Hacker News: scott_s

New comment by scott_s in "Why Large Language Models Fail at Tabular Prediction"

scott_s — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 14:37:39 +0000

I find that an odd take. The paper claims to establish what causes the problem: dimensionality. They are clear in that they don't understand why. But this sort of work is what needs to be done to eventually solve the problem.

New comment by scott_s in "TorchCodec 0.14: HDR Video Decoding for CPU and CUDA, and Fast Wav Decoder"

scott_s — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 19:33:29 +0000

We dynamically load the shared object files. See: https://github.com/meta-pytorch/torchcodec/blob/8bbce656797c...

Solutions that shell out to the `ffmpeg` binary are not going to perform well.

New comment by scott_s in "TorchCodec 0.14: HDR Video Decoding for CPU and CUDA, and Fast Wav Decoder"

scott_s — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 21:38:49 +0000

I was copying URLs fast-and-furious. The PyTorch Stable ABI reference is: https://docs.pytorch.org/docs/2.12/notes/libtorch_stable_abi...

New comment by scott_s in "TorchCodec 0.14: HDR Video Decoding for CPU and CUDA, and Fast Wav Decoder"

scott_s — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 15:08:25 +0000

1. A higher-level API that better integrates into the PyTorch ecosystem.

2. Ease of going back-and-forth between CPU and GPU; in our experience, there's still a lot of scenarios where CPU decoding makes sense.

3. Audio decoding support.

Please take a look at our tutorials to get a feel for what TorchCodec can do: https://meta-pytorch.org/torchcodec/stable/generated_example...

New comment by scott_s in "TorchCodec 0.14: HDR Video Decoding for CPU and CUDA, and Fast Wav Decoder"

scott_s — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 14:56:03 +0000

You can get older version of TorchCodec that work with older version of PyTorch, but it unfortunately will not have the new features (HDR video decoding; fast Wav decoding) in the latest release. See the compatbility matrix: https://github.com/meta-pytorch/torchcodec#compatibility-wit...

Up until recently, TorchCodec releases worked with one-and-only-one version of PyTorch. This is because up until recently, PyTorch did not have a stable ABI, and we needed to pin TorchCodec releases to PyTorch releases. But! PyTorch now has an excellent Stable ABI (https://github.com/meta-pytorch/torchcodec#compatibility-wit..., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNdEmnvMvGE&t=1s) and TorchCodec is taking advantage of that since version 0.12.

New comment by scott_s in "TorchCodec 0.14: HDR Video Decoding for CPU and CUDA, and Fast Wav Decoder"

scott_s — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 14:47:17 +0000

The one you have installed. :) We don't distribute FFmpeg and instead find your installed version at runtime. We support versions 4 through 8.

New comment by scott_s in "TorchCodec 0.14: HDR Video Decoding for CPU and CUDA, and Fast Wav Decoder"

scott_s — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:08:36 +0000

For disclosure, I've worked on TorchCodec. I'm happy to answer any questions!

TorchCodec 0.14: HDR Video Decoding for CPU and CUDA, and Fast Wav Decoder

scott_s — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:08:36 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/meta-pytorch/torchcodec/releases/tag/v0.14.0

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48476539

Points: 62

# Comments: 13

New comment by scott_s in "We might all be AI engineers now"

scott_s — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 19:17:31 +0000

You are correct, but this is not a new role. AI effectively makes all of us tech leads.

New comment by scott_s in "We might all be AI engineers now"

scott_s — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 19:15:06 +0000

That's not what the author means. Multiple times a day, I have conversations with LLMs about specific code or general technologies. It is very similar to having the same conversation with a colleague. Yes, the LLM may be wrong. Which is why I'm constantly looking at the code myself to see if the explanation makes sense, or finding external docs to see if the concepts check out.

Importantly, the LLM is not writing code for me. It's explaining things, and I'm coming away with verifiable facts and conceptual frameworks I can apply to my work.

New comment by scott_s in "What's up with all those equals signs anyway?"

scott_s — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 15:53:52 +0000

I think of, and look up, this drunken rant at least once a year.

New comment by scott_s in "ACM Is Now Open Access"

scott_s — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 02:32:11 +0000

Yes, and that peer review happens through the ACM. It serves an organizing function. The conferences themselves are also in-person events, and most of the important research papers come out of those conferences.

New comment by scott_s in "ACM Is Now Open Access"

scott_s — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 00:54:10 +0000

It doesn't. arXiv is exclusively a pre-print service. The ACM digital library is for peer-reviewed, published papers. All of the peer-review happens through the ACM, as well as the physical conferences where people present and publish their papers.

New comment by scott_s in "ACM Is Now Open Access"

scott_s — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 16:52:58 +0000

IEEE may do it, as it's a professional organization. That is, they're a non-profit dedicated to the furtherance of the field. Being open access fits their mission, and the costs can be handled by dues and fees. Springer and Elsevier are for-profit publishers. I don't know how if they can have an open-access business model.

New comment by scott_s in "ACM Is Now Open Access"

scott_s — Thu, 01 Jan 2026 16:49:12 +0000

Great news. They temporarily opened it in 2020 during the pandemic. I argued it should remain so in a post: https://www.scott-a-s.com/acm-digital-library-should-remain-.... I'm glad it's finally happened.

New comment by scott_s in "I ignore the spotlight as a staff engineer"

scott_s — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 16:04:25 +0000

Gather metrics and regularly report them.

New comment by scott_s in "What Killed Perl?"

scott_s — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 19:39:29 +0000

Agreed. In grad school, I used Perl to script running my benchmarks, post-process my data and generate pretty graphs for papers. It was all Perl 5 and gnuplot. Once I saw someone do the same thing with Python and matplotlib, I never looked back. I later actually started using Python professionally, as I believe lots of other people had similar epiphanies. And not just from Perl, but from different languages and domains.

I think the article's author is implicitly not considering that people who were around when Perl was popular, who were perfectly capable of "understanding" it, actively decided against it.

New comment by scott_s in "Scientist exposes anti-wind groups as oil-funded, now they want to silence him"

scott_s — Wed, 27 Aug 2025 13:10:24 +0000

That's true of all renewable energy sources. So we should take advantage of all of them, as much as is feasible.

New comment by scott_s in "Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context"

scott_s — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 14:07:59 +0000

You train on data. Context is also data. If you want a model to have certain data, you can bake it into the model during training, or provide it as context during inference. But if the "context" you want the model to have is big enough, you're going to want to train (or fine-tune) on it.

Consider that you're coding a Linux device driver. If you ask for help from an LLM that has never seen the Linux kernel code, has never seen a Linux device driver and has never seen all of the documentation from the Linux kernel, you're going to need to provide all of this as context. And that's both going to be onerous on you, and it might not be feasible. But if the LLM has already seen all of that during training, you don't need to provide it as context. Your context may be as simple as "I am coding a Linux device driver" and show it some of your code.

New comment by scott_s in "Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context"

scott_s — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 18:49:13 +0000

Because training one family of models with very large context windows can be offered to the entire world as an online service. That is a very different business model from training or fine-tuning individual models specifically for individual customers. Someone will figure out how to do that at scale, eventually. It might require the cost of training to reduce significantly. But large companies with the resources to do this for themselves will do it, and many are doing it.