Barjak | 6 years ago | on: Berlin Brandenburg: The airport with half a million faults
Barjak's comments
Barjak | 7 years ago | on: Ibuprofen alters human testicular physiology to produce compensated hypogonadism
Barjak | 7 years ago | on: Boring Co. Drops LA Westside Tunnel Plan
Barjak | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: What are the best textbooks in your field of expertise?
Barjak | 7 years ago | on: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars
This strikes me as the fundamental issue.
Barjak | 7 years ago | on: 'Breakthrough' algorithm exponentially faster than any previous one
"An Exponential Speedup in Parallel Running Time for Submodular Maximization without Loss in Approximation"
Barjak | 7 years ago | on: Intel Delays Mass Production of 10nm CPUs to 2019
As I understand it, the EUV light is produced by dropping little drops of tin in front of a laser, which turns it into a plasma that emits 13.5nm light. However, tin particles scatter everywhere and eventually damage the collector mirror, so it's hard to make these machines robust.
I also imagine with these high energies and 30% absorption, you have to cool all the mirrors to keep them from deforming, but I'm no expert.
Barjak | 8 years ago | on: On Radical Markets
This would be an interesting hypothesis to explore with swarm reinforcement learning. It seems to me that rights have a lot to do with optimal/stable cooperation strategies in certain types of games, and maybe RL can uncover better strategies, or maybe not.
The simplest well-studied problem of this sort is the iterated prisoner's dilemma. The strategies we have today are remarkably similar to the Axelrod's original strategies three decades ago.
Barjak | 8 years ago | on: Things I Learned from a Job Hunt for a Senior Engineering Role
>It's a number's game. You must send a fuckload of resumes ...
So you recommend not bothering with personalized cover letters? At this point I'm really starting to see the sense in this.
Barjak | 8 years ago | on: Underestimating the mind-warping potential of fake video
I guarantee you that there exist (or will exist) highly profitable consultancies which specialize in faking evidence. Just think about how easy it would be to launder a million here, a million there, disguised as legal fees in some of these large cases.
We're approaching the limits of the traditional legal system with human juries. I don't how to solve this in the long term. I'll speculate that the solution will involve blockchains and a new, more minimal, totally decentralized legal system.
Barjak | 8 years ago | on: Memory, attention, sequences
Someone linked me the author's more recent article [1] yesterday which claims hierarchical attention models totally outclass traditional RNNs/LSTMs. I really want to read an empirical comparison or a HN thread with experts chiming in.
[1] https://towardsdatascience.com/the-fall-of-rnn-lstm-2d1594c7...
Barjak | 8 years ago | on: Ask HN: Which search engine do you use, and why?
Also I agree that Google is outsmarting itself in terms of guessing what users want. It used to be you could learn how to coax Google into giving good results, but its queries feel way less expressive these days because they're trying to be smart.
I'm better at learning the behavior of a stupid search engine than a smart search engine is at learning my behavior (for now at least).
I still use Google Scholar a lot though.
Barjak | 8 years ago | on: Tricks Make Virtual Reality Feel Real (2016)
Barjak | 8 years ago | on: The Looming Battle Over AI Chips
I would tell a younger version of myself to focus your education on some aspect of the semiconductors industry.
Barjak | 8 years ago | on: I was Zuckerberg’s speechwriter
Look at last week. The senate was on their high-horse, admonishing facebook for privacy infringements, totally unaware of the irony they are an appendage of the same entity which created the NSA and continues to eavesdrop on all of our conversations.
We can all opt out of Facebook. Thankfully many have. But NSA surveillance is involuntary.
Why are we more worried about a voluntary and foreseeable risk than an involuntary rights violation?
Don't interpret this as saying Facebook acted appropriately.
Barjak | 8 years ago | on: Seattle's New Normal: Homelessness Is Now Middle Class
Seattle was also one of those cities hostile to jitneys. http://mynorthwest.com/152499/political-promise-personal-veh...?
So my impression is that Seattle often jumps the gun regulating things away--banning things that actually increase quality of life/spending power. We all know that those without discretionary income are the first to feel drops in spending power (due to regulation, etc.).
I'm also reminded of a great chapter in "Downtown: Its Rise and Fall" which talks about the special interests behind and the consequences of tenement reform, consequences which were largely negative if you were poor. I can't help wondering if similar forces have led to Seattle's present-day predicaments.
Barjak | 8 years ago | on: Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet?
Sadly, the archive only contains 300,000 words IIRC.
It's just "OED_unpack_tools.py" on github.
I'm reminded of that $2M bathroom at a public park in NYC.
This is the video. There's some libertarian editorialization, but the facts themselves are solid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfAE5emMCs8