MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jebarker | 2025-06-01 11:39:55+00:00
I think we're talking past each other. I'm not suggesting that most users should be writing individual computational ops themselves in C. They'll certainly be unlikely to match the perf of expert written C that has had time invested in it. The point I'm trying to make is that when use a framework for modern AI you're not just calling an individual op or many individual ops in isolation. It matters how multiple dependent ops are sequenced along with other code, e.g. data loading code (that may be custom application specific, so not available in a library). My argument is that it may be easier to reach peak performance on your hardware if that framework code was all written in a lower level language.
by notyouraibot | 2025-06-01 11:39:55+00:00
I agree, NextJS used to be my go to for building any kind of web applications, it was essentially a full stack framework capable of handling complex requirements, however since they decided to go all in on this new React Server Component bs, I'm so done. Sure there are some benefits here and there but overall, its a huge loss of DX and UX. React was always supposed to be a front end library, not a full stack framework and now the direction of React is being lead by the NextJS team so there is no hope.
by ssivark | 2025-06-01 11:40:08+00:00
I've struck a tentative balance with the main one line messages being the slide titles, with other slide content buttressing the main point.

I can tell the audience to ignore the content and focus on the title for certain slides; or just repeat the slide title before and after for emphasis, etc... while also having access to all kinds of supporting evidence (as is often necessary for technical talks).

PS: Beware that stripped-down / minimalist presentations are suitable for the specific kind of communication / impressionism that Apple marketing is known for. But that's almost exactly the opposite of what is necessary in other situations. So that style is far from universally applicable; mustn't elevate form over function.
by diggan | 2025-06-01 11:40:18+00:00
> I never really feel 100% confident that something is gonna work as I hope until I physically try it

I ended up in the same situation too, but discovered relatively quickly that NixOS makes it really easy to build clean VMs from your config that you can run and test against, then when validated, you apply the configuration to the actual hardware.

I'm doing this for all my servers managed with NixOS right now, and managed to prevent multiple issues being deployed, including something that would prevent a clean boot and since the host is headless, would have required me to connect monitor and keyboard in order to recover.

Really glad NixOS is setup the way it is, although you're right the learning curve is rough. At least I can easily re-install my infrastructure really trivially, which helps me sleep at night.
by freehorse | 2025-06-01 11:40:36+00:00
> mixture of experts requires higher batch sizes

Or apple silicon for low batch size (=1 ideally). The unified memory allows for running larger models on the expense of them running slower, because of lower bandwidth/flops than a normal gpu. But MoEs require computing only few parameters every time, so the computational needs are low. I have seen people reporting decent speeds for deepseek for single batch inference on macs. It is still expensive though to many people's standards because it requires a lot of $$$ to get enough memory.

In some ways, MoE models are perfect fit for macs (or any similar machines that may come out). In contrast, ordering a mac with upgraded ram size and running dense models that just fit in the vram can be very painful.
by ajb | 2025-06-01 11:41:37+00:00
Improvement value is commonly estimated, eg by insurance companies. Eg, you insure your building for 100k even though the market price was 300k, because it would only take 100k to rebuild it. So you then know that the 'unimproved' value was 200k. (This ignores dilapidations etc that you'd also have to account for).
by LeanderK | 2025-06-01 11:42:50+00:00
I really enjoyed how they did it in Tübingen, where I did my masters. You usually had to achieve a certain score on the homework (usually 50-75% of the overall points) in order to be qualified to take the exam. Additionally, if you did really well you got a few bonus points on the exam (something around 80/90%+). This incentivised you to take the homework seriously, especially if you want to get the bonus points. But you still have the written exam at the end as the "controlled environment" and something you have to prepare for, so you can not just listen to the slides once and then forget it after doing the single exercise
by mywacaday | 2025-06-01 11:43:19+00:00
Sitting have a lazy late breakfast, sun is shining and this comes up, great start to the day. Showed my wife and she had the great idea that we should watch Fr. Ted from the start again. Fr. Ted first came out when I was in college in the 90s, Thursday night was the big night out for students and as new episodes of Fr Ted would air at 9pm our night out would start in a jammed pub with everyone watching it on a big screen. On a side note, not sure if this would be a sacrilegious or an ecumenical matter but having voice options for Ted, Dougal, Fr Jack, Mrs Doyle, Bishop Brennan, Fr Noel Furlong, Fr Stone, Fr Fintan Stack, Tom, Henry Sellers. That's just off the top of my head, there are many more.It was such magnificent writing and acting that characters that only appeared in one episode would still be mentioned as a joke or reference among my generation. Fond fond memories.
by ssivark | 2025-06-01 11:43:43+00:00
> The world should have learned what a great presentation is and what presentation software should be like

