Hacker News Reader

3eb7988a1663on Running a 28.9M parameter LLM on an $8 microcontroller

Unless I am mis-reading the benchmarks, some of those are run as CPU only, no GPU involvement.

3eb7988a1663on The US is charging an American citizen for wiping his phone at the border

I expect this that the case is going to get dismissed on technical grounds without addressing the core issue. If you are not directly charged with the specific offense, what is the limit of "destroying evidence" as its own crime?

  - If I rob a bank and then burn all of my planning materials after the crime - did I destroy evidence?
  - If I rob a bank, the police question me but do not charge me with anything. I then burn all of the planning materials - did I destroy evidence?
  - If I rob a bank, the police have a warrant to search my house in relation to an unrelated insurance scam across the street. Then I burn all of my bank heist materials - did I destroy evidence?

When the police are "just having a chat" and you later destroy all of your papers which might have been linked to a crime - isn't that fully within my rights to destroy my property? When do I have an explicit requirement to maintain my effects so the state can use it against me?

If I have a dash-cam in my car and it records me speeding - am I not allowed to overwrite the old footage? What if that dash-cam footage is the only thing that proves a crime were committed? Now I am forced to let my possessions testify against me.

3eb7988a1663on Running a 28.9M parameter LLM on an $8 microcontroller

That's incredible. Sure, not practical for most applications, but if you really want a local top tier model, you can run it on anything as long as you are patient.

As someone with a healthy amount of RAM, but just a 16GB GPU, I am wondering what kind of work I could queue up for overnight runs. I thought the best models were fully out of reach, but the 128GB CPU only test had a 1.8 tokens/second. While not speedy, you could probably do something with that given extensive coffee breaks. This speed simulator[0] demos what it looks like.

[0] https://shir-man.com/tokens-per-second/?speed=1.8

3eb7988a1663on DeepSeek pause fundraise after comments on compute gap to US leaked (transcript) [pdf]

They can't get hardware because the US has put restrictions on how much can be sold to China. There is not a technical or know-how limitation, but political. Deepseek could otherwise write some checks to NVidia for what they want.

Thanks to the import restrictions, I expect Chinese GPU hardware to be competitive within a few years.

3eb7988a1663on Show HN: I simulated closing the Strait of Hormuz on real oil trade data

Not that the administration is trustworthy, but they recently announced that the structural floor is ~70M barrels. Which is significantly lower than other public estimates. Which strikes me as an attempt to ease the market that there is significantly more breathing room.

3eb7988a1663on Show HN: I simulated closing the Strait of Hormuz on real oil trade data

I have been hoping China would force this issue. Send an oil tanker through and see if the US has the balls to stop it. Either the US does and everyone gets peeved or the US lets it float away and look incredibly impotent.

3eb7988a1663on Taylor Farms Called White House to Try to Delay Cyclospora Recall

This is the most upsetting thing about everything that is happening. Like, sure I have plenty of criticisms about the FDA, but by and large, I thought the body was slowly working in the direction of the public good.

Once you destroy that trust, every single announcement becomes suspect. You no longer have anything you can believe.

3eb7988a1663on The Collapse at Netflix Signals the End of Audience Capture

I think it would only be fair to count S2 if it immediately followed S1. A big gap means I cannot recall details from the original.

Working down the list:

  - Night Agent: S1 2023-March, S2 2025-January => 2 years
  - One Piece: S1 2023-August, S2 2026-March => 3 years
  - Four Seasons: S1 2025-May, S2 2026-May => 1 year
  - Running Point: S1 2025-March, S2-2026-April => 1 year
  - Beef: S1 2023-April, S2 2026-April => 3 years

Some of those are enormous intermissions! It is no surprise you cannot maintain an audience when you leave them hanging for so long.

3eb7988a1663on The Collapse at Netflix Signals the End of Audience Capture

The multi-year gap kills my interest. After a huge hiatus, I have forgotten key plot points, so I have to either accept that some elements will not make sense or commit to re-consuming the original season. Both of which are deeply unappealing.

I keep meaning to watch Arcane season two, but the first one was so dense (not necessarily plot, but just so many little things) that I know I would be cheating myself to watch it after the sizeable gap. Yet rewatching S1 just to start S2 is such a time commitment.

3eb7988a1663on Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

Exactly the kind of breakdown I was hoping to see. Thanks.

3eb7988a1663on Startup founders urge U.S. government not to shut off Chinese open weight AI

If there were ever a sign I need to get mirroring, this is it.

What are the best Chinese models on HuggingFace today? Bucket by ideal RAM: <16GB, <32GB, <96, <256, 256+

Text generation, image generation, TTS, etc

3eb7988a1663on Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth

To advertise the maximum possible performance numbers, CPUs and GPUs massively shoot up the power draw for that final few percentage points. If you are worried about actual calculations/$, cutting back on the power will save your energy bill for practically no loss.

