Hacker News: dgacmu

New comment by dgacmu in "Show HN: Are You in the Weights?"

dgacmu — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 02:17:49 +0000

From one person who's completely not-anonymous on HN to another: Why? Do you worry about the association of your IP address with your real name by yet another site other than any place you've made purchases from or signed up for an account from?

(I'm asking seriously, as I can see some risk to having that linkage more public, but given the rate with which services holding PII are compromised and my own personal rate of receiving notices of "oops, we kinda sorta leaked everything about you, here, have more free credit monitoring", I assume almost all of this is available already.)

New comment by dgacmu in "Law Enforcement's "Warrior" Problem (2015)"

dgacmu — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 20:40:26 +0000

The problem for people like that is that they're working in a system that rewards and mandates bad behavior. You want your traffic tickets to stick so you can make quota? Ticket more black and poor people. They won't contest the tickets as much. Drug arrest and conviction quota? Find people who can't afford an attorney, they'll get an overworked PD and likely take a fast plea bargain.

Good people are responsive to the incentives we've created for them also.

US Mint launches $1 coin featuring Cray-1

dgacmu — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 18:55:45 +0000

Article URL: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/us-mint-launches-1-coin-featuring-cray-1/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48465840

Points: 4

# Comments: 2

New comment by dgacmu in "Nvidia is proposing a beast of a CPU system for Windows PCs"

dgacmu — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 16:53:18 +0000

He's not a loser; he's done some really fun work that many people use daily. I've used his range mapping trick in multiple projects/papers. It's elegant.

It sounds like he's gotten bad advise about how to market himself /or/ this is being marketed to people who have bigger checks to write and whom he believes will be responsive to this kind of marketing. As an academic, it rubs me very wrong - I think it's detrimental to the field when we get into h-index stacking contests or citation count comparisons. But I don't know what incentives he's responding to, which seems important for putting this stuff in context.

(as an aside, it turns out that polars + fastexcel is about 10x faster than pandas + openpyxl for searching that dataset, if anyone else is curious what he was actually talking about. :)

New comment by dgacmu in "Ask HN: What was your "oh shit" moment with GenAI?"

dgacmu — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 21:03:51 +0000

I suggested to a masters' student that a problem we were working on would benefit from analyzing it mathematically. He brought an incorrect solution the next time we met, and on a whim, I asked Gemini to do it. Gemini got it right. I started looking for more ways to use it after that.

New comment by dgacmu in "Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model"

dgacmu — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 00:58:48 +0000

Ah! Good question: Google's non-open-weights models (Gemini, etc) have almost always outperformed on image recognition tasks compared to any other models. I use a mix of in-house and Gemini for image classification tasks for $startup. No other models have done as well, and I had hoped that some of that would spill over into their open source models. It does to a degree - bigger Gemma models are okay.

New comment by dgacmu in "Gemma 4 12B: A unified, encoder-free multimodal model"

dgacmu — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 00:15:41 +0000

I was excited about this until I fed it one of my local test problems: coin identification. I then spent 10 minutes arguing with it that a photo of a 1998 washington quarter was not, in fact, a Morgan Silver Dollar. I mean, I wish it was.

It went into a crash loop on a british columbia 1 dollar coin. This happened with both Q4_1 and Q8. Maybe I'm holding it wrong or it's just really bad for this task.

In contrast, gemma4 gets the british columbia coin right though it also mis-identifies the quarter. gemini 3.1-flash-lite nails them both.

Was getting about 50 t/s output on a 3090 with Q8 which seems ok.

New comment by dgacmu in "A new way to build chips: Sequentially stacking silicon to extend Moore's Law"

dgacmu — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 10:49:55 +0000

But it does, at least to some degree: For the cpu (or brain) you want high density to minimize the latency between components. For the heat sink, you want high surface area, which you can actually do to some degree three-dimensionally, particularly when you have active cooling. Look at a typical heat sink with a fan attached to it -- it has some depth, because that depth allows more heat to be transferred to the air to it by increasing the surface area exposed to the air. Lungs do the same thing, and they do function as part of our cooling system. So if you have a way that the flow of the exchange medium is not limited by the external surface area of your heat exchanger (a fan, a pump, a diaphragm), you can go pretty far.

New comment by dgacmu in "The newest Instagram “exploit” is the goofiest I've seen"

dgacmu — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 22:54:50 +0000

I'm probably out of date, but Google's advanced protection at one point did account recovery via postcard to your home address. High latency but pretty good as a fallback.

