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FractalNerve

201 karma · joined July 15, 2014

Frankfurt/Germany – Contact: https://tny.im/114

Pursuing my M.Sc. Thesis in Computer Science in Deep-Learning and Data-Science-based Process Automation. Highly motivated and curious about: CS, AI, PHYS, MED and IT

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FractalNerve··on Lensless camera creates detailed 3-D images without scanning
This makes the Holographic_imager a reality, hooray!

[1] http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Holographic_imager

To me this is the most major breakthrough I've heard in the recent years, which can and will hopefully affect everything. Using the extra CMOS Chip on your flagship smartphone will allow for taking 3D and soon Holographic pictures!

How Amazing! I remember there was an AI trained to turn 2D pictures into 3D [2], combining that with the NPU Chip on smartphones can truly make this happens very soon.

[2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4904298/The-A...

FractalNerve··on Using Java 9 Modularization to Ship Zero-Dependency Apps
I didn't understand the article, can someone explain what it means for java development, please??

Will we be able to create runtime-less executables that are fully dependency free? That would be awesome to write a bootloader in Kotlin or any other Java Synthax Substitute.

FractalNerve··on LLVM patch to fix half of Spectre attack
Wasn't Intel's transactional CPU Memory the solution, but it also failed to to bugs?

Sorry for quoting wikipedia, but I'm not at school, hah! [1]

'''' TSX provides two software interfaces for designating code regions for transactional execution. Hardware Lock Elision (HLE) is an instruction prefix-based interface designed to be backward compatible with processors without TSX support. Restricted Transactional Memory (RTM) is a new instruction set interface that provides greater flexibility for programmers.[13]

TSX enables optimistic execution of transactional code regions. The hardware monitors multiple threads for conflicting memory accesses, while aborting and rolling back transactions that cannot be successfully completed. Mechanisms are provided for software to detect and handle failed transactions.[13]

In other words, lock elision through transactional execution uses memory transactions as a fast path where possible, while the slow (fallback) path is still a normal lock. ''''

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_Synchronization_...

FractalNerve··on LLVM patch to fix half of Spectre attack
Wasn't Intel's transactional CPU Memory the solution, but it also failed to to bugs?
FractalNerve··on LLVM patch to fix half of Spectre attack
> they didn't have the cycles to write everything down!

hahaha that was a good pun! Do you have a link to Jann Horns personal blog or Github? I've not never heard of him before.

FractalNerve··on LLVM patch to fix half of Spectre attack
> It may even be time for dedicated kernel cpus/cores.

Oh yes, I agree! One needs to be able to phycically (un)lock the "kernel fpga" like a door without remote capabilities, except for server cpu's. Or whatever chip designers believe is a good "physical kernel embodiment" other than fpga.

EDIT: I know it's not really clever, but I would really enjoy hearing any solutions that doesn't try to fix it at the hardware level.

FractalNerve··on Tracking friends and strangers using WhatsApp
I'm using an xposed mod to continually be online on WhatsApp, even when my phone's screen if off. Would this thwart such attacks? I mean it would be an anomaly, but other than that I don't know what other information you could get, except the last Online/Offline never changing.

It confuses my friends though, who write me more at night times than usually, luckily though I've a DnD mode that saves me from waking up. (confuses gf too)

FractalNerve··on My Sudden Synaesthesia
hmm, I'm not sure but I think there are many people with hidden synaesthesia like you, especially other forms that we don't know yet. Or there are different types of synaesthesia-like neurological phenomenons. Unsure if the government/doctors or schools should help you use/detect these or not.

I didn't think about this, but does feeling a smell or scent in different emotional strengths also count to synaesthesia?

FractalNerve··on Google Pixel Buds are wireless earbuds that translate conversations in real-time
Depends on whom you take a photo off, where and from where. It's a complicated matter juristically, but the morale is easy. Don't take a photograph of someone visible in your photo without their consent. If so, at least don't upload it anywhere public or online.

In Germany there's a law giving you the copyright on your own photo[1], it's difficult in the USA and less difficult in other countries[2]

EDIT:

Voice recordings are practically illegal in the public without consent in Germany[3] and also in the USA [4][5].

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[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recht_am_eigenen_Bild_(Deutsch...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photography_and_the_law

[3] https://dejure.org/gesetze/StGB/201.html

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_recording_by_civil...

[5] https://www.rcfp.org/browse-media-law-resources/digital-jour...

