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boberoni

735 karma · joined July 24, 2018

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boberoni··on Ask HN: If we train an LLM with “data” instead of “language” tokens
(Disclaimer: I am not an AI expert.) To me, LLMs are a special form "self-supervised learning"[1], which is a special form of unsupervised learning. While supervised learning aims to use input data to predict labels, self-supervised learning uses the context around the input data to predict future data. The key part here is context. This excellent article [2] by Yann Lecun et al. explains how self-supervised learning uses temporal and spatial context to extract patterns, which can then be used to predict future data or generate new data. In fact, prediction and generation go hand-in hand. So, you could definitely apply the techniques of LLMs to arbitrary streams of data with meaningful temporal or spatial patterns.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-supervised_learning

[2] https://ai.meta.com/blog/self-supervised-learning-the-dark-m...

boberoni··on How to Start a Startup (2005)
On the flip side, how do you end a startup? (gracefully)
boberoni··on Ask HN: Building Db from Scratch
I would recommend Harvard's CS165 course [0]. The lecture videos and slides are available, but the projects and setup code is not. However, you can view this as an opportunity to use any programming language that you like and pick your own feature scope.

[0] http://daslab.seas.harvard.edu/classes/cs165/index.html

boberoni··on The way out of burnout (2016)
https://archive.is/XvEXh
boberoni··on Fabricated data in research about honesty
The podcast “If Books Could Kill” has a great episode that breaks down and debunks the book “Nudge”. The podcast also factchecks various other pop-science and so called “airport books”.
boberoni··on Ziplm: Gzip-Backed Language Model
"An early version of a new project will sometimes be dismissed as a toy. It's a good sign when people do this. That means it has everything a new idea needs except scale, and that tends to follow." [1]

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/greatwork.html

boberoni··on Notes on a New Philosophy of Empirical Science (2011)
Hi, Dan! Just want to say thanks for your work on this topic. I really loved your book so I wanted to share it with the HN community. Supervised learning always seemed to rub me the wrong way, both when I learned it in college and when I saw it used in practice in industry.

I was led to your book by recent research in self-supervised learning by LeCun et al [1] [2]. Since reading your book, I have been digging into the work by Rissanen [3], Grunwald [4], and Hinton [5], among many others. I'm trying to build up my knowledge so that I can apply it to TinyML [6] (e.g. running a neural network on a microcontroller with 256kb of RAM). In a TinyML context, power usage must be low and labeled data is non-existent. I have a vague intuition of how MDL can be used to guide the engineering constraints of TinyML, and I'm hoping to formalize this in my research.

Dan, if you know of any papers or research groups that would be related to this area, I'd love to read more about it.

[1] https://ai.meta.com/blog/self-supervised-learning-the-dark-m...

[2] https://ai.meta.com/blog/yann-lecun-ai-model-i-jepa/

[3] https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-0-387-68812-1

[4] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262529631/the-minimum-descripti...

[5] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5920308_To_recogniz...

[6] https://sites.google.com/g.harvard.edu/tinyml/home

boberoni··on My PhD took a long time and there’s no shame in that
The real PhD was all the failed hypotheses you made along the way.
boberoni··on Introduction to math for game developers
I've had success with using VS Code for editing GDScript files, instead of using the built-in editor for Godot.

When I started using Git to track my Godot projects, I realized that all the scene files (.tscn) are just text files, and the Godot editor is a GUI for editing these text files. Scene files just store data: relationships between nodes and properties on each node. After this relevation, the whole system started to "click" for me and I started treating Godot game projects just like any other web app or mobile app that I work on.

boberoni··on Tiny Binaries (2021)
For those curious about Zig, I compiled (Zig version 0.10.1) the following source code:

  const std = @import("std");

  pub fn main() !u8 {
      const stdout = std.io.getStdOut().writer();
      try stdout.print("hi!\n", .{});
      return 0;
  }

...using the following compiler flags:

  zig build-exe main.zig -target x86_64-linux -O Debug
  #=> 965k


  zig build-exe main.zig -target x86_64-linux -O ReleaseSafe
  #=> 788k


  zig build-exe main.zig -target x86_64-linux -O ReleaseFast
  #=> 695k


  zig build-exe main.zig -target x86_64-linux -O ReleaseSmall
  #=> 9k

Zig with "-O ReleaseSmall" optimizations creates a 9k binary, putting it at 5th place on OP's chart.
boberoni··on I've mostly stopped reading technical mailing lists
> In the beginning I had unkind descriptions of these sorts of questions, but I've come to be more sympathetic to them, especially the questions that come from people abroad who may not have English as their first language. The unfortunate fact is that projects aren't necessarily well documented and their documentation probably is dauntingly hard to read for people who aren't fluent in technical English, and people have work to get done (using those projects).

