shoyer

9 ms·

1.
by shoyer 2mo ago
When will this support "trees" of pull requests, with dependent changes? In my experience with stacked changes (from Google), it is often the case that changes do not stack up as a linear history. I imagine that would especially b
2.
Show HN: Coordax: Coordinate Axes for Jax(github.com)
2 points by shoyer 10mo ago|0 comments
3.
by shoyer 2y ago
The short answer is that tracing is way, way easier to implement in a predictable and reliably performant way. This especially matters for distributed computation and automatic differentiation, two areas where JAX shines. AST parsing via re
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by shoyer 2y ago
Glad to see that you can make ensemble forecasts of tropical cyclones! This absolutely essential for useful weather forecasts of uncertain events, and I am a little dissapointed by the frequent comparisons (not just you) of ML models to ECM
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by shoyer 2y ago
ERA5 covers 1940 to present. That's well before the satellite era (and the earlier data absolutely has more quality issues) but there's nothing from 170 years ago.
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by shoyer 3y ago
Not sure if $199 is reasonably priced in your opinion, but the Nest Wifi Pro supports 6E.
7.
by shoyer 4y ago
+1 one of most common mistakes for PhD students is picking a project based on research interests rather than the adviser. I believe it is relatively uncommon to speak with former students of an adviser, but this is something that everyone e
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by shoyer 4y ago
df.pipe(f, ...) is just syntactic sugar for f(df, ...). Nothing slow about it.
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by shoyer 4y ago
I work on weather prediction, both with traditional simulation methods and machine learning. I have not seen any examples of cellular automata used for useful predictions in this space.
10.
by shoyer 5y ago
I guess "quantum physicist" can mean either an academic credential or a job title. In my case, I have the former but no longer the later. I finished my PhD nine years ago and no longer work in the field.
11.
by shoyer 5y ago
As former quantum physicist, I find it little troubling to read "quantum theory has reached a dead end" in specific reference to the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Most quantum physicists could not care less about how quantu
12.
by shoyer 5y ago
My experience was that robo-investors are great until you need something special. Then they can become rather painful. Exmaple: I got divorced last year. Betterment took weeks of time and many phones calls until they were able to figure out
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by shoyer 5y ago
Foxconn once said it would spend $10B building a factory in Wisconsin. Now the claim is $672M -- over next six years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_in_Wisconsin We'll believe it when it happens.
14.
by shoyer 5y ago
Most of the "bugs" caught here (including in TensorFlow and in my own project, Xarray) seems to actually be typos in the test suite. This is certainly a good catch (and yes, linters should check for this!), but seems a little over
15.
by shoyer 5y ago
NERSC is part of DOE’s Office of Science. Nuclear weapon development is done by DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which sponsors labs like Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos. It definitely isn’t NERSC, NNSA has its own d
16.
by shoyer 5y ago
> Neural networks need completely different optimisation methods, and there is no practically useful application of any of the Newton or Quasi-Newton methods for their optimisation. I don't think this is quite fair. There are severa
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by shoyer 5y ago
A PhD is certainly not for everyone (or even most), but it's rather unfair to say that it does not teach any employable skills. Even PhDs who go on to work in completely unrelated fields learn how to make progress on poorly defined pro
18.
by shoyer 5y ago
ECMWF makes probabilistic forecasts, in the form of an ensemble of 50 IID examples. So this is mostly matter of Windy figuring out how to put that information into their UI.
19.
by shoyer 5y ago
The general case of implicit differentiation, i.e., for functions y(x) defined by the constraints F(x, y(x)) = 0, where x and y are vectors, is solved by "implicit function theorem": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki&#
20.
by shoyer 5y ago
This looks really interesting. Does anyone know where the money is coming from? I'm guessing foundations like Schmidt Futures? It seems like financing is the crucial challenge for getting anything like this off the ground.
21.
by shoyer 5y ago
This post is yet another example of why you should never use APIs for random number generation that rely upon and mutate hidden global state, like the functions in numpy.random. Instead, use APIs that explicitly deal with RNG state, e.g., b
22.
by shoyer 6y ago
By the way, is there another reference with a full description of how the benchmarks are setup? I'd be curious how Xarray (end user API) + Dask (distributed compute) + Zarr (distributed storage) compares. Xarray definitely takes a diff
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by shoyer 6y ago
Hi Peter, good to run into you again :) I agree, formulating open benchmarks is great work, and there's nothing suspicious about performing well on benchmarks you write. It's just worth keeping in mind: https://matthewr
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by shoyer 6y ago
The short answer is that I wrote Xarray before I showed up at Google :)
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by shoyer 6y ago
It’s worth noting that the author of this report is Peter Baumann, the author of Rasdaman. So it shoukd be no surprise that Rasdaman comes out on top in the various benchmarks and is presented as the leading “array database.” My two cents (
26.
by shoyer 6y ago
Here’s the paper: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/53e2/70a3f29cf556849362130e... Unfortunately on closer examination the results look pretty meaningless to me. The study involves rather small numbers (e.g., 4/33
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by shoyer 6y ago
I'm a big believer in auto-diff, but I'm skeptical that any autodiff tool would differentiate a 100k line simulation code correctly and efficiently without manual intervention. I'd certainly love to be proven wrong, though an
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by shoyer 6y ago
To be more precise, in backwards mode auto-diff, inputs only need to be saved if they are used in a non-linear way.
29.
by shoyer 6y ago
All good points! "Non-deterministic" behavior within the same program/process is still a bridge I would not want to cross. This could result in subtle glitches, e.g., when a user hits "refresh" with the same inputs,
30.
by shoyer 6y ago
As someone who builds neural networks routinely, this sort of non-reproducibility sounds troubling to me. We expect small differences for floating point arithmetic between platforms, but integer math is typically exact. This is all the more

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