FractalNerve··on Google Pixel Buds are wireless earbuds that translate conversations in real-time
Is all voice in a room with a person wearing Google Buds transmitted to the cloud??

Isn't that prohibited and eavesdropping onto unsuspecting citizens?

I mean it's not just temporarily processed and immediately deleted afterwards. That's Google trying to get WiFi SSIDs, (Satellite, Street, Indoor, Face, Object) Pictures, Voices, real-time Geo-Location of consumers and whatnot.. it's getting off the hand..

I was shocked when I first discovered that my "ok, Google" conversations were stored in the cloud indefinitely with a badly designed and hidden Web-UI that allows "deletion" (whatever that legally means with Google-speak).

FractalNerve··on Google Pixelbook – A High Performance Chromebook
Yes, but that's the definition of "false and deceptive advertisement", isn't it?

I'd wish for someone to sue a giant corp. so that a law can stop other mega corporations from doing deceptive advertisements. Just like factualized "health-benefits" on supplements were prohibited unless proven right via 'a study (?)' as a gateway.

$999 for a much underpowered Sony Vaio like Subnotebook is too much! You also BUY the strongest VENDOR-LOCKIN made into a product ever, the "Google-Ecosystem". Allow installation of any OS, then we're good, but until then, don't say it's a notebook or laptop. It is not!

As a sidenote, using "false" as a strawman as in "fake-news", thus allowing government to "silence false voices" should be stopped. Censorship, illegalization, demonization are the enforcment of rules made for a minority onto the majority and we know why this is bad for a healthy 'governence of a country'.

FractalNerve··on Darwin-xnu: The Darwin Kernel
You've incredible search skills! Thank you very much =))
FractalNerve··on Darwin-xnu: The Darwin Kernel
wow, interesting! Where can I find your project?
FractalNerve··on Open-Sourcing Vespa, Yahoo’s Data Processing and Serving Engine
I thik basing this on PostgresSQL was wrong now and believe that a meaningful approach at creating a Vespa alternative yourself is basing this on a Content-Adressable-Storage[1] and adding a DB-Layer ontop (ie. using AUFS).

It would have following properties: decentralized, distributed, resilient, highly-available, software-defined storage & retrieval system.

According to http://vespa.ai/#featurematrix:

        FEATURE	                    VESPA	ELASTIC SEARCH	RELATIONAL DATABASES
        ACID transactions			                •••
        Optimized for analytics		        •••	        ••
        Optimized for serving	    •••	        •	        ••
        Scalable	            •••	        ••	        •
        Easy to operate at scale    ••	                        •
        Text search	            •••	        ••	        •
        Machine learned ranking	    •••	        •               2.1.2) - 2.1.4)	
        Middleware logic container  •••		                1.4)
        Live reconfiguration	    •••	                        1.2)
And yet I've to admit that even if the Github repository looks quite chaotic, making an alternative, even using existing technologies would be big feat.

Initially I would've chosen PostgresSQL as a base, but the "HA-Layer" is something that shouldn't be decoupled and not a later thought. That's why CAS is a much better form of integration. Also integrating the PostgresSQL Engine into a zfs kernel extension ie. would be a mess. And integrating the database engine into a a distributed p2p algorithm would only add compatability issues an no real advantages.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_storage#Op...

PS: Clever aquisition by Docker! "Infinit.sh is a content-addressable and decentralized (peer-to-peer) storage platform that was acquired by Docker Inc." And in my eyes one of the best implementations and easiest targets that allow adding a database-layer ontop.

FractalNerve··on Open-Sourcing Vespa, Yahoo’s Data Processing and Serving Engine
> How else could you solve what Vespa does using Rust, Go, or C/C++ libraries?

Let me try myself answering my own question, I hope someone hops in and tells me where I'm wrong or how else to improve :)

