HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

chabons

424 karma · joined July 16, 2018

submissionscomments
chabons··on OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell
Sure, but even heavily discounted Nvidia chips won’t be competitive for inference if they’re worse on perf/W.
chabons··on OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell
As opposed to closed-source models? Benchmarks for GPT Sol wouldn’t be particularly meaningful, as no one else can run the benchmark, and we don’t know what the exact model specs are.

Picking the best open source models is really the best they can do.

chabons··on Hey Nico, you didn't vibe code your data room but stole it from Papermark
They didn't even attempt to make a clean-room implementation, they just had the LLM clone it for them with access to the source.
chabons··on Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
> "[…] and these interlopers are the real geniuses […]

This wasn’t the framing I was going for. My point was that industry boundaries are fluid and expand/contract as demand dictates. You’re correct that incentives are not all positive (pay, work life balance, perks), other industries contracting might force people to find work elsewhere.

All that said, I don’t think these people have “odd backgrounds”. I work in a math-heavy domain, so these backgrounds make as much sense as a traditional CS background, and I think these folks are just as likely to be retained in a crunch.

chabons··on Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs
“There is a population of qualified workers […]”

In my experience, this is not true. Demand for software engineers has been so high, and pay so high as a result, that it’s pulling in workers from adjacent industries. The total software-qualified workforce is larger than the set currently working in software, and people with transferrable skills move in and out of software as incentives dictate.

A number of my current and former coworkers are from math and physics backgrounds (CFD, energy, etc…). These are folks that before might have stayed in academia, or ended up in aerospace, defense, or other engineering fields.

If everyone over hired, demand drops, and companies drop pay as a result, I’m sure we’ll see some folks in software with transferrable skills move to other industries.

chabons··on Yann LeCun raises $1B to build AI that understands the physical world
Where in academia can one get a Billion (with a b) dollars to research something?
chabons··on Inner-Platform Effect
Developers are users too. If users cared enough not to use cross-platform software because it didn’t look native, then it wouldn’t get built.
chabons··on Rivian's TM-B electric bike
"rather hard" is really underselling things. Without considering generator->motor losses, 250W is a lot of power, even for a larger (>80kg/176lbs) rider. For basically anyone who doesn't train on the bike, this is an unsustainable effort.

Even a floor of 100W would rule out smaller/less athletic riders.

chabons··on US High school students' scores fall in reading and math
Intuitively, I can understand that English Second Language students would struggle in classes other than English, but are the demographics really shifting enough to explain the drop in attainment shown in the article?

The best demographic data I can find is here: https://datacenter.aecf.org/data/tables/103-child-population...

The best data I can find on language spoken at home is here: https://datacenter.aecf.org/data/tables/81-children-who-spea...

The above shows the share of "Non-Hispanic White alone" children (who I'll assume speak English as a first language) going from 52% to 48% from 2015-2024, and the percentage of "Children who speak a language other than English at home" staying flat at 22% from 2013-2023. From 2015-2024, math attainment goes from 62% to 55%.

At a glance, it would seem that the shift in math attainment cannot be explained by demographics/language alone.

chabons··on US High school students' scores fall in reading and math
I'm missing something. What change in demographics are we talking about, and why would that influence math results?
chabons··on The Begining of the End for ANT+ Wireless
Garmin has a market cap of ~40B USD. Inflation adjusted, that's where NVIDIA was <10yr ago. It's not missing resources to do the work IMO, but it's missing the market dominance to singlehanded set the standard for the industry.
chabons··on Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus
For me, it's that the ergonomics are straightforward, and everything works out of the box. If I find myself on a new machine, just installing fish gives me an ergonomic setup without having to install too many additional tools or mess with configuration.
chabons··on Updates to H-1B
I don't have statistics, but given the student visa -> H-1B pipeline changes, it would seem there are a number of H-1B holders who are educated in US colleges (either at the undergrad or graduate level). This indicates that the problem is not entirely a training gap.
chabons··on 1 bug, $50k in bounties, a Zendesk backdoor
The author specifically stated: "Realizing this, I asked for the report to be forwarded to an actual Zendesk staff member for review", before getting another reply for H1. I read this as they escalated it to Zendesk directly, who directed it back to HackerOne.
chabons··on Batteryless OP-1
I was thinking the same. Also, I would have liked if they discussed/measured the worst-case power draw of the device before starting to add capacitors, as it's possible a PC USB port just doesn't supply enough current to power it at steady state.
chabons··on Kawaii – A Keychain-Sized Nintendo Wii
Before I knew this I had someone pull out their lighter and point the remote at it when our sensor bar died. Took me a little bit to figure it out.
chabons··on Mass tourism protesters squirt water at Barcelona tourists
> Embrace them and make rules to prevent them from damaging the city they’re coming to experience.

