MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jasomill | 2026-03-03 23:12:32+00:00
Starting with POWER8, the Linux kernel and some of the BSDs support 64-bit PowerPC in both big- and little-endian modes. Older PowerPC chips had more limited support for little-endian, and all the commercial desktop/server PowerPC OSes that come immediately to mind (classic Mac OS, Mac OS X, NEXTSTEP / OpenStep, OS/400 / IBM i, AIX, BeOS) are big-endian only.

As you'd expect, Linux distribution support for big- and little-endian varies.
by tombert | 2026-03-03 23:12:45+00:00
The backlash is "painful"? Maybe don't make a moralizing tweet about your principles only to change them three hours later. It comes off as opportunistic grifting.

I don't blame the OpenAI staff (and as far as I am aware most people don't). Most of us end up working for assholes if you go far enough up the chain, but it's different when the CEO tries to earn social credit by having his principles, only to seize on an opportunity and just ignore those principles. He can say "oh well they pinky swore they wouldn't abuse this or redefine laws to say what they're doing is 'lawful'", but I personally would have trouble trusting the words of a convicted fraudster lolcow that we decided to elect as president and an alcoholic Fox News host. I guess that makes me a "radical leftist" though, I'm sure that the 10000 IQ people always trust convicted criminals.

I'm sure Sam Altman will make his money, and I'm sure that OpenAI will continue to take over the world like before, but I don't have to fund it myself, hence why I canceled my ChatGPT Plus and signed up for Claude. I'm sure that the CEO for that company will be a douche eventually too, but at least as of right now he seems to have a shrapnel of integrity.

I can't read most of the article because most of the common archiving sites don't appear to work.
by easygenes | 2026-03-03 23:13:00+00:00
At scale, teams don’t win by owning more FLOPs; they win by shrinking the distance between hypothesis and measurement. I learned that the expensive way: running large training pipelines where iteration speed was the difference between “we think this works” and “we know” - building some of the most capable open-weights models available while leading the OpenOrca team in 2023. So I took Karpathy’s microgpt - a Transformer small enough to hold in your head - and made it fast enough that you can also throw it around and learn its behavior by feel: change a learning rate, flip a batch size, tweak a layout, rerun, and immediately see what moved; full sweeps at interactive speed.

In this toy regime, performance is set by granularity. When the work is a pile of tiny matrix multiplies and elementwise kernels, overhead and launch/scheduling costs can dominate peak throughput. Laptop CPUs can be faster than Blackwell GPUs. That’s a regime inversion: the “faster” machine can lose because it spends too much time on ceremony per step, while a simpler execution path spends a higher fraction of wall time doing useful math. In that corner of the world, a laptop CPU can beat a datacenter GPU for this workload - not because it’s a better chip, but because it’s spending less time dispatching and more time learning. That inversion reshapes the early-time Pareto frontier, loss versus wall-clock, where you’re trading model capacity against steps-per-second under a fixed time budget.

Early-time is where most iteration happens. It’s where you decide whether an idea is promising, where you map stability boundaries, where you learn which knobs matter and which are placebo. If you can push the frontier down and left in the first few seconds, you don’t just finish runs faster.. you change what you can notice. You turn “training” into feedback.

Inside, I take you on a tour of the AI engine room: how scalar autograd explodes into tens of thousands of tiny ops, how rewriting it as a handful of tight loops collapses overhead, how caches and SIMD lanes dictate what “fast” even means, why skipping useless work beats clever math, and how ISA-specific accelerators like Neon/SME2 shift the cost model again. The result is a ~19,000× speedup on a toy problem - not as a parlor trick, but as a microcosm of the same compounding process that drives real progress: better execution buys more experiments, more experiments buy better understanding, and better understanding buys better execution.
by h4ch1 | 2026-03-03 23:13:05+00:00
I've been evaluating truly native x-platform GUI frameworks for a while and GPUI[0] from the zed team along with longbridge/gpui-component[1] looks the most promising.

