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chrxr

243 karma · joined May 12, 2014

Doing stuff at Harvard SEAS
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chrxr··on We decided to move 90% of our workload from the cloud to on-prem infrastructure
Worth noting that using a gaming card for workloads like this would likely void the warranty.
chrxr··on Ask HN: Why does Cloudflare/hCaptcha care so much about buses, boats and trains?
My small act of rebellion is to select exactly one incorrect cell each time.
chrxr··on ALiEn – a GPU-accelerated artificial life simulation program
This is going to be a random comment, but the thing that struck me most was how close this person's Github username is to my own! github.com/chrxr vs github.com/chrxh. Feels bizarre. And seeing their actual name it appears there username has the same relationship to their real name as my own username.
chrxr··on Offbase: Static site generator in a browser
Looking back at this comment, I realize now that it's pretty pointless... just excited to play with stuff. Sorry folks! Enjoy your day.
chrxr··on Offbase: Static site generator in a browser
Now I feel bad about my planned two-parter on my elaborate blog setup :)
chrxr··on Offbase: Static site generator in a browser
I think this is catering to a specific audience who is not me :) I actually find that the complexity of self hosting is the interesting part.

I did this to learn stuff. Seeing as I have little to say, my blog site is more of a technical playground than a valuable store of content.

I omitted that between the EC2 version and this current version, I built a really convoluted version with an ALB, Aurora, always-on ECS etc. That came to $80 a month. So then that motivated me to go the other way with the super cheap option.

chrxr··on Offbase: Static site generator in a browser
I recently moved my personal website (https://chrxr.com) to a static site in a rather complicated fashion.

I use Wagtail as my CMS, so I dockerized it and put it on an ECS cluster. I then use Wagtail Bakery to publish the pages to S3. I then change the task count on the ECS service to 0. For a DB I use sqlite in EFS, so it's persistent and backed up.

I was previously running on an EC2, and cut the cost from about $15 per month to ~$1-2 per month. All I'm paying for is <1mb S3 storage, a single route 53 hosted zone, and one image in an ECR repo.

If I want to add content, I spin up the ECS task again and work away. Note that part of the reason for such a low cost is my website get VERY little traffic :)

Apart from the cost, I also have the advantage that it's lightning quick most of the time, with caching provided by CloudFront.

chrxr··on Tabletop Simulator
TTS is great for 40k, although moving a large amount of pieces can be a pain. There are a huge amount of model scans available, and the community has put an immense amount of effort into building battlefields. I have mixed feelings about the morality of getting this stuff for free. I say mixed because the price of actual GW models is criminal. However, I don't think this takes much profit from GW. It certainly hasn't prevented me from wanting to paint models and play in person. But with that currently being impossible, TTS and Warhammer Total War are my only outlets.
chrxr··on Imperial Wars Always Come Home
But how many applications of soldiers overseas are there other than in the advancement of imperial aims? Dubious peace keeping claims? I understand this is a very subjective topic, but its at least understandable that someone should make this connection.

I read the article as arguing that the USA is an empire, and as such its soldiers are overseas furthering those imperial aims. So in that sense it is the imperial ventures that are creating the vets who need to be managed at home.

chrxr··on Harvard University Won’t Require SAT, ACT for Admissions Next Year
If the learning experience is simplified to listening to a lecture, either live or recorded, and all grading is done algorithmically, then yes, there is no scaling limitation. This would be considered a very poor learning experience though. Even in the School of Engineering at Harvard, even for the CS classes, very few use autograding. Students expect individual feedback on their work. They expect the ability to personally interact with teaching staff. They expect group work, labs, office hours, reading groups, and some level of supervision over these activities.

I work at Harvard, and I can tell you there is a real push to create a quality experience in remote learning, and a lot of resources are being directed towards this. It is not just the same classes via Zoom. Of course these enhanced learning environments could be replicated on campus as well, there's nothing particularly special about the remote learning environment.

But as you suggest, it is the residential experience that most folks are paying for. Harvard considers the residential experience as one of their primary value propositions. That is why Harvard and other schools are working very hard to get students back to campus. It's a difficult balancing act between this and maintaining the health of the campus. A major outbreak amongst undergrads would be a serious blow to everybody involved, so health is always going to come first.

