Hacker News Reader

thundergolferon Duolingo's Video Call Offers Realistic Conversation Practice

I tried this a couple weeks ago because they give you a 'freebie' run before gating the feature behind a Max subscription. It really is quite good, at least for basic conversation.

> The other thing you’ll notice about Lily is that her sassy personality really shines.

It's not sassy, Lily seems entirely bored and annoyed that she has to speak to you. It really is a curious choice and I wish they'd explain why they went this way. But I didn't find the personality off-putting at all. I just said my lines, got realistic responses, felt it worked well, and then went back to regular Duolingo exercises.

thundergolferon In the belly of the MrBeast

Him and also Marshal McLuhan. McLuhan realized all the way back in the 60s that computer technology (like all technology) in some sense wants things and manipulates the user to get it. The 'electric' technologies have their own logic and are not neutral on questions of humanity, politics, nature, etc.

thundergolferon Reflections on 1 Year of (Trying to) Become Successful on YouTube

"Reflections on 1 Year of (Trying to) Becoming Successful" isn't correct either.

thundergolferon Egoless Engineering

A read that book a couple years ago and thought it wasn’t very good, probably the worst of the “classic” 20th century texts. The Psychology of engineering is underrated though and someone should really write a new book on it.

thundergolferon Static IPs for Serverless Containers

Yes it will.

(I work at Modal.)

thundergolferon You must read at least one book to ride

I love this guy's cynicism and no-bullshit attitude. As someone who lived in Melbourne and has suffered Deloitte's "technology" department, the frustration and anger is warranted.

Like everyone else, Australia has tech brain drain and loses its best software engineers to USA. But unlike almost everyone else it's a very rich country and so can still afford to spend billions of dollars training and deploying engineers who "haven't read one book" to quote-unquote 'solve' domestic and regional technology problems. It's a giant make-work program to keep people busy while property speculation and resource extraction drives GDP growth.

thundergolferon Using uv with PyTorch

In our internal benchmarks miniconda is about as fast as uv at installing torch.

thundergolferon Kids Can't Read Books

The author of this pro-books piece is an MD at Achieve Partners which pumps e-learning (chromebooks, iPads, ar/vr in classrooms). Is the author speaking candidly out the side of his mouth here? Maybe he quit recently in disgust and just hasn’t updated his CV.

thundergolferon Using uv with PyTorch

Kind of an aside as this doc is about the complexities of installing particular PyTorch versions, but will say that uv is way faster at installing PyTorch than pip.

We run internal benchmarks of our custom container image builder and in the 'install torch' benchmark the p50 time saved when using `uv` is 25 seconds! (71.4s vs. 43.74s)

---

Aside 2: Seems there's a missing "involves" in this sentence: "As such, installing PyTorch typically often configuring a project to use the PyTorch index."

thundergolferon Ask HN: How to host an AI model that processes PDFs into structured data?

Modal.com can support this. A couple existing PDF extraction startups use it. You could have a custom endpoint up in minutes. It’s serverless so will be low cost for your level of traffic.

thundergolferon Computer use, a new Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Claude 3.5 Haiku

It’s a sandbox compute environment, using Gvisor or Firecracker or similar, which exposes a browser environment to the LLM.

modal.com’s modal.Sandbox can be the compute layer for this. It uses Gvisor under the hood.

thundergolferon Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

And now Bob McGrew, Chief of Research

thundergolferon Cloudflare misidentifies Hetzner IPs as being located in Iran

Happened to use with GCP too. We had Oracle Cloud instances being flagged as from Iran and had to file forms with them to get them to not block the IPs.

thundergolferon Why Amazon Hired a Car Mechanic to Run Its Cloud Empire

This article draws comparison’s to James Somer’s article on Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, The Friendship That Made Google. Where Somer’s was able to draw out the idiosyncratic detail of what made those engineer’s tick, this article reads as vague. It’s often pulling in praise from other industry big shots and that praise is so general, for example Hamilton’s “broad and deep” knowledge, that it sounds like politicians praising other politicians. If you want to write a credible puff piece for a distinguished engineer you should be a lot more grounded in the details of the engineering.

thundergolferon Bitcoin puzzle #66 was solved: 6.6 BTC (~$400k) withdrawn

We had fraudsters using modal.com compute to solve this challenge. It's not traditional mining software so it didn't initially get flagged, but we've updated our detection to catch it now[1].