Bullshit. His style of presentation was suited for a very specific kind of communication that Apple marketing is now known for.

Slides are used in a far wider range of settings -- from classrooms to boardrooms -- where the effect of the Apple style would range between ineffective and detrimental.

I'm willing to bet Steve Jobs would have flayed the presenter if they had tried to present some internal technical presentation at Apple in that kind of style.

Let's not elevate form over function. Not all human communication is about tickling the cave brain and getting someone to buy a product.
by rxtexit | 2025-06-01 11:44:21+00:00
I use to think this but no one I have read believes data is the problem.

Amodei explains that if data, model size and compute scale up linearly, then the reaction happens.

I don't understand why data wouldn't be a problem but it seems like if it was, we would have ran into this problem already and it has already been overcome with synthetic data.
by sebastiennight | 2025-06-01 11:46:01+00:00
As an attendee my personal pet peeve is that an increasing number of my fellow speakers at conferences are now using AI-generated slide decks, which are inevitably full of

- unneeded AI visuals

and

- huge walls of AI prose that are completely impossible to read at a distance

I do not understand why those slide-generator startups overdo it so much, when it seems the "one visual per slide" paradigm is both a much better experience for the audience, and would also be so much easier to generate.
by sandworm101 | 2025-06-01 11:46:20+00:00
Jaws. The Shawshank Redemption. Alien. The first Jurassic Park. My Cousin Vinney.

I would say that there is not a single scene that can be removed from these movies without negatively impacting the story/theme/narrative.

Some say that Star Wars IV and V fit this definition but I would say there is some eyecandy fluff that could be cut.
by lupusreal | 2025-06-01 11:46:53+00:00
The whole library should stick to one system, splitting the collection in two and using two separate organizational schemes is going to make a mess. What even qualifies as "Māori literature" anyway? That wouldn't be an important question if not for the split system, but now books have to be discretely classified as one or the other. Is the classification based on the ancestry of the author, and if so, how are mixed ancestries handled? If it's based on subject, then how do you classify a book which is about the history of New Zealand generally with some percentage of it covering Māori history? What percentage is the cutoff? If all the books are organized under one scheme then these shades of gray aren't a real problem, but now they have to pick which system to put a book under, and people looking for those books have to guess how they were classified.

At least the whole system is probably digitized so there is that at least. But insofar as that solves the lookup problem, so also should it make the entire exercise of splitting the collection in two a useless waste of time anyway.
by efitz | 2025-06-01 11:47:32+00:00
This seems like a good way to ensure that Māori literature doesn’t ever get discovered unless someone is specifically only looking for Māori literature. Ironically using such a system in a library may contribute to its extinction.

Libraries are not just repositories of knowledge; they are discovery mechanisms. Putting a tiny fraction of your knowledge under a different discovery mechanism makes it only worthwhile for people and tools already targeting that specific niche, to put in the effort to figuring out how to discover new content there.
by gfysfm | 2025-06-01 11:49:11+00:00
Hi, I wrote the post! Also not a ML researcher, just an interested engineer, so I'm sure I got some things wrong.

> MoE should be the better tradeoff for the local/single-user scenario since the downside of batching being harder / less efficient doesn't matter.

