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kraphton [dead]

I feel like I'm not the target audience for this. When I have large data, then I directly write SQL queries and run them against the database. It's impossible to improve performance when you have to go out to the DB anyway; might as well have it run the query too. Certainly the server ops and db admins have loads more money to spend on making the DB fast compared with my anti-virus laden corporate laptop.

When I have small data that fits on my laptop, Pandas is good enough.

Maybe 10% of the time I have stuff that's annoyingly slow to run with Pandas; then I might choose a different library, but needing this is rare. Even then, of that 10% you can solve 9% of that by dropping down to numpy and picking a better algorithm...

kraphton More telcos confirm Salt Typhoon breaches as White House weighs in

Why do straight to dystopia when notary publics exist?

kraphton The GPU is not always faster

Too specialized. You can't use GPUs as general purpose computers. The basic unit of operation is the warp, which is 32 threads operating in lockstep (simplified). If you're not using all 32 threads, then you may as well not be using a GPU.

kraphton MTA's A.I. bus cameras issue mistaken parking violations

I have doubts this is actually that profitable. More likely the company is rolling their labor overhead into the per-camera pricing. It's a small order too, only 1000 cameras.

kraphton Initial CUDA Performance Lessons

I'll believe it when autovectorization is actually useful in day to day high performance coding work.

It's just a hard problem. You can code ignorantly with high level libraries but you're leaving 2x to 10x performance on the table.

kraphton Is the attack helicopter dead?

I believe in his earlier videos he mentioned that he isn't able to discuss Australian defense procurement on YouTube due to a conflict of interest with his day job.

kraphton Show HN: Coros – A Modern C++ Library for Task Parallelism

I know TBB will still be supported 5 years from now, though.

kraphton Do grayscale images take less space?

The same idea is used when doing complex IQ sampling of radio frequency data. I don't know if it's as obscure as you say, it's just not commonly considered when dealing with plain cameras. It's a bigger deal when working in the RF domain, or SAR imagery...

kraphton Python Has Too Many Package Managers

Pip is mediocre for vendoring non-Python or binary dependencies. Wheels are OK, but sometimes there are still problems.

Conda solves this pain point by being a general purpose package manager.

Poetry is for the more reproducible builds people. It's a little better, but it's not great enough to get people to switch.

kraphton McDonald's is ending its drive-thru AI test

If this is really a big money saver, you'll see fast food restaurants reorganize their restaurant to be more like old Sonics - multiple ordering stations that are serviced by the window.

If you've never seen a Sonic, it's organized like a gas station. Replace gas pump with kiosk.

kraphton Tesla 'self-driving' technology failed to detect a moving train ahead of a crash

Humans can't handle fog or snow either.

kraphton Show HN: gpudeploy.com – "Airbnb" for GPUs

ID verification before you can host and random audits from gpudeploy.

kraphton Are recruiters better than a coin flip at judging resumes? Here's the data

If you're not Oxbridge, the AI would actually give you a leg up in applications.

kraphton Cost of developing new drugs may be lower than industry claims: trial

The measure in healthcare is QALY, or quality-adjusted life year.

kraphton If Inheritance is so bad, why does everyone use it?

I still find it funny that somehow the idea of runtime function dispatch via function pointer is called the "strategy" pattern.

kraphton Ask HN: What things are happening in ML that we can't hear over the din of LLMs?

I have doubts that a simple adaptive building model-based controller wouldn't be better, and interpretable. I wonder why you'd go with a perceptron... those are so limited.

kraphton Tenstorrent unveils Grayskull, its RISC-V answer to GPUs

I'll bet against that. NVIDIA's margin is so large that Google/Microsoft and others can fund / are funding large teams to make TPUs and other dedicated hardware competitive. I also believe LLMs are part of the hype cycle just like crypto. In ten years the gaming market will return to being NVIDIA's primary market.

kraphton U.S. rice exports to Haiti have unhealthy levels of arsenic, study finds

the way rice is cooked can reduce arsenic levels by 80%. we don't need to completely forbid rice production in the southern US

kraphton How I got scammed out of $50k

Depending on the context, any representative measure of central tendency, such as the mid-range, median, mode or geometric mean, can be called the average.

kraphton HexChat 2.16.2, the Final Release

Ah, I remember using IRC when I was young. Occasionally I've used hexchat to lurk on efnet.

