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dj_axl

203 karma · joined September 30, 2010

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dj_axl··on Black hole singularity is a surface not a point
scoffs Well yeah everyone and their aunt knows singularities have 5 dimensions.
dj_axl··on AI Isn't Outthinking Mathematicians. It's Out-Remembering Them
So build a better proof/paper/technique search engine?
dj_axl··on Show HN: Woxi - Open-source Mathematica / Wolfram Language reimplementation
I'm guessing the other Parallel functions are implemented? I vote to include them all, from the comparison page ParallelSelect and ParallelCases are missing as of now. This would allow more multithreaded programming.
dj_axl··on What sort of maths are LLMs good at?
> Peter Scholze and Jakob Stix pointed out 8 years ago

Interesting read!

https://ncatlab.org/nlab/files/why_abc_is_still_a_conjecture...

dj_axl··on Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints
FWIW I know of a pharmacy network that's implementing AI. Not only does the AI make egregious errors like speaking in Spanish when the conversation is in English. It also has a limited context window for ground rules of 5000 tokens or less. So correcting all the various errors goes over the instructions limit. As a result if the implementation goes through it will be of poor quality. All I can think is that people with no technical expertise are making these decisions, it is easy for any techie to predict that AI of this level won't be capable.
dj_axl··on How to Train a Gen AI Kick Drum Model on Your Old Linux Desktop with 6GB VRAM
Modeled reverb yet no modeled compressor, hrmm, is compression not used on kick drums (or not a big part of the sound)?
dj_axl··on S&P downgrades Oracle to BBB – only one notch above junk level
They can rent out their AI infra to The Hyperscalers.
dj_axl··on Lossless GIF recompression via exhaustive search
Too big to exhaust... the concluding sentences of the article contain the details. "Hybrid search with pruning" is the current state of the codebase.
dj_axl··on F3
Paper mentions Parquet, ORC, Nimble, Lance, TSFile, Bullion, and BtrBlocks.
dj_axl··on My LSM tree was slower than a B-tree. Then I profiled it
> A 100-bit bloom filter holding 100,000 keys is saturated instantly. Every bit is set. It returns “maybe present” for every key you ask about — which means it filters nothing, and every read falls through to a full file scan.

Hahaha. (Seems like the bloom filter library isn't set for maximum false positive rate and/or to autoexpand.)

Edit: Actually there's a BloomFalsePositive setting, maybe it never gets used? Also maybe it's not a library and it's a custom implementation.

dj_axl··on Leaked financial docs show OpenAI is losing billions of dollars a year
Marketing might help at some workplaces, presumably that are dedicated to Microsoft, for example our network blocks Claude (and DeepSeek) and is slowly rolling out Codex team by team. They should encourage Amazon/AWS to market for them.
dj_axl··on Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? (2025)
> Let’s imagine the owner lowers the rent by 30% to fill the building.

Thought I'd comment with some concrete numbers. New buildings near me (West LA) are at $4100/month for a studio, where average rent in the area is $2300 for a studio, $2650 for a 1-bedroom. To fit in with "average" rent they'd need to lower 44% however 30% might be about right. Otherwise at 4% inflation wait 9 years? 1.04^9 = 1.42 ~ 100/(100 - 30).

dj_axl··on Show HN: Deconvolution – a Rust image deconvolution and restoration crate
Any denoising?

https://github.com/Twinklebear/oidn-rs

dj_axl··on Doing nothing at work
Thread.sleep(100000) everywhere until it breaks. Then lo and behold you have fought fires longly and bravely until midnight on Friday after the release. Don't ask me why it's rewarded, and, of course every now and then they switch to rewarding different things.
dj_axl··on Morningstar values SpaceX at $780B, half its IPO target
If the rule change goes through then SpaceX could be added to an index such as the S&P 500, where many (most?) pension funds invest. "S&P 500 has been considering a rule change to waive the earnings requirement and shorten the seasoning period for mega-cap IPOs like SpaceX." "Pension funds allocate 30% to 50% of their total portfolios to broad U.S. equities [in the form of index funds.]"
dj_axl··on Morningstar values SpaceX at $780B, half its IPO target
Revenue. (Or forecast revenue, take your pick.)
dj_axl··on Fast Factorial Algorithms
No mention of any of these!

