| ▲ | Five Years of Tinygrad(geohot.github.io) |
| 54 points by iyaja 4 hours ago | 32 comments |
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| ▲ | paxys 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Lots of words and weird analogies to say basically nothing. What is the status of the project? What can it do? What has it achieved in 5 years? But no, let's highlight how we follow the "Elon process". As a side note, whenever someone incessantly focuses on lines of code as a metric (in either direction), I immediately start to take them less seriously. |
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| ▲ | dewey an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Using lines of code as a metric for productivity is bad. Using it to show how simple something is, or how a refactor removed x lines of code that doesn’t need to be maintained any more isn’t such a bad thing I’d say. | | |
| ▲ | alphazard an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Yeah this is exactly right, if you can trust the contributors to not code-golf or otherwise Goodhart the LoC metric, then it's a reasonable measure of complexity. It doesn't work as well when you start mixing languages, or generating code. | |
| ▲ | selkin 36 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Less LOC also doesn't imply simplicity: just look at the demoscene, which often has the former but not the latter. | |
| ▲ | whilenot-dev an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | TFA includes a time measurement though, and 5 years for 18'935 SLOC doesn't scream quite "how simple something is". |
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| ▲ | jszymborski 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | From [0]: "When we can reproduce a common set of papers on 1 NVIDIA GPU 2x faster than PyTorch. We also want the speed to be good on the M1. ETA, Q2 next year." [0] https://tinygrad.org/#tinybox | |
| ▲ | piskov 38 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | He was able to run nvidia gpu on mac via thunderbolt with tinygrad. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/tiny-corp-su... — Check tinygrad’s twitter account for specifics if you want to catch up on progress |
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| ▲ | still-learning 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| >People get hired by contributing to the repo. It’s a very self directed job, with one meeting a week and a goal of making tinygrad better I find this organizational structure compelling, probably the closest to reaching 100% productivity in a week as you can get. |
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| ▲ | ttul an hour ago | parent [-] | | I wonder what happened to George’s old policy of requiring everyone to move to San Diego? | | |
| ▲ | georgehotz an hour ago | parent [-] | | That's comma.ai's policy since they make hardware and solve physical problems. The tiny corp has been hybrid (remote-first) since day 1 because it primarily writes open source software, and there's a long track record of success with remote for this kind of task. We have a few whole-team meetups in Hong Kong each year for 2-4 weeks, and there's a San Diego or Hong Kong office that anyone can work from as they choose. We also have a wide array of fancy multi GPU boxes that everyone on the team gets full access to (known external contributors can get some access also). I think many companies that were quick to embrace remote have walked it back, not everyone is capable of working productively remotely, nor are all types of work amenable to remote. |
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| ▲ | pa7ch 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Very weird to market this as subscribing to "Elon process for software" I remember when defcon ctf would play Geohot's PlayStation rap video every year on the wall. |
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| ▲ | spiderfarmer 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I hate it when ‘inspirational’ quotes are attributed to the person with the largest audience and not the people who came up with it, like in this case, the engineers at Lockheed’s Skunk Works. | | |
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| ▲ | alphazard an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > To fund the operation, we have a computer sales division that makes about $2M revenue a year. What's the margin on that? Do 5 software engineers really subsist on the spread from moving $2M/yr in hardware? |
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| ▲ | measurablefunc an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Is it really "Complex"? Or did we just make it "Complicated"? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY |
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| ▲ | alphazard an hour ago | parent [-] | | Programming a GPU in 2025 is complex, that might be because it has been made complicated, but regardless, it is not complexity that this project can control. The fact that it competes with PyTorch in so few lines speaks to the incredibly low incidental complexity imposed by Tinygrad. |
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| ▲ | mika6996 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| What would tinygrad replace if they continue to proceed like this? |
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| ▲ | piskov 42 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > tinygrad is following the Elon process for software. Make the requirements less dumb. The best part is no part. That’s not Elon. See Russian TRIZ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIZ |
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| ▲ | deburo 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| So this is all python? I bet Chris Lattner probably approached them. |
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| ▲ | zephen 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Lattner is a smart guy, but I think Mojo might be the wrong direction. Time will tell. History has not so far been kind to projects which attempt to supplant cPython, whether they are other Python variants such as PyPy, or other languages such as julia. Python has a lot of detractors, but (despite some huge missteps with the 2-3 transition) the core team keeps churning out stuff that people want to use. Mojo is being positioned "as a member of the Python family" but, like Pyrex/Cython, it has special syntax, and even worse, the calling convention is both different than Python, and depends on the type of variable being passed. And the introspection is completely missing. |
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| ▲ | timzaman 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Fell bad for geohotz. Such a lovely guy, i hope he strikes it right soon |
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| ▲ | vileain 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| [flagged] |
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| ▲ | dang 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html | | | |
| ▲ | mycodendral 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | the value is the directness, not implied origination not everyone cares about playing voldemort | | |
| ▲ | vileain an hour ago | parent [-] | | What is so aggrandizingly 'direct' about calling the system you are attempting to improve 'dumb'? |
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| ▲ | spiderfarmer 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | There are lots of bubbles where Elon is still king. Those bubbles are often void of deodorant. | | |
| ▲ | vileain 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Based on the response it appears HN is one such bubble. | | |
| ▲ | spiderfarmer an hour ago | parent [-] | | Elon spent billions to buy a platform and promote his tweets. He spent billions more to create a tweaked AI model that praised him like a mad king. He only has to spend a couple thousand a month to influence comment ranking on HN. |
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