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There was a company called Petridish that did exactly this. They pivoted after six months and became Blue Apron: https://vator.tv/news/2017-09-05-when-blue-apron-was-young-t...
Re:How to train large deep learning models as a startup on Thursday October 07, 2021 @02:49PM (#28790569)
Users expose their model to our Trial API (https://docs.determined.ai/latest/topic-guides/model-definit...), the base class then implements a training loop (which can be enhanced with user-supplied callbacks, metrics, etc.) that has a whole bunch of bells and whistles. Easy distributed (multi-GPU and multi-node) training, automatic checkpointing, fault tolerance, etc.

Concretely, the system is regularly taking checkpoints (which include model weights and optimizer state) and so if the spots disappear (as they do), the system has enough information to resume from where things were last checkpointed when resources become available again.

Re:How to train large deep learning models as a startup on Thursday October 07, 2021 @11:25AM (#28787548)
Check out Determined https://github.com/determined-ai/determined to help manage this kind of work at scale: Determined leverages Horovod under the hood, automatically manages cloud resources and can get you up on spot instances, T4's, etc. and will work on your local cluster as well. Gives you additional features like experiment management, scheduling, profiling, model registry, advanced hyperparameter tuning, etc.

Full disclosure: I'm a founder of the project.

Tom7’s sigbovik submissions are true works of art. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom7/mario/mario.pdf
Re:Let’s Invent B(+)-Trees on Monday April 27, 2020 @09:04PM (#23002172)
The exposition is tight.
Re:SQL queries don't start with SELECT on Thursday October 03, 2019 @11:28PM (#21154531)
Relational database queries are supposed to be _declarative_. As a user, you're not supposed to think about the mechanics of execution because the database system is supposed to be able to decide how to execute your query using whatever magic it wants, as long as it satisfies the contract that it gives you the right answer.

It's absolutely useful as a debugging tool to build up some semantic understanding of what the query means, and I encourage every database user to learn to use EXPLAIN, but relying on a mental execution model is borderline dangerous.

Re:Building a Dark Web Crawler in Go on Monday September 23, 2019 @07:37AM (#21047875)
Assume 100 pages on each onion address (it’s probably power-law but let’s just assume that’s the mean). Latency with Tor is super high. Assume average of 5s to load a single page. This is generous because tail latency will probably dominate mean latency in this setting.

These things can happen in parallel but let’s also assume no more than 32 simultaneous TCP connections per host through a Tor proxy.

So we’re looking at ~75k1005/32 seconds = 14 days to run through all of them. You may not need to distribute this but there are situations (e.g. I want a fresh index daily) where it is warranted.

Re:An Idiot’s guide to Support vector machines (2003) [pdf] on Monday December 31, 2018 @10:22AM (#18794828)
It’s also hard to separate the design of the neural architecture from the definition of the feature extractor.
Re:IPhones start slowing down after a year on Thursday December 21, 2017 @12:08PM (#15980600)
I had one of these phones too - it was a bad batch of serial numbers according to Apple. If this happens to you: https://www.apple.com/support/iphone6s-unexpectedshutdown/
Crunchbase has a good deal of data here - it is incomplete particularly for smaller companies, but is pretty good for larger investment rounds.
Re:Foundations of Machine Learning Boot Camp on Saturday January 28, 2017 @12:50PM (#13507675)
A word of caution - these talks are highly technical and theoretical and I don't recommend them for anyone looking to understand practical applications of ML. If, however, you're interested in intro to cutting edge work at the frontier of theoretical underpinnings of ML, this is a fabulous group talks from some of the sharpest academics in the field.
We've used this dataset to build a product review classification pipeline as an example application that can be developed using our project, KeystoneML (which runs on spark) - code is here: https://github.com/amplab/keystone/blob/master/src/main/scal...
Re:NetBricks: A new network function framework based on Rust on Wednesday December 21, 2016 @08:44AM (#13228985)
Re:Fast Fourier transform in x86 assembly on Saturday December 10, 2016 @04:38PM (#13148083)
I would also be interested in seeing this.
Re:Apple to Start Publishing AI Research on Tuesday December 06, 2016 @03:35PM (#13118070)
Microsoft is 23 years older than Google and it usually takes time for a corporation to create an R&D lab. Given Google's rich academic roots this happened faster there than usual. Google is doing a good job given that it's a relatively young company. I hope their research output continues to increase in quality and volume.

