Hacker News: shoyer

New comment by shoyer in "Stacked PRs are now live on GitHub"

shoyer — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 20:30:15 +0000

When will this support "trees" of pull requests, with dependent changes? In my experience with stacked changes (from Google), it is often the case that changes do not stack up as a linear history. I imagine that would especially be the case these days with parallel coding agents.

Show HN: Coordax: Coordinate Axes for Jax

shoyer — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 22:36:14 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/neuralgcm/coordax

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46154131

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by shoyer in "How to scale your model: A systems view of LLMs on TPUs"

shoyer — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 23:50:51 +0000

The short answer is that tracing is way, way easier to implement in a predictable and reliably performant way. This especially matters for distributed computation and automatic differentiation, two areas where JAX shines.

AST parsing via reflection means your ML compiler needs to re-implement all of Python, which is not a small language. This is a lot of work and hard to do well with abstractions that are not designed for those use-cases. (I believe Julia's whole language auto-diff systems struggle for essential the same reason.)

New comment by shoyer in "Launch HN: Silurian (YC S24) – Simulate the Earth"

shoyer — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 19:40:29 +0000

Glad to see that you can make ensemble forecasts of tropical cyclones! This absolutely essential for useful weather forecasts of uncertain events, and I am a little dissapointed by the frequent comparisons (not just you) of ML models to ECMWF's deterministic HRES model. HRES is more of a single realization of plausible weather, rather than an best estimate of "average" weather, so this is a bit of apples vs oranges.

One nit on your framing: NeuralGCM (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07744-y), built by my team at Google, is currently at the top of the WeatherBench leaderboard and actually builds in lots of physics :).

We would love to metrics from your model in WeatherBench for comparison. When/if you have that, please do reach out.

New comment by shoyer in "Loading a trillion rows of weather data into TimescaleDB"

shoyer — Tue, 16 Apr 2024 23:59:19 +0000

ERA5 covers 1940 to present. That's well before the satellite era (and the earlier data absolutely has more quality issues) but there's nothing from 170 years ago.

New comment by shoyer in "Infrared may no longer be a punchline, as IEEE approves 9.6Gbps wireless light"

shoyer — Mon, 17 Jul 2023 07:07:23 +0000

Not sure if $199 is reasonably priced in your opinion, but the Nest Wifi Pro supports 6E.

New comment by shoyer in "I'm quitting my PhD"

shoyer — Mon, 23 May 2022 18:06:18 +0000

+1 one of most common mistakes for PhD students is picking a project based on research interests rather than the adviser. I believe it is relatively uncommon to speak with former students of an adviser, but this is something that everyone entering a PhD should do.

Finding a good mentor -- someone whose values you agree with and who sets you up for career success -- is far more important than working on any particular topic of interest. The world is full of interesting research topics, and very few PhDs work in the precise area of their PhD research for their entire career.

New comment by shoyer in "Modern Pandas (Part 2): Method Chaining"

shoyer — Sun, 01 May 2022 17:29:06 +0000

df.pipe(f, ...) is just syntactic sugar for f(df, ...). Nothing slow about it.

New comment by shoyer in "We’ve got a science opportunity overload: Launching the Wolfram Institute"

shoyer — Thu, 07 Apr 2022 15:32:51 +0000

I work on weather prediction, both with traditional simulation methods and machine learning. I have not seen any examples of cellular automata used for useful predictions in this space.

New comment by shoyer in "It’s time to admit quantum theory has reached a dead end"

shoyer — Wed, 09 Mar 2022 07:39:45 +0000

I guess "quantum physicist" can mean either an academic credential or a job title. In my case, I have the former but no longer the later. I finished my PhD nine years ago and no longer work in the field.

New comment by shoyer in "It’s time to admit quantum theory has reached a dead end"

shoyer — Wed, 09 Mar 2022 00:39:31 +0000

As former quantum physicist, I find it little troubling to read "quantum theory has reached a dead end" in specific reference to the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Most quantum physicists could not care less about how quantum mechanics is interpreted when it makes highly accurate quantitative predictions, and there are still plenty of interesting open problems for quantum theory (e.g., related to the practical design of algorithms and hardware for quantum computers).

This article also misses what is likely the leading interpretation of quantum mechanics by actual quantum physicists, namely that the measurment problem is solved by decoherence (the quantitative theory of how classical states emerge from quantum states):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_problem#The_role_o...

