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rllin

42 karma · joined April 25, 2013

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rllin··on Techniques for Training Large Neural Networks
"One weird trick" is still pretty much the first way to go for most recommendation systems that are large embeddings focused. see torchrec, nvidia's hugectr
rllin··on Treat Kubernetes clusters as cattle, not pets
really you should treat your entire cloud deployment (sans state where impossible) as cattle
rllin··on South Africa's lottery probed as 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 drawn
did nobody read the article lol

> The organisers say the sequence is often picked. But some have alleged a scam and an investigation is under way.

> It is extremely rare for multiple winners to share the jackpot.

that sequence happens, but multiple winners is rare

so the combination of them is the concern here

rllin··on Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993
yep demand side subsidies do not have good outcomes

supply side are a bit better

wrt cost disease

see how milk has remained the same price for decades

rllin··on The brilliance of All Gas No Brakes
spiritual successor

AGNB needs some time to grow into longer format

they're literally 3 dudes in an RV without a working toilet

if they had BBC money they would live up to Theroux 100%

rllin··on Effective Airflow Development
you only need two operators, the kubeoperator, the dataflow operator

and then every task is just a standalone, vertically scalable service on k8s or a giant horizontally scalable compute job

rllin··on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing
the thing is humans have most efficiently encoded (in detail) reality in text. humans already highlight what is worth encoding about reality.

for example, you can finetune gpt-2 to have an idea of sexual biology by having it read erotica. just like how you can have a model learn the same by watching porn. but it is much more efficient to read the text, since there is much less information that is "useless"

rllin··on The brilliance of All Gas No Brakes
AGNB is the spiritual successor to Louis Theroux

it's what Vice tried to capture but failed. parachute journalism works, only if you inject very little of yourself into it and have minimal framework.

rllin··on Google announces Pixel 5, Pixel 4A 5G, and Pixel 4A
anybody know if 5g is worth waiting for?
rllin··on VCs Are Destructive Predators
lol it is so rare for a company that goes belly up to hurt someone's career
rllin··on Stanford Student Claims to Run Bootleg Covid-19 Testing Lab
it's a specialized swab shortage
rllin··on Fast and Easy Infinitely Wide Networks with Neural Tangents
It really looks more and more like JAX is the internal winner after the tf 2.0 fiasco
rllin··on Cloud AI Platform Pipelines
not op...
rllin··on Cloud AI Platform Pipelines
google deployment manager. it has incredibly subpar support for other GCP services. all support interactions resort to them suggesting migration to Terraform. we do use it in production, but not without great headache.

this isn't an explicit kill-off, but certainly purposefully offering bad support

rllin··on Coders Automating Their Own Job
this is in a class of problems i've been thinking about recently

- usury

- patents

- copyrights

- land

- software as a service

the first 3 all have some slowly changing socially acceptable period of profit. and they are all enshrined in law. but this means there are also frameworks in place for adjusting this period of profit (lobbying, etc.)

the 4th is only capped by property taxes and sometimes with unintended consequences (cf. prop 13)

the 5th is unregulated and seems socially acceptable to have no definite end date due to a combination of (sometimes artificial) technical difficulty (need for support, e.g. RedHat, any other company based on FOSS) and slow addition of pithy features.

i'm not sure i have any conclusions, but I think this framework is useful because it allows us to examine it with an older moral framework rather than a more (post) modern marxist.

rllin··on Hire people who aren’t proven
not only does the industry not have a labor union, there's a culture of passion which is almost like having a negative union.

any time passion is involved, you are being paid less than market. cash is a more liquid currency and can in fact buy passion.

rllin··on Building a Treasury Bond Ladder
Responding in general to the meme of "but what is your time worth?"

people often underestimate their ability to change their own utility functions. If you're watching 4 hours of TV every night (or reading or w/e other "mental recharge" activity) simply change your utility function to let financial planning "recharge you."

The ultimate arb is changing your own utility function.

Obviously this may be harder or easier for some people, but it's a very learnable skill.

rllin··on Pandoc
frustratingly slow for word docs. antiword is better for those of you who wish to convert word docs en masse
rllin··on Show HN: BuzzFeed open source SSO
a bit ignorant in this area, but how is this functionally different than Google Cloud IAP?
rllin··on Python Fire – Generates CLIs from any Python object
we use this in production (flags for kube execs of python scripts)

it is bounds better than argparse and click. would highly recommend.

important to note here, that a lot of this is thanks to the python team's continued extension of the inspect module.

rllin··on Andy Rubin Puts Essential Up for Sale, Cancels Next Phone
The T-Mobile G1 you posted is probably the best phone of its time. I have not met a user of that phone who does not want to go back to the smooth keyboard feel.
rllin··on The Egg (2009)
This seems like such an odd response to me. The Martian is as far as you can get from hard sci-fi?

It seems like Andy writes exactly for movies. Heavy on scene and technicality details, but very, very scant on quality dialogue and character development.

rllin··on The Average Age and Years Served of Members of US Congress Every Year Since 1789
Why is this a priori bad? Take a look at how the short tenures of California congress has turned California way more populist than most people are comfortable with.

There are many things wrong with short tenures (not that there aren't things wrong with long ones). The main ones include turnover of associated staff who actually know what wheels to grease to get things done. Meanwhile the "figurehead" actual politician has no time to build up political capital with his colleagues.

rllin··on The Unnerving Existence of Teen Boss
It's increasingly looking like the biggest shift in our lifetimes is not sudden mass automation of the labor industry but the shift from a service industry to a content creation industry.

If you're not a content creator/owner, you're a content consumer. Content is the new rent seeking.

rllin··on Chinese Companies Are Buying Up Cash-Strapped U.S. Colleges
They have a known anti asian american bias not an anti asian bias. Asians pay full tuition.
rllin··on Continuous low-power music recognition
> The question of "what song is this" comes up maybe once a month at best, and apps like Shazam already exist and have much deeper databases to search through.

very bold anecdata claim.

I would love to see Shazam numbers as to the actual median frequency per month.

I love this feature on my Pixel 2. I glance at my phone at least 2-3 a day just for this feature. To me it adds another layer of separation from being tied to me phone. Previously pulling up Shazam would bait me into engaging with notifications I didn't need to engage with.

I do agree with the privacy concerns though.

rllin··on VLC media player 3.0.0 'WeatherWax' Release Candidate 3
chromecast!
rllin··on Making Millions by Distributing Pirated Movies
Have been working on something similar, do you mind explaining how you chose ad networks? and any other monetization hot tips?
rllin··on Ask HN: Writing cover letters for tech jobs
The request of cover letters in certain fields are to me a red flag.

It seems very useful in some fields which require the skills a cover letter shows off and could substitute for a screen or casual interview.

In many technical fields however, requesting cover letters usually suggests to me a lower quality in their hiring process. This undoubtedly bleeds over to my perception of the management, namely more into checking boxes than results.

rllin··on Choosy Eggs May Pick Sperm for Their Genes, Defying Mendel’s Law
I feel like this is a misunderstanding how strict Mendelian genetics is.

Most evolutionary theorists think more like physicists and do realize every trait is selectable.

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