Though I haven't tested it too much other than building small personal tools like a work habit tracker, it's very well documented and looks great. Gave me a good excuse to try the language again as well.

[0]: https://www.gpui.rs/

[1]: https://longbridge.github.io/gpui-component/
by anonymous_sorry | 2026-03-03 23:13:06+00:00
Have you ever had a chatbot solve your problem? I don't think this has ever happened to me.

As a reasonably technical user capable of using search, the only way this could really happen is if there was no web/app interface for something I wanted to do, but there was a chatbot/AI interface for it.

Perhaps companies will decide to go chatbot-first for these things, and perhaps customers will prefer that. But I doubt it to be honest - do people really want to use a fuzzy-logic CLI instead of a graphical interface? If not, why won't companies just get AI to implement the functionality in their other UIs?
by Eridrus | 2026-03-03 23:13:34+00:00
I disagree with on-prem being ideal for GPU for most people.

If you're doing regular inference for a product with very flat throughput requirements (and you're doing on-prem already), on-prem GPUs can make a lot of sense.

But if you're doing a lot of training, you have very bursty requirements. And the H100s are specifically for training.

If you can have your H100 fleet <38% utilized across time, you're losing money.

If you have batch throughput you can run on the H100s when you're not training, you're probably closer to being able to wanting on-prem.

But the other thing to keep in mind is that AWS is not the only provider. It is a particularly expensive provider, and you can buy capacity from other neoclouds if you are cost-sensitive.
by SaberTail | 2026-03-03 23:13:38+00:00
The "figure out what you want to say" is key. I've started to think of LLMs, at least in a business setting, as misunderstanding amplifiers.

How many times at work have you been talking to someone else where they're using common words as jargon? Maybe it's something like "the online system" or "the platform". And it's perfectly clear to them what they mean, but everyone else in the company either doesn't know what that actually is, or they have a distorted idea based on the conventional definitions of the words. Even without LLMs in the mix, this can lead to people coming out of meetings with completely different understandings of what's going on.

My experience is few people are actually providing the relevant context to the LLM to explain what they mean in situations like this. Or they don't have the actual knowledge and are using the LLM in the hopes it'll fill in for their ignorance. The LLMs are RLHFed to sound confident, so they won't convey that they don't know what a piece of jargon means. Instead they'll use a combination of the common meaning and the rest of the context to invent something. When this gets copy/pasted and sent around, it causes everyone who isn't familiar to get the wrong idea. Hence "misunderstanding amplifier".

To the point of the article, this is soluble if people take the time to actually figure out what they are trying to convey. But if they did that, they wouldn't need the LLM in the first place.
by PunchyHamster | 2026-03-03 23:14:05+00:00
> The main cost with on-prem is not the price of the gear but the price of acquiring talent to manage the gear. Most companies simply don't have the skillset internally to properly manage these servers, or even the internal talent to know whether they are hiring a good infrastructure engineer or not during the interview process.

That's partially true; managing cloud also takes skill, most people forget that with end result being "well we saved on hiring sysadmins, but had to have more devops guys". Hell I manage mostly physical infrastructure (few racks, few hundred VMs) and good 80% of my work is completely unrelated to that, it's just the devops gluing stuff together and helping developers to set their stuff up, which isn't all that different than it would be in cloud.

> And remember, you want 24/7 monitoring, replication for disaster recovery, etc.

And remember, you need that for cloud too. Plenty of cloud disaster stories to see where they copy pasted some tutorial thinking that's enough then surprise.

There is also partial way of just getting some dedicated servers from say OVH and run infra on that, you cut out a bit of the hardware management from skillset and you don't have the CAPEX to deal with.

But yes, if it is less than at least a rack, it's probably not worth looking for onprem unless you have really specific use case that is much cheaper there (I mean less than usual half)
by graypegg | 2026-03-03 23:14:57+00:00
I would agree with you given we were talking about MacOS or Windows. Who knows, that may come later. If this was a more consumer-focused niche linux distro like SteamOS, I would also be concerned for the same reason.

