skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tell HN: Sometimes it just takes a long time
On Friday I woke up realizing that I could not take the weekend off as I’d planned, even though I’d already worked over the previous weekend, because I had to turn on the CUDA flag on our new inference service. Otherwise, we’d be wasting GPUs over the weekend, and wouldn’t be ready for an important meeting next week.

It took me all Friday and all of today, literally until midnight, but I was finally able to run the inference with CUDA enabled.

I don’t feel like it could have gone much faster. Even having learned from a few mistakes (This PyTorch is only compatible with THAT version of CUDA), I think it still would have taken one and a half days to do.

To “turn on CUDA”.

A big part of learning to be effective in tech is to learn to navigate overly complicated processes using various heuristics (this feels like it’s taking too long, I’m going to backtrack).

Don’t beat yourself up. Move slower and more methodically. Draw a map and ask yourself where in the process you think you are exactly and what the obstacle is, and write those down. Take extensive notes, especially on paper, as you try to understand things. As you systematize your understanding, distill it into checklists and scripts.

And stretch. And stretch. And hydrate. And hydrate.
> Kids already do not want to be in school

Where I grew up, kids were required to attend school until they were 16, but free schooling was available until high school graduation, so nominally about 18.

The number of 17 year olds who voluntarily went to school tells me that a lot of kids want to be in school.

> why isn't this being used to improve educational outcomes in general?

There is overwhelming evidence that environmental lead worsens educational outcomes in general.

That's one of the reasons we have greatly reduced using lead.

Just because the data against lead is overwhelming doesn't mean we suddenly know everything about how to improve learning.

> I think this ban is also going to be ineffective.

We know that such bans elsewhere can be effective.

We know that teens smoke at school too, even though smoking has long since been banned at school, with punishment which includes suspension.

Should we get rid of smoking bans then?
I can't refute that. while I arguably (by my family line's standard) came into "life changing money" I also did have a bunch of upbringing from family, education, and second hand experience to take steps to avoid that. But I agree that words are cheap, and 6 to 7 figures is yet another magnitude of life changing.

On a similar note, I do understand the peer pressure that comes with being on a team like that. "tradition" where you buy your entire team dinner for a night on the order of high 5 figures as a start. I can start to sympathize with how that spirals when the environment itself pressures you. More reason to make a financial planning class mandatory in school. Won't save everyone, but it'll at least bring awareness.
Where do you live that you don't follow laws (, rules, and norms), and so isn't 'totalitarian'?
Must be great.
> The first iPhone was so bad that “the Google phone”

It was prototype though. A lot of people could see the potential but the device itself was pretty bad.
I have the opposite impression looking around at the current situation. The tech giants moved fast and broke things and they broke humanity.
by "secure it" they mean "charge you"
Not common but I'm with you. People get offended when you don't want to stuff your face around them and I deplore it.

I eat because I have to, not because I want to. My version of Ozempic was giving myself a complex.
That is explicitly irrelevant:

> That meant, hopefully, that they’d be judged solely on how many organs they recovered and transplanted into people

It would seem like extraction with the sole purpose of research is out of scope for organ donors.

Ie. The author did justice in only referring to research that includes transplantation.
> Musk stuck to what he's good at

Right. And that is?
Given American anti tax sentiment, it isn’t surprising.

Plus there is a concerted effort to maintain the narrative that the government should be starved, because the government is the most wasteful body that can be.

Being rich isn’t just some sort of statistical metric - it’s also a clear cut option to have your principles and desires accommodated.

It’s not hard to believe.

To determine whether its 60-40 (tax avoidance - convenience optimization) would seem to be the question to pursue.
To be honest with the current polarisation levels in politics it's no longer possible to be neutral. The conservative side is now even strongarming companies into abandoning their diversity programs! This is just really not ok, I'm part of the LGBTIQ+ support network in our company and this kind of thing is really making waves. People are worried, even though we're a Europe based company where this is not a contested topic (though we do have many offices in the US). See what happened to Ford, Jack Daniels, Harley Davidson, and many others. Decades of progress are being thrown out the window.

