5 ms·

This is very neat, but these days I am truly enamoured with "reactive" notebooks. They are rather orthogonal to the concern here. Reactive notebooks automatical

This is very neat, but these days I am truly enamoured with "reactive" notebooks. They are rather orthogonal to the concern here. Reactive notebooks automatically build a dependency tree between cells. When you edit a cell, all cells depending on it get re-evaluated. It is extremely valuable for reproducibility. My favorite example is Pluto Notebooks in Julia (very Julia-specific), but I have seen (maybe less polished) similar tools in other languages too: https://plutojl.org/ https://plutojl.org/ On the other hand, when it comes to caching, Mandala (in python), brings the best both from caching and reactivity. A truly amazing memoization tool for computational graphs, much more sophisticated and more powerful than alternatives: https://github.com/amakelov/mandala https://github.com/amakelov/mandala

ylow 3y ago
Author here. Mandala looks really cool. Thanks for the recommendation!
- pgbovine 3y ago
  very cool idea! i was also very interested in this problem during grad school ... prototyped an approach by hacking CPython, but the code (python 2.6? from 2010 era) has long bitrotted: https://pg.ucsd.edu/publications/IncPy-memoization-in-Python-interpreter_ISSTA-2011.pdf https://pg.ucsd.edu/publications/IncPy-memoization-in-Python... https://pg.ucsd.edu/publications/IncPy-memoization-in-Python-interpreter-preliminary_TaPP-2010.pdf https://pg.ucsd.edu/publications/IncPy-memoization-in-Python...
- pgbovine 3y ago
  also, while i have your attention here, since you wrote that related post on (not) vector db's ... what would you recommend for a newbie to get started with RAG? let's say i have a large collection of text files on my computer that i want to use for RAG. the options out there seem bewildering. is there something simple akin to Ollama for RAG?
  - zzleeper 3y ago
    If you want to get something done quickly, try llama index. If you want to learn/hack, pick an easy vectordb, get an OpenAI API account, and do a quick attempt Then you can switch to a local LLM and embedder, and it helps a bit in learning what the pain points are
jihadjihad 3y ago
There was an interesting post yesterday that captured some of these ideas: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38681115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38681115

ylow 3y ago

Author here. Mandala looks really cool. Thanks for the recommendation!

pgbovine 3y ago
very cool idea! i was also very interested in this problem during grad school ... prototyped an approach by hacking CPython, but the code (python 2.6? from 2010 era) has long bitrotted: https://pg.ucsd.edu/publications/IncPy-memoization-in-Python-interpreter_ISSTA-2011.pdf https://pg.ucsd.edu/publications/IncPy-memoization-in-Python... https://pg.ucsd.edu/publications/IncPy-memoization-in-Python-interpreter-preliminary_TaPP-2010.pdf https://pg.ucsd.edu/publications/IncPy-memoization-in-Python...
pgbovine 3y ago
also, while i have your attention here, since you wrote that related post on (not) vector db's ... what would you recommend for a newbie to get started with RAG? let's say i have a large collection of text files on my computer that i want to use for RAG. the options out there seem bewildering. is there something simple akin to Ollama for RAG?
- zzleeper 3y ago
  If you want to get something done quickly, try llama index. If you want to learn/hack, pick an easy vectordb, get an OpenAI API account, and do a quick attempt Then you can switch to a local LLM and embedder, and it helps a bit in learning what the pain points are

jihadjihad 3y ago

There was an interesting post yesterday that captured some of these ideas: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38681115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38681115