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xiphias

768 karma · joined April 12, 2013

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xiphias··on Rust Language, and Why C/C++ Will Never Die (2015)
benchmars game is great, but sadly not well maintained anymore. Rust has it's flaws, but it's not runtime speed (much more compilation speed, IDE support, distributed compilation support).
xiphias··on Rust Language, and Why C/C++ Will Never Die (2015)
The Rust - C++ speed comparison is sadly quite bad. On a modern machine, some of the benchmarks from the benchmarks game ran faster in Rust than in C++. It usually depends on the explicit / implicit vectorisation support, and a lot of it is taken care of by LLVM.

Also if you look at the C code, the multi-threaded optimizations are quite hard to write in C, while Rust has Rayon (which is not yet used in the Benchmarks game examples).

xiphias··on AI Can Transform Anyone Into a Professional Dancer
Sounds interesting, thanks! I had a few informative but controversial comments in the past... that may be the reason.
xiphias··on AI Can Transform Anyone Into a Professional Dancer
It looks impressive, I just don't understand why computer games don't use these techniques to feature realistic human bodies/faces.
xiphias··on Firefox Lockbox
If by PBKDF2 you mean PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256, it should die as it's so much less secure than using Argon2 as a password hash function.
xiphias··on Tesla opens the Model 3 reservation floodgates
Adding other tents are probably easy, the hard part is slashing the cost of manufacturing to be profitable with $35000/car
xiphias··on Rust 2018: an early preview
Even if Rust becomes almost as complex than C++ (which may be necessary to be able to move all low level code base from C/C++ to Rust), the world becomes a safer place by not having so many memory corruption bugs while being CPU/memory friendly. I really appreciate the fast pace the Rust team has and hope for this transition to start ASAP (though features are still missing for big code bases, like distributed compilation).
xiphias··on Zuckerberg didn’t make any friends in Europe today
I can't speak for Italy, but as one of the hundreds of thousands of Hungarians who could easily get a job outside Hungary _because_ of Hungary joining the EU, I'm deeply thankful for the fact that EU is trying to control the damage that Orban Viktor is doing to the country.

As for the elections: Orban used lots of tools (cheating) to make sure that they win again. Migrants/illegal border crossers are not a problem here at this time here actually (they prefer Germany with a better economy).

Most of us Hungarians want to stay in the EU, but we have a dictator who would prefer to be outside if the money stops flowing from EU to them.

xiphias··on Ask HN: What are some tech companies that do not use an open floor plan?
At Google priority based meeting cancellations were implemented to solve this problem for important people. The only problem was that I wasn't important enough.
xiphias··on Autonomous braking: 'The most significant development since the safety belt'
The problem with this combination is that it may reduce the number of crashes/injuries, but increase the number of deaths at the same time
xiphias··on Coinbase Ventures
Coinbase still didn't implement transaction batching. Whenever Bitcoin's price drops for a few months the company forgets that its system needs to be solid and scale 10x for the next bull run. They should be already be preparing for Schnorr signatures support (not a year after it's in production). There's a lot of things they could do to solidify their business instead of spraying money around.
xiphias··on Don’t Fix Facebook, Replace It
It sounds interesting, can you give a concrete example?
xiphias··on An Update on Last Week’s Accident
It's quite hard if you take into account that machine learning needs 10000x the training data that a human needs, and Tesla is sold in 30+ countries (and used in much more).

I think 3d mapping the surrounding world correctly using multiple cameras (what humans are doing) is more generalizable.

xiphias··on An Update on Last Week’s Accident
It's not always true. Waymo is a clear exception: their car was at current Tesla's level 5 years ago, but they chose not to run into production. Many Google engineers left from the team because they wanted to see their work in public, but Larry clearly wanted safe L4 driving before getting to the roads.

(of course Google did lots of ,,ungoogly'' things in the past few years, but at least they got Waymo right)

xiphias··on Google is shutting down its goo.gl URL shortening service
all existing links will continue to redirect to the intended destination.