Many US companies are now feeling forced to choose a side. At least I now know which to boycott..
...using a vpn to access twitter.
Most PS2 games used the PS1 hardware for audio/sfx so you freed the main CPU for rendering/gameplay.

I believe Gran Tourismo 3 used the ps1 hardware for everything except rendering, which was the kind of nuts thing you could do if your games were single platform and with huge budget.
I said googolplex facts can be "derived". I didn't say they're stored. Also a single perceptron can answer an infinite number of questions. Here's how...

For example the knowledge of how to answer the linear equation "Y=mX+b" contains an infinite number of "facts". For any X prompt, you put in, you can get out a "fact" Y. That's a question and an answer. This is actually a perfect analogy too, because all Perceptrons are really doing is this exact linear math (aside from things like a tanh activation functions, etc).
Real-Time Datamoshing in Unreal [video]
Weirdly Hybrids have now become a climate denial fave.

In any thread about EVs there is a typical HN commenter desperate to tell you that they drive a hybrid, not an EV like those silly virtue signalers.

For those who remember the vicious attacks on the Prius it's a wild shift in attitude.
I have a problem with someone imposing their political opinions on others by buying the means of publishing and communication. You don’t?
The problem with speed limits in general is that they're not universally applicable. Darkness, fog, rain, snow, etc. can all change what the actual safe maximum speed is. So even with a posted 55mph speed limit, the maximum safe speed at a particular time might be lower (even considerably lower), and a LEO could cite you for going too fast even if you're driving under the posted limit. (I've been on the interstate in the snow where you'd be likely to get pulled over if you were going much over 25mph, even with a posted 65mph limit.)

Driver skill and reaction time also plays a factor, but of course people are not so great at judging what their own specific safe speed is all the time. And all other things being equal, you're more likely to get into a crash if you're driving faster rather than slower, and the injuries you sustain will be worse at a higher speed.

IIRC speed limits are often set at some percentile (85th?) of what all drivers would (theoretically) "naturally" drive if there was no posted limit. And, on highways, cops will often not pull people over for exceeding the speed limit by a moderate amount. Once, long ago, a cop told me that, absent adverse conditions or other unsafe behavior, he usually will not stop anyone unless they're going more than 10mph over the highway speed limit. And I expect if he were hiding in a speed trap that no one could actually see driving by, and everyone was going 70mph on your 55mph road, he'd probably just sit there and not bother anyone, unless they were doing something else that was unsafe.

I guess this is a long winded way to say that there really is no single safe speed that applies to everyone, in every road condition. The law acknowledges this, and police often let you do your thing unless they believe you're actually doing something unsafe. The discretion and judgment calls can be a problem (biases, etc.), but I don't think a society where unavoidably "fuzzy" laws were always prosecuted would be a great society either.
The phone form factor is yelling something at us and UX designers just can’t hear it.

Hint: We don’t spend our days scrolling horizontally
wttr is my favourite

for me this is the most accurate for my local weather.

loads of settings though I just set up a simple alias

alias weather='curl wttr.in/London=?3M'

or not for a simple day weather output

curl wttr.in/London?format="Weather:+%C,+%t,+%h,+%w,+%W+%P\nTimezone:+%Z\nTime:+%T+|+Dawn:+%D+++|+Sunrise:+%S\nZenith:++%z+++|+Sunset:+%s+|+Dusk:+%d\nLocation:+London,+England\n"
He has an entire chemical lab to himself and only puts out a video every few months. Add to that his own salary and all the other overhead of running a channel, and you quickly realize that the per-video cost is already very high regardless of video specific expenses.

