Hacker News: querez

New comment by querez in "I made a kernel 2.2x faster. It made my training loop 3x slower"

querez — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 04:30:17 +0000

I didn't know about the static cache, that was a nice learning for me. The rest is pretty obvious /too lengthy for everyone who ever did profiling/benching. Also, the text has a lot of LLM slop-phrases in it that need cleaning up ("the X is structural", "the Y is real", "the gap is Z")

New comment by querez in "The AI Layoff Trap"

querez — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 06:37:29 +0000

AI doesn't need to be AGI to be useful. Surely, you've tried Claude Code before and found it more helpful than Clippy?

New comment by querez in "BarraCUDA Open-source CUDA compiler targeting AMD GPUs"

querez — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 22:59:10 +0000

> The project owner strongly emphasize the no LLM dependency, in a world of AI slope this is so refreshing.

The project owner is talking about LLVM,a compiler toolkit, not an LLM.

New comment by querez in "D Programming Language"

querez — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 06:59:48 +0000

That's not how I remember it. Excitement for python strongly predated ML and data science. I remember python being the cool new language in 1997 when I was still in high school. Python 2.4 was already out, and O'Reilly had put several books kn the topic already it. Python was known as this almost pseudo code like language thst used indentation for blocking. MIT was considering switching to it for its introductory classes. It was definitely already hyped back then -- which led to U Toronto picking it for its first ML projects that eventually everyone adopted when deep learning got started.

New comment by querez in "We mourn our craft"

querez — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 19:50:58 +0000

I think you're underestimating what AI can do in the coding space. It is an extreme paradigm shift. It's not like "we wrote C, but now we switch to C++, so now we think in objects and templates". It's closer to the shift from assembly to a higher level language. Your goal is still the same. But suddenly you're working in a completely newer level of abstraction where a lot of the manual work that used to be your main concern is suddenly automated away.

If you never tried Claude Code, give it s try. It's very easy to get I to. And you'll soon see how powerful it is.

New comment by querez in "Trinity large: An open 400B sparse MoE model"

querez — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 12:53:21 +0000

I assume TPU TCO is significantly cheaper than GPU TCO. At the same time, I also assume that market demand for GPUs is higher than TPUs (external tooling is just more suited to GPU -- e.g. I'm not sure what the Pytorch-on-TPU story is these days, but I'd be astounded if it's on par with their GPU support). So moving all your internal teams to TPUs means that all the GPUs can be allocated to GCP.

New comment by querez in "Trinity large: An open 400B sparse MoE model"

querez — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 04:43:47 +0000

> No Gemini was not "entirely trained on TPUs". They did hundreds of experiments on GPUs to get to the final training run done entirely on TPUs. GCP literally has millions of GPUs and you bet your ass that the gemini team has access to them and uses them daily.

You are wrong. Gemini was definitely trained entirely on TPU. Of course your point of "you need to count failed experiments, too". Is correct. But you seem to have misconceptions around how deepmind operates and what infra it possess. Deepmind (or barely any of Google internal stuff) runs on Borg, an internal cloud system, which is completely separate (and different) from gcp. Deepmind does not have access to any meaningful gcp resources. And Borg barely has any GPUs. At the time I left deepmind, the amount of tpu compute available was probably 1000x to 10000x larger than the amount of gpu compute. You would never even think of seriously using GPUs for neural net training, it's too limited (in terms of available compute) and expensive (in terms of internal resource allocation units), and frankly less well supported by internal tooling than tpu. Even for small, short experiments, you would always use TPUs.

New comment by querez in "The Thinking Game Film – Google DeepMind documentary"

querez — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 19:13:30 +0000

I grew up in the Internet at that time, and it's certainly not how I type. So you might want to be more specific about which sites or subcultures you think this style is representative of?

