Hacker News: xyhopguy

New comment by xyhopguy in "Anthropic S-1"

xyhopguy — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 13:52:20 +0000

Nvidia almost hit 100B in revenue last quarter.

New comment by xyhopguy in "I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit"

xyhopguy — Wed, 27 May 2026 23:30:12 +0000

Microbatch size is a hyperparameter, it can be set to 1 and work just as effectively. With gradient accumulation it's equivalent even. Large batch sizes are used to increase parallelism, and sometimes to reduce variance in the loss signal (at the cost of increased bias).

Batch size is frequently limited by compute bottlenecks well before memory.

New comment by xyhopguy in "The Disadvantages of an Elite Education (2008)"

xyhopguy — Wed, 06 May 2026 18:19:24 +0000

No one wants to be around an alcoholic. But it's not to be nice, but to understand them, their struggles, and their perspectives.

Anecdote - I was at a concert with my brother, outside in the smoking area. A homeless woman came by, didn't say anything but was kinda just looking around. My brother is the only one who spoke to her, he offered his cigarette butt. Which is exactly what she was looking for.

Never would have occured to me- but I would guess it made her feel more seen and human.

New comment by xyhopguy in "Nuclear receptor 4A1 linked to health effects of coffee: study"

xyhopguy — Sun, 03 May 2026 20:02:44 +0000

cancer is more like debugging a gigantic DL model than an operating system. spaghetti of redundancies all the way down.

New comment by xyhopguy in "Craig Venter has died"

xyhopguy — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 16:17:51 +0000

He wasn't the only one who saw the problem computationally. Famously, the mathematician Michael Waterman sat on the other-side of the race for the human genome.

New comment by xyhopguy in "There Will Be a Scientific Theory of Deep Learning"

xyhopguy — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 14:36:57 +0000

not really. early deep learning models were run on single consumer-grade GPUs. the inflection occured _right_ when parallel computing became fast enough to do backprop in a reasonable amount of time with performance better than tree methods.

at that time all the compute resources in the world would not have been enough to train the models from even the last ~6 years or so, probably more.

New comment by xyhopguy in "Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects"

xyhopguy — Sat, 18 Apr 2026 15:50:03 +0000

3x increase in compute for a 1.5x increase in tdp is pretty good considering the underlying process had barely changed. In anycase, consumer GPUs aren't a good metric as they operate with different economic constraints.

H100 to GB200 saw a 50x increase in efficiency, for example.

New comment by xyhopguy in "I should have loved biology"

xyhopguy — Sat, 09 Jul 2022 15:21:19 +0000

> I wanted to conjure models I could play with in my hand. I wanted a museum where I could walk around inside the epithelium during an immune response. I wanted to put ideas into physical space, like on a pinboard—TLRs go here, with the other innate armament; CD4+ T cells are there, in the adaptive world—but I wanted it to be as searchable, copy-pasteable, shareable, and composable as text.

VR anyone?

New comment by xyhopguy in "US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent"

xyhopguy — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 20:33:03 +0000

Currently we deal with >= 8am sunrise for 2 months of the year. With this proposal, you get it for November and February too. yay!

New comment by xyhopguy in "US Senate votes unanimously to make daylight savings time permanent"

xyhopguy — Tue, 15 Mar 2022 20:16:25 +0000

this proposal will set sunrise at 9am during december in Oregon and washington. 'Wake up later' doesnt really work for most people.

New comment by xyhopguy in "Adobe tricks users into a 12 month contract"

xyhopguy — Sat, 05 Feb 2022 17:02:53 +0000

I recently dealt with this. Right before my free trial expired, I went to cancel. A support rep offered another 3 months free. The first red flag was not receiving a log of our conversation. Three months go buy and sure enough, when I went to cancel, they told me I had already committed to a year. Incredible. After some persistence and vague legal threats I managed to receive a full cancelation and refund.

New comment by xyhopguy in "Centers of Population"

xyhopguy — Fri, 21 Jan 2022 21:57:42 +0000

Definitely is technically in the northwest part of the state, but I'm not sure I'd call it close to the Washington border.

It's much closer to Salem and Bend than it is Portland, for instance.

New comment by xyhopguy in "Centers of Population"

xyhopguy — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 19:29:45 +0000

For oregon the population center is almost exactly Detroit. There is a large population in the willamette valley south of portland (and bend is captured by this too).

New comment by xyhopguy in "What do you do with a billion grams of surplus weed?"

xyhopguy — Tue, 10 Aug 2021 01:50:47 +0000

Weird, it's all bulk in Salem.

New comment by xyhopguy in "What do you do with a billion grams of surplus weed?"

xyhopguy — Mon, 09 Aug 2021 15:27:02 +0000

I have no idea where you guys are seeing these prices. Chalice, on the absolute high end that I've seen, tops out at 250/oz.

Nectar/Green Cross are my gotos, both of them are well below the prices yall are discussing. Green cross in particular has better stuff than the other venues as well. Maybe try shopping in Salem instead of Portland? Dunno, I never go into the city for weed.

New comment by xyhopguy in "What do you do with a billion grams of surplus weed?"

xyhopguy — Mon, 09 Aug 2021 15:23:20 +0000

go to greencross in bend, they have the exact prices i'm referring to. Dont go to the stores that purchase from bulk retailers, shops that have their own farms typically have higher quality and lower prices.

New comment by xyhopguy in "What do you do with a billion grams of surplus weed?"

xyhopguy — Mon, 09 Aug 2021 15:22:33 +0000

i mean this is verifiably wrong:

try this place in salem, really nice stuff and great prices. "Reserve" is their top-of-the-plant pickings that go for $160 oz. Not a big difference between their bulk (75-100) and reserve.

https://www.greencrosscanna.com/commercial-street

New comment by xyhopguy in "What do you do with a billion grams of surplus weed?"

xyhopguy — Sun, 08 Aug 2021 00:45:04 +0000

its not hard to get top shelf ounces for $100-140 in oregon...

New comment by xyhopguy in "Heat dome causing record breaking heat wave"

xyhopguy — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 23:34:00 +0000

thats a dewpoint of 76F!!! dunno what its like a little more east but in the northwest that's unheard of.

Portland's dewpoint I think peaked around 65F.

New comment by xyhopguy in "Canada weather: Dozens dead as heatwave shatters records"

xyhopguy — Wed, 30 Jun 2021 14:06:03 +0000

At 49C you need a dewpoint of almost 70 (!!) to get 20% relative humidity. thats nasty -- during the heatwave in portland the dewpoint was between 63-68 most days. Usually its ~55. For context, the dewpoint on the east coast during the storm season usually is between 70-75.