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jeff_friesen's comments

jeff_friesen | 6 years ago | on: Cascade reactions use nanoparticles to convert CO2 to complex molecules

We have excess power in many places almost every day with wind and solar. Often the utilities get charged whether they use it or not. Sometimes they even get charged on top of their regular rate for not using it. The more solutions that use this surplus power, the more the utility can cost-effectively integrate renewables into the grid.

jeff_friesen | 6 years ago | on: Show HN: Easy intro book to Clojure and immutability

I think what you are stating is that the Clojure ecosystem is stagnating. I'm moving more and more of our company's stack over to the Clojure ecosystem because I see a lot of innovation and excitement in it. More importantly, it takes fewer people to be more productive in it.

I know some high-profile people have left the language for various reasons, but there are lots of people I know personally who are joining it. We should expect some churn.

I won't try to convince you that it isn't stagnating, but I want to put out an alternate perspective from someone who is investing a lot in the ecosystem.

jeff_friesen | 7 years ago | on: A tiny Swiss company thinks it can help stop climate change

That kind of dismissive, smug response is never helpful and often disempowering. While so far we've never gotten around conservation of energy laws, we've often engineered solutions that met our goals. There are renewable sources of energy that can power this effort. Many wind-farms and even solar farms are starting to overproduce in some areas. Nuke plants overproduce because they can't adapt quickly enough to changing demands. There are solutions to the problem of powering these sequestration units.

jeff_friesen | 7 years ago | on: Stopping the RSI pain that almost destroyed my programming career (2016)

I had disabling back problems. I even had a setup where I could lay on my back and type with a monitor above me(!). I read the "The Mindbody Prescription" and it went away pretty quickly. It comes back briefly once or twice a year, but it's very minor and I have confidence it will pass. According to this book, it's not "all in your head". These are real, physical symptoms. But healing can be done mentally.

jeff_friesen | 8 years ago | on: Announcing the MapD Cloud: self-service GPU-accelerated analytics

I love MapD and been following them for a couple years. . I've been trying to do similar things using crossfilter, dc.js and custom elements. It works well up to 100K records, but we're starting to need millions of rows. But the entry previously was steep technically and financially. This cloud offering sounds perfect.

jeff_friesen | 8 years ago | on: HP Updates Z8 Workstations: Up to 56 Cores, 3 TB RAM, 9 PCIe Slots, 1700W

I somewhat disagree. Maybe there are few compiled applications that can use those resource, but it's easy to write code that uses all of them.

I have a 40 core CPU machine with a GTX 1080 Ti GPU. I run deep learning models with 90% GPU utilization and those 40 cores are barely used.

I would love to have 3 more GPUs to run in parallel to test different neural network architectures. Sometimes I'll run a CPU script at the same that processes machine learning data that uses all 40 cores.

I would use 4000 CPU cores and 10 GPUs in a machine if I could get them and I don't even do machine learning full time. I'm personally happy to see this trend of more core counts.

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