WingNews logo WingNews GitHub [2]

nuisance-bear's comments

nuisance-bear | 4 years ago | on: Test for lists in Cython

If you carefully read OP's response in the PR, he says he tried static typing make_list in addition to iterate_list. Your comment elides the resource allocation step.

Like OP, I observed that static typing make_list yields little benefit. It's runtime is 3x the runtime of iterate_list. And that makes sense. I'm not sure why we'd expect Cython to speed up the allocation of large numbers of Python objects.

nuisance-bear | 4 years ago | on: Unifying the CUDA Python Ecosystem

Here's an example that illustrates the phenomenon. If memory serves me right, index latency is superlinear in dimension count.

   import time, torch
   from itertools import product

   N = 100

   ten = torch.randn(N,N,N)
   arr = ten.numpy()

   def indexTimer(val):
       start = time.time()
       for i,j,k in product(range(N), range(N), range(N)):
           x = val[i, j, k]
       end = time.time()
       print('{:.2f}'.format(end-start))

   indexTimer(ten)
   indexTimer(arr)

nuisance-bear | 4 years ago | on: Unifying the CUDA Python Ecosystem

Tools to make GPU development easier are sorely needed.

I foolishly built an options pricing engine on top of PyTorch, thinking "oooh, it's a fast array library that supports CUDA transparently". Only to find out that array indexing is 100x slower than numpy.

nuisance-bear | 4 years ago | on: Adversary Drones Are Spying on the U.S. and the Pentagon Acts Like They're UFOs

"In fact, I believe that those in power who snicker about credible reports of strange objects in the sky and stymie research into them, including access to classified data, have become a threat to national security themselves."

This seems to have become a deep-seated aspect of American culture. It extends into startup land as well. We on HN seem to be deeply skeptical of new applications of technology--like Dropbox and Coinbase--despite being highly receptive to developments lower in the abstraction hierarchy.

nuisance-bear | 5 years ago | on: Unusual Stock Trading by Whales in US Congress

If you work in private equity, it's the worst. Your company isn't actively trading stock, but you still get banned from options, shorts, and need pre-clearance for every single trade. So you end up long SPY... even if you derive independent utility from actively managing your portfolio.

The law doesn't require this of course, but basically all money managers get their insider trading compliance program from the same 3 outside law firms.

nuisance-bear | 5 years ago | on: The Pentagon will have to live with limits on F-35’s supersonic flights (2020)

Supersonic cruise was an explicit design requirement for the F35, and it has been achieved using materials developed in the 1990s for the F22.

Your problem set sounds super cool, and it would be nice if DOD had a functioning acquisition process that would allow people with interesting tech to out-compete companies whose boards are stacked with current and former public officials. But alas, that's not the world we live in.

The sad thing is, there are probably dozens of proto Kelly Johnson's out there. But they've made defense industries so intolerable that none of them work there.

nuisance-bear | 5 years ago | on: Lost 72 hours worth of research data to forced update

I'd say this person is actually lucky Windows forced an update. Compute nodes fail, which is why you log state so you can restore your simulation or training routine. Instead of experiencing a failure in industry, they learned the "cache state" lesson in a low-stakes academic setting. Maybe they'll extrapolate the lesson and start keeping off-site backups too.

nuisance-bear | 5 years ago | on: Signal Is a Government Op

It's a lot easier to point at a fact everyone knows (Moxie took government money) than it is to find an exploitable bug in Signal.

This article is waste of time.

nuisance-bear | 5 years ago | on: China Creates Its Own Digital Currency, a First for Major Economy

How is this materially different from the system we already have?

US dollars are just rows in a distributed database. The database is distributed over a network of banking nodes. The network is highly concentrated [1], and its super-nodes are already very difficult to distinguish from government in anything but a formal legal sense.

Insofar as I can tell, a digital currency would be the same thing as government saying "banks need to provide unrestricted access to their networks" which has basically happened already.

[1] https://www.ffiec.gov/npw/Institution/TopHoldings

nuisance-bear | 5 years ago | on: Show HN: See the stock trades your representative is making

Whoa, the press release does not match the results. Scroll down to Tables 2a,2b on pp. 26-27 of the NBER paper.

These are their 1 year horizon alpha's and tstats against Fama French 3 factor:

          alpha     tstat
   Long   6.5%      6.6
   Shrt   5.0%      3.7
Those numbers are economically and statistically significant.
page 1