     1) Get PostgresSQL exntensions via "package manager" pgxnclient
     1.1) pg_bouncer - For connetion pooling
     1.2) yoke - As a high-availability cluster manager with auto-failover and automated cluster recovery
     1.3) prestodb.io - Distributed SQL query engine for pgsql
     1.4) pglogical - Logical streaming replication for using a publish/subscribe model
     1.5) pg_lambda - To create your own AWS (meta) Lambda
     1.6) pg_strom - To offload tasks to the GPU
     1.7) zombodb - To utilize full-text searching via indexes backed by Elasticsearch
     2) Put all together with pglogical and presto to seperate GPU/CPU intensive tasks.
     2.1) "Build Missing Middleware" - To design/fuse a query visually that combines multiple backends
     2.1.1) Create a binary data-stream by integrating pg_lambda, pg_strom, presto and zombodb
     2.1.2) "Build Missing Middleware" - A tensor processing extension to use ML Model evaluations
     2.1.3) "Use Missing Middleware" - For data-processing via Machine-Learning models
     2.1.4) "Use Missing Middleware"- To output ML processed results into the database
     2.2) Partition these queries using "pg_lambda + middleware" to create accelerated and fused query results
So what's missing to create a Vespa alternative using existing technologies is everything in Point 2) if I'm not mistaken. Torrent based replication isn't exactly neccessary, except at Twitter/Facebook scale, but if you reach that stage you can hire a libtorrent author.
FractalNerve··on Open-Sourcing Vespa, Yahoo’s Data Processing and Serving Engine
So the upsides of Vespa over Elasticsearch are speeding up the rate at which it scales? Ah, that seems reasonable for a company this size, but is there something in there that's of use for Startups?

This blog post shows how Elasticsearch was used to reindex a 136TB dataset with 36B documents[1], so I'm unsure exactly where except for Google/Yahoo Scale companies Vespa is of use. I would like to understand howto utilize it though without adding an umnanagable complexity.

EDIT: Maybe a Vespa Cloud startup, that abstracts the management and makes "Scalability as a Service" by utilizing other Cloud providers.

--

[1] https://thoughts.t37.net/how-we-reindexed-36-billions-docume...

[2] http://docs.vespa.ai/documentation/vespa-quick-start.html

FractalNerve··on Open-Sourcing Vespa, Yahoo’s Data Processing and Serving Engine
May I ask some stupid questions? :/

I don't quite get the diagram of the Vespa Architecture. Is Vespa a middleware between database engine and query parser? This is what puzzles me.

If so, are there other such middlewares available for ie. PostgresSQL that allow hooking "Query Templating Models" (that is it?) generated via Machine-Learning Models? Is it way more complicated than that, or did they overengineer the problem into a monolith? EDIT: Looking at https://github.com/vespa-engine/vespa it seems that it is overengineered, or maybe it consists of individual micro-components like node.js, hmm more questions :(

Is GraphQL such middleware or lower-level?

Does Vespa replace custom Glue-Code between Backend and Frontend that generates such query-sets for content ranking/positioning?

Or what exactly does Vespa solve? I'm sorry, I've read the article, but can't say, yep that's what it is!

EDIT: How else could you solve what Vespa does using Rust, Go, or C/C++ libraries? A very simple or general direction would be immensely useful to understand Vespa =) The project makes the simultanous impression of an immense engineering feat and at the same time a huge code debt.

FractalNerve··on China Blocks WhatsApp
What are the downsides for 1) China and 2) chinese citizens from an objective PoV?
FractalNerve··on Survival of the Prettiest
I am very sorry, I wish english was my mother language or I had better writing skills. But you can catch me up off HN, I'd be glad to talk and listen to a fellow mind :)
FractalNerve··on Survival of the Prettiest
>> mathematical notation is often clean and expressive, while programming language and its string-of-chars constraint makes for much more difficult to understand notation.

Yes, it's clean, if you know all symbols. But it's an unnatural mental burden. We think in patterns and structures. Our language should be similar, because what we express with language is unavoidably self-similar.

I'm gratefull for all the replies, as it seems to underline that this thought resonates strongly. Notation hinders understanding and the farther away symbols deviate from structures we use everyday, the stronger. Even though I personally prefer Unicode/Pictograms, it can't be that we have to reinvent Notation evertime that subsums recurring structures in programming, mathematics, physics, chemistry and every other conciously disconnet field in the same way. Because of universal properties I don't know about.

Yes, field specific notation has it's local and inherent beauty, but the price is too high! We can't fix education globally, at least not at this stage of our development. Thus we should drop efforts put into keeping Notations diconnect. It will widen the knowledge gap between the systemically uneducated majority stronger and stronger.

A solution? Biomimicry has always been our strongest weapon! I think nature is also far ahead in adopting a universal and often times visual language, we only acknowledge when we become isolated experts in a narrow sub-field, such that the language reveals itself.