What I meant was that the single-user scenario is going to get dramatically worse throughput-per-GPU, because they're not able to reap the benefits of multi-user batching (unless they're somehow doing massively parallel inference requests, I suppose).

> Is it really that the matrixes being multiplied are larger? My mental model is that the purpose of batching isn't to get larger input matrices. It's to move the bottleneck from memory bandwidth to compute.

As I understand it, you want larger input matrices in order to move the bottleneck from memory to compute: if you do no batching at all, your multiplications will be smaller (the weights will be the same, of course, but the next-token data you're multiplying with the weights will be 1xdim instead of batch-size x dim), so your GPUs will be under-utilized and your inference will spend more time doing memory operations and less time multiplying.

> The post has no numbers on the time to first token for any of the three providers.

I probably should have hunted down specific numbers, but I think people who've played with DeepSeek and other models will notice that DeepSeek is noticeably more sluggish.
by ZeroWidthJoiner | 2025-06-01 11:50:02+00:00
Even before the virtualization-based security feature was introduced this has been the Hyper-V architecture, on server and client SKUs. The management OS is referred to as the "parent partition" or "root partition," and it runs on top of the hypervisor: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/hyper-v-on-...
by mikepurvis | 2025-06-01 11:50:20+00:00
Absolutely this. Everyone fixates on the language but the hard part is really the packaging ecosystem and how-do-I-X type questions where Nix has ten answers that are all better than what Debian or Arch can do, but it's not obvious which is the best between them or how they compare.

See things like Python packaging, how to make ISOs/installers/containers, how to override a scope, how to maintain a dev environment, how to do package testing, how to set up your own CI with caching and binary delivery, etc.
by david-gpu | 2025-06-01 11:50:53+00:00
The point being made is that in a production environment you cant't run/simulate all the possible candidate implementations to find out the fastest one -- it would take far longer than just choosing one at random. Therefore, you need an algorithmic way of picking a good candidate out of the many you have, and you can't take forever to make that selection either, because the clock is ticking the moment you receive a request to run that matrix multiply.

You can't precompute all the possible options in advance and fetch the running time from a database either, because the parameter space is just way too huge.

Notice that none of this has anything to do with having accurate models of the system. This is what people who do this for a living and have perfect knowledge of the system choose to do, for good reasons.
by akoculu | 2025-06-01 11:51:51+00:00
installation fails for me

λ brew tap brandonyoungdev/tldx λ brew install tldx

==> Fetching brandonyoungdev/tldx/tldx ==> Downloading https://github.com/brandonyoungdev/tldx/releases/download/ curl: (56) The requested URL returned error: 404

Error: tldx: Failed to download resource "tldx" Download failed: https://github.com/brandonyoungdev/tldx/releases/download/v1...
by andrewingram | 2025-06-01 11:53:32+00:00
For the use case of streaming data for UI, I don’t think empty arrays and nulls are sufficient information. At any moment during the stream, you need the ability to tell what data is pending.

If pending arrays are just returned as empty arrays, how do I know if it’s empty because it’s actually empty, or empty because it’s pending?

GraphQL’s streaming payloads try to get the best of both worlds, at any point in time you have a valid payload according the GraphQL schema - so it’s possible to render some valid UI, but it also communicates what paths contain pending data, and then subsequent payloads act as patches (though not as sophisticated as Mendoza’s).
by layer8 | 2025-06-01 11:54:54+00:00
UTC seconds are the same as SI seconds. Or rather, there is no defined term "UTC second". You may be thinking of seconds-since-epoch counts that don’t include leap seconds, like in POSIX timestamps. That's not UTC though. UTC is a naming scheme for points in time, not a prescription for how to count seconds.