I am lucky to have English be my primary language. If most of the world's documentation was in another language like Spanish, I can certainly see myself struggling to RTFM and resort to posting on a forum with my best effort at using Spanish to explain the context of my technical bug and request for help.

boberoni··on How Software Companies Die (1995)
Vertical is non-optimal for mobile, but it was on okay read for me when I switched to horizontal.
boberoni··on Lego violates GPL by keep Blender-based BrickLink Studio source closed (2021)
How about Apache-2.0? My mental model is that MIT, BSD, and Apache are permissive, while GPL is copyleft.
boberoni··on Google asking employees to help train Bard by rewriting wrong answers
So, the employees are asked to improve the quality of their training data based on model inference results. To me, this just looks like the scientific method.
boberoni··on From math to machine: translating a function to machine code (2017)
It would be cool to extend this and translate machine code to logic gates and electrical circuit.
boberoni··on Cyber is a new language for fast, efficient, and concurrent scripting
Implemented 96.3% in Zig. Very cool!

Although for my own scripting language, I use Rust. The functional bits make writing compiler programs really fun.

boberoni··on Ask HN: Why do you find your job satisfying?
Do you mind me asking how you got into server software engineering for a video game? Also, how is the work-life balance. I feel like I shy away from game dev because of the horror stories, but working on backend servers for an online multiplayer game sounds like a fun challenge.
boberoni··on Selfie – A tiny RISC-V C compiler, emulator and hypervisor
According to the GitHub README, selfie's emulator and hypervisor can only support programs in RISC-U, "a tiny and easy-to-teach subset of RISC-V".[1] So... not the full RISC-V ISA.

For what it's worth, the selfie compiler can build RISC-U programs for you. Still a really cool project! I've been meaning to learn more about compiler backend development. I usually spend time on the frontend.

[1] https://github.com/cksystemsteaching/selfie

boberoni··on Selfie – A tiny RISC-V C compiler, emulator and hypervisor
This part of the README explains what exactly Selfie can be used for:

> a self-compiling compiler called starc that compiles a tiny but still fast subset of C called C Star (*) to a tiny and easy-to-teach subset of RISC-V called RISC-U,

> a self-executing emulator called mipster that executes RISC-U code including itself when compiled with starc,

> a self-hosting hypervisor called hypster that provides RISC-U virtual machines that can host all of selfie, that is, starc, mipster, and hypster itself, and a tiny C* library called libcstar utilized by selfie.

boberoni··on Secondments at Zapier
Did Branson or Zapier adjust compensation based on their new roles and responsibilities?
boberoni··on Advice for Less Experienced Software Engineers in the Current Tech Market
> “It’s more important to get started than to have a perfect start.”

So true. This goes for your first job as well as any side project or company you want to build.

boberoni··on Databases in 2022: A Year in Review
Dbdb.io has a catalog of database tech. It is maintained by the CMU database research group.

https://dbdb.io

boberoni··on We’re in a golden age of board games
https://archive.vn/r5zP6
boberoni··on A book teaching assembly language programming on the ARM 64 bit ISA
I’m a noob at assembly and this was something that I never figured out:

For assembly languages, how does package management work? As an example, how would I “import” code from my co-worker or from an open source library on GitHub?

My first thought is that “maybe this is what a linker does…”, but what sort of toolchains exist for dependency management in assembly programming? What’s the analogy to pip, npm, cargo, etc.?

boberoni··on The simplest app that makes money
I have a bookmark to a personal Google Doc called “SaaS Business Ideas”, for whenever I think of a project that I think I can monetize.

The Google Doc is actually view-only and says “Stop ideating about projects to make money! You probably don’t need the money. Just work on projects that you find fun.”

boberoni··on Sorting with SIMD
I thought that blurring a photo would set each pixel to the average color value of all its neighbors. Since information is lost, how could you reverse engineer a blurred photo?
boberoni··on Sapling: A new source control system with Git-compatible client
I doubt that the FB people involved with the layoffs are the same FB people who decided to open source the Sapling project. Many FB engineering managers were not aware that the layoffs were being planned. Moreover, it takes up-front planning and design decisions (by more than just a few days) for a private company to open source their internal projects.
boberoni··on Social Media Is Dead
Social media is changing, but not dead. Maybe the idea of what we “want” social media to be, is dead.

There will always be a demand for social status. And, as long as there is sufficient demand, there will be supply. Eugene Wei[1] has written a lot about how online social media operates in the economy of social status. It applies to TikTok and LinkedIn alike.

[1] https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service

boberoni··on Associations between alcohol consumption and gray and white matter volumes
For reference, a single shot (1.5 fl oz of 40% alcohol) has 14g of alcohol.
boberoni··on Pig War (1859)
For a humorous, animated video summary of the Pig War, check out the YouTube channel "Oversimplified": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLq6GEiHqR8&ab_channel=OverS...
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