MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by formalsystem | 2025-09-03 22:18:37+00:00
I work on PyTorch and there are many things that make me suspicious about these results. My TL;DR is unless we get a zip file of all the kernels with how they're benchmarked results like this are almost impossible to verify

1. I don't have an M4 but I have an M1 Pro and I tried running the claimed 18x speedup VisionAttention attention example and I get close to identical runtimes. This example has more issues the main optimization the LLM is doing is a fusion and so not comparing to torch.compile is a bit sus. The numerics are off as well and I suspect the atols were way too big. Finally MultiHeadAttention is a deprecated API so using neither SDPA or torch.compile is a weird choice

2. In general 18x (and even some 100x speedups claimed near the end) are just a smell that some kernel is incorrect, the typical way you can get speedups like this is you don't warmup or you forget to synchronize. PyTorch has a lot of benchmarking footguns which is why sharing the exact eval scripts is helpful

3. Speaking of footguns, the shapes I saw in the examples were tiny, in that regime you're more often measuring noise as the primary bottleneck is not compute or memory but overhead

4. Generating many random shapes is also not so safe, some input distributions can make certain kernels trivial for example torch.randn() by default generates samples from a normal distribution with mean 0 and variance 1 and so if you take the mean of a large vector you're almost guaranteed to just get 0 esp if your tolerance is too high

5. KernelBench levels measure vastly different things and if you want to compare to PyTorch operators you want to focus on Level 1, Level 2 is fusions and so the right baseline is torch.compile and more reliable on nightlies. The Mamba 2 example (which I didn't run) also acknowledges that the primary thing it does is fusions which assuming everything is correct would still be strange to baseline vs eager

So please for everyone's sanity if you find a kernel that's 10-100x faster please share the exact code and benchmarking methodology to your smartest performance friends, you should be extremely skeptical of such results often you can discard some numbers based on a simple speed of light analysis. We all desperately want faster kernels but to get them we have to be really fanatical about correctness.
by jorvi | 2025-09-03 22:18:39+00:00
Mullvad is rather principled on privacy. You can't even make a real account, you can only generate an account number that you can charge, and I assume they do some sort of clever tricks to keep themselves as blind as possible to who uses the account number. Firefox Relay is also just whitelabeled Mullvad, so they have Mozilla's stamp of approval.

Of the big VPNs, the only one's that have ever felt shady to me are NordVPN and Private Internet Access. NordVPN because of the sheer amount of false advertising they pay YouTubers to do, and Private Internet Access because of how cheap they are and how poorly they maintain their infrastructure. Their .ovpn generated files haven't worked for 2+ years now because they include certificates with malformed revocation dates, and refuse to pay the certificate authority to update them.
by stillpointlab | 2025-09-03 22:18:54+00:00
> We all know that the industry has taken a step back in terms of code quality by at least a decade. Hardly anyone tests anymore.

I see pseudo-scientific claims from both sides of this debate but this is a bit too far for me personally. "We all know" sounds like Eternal September [1] kind of reasoning. I've been in the industry about as long as the article author and I think he might be looking with rose-tinted glasses on the past. Every aging generation looks down at the new cohort as if they didn't go through the same growing pains.

But in defense of this polemic, and laying out my cards as an AI maximalist and massive proponent of AI coding, I've been wondering the same. I see articles all the time about people writing this and that software using these new tools and it so often is the case they never actually share what they built. I mean, I can understand if someone is heads-down cranking out amazing software using 10 Claude Code instances and raking in that cash. But not even to see one open source project that embraces this and demonstrates it is a bit suspicious.

I mean, where is: "I rewrote Redis from scratch using Claude Code and here is the repo"?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
by pavon | 2025-09-03 22:18:59+00:00
I have both OSMAnd and Organic Maps installed, but I usually end up reaching for OSMAnd. I like the softer color scheme of Organic Maps better, but not the decrease in detail. Neither are perfect about choosing when/where to draw street names, but I have to zoom/pan a lot more to find them in Organic Maps.