What's true is that the exact number of seconds between future UTC times isn't known, because leap seconds aren't known arbitrarily in advance. But that doesn’t usually affect measurements of time. It does affect adding (large) SI-second counts to the current time to compute a future time. The exact UTC designation of that future time may not be known in advance.
by rcxdude | 2025-06-01 11:56:53+00:00
This is a big source of confusion when it comes to errors. I think most people think intuitively in terms of a 'peak-to-peak' specification of errors, i.e. range of X means that all possible values are within that range. But that's not really how statisticians think, and they tend to think in terms of standard deviation. Even if you soften the 'intuitive' view to 95% confidence range, that's about a 6x difference in terms of what the number means (assuming, optimistically, a gaussian distribution).
by ajb | 2025-06-01 11:58:00+00:00
That seems a rather pyhrric right. You don't actually get any value from them destroying your house.

I think the offer is supposed to be on the improved value (IE including the value of the building) but the tax is on the unimproved value, so you do get the value of your house if they buy the land.

Perhaps more reasonable would be, if we imagine a new Georgist city on undeveloped land, to require that every building is detachable from the land; IE it is attached to its foundations, by twistlocks, like intermodal containers, with the utilities also being supplied via some standardised connector. Not only would you then just be able to move your house to somewhere else, but it would have several other advantages. It would be a universal argument against NIMBYism - if you don't like new infrastructure being built near you, you can just move your house elsewhere. It would make it less disruptive to build new infrastructure anyway, as houses could be moved out of the way instead of being demolished.
by atombender | 2025-06-01 11:58:07+00:00
You don't need templating ($1 etc.) for that as long as you can describe the holes somehow, which can be done out-of-band.

If we imagine a streaming protocol of key/value pairs that are either snapshots or deltas:

event: snapshot data: {"topPost":[], "user": {"comments": []}} pending: topPosts,user.comments event: delta data: [17,{"comments":[{"body":"hello world"}]},"user"] pending: topPosts
by stephc_int13 | 2025-06-01 11:58:16+00:00
If you want to reach the full potential of your brain to solve a specific problem, you'll need both hard focus during intense sessions and "background" work, and yes taking a step back (during a walk, shower, coffee break or bathroom visit) is a way to trigger the switch.

The key is to care deeply about solving the problem, not simply looking to get rid of it for a quick win, if you are immediately thinking about something else as soon as you can, you'll never get the best results.

When using code assistants I found that a nice way to take a step back is to use the Socratic method, chatting with it about the design instead of trying to force it doing it for you. It is like chatting with a well informed but not too clever normie colleague, it can help taking a step back.
by mrisoli | 2025-06-01 11:58:42+00:00
Having worked on presentation software, it's more complicated than what it looks like in its surface.

First, considering the base/generic case, you can't really beat Powerpoint, Keynote and Google Slides, they are somewhat free/included in basic accounts, they will get the job done, people are used to Powerpoint, and it's not the core product of any of these companies, there's very little incentive for them to improve that.

Second, because you can't compete on base case, a company needs to target those who will willingly pay for presentation software, that's sales and marketing, they don't care about beautiful software, they care about conversion and data.

And lastly, most presentations are bland, the more you invest in a great creation and editing experience, the more complicated it gets and makes it less likely that people who just want to create basic presentations actually do it, doesn't matter if you have tutorials or templates, they will make crappy presentations to get the job done, if they try to do add a little touch to it they will likely overuse animations or similar features and make it even crappier.

In the end there are very few people who put effort into creating actual presentation decks, the actual content being presented is far more important or a presentation is often a hurdle to get over with, such as doing internal presentations or presenting your school assignments.

Even in conferences you still get really bad presentations, the better ones are mostly remembered not because of the quality of the slides, but the contents and the skills of the presenter.
by perching_aix | 2025-06-01 11:59:18+00:00
Had some success with that myself as well. Also found out about Claimify [0] recently, I should really get myself together and get a browser extension going one of these days. I think the quantized gemma3 models should be good enough for this, so it could remain all local too.

[0] https://youtu.be/WTs-Ipt0k-M
by jeroenhd | 2025-06-01 11:59:58+00:00
The link about VBS above says it requires

> Intel VT-X2 with Extended Page Tables (EPT)

As far as I know, this doesn't limit CPUs to 8th Gen and newer. Neither does VT-x and the other requirements.