Feels like discord killed off IRC for good. Any reason I should switch to an alternative client for the yearly IRC log-on?

Maybe I can find my ancient mIRC client lying around...

kraphton TSMC to build second Japan chip factory

Uh, are you saying that Iran wouldn't erase Israel from the Middle East if they had the capability to do so? Where are you going with this? It's indisputable that Iran sponsors anti-Israeli militias across the Middle East, which would qualify them as a threat.

kraphton TSMC to build second Japan chip factory

3: Hmmm.

Not according to Japan's 2023 defense white paper.

https://www.mod.go.jp/en/publ/w_paper/wp2023/DOJ2023_Digest_...

kraphton Paperwall: Chinese websites posing as local news outlets target global audiences

1) whataboutism 2) citation needed 3) Even if both sides utilize propaganda, historically the scale of agitprop coming from authoritarian countries has been much greater. This is still newsworthy.

You can't even read most Western propaganda in China because the government goes to great lengths to censor narratives counter to offical views.

kraphton Gnuplotlib: A gnuplot-based plotting backend for NumPy

People who are making plots in the terminal don't want to type out the fully qualified library name. Majority of plots are written and read only once during data exploration and analysis time.

kraphton Show HN: EXT – an easy way to build cross-platform desktop software

This post is way less informative than the FAQ on your website. I clicked the links thinking I'd get an alternative to JavaFX, Qt, or Electron, but instead I found this which does a better job of explaining what this actually is:

EXT Technical FAQ

What is EXT?

EXT is a platform that allows third party developers to install, load, run, publish and monetize JavaScript-based extensions and native modules, while giving end-users complete control over each extension’s permissions. EXT also includes a store where end-users can find and purchase approved extensions (though the platform also allows side-loading private extensions and modules).

How do extensions work?

Internally, EXT uses the V8 engine to run extensions, which makes their execution extremely fast. Our build pipeline allows us to integrate the latest V8 engine versions automatically, which means you are always going to be up to date with the latest security updates when using EXT. The V8 engine itself does not provide any APIs to extensions, all it can do is run JavaScript code. This is why we allow developers to load EXT modules (which provide functionality) into their extensions. If an extension wants to use an API, it must do so via a module.

kraphton Optimizing the unoptimizable: a journey to faster C++ compile times

Nah, C++ needs more than that. There's some ridiculous template heavy code out there where the majority of time is spent linking. You can't even do a debug build without optimizations on Windows with these programs because the coff file format can't handle it, even when compiling with "/bigobj".

kraphton As child care costs soar, more parents may have to exit the workforce

Somehow, I think it's just cultural. I spent many years outside of the US, and I think expectations for space are too inflated in America. There are many happy families in Europe raising two kids in a 500 sqft apartment.

kraphton Spain’s Lessons for American Decline

What intrinsic value? It's shiny and rare, valuable for the same reason BitCoin is. The industrial usage of gold is limited to niche uses.

The Spanish price revolution crippled the Spanish state due to the huge inflation driven by New World treasure fleets. Gold is nothing special here.

kraphton Spain’s Lessons for American Decline

> 6. One cannot overstate the importance of slavery to American economic development and power.

Doubt. The economic decline of the American south was well on its way by the 19th century. That some prisoners today make license plates has no material affect on US GDP - this claim needs sources.

kraphton Show HN: Shimmer – ADHD coaching for adults, now on web

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ray_Peat

I think there's some important things to say about neuroscience and ADHD, but I don't think Ray Peat is the authority you want to quote about this subject.