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karolkozub's comments

karolkozub | 2 years ago | on: Twitter deleted a tweet about the FAA grounding of the Starship program

If this truly is an attempt at censorship, it seems that shadow banning could have been just as effective and harder to detect. Maybe they could even secretly add a generic has_negative_sentiment_towards_an_elon_company modifier to their ranking algorithm and dial the outreach of such tweets way way down, in similar vein to author_is_elon.

karolkozub | 4 years ago | on: 5% of 666 Python repos had comma typo bugs (inc V8, TensorFlow and PyTorch)

I really like the idea of automated code review tools that point out unusual or suspicious solutions and code patterns. Kind of like an advanced linter that looks deeper into the code structure. With emerging AI tools like Github Copilot, it seems like the inevitable future. Programming is very pattern-oriented and even though these kinds of tools might not necessarily be able to point out architectural flaws in a codebase, there might be lots of low-hanging fruits in this area and opportunities to add automated value.

karolkozub | 4 years ago | on: Poll: How much time on average do you exercise in a week?

Almost exactly 10 years ago I picked up climbing/bouldering and I cannot recommend it enough. It's a fascinating sport combining elements of pure strength, coordination, technique and problem solving. Every route is unique and it's not uncommon to have vastly different approaches depending on your height, finger strength, flexibility, and many other parameters. Finding a solution that works for you can sometimes be more difficult than the climb itself. It's definitely not as boring and repetitive as weightlifting. I highly encourage everyone to try if they haven't yet.

karolkozub | 4 years ago | on: Don't bring a tree to a mesh fight

I think I found one more minor typo – in the Control Flow Graph section I believe "The possible number of calls to c is zero to infinity;" should be "zero to one" instead, as the flow terminates as soon as it reaches "c", so there is no chance for it to be greater than one.

karolkozub | 5 years ago | on: Douglas Adams' note to self reveals author found writing torture

Typed out version:

> General Note to Myself

> Writing isn't so bad really when you get through the worry. Forget about the worry, just press on. Don't be embarrassed about the bad bits. Don't strain at them. Give yourself time you can come back and do it again in the light of what you discover about the story later on. It's better to have pages and pages of material to work with and sift and maybe find an unexpected shape in that you can then craft and put to good use, rather than one manically reworked paragraph or sentence.

> But writing can be good. You attack it, don't let it attack you. You can get pleasure out of it. You can certainly do very well for yourself with it...!

karolkozub | 5 years ago | on: 1.5 is the midpoint between 0 and infinity in Ruby 

  The following values were inspected:
  1
  2
  4
  8
  16
  32
  64
  32
  48
  40
  44
  42
  43
The most surprising part for me is that in the integer search 32 is inspected twice. From my brief testing it seems to only happen with infinite ranges. Is that a bug in bsearch or am I missing something?

karolkozub | 5 years ago | on: You might not need machine learning

In my understanding AI is an even broader term and means "any solution that imitates intelligent behavior". E.g. expert systems which are pretty much a bunch of if-then rules are also considered AI.

karolkozub | 5 years ago | on: You might not need machine learning

I love the article, but I don't agree with the premise that machine learning equals neural nets. In my understanding machine learning is a very broad term that just as well could be applied to the polynomial model if the constants were optimized algorithmically. I feel like the presented argument is more for transparent vs opaque models rather than machine learning vs something else. Also one could argue that the polynomial model is just a perceptron[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptron

karolkozub | 5 years ago | on: Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program

Wow. That's amazing. That's a 20% increase in revenue for those eligible. I'm guessing they decided the increased value of their products from more smaller developers creating apps for the platform is greater than the lost revenue.

If I understand correctly though, since it's a hard cutoff it creates this gap between 1m and ~1.2m where you're actually worse off by making more money pre-tax.

   999k --[-15%]--> 849k
  1000k --[-30%]--> 700k
  1213k --[-30%]--> 849k

karolkozub | 5 years ago | on: Tax working from home 'to support vulnerable jobs' – Deutsche Bank

Taxes have many purposes, and one of them is incentivizing preferred behaviors. Why should we discourage working from home? Is wasting a significant part of your life commuting to work really that good for the society? It's certainly not for the environment.

Also, there are many hidden drawbacks of working from home – it's more socially isolating, the work-life balance suffers, setting up a home office may be costly. I can imagine such a tax making working from home not worth it for lots of people.

karolkozub | 5 years ago | on: Why Leaders Need to Learn the Skill of Writing

First of all let me make clear that by "really good" I don't necessarily mean expensive. Instead, the goodness of the pen will be reflected in how pleasant it is to write with it. A good pen feels right in your hand and on paper. Its line thickness matches your writing, and its color matches your taste. Different people will have different preferences and it might take some time to find the right one.

Personally I use "Pilot Super Grip G F" [0] – a 0.7mm black retractable ballpoint pen and I always keep one in my notebook.

[0] https://www.pilotpen.eu/en/super-grip-g-retractable-fine-tip...

karolkozub | 5 years ago | on: Why Leaders Need to Learn the Skill of Writing

I use very cheap notebooks with a plain paper cover. I tried more expensive Moleskine notebooks a while ago and found a surprising problem with them. They were too beautiful to use. I couldn't bring myself to blemish them with my unfiltered flow-of-mind notes which would often turn out chaotic and stupid. I would only write things down selectively when I felt they were worthy and sufficiently structured. This would in turn inhibit most of my writing and significantly reduce the value of this habit. With a cheaper notebook the effect disappears. The less holy it is, the more useful it becomes.

On the other hand I highly recommend finding a really good pen to write with.

karolkozub | 5 years ago | on: Why Leaders Need to Learn the Skill of Writing

Throughout my adult life I've always kept a notebook to write down everything that came to my mind. Random ideas for projects and articles, problems and solutions, schemas and drawings, lists and tasks. Whenever I get stuck with a project I will open my notebook and start writing everything down, breaking down the complexities of the task into smaller less terrifying chunks, pinpointing the most problematic parts. In most cases putting it all on paper gives me the clarity needed to jump the hurdle and move forward with the project. I think it often comes down to a problem being too complex to fully fit in my mind. By writing it down I make the notebook an extension of my limited short-term memory. It's a bit like swap memory when you run out of RAM – it's significantly slower, but can save you when the memory requirements of the task exceed what's immediately available.

karolkozub | 5 years ago | on: Cursed Elixir

I was raised on programming contests and it took me many years to realize that clever code doesn't equate good code. In the vast majority of cases readability is more important than cleverness, performance, abstraction, and adhering to imaginary rules. The best measure for the quality of the codebase is whether at a glance you can understand what's going on.
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