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kirvyteoon Show HN: Supertree – interactive visualization of decision trees in Python

Is there any documentation? I am trying to understand why I have target1 and target2 in the same circle for both left and right outcomes.

kirvyteoon Omicron extensively but incompletely escapes Pfizer vaccine neutralization

There is something odd with the stats. If we look at individual age groups listed, the cases for unvaccinated is multiple x higher than fully vaccinated. Then if one looks back at "all ages", the cases per 100,000 people are almost the same. Is there a bug with the charts?

kirvyteoon Using VR to interact with your deceased child

This is heartbreaking. But I can imagine a scenario where a grieving billionaire pays a team to continuously generate new VR interactions, even "growing" the child to adulthood over the years.

kirvyteoon Setting up a home VPN server with WireGuard

Thanks for the tip. I have been sourcing for alternatives to ExpressVPN for China. Last year was pretty ok but on a recent trip, it had difficulty connecting 70% of the time and failed in multiple cities inland and on the coast. Seems like I need to setup my own now.

kirvyteoon Telomere shortening rate predicts species life span

The graphs on Fig. S2 doesn't seem to map well to the points. I would say these 2 are not related. To me, the mouse looks like the outlier.

kirvyteoon Firefox brings smooth video playback with the fastest AV1 decoder

Any updates on the free hw decoder by Google? I am hoping to test it on a FPGA (if possible)

kirvyteoon Going hungry affects children for their whole lives

I do this to my kids. I don't know if it helps. (The older one is 9 who eats almost everything and a younger picky eater who is 5.) Getting them to try a wider variety of food is often tough since it is easy to fall back on the usual stuff. Occasionally I have new types of food, I would make a small bitesize and use all the powers I have for them to take the first mouth. If they swallow it without tasting, they get a second mouth of it. They have to describe the taste to me precisely in simple terms, e.g sweet, chunky, sour, like apples etc. Often when they have a conscious bias, e.g. the younger one dislikes anything that resembles white creamy sauce, they will say it is "yucky". Yucky is not a taste descriptor. I sometimes add things they like e.g. bits of chocolate. My goal is to encourage them to focus on the taste and make connections like "this ugly piece of food will taste like chocolate since there is chocolate. Btw it is actually sweet as well". Basically, I am trying to address a unconscious bias in their imagination of the taste. It also helps to understand better what they really like and what is totally unacceptable. For example, taste-wise, tomatoes are off limits to my older one ... for now because you never know when it changes. :) Hope this gives you some ideas.

kirvyteoon Singapore Weighs Fate of Its Brutalist Buildings

Lol...I was waiting...

kirvyteoon We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly

If we can take "freer" out of the argument for a minute.. (because not everyone in the world places personal freedom on the same level of importance)

Better search results? Better quality of information for Chinese researchers and developers? Better road information? Or email? Cloud services?

kirvyteoon We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly

Has anyone thought about the effects of NOT having google search product and services in China? I read a lot of negativity about how it is ruining the culture and personal beliefs about freedom. Has anyone balanced it with what is the upside to users (not money for Google)?

kirvyteoon Jin Yong, the 'Tolkien of Chinese literature', has died

Don't get me wrong. I am sure it is a massively popular book.

But I have not found stats that break down the "150 million over 60 years". It was published on 1954 + 60 years = 2014. The movies are made in 2001. So what is the % of sales for 48 years versus the 14 years after 2001? I am not sure really.

kirvyteoon Jin Yong, the 'Tolkien of Chinese literature', has died

I get what you mean. Wheel of Time has its slow moments. But then the whole series had a really odd pace. The last 3 books after RJ passed away was too fast and too sudden.

kirvyteoon Jin Yong, the 'Tolkien of Chinese literature', has died

Thanks for the recommendation. I haven't read a fantasy book in a long. This looks like an interesting one.

kirvyteoon Jin Yong, the 'Tolkien of Chinese literature', has died

I am pretty sure Tolkien books were way less popular before the movies were made. I often see them gathering dust in the library. I will be honest. For someone used to reading fantasy novels from Robert Jordan, Raymond Feist, Anne McCaffrey etc, I find the pace of the books excruciatingly slow. The details are great and the imagination is impressive but it is painful to read... (apologies to LOTR fans)

kirvyteoon System76 on US Manufacturing and Open Hardware

> UK is land-banking and a tax system that encourages you to invest in land and leave it as wasteground.

