tntn's comments

tntn | 6 years ago | on: U.S. Life Expectancy Drops for Third Year in a Row (2018)

But it doesn't reflect the factual subtitle. The title here says 1918, but the true trend is 1915-1918, which had a bit of a war as well.

> There is no requirement to post the article headline as-is on HN.

There is. From the guidelines:

> Otherwise [i.e. not excessive clickbait] please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.

tntn | 6 years ago | on: U.S. Life Expectancy Drops for Third Year in a Row (2018)

HN title is not good. Original title is "U.S. Life Expectancy Drops for Third Year in a Row, Reflecting Rising Drug Overdoses, Suicides."

The comparison is between the last three years and 1915-1918, but the Spanish flu was just getting going in 1918.

EDIT: folks just arriving, the HN title has changed since I commented. It previously said "worst trend since Spanish flu," or something.

tntn | 6 years ago | on: Writing a small ray tracer in Rust and Zig

> I wrapped my objects in atomic reference counters, and wrapped my pixel buffer in a mutex

Rust people, is there a way to tell the compiler that each thread gets its own elements? Do you really have to either (unnecessarily) add a lock or reach for unsafe?

tntn | 6 years ago | on: Apple buys autonomous driving company Drive.ai

The copy on https://comma.ai/ has certainly changed tone from what it once was.

Now it is clearing pushing a driver-assist angle ("improves your stock ACC and LKAS," "copilot," "augment"). No mention of "self-driving," "autonomous," or the like.

Previously, it was clearly marketing a full-self-driving, no human involved system: "ghostriding for the masses," "software to make your car self driving."

tntn | 6 years ago | on: Google CTF 2019

It produces the full domain name (up to .com) in ~ 1 minute. If there is more to the url (a path, ?= parameters, etc) after the domain name, then no.

tntn | 6 years ago | on: Google CTF 2019

Yeah, I put labels corresponding to the original IP throughout and used a jump table.

tntn | 6 years ago | on: Google CTF 2019

> My other option was to translate it into real assembly

I wrote a compiler from emoji-code to amd64 (mostly because I'm more interested in compilers than reversing). It runs quite fast - prints the whole domain in ~1 min. I'd highly recommend it to people who are into assembly, it was a fun exercise.

tntn | 6 years ago | on: Differentiation for Hackers

Huh, interesting. First time I read this comment, it said something like "why should I care what you think?" I guess the edit indicates that you do care?

tntn | 6 years ago | on: Differentiation for Hackers

    >>> import autograd.numpy as np
    >>> from autograd import grad
    >>> def fn(x):
    ...   return np.power(np.power(x, 3), 1/3)
    ...
    >>> gradfn = grad(fn)
    >>> gradfn(0.0)
    /usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/autograd/numpy/numpy_vjps.py:59:RuntimeWarning: divide by zero encountered in double_scalars
    lambda ans, x, y : unbroadcast_f(x, lambda g: g * y * x ** anp.where(y, y - 1, 1.)),
    /usr/local/lib/python3.6/dist-packages/autograd/numpy/numpy_vjps.py:59: RuntimeWarning: invalid value encountered in double_scalars
     lambda ans, x, y : unbroadcast_f(x, lambda g: g * y * x ** anp.where(y, y - 1, 1.)),
    nan
… Damn.

    >>> import torch
    >>> x = torch.tensor(0.0, requires_grad=True)
    >>> y = ((x**3) ** (1/3))
    >>> y.backward()
    >>> x.grad
    tensor(nan)
… Damn.

tntn | 6 years ago | on: Differentiation for Hackers

> I don't see a problem with simplifying the exponents first.

Sure, we call that computer algebra. As soon as you start doing that, you aren't doing automatic differentiation, you are doing (at least in part) symbolic differentiation.

tntn | 6 years ago | on: Differentiation for Hackers

Just because automatic differentiation is a different technique than numerical differentiation doesn't mean it isn't a numerical method.

(I probably should not say this, but I will anyway: your comments regarding math and science always give me the distinct impression that you know the name of a lot of things without knowing much about the thing. You are frequently breathless about analog quantum computing, Lie algebras, Chu spaces, some universal concept of duality, but then you fail to respond with substantial arguments to people that try to temper the breathlessness. If you want to convince people of things, you should work on this.)

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