tylerhou · HackerTrans

bot, or someone heavily using an LLM. all 26 “papers” listed on orcid were written in 2026 and “published” on zenodo

Graduate students! Hah! ML researchers can only hope their papers at ICLR/ICML/NeurIPs are reviewed by graduate students!

tylerhou

5 mesi fadiscuss

This article is missing (extremely important) context that CS enrollment at Berkeley was restricted significantly. Many students at Berkeley want to major in CS, but can’t.

tylerhou

5 mesi fadiscuss

The art’s aesthetic, which resembles Calvin and Hobbes, is disrespectful to its creator, Bill Watterson’s.

Bill spent a lot of energy fighting commercialization of his work, arguing that it would devalue his characters and their personalities. I don’t know what is cheaper than using an AI model to instantly generate similar art, for free.

tylerhou

5 mesi fadiscuss

A big problem is that the range that we have decided to call “normal” might not actually be a normal range.

For example, 50% of surfers were found to have insufficient vitamin D in one study. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17426097/

There are at least two possible conclusions that you could draw. One conclusion is that we all need vitamin D supplementation regardless of how much sun exposure we receive.

Another conclusion is that we might want to reevaluate what we consider the normal range to be, especially when we are deciding a range for a specific individual.

tylerhou

6 mesi fadiscuss

You should check out Perceus! https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

tylerhou

7 mesi fadiscuss

Basically, a proxy. You don't need to deep copy; you just need to return a proxy object that falls back to the original dict if the key you are requesting has not been found or modified.

Functional data structures essentially create a proxy on every write. This can be inefficient if you make writes in batches, and you only need immutability between batches.

tylerhou

7 mesi fadiscuss

Monads do not need to build up a computation. The identity functor is a monad.

tylerhou

7 mesi fadiscuss

Yes.

tylerhou

7 mesi fadiscuss

The sun’s radiation hitting earth is 44,000 terawatts. I think we’re fine with an “extra” terawatt. (It’s not even extra, because it would be derived from the sun’s existing energy.)

https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/135642main_b...

tylerhou

9 mesi fadiscuss

> I would like to learn category theory properly one day, at least to that kind of "advance undergraduate" level she mentions.

As someone who tried to learn category theory, and then did a mathematics degree, I think anyone who wants to properly learn category theory would benefit greatly from learning the surrounding mathematics first. The nontrivial examples in category theory come from group theory, ring theory, linear algebra, algebraic topology, etc.

For example, Set/Group/Ring have initial and final objects, but Field does not. Why? Really understanding requires at least some knowledge of ring/field theory.

What is an example of a nontrivial functor? The fundamental group is one. But appreciating the fundamental group requires ~3 semesters of math (analysis, topology, group theory, algebraic topology).

Why are opposite categories useful? They can greatly simplify arguments. For example, in linear algebra, it is easier to show that the row rank and column rank of a matrix are equal by showing that the dual/transpose operator is a functor from the opposite category.

tylerhou

9 mesi fadiscuss

No, sorting 50/2ish things 50 times allegedly takes 1-2ms. Which is only slightly more believable.

tylerhou

9 mesi fadiscuss

It is not critical for register assignment -- in fact, SSA makes register assignment more difficult (see the swap problem; the lost copy problem).

Lifetime analysis is important for register assignment, and SSA can make lifetime analysis easier, but plenty of non-SSA compilers (lower-tier JIT compilers often do not use SSA because SSA is heavyweight) are able to register allocate just fine without it.

tylerhou

9 mesi fadiscuss

Here's a concise explanation of SSA. Regular (imperative) code is hard to optimize because in general statements are not pure -- if a statement has side effects, then it might not preserve the behavior to optimize that statement by, for example:

1. Removing that statement (dead code elimination)

2. Deduplicating that statement (available expressions)

3. Reordering that statement with other statements (hoisting; loop-invariant code motion)

4. Duplicating that statement (can be useful to enable other optimizations)

All of the above optimizations are very important in compilers, and they are much, much easier to implement if you don't have to worry about preserving side effects while manipulating the program.

So the point of SSA is to translate a program into an equivalent program whose statements have as few side effects as possible. The result is often something that looks like a functional program. (See: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~appel/papers/ssafun.pdf, which is famous in the compilers community.) In fact, if you view basic blocks themselves as a function, phi nodes "declare" the arguments of the basic block, and branches correspond to tailcalling the next basic block with corresponding values. This has motivated basic block arguments in MLIR.

The "combinatorial circuit" metaphor is slightly wrong, because most SSA implementations do need to consider state for loads and stores into arbitrary memory, or arbitrary function calls. Also, it's not easy to model a loop of arbitrary length as a (finite) combinatorial circuit. Given that the author works at an AI accelerator company, I can see why he leaned towards that metaphor, though.

tylerhou

9 mesi fadiscuss

> M5 is 4-6x more powerful than M4

In GPU performance (probably measured on a specific set of tasks).

tylerhou

9 mesi fadiscuss

Money circulates but resources do not. A human hour spent constructing a data center can’t then be used to build an apartment building.

tylerhou

10 mesi fadiscuss

> You can end up writing nearly the exact same code twice because one needs to be async to handle an async function argument, even if the real functionality of the wrapper isn't async.

Sorry for the possibly naive question. If I need to call a synchronous function from an async function, why can't I just call await on the async argument?

    def foo(bar: str, baz: int):
      # some synchronous work
      pass
    
    async def other(bar: Awaitable[str]):
      foo(await bar, 0)

tylerhou

11 mesi fadiscuss

> ibuprofen is better in every way.

Taking ibuprofen (or other NSAIDs) long-term can wear away the stomach lining, causing ulcers. Acetaminophen is generally better tolerated to manage mild long-term pain than NSAIDs, as long as you don't overdose / take with alcohol.

tylerhou

3 anni fadiscuss

CEOs are also usually not allowed to take short positions in the company they head. Analogously, actors should not be allowed to short movie futures they act in.

tylerhou

5 anni fadiscuss

Wearing a mask reduces COVID transmission by ~70% [1]. Adding vaccination on top of that probably reduces transmission to ~5% percent (just a guess). These are almost free interventions.

In contrast, heart disease and cancer are much more expensive to mitigate. Regular exercise reduces the incidence of some heart diseases for the average person by about ~50% (estimating from the graph) [2]. We have no cheap way of reducing cancer incidence (besides vaccines for some viruses that cause cancer) — for example, intervening in cases of substance addiction is expensive.

So even if your comparison was correct (it's not), how is it relevant? Are you trying to argue that the government should compel people to completely alter their lifestyles before they should mandate masks or vaccines? That makes no sense, because 1) preventing cancer requires mandating vaccines and 2) the interventions are orders of magnitude more expensive.

Or, are you trying to suggest that the deaths of 650,000 people (in the US) are insignificant because there are some aggregate diseases that kill more? And therefore, because we can't stop all death, it's pointless to try to even mitigate some death?

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...

[2] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/01.CIR.00000488...

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