How and why does that work?

kirvyteoon Spatial: A High Level Programming Language for FPGAs

Any Language -> LLVM -> FPGA / ASIC

This is much closer than you think. I am aware of quite a few parties embarking on this. LLVM is the common denominator.

kirvyteoon The cost of keeping Singapore squeaky clean

It is definitely a "cleaned" city. The level of cleanliness has gone now and litter has increased. Public awareness of this has gone down. If you know Singapore, there has always been a history of govt-led campaigns.

15 years ago, it wasn't like that. People bring their own tupperware to do take aways. All the cutlery were washed and cleaned. This meant more time and energy from the hawkers. In the name of efficiency, low cost, disposable plastic/styrofoam/chopsticks is a convenient solution, unfortunately.

kirvyteoon An FPGA-based In-line Accelerator for Memcached (2013) [pdf]

what synthesis settings have you found have the most impact?

The answer is - it depends. Unfortunately, we have not found a "golden" combination of settings yet. If you have a highly congested design, synthesis does help a lot, but not all cases. There are correlations between the settings, so if A is good, B is good, A+B could be bad. Seeds belong to a category of techniques that we classify as random. For example, for Vivado, although Xilinx removed the seeds feature, we created a technique to trigger randomness in the placement using a property of Vivado.

What we do is not new in the sense that settings exploration has always been around. But with cloud compute resources and ML approaches, it really enables timing closure and optimization methods in a cheaper and more disciplined fashion.

We are also very interested in users of OpenCL/HLS/C. The translated RTL is often not as optimized/readable as what an RTL designer will do if he/she does it directly in RTL. Our tool (InTime) can be a good boost to the performance of such RTL.

kirvyteoon An FPGA-based In-line Accelerator for Memcached (2013) [pdf]

I am the co-founder of Plunify. We have an ML software solution (InTime) that optimizes FPGA design by tuning the parameters of the compilation, i.e. synthesis, P&R. I don't know much about memcached accelerators but if it is a performance driven application, like HFT, I believe we can make it go even faster, i.e. increase the FMax. I read from your website that you are using Intel PSG devices. We often see designers using seeds to close timing or optimize the timing, but that is leaving performance on the table. For more details: https://support.plunify.com/en/2018/04/17/compare-timing-per...

Happy to talk more at kirvy@plunify.com if you are interested. Congrats on getting a seed round from Intel Capital!

kirvyteoon Why are diapers so expensive?

I used cloth diapers for my 2 kids. You save a lot of money, especially when they are less than 1 year old because it happens so frequently but it is just urine and liquid poop. Rinse and soak them in a pail of water with detergent for a few hours. It will be stain free. Wash in washing machine afterward once you accumulate enough pieces. Forget about ironing and boiling water. It is unnecessary. Since they are pretty thin, they dry quickly too. Reuse!

kirvyteoon NYT reporter: “81% ICOs were scams”

"· Gone Dead (pre-trading): Succeeded to raise funding and completed the process, however was not listed on exchanges for trading and has not had a code contribution in Github on a rolling three-month basis from that point in time."

I don't know ICO mechanics well but why is this a criteria? Can anyone explain?

*Edit: I mean the code contribution in Github portion

kirvyteoon The Robots Are Coming and Sweden Is Fine

I like the idea of a productivity tax. I feel the "least" productive activity should get taxed the most. E.g. rent should be taxed higher than work income. It doesn't make sense that the highest earner in a job should be taxed at the same rate as a person sitting back and waiting for rent. Not sure about Sweden but in Singapore, rental is added to your total income from your job and taxed as a total.

kirvyteoon Larry Ellison allegedly tried to have a professor fired for benchmarking Oracle

The EDA (Electronic Design Automation) industry is full of such clauses. Every software in that industry is selling based on its quality of results or faster processing time. Every tool claims 10x improvements but there is no way to verify it. To be fair to them, understandably designs are different and may yield different quality of results.

kirvyteoon Shenzhen is a hothouse of innovation

First of all, it is a complex place. All big countries are.

Creating an original product/idea is different from innovating upon an existing one. So is Google not innovative as they did not invent internet search? ApplePay is less innovative because Alipay (handled USD660B in 2012) was started in 2004? Or Wechat is not innovative because whatsapp was there first?