It would be a PR nightmare for Google if they stopped redirecting existing links, but they won't do that as they're a huge user of the web graph as well.

xiphias··on BMW says electric car mass production not viable until 2020
i8 is a hybrid car with a very small electric range and small cargo space.
xiphias··on HIP – Convert CUDA to Portable C++
,,HIP is not intended to be a drop-in replacement for CUDA, and developers should expect to do some manual coding and performance tuning work to complete the port.''

It's a great start, but I'm sure a lot of cases are not yet handled (like asm instructions?)

xiphias··on Developers love trendy new languages, but earn more with functional programming
,,Fifty-eight percent say that ethics are the responsibility of upper management''

With the same reasoning management could say that ethics is the responsibility of investors who decide about how ethical a company should be and customers who may pay for the non-ethical product.

xiphias··on Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham
Thanks for the answer. When I was implementing a language learning program (who hasn't? :) ), using logistic regression was working quite well to quickly find my vocabulary level in about 10 questions in the top 10000 most frequently used words list adaptively (I ran a full logistic regression on the user dataset after each new data point, by mapping the position of the words to the estimated level of the user), and the questions just felt right. So I'm not talking about multiple logistic regression model, just using 1 variable, which works with lots of questions (as long as the question hardness is well calibrated).

Although I'm happy that you're trying to predict the most informative question, for me some questions near the end felt trivial, so either my feeling wasn't right about the hardness of a question, or the algorithm has lots of space to improve, or the question hardness levels weren't calibrated optimally.

Anyways congrats for the success for your startup (I just hope that you prioritize people who don't have U.S. VISA)!

xiphias··on Triplebyte Raises $10M from Initialized Capital, Marissa Mayer and Paul Graham
Hi, I just went through the interview questions, they were fun (they said that I did exceptionally well, but nothing concrete, like percentage). I'm not looking for job, just though I try it out.

What I was interested in is whether the questions get harder, if I answer well, but they seemed random.

You could use logistic regression to estimate the level of an interviewer and adjust the questions to get to the same accuracy with less time (or to improve accuracy with the same number of questions/time)

xiphias··on The Battle for Best Semi-Autonomous System: Tesla Autopilot vs. GM SuperCruise
I don't think so. Being able to go home drunk together with friends at night without a taxi sounds like a feature everybody would love while there's no better solution than having an ugly LIDAR.

Elon Musk is probably right that in the long term it won't be needed, but those few years count a lot.

xiphias··on Retiring Wave
The operational transforms were integeated into Google Docs later for multi-person editing (the Wave team was merged into Google Docs), and it works quite well.
xiphias··on Doctors in China Lead Race to Treat Cancer by Editing Genes
The world is teamed up more than ever: as soon as there was result it was published on internet. The ongoing study was published on a U.S. website. The lots of interesting trials that are going on is the opposite of what was happening in the last 30 years when it took many years for a drug company to publish any result of any interesting test that it had made.
xiphias··on Show HN: Browser extension to read HN comments for any url, in ClojureScript
Another option is using a bloom filter (just like how Chrome does it for malware URL detection)
xiphias··on Facebook open-sources Detectron
I'm happy that tech companies are open sourcing basic research all the time, and thinking a lot about what would have happened if large pharmacy companies did the same thing. I'm just hopeful that with new biotech companies the science behind curing people will get faster as well.
xiphias··on [dead]
Link to the interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcjxSThD54
xiphias··on NeoPG – an opiniated fork of GnuPG 2
At this point Rust is the clear winner, as it's providing higher safety for similar run-time speed.
xiphias··on Chrome is turning into the new Internet Explorer 6
Not just innovating, but all browsers are fixing bugs. IE 6 was full of positioning bugs, which meant that it was extremely hard to make something look the same in 2 browsers.

Nowadays browsers achieve pixel perfect positioning and compatibility with each other.

xiphias··on Pineapple Fund looking to convert some funds to Bitcoin Cash
Nobody, as they now make sure that they have nothing to do with altcoins. They put an enormous amount of effort to keep Bitcoin decentralized, at the same time trying to improve fungibility.
xiphias··on Tokio internals: Understanding Rust's async I/O framework
You don't have to, as Tokio is just a building block for people who're implementing protocols. But those implementations will have great safe, zero-copying characteristics.
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