New comment by querez in "Bird flu viruses are resistant to fever, making them a major threat to humans"

querez — Fri, 28 Nov 2025 07:47:40 +0000

The sentence is constructed, weirdly, but it's meant to say that fever is "killing off unknown foreign bodies"

New comment by querez in "Shai-Hulud Returns: Over 300 NPM Packages Infected"

querez — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 12:49:48 +0000

Arguably both Go and Python also have great stdlibs. The only advantage that JVM and .NET have is a default GUI package. Which is fair, but keeps getting less and less relevant as people rely more on web UIs.

New comment by querez in "Nvidia DGX Spark"

querez — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 21:45:54 +0000

I don't think "inference" as a verb has become technical slang. At least not in my bubble.

New comment by querez in "Nvidia DGX Spark"

querez — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 07:01:28 +0000

"developers can prototype, fine-tune, and inference [AI models]"...

shouldn't it be infer?

New comment by querez in "If you're remote, ramble"

querez — Sun, 03 Aug 2025 11:01:07 +0000

I think what is distinct in this proposal is that there are n 1:n channels

New comment by querez in "Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update"

querez — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 15:24:21 +0000

Why? I fail to see how using chromium as basis for other apps has impact on who has the power to innovate in the browser space?

New comment by querez in "A lost decade chasing distributed architectures for data analytics?"

querez — Thu, 22 May 2025 06:26:41 +0000

> The geometric mean of the timings improved from 218 to 12, a ca. 20× improvement.

Why do they use the geometric mean to average execution times?

New comment by querez in "Why Bell Labs Worked"

querez — Mon, 12 May 2025 12:23:20 +0000

As someone who worked at both Brain and DeepMind: their cultures were very different. Brain was bottom-up, open-field research whatever you want/care for. DeepMind was much more narrowly focused and massively more top-down.

New comment by querez in "Why Bell Labs Worked"

querez — Sun, 11 May 2025 22:29:13 +0000

>> The freedom to waste time. The freedom to waste resources. And the autonomy to decide how.

> As the article notes, several companies (Apple, Google, etc.) could (currently) afford to fund such a lab, but there is no way their management and shareholders would approve.

Google did set up such a lab. The mission of Google Brain was literally to hire smart people and let them do work on whatever they want. ("Google Brain team members set their own research agenda, with the team as a whole maintaining a portfolio of projects across different time horizons and levels of risk." -- https://research.google.com/teams/brain/). Unsurprisingly, Google Brain is the place that originated the Transformer that powers the current AI craze (and many, many, many other AI innovations).

New comment by querez in "Google announces Sec-Gemini v1 a new experimental cybersecurity model"

querez — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 06:50:52 +0000

I guess it depends on use-cases. I use ChatGPT a lot for "trivial" questions a la "how do I uncommit a specific file in my last git commit" or "how do I paste from one PIL.Image into another one". In the past I would have to search google, click on the StackOverflow link, and then parse that whole page. Asking ChatGPT to give me just the snippet is faster, so doesn't get me out of my flow as much.

New comment by querez in "Google announces Sec-Gemini v1 a new experimental cybersecurity model"

querez — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 22:04:36 +0000

I use a very simple custom system prompt (not on my work machine at the moment, but essentially something along the lines of "for technical questions, please be concise and to the point, and when asked for code, omit explanations and emit just the code itself unless I ask for explanations"), and it does wonders.

New comment by querez in "Tesla sales drop 35% in San Diego County"

querez — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 12:38:19 +0000

So, with regard to Greenland, he specifically refused to rule out military action [0]. Which in diplomatic protocols comes very darn close to threatening a military attacks.

As far as Canada goes, Trump's national security advisors is on the record [4] saying he doesn't think there's any plans about this. Which is also an extremely uncertain way of talking about military action about your closest neighbor. Trump has repeatedly talked about making Canada the 51st state [1], and called Trudeau a "Governor" [2]. Here's a New York time article summing up the types of threats/attacks Trump made wrt. Canada[3].

[0] https://apnews.com/article/trump-biden-offshore-drilling-gul... [1] https://apnews.com/article/how-canada-could-become-us-state-... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-mocks-pr... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/us/politics/canada-trump-... [4] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-national...