But this is a general purpose desktop linux distro. A common, beginners-choice option, but still an option placing the user in a pretty rare breed. This isn't to game cheaply on a Steam Deck they bought, this is a choice to either build a PC ignoring the buy prompts for "Remember the windows license!", or choosing to overwrite the preinstalled OS on your laptop/PC.

The venn diagram of anus-scan-accepters and regular ubuntu users is simply two distant circles.
by WD-42 | 2026-03-03 23:15:34+00:00
No. It doesn’t matter how good an llm model is. If a person has something to say and they can give the llm enough context to say it well, they should just write it themselves. Theres 0 reason to bring a llm into it. Doing so simply makes your writing less trustworthy because as a reader I don’t know if what I’m reading is genuine from the writer or simply average of all texts filler.
by aprentic | 2026-03-03 23:16:35+00:00
People want to spend as little as possible while getting support for their product as long as possible.

Companies want people to spend as much as possible while doing the minimum work on the product.

Chatbots let companies spend almost nothing while pretending to provide long-term support.

I wonder if something similar to a copyleft license could help. What if there was a contractual "fair business" pledge that companies could add? I imagine that good enough lawyers could craft something that essentially said, "You can only display this contract if you legally guarantee that you do X, Y, Z and do not do A, B C."
by gruez | 2026-03-03 23:17:04+00:00
>You may distribute the software or any part of its source code only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes.

Semantic arguments over what "FOSS" means aside, for most people, calling it "not FOSS" probably makes them more confused than if you just said "it's FOSS", even if the latter might not be technically correct.
by jamiesonbecker | 2026-03-03 23:17:34+00:00
Classic OpenSSH safety check: if /home/$user (or ~/.ssh) is too open, or ownership/modes are off, sshd will refuse pubkey auth. Annoying, but correct.

If you still have some access (console, password login, another sudo user), this usually fixes it:

username=bob
sudo chown "$username:$username" /home/$username
sudo chmod 700 /home/$username

sudo install -d -m 700 -o "$username" -g "$username" /home/$username/.ssh
echo "ssh-ed25519 AAAA....insertyourpubkeyhere" | sudo tee /home/$username/.ssh/authorized_keys >/dev/null
sudo chown "$username:$username" /home/$username/.ssh/authorized_keys
sudo chmod 600 /home/$username/.ssh/authorized_keys

(optional, if the user needs sudo)

echo "$username ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL" | sudo tee /etc/sudoers.d/$username >/dev/null
sudo chmod 440 /etc/sudoers.d/$username

Not to shill too hard, but this exact "keys/perms/sudo drift" failure mode is why Userify exists (est. 2011): local accounts on every box + a tiny outbound-only agent that polls and overwrites desired state (keys, perms, sudo role). If scp/rsync/deploy steps clobber stuff, the next poll re-converges it (cloud default ~90s; self-host default ~10s; configurable). Removing a user also kills their sessions. No inbound ports to nodes, no PAM/NSS hooks, auditable.

Shim (old but readable): https://github.com/userify/shim/blob/master/shim.py#L308
(obligatory): https://userify.com
by fc417fc802 | 2026-03-03 23:17:51+00:00
Wrong level of abstraction. NUMA is an additional layer. If the program (script, whatever) was written with a monolithic CPU in mind then the big picture logic won't account for the new details. The kernel can't magically add information it doesn't have (although it does try its best).

Given current trends I think we're eventually going to be forced to adopt new programming paradigms. At some point it will probably make sense to treat on-die HBM distinctly from local RAM and that's in addition to the increasing number of NUMA nodes.
by tzs | 2026-03-03 23:18:00+00:00
>> "The Pledge America Campaign enables broadcasters to lend their voices in support of Task Force 250 and the celebration of America’s 250th birthday by airing patriotic, pro-America content that celebrates the American journey and inspires its citizens by highlighting the historic accomplishments of this great nation from our founding through the Trump Administration today."

