Barjak's comments

Barjak | 7 years ago | on: Life in the Spanish city that banned cars

>People don’t like being told they can’t drive wherever they want, but Lores says that while people claim it as a right, in fact what they want are privileges.

This strikes me as the fundamental issue.

Barjak | 7 years ago | on: Intel Delays Mass Production of 10nm CPUs to 2019

There are no lenses which are transparent at 13.5. This means you have to use mirrors instead, and even that's a challenge. 13.5nm was selected because it can be reflected by special Molybdenum/Silicon mirrors, but even these mirrors only reflect about 70% of the light. This means that for every two mirrors you add to the system, you have to double the brightness of your energy source.

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

>However, markets are socially constructed because they depend on property rights that are socially constructed, and there are many different ways that markets and property rights can be constructed, some of which are unexplored and potentially far better than what we have today.

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

What percentage of the 100 applications include a personalized cover letter these days?

>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've been afraid of this for years.

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

I saw it yesterday too. I'm interested in attention models, but I'm not a skilled enough practitioner to say anything meaningful about them yet.

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?

I use DuckDuckGo because of infinite scrolling and the ability to navigate your search results with the up/down arrows. It's not privacy, but usability. It's insane that these features aren't built into every search engine.

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: The Looming Battle Over AI Chips

If I were better credentialed, I would definitely be looking to get into semiconductors right now. It's an exciting time in terms of manufacturing processes, and I think some of the most interesting and meaningful optimization problems ever formulated come from semiconductor design and manufacturing, not to mention the growing popularity of specialized hardware.

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

Am I alone in thinking this isn't heresy? A country or federal state is just a company with a monopoly over law in a certain geographical region. Facebook's "monopoly" is at least subject to the whim of the market, as the Delete Facebook campaign shows.

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

I don't have many data points on Seattle, but I'm reminded of this article from a couple years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12459698

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?

I just published a repository that de-obfuscates the archive from OED's Windows CD-ROM version. I don't know anything about the markup language it uses and I don't know anything about JSON either, but I attempt to parse it and convert it to JSON.

Sadly, the archive only contains 300,000 words IIRC.

It's just "OED_unpack_tools.py" on github.

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