I wonder if the improvements for the aluminum heatsink might be applicable to other situations like cpu/gpu heatsinks or other places where cooling is needed. It seems like it might be economical.
Readit Newsscheme271 commented on 15-Fold increase in solar thermoelectric generator performance nature.com/articles/s4137... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
scheme271 commented on Unexpected productivity boost of Rust lubeno.dev/blog/rusts-pro... · Posted by u/bkolobara
Jeeze, why should attribute assignment have side-effects, anyway? That'd be gross!
I think it's unavoidable for any sufficiently complicated object or variable. Think of c++'s unique_ptr that guarantees that only a single reference to memory exists so that that the memory can be free'd safely when it goes out of scope. Or thing of a complicated object that has references to allocated memory. You either allocate a bunch of memory and copy values over or have two objects refer to the same bit of allocated memory. Each solution potentially has major downsides. Your objects don't even have to be all that exotic, think of a vector holding 1024 fp64 values or a 8kb long string.
scheme271 commented on Unexpected productivity boost of Rust lubeno.dev/blog/rusts-pro... · Posted by u/bkolobara
The entire discussion is about “=“ doing weird stuff, which in 99.9% of cases it does not do. And my point was that no language, without doing weird stuff (like overloading), does not let “=“ do weird stuff (and thus is pure). The counterarguments all involve nonstandard contracts. Therefore, thinking that using “=“ will have some magical side-effect is absolutely never expected by default.
So, with anything that isn't a primitive type (e.g. int, bool, etc), there's a chance that assignment is going to require memory allocation or something similar. If that's the case then there's a chance of bad things happening (e.g. a out of memory error and the program being killed).
More commonly, if you look at things like c++'s unique_ptr, assignment will do a lot of things in the background in order to keep the unique_ptr properties consistent. Rust and other languages probably do similar things with certain types due to semantic guarantees.
scheme271 commented on A bubble that knows it's a bubble craigmccaskill.com/ai-bub... · Posted by u/craigmccaskill
I think this is directionally correct. But we tend to remember the technologies which became mainstream after the bubble burst and forget those that fizzled or found a much less world-changing niche.
Blockchain, NFTs and 3D printing are still around and have vacuumed up billions and billions without the average person being able to tell an impact on their lives.
3d printing has gone somewhat mainstream unlike the others. Manufacturers use it and it's somewhat common to see stuff that's been 3d printed being sold or created as small run prototypes.
scheme271 commented on Mark Zuckerberg freezes AI hiring amid bubble fears telegraph.co.uk/business/... · Posted by u/pera
Could you explain your claim that ANNs are nothing like real neural networks beyond their initial inspiration (if you'll accept my paraphrasing). I've seen it a few times on HN, and I'm not sure what people mean by it.
By my very limited understanding of neural biology, neurons activate according to inputs that are mostly activations of other neurons. A dot product of weights and inputs (i.e. one part of matrix multiplication) together with a threshold-like function doesn't seem like a horrible way to model this. On the other hand, neurons can get a bit fancier than a linear combination of inputs, and I haven't heard anything about biological systems doing something comparable to backpropogation, but I'd like to know whether we understand enough to say for sure that they don't.
Neurons don't just work on electrical potentials, they also have a multiple whole systems of neurotransmitters that affect their operation. So I don't think their activation is a continuous function. Although I suppose we could use non-continuous functions for activations in a NN, I don't think there's an easy way to train a NN that does that.
scheme271 commented on The new geography of stolen goods economist.com/interactive... · Posted by u/tlb
> How is it impossible to track down a thief?
It's not. If an expensive supercar is stolen, the police forces somehow find it really quickly.
The problem is that police forces are there to protect the property of the aristocracy and oppress the plebeians. Any "protection" for the plebeians is purely incidental and accidental.
That expensive supercar is a lot more noticeable than a toyota corolla. People are also more likely to remember seeing a lime green lambo than a silver corolla.
scheme271 commented on The first widespread cure for HIV could be in children wired.com/story/the-first... · Posted by u/sohkamyung
I believe it is. We've had vaccines for the common flu for a while and routinely create new vaccine formulations that are effective against the current strains. Nothing like that exists for HIV.
This is exactly the kind of obvious mistake that contributes to the complexity of explaining education outcomes. Requiring a "teacher recommendation" to allow a student to take an advanced course introduces bias and consequently is suboptimal to say the least.
That the following had to be done is sadly the state of affairs in the US:
> In 2018, North Carolina passed House Bill 986, Session Law 2018-32, which included Part II: Enrollment in Advanced Mathematics Courses. This legislation established § 115C-81.36, requiring that "any student scoring a level five on the standardized test for the mathematics course in which the student was most recently enrolled shall be enrolled in the advanced course for the next mathematics course in which the student is enrolled."
Edit to add:
This is also the kind of thing that machine learning/"algo" skeptics/detractors skip over or ignore when evaluating automation: humans are often wrong.
I'm not sure why you had that dig about ML skeptics but ML models can often perpetuate human biases if they aren't trained properly. For example, consider the amazon hiring algo that consistently rated female candidates below male candidates.
> Azul has a JVM that doesn't have GC pauses
That's GC duration time but the article indicates:
"This is because Zing uses a unique collector called C4 (Continuously Concurrent Compacting Collector) that allows pauseless garbage collection regardless of the Java heap size (up to 8 Terabytes)."
Azul's GC runs concurrrently with the app so those GC durations occur without a pause. If you think about it, there's no reason why GC requires a pause in order to work, with the right conditions, GC should be able to analyze and remove dead allocations without stopping an app.
Good story! I totally didn't know about the trick of changing what the JIT code produces bypassing JNI overhead.
> Never have I ever seen such a highly optimized Java codebase. Not before, not since.
This makes me wonder where it was. I know in the fintech world there's at least one hedge fund (not HFT, not market maker) where all their latency-sensitive trading code is written in Java, and when I asked them about GC pauses they said that their hot path produces no garbage so GC doesn't kick in.
Azul has a JVM that doesn't have GC pauses and has fairly good memory allocation / collection throughput.