> Even ignoring the context (Trump censoring things, limiting private institutions speech, murdering people because their state's governor said mean things, etc, etc), the text of the page you link to clearly says broadcasters will need to air pro-Trump programming

Where does it say that? The part you quoted is using "Trump Administration today" as an interval endpoint, not a specifier of content.
by ericd | 2026-03-03 23:18:01+00:00
Actually, I have, Amazon has an excellent one. I had a few exchanges with it, and it initiated a refund for me, it was much quicker than a normal customer service call.

Outside of customer service, I'm working on a website that has a huge amount of complexity to it, and would require a much larger interface than normal people would have patience for. So instead, those complex facets are exposed to an LLM as tools it can call, as appropriate based on a discussion with the user, and it can discuss the options with the user to help solve the UI discoverability problem.

I don't know yet if it's a good idea, but it does potentially solve one of the big issues with complex products - they can provide a simple interface to extreme complexity without overwhelming the user with an incredibly complex interface and demanding that they spend the time to learn it. Normally, designers handled this instead by just dumbing down every consumer facing product, and I'd love to see how users respond to this other setup.
by throwaw12 | 2026-03-03 23:18:15+00:00
you are just describing the shades of grey, even if one looks brighter, doesn't change the fact that it is still grey, I think your take is too simplistic.

Human nature didn't change, it is still power hungry, small percentage of narcissistic people want to control the masses and exploit, give them a chance (I mean to current capitalists), you will become a slave.

Look at the Elon and what he did to X employees, some were sleeping in the office "proudly", who still got laid off anyways, look at the Bezos, who fought against forming unions. So you think those people are different then slave owners? deep inside they are same, power and capital hungry, ready to do anything to get more powerful (see any big tech corporate, blood bath of politics at the top to fight for staffing and stack ranking to show "impact")
by johnwalkr | 2026-03-03 23:18:35+00:00
If I had to guess, with so many devices (speakers, microphone, webcam) on top of any external ones you connect, having multiple inputs especially one that can't possibly connect your computer to those devices, is virtually guaranteeing that some users will complain that it doesn't work. I believe there is a similar reason why usb-c hubs rarely have downstream usb-c ports. When you do find one, they always have several reviews complaining that it doesn't work with 3 hard drives and 2 monitors plugged in.
by MoonWalk | 2026-03-03 23:19:38+00:00
If your Mac goes bad it can be worthwile. My friend gave me his pre-Retina 27" iMac, part of the circa-2008 generation of Macs whose GPUs all failed.

I removed all the computing hardware but kept the Apple power supply, instead of using the cheapo one that came with the LCD driver board I bought. I was able to find the PWM specs for the panel, and installed a cheap PWM module with its own frequency & duty-cycle display to drive it and control brightness.

The result is my daily desktop monitor. Spent way too much time on it, but it works great!
by esperent | 2026-03-03 23:19:44+00:00
The biggest issue for me has always been inherent US bias. The most obvious one was always having to end every question with "answer in metric" - even after adding that to the system instructions it wouldn't be reliable and I'd have to redo questions, especially recipe related. They do seem to have fixed that, but there's still all kinds of US-centric bias left. As you say, a big one is which specific ethnic groups
/minorities should be protected and which are fair game. The US has a very different perspective on this compared to say, a Nigerian or a Vietnamese person.
by jmyeet | 2026-03-03 23:20:42+00:00
I'm reminded of the Air Canada customer service chatbot. It completely made up a refund policy (and there are still people on HN who insist LLMs don't hallucinate) and a court ruled the company had to honor it [1].

The only way to deal with this is to make the implentation not worth it by constantly bypassing it to speak to a human and/or making it cost money by getting it to give you things you're not otherwise entitled to.

I really wonder how these things will handle prompt injection and similar things. I have no confidence any of this is secure.

Wait until this comes to healthcare and it'll be chatbots handling prior authorization calls, wasting even more physician time.

[1]: https://www.wired.com/story/air-canada-chatbot-refund-policy...
by II2II | 2026-03-03 23:20:48+00:00
> I just have not yet been convinced I should actually care.

