Hacker News Reader

ma2rtenon EleutherAI One Year Retrospective

I think they do ask you what you are planning to use the resources for, what your qualifications are and make a decision to allocate and how many tpus based on that.

ma2rtenon How useful was the Netflix Prize challenge for Netflix?

That is not the origin of the term. It was coined by Jim Cramer for fast growing stocks.

ma2rtenon YouTube channel “TechLead” creator has created a crypto and pulled the rug

I completely disagree I think that those people are extremely hard to identify, because they are able and willing to game the interview process. I also don't think that people like that deliver positive value to the company.

ma2rtenon SafeDollar ‘stablecoin’ drops to $0 following DeFi exploit on Polygon

I thought that was conventional wisdom.

ma2rtenon Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

Employers don't prefer university graduates because universities offer better vocational training. Universities teach scientific thinking which makes students better employees. Universities don't teach specific skills but they teach the underling principles.

ma2rtenon Nvidia Canvas

There is also an online version here:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/research/ai-playground/

ma2rtenon “Please don't waste maintainers' time on your KPI grabbing patches”

These small patches create some overhead for maintainers. He actually said in the follow up message that grouping them together is fine.

Please at least merge all those small fixes into a larger patchset, and with a good cover letter to explain the reason (and auto-tool to do the change if possible) for all the involved maintainers, so that all of us are on the same page.

ma2rtenon Andrej Karpathy (Tesla): CVPR 2021 Workshop on Autonomous Vehicles [video]

The talk wasn't part of the main conference but it was part of a workshop, which was just one out of tons of workshops.

http://cvpr2021.thecvf.com/workshops-schedule

ma2rtenon Ask HN: Do software engineers have leverage?

According to this random Spanish website I found and translated using Google translate, it's done for plural words.

https://definicion.de/rrhh/

ma2rtenon I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney who does work for YC and startups. AMA

Can you be more specific? What advice did he give you that was wrong? Was there any reason he stopped communication other than the application being rejected?

ma2rtenon Netherlands must ban cryptocurrencies immediately: CPB head

"Hasekamp stated that several countries took steps to curb cryptocurrencies [...] The Netherlands is lagging behind. "

It seems like The Netherlands would be the first western country to do so.

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

ma2rtenon DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

I'm more in Yann LeCun's camp who called unsupervised learning the cake, supervised learning the icing and reinforcement learning the cherry on top of the cake.

ma2rtenon DeepMind says reinforcement learning is ‘enough’ to reach general AI

Maybe, but that is not helpful in the sense that it doesn't guide research in how to get there.

ma2rtenon The top-ranking HTML editor on Google is an SEO scam

The useful thing would instantly become useless because people would start gaming it.

ma2rtenon MUM: A new AI milestone for understanding information

According to the scaling laws it scales on a log scale.

ma2rtenon Google says Rowhammer attacks are gaining range as RAM is getting denser

When I initially read the headline I thought for a second that it meant storage capacity is getting smaller. But then I realized that that doesn't make sense and it's referring to process size.

ma2rtenon OpenAI Announces Funding for Startups

Keep in mind that the former president of YCombinator is the CEO of OpenAI. That might help explain a move like this. Also recently a lot of people left Open AI at the same time. There was some speculation that they are going to start a new startup. Maybe this is a way for OpenAI to be able to invest in them.

ma2rtenon OpenAI Announces Funding for Startups

Similarly, Peter Thiel once made a case that if Google ever paid a dividend it would be an admission that they are no longer a technology company and are instead a bet again innovation in search.

That seems silly to me. Google is not paying dividends right now, but they are doing stock buybacks which is basically the same. However, Google also has 100k+ employees there are only so many people who can work on innovation in search at the same time.

ma2rtenon Ask HN: Is it better to generalise or specialise as a developer?

Scale brings different challenges but most of them have been solved already and been abstracted away (at least at Google). From what I have seen most people work on implementing some kind of business logic.

ma2rtenon YouTube approves ad by Belarusian gov with journalist from hijackd Ryanair plane

You can also pay for Google One to get human support.

ma2rtenon I Was Robbed in San Francisco While the Cameras Rolled

I actually don't know if the crime rate in SF is higher than elsewhere, but if it is I think cause is the opposite. It's what happens when capitalism goes unchecked. Cost of living is on the rise while wages are stagnant. Crimes are often committed by people who are desperate. Also there are no facilities for people who are mentally ill, who will go on to commit crimes.

ma2rtenon Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) to be retired on June 15, 2022

That reminds me of a story where in 2009 some rouge youtube employees put up a warning that IE6 would be deprecated:

https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6

ma2rtenon Subsidies Awarded to Amazon: at least $4.04B and Counting

I think an Amazon datacenter is going to have a few more people than that because it's so huge. I just looked at the satellite image of their Ashburn datacenter in Google Maps. I saw maybe like 50-ish cars.

ma2rtenon Try This One Weird Trick Russian Hackers Hate

They would likely notice once they fire up a disassembler or debugger.

ma2rtenon Work from Home and Productivity

Or maybe people need to have more formal meetings because they can’t have informal conversations like they would in the office.

ma2rtenon Online, mug shots are forever – some states want to change that

That’s already the case. You can file a foia request.

ma2rtenon Enhancing Photorealism Enhancement

I think it's worth exploring multiple approaches to a problem. Maybe this neural network approach can be improved upon and it will also generate photorealistic looking images but have other advantages such as less effort on behalf of the game developer or less compute.

ma2rtenon Current RNA vaccines protect against worrying coronavirus variants

I've been reading HN for over a decade and I've seen comments from people with a huge variety of backgrounds. Many people switch fields later in life or they might just be interested in technology/startups.

ma2rtenon FBI subpoenaed Apple for data of Sci-Hub founder

I'm wondering why it's only 38%. They charge a lot and mostly work with volunteers. It should not cost 62% of what they charge to run a website to host some pdfs.

ma2rtenon Why I Work on Ads

I have also noticed this in other HN discussions. Everyone seems to assume everyone else agrees with their view on the topic and there is never any open discussion about it. Usually people just talk past each other and it's never pointed out.