effectively 10k of the pre-money) now owns 0.5% (effectively 10k of the post-money). Ostensibly, their stake should be worth exactly the same before and after the deal, a smaller slice of a bigger pie. In practice, there's various incentives to inflate valuations, such that the early investor's slice is getting smaller faster than the pie is getting bigger.

Furthermore, investors tend to demand extra terms on top. The big one here is called liquidation preference, which is a clause that says, approximately, if/when this company is sold, this investor gets the first X amount of it, usually corresponding to some multiplier of their investment amount. Later rounds will ask to win out in preference, effectively creating a stack of liquidation preferences. In practice, liquidation preferences can often add up to so much that a moderately-successful sale goes entirely to preferred shareholders, and common shareholders see nothing. Perhaps the dealmakers put in a bit of a sweetener for the founders and/or current executives to grease the deal. Your average employee and angel or seed investors certainly see nothing in this deal.
by throwup238 | 2025-05-03 19:10:43+00:00
This is why a competent and well staffed bureaucracy is so important. Screwworm is really easy to eliminate by flooding their population with males sterilized by radiation (females only mate once in their lifetime so their population falls off fast). There are factories in Latin America already set up to do so at large scale, all it would take is a contract with the USDA to guarantee enough supply for the states.

Edit: Hah, I get to eat my words. Turns out USDA and APHIS have been trying to fly planes over Mexico to release the sterile flies, but the Mexican government has been restricting the flight days and denying landing permission, which has hampered the program. Looks like the Mexican bureaucracy is the one failing here, and USDA/APHIS might be running pre-emptive releases in the US (but I can't find a source on that). They just agreed to lift those restrictions and cooperate more at the end of April.
by busyant | 2025-05-03 19:13:21+00:00
I agree w/ some of what you say, but other stuff ... ?

> but that was bound to happen anyway because of the loss of the petrodollar agreement

The agreement was informal and it "ended" about a year ago. Last I checked, most oil was still priced in USD.

> Basel 3 as the capital reserve system they transitioned to fails because it assumes objective value

citation needed.

I'm worried about the long-term value of the US$, but perhaps not as much as you ... are you putting your money where your mouth is on that?
by smpanaro | 2025-05-03 19:14:44+00:00
What do you mean by less wide? The main bottleneck for transformers is memory bandwidth. ANE has a much lower ceiling than CPU/GPU (yes, despite unified memory).

Chunking is actually beneficial as long as all the chunks can fit into the ANE’s cache. It speeds up compilation for large network graphs and cached loads are negligible cost. On M1 the cache limit is 3-4GB, but it is higher on M2+.
by tchalla | 2025-05-03 19:14:58+00:00
Buffet on Tariffs

> “It’s a big mistake, in my view, when you have seven and a half billion people that don’t like you very well, and you got 300 million that are crowing in some way about how well they’ve done - I don’t think it’s right, and I don’t think it’s wise,” Buffett said. “The United States won. I mean, we have become an incredibly important country, starting from nothing 250 years ago. There’s not been anything like it.”
by hinkley | 2025-05-03 19:15:00+00:00
It’s big for caches. As your application grows in complexity you get dependent lookups. I need the user id to get the company id. I need the company id to figure out what features the user has access to. And then I need to run a bunch of queries to pull data for those feature.

And while using the cache may cut an order of magnitude off of the overall time, you’ve gone from hundreds of milliseconds to tens, but with a bloom filter you can figure out you have a cache miss faster and start the process of fetching the data sooner. The user may not notice the small improvement in response time, but by Little’s Law your cluster size can be smaller for the same traffic.

Web browsers use bloom filters to determine which CSS rules apply to which elements. IIRC Chrome removed a perf screen for CSS rules because most people were getting results below the noise floor for the timing function. The time to load the CSS was still relevant (maybe moreso due to the higher setup cost of the filters).
by bayarearefugee | 2025-05-03 19:15:35+00:00
There's video of his announcement.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/03/warren-buffett-to-ask-board-...

On one hand, he doesn't sound that great (in terms of subtle overall health markers in his voice) when he talks.

On the other hand, he's 94 and most people (especially men) don't make it into their 90s, so...
by voidspark | 2025-05-03 19:17:40+00:00
Not for inferencing. M3 Ultra runs big LLMs twice as fast as RTX 5090.

https://creativestrategies.com/mac-studio-m3-ultra-ai-workst...

RTX 5090 only has 32GB RAM. M3 Ultra has up to 512 GB with 819 GB/sec bandwidth. It can run models that will not fit on an RTX card.