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089396591...

dj_axl··on Oracle stock gains 36% to post best day since 1992, adding $244B in value
OpenAI contract, "Sept 10 (Reuters) - OpenAI has signed a contract to purchase $300 billion in computing power over roughly five years from Oracle".
dj_axl··on We can, must, and will simulate nematode brains
Just wire neurons (human or otherwise) to computers, and see what happens.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2025-03-05/cortical-labs...

dj_axl··on Ask HN: Where do seasoned devs look for short-term work?
Any niche? I mean, possibly large-scale data processing, yet I've seen people go more niche than that. In other words if your resume has 5+ years in one particular industry then that might be whom to target.
dj_axl··on Do AI companies work?
You're perhaps forgetting Waymo at $30B
dj_axl··on Tor’s Branding Pivot Is Going to Get Someone Killed
> diskless laptop with a USB live distro with no RW filesystem

Which distro? One known problem is that browsers still transmit their location. If the network and the laptop are hundreds of yards distant, that's an instant red flag. Once that problem is corrected, there may be unknown problems to deal with.

dj_axl··on Ask HN: Where do you go for civil discussion on the Internet?
Have an upvote. The "Note: It is allowed to cost money." reminds me that the $5 charge on MeFi filters out alot of noise. However, this doesn't necessarily promote an increase in quality. Much of the discussion can be, like Reddit, cute or snarky one-liner comments.
dj_axl··on Real talk from real computer science teachers
You're right about the pay for teachers. However if you look at the way it's worked out for adjunct professors at the college level, the part-time pay is even less, plus they miss out on benefits. If there's any high school teachers' union involved, I'd bet they'd be against allowing part-time teachers.

Once I chanced upon an ad for high school comp sci teacher. They were willing to waive the Master's degree requirement as well as the teaching credential requirement. As you note, the pay was ridiculously low, about 30-35% less than industry salary for a fresh-out-of-school graduate. Would have been nice though, for someone eager to teach but wanting to skip the 2-4 years of extra training.

dj_axl··on Large Companies Game H-1B Visa Program
> they're getting paid the same or more than existing software devs.

Ha. Look at some writeups of the SoCal Edison outsourcing, for example. U.S. citizens making $95K were replaced with H1-B workers earning $60-65K, and that's generously estimating the lower salaries. Tata and Infosys might pay their workers closer to $40-50K.

https://www.google.com/search?q=socal+edison+h1b+wages

dj_axl··on The Economist's US college rankings
> There seems to be a major issue with cost-of-living adjustments

Yep yep. Otis College of Art and Design "overperforming" for $42k salary is ridiculous. The title Junior Graphic Designer pays around $40k* in Los Angeles, where Otis is located. Therefore, the average for graduates is as-expected. *Source: Glassdoor.

dj_axl··on My Dark California Dream
> I tried the Metro, but it didn't go where I wanted to go somehow.

Metro rail is not complete coverage, however the extension out to Santa Monica (West LA) is opening early 2016. As you say, the buses get mired in traffic all too often.

dj_axl··on How the 'hoverboards' took off in spite of laws against them
I wish this were the law everywhere. It varies by jurisdiction. "Each city in California has its own rules about riding a bicycle on the sidewalk. Some cities allow sidewalk riding, some don’t. Check with your city’s municipal code." (http://la-bike.org/resources/california-bicycle-laws)
dj_axl··on Hitler's Drug Addiction
> I'm a little leery of articles like this that are so demonizing

Particularly when the article avoids comparison to either modern military drug usage, or allied military drug disbursement at the time. "British troops used 72 million amphetamine tablets in the second world war and the RAF used so many that "Methedrine won the Battle of Britain" according to one report."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alertness

dj_axl··on Ellen Pao Is Stepping Down as Reddit’s Chief
> I saw racist and sexist posts personally

Honestly Reddit in general could be taken as "racist and sexist" by an outsider. By an outsider. The humor tends to be sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek, over-the-top, and in-group. For example any references to /r/pyongyang can be written off, 99% of the time it's part of a dedicated running joke that's not intentionally malicious. Pao as Hitler is jarring? You seem naively unfamiliar with Reddit.

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