pbadams

Joined 8 years ago

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76
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18
Member since
Aug 22
https://pbada.ms
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Recent submissions

Comment · 5 months ago
There's the Khadas Mind series of mini pcs. They have a proprietary docking interface though. Agree that it would be great if this form-factor was more common.
Comment · 2 years ago
Comment · 2 years ago
It's not mentioned in the original paper, but DiskANN also supports PQ at build-time via `--build_PQ_bytes`, though it's a tradeoff with the graph quality as you mention.

One interesting property in benchmarking is that the distance comparison implementations for full-dim vectors can often be more efficient than those for PQ-compressed vectors (straight-line SIMD execution vs table lookups), so on some systems cluster-and-merge is relatively competitive in terms of build performance.

Comment · 2 years ago
I think you might be right that encouraging curious discussion of these topics is important to the mission of HN.

However, if the moderation approach is going to change, I think it would be better to do so explicitly through changes to the site guidelines rather than in an ad-hoc way. I don't think that this article is covering an 'interesting _new_ phenomenon' (emph. mine) as discussed in the guidelines, and indeed most of the comments are talking about moderation policy or the conflict in general as opposed to the details presented in the article. Perhaps it would be better to have a thread explicitly focused on members of the community engaging with each other as individuals, such as a hypothetical 'Ask HN: How has conflict personally affected you?' or 'Ask HN: How/why have your views on this conflict changed over time?'

The stories that the article has to tell are important, but they aren't the thing that people are discussing here. And moderating submissions instead of explicitly discussion-focused posts invites some of the concerns about sourcing and bias that have been raised in other comments.

Comment · 3 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
Altman has claimed before that he doesn't hold equity in OpenAI. He could have some kind of more opaque arrangement that gives him a material stake in the financial success of OpenAI, and downplayed it or didn't disclose it to the board.

Who knows, though -- I'm sure we'll find out more in the next few weeks, but it's fun to guess.

Comment · 3 years ago
Comment · 3 years ago
Apart from the comments you've already gotten, another goal of geospatial systems is to support range queries (e.g. for the bounding box of the user's screen, what are all the businesses in that box). In higher dimensions range queries are mostly useless and the focus is on NN queries.

But as the other comments have mostly said, it's mainly dimensionality and scale differences that drive the design differences (e.g. graphs end up working better than trees in high dimensions)

Comment · 3 years ago
> Let's put deep learning aside for a second. Can anyone here name a single academic in any other subfield of computer science who had a string of groundbreaking research works where every one of those works is from 1980 or after?

Shafi Goldwasser (Probabilistic encryption, zero-knowledge proofs, etc.) got her PhD in 1984.

Leslie Lamport is just a bit before your deadline, his 'Time, Clocks' paper came out in 1978, but the bulk of his work was after 1980, including paxos.

While there's definitely some truth to your Kuhnian view of 'times of revolution' in a field, I think it's hard to apply that to recent progress because it may just be that it's not clear which research works were groundbreaking without the benefit of hindsight. To me, the revolutionary period of CS research is still ongoing.

Comment · 4 years ago
Part of the difficulty is, if very few people are browsing to page 2, deciding what to put on page 2 becomes harder and harder.

Google has a lot of user behavior signals to decide what should be in results 1-10. Deciding if a page should be ranked 20, 200, or 2000 without any user clicks to check if you're right is really difficult.

I would bet that since 2008/9, the relative numbers of spam site operators, Google engineers, second-page searches have changed significantly.

Comment · 4 years ago
There are also fewer buses needed to carry the same number of people, and they are operated by professional (and hopefully less distracted!) drivers.

I'm not sure a good data source, but I'd expect that the serious injury rate per person-mile of buses is much lower than that of private cars.

Comment · 4 years ago
Even if the 'bug' of limited time off is solved, I think people's valuation of their time is still pretty high. The trains/airships would have to be quite nice (read: heavy, expensive, possibly less efficient) for you to be willing to spend so much time in them.

On a sillier note, I wonder what the fastest speed you can reach is, in terms of timezones/hr.

My guess was a polar route like ANC-HEL, but there don't seem to be any direct passenger flights. Condor flies ANC-FRA seasonally, which is pretty much exactly 1 hour time difference per hour of flight. Another possibility is TAS->URC, at 1.2.

The author's routes, YVR-LHR and YVR-NRT, are both 0.8-0.9 hours difference per hour flight time, depending on direction.

Comment · 4 years ago
I agree in the typical case, but they support concurrent add/delete one of their index options. Handling consistency/contention for modifying whatever graph/tree/etc structure they are using is probably nontrivial, and the resulting cache invalidations would also likely affect the QPS.

P.S. Great work on your site, by the way - it's a really inspiring project!

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