HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

srajabi

221 karma · joined February 5, 2012

Software Dev in ML/Analytics out of YVR
submissionscomments
srajabi··on Why HNSW is not the answer and disk-based alternatives might be more practical
What about DiskANN? https://milvus.io/docs/disk_index.md
srajabi··on Spotify CEO Daniel Ek surprised by how much 1,500 layoffs' impacted operations
https://archive.is/L0BdY

Summary:

* Spotify’s Layoff Impact: CEO Daniel Ek was surprised by the significant operational challenges following the layoff of 1,500 employees.

* Financial Performance: Despite achieving record profits of €168 million and revenue growth, Spotify missed its targets for profitability and user growth.

* Investor Reaction: Shares increased by over 8% after the earnings report, reflecting investor confidence.

* Long-Term Strategy: Despite short-term issues, Spotify believes the layoffs were necessary for long-term profitability.

srajabi··on A concrete example of what goes wrong with Apple's docs
Does this mean you get additional documentation then the example in the blog? Or is that $99 for the bad documentation?
srajabi··on NeurIPS 2023 Posters Cluster Visualization
Is this down?
srajabi··on Sam Altman, OpenAI board open talks to negotiate his possible return
I constantly do this OpenAI/OpenAPI typo
srajabi··on Presence of airborne microplastics in human lung tissue
Looks like they've been in use since 1972 and in use in Healthcare specifically since 1995.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N95_respirator#History

srajabi··on Death by design patterns, or On the cognitive load of abstractions in the code
No abstractions turns to spaghetti Too many abstractions turns to spaghetti

I don't think the answer is one or the other at all like the blog post is implying. I think his previous conclusion of a threshold makes more sense. Perhaps though they have chosen the wrong abstractions and hence the confusion

srajabi··on Java Panama Vector API Integrated with Apache Lucene
A little hard to understand why this is cool, but if I understand correctly:

1. Lucene is trying to get Approximate Nearest Neighbours (ANN) search working for semantic search purposes: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/LUCENE-9004 https://github.com/apache/lucene/issues/10047

2. The Panama Vector API allows CPU's that support it to accelerate vector operations: https://openjdk.org/jeps/438

So this allows fast ANN on Lucene for semantic search!

How did people do this before Lucene supported it? Only through entirely different tools?

srajabi··on Language models can explain neurons in language models
"This work is part of the third pillar of our approach to alignment research: we want to automate the alignment research work itself. A promising aspect of this approach is that it scales with the pace of AI development. As future models become increasingly intelligent and helpful as assistants, we will find better explanations."

On first look this is genius but it seems pretty tautological in a way. How do we know if the explainer is good?... Kinda leads to thinking about who watches the watchers...

srajabi··on DeepFloyd IF: open-source text-to-image model
Wow this does so well on text! The original model struggled a lot, it's impressive to see how far they've come.
srajabi··on Alpaca: An Instruct Tuned LLaMA 7B – Responses on par with txt-DaVinci-3
Can't seem to click "I Agree" and try it out. Anyone have a work around?

Edit: The answer was patience

srajabi··on Google, Meta hired talent to do 'fake work'
It's not a defense. If you want to fix the fact that a lot of tech jobs are bullshit, FAANG or otherwise. You have to fix that phenomenon in all work sectors, because it's not a uniquely big tech created problem.
srajabi··on Google, Meta hired talent to do 'fake work'
Most jobs are bullshit jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs the phenomenon is not unique to tech.

How many finance workers on wall street do you think provide direct value to society?

srajabi··on Bard and new AI features in Search
This is all fluff with very little substance, OpenAI wow'ed the whole world with ChatGPT and all Google can do is post a half-baked fluff piece that they're releasing something "soon"
srajabi··on Let's build GPT: from scratch, in code, spelled out by Andrej Karpathy [video]
It's cool you're on here and I'm sure I speak for many people in saying I really appreciate your video series and comments like the above!

Thank you!

srajabi··on Show HN: Death by AI
Great site!

I feel like it's missing some things though:

* Data Entry -- OCR and the like

* Data Retrieval -- Don't search engines still qualify as AI

* Sorting mail?

* Other factory use cases like removing undesirable tomatoes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYQ_5c6m8Is

* Many others I'm not thinking of...

srajabi··on Twitter's anti-Mastodon filter evasion
I wonder how long before Twitter patches this, one thought is that since they've fired so many people they may not be executing well enough to patch this quickly.