When I tested "ECO" mode on my AMD CPU, performance was ~97% of regular mode, and temperatures dropped 5-10C. I think ECO mode drops TDP from something like 100W->65W. Cheaper and cooler to run for basically no cost.

If you are bitcoin mining or selling GPU capacity, you are incredibly conscious of your energy bill, so it only makes sense to optimize the power draw.

3eb7988a1663on Hardcore IndieWeb: Run your own website 100% independently for only $0.01/day

I get your point, but I still remember that guy who got a $100k Netlify bill for his free plan.

3eb7988a1663on How GitHub gave every repository a durable owner

As to the "executive sponsor" -clearly this is going to result in more "god" repos which keep accumulating responsibilities because nobody can be arsed to go through the official approval channels.

Source: my workflow once they required various TPS forms to be completed before you were allowed to create a new repository.

3eb7988a1663on What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph

Up until a few years ago, SO published full dumps onto the Internet Archive. There has been a community effort which has picked up the torch and is continuing to do the same on a ~monthly cadence.

3eb7988a1663on Workspaces – Explore the workspaces of modern creators

This[0] is my personal favorite that was posted on a battlestations page. If it is staged, I think the author is pandering more to the Buffalo Bill demographic rather than tech nerds.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/h44Uzw0

3eb7988a1663on My midlife crisis Corolla is fast, furious, and modded

There is nothing like the rage I feel when a car/motorcycle is moving 5mph in heavy traffic doing nothing but revving the engine nonstop.

3eb7988a1663on I'm a USB-C Maximalist

I thought Nintendo had designed a non-compliant USBC port on the Switch. The conspiracy theory was this was deliberate to strangle the third party accessory market.

3eb7988a1663on I'm a USB-C Maximalist

Have you checked the port for lint? I have found those disposable flossing sticks are an excellently sized, non-conductive edge of plastic you can use to dig in there and remove the bits preventing the cable from getting a good connection.

3eb7988a1663on Lawsuit claims Meta's layoff decisions were made by AI, not humans

Here I was hoping that burn-baby-burn was a joke[0], but in fact, proper use was the only way to keep your job.

[0] https://github.com/dtnewman/burn-baby-burn

3eb7988a1663on Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid

We took a random subset of the football team who graduated and went pro. College is looking like a fantastic investment!

3eb7988a1663on Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid

The question at hand is about undergraduate. The student's pre-PhD education likely did have loans. If you go straight from bachelors + loans to a multi-year PhD program, the student appears completely destitute in the stats. Even if they are making long-term investments in their/societies future.

3eb7988a1663on Female US rower completes historic solo journey from California to Hawaii

Until that video, I was thinking, "Yeah, this would be a really cool thing to do." Then I heard that awful racket of the navigation system bringing constant misery to the entire experience.

Also, it was adorable seeing her stuffed animals. Whatever it takes to stay sane over six weeks.

3eb7988a1663on Under federal rule, colleges must leave grads better off or lose financial aid

Also unclear how it works for the PhD pipeline. If you roll straight from bachelor's to a doctorate program - you have abysmal earnings for the next 5-6 years of your life.

3eb7988a1663on Prefer strict tables in SQLite

'0' and '1', while not ideal, seems fine to maintain? There is not even a true SQLite boolean type.

Then again, I have been subjected to Oracle nonsense for too long and have had to accept all of the boolean alternatives: 0,1,'0','1',Y,N,y,n,YES,NO,T,F, etc

3eb7988a1663on Female US rower completes historic solo journey from California to Hawaii

That page was disappointingly sparse. I wanted pictures of the interior - what does it look like to sleep, how much space when it is fully packed with food, is there any accommodations for the bathroom, or do you just go over the edge, etc.

3eb7988a1663on Sodium-ion "salt" batteries will revolutionize electric-vehicle and grid storage

There is also no Buy button for a Tesla Megapack on a consumer website, yet they are still being deployed.

3eb7988a1663on Why Vancouver is always a stand-in for San Francisco in movies and TV shows (2021)

I noticed more than one scene where it was actually raining, but they digitally edited it out (as best they could on a TV budget). I always thought it was weird for a place with such perfect weather that they could not delay shooting by a day.

3eb7988a1663on Sodium-ion "salt" batteries will revolutionize electric-vehicle and grid storage

Lithium batteries will also produce HCN in a fire. I believe sodium batteries actually produce less than lithium, but I do not have a primary source handy.

3eb7988a1663on Sodium-ion "salt" batteries will revolutionize electric-vehicle and grid storage

https://peakenergy.com/

They might be a bit bigger than you want for home.