It's acceptable to have rich symbols, if we can't get an universal notation based on a better generalizing (structural?) representation instead. I guess some of you may think about a more readable form of set-theory, others of geometric computing or mathematical manifold theory. Whatever it is that makes nature so efficient in reusing sub- and system-languages via controlling structures is what we should also define, understand, formalize and adopt throughout all fields via government backed efforts. I believe this is more important than I can currently imagine for our long-term future. An universal language, able to describe not only other languages, but also defining properties of complex systems, that's so alien it might work.

I think I've unknowingly stated a probably open mathematical problem. But can't put my finger on it. Can someone help?

PS: Sorry for coming late, deadlines coupled with a awfully slow laptop...

FractalNerve··on Survival of the Prettiest
I really like your thinking and believe that there is an eminent truth behind it. Such that loose social connectedness naturally procreates the development of such proxies as a form of stabilization mechanism.

What I'd really like to understand and see visualized are the non-linear social dynamics presented in manifold theory.

FractalNerve··on Survival of the Prettiest
Math's Syntax and 'universal' language is a great barrier that unlocks the world's knowledge. Applied scientific fields take almost 10-20 years until they sieve/diffuse the knowledge, due to this barrier. (In my perception at least)

I wish math used a pythonesque and popular alternative language, so that very low- or high-level 'assumptions' weren't blocking a greater audience from participating in the field. Although I'm familiar with it, I find it sometimes a little too elitist, because almost every symbol requires an explanation, before it can be used. Javascript and Python have this great balance, I feel is urgently needed in Maths.

FractalNerve··on China orders Bitcoin exchanges in capital city to close
I think parent means that china avoids the risks of using theoretically subversive decentral foreign technologies, is this right?
FractalNerve··on JSLinux – Run Linux or other Operating Systems in your browser
wow, this is really insanely fast, great share!

I currently use Joey for Reddit and OpenGur for Imgur.

FractalNerve··on Drone Building 101
Hi Nathan, thanks for the writup, highly appreciate you taking an HN/AMA :)

What about the "Bayang Toys 9x", do you have better suggestions today? Because GearBest's armada of similar drones make it hard to choose a great drone for an outsider [1]. I think there are three folks who are in the majority, that aren't professional hobbyists.

Those who want a) great office+outdoor drones for under '$69', b) very fast drones with cameras for under '$249' c) high-altitude aerial drones with stablized cameras for under '$349'

Can you suggest drones that fit into these categories? =)

--

[1] https://www.gearbest.com/rc-quadcopters-c_11333/

FractalNerve··on How to Make Python Run as Fast as Julia (2015)
That's impressive! What does fusion mean? I've heard fusion multiple times and I've the feel that fusion (in haskell at least) is something very advanced that's not really thought. Can you explain?
FractalNerve··on Intel Announces Movidius Myriad X VPU, Featuring ‘Neural Compute Engine’
Thank you for the great answer Nick, that's the best summary I could've hoped for!

So in summary:

 ⇒ low power, high speed inference on x86 CPU 🡺 Intel Movidius

 ⇒ low power, high speed inference non x86 🡺 NV Jetson

 ⇒ low power, low speed inference 🡺 RPi and similar

 ⇒ high power, high speed inference 🡺 GPU(s)

NVidia Jetson is the obvious winner, if there is no viable alternative, however Jetson is quite expensive and therefore I can't go that route. I want to speed up training & inference. eGPUs are more or less affordable, but low power training & inference at medium or low-cost would strike me as a clear winner.  

 

Sorry for the late answer, nonetheless, even though I didn't get an alternative DSP that offers similar advantages as Movidius, I'm still grateful for your insightful comment.

FractalNerve··on Intel Announces Movidius Myriad X VPU, Featuring ‘Neural Compute Engine’
>> Movidius ⸺ Legitimately I have no idea why they paid so much for a glorified DSP. But then again, so are most "Deep Learning Processors" right now.

Curious, do you know alternative "DSPs" able to achieve similar results for Deep-Learning, Computer Vision or Machine-Learning algorithm acceleration?

I would highly appreciate a real answer, because I intended to buy one of these movidius "sticks". And further accelerate the Laptop with an eGPU.

FractalNerve··on Interview with Ken Thompson (2011)
Not sure if it was used in Stuxnet, but an OOC compiler already exists [1] :)

[1] https://ooc-lang.org/

FractalNerve··on Titan in depth: Security in plaintext
Hi BlueGate010 :)

your name reminds to IBM. Is Titan your internal weapon against the NSA?

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