New comment by dgacmu in "WH proposes rules giving political appointees final approval on research grants"

dgacmu — Sat, 30 May 2026 14:09:06 +0000

One of the explicit goals of the NSF is to train the next generation of scientists. Part of that is making sure that you're creating a rich pipeline of people who are going to do innovative things. Broadening participation is much more about things like getting more (usually younger) people from all walks of life interested in joining your field. Which is basically an unmitigated good -- first, the obvious advantage that having more people who want to be in a field is good for it from the perspective of choosing the best folks. And second, the less obvious but perhaps more important thing that people with different perspectives often end up thinking about problems differently. It's not nearly as helpful to have 1000 people all focused on chasing the same problems with the same toolbox of solutions as it is to have 1000 people focused on different problems with different ideas of how to approach them.

I say this as a professor at a top computer science department. I have _never_ felt limited in my ability to collaborate with the best folks in my area. Ever. I do! And it's great! And I also believe strongly it's important to make sure we are growing those next generations of amazing people, because the thing that makes research awesome is working with them.

New comment by dgacmu in "FBI arrests CIA official with $40M in gold bars in his home"

dgacmu — Thu, 28 May 2026 13:38:48 +0000

But then you'd have to keep stealing more gold bars for the upkeep, and who has time for that?

New comment by dgacmu in "AMD pulls a bait-and-switch on Linux users with Vivado licensing changes"

dgacmu — Thu, 28 May 2026 11:44:06 +0000

Large company again makes local decision without considering the effects outside that single product line.

I wonder how many Linux GPU sales their decision to penalize Linux on their FPGA line will cost them.

New comment by dgacmu in "Raft Consensus with a Minority of Nodes"

dgacmu — Wed, 27 May 2026 18:39:15 +0000

I don't think this is correct. Heidi's work made a different observation: That you can smear quorum intersection across phases of paxos, whereas the blog post in this submission is observing that you can do bog-standard quorum intersection in a way other than just thinking about majority intersection, via algebraic/geometric structures. I believe these are generally orthogonal observations.

(Heidi's work is both deeper and more practical; this post is just a really cute observation that there's something mathematically deeper underlying the idea of intersecting quora.)

New comment by dgacmu in "Xiaomi MiMo-v2.5 Series API Permanent Price Reduction Up to 99%"

dgacmu — Wed, 27 May 2026 13:57:02 +0000

Chinese EV policy in the US is about propping up our auto industry despite its best efforts to lose the EV battle. This has nothing to do with "communism", it's a purely economic thing that ties into internal US voting blocs.

New comment by dgacmu in "Is "colorectal cancer" rising in "young people"?"

dgacmu — Wed, 27 May 2026 00:31:05 +0000

Kenji's stick blender mayo recipe is also really good and really easy.

New comment by dgacmu in "Is "colorectal cancer" rising in "young people"?"

dgacmu — Wed, 27 May 2026 00:28:17 +0000

I woke in the middle of my first one due to inadequate sedation and it felt like someone was pushing their fist into my stomach too hard and/or having cramps. Tolerable but unpleasant. I elected for propofol on my second and was happier (though both midazolam/fentanyl and propofol basically make you kinda useless for the rest of the day).

New comment by dgacmu in "Big tech's anti-labor playbook has come for Wikipedia"

dgacmu — Tue, 26 May 2026 23:58:19 +0000

It is sometimes said that reality has a liberal bias. But it is literally the case that historians rank these two presidents at nearly opposite ends of the spectrum, and the article's tone seems to reflect that. Which isn't really an example of bias in Wikipedia - it is supposed to reflect what reliable sources say.

New comment by dgacmu in "Stop Advertising in Your Commits"

dgacmu — Tue, 26 May 2026 20:05:37 +0000

I gently disagree. I think that having provenance information logged is valuable - both to the project ("please ban dga because he's submitting ai slop") and to people who might want to study all of this stuff ("interesting, ai coauthored PRs were rejected at a rate X times that of non-attributed PRs"). I think a non-advertising header of some sort that included more specific information about the LLM would be even better, of course.

New comment by dgacmu in "Eagle 3.1: Collaboration Between the EAGLE Team, vLLM Team, and TorchSpec Team"

dgacmu — Tue, 26 May 2026 17:36:12 +0000

Yup. Not just you.

New comment by dgacmu in "What we lost when we stopped letting kids leave the front yard"

dgacmu — Tue, 26 May 2026 13:16:46 +0000

That's massively over-generalized. I live in Pittsburgh, which is not a huge city, but my experience is the exact opposite. My 8yo walks to friends houses in the neighborhood and to the park by himself sometimes. My 13yo is now switching from private school to the public high school, which is quite well-regarded. We don't live downtown, but our part of town has been an amazing place to raise kids. (Squirrel Hill, for those stalking Pittsburgh remotely. :). We chose not to live in the bars and parties areas because we're not 20. Cities are not homogeneous.