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charleskinbote's comments

charleskinbote | 1 year ago | on: ActBlue Isn't Selling Your Data

Donating to them has been one of my greatest regrets. For months I’ve been playing with the idea of getting a new number because I have found no way to treat the inundation of texts like I do with spam email, but my experience with Google voice has told me no number is completely safe from spam, where every once in a while I get calls collecting debt from the person whose number it used to be.

charleskinbote | 3 years ago | on: The unlikely odds of making it big on TikTok

Undoubtedly very similar if not identical to what other social media platforms do. For all these apps, there should be explicit big banner opt-in prompts with a default of opt-out at the very least, e.g. "can we correlate you to other devices using your keystroke patterns?". I don't think the average person should be obligated to accept or reject terms of service wholesale but instead term by term; put the burden on the company, not the consumer. It would encourage smaller sets of terms and make the users more aware of what they're getting into.

charleskinbote | 3 years ago | on: ROS – Robot Operating System

My experiences with ROS have mostly been klunky. The documentation is really sub par, the Python portions completely highjack the logging module, and (if my memory serves me) the messages types aren't backwards compatible like other IDLs and so it can be a maintenance nightmare. I also felt like it was too easy to outgrow, like when wanting to communicate using something other than ROS messages, or upgrading the codebase to a C++ version that ROS noetic doesn't support.

charleskinbote | 3 years ago | on: Ante: A low-level functional language

Thanks for sharing!

The dot product example gave me pause because map2 seems to be the same as zipWith. Does that exist in Ante? Without context I might have thought map2 was going to act as bimap. Take that for what you think it's worth :)

Also I might be having a brain fart -- but isn't the dot product in your example equal to 32?

charleskinbote | 4 years ago | on: Split the States (2021)

This reminds me of balanced graph partitioning, where the graph is planar and its the nodes that have weights instead of the edges.

charleskinbote | 5 years ago | on: Show HN: Antimander – Optimize Congressional Districts with Genetic Algorithms

Along the same thread, genetic algorithms have been used to evaluate fair land allocation in Brazil [1], which have also historically been done by hand. I agree with another user that pointed out the very same tools can be used to gerrymander even more effectively than those districts are currently, perhaps in less obvious ways, without the oddly shaped borders that stretch wildy from place to place. It would be important not to have this occur behind closed doors but left open to scrutiny where the fitness function and biases are in full view.

[1] https://www.lume.ufrgs.br/bitstream/handle/10183/174950/0010...

charleskinbote | 5 years ago | on: Sell Yourself, Sell Your Work

> If you lock yourself in a room and do the most marvellous work but don't tell anyone, then no one will know, no one will benefit, and the work will be lost. You may as well not have bothered.

Maybe this article should be called "I sell, therefore I am".

The quote from the article, to me, sounds ridiculous. I don't lock myself in a room and do marvelous work for other people, so that they know it exists, or so that it will last longer than I do -- and I suspect many other creators feel similarly.

charleskinbote | 6 years ago | on: Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2019)

Location: Boston, MA

Role: Software Engineer / Research Engineer

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python, C, AI, Haskell, OpenCV, Git, PostgeSQL, SQL, AWS, Scala, NumPy, Keras, TensorFlow, Docker, Django, Bash, Linux, autonomous systems

Resume: Upon email request, include company name

Email: [email protected]

I'm a software engineer with research experience, primarily in stochastic methods like Genetic Algorithms and Monte Carlo Tree Search for non-convex optimization problems like robot exploration and high-performance quantum circuit simulation. I'd be interested in any role where I can branch into other AI domains, including ML. I have interests in neuro-evolution for NLP, for example. Generally, though, I am open to a wide range of opportunities, happy to chat with anyone.

charleskinbote | 6 years ago | on: We can’t trust AI systems built on deep learning alone

I've asked myself the same. I think of it this way: we can imagine that, in the set of all possible solutions to a particular problem, a subset of those are too hard for humans because they are solved with systems too large for a human to have designed in a reasonable amount of time, or the systems themselves contain pieces that are composed in some previously unrealized way. Of that subset, there may be solutions whose pieces and compositions are well-understood. In these cases (perhaps not exclusively), it might be possible for us to begin understanding any rationale.

edit: after noticing this other hacker news article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21107706), I wanted to add that this line of thinking is applicable to understanding programs and proofs written by humans as well. Programs and proofs can be well-understood when their pieces, and the way those pieces compose, are well-understood. When the pieces, e.g. lemmata in a proof, are large or hard to decompose, the proof (i.e. the solution to a problem) is harder to verify and understand.

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