Hacker News Reader

_eigenfooon The Berkeley Crossword Solver

I wrote some of my thoughts on the BCS here. tldr: I don’t think BCS outperforms humans.

https://twitter.com/_eigenfoo/status/1528427650187943941

_eigenfooon Web scraping is legal, US appeals court reaffirms

Upon more digging [1], the district court trial is currently scheduled for Feb 27 2023. It'll take a while!

[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.31...

_eigenfooon Web scraping is legal, US appeals court reaffirms

"Web scraping is legal" seems to be an overbroad interpretation - the Ninth Circuit is merely reaffirming a preliminary injunction in light of a recent and separate ruling by the Supreme Court. The opinion [1] only weighs the merits hiQ's request for injunctive relief, and doesn't say anything about the meatier topic of web scraping legality.

I think the real action will be the ruling of the district court.

[1] https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2022/04/18/1...

_eigenfooon Bash PS1 Generator

What do you use the history count for?

_eigenfooon PyMC: Theano Is Dead, Long Live Theano

Hello, PyMC developer here. We're excited to give Theano a second life, and hope that this work will lend some staying power to the PyMC project in the probabilistic programming world.

As always, we're happy to accept to contributions! If you're looking to get involved, now is a great time. Please don't hesitate to speak up or reach out, either on the Theano-PyMC GitHub repo (https://github.com/pymc-devs/Theano-PyMC) or some other way (my website's in my bio).

_eigenfooon Changes Coming to Pip 20.3

Migration guide: https://pip.pypa.io/en/latest/user_guide/#changes-to-the-pip...

_eigenfooon A Short Story About SQL’s Biggest Rival

One major strength of SQL is its readability - it reads so much like English that a non-technical stakeholder could conceivably understand queries. Do you not find that this is a valuable thing that's lost with relational-algebra-esque syntax?

_eigenfooon Ask HN: What is a better approach to interviewing?

How do you compensate for the fact that you don't know the codebase that well? I feel like a lot of the value of interviews is that you see how a candidate thinks through a problem that you have also thought deeply about, which gives more fruitful discussions.

_eigenfooon Level 3 Global Outage

Can somebody please clarify - what exactly is this an outage of, and how serious is it?

_eigenfooon Palantir S-1

Yes. They're pretty explicit about this:

> So long as our Founders [...] meet a minimum ownership threshold on the applicable record date for a vote of the stockholders[...], these Founders will effectively control all matters submitted to a vote of the stockholders for the foreseeable future. This could delay, defer, or prevent a change of control, merger, consolidation, or sale of all or substantially all of our assets that our other stockholders support. Conversely, this concentrated control could allow our Founders to consummate a transaction that our other stockholders do not support.

_eigenfooon Tired of note-taking apps

Have you considered linking notes from one notebook to another? E.g. if you named each notebook and numbered pages, you could just point to "page X in notebook Y", and wouldn't need to transcribe. Would this be something helpful to you?

_eigenfooon The ProtonMail Android app is now open source

ProtonMail seems to be on a roll this month. They both released Bridge for Linux [1] and open sourced Bridge [2].

[1] https://protonmail.com/blog/proton-bridge-linux-launch/

[2] https://protonmail.com/blog/bridge-open-source/

_eigenfooon Three pytest key contributors to have quit the project due to a single bad actor

Two contributors have announced their departures on the pytest-dev mailing list:

- https://mail.python.org/pipermail/pytest-dev/2020-April/0049...

_eigenfooon 2019-nCoV may contain a gain-of-function for efficient spreading

I'm not sure why this is circulating HN.

Most of us here are not medical or epidemiological experts at all, and most of the comments here are just people asking for an layman's explanation of this paper. Trying to ascribe meaning to highly technical results seems futile (at best) or irresponsible (at worst).

_eigenfooon Clear Your Terminal in Style

I've just used alias c=clear in my .bashrc and never looked back. Not even Ctrl+L feels as convenient as c+Enter

_eigenfooon How to Take Smart Notes

In case you still haven't found it, bashlog is here: https://github.com/jodavaho/bashlog

_eigenfooon Into the Personal-Website-Verse (2019)

https://eigenfoo.xyz/

I mainly use my blog to motivate me to learn new things in machine learning/data science. It's been a pretty effective tactic!

_eigenfooon Ask HN: Slack Alternatives?

Not free, but a lot of big corps seem to use Symphony: https://symphony.com/

_eigenfooon ProtonMail is now more secure against sophisticated attacks

Relevant comment from the ProtonMail team on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/d1q7ee/security...

_eigenfooon Plant trees while you search the web

Thank you for pointing this out! This changes how I think about Ecosia.

EDIT: grammar

_eigenfooon Plant trees while you search the web

> If you don't click on ads, or have an Adblocker installed, you generate no money for Ecosia. Thus, no trees get planted.

Do you have a source/reference for this?

_eigenfooon The multi-armed bandit problem (2012)

Bandit algorithms can also be approached from a Bayesian point of view! This lets you quantify the uncertainty in your estimates (e.g. how uncertain you are than ad A has a higher CTR than ad B), which a lot of other bandit methods don't offer.

To toot my own horn a bit, I wrote a blog post about Bayesian bandits: https://eigenfoo.xyz/bayesian-bandits/

_eigenfooon Show HN: Commento: a fast, privacy-focused alternative to Disqus

Just to throw in my two cents: there's also https://utteranc.es/. It takes a bit more effort to get up and running, but if you're comfortable with your comments being powered by GitHub issues, it's a great way to go!

_eigenfooon Nonnegative matrix factorization

NMF (and matrix factorization techniques more generally) are a really underrated machine learning technique. If you have a decent intuition for linear algebra, matrix factorizations are straightforward to understand, fairly easy to interpret, and can work wonders in applications far beyond recommender systems.

As the blog post mentions, NMF has a potential applications to text mining, which I've tried out here on Reddit posts: https://eigenfoo.xyz/reddit-clusters/

_eigenfooon Multi-Armed Bandits, Conjugate Models and Bayesian Reinforcement Learning

Yes! I haven't read all of it yet, but from what I've seen so far, the book spends a lot of time rigorously proving mathematical properties/bounds of various bandit algorithms. I love rigor as much as the next guy, but I also like seeing code :)

_eigenfooon Multi-Armed Bandits, Conjugate Models and Bayesian Reinforcement Learning

Incredible! Thanks for sharing the advice :)

_eigenfooon Multi-Armed Bandits, Conjugate Models and Bayesian Reinforcement Learning

Right! Sorry about that, forgot to add mathjax. Should be fixed soon...

_eigenfooon Ask HN: What are your favorite statistics and probability textbooks?

If you're looking for just mathematical statistics, I liked Hogg McKean and Craig's "Introduction to Mathematical Statistics" (4th edition was much better than the ones after it, imo).

But if you're looking to learn prob/stats for applications to ML, most ML textbooks have a chapter or two reviewing the relevant stuff. I liked the first two chapters of Bishop's PRML for that.