1. https://modal.com/blog/catching-cryptominers

thundergolferon Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (1989)

You can get a beautiful poster of it from https://www.docubyte.com/projects/guide-to-computing/ (scroll to the bottom).

I've got docubyte's poster of the PDP-7 and it's great.

thundergolferon Ask HN: Share your personal site

https://thundergolfer.com/blog/

My site is one of those 'do it quick, don't ever rewrite it' ones. It's still Jekyll, has a bunch of raw HTML and JS embedded in posts, but doesn't get in the way of actually publishing.

I'm reasonably happy with it now. I wish the library section (https://thundergolfer.com/library/) was auto-updated from Goodreads, and wish I had a proper Javascript solution, but realistically I'm not going to get around to it.

thundergolferon iFixit takes shots at Anthropic for hitting servers a million times in 24 hours

Unbearable website on mobile. Banner ads, footer ads, auto scrolls away from article, video popup ads. Just awful.

thundergolferon Third Places and Neighborhood Entrepreneurship: Evidence from Starbucks Cafés

People sitting on their laptops, usually with headphones, are actually themselves hostile to third places and that's why some cafes ban them on weekends.

The definition of a third place is fully incompatible with it being just a remote work location: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

thundergolferon Teaching general problem-solving skills is not a substitute for teaching math [pdf] (2010)

This is the central claim of E.D Hirsch's Why Knowledge Matters[1] book on educational reform. Hirsch is perhaps best known for coining the term "cultural literacy" in his book of the same name.

A little while back I wrote about cultural literacy in the software industry, following the lead of Hirsch's book.[2]

1. https://hep.gse.harvard.edu/9781612509525/why-knowledge-matt...

2. https://thundergolfer.com/software/culture/2024/01/14/comput...

thundergolferon Finding out where syscalls are called from: Stack traces with strace

Why did you just quote the start of the article?

thundergolferon How to catch crypto miners using syscall signatures

Hi, author of the post and Modal engineer here in case anyone has any questions. Also got Twitter DMs open if you've got some detection tips and tricks of your own :)

thundergolferon Learn things that don't change

Yes, the fundamentals don't change, but this blog is just affiliate link farming and the 40 (!) books it recommends includes a lot of non-fundamental rubbish.

Here's a much better list of around 7 books: https://teachyourselfcs.com/.

thundergolferon OpenAI’s Library

Nicely designed library, but the books they choose to highlight are surely deliberately dull. Unless the collection is fully corporate bleached, there’s got to be some far more interesting stuff in there. Infinite Jest, really?

No Girard, N Weiner, Ellul, W Benjamin, W Gibson.

thundergolferon Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

It's the opposite of what you say. Slim to none of the alternative cloud providers re-rent their GPUs.

Coreweave, Fluidstack, Lambda Labs, Paperspace, Cudo Compute, Hydra, Datacrunch.io, Vultr, Crusoe Cloud, SF Compute.

As far as I can tell none of these providers give you a GPU originating in Azure, AWS, or GCP.

thundergolferon Alternative clouds are booming as companies seek cheaper access to GPUs

Lambda Labs has on-demand GPUs. Just put in a credit card and you're able to launch. I launched an 1x H100 server just 10 minutes ago on Lambda Labs.

The price is also $2.49/hr which does not seem predatory at all.

thundergolferon How to Make More Money Renting a GPU Than Nvidia Makes Selling It

Jeez, didn't pick that out when reading and it seems an egregious error. But they probably got mixed up with how many hours in 4 years because the 4 year timeline is used throughput the article.

thundergolferon How to Make More Money Renting a GPU Than Nvidia Makes Selling It

> The extracted value figures are opportunity costs, not direct revenue.

What does this mean?

thundergolferon How to Make More Money Renting a GPU Than Nvidia Makes Selling It

The H100 prices seem wrong based on today's prices. I'm looking at our data on H100 prices across ten cloud providers and the H100 on-demand prices range between $3-6 hr, the average being $3.83 USD.

The p5.48xlarge with 8 H100s is indeed $12.29 per GPU-hour as the article states, but their claim that the blended hourly rental price for H100s could be $9.40 USD over the next 4 years appears ludicrous.