Also, is there a way to do this where they won't be able to patch? Maybe alternate domain names for these known domain names that are being blocked, similar to what thePirateBay did.

srajabi··on John Carmack Leaves Meta
Or the typical poor execution at extremely large tech companies. Where various people have incentives that aren't aligned with the overall objective of making a good product. Instead people are incentivized to empire build and be self serving.
srajabi··on John Carmack Leaves Meta
Basically Carmack is frustrated by:

1. Rate of progress on AR/VR at meta

2. People within Meta not "Giving a Dam!" / Poor decisions made within the org

3. Poor quality of the execution which I guess is related to #2

Relevant quote: "It pains me to hear people say that they don't even get their headset out to show off at the company because they know it's going to be a mess of charging and updating before they can make it do something cool," Carmack said at the time. "VR should be a delight to demo for your friends."

srajabi··on How does GPT obtain its ability? Tracing emergent abilities of language models
Amazing insight, particularly section 6.

"- The two important but different abilities of GPT-3.5 are *knowledge* and *reasoning*. Generally, it would be ideal if we could *offload the knowledge part to the outside retrieval system and let the language model only focus on reasoning.* This is because: - The model’s internal knowledge is always cut off at a certain time. The model always needs up-to-date knowledge to answer up-to-date questions. - Recall we have discussed that is 175B parameter is heavily used for storing knowledge. If we could offload knowledge to be outside the model, then the model parameter might be significantly reduced such that eventually, it can run on a cellphone (call this crazy here, but ChatGPT is already science fiction enough, who knows what the future will be)."

& "Yet there was a WebGPT paper published in Dec 2021. It is likely that this is already tested internally within OpenAI."

It definitely feels like this may be the next step in making this kind of system robust. It ends up being an interface for search.

srajabi··on Goodbye, data science
This resonates with me so much, I stumbled into data science out of University a decade ago. Left it to do SWE and came back to it in the last 3 years.

So many data scientists are full of themselves thinking they are magicians and software developers are blacksmiths who are beneath them.

Incrementally at my company the SWE's have automated so much of the data scientists workflow that they end up just as you describe, using the tooling and being relegated to becoming analysts.

After 3 years coming back to this field, I see the writing on the wall: In the 90's most models were created by software developers, in the 2030's most models will be created by software developers.

srajabi··on Postgres: A better message queue than Kafka?
I don’t think this article made a compelling reason not to use Kafka. In fact it may have made the opposite point.

Wouldn’t it have been easier to just use Kafka?

srajabi··on Show HN: Semantic Search for Ctrl+F
Is this open source? Seems like it might be small enough to be great for learning from.
srajabi··on Engineers can disrupt climate change
It's quite cost effective to do something like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...

Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening

srajabi··on Rules of thumb for a 1x developer
I've thought about this as well. If you have flow for ~6 hrs a day with ~2 hrs a day of buffer time for meetings, lunch, coffee...etc. You'd be in the top third of software developers. Anecdotal for sure but I'd love to see a study on this.
srajabi··on Valve's Proton Has Brought 6000 Windows Games to Linux So Far
In that circumstance if we had really good auto match making, does it matter? In a competitive environment I don't care if I'm vs.'ing a bot or a human as long as I'm matched with the intent of 50% win rate.

Of course with current cheating the issue is not deep learning based agents but seeing through walls or aim assisting. Those just ruin the enjoyment of the game. Similarly I loathe vs'ing an AI that uses the same methods.

srajabi··on COBOL programmers answer call
Well it is in most of the world. Compare the US to Canada, similar patient outcomes at double the cost.
srajabi··on James Lovelock: 'I Would Not Waste My Fortune on Colonizing Mars'
But if we had the artificial magnetosphere and then populated the atmosphere we would get similar effects to Earth's protection?
srajabi··on James Lovelock: 'I Would Not Waste My Fortune on Colonizing Mars'
It's possible to have an artificial magnetosphere with current technology: https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/V2050/pdf/8250.pdf

Theoretically at some point it should be possible to make this somewhat permanent with minimal maintenance. Depending on technology it could go from a station that lasts a hundred years to millions of years.

srajabi··on Tricks to start working despite not feeling like it
I don't even understand how anyone would like it.
Page 1 of 2Next →