Best of 2022

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2022. 582 posts.

Systems & Performance
408

RETRO is fast

When I first read Google’s RETRO paper, I was skeptical. Sure, RETRO models are 25x smaller than the competition, supposedly leading to HUGE savings in training and inference costs. But what about the new trillion token “retrieval database” they added to the architcture? Surely that must add back some computational…

414

How to JIT – An Introduction

When I wrote the introductory article for libjit , I aimed it at programmers who know what JITs are, at least to some extent. I did mention what a JIT is, but only very briefly. The purpose of this article is to provide a better introductory overview of JITing, with code samples that don't rely on any libraries.