Also, the address search on OSMAnd used to be much worse than Organic Maps, but it has improved, and I actually prefer it over Organic Maps now.
by palata | 2025-09-03 22:18:59+00:00
> It's a matter of principle

My principle is that I fight for things that bring something, not for the sake of fighting :-).

> I do. With proper pressure Google can stop manufacturers from dragging their feet. Say if Android required an unlocked bootloader and a standard API BSP.

I don't follow. How would having an unlocked bootloader prevent alternative OSes?
by Nextgrid | 2025-09-03 22:19:29+00:00
A lot of those early "videogames over broadcast medium" worked by having all the games being broadcasted all the time in a loop and the decoder (typically a fat "cartridge" with a modem embedded) waiting until the chosen game was broadcast and then caching that broadcast into some (battery-backed?) RAM or rewritable ROM.

It was purely one-way communication, so payment and access control (if any) was handled locally by the cartridge. As far as I know none of those supported per-game payment, so the payment was included in the purchase/rental price of the cartridge/modem.
by goalieca | 2025-09-03 22:19:31+00:00
There's a relatively monotonous task in software engineering that pretty much everyone working no a legacy c/c++ code base has had to face: static analysis and compiler warnings. That seems about as boring and routine of an operation that exists. As simple as can be. I've seen this task farmed out to interns paid barely anything just to get it done.

My question to HN is... can LLMs do this? Can they convert all the unsafe c-string invocations to safe. Can they replace system calls with posix calls. Can they wrap everything in a smart pointer and make sure that mutex locks are added where needed.
by slg | 2025-09-03 22:19:31+00:00
>For fuck's sake, children are being firebombed in Gaza right now, and this is the imperative ethical hill you choose to die on?

Nonsense like this is where I leave the conversation. You can't deny the accusations of moral grandstanding in the same breath you say this. I commented directly on the topic being discussed in a specific HN thread. That does not mean I think this is the most important issue on the planet and the non-sequitur of contrasting a discussion of IP law with children in Gaza being firebombed is just straight up offensive. The "karma sink" here isn't voicing your "ethos", it is you.
by dekhn | 2025-09-03 22:19:32+00:00
Similar experience in DNA/genome analysis. A large part of DNA analysis was based on parser theory.

This paper was my introduction to DNA analysis as well as Chomsky hierarchy: https://www.jstor.org/stable/29774782 (I wasn't able to find a free copy).

IIRC, pseudoknots in RNA require context-free grammars to parse.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-09-03 22:20:36+00:00
>At 10 times revenues, to give you a 10-year payback, I have to pay you 100% of revenues for 10 straight years in dividends. That assumes I can get that by my shareholders. That assumes I have zero cost of goods sold, which is very hard for a computer company. That assumes zero expenses, which is really hard with 39,000 employees. That assumes I pay no taxes which is very hard. And that assumes you pay no taxes on your dividends which is kind of illegal. And that assumes with zero R&D for the next 10 years, I can maintain the current revenue run rate. Now, having done that, would any of you like to buy my stock at $64? Do you realize how ridiculous those basic assumptions are? You don’t need any transparency. You don’t need any footnotes. What were you thinking?”

-Cisco CEO, post-DotCom.
by captainkrtek | 2025-09-03 22:20:42+00:00
I'm not talking about generating a few lines instead of importing left-pad. In recent PRs I've had:

- Implementing a scheduler from scratch (hundreds of lines), when there are many many libraries for this in Go.

- Implementing some complex configuration store that is safe for concurrent access , using generics, reflection, and a whole other host of stuff (additionally hundreds of lines plus more for tests).

While I can't say any of the code is bad, it is effectively like importing a library which your team now owns, but worse in that no one really understands it or supports it.

Lastly, I could find libraries that are well supported, documented, and active for each of these use-cases fairly quickly.
by cnst | 2025-09-03 22:20:44+00:00
Just because you don't see a problem with Apple's monopoly, doesn't mean that everyone for whom it's a problem is a Blink admirer or works for Google or Microsoft or Chrome or Blink.

