Hacker News: zhemao

New comment by zhemao in "TinyTinyTPU: 2×2 systolic-array TPU-style matrix-multiply unit deployed on FPGA"

zhemao — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 07:33:24 +0000

TPUs aren't transformer ASICs. The Ironwood TPU that Gemini was trained on was designed before LLMs became popular with ChatGPT's release. The architecture was general enough that it ended up being efficient for LLM training.

A special-purpose transformer inference ASIC would be like Etched's Sohu chip.

New comment by zhemao in "I should have loved electrical engineering"

zhemao — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 19:11:21 +0000

In computer architecture / digital ASIC design there's zero control theory. There's not much mathematics in general.

New comment by zhemao in "I should have loved electrical engineering"

zhemao — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 18:30:27 +0000

I had a similar starting point to the author but ended up in totally the opposite direction, haha. Took computer engineering in undergrad and did well in both CS and EE courses. My first job was as an SDE at AWS but I hated it. Went back to school for EE, got a PhD, and started working as an ASIC designer, which I'm still doing today.

It's definitely the case that there's a bigger jump from school project to actually useful product for EE than for CS. But now that we have affordable but decently featured FPGA boards, the barrier is much lower than before, at least for digital design.

New comment by zhemao in "I should have loved electrical engineering"

zhemao — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 18:12:21 +0000

No? There's plenty of overlap. I studied computer engineering in undergrad, which is similar to the author's original major. There are a lot of subjects that straddle the boundary, like computer architecture, embedded systems, and digital signal processing.

Obviously yes, if you're doing heavy analog/power/RF stuff you're going to be pretty far from software, but EE is a really broad field.

New comment by zhemao in "Jackie Chan’s Plan to Keep Kicking Forever"

zhemao — Sat, 28 Oct 2017 18:01:30 +0000

Yeah, New Police Story was weirdly dark.

Police Story 1-4 were all good fun. Not really for kids though. Plenty of bawdy jokes and innuendo.

New comment by zhemao in "Facebook is 'silencing' Rohingya Muslim reports of 'ethnic cleansing'"

zhemao — Wed, 20 Sep 2017 20:24:43 +0000

And how open is the administration to taking in Rohingya refugees who've been displaced by the violence?

New comment by zhemao in "Facebook is 'silencing' Rohingya Muslim reports of 'ethnic cleansing'"

zhemao — Wed, 20 Sep 2017 20:21:57 +0000

> the Buddhists didn't woke up one day and decided to commit genocide

Germans didn't wake up one day in the 1930s and decide to exterminate the Jews either. That doesn't mean the Jews were at all to blame for their persecution.

New comment by zhemao in "The New Preschool Is Crushing Kids (2016)"

zhemao — Wed, 20 Sep 2017 19:52:09 +0000

> What ideas have parents come up with to make it "feel" like there's more unstructured play time for kids during the school year?

Uh maybe, I don't know, actually giving them more unstructured play time? Schools have been drastically cutting back on mid-day recess and other types of "free time".

New comment by zhemao in "In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values"

zhemao — Thu, 07 Sep 2017 00:22:55 +0000

Thank you. I wondered if anyone else could see why the original essay is so ridiculous. It assumes that bad culture is the cause of poverty, and not the other way around. It's pretty obvious that the decision to get married and stay married is affected by material conditions. One consequence of the decline in manufacturing jobs is that less-educated men have pretty low employment rates. Since they can't hold down a stable job and be the primary breadwinner (as "bourgeois culture" expects them to), there's little reason for them to stick around (or for their partners to keep them around). This also explains the data Haidt and his group turned up on the correlation between parents' marriage status and children's future success. The couples that managed to stay together were the ones that had a better financial/employment situation. There's no reason to believe that a deadbeat dad would improve his child's future competitiveness that much just by staying married to the child's mother.

There's also the fact that single moms on welfare would lose their benefits if they married the father of their children. As one astute internet commenter on a similar article remarked, "Only an ivory tower egghead could think that poor people don't make rational economic decisions."