This piece of equipment still seems like a better investment than the ~4.5oz of gold he bought to make golden grills, which would be about 11k at todays rates.
If it were up to me there'd be a way to completely disable it globally for all models. Let me explicitly enable it when I'm just shelling around or checking results in unit tests. It is not a feature for production environments.
In democracies, the minority who own the bulk of wealth are lobbying to ensure they avoid paying taxes. That’s not cool.

Firstly - many developed countries have higher tax rates than America.

Secondly - the issue isn’t being rich. The issue is that tax avoidance for so many years has resulted in absurd levels of wealth capture.

Thirdly - no polity level discussion can happen effectively, because that wealth ensures productive discussion is mired in controversy by the time it reaches the voting public.
Is this an Electron app? I wonder why it can't be just a browser extension instead?
Would you be willing to elaborate a bit on that? So my understanding here is that they are using monad algebras to model the kinds of constraints you might care about (symmetry invariance/translation invariance/etc), and then by instantiating these generic monads over the category of vector spaces and fiddling through the diagrams, you recover the usual constraints on the weights in your neural net. I don't think it's supposed to work around the fact that you have to do a lot of hard math in that step, but it gives you a blueprint for doing it that generalises symmetry constraints. So you could come up with some interesting idea for a NN layer/block and use this schematic to direct your derivation of the corresponding constraints on your neural net, I guess?

So it seems valuable to me in that respect, especially if they can achieve what they want (logical inference-rule-invariant NN blocks, PL semantics invariant stuff, etc).

Anyway, I'm interested in your perspective/objections! (if it's technical that's fine too, I have a lot of maths background)
Scientific journalism, Julian Assange, and a world without leaks
What annoys me is that they are unbounded. You can always add more. A script has a finite set of symbols and its relatively rare that its extended with a new symbol. It's just a job retention measure for the Unicode consortium.
It's fine if you run it at a cloud provider. Setting up a k8s cluster yourself is painful though and at a cloud provider it costs far more than using just bare metal and/or docker (we do not, as it's another thing to manage and very boring). We have auto deploy scripts in Perl since the 90s and never had any needs for any of this stuff; we now host for less than $100/mo, with millions of users and a lot of profit with very little maintenance. I wonder why IT people like burning money so much, especially here on HN.

There is no need for almost any sites; sure facebook/google, but you are not running those nor is it likely you (not specifically you obviously, me neither) ever will. VPSs are robust these days and have no downtime besides kernel updates. I cannot phantom why you would want to burn humans or money on this kind of complexity. But then again, we like profit (not growth because of growth) and it seems that most here really are not that interested in that. If I cannot be Gates or Musk (and I cannot, nor can you, again, no attack on you; just statistics) then I rather have little work or headache with millions $ of profit/mo coming in instead of 'growth'. Maybe i'm odd, but I am free for the past 30+ years because of these choices (currently; common lisp, apache, perl, php, mysql, haproxy, redis, wireguard; hopefully I get this down to just common lisp + wireguard before I pass). We don't use libraries or tech less than 10 years old unless it's really needed and we contribute to everything we use (so we use very few things otherwise we have to hire and that's a waste of $); I sleep very well at night knowing nothing is going to happen.
Something tells me at the least bsky will not begin a name calling primary school attack with a supreme court justice of a sovereign nation while using abusive names for the president of that country all the while using childish fake AI generated graphics.

PS. Somehow all of this feels very natural when done by Musk. It kind of makes sense. It feels like “yes yes, he’d do this”.
Wait if this is what OP is referring to I am even more confused because the last time I built a custom GPT it was horribly slow and very inaccurate to look up uploaded information

also you certainly couldn't upload gigabytes of your own PDFs. Did anything change??
Just to say there are libraries to help you find n+1 queries too (when your code is running).

I use https://pypi.org/project/django-nplusone/ for instance. Sentry also warns of these by the way.
Yeah so much for supporting your children in their chosen life path :'(

Imagine having to completely break contact with your own father because he hates who you are so much :'(

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-61880709
> 2) Evolution is a biological process term, and an overloaded and ambiguous one at that. Culture is accretive and driven by social dynamics. “Cultural evolution” is literally nonsensical. This was, however, a popular way of thinking in the nineteenth century; make of that what you will.

