Hacker News Reader

NohatCoderon Bend – A language that blocks AI mistakes via proof, on CPU and GPU

This is the age old problem with proving correctness. You can (sometimes) prove that two programs have identical behaviour. One of the programs can be slightly simpler in that it is only concerned with what the correct result of a given operation is, not how to get there. But this doesn't fundamentally change that the complete specification is almost as complicated as the program itself.

NohatCoderon Fujitsu launches made-in-Japan next-generation CPU FUJITSU-MONAKA

Yeah, this very much gives the vibe that the original plan was to design a CPU, then suddenly AI AI AI happened, and they squeezed some matmul units into the design at the last minute in order to please the higher ups.

NohatCoderon Nvidia to acquire Hugging Face

As a normal investor it isn't, but once you get to double digit percentages and start getting real influence it is a different story.

NohatCoderon Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth

I suspect you are right, but it is getting really difficult to tell the difference between AI and someone who simply don't know what they are writing about.

NohatCoderon Most Americans say "not in my backyard" to AI data centers

The power density has been steadily increasing over the years, and then going from CPU to GPU makes it even bigger. This wouldn't be such a big issue if they actually took the time to build the infrastructure. But nobody has time, so it is gas turbines and evaporative cooling, and that makes a horrible neighbour.

NohatCoderon Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth

Nah, "selling shovels" is mostly a metaphor, the amount of iron that went into mining equipment was insignificant, beyond some local demand peaks. The majority of the business was consumables.

A key thing to understand about the gold rush is that it was not a major economic event, or at least nowhere near as big as the participants thought it would be, hence the tradegy.

The AI gold rush is different in that there actually is a mountain of "shovels" large enough to flood the global market quite severely.

NohatCoderon Most Americans say "not in my backyard" to AI data centers

I guess we can go the long way round. How often does the bakery use 12 million therms of natural gas?

NohatCoderon Most Americans say "not in my backyard" to AI data centers

You "suspect", but your suspicion comes with a unit of energy, which simply does not make sense in the context. The rest of us are talking about effect.

NohatCoderon Most Americans say "not in my backyard" to AI data centers

First thing missing from this "article" is a number indicating how many people don't want AI datacentres anywhere. You can't claim that someone is a NIMBY if their stance is that the damned thing shouldn't be built anywhere.

NohatCoderon Jelly UI: Soft-body physics for native HTML form controls

I would say that this is a joke, someone made a wobbly UI, isn't that funny. But I get a bit worried when trying to gauge much work went into this that is not required for the joke. It looks like the author actually expect people to pick up this thing and use it, and that is kind of scary.

NohatCoderon Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now

Yeah, one needs to understand that "unsafe" does not mark which parts of the code are actually unsafe, it simply marks parts where the compiler ignores parts of its rule set. But the implications can crop up anywhere, there is no guarantee that a resulting use-after-free or similar can only happen inside the unsafe blocks.

In short, if you use an unsafe block, then potentially any part of your code is unsafe.

NohatCoderon Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests

There is no such thing as a complete test suite, there will always be some possible bug that it doesn't catch.

In particular, if you put an LLM in an automated loop of "this test fails, please fix it", there is a pretty good chance that it will simply special case all of the tests, possibly in some contrived way that makes it not at all obvious when you read the code.

NohatCoderon Ask HN: Im a back end dev, how do you go from designing the UI with AI?

If usage of the basics become "bloat" and "a nightmare to maintain", then you haven't learned how to use them.

NohatCoderon Ask HN: Im a back end dev, how do you go from designing the UI with AI?

Have you actually learned to write HTML and CSS without any kit/framework?

I generally don't find that the frameworks help nearly as much as people think they do, and if you haven't learned the basics they easily get in the way of doing so.

NohatCoderon I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

"~10k reads+writes per month"

It is the same story over and over again. Your AWS bill is "low" because the actual resources you use are a tiny fraction of what a modern computer can deliver.

This is probably fine for your case, but you could run the same load on any toaster, and without a meaningfully demanding task it is hard to tell them apart.

NohatCoderon I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

Don’t forget that people involved in information technology procurement will pay very large sums of the company’s money to not understand anything.

FTFY

NohatCoderon Afroman found not liable in defamation case

No, treating people with hostility and escalating the situation only makes it more likely that someone will snap and attack a cop.

People generally do not shoot at cops, because whether or not they hit the target doing so is pretty much signing their own death sentence. All cops have to do to protect themselves is to not provoke people to fight-or-flight reactions.

NohatCoderon Making WebAssembly a first-class language on the Web

The whole WASM thing just went sideways from the start. It feels like the property of being practically unreadable and unwritable for humans was a design criterium, it is certainly the primary "feature" enabled by the stack approach.