New comment by zhemao in "In Defense of Amy Wax’s Defense of Bourgeois Values"

zhemao — Wed, 06 Sep 2017 22:45:11 +0000

Pretty sure GP means the mass emigration of Europeans to North America in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

New comment by zhemao in "Lu Ban's axe and working with your Chinese suppliers"

zhemao — Sat, 02 Sep 2017 05:25:27 +0000

> places where people aren't getting paid to innovate but rather are there to do a 9-5 job, there is little (and, in many cases, negative) incentive culturally to think outside the box and push the envelope

That's pretty much every country, including the US. Even many Silicon Valley companies are this way.

New comment by zhemao in "Lu Ban's axe and working with your Chinese suppliers"

zhemao — Fri, 01 Sep 2017 22:30:03 +0000

Samsung is a strange choice of example. It also mostly follows a "well made clone" business model and Korean work culture isn't much different from Chinese.

New comment by zhemao in "Airbnb’s ban of Nazis in Charlottesville sets an important standard"

zhemao — Mon, 14 Aug 2017 20:00:25 +0000

> Does that same freedom exist for private entities that don't want to bake cakes for gay couples?

I think sexuality should be a protected class. I do not think neo-Nazis or White supremacists should be a protected class. But in the case of the wedding cake, I think it would be fine for bakers, caterers, or photographers to refuse to work at a gay wedding, an event they consider immoral. If a customer happened to be a neo-Nazi and was booking a vacation stay, I doubt AirBnB would have cared. It was the fact that they were using the service to book accommodations for the rally that caused the company to cancel their booking.

> That is why you need to defend the principle, even if you don't like the specifics of what you are defending, and is why, for example, the ACLU is defending Milo

The ACLU is defending Milo from government suppression of his speech. I agree with the principle they are defending. This is not the same as a private entity deciding not to do business with him. The ACLU will not, for instance, help him sue Simon & Schuster for cancelling his book deal.

New comment by zhemao in "Airbnb’s ban of Nazis in Charlottesville sets an important standard"

zhemao — Mon, 14 Aug 2017 19:45:17 +0000

Religion, race, gender, etc. are protected classes. Political ideology is not.

New comment by zhemao in "Airbnb’s ban of Nazis in Charlottesville sets an important standard"

zhemao — Mon, 14 Aug 2017 00:03:03 +0000

Despite the existence of laws criminalizing holocaust denial and displaying Nazi symbols, Germany still has holocaust deniers and neo-Nazis. Criminalizing speech isn't a very effective way of diminishing it.

New comment by zhemao in "Airbnb’s ban of Nazis in Charlottesville sets an important standard"

zhemao — Sun, 13 Aug 2017 23:45:18 +0000

Yes, the 1st amendment protects freedom of association. That is, the freedom of private entities to not do business with Nazis.

New comment by zhemao in "How Canada became an education superpower"

zhemao — Thu, 03 Aug 2017 07:45:05 +0000

Very true. I don't think the Republicans are solely to blame though. I live in the SF Bay Area, definitely a very blue part of the country. Despite pretty steep taxes, our public transportation and public schools aren't much to look at. Better than other parts of the country, probably, but it ain't Canada. Even when there's a political will, there doesn't seem to be much know-how in how to actually provision public infrastructure and services in an efficient way.

New comment by zhemao in "How Canada became an education superpower"

zhemao — Thu, 03 Aug 2017 07:36:30 +0000

And if you came to the US and saw our public schools here, you'd probably die of laughter.

New comment by zhemao in "How Canada became an education superpower"

zhemao — Thu, 03 Aug 2017 06:55:57 +0000

Oh look, yet another article about a country that's doing education better than us here in the US. And the funny thing is that they all seem to do things in different ways.

You know what I think the problem is? Americans on the whole just don't care about public education. Either in terms of quality or equity.

Chinese scientists create biggest virtual universe with world’s fastest computer

zhemao — Sat, 29 Jul 2017 03:33:06 +0000

Article URL: http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2104297/chinese-scientists-create-biggest-virtual-universe-worlds-fastest

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14879331

Points: 1

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