I'm typing this in Firefox on a Mac; I usually uninstall Chrome even from Android, usually after first using it to install F-Droid, then Aurora Store; then it's disabled promptly. Why should I not be allowed to disable Safari?

Apple's iOS monopolies are a far bigger issue than Chrome. These issues you guys talk about, don't really exist for me. I use YouTube regularly without Chrome, I use Android without a Google Account, I use all the banking apps without Play Store. None of this is possible on iOS. On iOS, you cannot preserve your privacy at all, because everything depends on having an Apple Account, and being monitored by Apple. Hence, I don't take iOS or iPhone as a serious contender for a daily driver for me.
by pil0u | 2025-09-03 22:21:02+00:00
Maybe I haven't found the right tool yet, but every time I see a product trying to solve data analysis with AI, the first example often deals with aggregated revenue over time or something similar.

This can be solved by a student after 3 days of learning SQL from scratch.

The article, while technical, remains pretty vague about implementation and what real, business problem they managed to solve with such a framework.

Of course building on top of a semantic layer is good for LLMs, but that assumes 1. this semantic layer exists 2. it is not a freaking mess. While tools like dbt helped with 1, I'm yet to see a clean, well-documented, lineage-perfect semantic layer.
by amradio1989 | 2025-09-03 22:21:41+00:00
The models are being tweaked for purposes other than usefulness. Its a product after all. It's not really a tool in the conventional sense of the word.

Sure you can use it as a tool, but you can also use it as an experience, or even a companion. But that requires it to be "not boring".

Quite frankly, "useful" is the least profitable route for this technology. It's all about the experience. People pay way more for that.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-09-03 22:22:29+00:00
I'm not arguing for subsidies or public housing. Just for a property tax that combines land value with property improvement using some reasonable formula that combines them. Increasing the share of property tax related to land value (it doesn't have to be zero percent) vs property improvement (it doesn't have to be zero percent either) can prevent shocks that avoid obliterating older housing stocks that traditionally serve as affordable housing, while still pushing for increasing density over time in popular cities (this will also act in the opposite way in cities like Buffalo that are less popular and land value tends to very cheap).
by stego-tech | 2025-09-03 22:22:45+00:00
This is my current drum I bang on when an uninformed stakeholder tries shoving LLMs blindly down everyone’s throats: it’s the data, stupid. Current data aggregates outside of industries wholly dependent on it (so anyone not in web advertising, GIS, or intelligence) are garbage, riddled with errors and in awful structures that are opaque to LLMs. For your AI strategy to have any chance of success, your data has to be pristine and fresh, otherwise you’re lighting money on fire.

Throwing more compute and data at the problem won’t magically manifest AGI. To reach those lofty heights, we must first address the gaping wounds holding us back.
by lelanthran | 2025-09-03 22:22:49+00:00
> If you think it is possible then I'd like to see an implementation of a sudoku puzzle solver as Markov chain. This is a simple enough problem that can be implemented in a few dozen lines of Prolog but I've never seen a solver implemented as a Markov chain.

I think it can be done. I started a chatbot that works like this some time back (2024) but paused work on it since January.

In brief, you shorten the context by discarding the context that didn't work out.
by naasking | 2025-09-03 22:23:14+00:00
I don't know what exactly Musk said on the topics you raise, I only know that he did say something like vision being the core problem and that lidar can't solve that problem (nor can any combination of other sensors we currently have). It makes sense to focus on vision and to question the value add of lidar, because if you can solve vision then many other sensors are redundant.

Maybe it can't be solved using current tech, who knows, but saying that fully autonomous driving in our current world isn't achievable without vision is a correct position. I have no opinion on anything else.
Ask HN: Is Google AI Overview giving you scam phone numbers?
by CreepGin | 2025-09-03 22:23:14+00:00
Today my wife was trying to cancel a GEICO policy. She searched for "geico home insurance phone number". On top of the results page in the AI Overview section, it gave out a phone number (1-800-442-9393) in the first sentence. So my wife called. The guy on the other end didn't ask anything insurance-related and just went straight for home address and credit card information. She got scared and hang up shortly after.