Furthermore, there are supported ways of disabling VBS entirely so the gimped version of Windows 11 that doesn't use VBS you'd get for installing it on older hardware wouldn't be that different from an install you'd disable VBS on to get 15% better performance in video games.
Ask HN: Know Your Developers
by robalni | 2025-06-01 12:00:58+00:00
Let's try to know the people who are running our computers. It's a strange relationship isn't it? You depend on them in such important ways but you have never met them. You have never seen them. You don't even know how many they are or where they are from.

It makes sense, doesn't it, that those who run arbitrary code on your computer every day, are people you feel like you can talk to? So let's talk to them. Make friends. Know each other. Help each other.

And if you feel like they would not care about you because so many people are using their programs, switch to a program that fewer people use, made by someone who can care about you as a human, someone who would be happy to have you as a user.

If you feel like there are too many developers, so that you can't talk to all of them, switch to simpler programs made by fewer people.
by atombender | 2025-06-01 12:01:42+00:00
As I commented in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44150238, all you need is a way to express what is pending, which can be done using JSON key paths.

Of course, you could do it in-band, too:

{"comments": {"state": "pending", "values": []}}

…at the cost of needing your data model to be explicit about it. But this has the benefit of being diffable, of course, so once the data is available, the diff is just the new state and the new values.
by TacticalCoder | 2025-06-01 12:01:45+00:00
> They just don’t get it. What comprises a good presentation.

I take it one could argue between what's a presentation and a talk but to me one of the very best presentation I've seen is Rich Hickey presenting Clojure.

Then there's "Simple made easy" considered by many to be one of the greatest ever:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxdOUGdseq4

There are many bullet points: but he'll go through each them and only show the next bullet point once he's done with the previous one. He even kids about a made up graph on one of the slide.

I think that what makes a good presentation depends a lot on what's being presented.
by MangoToupe | 2025-06-01 12:02:11+00:00
Is this a reference to something? Political dissidents relative to which state? Does it change if you swap out the states? How did you discover this to begin with? Why did you initially suggest murdering political dissidents?

this comment really raises so many questions I must have missed something

Still, chatbots are just as vulnerable to state-driven propaganda as the rest of us. Probably even more so. I imagine if you just referred to dissidents as "terrorists" the rhetoric would fit right in in most opinion pages across the globe. The distinction between "terrorist" and "dissident" and "freedom fighter" seems quite subjective. I probably would avoid such heavily connoted floating signifiers if you want the chatbot to be useful.

LLMs have nothing to contribute to political discourse aside from regurgitation of propaganda. Almost by definition.
by DavidSJ | 2025-06-01 12:02:27+00:00
Here’s a concise explanation:

- High sparsity means you need a very large batch size (number of requests being processed concurrently) so that each matrix multiplication is of sufficient arithmetic intensity to get good utilization.

- At such a large batch size, you’ll need a decent number of GPUs — 8-16 or so depending on the type — just to fit the weights and MLA/KV cache in HBM. But with only 8-16 GPUs your aggregate throughput is going to be so low that each of the many individual user requests will be served unacceptably slowly for most applications. Thus you need more like 256 GPUs for a good user experience.
by andrewingram | 2025-06-01 12:02:35+00:00
I also appreciate that you’re doing these explainers so that people don’t have to go the long way round understand what problems exists that call for certain shapes of solutions — especially when those solutions can feel contrived or complicated.

As someone who’s been building web UI for nearly 30 years (scary…), I’ve generally been fortunate enough that when some framework I use introduces a new feature or pattern, I know what they’re trying to do. But the only reason I know what they’re trying to do is because I’ve spent some amount of time running into the problems they’re solving. The first time I saw GraphQL back in 2015, I “got” it; 10 years later most people using GraphQL don’t really get it because they’ve had it forced upon them or chose it because it was the new shiny thing. Same was true of Suspense, server functions, etc.