Calling things racist isn't a valid argument. Meme theory is from the 20th century, not the 19th.
It depends on the complexity of what you're building, how clearly you can define it and how much you need to experiment and iterate.
At least in The Guardian's story...both The Patriarchy, and Hollywood Cultural Imperialism, seem too loom far larger than the history & symbolism & advantages of Sweden's own traditions

But closing para...

> The debate comes despite the number of weddings falling in Sweden. Last year, 44,190 couples got married. In 2012, the figure was 56,240.

...which makes the whole thing sound a bit like a deck chair argument on the Titanic.
Occasional well-thought-out, ambitious, and positive talking points combined with a whole lot of keeping his mouth shut seemed to work pretty well for him.
By the way, the Samsung gallery has a nice video editor with a timeline built in.
It's not that easy to do it well =) I'm interested in your objections if you would be willing to elaborate.
I used to think this too. LLms make generating such UIs in other frameworks too much easier. Also the admin UI gets clumsy very fast and you’ll need to roll your own for a good UX.
The divide goes back even further than the USSR.

The enlightenment era gave us two separate definitions of freedom. At its foundation, the US govt is granted whatever rights it has to constrain freedom by wholly autonomous and free individuals, and in the other (French, continental) conception freedom is both defined and granted by the state. Authoritarianism is baked into the definition.

It will take future historians living in more intellectually permissive times to give a full account as to why the first concept of freedom only ever took root in the US and why the majority of countries have adopted the second.
I would say even more:

- the main reason to use django today is the admin UI

- and the only reason to use django ORM is the admin UI
Workspaces in IntelliJ IDEA
On the contrary, I saved you that extra step of looking for Sebastian Raschka's repository of writings.
There's a difference between reading the news and chatting with an AI - evident because of the verbs.

While news are one-sided and usually have no immediate ways of discussing them (besides maybe Reddit and HN). Chatbots on the other hand are a correspondence, which makes them more like a discussion or interview... they seem more approachable (human?)

Platforms like c.ai push this to the extreme. While AI relationships seem dystopian right now, I fear they are already creeping up on us - forming beliefs even stronger than news can.

... Google and Microsoft are big in AI, so it's not even a change in "leadership" anyway.
It's wonderful seeing this three days later after Guido himself has come in to say that this was nothing nefarious and more of an automation mishap. Yet here stands dozens of comments from people crying about how code of conduct is ruining the world and the PSF and SC should be dismantled.

As is often the case, there is usually more to the story and we would be better off learning what really happened instead of immediately jumping to conclusions and then blaming people based on those conclusions. Otherwise we look rather silly when it ends up that it was all just a mistake and we risk ruining a good thing by our rash judgements.
No. That’s the point of tailwind. You can include things like hover states. Inline css hits a roadblock there and you’re forced to go out to a style tag. Then you have to start naming things. Then you risk conflicts.

That’s the problem tailwind solves.
Founder Mode
Please note - this is a more modern belief. Something that solidified in the zeitgeist post 2008.

If you go to early Reddit, you will see it a staunchly pro market, anti tax stronghold - as was HN.

For eons, “competition” was the mantra along with “greed is good”. Many people who own wealth reached there with that ethos.

No one has to “contribute more”. That’s the opportunity for whichever bright eye person decides to take advantage of the gap in the market.

If you want a counter to this dogma -

1) Yes. Market inefficiencies should be open as opportunities to the industrious

2) No. Not all market inefficiencies are the same. for example, Public goods (police, military) are not better off with multiple companies. Insurance is similar.

3) Lobbying for convenient rules, lobbying for weakened regulators has given far more advantage to firms, which then use that wealth to become rent seekers. They dont need to innovate, because they can litigate.

