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vegesm

353 karma · joined June 9, 2020

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vegesm··on Celebrating 70 Years of Fortran
At some point I was quite interested in how the very first version of FORTRAN looked like, so I wrote a FizzBuzz [1] in it.

It was a very bare-bones language, felt more like a high-level assembly macro language. One thing it did well was expressing formulas with the usual "mathematical" notations (+,-,*,/, parentheses to group operations, variables). I guess this was revolutionary at the time. But the control structures were very limited, everything was basically jumps and gotos. The IF was merely a syntactic sugar for conditional jumps. Of course, functions did not exist in the language.

[1] https://mveg.es/posts/fizzbuzz-in-fortran-1/

vegesm··on “A calculator app? Anyone could make that”
I'm the developer of an Android calculator, called Algeo [1] and I wonder which part of it that makes it feel like slow/not snappy? I'm trying to constantly improve it, though UX is a hard problem.

[1] - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.algeo.alge...

vegesm··on Calculus with Julia
Pytorch and tensorflow is pretty big. It implies all state of the art research code is not written in Julia, so it is a non-starter for any neural network based project.
vegesm··on Python 3.13 Gets a JIT
Because it only increases high single digit each release. If they keep up the 10% improvement for the next 10 release, we will reach a speedup of around 2.5 times. That's very small, considering how Python is like 10-20 times slower than JS (not even talking about C or Java like speeds).
vegesm··on The Long S
I always wondered where the integral sign was coming from. This gives a very simple explanation: it's just the letter 's', the shorthand for sum!
vegesm··on A systems model of anxiety-driven procrastination
This rings so true with me. I have a side project [1] that I try to promote and it always feels hard. Where do I start? Should I post comments in random subreddits? Should I write blog posts that may nobody read in the end? Start doing ads? I think having the multiple options kinda freezes me and it is so hard to start doing something.

[1] https://androidcalculator.com/

vegesm··on Tell HN: I made $1000 with my app and now making $500/mo
Congrats! It's about the same I make with Android with my app (a graphing calculator) [1]. Everyone says on Android you can earn less, I'm curious what's your experience will be.

[1] https://androidcalculator.com/

vegesm··on The Principles of Deep Learning Theory
I don't really get the first part of your comment. You say an NN is "just" compression + kNN and does no representational learning. But finding a compression (a transformation in other words) that makes kNN feasible on the data is exactly what people mean when they say it finds a hidden representation. It is a highly non-trivial task: e.g. simple distance in pixel space between images would get you useless results.
vegesm··on Restored F80 compiler code for CP/M
Slightly related: I got the first C compiler restored and ported to modern C [1]. It runs on Linux and can call libc functions, though it is restricted to 32bit mode.

[1] https://github.com/vegesm/c72

vegesm··on The Bitter Lesson (2019)
Actually, MobileNetV3 is a supporting example of the bitter lesson and not the other way round. The point of Sutton's essay is that it isn't worth adding inductive biases (specific loss functions, handcrafted features, special architectures) to our algorithm. Having lots of data, just put that into a generic architecture and it eventually outperforms manually tuned ones.

MobileNetV3 uses architecture search, which is a prime example of the above: even the architecture hyperparameters are derived from data. The handcrafted optimizations just concern speed and do not include any inductive biases.

vegesm··on Ask HN: Does targeted advertising work at all?
Back of a napkin calculation: showing OP 100 ads of blinds probably costs 0.1$ in the US. The cost of a blind is 100$ (I have no idea, don't live in the US). So if the probability of buying a second blind is at least 0.1% it was worth running the campaign.

The fact is, online ads are super cheap.

vegesm··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell
As others said, the active number of downloads is way lower (50k). Even then, I'm pretty bad at marketing and have no idea how to grow it or optimize the monetization.

It seems from 10 ideas 9 doesn't work and even the 10th brings only modest results.

vegesm··on Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2021 – Show and tell
I have an android app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.algeo.alge...).

It brings in right around $500 a month. It is fun to develop, especially that I can dabble into frontend and UI design which is quite far away from what I'm doing daily.

Interestingly, it used to bring in much more but the heydays of apps are over.

vegesm··on Apollo 11 implementation of Trigonometric functions (1969)
There is a blogpost linked in the annotations: http://jeanmariechauvet.com/papers/curttrig.html
vegesm··on It Can Happen to You
That's true for all software development. In seven years most of your team is replaced.
vegesm··on Email from Jeff Bezos to employees
I remember my school ran a contest where you had to find obscure information on the net. Things like when the inventor of the saxophone was born? You had to submit an URL so using the library was not an option. It was insanely hard, nowadays it's just one wikipedia click away.
vegesm··on Why it’s usually crazier than you expect
I wonder how much of those shares can BlackRock/etc actually sell. BlackRock has many index funds GME part of so they must hold on to those shares
vegesm··on Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility
which is all illegal and there is no indication that was happening with Gamestop
vegesm··on Statement of SEC Regarding Recent Market Volatility
Why would shorting Gamestop mean making it to go bankrupt? The falling stock price of a company doesn't cause a company to go bankrupt, the causality is in the other direction. Putting downward pressure on price is useful only if you want to do a hostile takeover.
vegesm··on Robinhood, in Need of Cash, Raises $1B from Its Investors
Also, don't card companies pay net30/60? So even if customers were able to pay their orders, Robinhood only receives the money in 30 days but has to pay to the clearinghouse in two days. That would wreck RH in a volatile period like this.
vegesm··on GameStop: Anger as trading in GameStop shares is restricted
Schrödinger's stock price
vegesm··on Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?
What GP meant is that after 5 years, you are just solving the same puzzles again and again.
vegesm··on The most remarkable legacy system I have seen
It seems it is Python. The author specifically mentions an upgrade to Python 2.7
vegesm··on CUDA on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2
That's quite funny sentiment: basically you are saying the only reason for some people to use Linux if they are forced to use it by some library. An operating system shouldn't rely on that, if it wants to be truly general purpose.
vegesm··on NetBSD Code Study
That must have been really long time ago, I remember having no problem dual-booting XP with linux.
vegesm··on IRS programming mystery continues
I think they also need the historical rules kept for whatever reporting/cross checking it is needed. So essentially they would have to rewrite the rules of the last 40-50 years.
vegesm··on MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations
It's time consuming and that is money (granted, Elsevier still gets more money than what is paid to editors)
vegesm··on How much did AlphaGo Zero cost? (2018)
probably the memory requirements mean that you do need (multiple) V100s though
vegesm··on Show HN: My first Android App – order-taker for family company that sells wood
My tip is not to use custom styling for buttons/text/etc just use the default Material design. It is already pretty nice, certainly better than what a non-designer can come up with. If you are interested in details, check out the design guidelines at https://material.io/, they cover a lot of stuffs from colors to padding sizes.
vegesm··on Thank HN: My startup was born here and is now 10 years old
Congrats!
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