Also worth noting that 20% of Harvard students pay 0 tuition, and more than 50% get needs-based scholarships. https://college.harvard.edu/financial-aid. So if you're smart enough, and/or fit into the financial aid brackets, why not go to Harvard? What's the risk there?

chrxr··on Covid-19 is now officially a pandemic, WHO says
That may be the case, but I would guess other insurance companies will buckle under similar pressure. Perhaps I'm being naive, but it seems like the worst kind of PR nightmare to financially cripple a group as big as those who will eventually be infected.
chrxr··on Covid-19 is now officially a pandemic, WHO says
Not true at least for many Blue Cross Blue Shield areas: https://home.bluecrossma.com/coronavirus
chrxr··on Covid-19 is now officially a pandemic, WHO says
That sucks if that's true for your insurance provider. Here in the US it is not always true. For example, Blue Cross Blue Shield in MA are covering expenses for testing and waiving co-payments for medically necessary treatments. https://home.bluecrossma.com/coronavirus
chrxr··on Deaf man sues Pornhub over lack of closed captions in violation of the ADA
Relevant precedent: Harvard recently settled with National Association of the Deaf, resulting in all videos made publically available after Dec 2019 requiring captions, and a required 5 day turnaround for captioning of older videos. https://dredf.org/2019/11/27/landmark-settlement-with-harvar...
chrxr··on Quintillion CEO’s Promise to Wire the Arctic Was $1B Scam
That's not the point of the glass cliff. The point is that women are more likely to be hired as CEOs when a company is in trouble than when a company is in good shape. It is specifically about the circumstances when a woman is more or less likely to be hired as a CEO.
chrxr··on Elsevier cuts off UC’s access to its academic journals
One of our academics at Harvard does exactly this via their lab website.
chrxr··on Head Wounds and Steel Helmets
Whilst it may not have been Blackett or his team doing the research, research in this area does seem to have been done(1), and there are books and papers written about it(2). 1- https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kyZgEKzZZtJQTCSG2/examine-yo... 2 - https://people.ucsc.edu/~msmangel/Wald.pdf
chrxr··on Introduction to Genetic Algorithms
I wrote a GA for picking an optimal Fantasy Football (soccer, Brit here) team based on player scores from the previous season(1). The team did above average, even though it was hobbled by the fact that I didn't do any transfers after the initial pick.

The knapsack problem(2), of which fantasy team picking is an example, is a classic use case for genetic algorithms.

1) https://github.com/chrxr/ga-prem-team/blob/master/scripts/ga... 2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapsack_problem

chrxr··on Liverpool Football Club’s reliance on analytics
In the article itself, Liverpool are correctly referenced throughout, without "The".
chrxr··on Travel through wormholes is possible, but slow
The philosophical implications of this are the subject of one of my favorite web-comics: The Machine, from Existential Comics http://existentialcomics.com/comic/1
chrxr··on We're Entering a Golden Age of Podcasts
Can anyone tell me if young people listen to podcasts? Like people under 16? I found something that suggests 7% of listeners are under 17*... I just wonder with an audience split like that, is it expected that young people will suddenly pick up podcasts when they reach a certain age? Or is it an indicator that the format doesn't appeal to the youngest generation?

https://www.convinceandconvert.com/podcast-research/new-demo...

chrxr··on Exclusive Design
It might just be me, but reading right-aligned paragraphs with all that white space to the left is quite painful. My eye naturally drawn the left edge of the page at the end of each line. It's a little better when you get to parts with the notes on the left, but even then the notes distract from the text they actually want me to read.
chrxr··on A Self-Learning, Modern Computer Science Curriculum
I remember looking at the site a few (maybe five?) years ago and everything was a bit of a mess. They've really pulled it together since then. It's really great.
chrxr··on A Self-Learning, Modern Computer Science Curriculum
For those like me, and like many in the UK, whose maths education ended at 16, I can definitely recommend Khan Academy for learning or relearning pre-calc stuff. The videos are short, the exercises are well thought out and numerous, and importantly the UI is great.

For example: https://www.khanacademy.org/math/algebra/

chrxr··on Udacity lays off 125 people in global strategy shift
I think the fact that many academic CS courses are based around understanding concepts rather than real world implementation makes it a more sensible choice to go with very stable, well proven technologies.
chrxr··on Advent of Code 2018
It's a pretty common thing to call something "Advent of x" or "x Advent calendar" nowadays, if it involves something happening once each day between 1st and 25th of December. For example: https://24ways.org/

More here: https://www.creativebloq.com/web-design/advent-calendars-des...

chrxr··on Why did the golden age of the Simpsons end?
If you have any reasonable cable package or something like Sling, you get access to the Simpsons World roku app or site which allows you to stream every episode.

http://www.simpsonsworld.com/

chrxr··on Building a better gov.uk, step by step
Other areas of IT around the UK gov are learning from the success of gov.uk. DHSC just set out its vision for digital future of healthcare for the NHS, and it looks very promising:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-future-of-hea...

chrxr··on The South African mountains older than continents
Being from the UK originally, bbc was always my go to site. Recently I've found it incredibly annoying to access in the US, particularly on mobile. There is a full screen overlay add for every page view. Note that I don't use any kind of ad blocking, so I'm bringing this trouble on myself.
chrxr··on The South African mountains older than continents
I don't think that's the issue being referred to. BBC.com has no advertising when viewed within the UK. Outside the UK it has a ton of adverts and tracking. So using UK VPN should get around those things.
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