Hacker News Reader

sakexon Fast LLM Inference From Scratch (using CUDA)

Great article. I think what you should cover next is collective matmuls and sharding.

sakexon Fast LLM Inference From Scratch (using CUDA)

Using Jax, you should be able to get good performance out of the box

sakexon Neuroevolution of augmenting topologies (NEAT algorithm)

Shameless plug:

I have an implementation in Rust (CPU only) with added GRU gates

https://crates.io/crates/neat-gru

sakexon The Opposite of Documentation is Superstition (2020)

I agree to some extent, but I'd say it depends on the programming language. For instance, in Python, you absolutely need documentation because you don't know what type is expected, what different values can be passed or even the optional kwargs etc. It's also very common to pass strings as parameters when one should be using enums, which means you can't know what are the possible values without having the doc or diving into the code.

In Rust however you can get away with way less documentation because the type system and signatures are self explanatory. And if you're doing things right, the set of values you can pass to your function is limited.

sakexon Francois Chollet is leaving Google

Jax is really nice

sakexon What Color is Your Function? (2015)

There is no preemption in Javascript. It is based on cooperative multitasking[1] (your await statements and non-blocking callback) which is the opposite of preemption.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_multitasking#:~:te....

sakexon Tax the Rich – European Citizens' Initiative

They don't bother explaining

sakexon Tax the Rich – European Citizens' Initiative

According to the article they link[1], the 1% richest is defined as earning more than $109,000 in 2015. So basically, they want to tax the people who already pay the most taxes. Actually rich people having the means to avoid paying taxes altogether, it's the educated middle class that's once again expected to pay for opaque, poorly managed, and unaccountable government programs.

Glad I live in Switzerland.

[1] https://www.oxfam.org/fr/communiques-presse/les-1-les-plus-r....

sakexon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (September 2024)

    Location: Switzerland 
    Remote: Yes
    Willing to relocate: Yes
    Technologies: Jax, Rust, Cpp, Python, JS, TS, Go
    Résumé/CV: Currently working on Gemini at Google, previous experience at a smaller company where I did computer vision 

 
   https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandre-senges-0a02a4111?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=android_app 


    Email: senges.alex [at] gmail.com

sakexon Google and Microsoft now each consume more power than some fairly big countries

I think I heard Google was aiming to do that by 2030. Not sure though

sakexon EU Council to Vote on Chat Scanning Proposal on Thursday

Another day I'm happy my country (Switzerland) respects its citizens wishes to not join EU

sakexon Show HN: Token price calculator for 400+ LLMs

An interesting parameter that I don't read about a lot is vocab size. A larger vocab means you will need to generate less tokens for the same word on average, also the context window will be larger. This means that a model with a large vocab might be more expensive on a per token basis, but would generate less tokens for the same sentence, making it cheaper overall. This should be taken into consideration when comparing API prices.

sakexon Understanding a Python Closure Oddity

That's why Javascript introduced the "let" keyword years ago

This logs from 0 to 9:

for(let i = 0; i < 10; ++i;) setTimeout(() => console.log(i));

This logs from 10, 10 times: for(var i = 0; i < 10; ++i;) setTimeout(() => console.log(i));

sakexon Wrong Map of Europe

> Zürich isn’t the capital of Switzerland, Geneva is…

No.. It's Bern

sakexon Ask HN: Going low-level – what to learn next?

An emerging (not-so) low-level programming discipline is AI/ML. So you could try implementing decoder only transformers using CUDA.

sakexon Figma’s Journey to TypeScript

I don't think Google uses K8s internally. Borg is still here though.

sakexon Apple must open iPadOS to sideloading within 6 months, EU says

Someone could steal the iPad and boot a different OS from a hard drive

sakexon GPT-4.5 or GPT-5 being tested on LMSYS?

The date at the top is wrong: 2023-04-30

I thought I was reading an old article.

sakexon Paris preserves its mixed society by pouring billions into public housing

I have the same feeling, growing up in Paris and then moving to Switzerland. Paris seems more and more dangerous and dirty. And people seem to become less and less happy.

sakexon Experienced engineers are struggling to get hired

It feels like having niche skills like Rust or Transformers makes it much easier. I found a new job very quickly after being laid off.

sakexon The Case Against Homework

Growing up I always managed to avoid doing my homework. Also I always passed with the minimum grade required. My parents and everyone around me kept saying that I would become a failure.

Well, today I'm a Machine Learning Engineer at a FAANG company and I have no regrets not wasting my youth on some stupid assignments that everyone forgot about as soon as it was graded.

sakexon [dead]

While I agree with the message, the phrasing is overly aggressive against tech workers "bros". I don't get what they're trying to achieve here.

sakexon Apple's iMessage avoids EU's Digital Markets Act regulation

Hey I'm also swiss but we have a weird edge case where most people have an iPhone but still use WhatsApp

sakexon Apple's iMessage avoids EU's Digital Markets Act regulation

I'm Swiss with a Pixel 7 Pro

sakexon Apple's iMessage avoids EU's Digital Markets Act regulation

Most Swedes I know use iMessage actually. That's very anecdotal tho

sakexon Text-to-CAD

That will be great to make video games, this can easily be imported into blender, then the textures can be made with stable diffusion or DallE

sakexon Programs are games, programming is a game

Programming is fun, software engineering is not

sakexon E.U. Agrees on Artificial Intelligence Rules with Landmark New Law

To be sure we're not going to lose yet another technological race, we're just not going to participate.

sakexon Emmet Shear statement as Interim CEO of OpenAI

WHy aren't they promoting from within?

sakexon Strong static typing, a hill I'm willing to die on

Not all type systems are born equal, for instance I'm amazed daily at the lack of type safety in Java/Kotlin