Later on, we checked the number and couldn't find any reference to it online. And what's even weirder was that when we tried to search for the same query again, it gave a completely different number (still not affiliated with GEICO).

Anyone has similar experience?
by timdiller | 2025-09-03 22:25:07+00:00
I haven't found ChatGPT helpful in speeding up my coding because I don't want to give up understanding the code. If I let ChatGPT do it, then there are inevitable mistakes, and it sometimes hallucinates libraries, etc. I have found it very useful in guiding me through the dev-ops of working with and configuring AWS instances for a blog server, for a git server, etc. As a small business owner, that has been a big time saver.
by paulhodge | 2025-09-03 22:25:17+00:00
I think different things are happening...

For experienced engineers, I'm seeing (internally in our company at least) a huge amount of caution and hesitancy to go all-in with AI. No one wants to end up maintaining huge codebases of slop code. I think that will shift over time. There are use cases where having quick low-quality code is fine. We need a new intuition about when to insist on handcrafted code, and when to just vibecode.

For non-experienced engineers, they currently hit a lot of complexity limits with getting a finished product to actually work, unless they're building something extremely simple. That will also shift - the range of what you can vibecode is increasing every year. Last year there was basically nothing that you could vibecode successfully, this year you can vibecode TODO apps and stuff like that. I definitely think that the App Store will be flooded in the coming future. It's just early.

Personally I have a side project where I'm using Claude & Codex and I definitely feel a measurable difference, it's about a 3x to 5x productivity boost IMO.

The summary.. Just because we don't see it yet, doesn't mean it's not coming.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-09-03 22:25:17+00:00
It's common for people to talk about "crime" when what they really mean is something like "street crime" or "stranger crime" - some random person I don't know hurting me or taking my stuff. It's true that other kinds of crime are common, but the solutions to them probably look pretty different than the solutions to let me safely walk around anywhere in my city after dark.
by edbaskerville | 2025-09-03 22:25:26+00:00
Human beings can, in fact, learn to echolocate, and they seem to experience it as vision, supported by their own descriptions and by fMRIs showing the visual cortex lighting up.

I'm not going to try to draw any inferences about consciousness from these facts. I'll leave that to others.

https://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/378577902/how-to-be...
by rayiner | 2025-09-03 22:25:53+00:00
> I've even seen you personally advocate for policies that, in my mind, cross extremely bright lines of constitutional protection.

You’re talking about putative “bright line rules” in a made up version of the constitution that has four branches of government and with “independent” civil servants running the show. I’m talking about the real constitution here, as it was understood by the people who wrote it.

> Especially when the president is already illegally deploying US troops within our own borders.

Judge Breyer’s recent order in the LA case upheld that the President can deploy the National Guard to protect federal property: https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/PCA%2... (“Finally, the Court’s injunctive relief in this case is narrowly tailored to address Defendants’ statutory violations. The injunction applies only to Defendants’ use of the National Guard in California, not nationally. Defendants are not required to withdraw the 300 National Guard troops currently stationed in Los Angeles, nor are they barred from using troops consistent with the Posse Comitatus Act. In fact, the Court essentially just orders Defendants to follow the (unedited) training materials that they introduced in this trial. See Task Force 51 Training Slides at 6. Thus, for example, federal troops can continue to protect federal property in a manner consistent with the Posse Comitatus Act.”).

The judge found that the troops had acted outside the scope of that authority. Much of that will certainly be overturned. For example, the judge found that the authority to protect federal property didn’t extend to “setting up protective perimeters, traffic blockades, crowd control, and the like.” (P. 42). It’s unlikely Congress intended to authorize the President to deploy the National Guard to protect federal property, but that doesn’t extend to routine measures that would be used to achieve such protection.

