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wmeddie

133 karma · joined March 16, 2010

Living and working in Japan. Interested in doing Deep Learning with statically typed languages and getting them models into production.
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wmeddie··on Destruction of nuclear bombs using ultra-high energy neutrino beam (2003) [pdf]
I don't think I've ever seen a sci-fi rendition of this concept. It means that an advanced enough alien species could come to a planet, from orbit disable all nuclear weapons and power plants, then start their invasion. Not as cinematic as a Death Star planet explosion, but sounds like a good tactical move for a galactic empire.
wmeddie··on Common Lisp: An Interactive Approach (1992)
I think you can argue that the pervasive use of notebooks is close enough for learning at least, but it's not as good for real development. The edit-and-continue features in Visual Studio for C# (and similar feature in Java) is the closest non-lisp thing we have these days. The languages aren't made for it like lisp are though, you have to do full restarts all the time.

I still wish there was an environment more like Smalltalk for Python.

wmeddie··on Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?
Exactly. This is the case for my children.
wmeddie··on Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?
Definitely read https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... if you haven't yet.

Then think about what are the requirements your system needs when it comes to names.

Does the app need to know what a user's name is at all or is a username enough? Does it need to distinguish the family part of their name for anything?

A thing I think is the most general is to just have a Full Name field (min length 1 and either John Doe or something cute as default) And a Nickname or Display Name field if your app needs to show something on screen.

wmeddie··on Ask HN: Is it just me or GPT-4's quality has significantly deteriorated lately?
Yes, people really need to know that unless you are using the browser plugin, you really shouldn't ask it questions like this. (A good rule of thumb I think is if you can't expect a random person on the street to get the question right without looking it up, you shouldn't expect GPT-4 to get it right either.)

Unfortunately for this question, even using the browser plugin it wasn't able to get the answer: https://chat.openai.com/share/6344f09e-4ba0-45c7-b455-7be59d...

wmeddie··on NEC’s Forgotten FPUs
All good questions.

1) It is a custom instruction set, you can rean the ISA guide over at https://www.hpc.nec/documentation

2) The main difference in simple terms is that AVX instructions have a fixed vector length (4, 8, 16 etc). With the SX the vector length is flexible so it can be 10, 4, anything up to the max_vlen (up to 256 on the latest ones). Essentially the idea is you have a single instruction that can replace a whole for loop. Without a good compiler though that means you have to re-write your nested loops.

3) There's currently two options when it comes to the compiler, you can use the proprietary NCC or use the open source LLVM fork NEC has. NCC is less compatible than GCC/Clang (particularly modern C++17 is problematic) but has a lot of advanced algorithms for taking your loops and rewriting them and vectorizing them automatically. The LLVM-fork currently supports assembly instruction intrinsics but they are still working on contributing better loop auto-vectorization into LLVM.

4) Porting software is not terribly difficult to get working, but quite a bit harder to get performing very well depending on the type of workload. Since the Scalar core is pretty standard, you can almost always take regular CPU code and get it running (unlike GPU code in general). If you don't leverage the vector processor though, the performance you get will be nothing special, especially at 1.6GHz. Most of the software made for it starts off as being CPU code and is then modified with pragmas or some refactoring to get it running with good performance on the VE. In almost all cases the resulting code still runs on a CPU just fine. One example of a project that supports both in a single code-base is the Frovedis framework[1].

I think the chip deserves a little more interest than it does. It's one of the few accelerators that you can 1) Buy today, right now 2) Has open source drivers [2] 3) Can run tensorflow [3]. The lack of fp16 support really hurt it for Deep Learning but it's like having a 1080 with 48 GB of RAM, still lots of interesting things you can do with that.

[1]: https://github.com/frovedis/frovedis [2]: https://github.com/veos-sxarr-NEC/ve_drv-kmod [3]: https://github.com/sx-aurora-dev/tensorflow

wmeddie··on NEC’s Forgotten FPUs
I am currently working with these. Anything you'd like to know more about?
wmeddie··on Japan Turns to Coal After Closing Nuclear Power Plants
One thing this article doesn't cover which was a big part of this decision was nuclear waste. Nobody wants nuclear waste sites in their prefectures. There was a plan to use breeder reactors, but that hasn't gone anywhere, and the waste is just piling up at the reactor sites with absolutely no place to dispose it. When the mayor of Osaka even hinted at making an underwater waste site the backlash was huge. I doubt any other politicians will step up after that (nor will their parties allow it). So with waste being in this deadlock state for decades, there's just no way forward for nuclear here.
wmeddie··on Ask HN: What is your ML stack like?
As someone slightly involved in the Deeplearning4J[1] project it always surprises me that more people don't consider this option.

[1]: https://github.com/eclipse/deeplearning4j

wmeddie··on How to Use User Mode Linux
Brings back memories. My first VPS back in 2003 used UML and it worked great. You could also run it inside Windows as well. Could even get GUI apps running by running Xming on your Windows desktop using CoLinux (http://www.colinux.org/?section=screenshots).
wmeddie··on Smartphones and Dematerialization
I also agree that this estimate is way off, but I think the idea is to think of the total energy use of the phone when you include the energy used by the servers that provide the services you use in apps. That is much harder to measure. Luckily Google, Facebook and Twitter invest a lot in energy saving at their data centers so it's one of the leanest ways of using compute power. I think that even when you put that energy into the equation, it's still nowhere near a refrigerator.
wmeddie··on Fast key-value stores: An idea whose time has come and gone
Systems like Erlang/OTP, Akka, Orbit and Orleans/Service Fabric are built on an actor model where domain objects of the system (e.g. Users, Accounts, Invoices, etc.) exist within the cluster and have a an address so they are like having a bunch of mini servers. These servers typically keep their state in memory so they can respond to query messages quickly. Plus the application can unload idle (or no longer necessary) actors and restore their state when they are needed again. It's very similar to the Linked in-memory key-value idea mentioned in the paper.
wmeddie··on Pock: Display macOS Dock in Touch Bar
This is pretty great. Only I wish it only showed when I clicked on the desktop (Since Finder does nothing else with the TouchBar) or swipe up from the bottom. Parallels actually does this same thing (minus swiping) for the task bar in Windows guests but switches to app specific bars when you open Office or a browser. I'm in the camp that finds the TouchBar really awesome. Never used function keys (except F5) but I use the TouchBar all the time in IntelliJ, iTunes, Word/Excel and it's great in PowerPoint when scrolling to just the slide you want.

