stephenheron | Better HN

stephenheron

712 karmaJoined July 18, 201145 submissions

Recent submissions

Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?

Hi,

My daily workhorse is a M1 Pro that I purchased on release date, It has been one of the best tech purchases I have made, even now it really deals with anything I throw at it. My daily work load is regularly having a Android emulator, iOS simulator and a number of Dockers containers running simultaneously and I never hear the fans, battery life has taken a bit of a hit but it is still very respectable.

I wanted a new personal laptop, and I was debating between a MacBook Air or going for a Framework 13 with Linux. I wanted to lean into learning something new so went with the Framework and I must admit I am regretting it a bit.

The M1 was released back in 2020 and I bought the Ryzen AI 340 which is one of the newest 2025 chips from AMD, so AMD has 5 years of extra development and I had expected them to get close to the M1 in terms of battery efficiency and thermals.

The Ryzen is using a TSMC N4P process compared to the older N5 process, I managed to find a TSMC press release showing the performance/efficiency gains from the newer process: “When compared to N5, N4P offers users a reported +11% performance boost or a 22% reduction in power consumption. Beyond that, N4P can offer users a 6% increase in transistor density over N5”

I am sorely disappointed, using the Framework feels like using an older Intel based Mac. If I open too many tabs in Chrome I can feel the bottom of the laptop getting hot, open a YouTube video and the fans will often spin up.

Why haven’t AMD/Intel been able to catch up? Is x86 just not able to keep up with the ARM architecture? When can we expect a x86 laptop chip to match the M1 in efficiency/thermals?!

To be fair I haven’t tried Windows on the Framework yet it might be my Linux setup being inefficient.

Cheers, Stephen

452stephenheron7mo ago620

Elon Musk's AI Company Acquires X in $45B Deal (opens in new tab)

(hollywoodreporter.com)

10stephenheron0y ago1

KBLaM: Bringing plug-and-play external knowledge to LLMs (opens in new tab)

(microsoft.com)

14stephenheron1y ago0

Ask HN: Limitations of LLMs?

I have been thinking about LLMs just like everyone else, I guess! The prevailing sentiment seems to be they are going to change the world, from jobs to politics and everything in between. However, I have been wondering if we are perhaps reaching “peak” LLM and we will see a dramatic reduction in progress.

I am a casual observer of this space so I may be barking up the totally wrong tree, but I thought I would put these ideas out anyway to see if anyone has any thoughts.

Lack of quality training data: Is there a possibility that all the good quality training data has already been used? I would argue that most of the internet doesn’t actually contain good content, and increasing the amount of training data from the internet might actually make these models produce worse output. Moreover, organisations with valuable content could begin to restrict data access, presenting further challenges for training.

AI generated content polluting training data: This is somewhat related to the previous point, but is there a risk that with LLMs generating so much content that the training data becomes polluted with AI generated text. How would this effect the model output? Is it like taking a photocopy of a photocopy over and over again?

Compute Resources: We continually hear that Moore’s Law is dead, are we going to start running into compute/memory issues? Without dramatic increases in both compute/memory are we going to hit scaling issues where it simply takes too long or we don’t have the memory to train larger models?

Architecture Limitations: From my understanding so far adding more and more parameters to a transformer increases its performance. Are we sure that this scales? Or at some point does this performance increase stop or even perhaps go into reverse?

Hopefully these points are not totally off the wall!

1stephenheron2y ago1

Ask HN: Google Load Balancer / Cloudflare Issues

Hi HN,

I am a bit of a loss so I am coming to Hacker News in the hopes someone has seen anything like this.

Approximately 6 hours ago we started getting a very strange error back from our site, that appears intermittently:

"<html><title>Error 500 (Internal Server Error)!</title></html>"

This error is a little bit strange, with only an HTML title and no body and a '!' being used. From a Google we can find no other references to this error, I did a search on Twitter and found 1 other reference to it, which is from a users complaining they can't get access to "https://beta.character.ai/". We verified that they are also seeing the same issue. The interesting this is that our site, also has the word beta in it which seems a bit suspicious.

We are running our site behind Cloudflare which is pointing to a Google Cloud Load balancer, from investigating the headers on "https://beta.character.ai/" we can see they are running a similar setup.

We have struggled to 100% identify if the issue is sitting with Cloudflare or Google but my current suspicion is Google.

If anyone has seen anything like this before, or can provide any assistance I would be very grateful.

Thanks, Stephen

4stephenheron2y ago1

Facebook iOS SDK causing crashes on startup (opens in new tab)

(github.com)

19stephenheron5y ago11

The source code for the NHSX Covid-19 BETA Apps (opens in new tab)

(twitter.com)

4stephenheron5y ago1

PSN Online ID Change Feature Entering PlayStation Preview Program Soon (opens in new tab)

(play.st)

1stephenheron7y ago0

Ask HN: At what size do Microservices make sense?

I like the idea of Microservices, however I have yet to have a project of the size where I felt the benefits of them outweighed the drawbacks. However I am going to meetups and conferences and seeing 1 - 2 people startups start with a microservice architecture.

I am wondering if I am missing something and microservices are perhaps more suitable for smaller projects / teams that I had originally thought.

Any advice would be fantastic.

21stephenheron7y ago7

Red Hat acquires CoreOS for $250M in Kubernetes expansion (opens in new tab)

(techcrunch.com)

3stephenheron8y ago0

Ask HN: Cryptocurrencies

I am backend web developer by trade and I am sure like many of you have been hearing more and more about cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. I did research about the underlying Blockchain technology and after some perseverance I think I understand the basics.

However I am struggling to understand the economics of these cryptocurrencies and I am hoping the HN crowd can shed some light on it by answering a few questions.

The original Bitcoin paper was titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” however from talking to people who have Bitcoin they don’t want to use it as cash because the price is too volatile instead they are basically buying Bitcoin as an investment. Is this a narrow view and are people around the world using it as a cash system? If people are not using it as cash is this even a problem but then what is driving its value?

To me it looks as if the Bitcoin system is wasting vast amounts of computing power and in turn electricity. Is this actually scalable or are we going to reach a point where it no longer becomes profitable to actually mine Bitcoins and as a result the network dies.

Etherium is another cryptocurrency that seem interesting due to it’s smart contract system. However is anyone doing anything useful for the end user with these smart contracts? I had a look at https://dapps.ethercasts.com/ and I struggle to see the value of it from looking at the list.

I apologize for coming over quite negative but I feel as if I am missing something and it is difficult to find balanced arguments when looking at cryptocurrencies. It seems to either be the “next big thing” or simply a bubble.

6stephenheron8y ago1

Ask HN: How to take notes?

I seemed to have avoided taking any sort of notes for most of my professional career mostly relying on my memory. However as I get a touch older I can sense that I am forgetting certain points from meetings etc.

I am looking for advice on how others take notes or perhaps some good resources on note taking. It seems like such a simple skill but it is one I am definitely missing out on!

Thanks!

18stephenheron8y ago7

An Uncharted Tech Retrospective (opens in new tab)

(youtube.com)

1stephenheron9y ago0