I'm not out to convince you since my reasons are unlikely to apply to you. There are some of us who want privacy for privacy's sake. We respect the social boundaries of other people, and find those who don't respect our social boundaries creepy. We don't much care one way or the other if those people are out to exploit us or to harm us. It is the act itself that we consider violating.
by hintymad | 2026-03-03 23:20:52+00:00
> I cannot be alone in feeling that titles (within "tech" in particular) are almost completely arbitrary?

I remember that 10 years or so ago, an E5 in Google is considered a pretty prestigious position. In Amazon, L6 is such a high achievement that the entire India site had one L6 for more than 300 engineers. But somehow things started to change. Everyone expected herself to get promoted every couple of years. There was a joke in Amazon along the line of L8 is the new L7.

My guess is that two factors came to play. One is that Meta (and then the Facebook) started to promote people really fast, so other companies followed. Also managers gradually treated promotion as a tool to retain the people they need. Once that's the incentive, a long title ladder becomes a natural choice.
by ddesposito | 2026-03-03 23:21:06+00:00
Hi, Jaen, thanks for the feedback. Whether they are independent or high entropy, its too soon to say, its a new framework I conceived and I am not a psychometrist, I would need to get to 500 or 1000 to see the recurrence of archetype clusters. I see your point however, some of the concepts may overlap, I am going to bring it down to 8 trait pairs / dimensions. Hogan has 7 dimensions seems. In your experience, how many archetypes exist in the human population? with 4 trait pairs, thats only 16, with 12, thats above 3000. Must be somewhere in between.
by llsf | 2026-03-03 23:21:21+00:00
the "2% cash reward" and "miles" etc. is common here in US because our cards charge the merchants already a lot. So sure we all overpay everything in US because of the credit cards, but we get a small piece back.

Now, would it be nice to not overpay at the first place. Technically we could re-implement the whole thing (instant payout, fraud detection, etc.) like Brazil or India did. It would bring more than $100B back to the US consumers every year, that could be spent elsewhere.
by to11mtm | 2026-03-03 23:21:39+00:00
> OS/runtimes weren’t really designed with hundreds of cores and complex interconnect topologies in mind.

I mean....

IMO Erlang/Elixir is a not-terrible benchmark for how things should work in that state... Hell while not a runtime I'd argue Akka/Pekko on JVM Akka.Net on the .NET side would be able to do some good with it...[0] Similar for Go and channels (at least hypothetically...)

[0] - Of course, you can write good scaling code on JVM or CLR without these, but they at least give some decent guardrails for getting a good bit of the Erlang 'progress guaranteed' sauce.
by kbolino | 2026-03-03 23:22:16+00:00
The Apple monitor will likely have better speakers, and I'm not even sure the others will have microphones at all. Apple also does a better job with color accuracy/consistency, at least historically. There's still a sizeable markup, but it's not entirely for nothing.

Back in the day (~15 years ago), when 4K monitors were unheard of and even Apple's high-end displays were still 1440p, you could get a bottom-dollar monitor using one of their panels (e.g. Yamakasi Catleap Q270) for about a third of the price. However, it came with no amenities, a single connector (dual-link DVI only), a questionably legal power cable, and no built-in scaling. The vendors, presumably to prevent refunds, even asked for your graphics card model before selling it to you, because it wouldn't work with low-end cards. Oh, and there were very few in the U.S., so you were typically getting them shipped straight from abroad, customs duties and all.

We've definitely come a long way.
by pjdesno | 2026-03-03 23:22:16+00:00
If you're writing code professionally, then you're not in college anymore and your programs aren't simple things that run from the start of main() through to the end and then exit.

If you're providing a service that needs to keep running, you need a strategy for handling unexpected errors. It can be as simple as "fail the request" or "reboot the system", or more complicated. But you need to consider system requirements and the recovery strategy for meeting them when you're writing your code.

Long, long ago I worked with some engineers who thought it was just fine that our big piece of (prototype) telecom equipment took half an hour to boot because of poor choices on their part. Target availability for the device was 5 9s, which is 5 minutes of downtime per year. They didn't seem to realize the contradiction.