Then there is the single array of memory that makes modern memory allocators not really work, resulting in every WASM compiler scrounging up something that mashes the assumptions of the source language into a single array.

NohatCoderon AVX-512: First Impressions on Performance and Programmability

I assume that the image would at least fit in L3.

NohatCoderon Fire Shuts GTA 6 Developer Rockstar North, Following Report of Explosion

I don't think this is likely to impact development much, they can rent office space elsewhere if needed.

NohatCoderon Ask HN: Share your personal website

https://nohatcoder.dk/

I don't post often, but I think what is there is quite worthwhile. It is whatever I want to write, but topics are typically maths, game theory and cryptography. There are also a few browser games.

The site itself might also be of note to some people as an example of an extremely light hand crafted website.

NohatCoderon AWS raises GPU prices 15% on a Saturday, hopes you weren't paying attention

Yeah, and I doubt that this is the last price hike. But I don't think this actually has a whole lot to do with ram prices. The thing is, AI cloud providers have generally been running at a massive loss, if you do the napkin maths, the procurement cost of these machines is equivalent to approximately a year of rent at these rates, for normal servers at AWS it is approximately a month.

NohatCoderon Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

The nature of these AIs is generally such that you can always throw more computation at the problem. Bigger models is obvious, but as I hinted earlier a lot of the current research goes more towards making various subqueries than making the models even bigger. In any case, for now the predominant factor determining how much compute a given prompt costs is how much compute someone decided to spend. So obviously if you pay for the "good" models there will be a lot more compute behind it than if you prompt a free model.

NohatCoderon Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

Lots of things to consider here, but mostly that is not the kind of prompt you would use for coding. Serious vibe coders will ingest an entire codebase into the model, and then use some system that automates iterating.

Basic "ask a question" prompts indeed probably do not cost all that much, but they are also not particularly relevant in any heavy professional use.

NohatCoderon Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

So let us compare AI to aviation. Globally aviation accounts for approximately 830 million tons of CO₂ emission per year [1]. If you power your data centre with quality gas power plants you will emit 450g of CO₂ per kWh electricity consumed [2], that is 3.9 million tons per year for a GW data centre. So depending on power mix it will take somewhere around 200 GW of data centres for AI to "catch up" to aviation. I have a hard time finding any numbers on current consumption, but if you believe what the AI folks are saying we will get there soon enough [3].

As for what your individual prompts contribute, it is impossible to get good numbers, and it will obviously vary wildly between types of prompts, choice of model and number of prompts. But I am fairly certain that someone whose job is prompting all day will generally spend several plane trips worth of CO₂.

Now, if this new tool allowed us to do amazing new things, there might be a reasonable argument that it is worth some CO₂. But when you are a programmer and management demands AI use so that you end up doing a worse job, while having worse job satisfaction, and spending extra resources, it is just a Kinder egg of bad.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-from-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas-fired_power_plant [3] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/anthropic-us-ai-n...

NohatCoderon Dr Matthew Garrett v Dr Roy Schestowitz and Anor

TL;DR:

Defendants Roy and Rianne Schestowitz were the targets of online harassment. They decided that claimant Matthew Garrett was behind it, and initiated their own hate campaign against him, in particular using their websites www.techrights.org and news.tuxmachines.org to do so.

The defendants did a very poor job of going to court, even by the standards of amateurs representing themselves, producing almost no evidence, none of which the judge found to be relevant.

Damages of £70K were awarded.

NohatCoderon What we talk about when we talk about sideloading

Wrong, plenty crap make it into the store, that is true for both Android and iOS. And the advertisement in the Android store is designed specifically to try to trick you into installing a different but similar app to the one you wanted.

NohatCoderon Replacing a $3000/mo Heroku bill with a $55/mo server

AWS certainly also does daylight robbery. In the AWS model the normal virtual servers are overpriced, but not super overpriced.

Where they get you is all the ancillary shit, you buy some database/backup/storage/managed service/whatever, and it is priced in dollars per boogaloo, you also have to pay water tax on top, and of course if you use more than the provisioned amount of hafnias the excess ones cost 10x as much.

Most customers have no idea how little compute they are actually buying with those services.

NohatCoderon How Israeli actions caused famine in Gaza, visualized

On the contrary, I think you will find that most people simply cannot comprehend the idea that Netanyahu/Israel would aid Hamas, they will think you are a conspiracy nut for stating the plain facts.

NohatCoderon A recent chess controversy

While it is good to see some Bayesian statistics in use, I wouldn't in this case put so much emphasis on an exact calculated probability that he did or din not cheat, the prior in this case is simply too wishy-washy for that.

The sound conclusion is that this is not evidence of cheating, but it is not evidence of the contrary either.