EDIT: Benchmark may not be properly utilizing the 5090. But the M3 Ultra is way more capable than an entry level RTX card at LLM inferencing.
by rz2k | 2025-05-03 19:17:58+00:00
I was trying to figure the same thing out a couple months ago, and didn't find much information.

It looked like even ANEMLL provides limited low level access to specifically direct processing toward the Apple Neural Engine, because Core ML still acts as the orchestrator. Instead, flags during conversion of a PyTorch or TensorFlow model can specify ANE-optimized operations, quantization, and parameters hinting at compute targets or optimization strategies. For example `MLModelConfiguration.computeUnits = .cpuAndNeuralEngine` during conversion would disfavor the GPU cores.

Anyway, I didn't actually experiment with this, but at the time I thought maybe there could be a strategy of creating a speculative execution framework, with a small ANE-compatible model to act as the draft model paired with a larger target model running on GPU cores. The idea being that the ANE's low latency and high efficiency could accelerate results.

However, I would be interested to hear the perspective of people who actually know something about the subject.
by timewizard | 2025-05-03 19:18:51+00:00
> fleets of space-based telescopes.

Isn't one of the nice aspects of astronomy is that you can do quite a bit as an amateur with some decent equipment and a nice vantage point? What value does this fleet have to these people?

> people who espouse this sentiment would likely be whining about "useless astronomy taking money away from helping poor people".

You've constructed a strawman for the purposes of gatekeeping; meanwhile, there very much is a reason to have a rational conversation about the trade offs of these large commercial ventures that impact literally the entire planet.
Show HN: A C++ Module Mapper
by listeria | 2025-05-03 19:19:41+00:00
The fact that there wasn't a simple way to not have to rebuild system modules for every project which used C++ modules (on Linux) was bothering me, so I made this module mapper to do exactly that: keep compiled system modules in their own directory, and compiled user modules in the project's directory. See the project README for more info.
by gen220 | 2025-05-03 19:19:56+00:00
I appreciate yours! And agreed it’s a fun topic :)

I don’t have much more to add but I’d really recommend you to read Tolstoy’s “Confession / What I Believe”, because I think you’d find it fascinating even if you don’t agree with it completely.

He has a metaphor (in a very Tolstoy-esque way), in which the world is like this bountiful, picturesque farm filled with sharp, durable tools, beasts of burden, rich soil, and so on. It was given to us and filled with people who each have their own slice of it, who eventually grow jealous and guard their slice and think themselves better than everyone else. The garden overflows with weeds, the well runs dry, so on. And then God rolls up and is like “how did you guys manage to mess it up so bad this time??”, fixes everything, and then tries to give us rules to prevent the disarray from occurring again. People start off ok, but then we invent new rules or ignore the existing rules in our own self interest, backslide, rinse and repeat.

Tolstoy’s thesis is basically that we’ve done the same thing to Jesus and the sermon on the mount that the Pharisees did to the Ten Commandments. i.e. constructed all these artifices and dogma that somehow allow Christianity to coexist with authoritarian, hierarchical, violent structures in our own self interests. We’ve let the garden spoil. No wonder the world is biblically messed up :)

Anyways that’s the core thesis but there are many other fascinating ideas in there, I really recommend giving it a try!
by whstl | 2025-05-03 19:20:35+00:00
I once lost a flight home (I was overseas) because the website of a company said there was a connecting bus between the airports I should take. The bus wasn’t there. I naturally lost the flight and had a very heated discussion with the clerk who was insisting that the website I was showing wasn’t theirs because I found it via Google (it had the same domain).

It was solved when I found the same information in the email sent by them.

Suddenly the clerk was apologetic and pretended she misunderstood the situation.

There are definitely capital-A assholes in both sides, with people willing to lie through the teeth to someone stranded in a foreign country just to avoid some minor inconvenience.
by kamranjon | 2025-05-03 19:23:01+00:00
They're basically second place behind NVIDIA for model inference performance and often the only game in town for the average person if you're trying to run larger models that wont fit in the 16 or 24gb of memory available in top-shelf NVIDIA offerings.

I wouldn't say Apple isn't serious about AI, they had the forethought to build the shared memory architecture with the insane memory bandwidth needed for these types of tasks, while at the same time designing neural cores specifically for small on-device models needed for future apps.

I'd say Apple is currently ahead of NVIDIA in just sheer memory available - which for doing training and inference on large models, it's kinda crucial, at least right now. NVIDIA seems to be purposefully limiting the memory available in their consumers cards which is pretty short sighted I think.