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2011.049...

New comment by shoyer in "UBS Acquires Wealthfront for $1.4B"

shoyer — Wed, 26 Jan 2022 22:53:57 +0000

My experience was that robo-investors are great until you need something special. Then they can become rather painful.

Exmaple: I got divorced last year. Betterment took weeks of time and many phones calls until they were able to figure out a way to divide our assets evenly, without a large difference in cost basis. Their automatic algorithm for dividing accounts just didn't know how to handle it.

If UBS figures out how to offer a higher level of service on top of robo-advising, that could be a real win.

New comment by shoyer in "Intel's $20B Ohio factory could become world's largest chip plant"

shoyer — Fri, 21 Jan 2022 17:56:30 +0000

Foxconn once said it would spend $10B building a factory in Wisconsin. Now the claim is $672M -- over next six years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_in_Wisconsin

We'll believe it when it happens.

New comment by shoyer in "5% of 666 Python repos had comma typo bugs (inc V8, TensorFlow and PyTorch)"

shoyer — Fri, 07 Jan 2022 19:28:06 +0000

Most of the "bugs" caught here (including in TensorFlow and in my own project, Xarray) seems to actually be typos in the test suite. This is certainly a good catch (and yes, linters should check for this!), but seems a little oversold to me.

New comment by shoyer in "GCC: The customer has nuclear weapons. They do not do “bounty”"

shoyer — Thu, 30 Dec 2021 02:08:32 +0000

NERSC is part of DOE’s Office of Science. Nuclear weapon development is done by DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which sponsors labs like Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos. It definitely isn’t NERSC, NNSA has its own dedicated supercomputers for weapons work.

New comment by shoyer in "Regularized Newton Method with Global $O(1/k^2)$ Convergence"

shoyer — Wed, 08 Dec 2021 01:04:23 +0000

> Neural networks need completely different optimisation methods, and there is no practically useful application of any of the Newton or Quasi-Newton methods for their optimisation.

I don't think this is quite fair. There are several variations of 2nd order methods, notably KFAC and Shampoo, that seem to quite effective for large-scale neural network training, e.g., see the intro of this paper for an overview: https://openreview.net/forum?id=-t9LPHRYKmi

New comment by shoyer in "Physics Student Earns PhD at Age 89"

shoyer — Tue, 02 Nov 2021 05:29:49 +0000

A PhD is certainly not for everyone (or even most), but it's rather unfair to say that it does not teach any employable skills. Even PhDs who go on to work in completely unrelated fields learn how to make progress on poorly defined problems and to advance the frontier of human knowledge. And a PhD is also of course a hard prerequisite for career in academia or research.

As for that survey of PhD students, I suspect you would get similarly dismal reviews of parenthood from parents of 0-5 year old children -- but of course that doesn't mean that nobody should have children! A better survey would ask PhD students how they feel about the experience well after they are done with it.

New comment by shoyer in "Windy.com"

shoyer — Fri, 10 Sep 2021 21:25:02 +0000

ECMWF makes probabilistic forecasts, in the form of an ensemble of 50 IID examples. So this is mostly matter of Windy figuring out how to put that information into their UI.

New comment by shoyer in "Implicit Differentiation"

shoyer — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 06:52:44 +0000

The general case of implicit differentiation, i.e., for functions y(x) defined by the constraints F(x, y(x)) = 0, where x and y are vectors, is solved by "implicit function theorem": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_function_theorem

∂ y(x) = -(∂_1 F(x, y(x)))^{-1} (∂_0 F(x, y(x)))

where ∂ denotes partial differentiation.

This turns out to be an incredibly useful identity for calculating derivatives. No matter how you calculated a solution to the equation, computing derivatives is "just" a matter of performing a linear solve.

If the calculation you performed is a solution to solving an equation, implicit differentiation is typically much faster, less memory intensive and more accurate than calculating derivatives by differentiating through your solver. For examples, you might check-out a recent paper I co-authored with colleagues at Google: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.15183

New comment by shoyer in "New Science aims to build new institutions of basic science"

shoyer — Thu, 13 May 2021 23:03:05 +0000

This looks really interesting.

Does anyone know where the money is coming from? I'm guessing foundations like Schmidt Futures? It seems like financing is the crucial challenge for getting anything like this off the ground.