Hacker News

Top stories

Live mirror
30 storiesupdated just nowView source snapshot
  1. Training a 4B model to produce 81% faster query plans than Postgres(rohanbansal.com ↗)
    65comments
  2. Breaking the 1.58-bit Barrier for Ternary LLMs(arxiv.org ↗)
    9comments
  3. Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust(nvidia.com ↗)
    36comments
  4. Xiaomi Mimo 2.6 live post-training dashboard(xiaomi.com ↗)
    51comments
  5. Backups Aren't Simple(filipovski.net ↗)
    9comments
  6. Small programming tricks(will-keleher.com ↗)
    173comments
  7. OpenSpec – A lightweight and configurable AI spec framework(openspec.dev ↗)
    1comments
  8. The engineering behind the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve(johnjwang.com ↗)
    3comments
  9. Reversing Factorio's RNG(gegell.github.io ↗)
    11comments
  10. Performance Improvements in .NET 11(devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet ↗)
    21comments
  11. AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran(wsj.com ↗)
    138comments
  12. Australia says it could follow Canada in forging deeper ties with EU(independent.co.uk ↗)
    2comments
  13. Accurate Models of AMD Matrix Cores(arxiv.org ↗)
    6comments
  14. Reverse-engineered Jev-like model(github.com/vinnylarouge ↗)
    7comments
  15. Japan's book scene is moving from bookstores to libraries(untranslatedjp.substack.com ↗)
    25comments
  16. How good are frontier models at physics?(arxiv.org ↗)
    25comments
  17. Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations(github.com/arnegiacomo ↗)
    236comments
  18. Mistral X Mozilla: Private, Multilingual AI Browsing(mistral.ai ↗)
    182comments
  19. Dream-RSI: Recursive Self-Improvement through Evolving Worlds(arxiv.org ↗)
    49comments
  20. Anatomy of a Texture(agentlien.github.io ↗)
    12comments
  21. Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce"(evanhahn.com ↗)
    123comments
  22. WalShadow: Sub-second Postgres replication to ClickHouse from physical WAL(clickhouse.com ↗)
    5comments
  23. Training Text-to-Image Models 3.6× Faster(linum.ai ↗)
    1comments
  24. Hackers Got Inside a Flock Camera(wired.com ↗)
    208comments
  25. Vectorized and performance-portable Quicksort (2022)(googleblog.com ↗)
    25comments
  26. Why Does the Universe Expand?(cosmicave.org ↗)
    1comments
  27. The DeepMind Institute(deepmind.com ↗)
    42comments
  28. I replaced my brown-noise browser tab with a menu bar app(oldmanrahul.com ↗)
    discuss
  29. Kyber (YC W23) Is Hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer(ycombinator.com ↗)
    discuss
  30. Destroy After Reading: photocopiers,cheap paper and DIY gave metal it's look(truegrittexturesupply.com ↗)
    1comments

Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust

94 pointsby 12h agodeveloper.nvidia.com
36 comments
1h agoHN ↗

I'm looking forward to trying these when they stabilize! I currently use WGPU for graphics, and cudarc for CUDA.

Note: Cuda-oxide is similar to Cudarc's host component, but uses a rust-style kernel dialect. Advantage: Share structs between host and device. Disadvantage: Trading standard Cuda kernels for a new, WIP dialect.

I haven't tried the tile API yet; looking forward to it.

The last time I checked, Cuda Oxide was Linux only, and required Async; these are why I haven't tried it yet.

1h agoHN ↗

cudarc been great for me, because it's easy to look up existing examples and references, and it maps 1-to-1 with what I see. I'm already having a tough time with CUDA itself, a dialect of it makes a tad harder to rely on previous work.

Seems more ergonomic in general though, both approaches they share, compared to cudarc, and less build infrastructure and fiddling with environments, which is great.

41m agoHN ↗

Nobody cares if kernels are written in Rust. Kernels were meant to be written in C, but if you want to go more high-level try Triton or a similar DSL that nicely abstract tile sizes etc.

18m agoHN ↗

oh no no no, this is going to break the CPP hold on AI and game dev.

10m agoHN ↗

kernels aren't meant to be written by any defined language. C is just a traditionally good default language that took over from assembly. No particular reason we have to stick with C.

