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whoisburbansky

2,216 karma · joined July 22, 2014

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whoisburbansky··on Let's put Tailscale on a jailbroken Kindle
The only (tiny) issue I've had with Tailscale on Kobo has been that the tailscale daemon prevents me from using the Kobo in Mass Storage Mode while it's active, so I have to disable/quit KOReader to be able to plug it in again, which is admittedly not frequently warranted anyways.
whoisburbansky··on ReMarkable Paper Pro Move
OTOH, koreader on the Scribe post jailbreak is easily the best large format PDF reading experience I've ever had.
whoisburbansky··on U.S. government takes 10% stake in Intel
Profits from the stake lower taxes that would otherwise be levied on you? Of course that’s moot if the deficit isn’t something being taken seriously.
whoisburbansky··on 2025 Hiring Pause
No, of course, but is the primary focus of the bulk of the staff educational or patient care? Seems disingenuous to pretend it's the former just to make a point.
whoisburbansky··on 2025 Hiring Pause
I mean, if you tack on a hospital to a university, the correct denominator to compare against is "patients served," not "students educated," at least for the portion of the headcount you're sticking in the numerator.
whoisburbansky··on The Illustrated DeepSeek-R1
https://planetbanatt.net/articles/mla.html this is a great overview of how MLA works.
whoisburbansky··on The Illustrated DeepSeek-R1
The key idea of Latent MHA is that "regular" multi-headed attention needs you to keep a bunch of giant key-value (KV) matrices around in memory to do inference. The "Latent" part just means that DeepSeek takes the `n` KV matrices in a given n-headed attention block and replaces them with a lower-rank approximation (think of this as compressing the matrices), so that they take up less VRAM in a GPU at the cost of a little extra compute and a little lost accuracy. So not caching, strictly speaking, but weight compression to trade compute off for better memory usage, which is good because the KV matrices are one of the more expensive part of this transformer architecture. MoE addresses the other expensive part (the fully-connected layers) by making it so only a subset of the fully-connected layers are active at any given forward pass.
whoisburbansky··on The Illustrated DeepSeek-R1
Foundations don't change much with "the speed of development"
whoisburbansky··on Firebase bill is usually $50, but I was surprised to see a $70k bill in one day
Somebody else pointed out that it's likely just an alert, not a hard limit, which checks out given Firebase documentation (https://firebase.google.com/docs/projects/billing/avoid-surp...), which has no mention of hard limits and explicitly warns you that an alert won't stop anything.
whoisburbansky··on Character amnesia in China
If the texts were incomprehensible to parents, how were they comprehensible to their intended recipients?
whoisburbansky··on Anatomy of a credit card rewards program
It plays out this way because anything anyone buys with a credit card, reward card or not, ends up costing 2-3% more than it would otherwise have, because of interchange fees. If you have a rewards card, the CC issuer turns around and gives you, say, half of that back (1% cashback on everything) and keeps the rest. It's kind of like a tax break that you only qualify for if your credit score is above a certain threshold, but you have to pay into regardless of income/credit score.
whoisburbansky··on 44% of All Single-Family Home Purchases Were by Private Equity Firms in 2023
The linked to Atlantic article literally makes the opposite point; the subtitle there is "Blaming the housing crisis on hedge funds and private equity may be easy, but it’s dead wrong."

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/01/housing-cr...

whoisburbansky··on The Seamless Communication models
It depends on what your goal is; for some tasks it's possible that getting the AI to do it is best, but, e.g. the existence of auto-pilot doesn't mean that hobbyist pilots wouldn't benefit from/enjoy exercising the same skills manually.
whoisburbansky··on Ketamine's effect on depression may hinge on hope
Wait are y'all the folks who moved together cross-country so you could be neighbors with your siblings?
whoisburbansky··on Room temperature, ambient pressure superconductivity – this time for real?
With the regular magnets, you'd have to hold them in places, since otherwise they'd rotate in place and fall back down, attracted to each other.
whoisburbansky··on Everyone Was Wrong About Reverse Osmosis–Until Now
Wait, where do the other two units of water go?
whoisburbansky··on Prince Rupert's Drop vs Molten Glass [video]
Cool call-out there, I hadn't realized praseodymium and neodymium are actually short for praseodidyium and neodidymium ("green" and "new" didymium, respectively). Having all three of those words multiple times writing out this comment, I totally understand why the extra "id" was eventually dropped for the elements' formal names.
whoisburbansky··on Flipper Zero banned by Amazon for being a ‘card skimming device’
This post kind of worked out great for me, since they've been out of stock on their main website every time I've tried to get one, but it looks like they're back now and I was able to make an order. Wouldn't have realized without this post reminding me to go check, so talk about silver linings, haha!
whoisburbansky··on Programmer interrupted: The cost of interruption and context switching (2022)
Huh, I really thought `shufti` was a typo in this context, and one that sounded funny to my Middle Eastern ears, so I was surprised to discover it's a real word, albeit with Middle Eastern origins [1].

1. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/shufti

whoisburbansky··on The 'buy now, pay later' bubble is about to burst
How does the floor rate make it a less terrible credit card?
whoisburbansky··on Mercedes is the first automaker to offer Level 3 self-driving in the US
How does one power active RF emitters on miles and miles of road surface? The vast majority of surface level roadway doesn’t even have powered illumination in most places, which leads me to think the lowest hanging fruit for this type of thing would be something passive, like the RF equivalent of cats eyes.
whoisburbansky··on Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
What language(s) do you do most of your work in?
whoisburbansky··on Ask HN: What is the best income stream you have created till date?
What are you invested in that dividends net you meaningful cashflow?
whoisburbansky··on Lobster and snow crab fisheries search for alternative baits
Nutrition isn't the same as calories; you can have a more efficient diet in terms of recommended daily values of macro and micro nutrients without having to rely on "products" higher up the food chain.
whoisburbansky··on Finding the Darkest Pencil
The article addresses the differences you point out.
whoisburbansky··on iPhone 14 Pro Camera Review: Scotland
Do you really think that the intersection of folks who are going to notice that images they've shot are over-processed/sharpened and folks who know how to get ProRAW files into Lightroom isn't a circle?
whoisburbansky··on Ask HN: Boring but important tech no one is working on?
I credit a huge portion of my current career and general math and reading skills to having a couple CDs of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JumpStart games early in my childhood. It's a pity I can't think of very many things that I would be comfortable pointing my own kids to and hope for the same effect.
whoisburbansky··on OpenAI API pricing update FAQ
Why wouldn’t they just charge more for the better, improved GPT-4?
whoisburbansky··on The world map that reboots your brain
It’s called path dependence; same reason that the Space Shuttle boosters’ width is constrained by the width of two horses’ rear ends put side by side.
whoisburbansky··on Book Review: 1587, a Year of No Significance
What makes you think they are related?
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