If you go by publication count alone, I suspect that IBM Research is still near the top. They have a large research organization that made some fundamental contributions in computer science in everything from speech recognition to databases.

Re:Zero Cost Abstractions on Wednesday November 30, 2016 @06:40PM (#13075724)
This is pretty awesome. One key bit of information that the compiler has is that the coefficients are a constant array of length 12, which makes the loop unrolling possible and also means that the register magic is in play - it's seriously awesome that the compiler does this.

That said, I'd expect something similar to happen with a well-written C program. Would equivalent abstractions in C++1{1,4,7} be "costly"?

Re:Amazon EC2 Elastic GPUs on Wednesday November 30, 2016 @02:26PM (#13073812)
GPUs in the cloud aren't targeted at gamers. They're targeted at people doing things like running render farms and training deep learning models.
Re:Serverless Map/Reduce on Friday November 04, 2016 @04:06PM (#12875621)
Keep in mind that with EC2 you're billed hourly so the fastest a 70 cpu-hour job could finish on m3.medium for $0.70 is 1 hour, and that's ignoring setup time, etc.

Meanwhile, on Lambda, you can actually run 1600 60s jobs (or 27 CPU-hours) in 3 minutes. This is inclusive of setup time, job submission, stragglers, etc. [1]

Of course, if you've got sustained load, it's cheaper to go with spot instances, but the "occasionally I need a buttload of compute," model is well-served by Lambda.

[1] http://ericjonas.com/pywren.html

Re:Serverless Map/Reduce on Friday November 04, 2016 @01:59PM (#12874528)
One of the nice things about lambda is the billing is super granular - you get billed at 100ms intervals.

Assuming 70 hours at $0.000000834/100ms [1]

The whole job costs $2.10.

[1] - https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/pricing/

Re:Be Kind on Friday October 14, 2016 @09:22AM (#12707861)
This varies highly depending on the organization. I've worked at places that do it both ways. Particularly in small places when resources are tight, teams are distributed, or there is a non-code safety measure in place (e.g. Business decisions are made ex-post of the code running dependent on the quality of its output), code reviews pre-deployment may not be necessary and can even be harmful (due to wasted resources).
Re:What 2,000 Calories Looks Like (2014) on Thursday September 29, 2016 @12:25PM (#12606533)
If I were trying to eat that diet and not break the bank/use all my time I'd invest in 4 things: 1) A ricecooker. 2) A food processor. 3) A sous-vide/vaccum sealer. 4) A Costco membership.

The ricecooker makes rice and keeps it warm all day. The food processor makes quick work of chopping veggies.

You could pack the cod/chicken in vacuum bags and freeze it, and then pop it in the water bath when it's time to eat. The sous-vide means you're not worried about over-cooking/attending to the process so you can do other things while your food cooks.

Costco will sell you high quality cod and chicken at ~$10/lb (probably less in store) and steak around $20/lb. You could similarly buy rice/potatoes/fish oil there in bulk.

Admittedly you're still spending $50+ on food/day, but that's not out of the question for someone earning $150k/year.

That said, it is probably much easier when you're earning $150m/year and can afford a private chef.

If you're willing to try something more bleeding edge: http://btrdb.io/
Re:Rust and Nix = easier Unix systems programming on Thursday April 14, 2016 @03:00AM (#11494781)
type systems are great.
Re:I’m not a human: Breaking the Google reCAPTCHA [pdf] on Friday April 08, 2016 @04:35PM (#11457704)
Going rate for humans breaking captchas is like $1/1000 captchas solved. A fully automated service could make some money, sure, but not exactly a killing.

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