Hacker News Reader

Khakion A landmark 2012 paper transformed how software recognizes images

Most research looks more incremental than people think. AlexNet is based on much work by Fukushima, Yann LeCun and others. Likewise, ELMO and BERT are based on 2015 work on pretrained language models:

https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5949-semi-supervised-sequence-l...

Khakion Computational Knowledge and the Future of Pure Mathematics

The Entscheidungsproblem says that proving theorems is at least as hard as the halting problem. This seems irrelevant to the issue of whether human input is essential for finding or proving interesting theorems.

Khakion Java: All about 64-bit programming

As of mid 2011, for £1K you can buy a PC with 24 GB of memory and for £21K you can buy a server with 512 GB of memory.

I'm not sure where he gets his computers from but those prices seem to be at least a few years away.

Khakion Ask HN: What are the changes you made in your life and never look back?

Nope, only if you're watching live (as it's being broadcast) TV.

Khakion Sequoia gives photo-sharing startup more money than they gave Google

I can see the viral ad now:

Boy sees a cute girl but can't work up the guts to talk to her. Boy notices she's taking pictures with Color and writes: 'will you go out with me' on a paper napkin. Boy takes picture of the napkin with Color. Girl sees the message but ignores him. Boy secretly keeps the photos she shared longing for his lost love till he's an old man. Camera pulls back to show his grandkids using Color.

Fin.

Khakion How I Lost $100 and Blamed It On cal(1)

The year calendar even showed the year as just '8', which is a dead giveaway.

Khakion Safari 5

Ah, that brings back nice memories of IE and Windows.

Khakion The havoc the XML purists wrought

The difference is a big deal to applications that use XML as a markup language (marking up documents and text), as it was designed to do originally.

Khakion Tell HN: New Google homepage, A/B testing gone crazy.

The results seem pretty much the same to me.

Khakion McAfee quarantines svchost.exe on millions of WinXP machines worldwide

Not anymore. If you receive a targeted attack or a 0-day attack vector through a firefox, pdf or even libpng vulnerability, the only real way you can be safe is to unplug your computer from the internet.

Khakion How Random Matrix theory sheds a light on the laws underlying reality.

I agree, I think SciAm has much better Pop Sci articles, at least the original authors of the paper write their articles.

Khakion How Random Matrix theory sheds a light on the laws underlying reality.

Seems to be an article filled with nothing but hype. It doesn't even define what a random matrix is. I had to first check on Wikipedia to work out that this theory 'probably' has something to do with Wigner's law and symmetric matrices.

Khakion Refactoring wars and how to avoid them: what is "simplicity" in programming?

Surely one long function is very much harder to test than several shorter ones? So in the context of unit-testing at least, testability is in harmony with Fowler's definition of simplicity. Seems like a nice goal to me.