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cosmic_ape

211 karma · joined June 11, 2017

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cosmic_ape··on Ask HN: How to be alone?
Hi, It sounds that its not only the fact of being alone that is difficult, but that you are going through changes. You were used to a certain way of viewing life and maybe youself as part of that life, and this changed. It usually will take time to figure what do you want now. Long term there probably are no tricks to this, as there are no tricks to building a house. You just put them bricks one after another, see if they fit. But you are in control of this, and in some ways it may be exciting.

In practical terms: (a) Give yourself time to figure what you want to do now. You are in no hurry. (b) Talking to a psychologist may help a lot. If you think talking to a psychologist is wierd, know that at least most psychologists talk to a (another|) psychologist regularly. (c) Exercise is good. If you are not into it, start slow. Walking, situps in the morning, a few pushups. Do it because its something that is generally good for most people, and now you have the opportunity to build that habit. Not because its a trick or distraction. Also, you don't need a gym for this, but if you go to a gym, you'll be around other people. You wouldn't need to interact with them, but you might. (d) There are hobbies that are quite social. Theatre classes, Karate or BJJ, writing workshops or photography classes. Depends on what you're into.

Enjoy

cosmic_ape··on The Universal Pattern Popping Up in Math, Physics and Biology (2013)
2013 But still cool
cosmic_ape··on Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options
Second that. There were articles a year or two ago about TVs trying to connect to any open Wi-Fi they can find, without you asking them. But hopefully LG wouldn’t go that far.
cosmic_ape··on NeurIPS 2025 Best Paper Awards
most papers have slides with audio, and some, including the awards ones will have short frontal talks. this will be released at some point after the conference, but right now looks like you'd have to be registered to see it.
cosmic_ape··on Astrophotographer snaps skydiver falling in front of the sun
This isn't about me though, no point in making this personal. I'm just trying to understand what's interesting about this picture. You are saying that just because nobody took that particular combination before, it is enough of a reason, right?
cosmic_ape··on Astrophotographer snaps skydiver falling in front of the sun
A lot of logistics, as mentioned. If you’d like to explain what’s in there beyond that, I’ll be glad to hear.
cosmic_ape··on Astrophotographer snaps skydiver falling in front of the sun
Care to explain? I actually do take pictures with a camera from time to time.

Again, this was staged. Also, when Tom Cruise performed his own stunts in Mission Impossible, that value I can understand. That is better than photoshop. Because they were hard stunts. This on the other hand seems to be standard.

cosmic_ape··on Astrophotographer snaps skydiver falling in front of the sun
Tbh, do not quite get the excitement around this picture. It was staged, and the stunt doesn’t appear to be particularly complex. A lot of logistics, sure. But seems like all there is to it is that someone just bothered to do it. So not clear what’s the additional value over photoshop.
cosmic_ape··on How blind photographers visualize the world
Is there a way to listen to the actual content? This is only a brief summary of the radio show.
cosmic_ape··on Firefox 115, Nightly supports a new “copy clean” link context menu action
you mean Pocket? I was wondering how well the search there works. Turns out it is possible to search the pages themselves, but only with paid subscription. In the free version it only searches the titles and urls, like the Bookmarks.
cosmic_ape··on Firefox 115, Nightly supports a new “copy clean” link context menu action
This is funny, because I recently descided to try Pocket, owned by Mozilla, and it adds

>?utm_source=pocket_saves

to all saved links.

cosmic_ape··on Are deep neural networks dramatically overfitted? (2019)
Do you mean the boosting graphs in Fig. 1, 4 of that paper?

It looks though that they have a double descent on the train set too, so it might not be the same phenomenon.

Nevertheless, good to know, thanks for sharing! I knew both papers but never thought giving much attention to such details of the figures of the 1998 one. Is the connection between the papers well known, i.e. something people talk about?

cosmic_ape··on DeepMath Conference 2020 – Conference on the Mathematical Theory of DNN's
This is like a workshop at a usual conference, no proceedings, right?
cosmic_ape··on Yann LeCun quits Twitter amid acrimonious exchanges on AI bias
I haven't followed the original debate, so not sure if this was a part of the argument against LeCun, but it could be:

The issue is LeCun makes an argument about fundamental research, but is not exactly a fundamental researcher, and does not necessarily represent fundamental research.

As an analogy, if you are a researcher of general chemistry, persumably there is no issue. However, if your research is specifically about chemistry for improving bullets, and you produce working prototypes, then some might say you should be subject to some regulation as a part of the arms industry. I'm not saying this is the right thing, just that such a point could be made. LeCun is arguably much more the second kind of researcher than the first. The research he represents is "better ways to recognize faces", not "statistical properties of natural images".