+1, squirting the tourists who are already there does little to discourage other tourists from coming, or to solve the problem that they're competing for the same housing.

That said, I can't help but think that AirBnB(/VRBO/etc...) is just faster to respond to market conditions than traditional hotel businesses because it leverages already built private residences. If land is 5x as profitable as accommodation for tourists, then anywhere where a hotel could be built the value of the land will increase, and thus housing costs. I guess the local govt. has zoning as a lever it can use to restrict where hotels can be built though. Maybe that's the point though, that AirBnB sidesteps zoning, extracting more value from the land than other users can.

chabons··on Climate Zones
The happened for me only in Celsius. It looks like in Fahrenheit the temperature updated for me.
chabons··on TDK claims solid state battery breakthrough
In general I agree, for instance an Apple Watch crams in so much hardware, that the battery frequently lasts less than a day. Compare that to my Garmin 245, which often lasts 2 weeks on a single charge if it's not using the GPS. It doesn't do as much, but that's fine. I'd love to see more "quiet" tech which eschews the pattern you describe above, and just focusses on doing the thing it's supposed to well so you don't have to think about it. EInk is another promising technology in this area.
chabons··on Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns
And more generally, consumers of Windows-only software, of which there is still a ton.
chabons··on Land value tax in online games and virtual worlds (2022)
This doesn't resolve the ongoing incentive to remove the LVT, creating immediate value for the current land-owners.
chabons··on Lithium-free sodium batteries exit the lab and enter US production
This assumes that the same number of vehicles use the charging station. Lower charge times means potentially higher steady-state throughput.
chabons··on Mexico's Floating Gardens
Here I was scanning the article for what they floated on. I had assumed it was a peat-bog type situation.

I guess the key benefit of this strategy is that the water level is high and the water is nutrient rich? Otherwise it's pretty similar to a standard canal irrigation setup.

chabons··on Flock Safety is the biggest player in a city-by-city scramble for surveillance
I really doubt this would be how things play out. Most crime isn't sophisticated or targeted.

The same argument can be made about internet-connected security cameras in general, that they could allow for remotely casing a potential target, and they're generally considered to be a deterrent, and not an enabler of crime.

chabons··on Google DeepMind's Aloha Unleashed is pushing the boundaries of robot dexterity
The videos are all shown at 2x speed, but your point stands, this is still pretty quick.
chabons··on Meta MTIA v2 – Meta Training and Inference Accelerator
> Intel Gaudi 3 has more interconnect bandwidth than this has memory bandwidth.

LPDDR5 vs HBMe2. I'm guessing there's a 2-5x price difference between those, but even so it's an interesting choice, I don't know any other accelerators which spec DDR. But yeah, without exact TCO numbers it's hard to compare exactly.

chabons··on Rye: Homoiconic dynamic programming language with some new ideas
Presumably as functions, the same way as excel?

and(x, y) -> bool

or(x, y) -> bool

if(cond, funcTrue, funcFalse) -> void

chabons··on FlipperZero: Our Response to the Canadian Government
Well, except we have video evidence of thieves wearing balaclavas during burglaries, not so much of them using FlipperZero's.
chabons··on In Europe, trains are full, and more are on the way
The way I see it, induced demand is just a way of saying that all modes trend towards equilibrium. If you invest more in trains, they become more attractive, and people gravitate towards them. The same is true of cars, busses, etc... How each mode of transport scales influences whether you want to induce demand for it.

AFAICT trains scale pretty well in terms of space and environmental impact, and point-to-point latency decreases as more trains are run (and transfer times decrease), so it's pretty nice to induce demand for it.

chabons··on Transformers on Chips
Interesting point. That said, the AI model space is rapidly evolving, while bitcoin's hashing problem is static. This makes it significantly more risky to make a large capital investment in dedicated HW when it's unclear if it will be able to run the next big model architecture. For instance, if this had been built + released a year ago, before SOTA models used MoE , then it would rapidly have become obselete.
Page 1 of 3Next →