I also love the clicky feel of the keyboard so maybe I'm just special...

wmeddie··on Buying into the Emacs Platform (2018)
Aquamacs (http://aquamacs.org) get's it tabs from somewhere...
wmeddie··on Neanderthal vs. ND4J – Native Performance, Java and CPU
Is there a guide for getting neanderthal running with MKL on Windows? I tried my best but I'm not smart enough to get passed the require statement.
wmeddie··on Michelangelo: Uber’s Machine Learning Platform
Skymind's SKIL does this. (I work on the team.) You don't have to send it your data though, you can just install it inside your system and have it connect to the data source or stream to train models (optionally doing hyper-parameter search), deploy them to REST servers and monitor their performance.
wmeddie··on MacBook Pro
More capacity and with one less display to drive. It should definitely last significantly longer.
wmeddie··on Ask HN: To those who became fluent in a second language, what did you do?
I know English, Spanish and Japanese. I started studying Japanese in college and I live and work in Japan now. Structured lessons were fundamental in becoming fluent but when I was here I sang a ton of Karaoke whenever I could. It really helped my pronunciation and vocabulary. Definitely recommend signing to learn language.
wmeddie··on I've Been Waiting For The Oculus Rift, But Now It's Sitting In My Closet
VR headsets that are attached to big PCs are very much a solo-thing at the moment. I can understand wanting to play a multi-player game like Halo while visiting a friend's house.

I got my Oculus Rift a few weeks ago and absolutely love it. Practically use it every day. Lucky's Tale was surprisingly good, and I can no longer Elite: Dangerous without the headset.

There's not enough software at the moment. I still want to see a good flight simulator and Altspace-like spaces with actual things to do with people.

wmeddie··on Announcing SQL Server on Linux
Entity Framework. Microsoft's high-level ORM for .Net.
wmeddie··on Vapor: a type-safe web framework for Swift
Except AppCode.
wmeddie··on Flux is the new WndProc
Angular is very similar to the MVVM style of GUI programming that's popular in Microsoft's XAML-based libraries (e.g. WPF, Silverlight, WinRT and now UWP). Which I think is interesting because that's where they ended up. Modern windows programming doesn't involve writing WndProc functions anymore.
wmeddie··on MVC is dead, it's time to MOVE on (2012)
For anyone wondering how Chinese/Japanese/Korean input works interms of DOM events check out the W3C's working draft of the IME API [http://www.w3.org/TR/2013/WD-ime-api-20130815/]. Specifically the sequence diagram near the end of the page.
wmeddie··on Fukushima: Your Days of Eating Pacific Ocean Fish Are Over
A quick calculation on Wolfram Alpha shows that it would be 292,000,000 L Which would fill 116 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
wmeddie··on Sublime Text Plugin: Activate & reload Chrome with a keyboard shorcut
It's a little known fact that you can easily make these kind of keyboard shortcuts globally by making a Service. Here's how to make a global service that reloads the browser:

  1. Open Automator
  2. Select Service
  3. Search for run Applescript
  4. Copy and paste one of the following Applescripts
  5. Change the Service receives selected drop down list to "No input" 
  6. Save the service  (Automator will ask you what to name it)
You can then find the service under "Services" inside the Application's Menu.

You can also assign it to a global shortcut by:

  1. Open the Keyboard section in System Preferences
  2. Find your service under the Services list
  3. Click the service to reveal the Add Shortcut button
  4. Type the shortcut (Like Command+Ctrl+R)
Applescript for Safari:

    on run
      tell application "Safari"
        do JavaScript "window.location.reload()" in current tab of window 1
        activate
      end tell
    end run
Applescript for Chrome:

    on run
      tell application "Google Chrome" to tell the active tab of its first window
        reload
      end tell
      tell application "Google Chrome" to activate
    end run
wmeddie··on Notch's Livestream for Ludum Dare 21
He said he was at 17,000 viewer hours. I'm not sure what plan he's using but if it was the professional one that'd be

17,000 * $0.27 = $4590!

wmeddie··on Why I am not worried about Japan’s nuclear reactors
True, but the reactors aren't full of light water anymore, they are pumping sea water into them.
wmeddie··on Ask HN: Best book you read in 2010 and briefly why
"Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices" By Peter Drucker

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0887306152

In Japan the book “What if the Female Manager of a High-School Baseball Team read Drucker’s ‘Management’" (By Iwasaki Natsumi) is incredibly popular. So I decided to read the original Drucker book and see for myself. Drucker's historical perspective by itself is interesting enough to warrant checking this book out. Although the advice is more focused on management in large companies, I think it lays a good foundation for those of us lacking MBAs.

wmeddie··on The Most Expensive Cities in the World
Tokyo is up to number 2? No wonder I'm constantly poor.

Been thinking about this lately though, it looks like Tokyo is home to more Fortune 500 companies than any other city. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_Global_500#2009_breakdo...

So it might be the best place for a B2B start-up.