At best, we’ve got 300 national guard troops in Los Angeles and we’re quibbling about exactly what they can and cannot do.
by mikae1 | 2025-09-03 22:25:56+00:00
> my-blog-article-title.md seems enough, and dates usually feel like clutter, since titles are distinct as they are and you don't really need the date in the filename to do anything useful.

I love to see when a page by posted just by looking at the URL. It also avoids naming collisions. For a static site, not rendered from a db, I wouldn't want to store every post ever written in one dir either. How well does that scale? Yeah, you can probably store 100K files in dir, but it will become unwieldy and slow to load when browsing a lot sooner. Just a dir per year probably solve any such problem.
by palata | 2025-09-03 22:25:57+00:00
It feels more like people object for the sake of objecting. I often have this feeling: people first don't care (about security, about renewable energy, ...), and the moment they start caring, there is a high risk that they will just object to everything, sometimes without good reasons.

Sure, we are being abused by TooBigTech and surveillance capitalism. It doesn't mean that all security is bad. Security is a compromise. Yet many people go "this added security comes from a governement/TooBigTech so it proves that it is a lie". Which is wrong: it doesn't prove it. Sometimes there are good things coming from governments/TooBigTech.

The world is more nuanced than people seem to realise.
by FloorEgg | 2025-09-03 22:26:06+00:00
Very true. Living cells are ~4-5 orders of magnitude more functional-information-dense than the most advanced chips, and there is a lot more living mass than advanced chips.

But the networking potential of digital compute is a fundamentally different paradigm than living systems. The human brain is constrained in size by the width of the female pelvis.

So while it's expensive, we can trade scope-constrained robustness (replication and redundancy at many levels of abstraction), for broader cognitive scale and fragility (data centers can't repair themselves and self-replicate).

Going to be interesting to see it all unfold... my bet is on stacking S-curves all the way.
by nullc | 2025-09-03 22:26:30+00:00
I don't know why anyone wouldn't assume that any VPN service is run by an intelligence service, potentially one hostile to you, or organized crime.

Consider-- people bring their traffic to you to monitor, and particularly people who are trying to conceal their identity or activities. They pay you for this, which means that if you get collateral benefit you can run at a small loss and undercut any legitimate players (if there are any!) or run levels of advertising that a legitimate business couldn't sustain. -- while its simultaneously one of the most cost effective surveillance plays you could imagine, since it's still primarily funded by the victims.

VPN services also have good deniability for their surveillance. Although (maybe!) your ISP can't surveil the VPNed traffic the VPN provider's ISP can as well as your counterparties ISP (and any other parties brought into the mix by things like third party content). And like any other electronic surveillance, parallel construction can be highly effective.

They can also be stood up by anyone, you can run any number of services. They don't require extremely extensive physical infrastructure, investment, large numbers of employees like running an ISP. You can even target particular actors or populations by using targeted advertising, though it's still most effective as a data hoovering operation.

Particularly for the intelligence actors they also have the benefit that issues like getting harassed by the state are among the complications of this business, but that is potentially less of an issue if you are the state.

And if there were an actually honest provider, they'd be a prime target for infiltration... all that interesting traffic in one place.
by mcny | 2025-09-03 22:26:38+00:00
> Too often people pull huge libraries for 50 lines of code.

I used to be one of those people. It just made sense to me when I was (I still am to some extent) more naïve than I am today. But then I also used to think "it makes sense for everyone to eat together at a community kitchen of some sort instead of cooking at home because it saves everyone time and money" but that's another tangent for another day. The reason I bring it up is I used to think if it is shared functionality and it is a small enough domain, there is no need for everyone to spend time to implement the same idea a hundred times. It will save time and effort if we pool it together into one repository of a small library.

Except reality is never that simple. Just like that community kitchen, if everyone decided to eat the same nutritious meal together, we would definitely save time and money but people don't like living in what is basically an open air prison.