basman
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1 year ago
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on: Something weird is happening with LLMs and Chess
Based on looking at the games at the end of the post, it seems unlikely. Both sides play extremely poorly — gpt-instruct is just slightly less bad — and I don't see any reasonable engine outputting those moves.
basman
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5 years ago
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on: No-kill, lab-grown meat to go on sale for first time
Also a bad argument: rephrasing GP's "We don't know enough to be sure this is safe" as "This is definitely unsafe".
basman
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6 years ago
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on: Q-Learning
The raycast probably disambiguated the state pretty well, such that it essentially had to memorize a few hundred actions, so that it did end up basically doing a sort of asynchronous distributed Dijkstra's algorithm.
basman
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11 years ago
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on: Ten seconds of math
352 with all options and limit 1000. Anyone do better? :)
basman
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11 years ago
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on: What makes for a stable marriage?
This is a misleading article in the following sense: the implication is "here are these seven surprising factors that are correlated with successful marriages". Except, in recent decades US divorce rates have bifurcated into two groups — well educated, affluent people who get married later and have lower divorce rates, and less well-off people who have a higher divorce rate. Given this one fact, most of the factors in the article are completely unsurprising. For example, it would be surprising if going on a honeymoon was not correlated positively with a successful marriage given that it is positively correlated with income.
basman
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12 years ago
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on: Why we love Scala at Coursera
So yes, they would be runtime errors in Python. But that's not such a catastrophe, actually. The way I write Python is by being in an IPython shell, writing short functions, unit-testing them as I go. So the development-time cost of those runtime errors is not very high, and in my experience offset by the flexibility and interactiveness. Writing in a functional style without much mutable state is really the thing that I find saves development/debugging time.
basman
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12 years ago
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on: Why we love Scala at Coursera
Your type checker catches array indexing bugs? Impressive.
basman
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13 years ago
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on: Free Online Book: Bayesian Reasoning and Machine Learning
Not a book, but Andrew Ng's coursera course (or Stanford class video lectures) are great and have lots of practical tips.
basman
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13 years ago
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on: Game Over
This blog post?
http://antirez.com/post/different-take-sexism-it.htmlI'd be curious how many people here find this beyond the pale. As a data point, I didn't. I don't agree with all of it, but I don't see what part of it counts as sexist, in the sense of advocating discrimination based on gender.
basman
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14 years ago
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on: Why should I have written ZeroMQ in C, not C++
Or, perhaps easier:
scoped_ptr<Image> image(allocate_image(...));
basman
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14 years ago
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on: NOAA: U.S. Records Warmest March; More than 15,000 Warm Temp Records Broken
What about the fact that 13 of the warmest years on record happened in the last 15 years?
basman
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14 years ago
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on: Ingo Molnar on what ails the Linux desktop
> He basically wanted to upgrade just one (obscure) app, and the process triggered the automatic removal of Gnome2 and installation of Unity. Just _IMAGINE_ how nightmarish this must look for normal users. You simply dont remove somebodys installed desktop sneakily from under their feet. You simply dont. That feels like the total loss of control over your computer.
Hmm, that's not exactly what happened, according to the link: "I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04 a week or so back in order to get a more recent version of SCons."
Your overall point is well taken, but I wonder how much it affects what I think of as "normal users", who don't care so much about upgrading to the bleeding edge of scons. Consider a hypothetical user of Hardy, so they've had it for four years: what are they actually missing if what they do is web surfing, email, and maybe document editing?
basman
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14 years ago
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on: Google's "free food" is not free
I found it interesting that their claimed value of 15-20k a year went unquestioned. At ~300 days a year, that's $60 a day. I'd value free food at a quarter of that at most.
basman
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14 years ago
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on: The single most useful Emacs feature
The nice thing is that many commands set the mark automatically. So in your example, there's no need for the initial C-SPC.
basman
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14 years ago
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on: Computer scientist Roger Craig built an app to prepare for Jeopardy domination.
The way it works in Jeopardy is that after the question is read, there's a guy who flicks a switch after which the betting window is open (and there's a visual cue so the players know when this happens). If you buzz before that you get briefly locked out.
basman
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14 years ago
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on: Machine Vision made Easy - SimpleCV
basman
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14 years ago
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on: 'You Are Not So Smart': Why We Can't Tell Good Wine From Bad
> Wine experts don't judge the quality of the wine but the quality of what the wine is supposed to taste like based on it's appellation controléé
If that's really true, why do they bother tasting the actual wine?
basman
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14 years ago
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on: Ask HN: What API to the physical world do you wish existed?
basman
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14 years ago
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on: Why I Go Home: A Developer Dad's Manifesto
No guessing needed. You could have just read his comment to find the answer.
basman
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14 years ago
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on: Why I Go Home: A Developer Dad's Manifesto
The arguments about mature programmers being more efficient with less time are a red herring. The point is, given this guy working 40 hours a week and an equally mature (presumably childless) programmer working say 70 hours a week, I'd go with the second one. It's just that there aren't a lot of the second to go around.