I am not Chinese but we sell software in Asia. In a smaller box, they have to be more innovative because of all the crap rules they deal with like Great Firewall. Sure, many of the copies are of low quality and pitiful. However, similar to the hindi word - jugaad, everyday innovations are made using whatever is available. In many ways, they are more flexible than the Japanese who defer more to standard practices and hierarchy.

Eventually some made it better than the forerunners. Wechat started as a messaging app but has outstripped whatsapp in terms of applications. It is so tightly integrated in everyday activities, i.e people pay for their daily groceries, buy mcdonalds, it has voice messaging way before whatsapp introduced it, withdraw sent messages etc.

I feel that the culture is only antagonistic towards people who don't like the political status quo, not business. Didi (uber), DHL type of services are illegal at the beginning but gained legitimate status eventually because of its usefulness to the society. The propaganda is not helpful but I don't see it as any different from religious propaganda. If you can ignore it, you are fine. (Well, some people claimed religious people are less innovative, but that is another discussion)

kirvyteoon Ask HN: How do you set prices?

If you read the book "Thinking fast and slow" (excellent book btw), one of the concepts is a baseline price. For example, if nobody knows the worth of your product, they tend to compare with an alternative - the closest competitive product or substitute. This gives you an idea of what you can charge. That defines your product price range. You cannot avoid the comparison because everyone googles, and if they can't find the equivalent, they will find the closest. This approach is not really scientific but I find that I can relate to this very easily then reading "X% says they will pay $100 for this" in a survey. Hope this helps.

kirvyteoon Catching a Flight? Budget Hours, Not Minutes, for Security

The list of stuff to check for just keeps getting longer. First were the belt and shoes, then the laptop, then liquids. The latest seems to be portable batteries. Every time a crazy guy hatches a new plot with plans to hide dangerous stuff in everyday items, the list will get longer. Someone needs to work on prioritizing that list or reducing it.

In Asia, where there are more bullet trains, I often pick the trains over flight if it is within 3 hours time difference. (Factor in the wait time and the distance to airport) Bigger seats, leg room and you don't need to off your electronics during "takeoff"!

kirvyteoon The language of productivity is now being used to advocate napping on the job

I visit our Chinese chip design customers such as Huawei, Fiberhome quite a bit. The napping starts after their lunchtime, and it is more than 30 minutes. They start to break for lunch around 1130am. Since food is provided at a canteen, lunch is a fairly quick affair. Around 1230pm, lights are off. Some people have a foldable bed, like a camping bed, tucked under their desks, others nap on their seats. There are no dedicated rooms for napping. People simply nap in front of their desks. Others prefer to surf net, go for a walk or even continue to work. You don't have to nap "Nap time" usually range between 1 to 1.5 hours. Often, vendors like us excuse ourselves so that we don't disturb them. Even phones are off. I would say only large companies have this culture. I don't think the smaller companies do that. Again my data points limited to chip design companies.

kirvyteoon Bank Hackers Steal Millions via Malware

"But the largest sums were stolen by hacking into a bank’s accounting systems and briefly manipulating account balances. Using the access gained by impersonating the banking officers, the criminals first would inflate a balance — for example, an account with $1,000 would be altered to show $10,000. Then $9,000 would be transferred outside the bank. The actual account holder would not suspect a problem, and it would take the bank some time to figure out what had happened."

A naive thought...if they leave with the exact amount of money (left) in the bank, should it be seen as just "illegal inflation", rather than seeing it as a theft. Someone made a gain but nobody made a loss in any case. Banks have always created more liquidity officially through loans, except that it is legal.

kirvyteoon Entrepreneurship the Illness - A day in the life

I have a part time staff for my startup who is a close friend. We both have kids. He has a day job and a similar schedule as yours. But the difference here is that he is happy with his day job (small company where everyone is almost like family). He dedicates time to help me out between 12 to 2am. He drowns in coffee daily, and tells me about how many years he has left to push himself. I am extremely grateful for his involvement and I constantly try to pry him away from his day job.

I guess my point is that one can be happy with whatever schedule(illness) they are forced to live it. It sounds like you only have 1 problem - the day job. Change it if you need one. If you enjoy your Mondays and you can pick your wardrobe, you found the right job. Good luck!

kirvyteoon Chinese RFC proposes separate, independent, national internets and DNS roots

It doesn't make sense to do this just to block sites. They are already doing it.

Can it be a fallout from the SOPA fiasco? Assuming best intentions :)- It seems like running your own autonomous root DNS enables them to stay up even if the domain name is taken down by domain hosts.