4) “more regulation means higher compliance costs” was a new one I saw. Guess what - if your firm uses contracts, that’s a compliance cost. Why not just do it by a hand shake? Save your lawyer fees.

Compliance costs ensure fair play between entities of unequal strength. You can trade on your competitive advantage, not on the tertiary strengths, such as a firms ability to pay for a better legal team.

Edit: Soap box - This is about Personal Responsibility.

The place where most people agree today, is the desire for a fair fight.

How can I reasonably defend the idea of personal responsibility, in something like the sale of NINJA loans.

If firms field trained, resourced, networked sales people to sell loans to people who have a negligible chance of even understanding what they are getting into, then how do I reasonably bring up personal responsibility ?

Can people reasonably be expected to read all the contracts they have signed? ( Netflix, Uber, gmail, phone, etc.)

Algorithmic ads are fine tuned to grab your attention and keep you online. There is more money spent on UI UX research than the GDP of some global south countries.

Forget America for a second - imagine how regulators in smaller economies handle these things. Heck, that’s if they even have time to worry about these things.
Well it certainly is convenient that a "private wealth attorney at an international law firm" decided to go on Reddit and talk about tax policy a short time after there is a proposal to tax unrealized capital gains.

There are many web sites that claim this is rampant and from what I can tell the idea of “buy, borrow, die” was developed by Professor Edward McCaffery back in the 1990s, but are there any actual reliable stats on how many lifetime low interest loans are being given out? How would such a lender stay in business? Lenders with that kind of capital can't find something more profitable than letting someone have hundreds of millions of dollars of money for decades and maybe hopefully the stock market isn't in a bear market at that time and they can get their money + .5% interest and some of the capital appreciation? It is very common to make short terms based on using stocks, etc as collateral. But how common is it to have a lender be ok with deferring interest for decades until the person dies? Not saying there aren't stupid lenders, but doing a quick search, I have not found one stat on how many lifetime loans like this are actually being done.

There is a treasury department page claiming that about 160 billion dollars in unrealized gains are not being taxed, but that isn't talking about stock being used as collateral, that is talking about simply the value of assets increasing - that is entirely different.

According to this: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jeff-bezos-sell-5-billion-185... Bezos has sold around $13.4 billion in stock in 2024. If he could easily avoid millions (maybe billions) of dollars of capital gains tax by this one simple trick, why wouldn't he have?
I've spotted this on several large events on setup day, explained how fucked they'll be in a few days and showed them a safe QR code generator. Usually it was just signage and they could reprint the QR code and glue it over the bad one, but one of them had printed hundreds of leaflets with the event schedule and I think they just ended up paying because even a year of "QR ransom" was cheaper than overnight printing and shipping.

My other favourite QR-code related fuckup is designers trimming the quet zone to just 1 module "because the white border looks ugly" and not checking if the codes are scannable. That and light-on-dark codes, which according to the standard don't exist, but most scanner apps can handle them these days thanks to endless complaining by designers.
A supreme court judge clearly acting against the laws of their state, but somehow Musk is the bad guy.
Imagine YouTube didn’t exist, but rather 100 different videos sites. When trying to watch a video, it plays the first 15 seconds, then throws up a paywall, asking for a monthly subscription. The quality of the video is unknown, the videos the site hosts aren’t ones you’d want to come back to every day, and since there are so many sites, paying for all of them isn’t feasible.

This is the state of online news today. Subscriptions really only make sense for regular readers. I’m not sure how one decides to become a regular reader of a site when there is a paywall preventing them from sampling the goods.

If I could use something like ApplePay, with no sign up, no providing an email, or any of that nonsense to pay 10-25¢ to read an article, with little to no friction, I think I’d be more likely to do that for the occasional article. Without a widespread system like that, the public isn’t left with many options other than work around. It has to be cheap enough, and easy enough, that the work around aren’t really worth it.
People so strongly wish that AI exists that they will believe anything. Pretty sad from a sociological and, much later, historical point of view.