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almostarockstar

296 karma · joined September 5, 2014

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almostarockstar··on Ask HN: What do you use to keep track of your ideas?
What service do you use? Sounds like an interesting (and fairly unique) approach for this purpose.
almostarockstar··on State of Startups
>no need for a car due to proper urban planning

Most European cities were built before urban planning was a thing.

almostarockstar··on State of Startups
1 out of 5 founders want you to think that they think they are raising a unicorn.
almostarockstar··on State of Startups
I'm from a class of 30. There were 2 women. This is in Ireland though.
almostarockstar··on Google’s former happiness guru's three-second brain exercise for finding joy
How is resiliency being thought to children? Genuine question. Is there a particular school of thought on this?
almostarockstar··on Google’s former happiness guru's three-second brain exercise for finding joy
Your post made me feel a little sad.

I'm working on my PhD thesis at the moment and between papers being rejected, supervisors dropping of the grid for weeks at a time, side projects failing etc., I've been trying to find a little respite in mindfulness.

I think there is certainly a place for mindfulness, calm and stress reduction techniques. I worry about stress related heart disease, aneurisms, cancer. But at the same time, a healthy cynicism can ground you.

Life is confusing.

almostarockstar··on Music theory for nerds
In fairness, the author said " I don’t understand why we need both", and not "We don't need both".
almostarockstar··on More awful IoT stuff
Sounds like there is a strong need for a standard OS build for IoT devices.

I'm not expert in the area, but I would imagine a standard API could be implemented to handle the vast majority of use cases. Connecting to an app securely, turning things on and off, basic scheduling.

almostarockstar··on Deep Reinforcement Learning: Pong from Pixels
Notice how the output (or the network) is stochastic, not a solid value. You could certainly tweak the output sampling function to reduce jitter.

Further training may also reduce this, but technically, since the jitter is not causing any reduction in the reward, it might not. The best approach would likely be to alter the reward system to discourage jittery play...but again, there is no point because it does not reduce fitness.

I suppose where this is important is in robotics where jittery movement might actually be dangerous, or wear down hardware. In that case, you could certainly use an output smoothing function and tweak the reward.

almostarockstar··on How cheap does solar power need to get before it takes over the world?
Unless you user superconductors, like cooled aluminium (if I remember correctly). There is a lot of research in this area at the moment. If you cool a conductor low enough, the resistance reduces dramatically and you can transmit electricity with very little line loss.
almostarockstar··on My Biggest Regret as a Programmer
The flexibility of JS is not how the language is designed, it is the hole that the language is filling.

The fact that using JS you can write a browser based app, a mobile app, backend software, configuration files and flat data files (JSON) without switching gears is the flexibility.

I would also argue that if you really don't like JS, you are using the wrong tool for whatever job you are trying to do.

almostarockstar··on Reddit prepares to launch new news website 'Upvoted'
Using wordpress as a CMS would be quite suitable. I would assume what makes more than 'just another wordpress site' will the back end. Load balancing, caching etc.

I would have expected a custom landing page though.

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