1h agoHN ↗

The launch is checked rather than trusted.

Damn even Nvidia is putting out fully Claude-written articles.

37m agoHN ↗

not to worry, they have an 'AI generated summary' box too

7m agoHN ↗

This thread flags an honest assessment of AI signal detection.

26m agoHN ↗

That's actually a magnificent observation. This is not only an indication of a keen eye, but a trained brilliant mind as well.

16m agoHN ↗

even Nvidia

Why "even Nvidia"?

They are fully behind using AI for basically everything.

What's next? "Damn, even McDonald's is putting out unhealthy food"

1h agoHN ↗

First of all, this is a pre-1.0 release that requires a nightly Rust compiler (if you choose the SIMT track with cuda-oxide) so that one is going to be unstable software.

Secondly, When an issue occurs with a kernel or you want to write your own custom kernel in Rust, now we need to diagnose if the problem came from either cuda-oxide (SIMT), Rust's side, CUDA or Tile (If you decide to choose the Tile track).

Another dependency into the list and course everything is open source except CUDA itself. So any issue that happens on the CUDA level, you are forced to wait for them to fix it.

53m agoHN ↗

In this age of LLM written everything which has softly killed my motivation for learning Rust somewhat, this has revived my interest if not only for the fact the LLMs haven't yet been trained on this yet!

47m agoHN ↗

LLM don't need to be trained in a library to use it well. It's just Rust which they know well.

29m agoHN ↗

And what prevent you exactly ?

There were humans far superior than you for writting Rust before LLM, now there's a LLM. The only difference is price and time execution.

You get an awesome teacher (LLM) ready to answer all your questions about Rust.

And you still find excuses not to learn it ?

At some point, just realize you've been lazy to learn it and LLMs are just an excuse.

5m agoHN ↗

I think OP’s point is that the payoff in learning a new language has diminished in this AI era. You can call that lazy, I’d consider it smart to consider whether you could be doing other, better, things with your time.

50m agoHN ↗

what this article tells me is that no one at Nvidia actually cares about this project whatsoever. otherwise, they would have had a person actually write the announcement.

43m agoHN ↗

I strongly dislike CUDA. Once you have allowed that proprietary cr*p into your C++ codebase, it is very hard to get rid, and you end up with code that is either tied to a single vendor or an #ifdef hell, probably both.

The best way to program GPUs is face up to the reality that they are not the same machine as the CPU, write your kernels in separate files, and launch them manually, like in Metal, OpenCL, and D3D12, etc. These days we even have DSLs like Triton that make kernel writing much more ergonomic than anything you would hope to achieve in Rust.

37m agoHN ↗

Is this satire? D3D12 and Metal aren't any less proprietary than CUDA.

34m agoHN ↗

The best way to program GPUs is face up to the reality that they are not the same machine as the CPU, write your kernels in separate files, and launch them manually

Isn't that how CUDA code is normally written?

6m agoHN ↗

No. CUDA allows you to write all the code in a single file, and uses a preprocessor to split it back out and pass it through separate compilers, one for host and one for device.

33m agoHN ↗

You could also use Mojo, one language for all targets.

32m agoHN ↗

I began to lose interest after the acquisition. Have you been following along, are they still going to open source it?

27m agoHN ↗

I thought they already did and released the compiler source code under Apache 2.0.

25m agoHN ↗

The Mojo compiler has been open source for over a month now.

And the Mojo standard library has been open source for over a year.

It’s all open source. Go check it out!

21m agoHN ↗

Once you have allowed that proprietary cr*p into your C++ codebase

People have been doing that all the time for every kind of codebase. It's just part of the business. I don't see how it's worth having any emotions or opinions about it. Seems like you are wasting your energy.

Are win32 APIs proprietary? So you decide to use them, use a wrapper/UI framework, or don't develop for Windows. Easy choice.

Developing for embedded devices? So you read the manufacturers manual and implement based on the spec, use some sort of HAL if they are available, or you don't have a job. Even simpler.

7m agoHN ↗

CUDA is not an API, CUDA is a language, so you cannot make that comparison.

15m agoHN ↗

yeah, just write a stub/wrapper around it and abstract. it's the classic coupling problem. nothing to do with CUDA

7m agoHN ↗

Will it then be possible to query TJunc hotspot temps on linux?