To take another example, there is an enormous amount of regulation in, say, medical research. And in this case there are good reasons for that. Gebru could be possibly arguing for something similar in say face recognition.

cosmic_ape··on Astronomers detect regular rhythm of radio waves, with origins unknown
Isn't it strange that the periods mentioned are integer multiples of days?

Don't known much about astronomy, but day as a unit of time is just a constant specific to our particular solar system. I guess a function of the sizes of the sun and the planets here. There should be nothing special about it. To think that 500M light years away there is something that has similar time proportions to be observed here as periodic is amazing by itself.

cosmic_ape··on Cantor function, a.k.a. devil's staircase
Not sure about that specific function. But the circle of ideas to which this function belongs can be loosely described as "how do we deal with non-smooth objects"? How do we construct them, measure and use them. Some such objects are sometimes called fractals, this function is a simple example.

There are concrete application examples, but in general one guy that was particularly interested in fractals in the real world was Mandelbrot. He published several influential books on fractals in nature (and in finance). Another famous name is Taleb, although imho he's much more a populariser than a researcher.

cosmic_ape··on A ‘Useless’ Perspective That Transformed Mathematics
Not a standard source for algebraists, but Percy Diaconis's book, mentioned in other comments, is an excellent introduction. Also contains applications in probability.
cosmic_ape··on A ‘Useless’ Perspective That Transformed Mathematics
This is of course just a hyperbole, especially in its original context.

For one thing, people routinely use representation theory to study groups of matrices. That is, represent the group of matrices by other matrices, acting on other spaces. If matrices were this elementary "thoroughly understood" object, one presumably wouldn't have needed to do that.

The real power of the representation theory is not that its matrices, but the notion of irreducibility. This allows you to decompose a complex action into simpler blocks and understand it that way.

cosmic_ape··on A ‘Useless’ Perspective That Transformed Mathematics
Well, it depends. Some people would say, justly I think, the way to come at Fourier transform is as a commutative representation theory.
cosmic_ape··on Track infections through resting heart rate
Data like this could (or might have the potential to) be used by the authorities to determine in which areas to test more. But otherwise it shouldn't send people anywhere, I don't think that was the intention.
cosmic_ape··on Gig: A new method for explaining complex ensemble ML models
Not a big fan of the idea of assigning credit to individual features, but as far as this idea goes, this seems like a very useful improvement.

The blog mentions an evaluation on some loan related data, and this data does not appear in the paper. I wonder wether it is available somewhere.

cosmic_ape··on Ask HN: Non-cloud voice recognition for home use?
As an aside, it seems you're interested in speech recognition, or speech to text, not voice recognition. Voice recognition is a different problem, where the particular speaker needs to be recognized from voice.
cosmic_ape··on Nature will publish peer review reports as a trial
Not that I know of. But its seems a few other conferences use OpenReview, besides ICLR. UAI for example.
cosmic_ape··on Nature will publish peer review reports as a trial
Some comments seem to miss the point that reviews will be published without naming the reviewers (unless they want to), and then only for accepted papers. So for the reviewer this should not change things much.

Also, NeurIPS conference publishes reviews for a long time now. But I haven't heard of anyone talking about a review of a paper. And if you do look at these reviews, really many of them are of really dismal quality. Maybe things will be different for Nature, idk.

cosmic_ape··on OEC: The Observatory of Economic Complexity
From the other comment it looks like they indeed use comtrade.

The IMF and Worldbank have some similar public data, although not in that amount of detail. [1] And I recently stumbled upon a project that tries to standartise the API for a lot of official data sources [2].

[1] https://www.imf.org/external/np/ds/matrix.htm [2] https://db.nomics.world/

cosmic_ape··on OEC: The Observatory of Economic Complexity
Great,thanks!
cosmic_ape··on OEC: The Observatory of Economic Complexity
Couldn't find any references to data sources. This would be much more serious and useful if sources were listed.

Of course, it would be even more useful if there was a "download all data" link...

cosmic_ape··on An idea from physics helps AI see in higher dimensions
Hype pipeline: 1) Take a banal feature engineering work. 2) Add Albert Einstein reference. 3) Profit.
cosmic_ape··on A harassment campaign on Goodreads
here's a recent thread discussing goodreads:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20904549

cosmic_ape··on Troubling trends in machine learning scholarship (2018)
previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17497273
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