Hacker News: singhblom

New comment by singhblom in "Bend: a high-level language that runs on GPUs (via HVM2)"

singhblom — Fri, 17 May 2024 21:44:51 +0000

It also has "Not yet" implications ...

New comment by singhblom in "Meta Llama 3"

singhblom — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 10:47:25 +0000

All anglophone. I'm guessing privacy laws or something like that disqualifies the UK and Ireland.

New comment by singhblom in "The Ozempic Plateau"

singhblom — Sun, 21 Jan 2024 19:17:37 +0000

But they have, right? Wegovy works really well. Ozempic is off label for weight loss only in the sense that it is the semaglutide drug that is marketed for diabetes and that it therefore isn't sold at the same high dose as Wegovy.

New comment by singhblom in "Swedish court sides with Tesla over blocked licence plates"

singhblom — Mon, 27 Nov 2023 19:36:15 +0000

That's not what the article says that the court found though. It says that the Transport Agency needs to find another way of delivering the plates. The case was not against the postal service.

New comment by singhblom in "Extreme parkour with legged robots"

singhblom — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 08:01:30 +0000

Dogs have more joints, one for the knee where the femur meets the tibia and one for the ankle where the tibia meets the tarsal bones. If you just have one single joint in the hind legs you probably want to be able to push off as easily as possible, so the lower one makes more sense.

New comment by singhblom in "We don’t need a third party. We need ranked choice voting"

singhblom — Sun, 02 Oct 2022 16:15:29 +0000

You could require candidates to publicly disclose their ranking of the other candidates before the election. If they have to lock in their preference a few days before voting day that in itself would be informative for voters.

New comment by singhblom in "Northvolt assembles first lithium-ion battery cell at Swedish gigafactory"

singhblom — Thu, 30 Dec 2021 12:55:54 +0000

At least for the steel industry stuff quoted in OP the electricity consumption is mostly to produce hydrogen gas. The gas will then be stored in giant underground chambers and after that used in the steel production. This works extremely nicely with wind power since the electrolysis decouples the electricity consumption from the steel production. This means that the steel plants will act as stabilizers and modulators of the electricity prices in the whole region to a certain extent (together with the hydro plants and batteries presumably).

New comment by singhblom in "Deep reinforcement learning is a waste of time (2019)"

singhblom — Sat, 10 Jul 2021 19:54:07 +0000

Aren't actor critic algorithms very close to GANs already? You have a generator/actor/policy that produces data and a discriminator/critic/q that says if the data is good or bad. The critic trains on the data generated by the actor and some extra info given by the user (rewards or example data) and the actor learns from the signal given by the critic.

New comment by singhblom in "Zhou Youguang, creator of the Pinyin writing system, has died"

singhblom — Sun, 15 Jan 2017 21:50:10 +0000

I thought 花 and 鼻 were ambiguous in most romanizations - at least I would write it as "hana" in all romanizations I can think of, yet the pitch accent differs. No?

New comment by singhblom in "Zhou Youguang, creator of the Pinyin writing system, has died"

singhblom — Sun, 15 Jan 2017 21:34:34 +0000

There was Russian influence, but maybe not for all the letters. Pinyin 'q' is based on Russian 'ч' if I recall correctly.

New comment by singhblom in "Universal Basic Income and the New Corporatist Democrats"

singhblom — Mon, 15 Aug 2016 13:41:42 +0000

I don't think anyone would ever argue that a government should do things it shouldn't. The most common disagreement is not if the government should do more than it should, but what exactly it should do. :P

New comment by singhblom in "PEP 526: Variable declaration in Python"

singhblom — Thu, 11 Aug 2016 10:43:17 +0000

I don't know about this. My feeling from working with Typescript and Javascript is that the type hints really help people understand what is happening. My background is as a Python programmer, but Typescript really convinced me that optional type hints are a super-valuable addition to a dynamic language. Most of my docstrings in python tend to be type annotations anyway -- might as well make it possible for tools to support it easily.

New comment by singhblom in "Intel to buy deep-learning startup Nervana Systems for at least $350M"

singhblom — Wed, 10 Aug 2016 09:26:33 +0000

They don't state flops because they don't do floats. The nervana chip has some weird fixed point format that they think works better for deep learning. I've heard similar noise out of Google (the other TPU company ...), so I wouldn't be surprised if we'll see the same in many of the specialized chips that people will build for deep learning.

I really don't think CUDA support is important for nervana's offering. They think of themselves as the Apples of deep learning - they want to offer an integrated stack from the chip all the way to the APIs. The way most people use deep learning you don't really need to know CUDA, you just need to use a library that is fast. So it's enough that nervana's engineers know how to write deep learning libs for their own chip. Furthermore I can't see Intel caring that much about CUDA support, since CUDA is owned by Nvidia.

What I've heard about the chip makes it sound really exciting. Many of the trade-offs in deep learning are different from the ones you do in graphics, so specialized hardware makes sense.