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darkxanthos

1,681 karma · joined March 8, 2008

Data Scientist
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darkxanthos··on Godox Transparent Viewfinder Camera C100
Just an sd card.
darkxanthos··on Blatant AI slop just won a 25k USD DeepMind Kaggle Grand Prize
The real story here is the judging potentially being AI slop.
darkxanthos··on Nintendo announces price increases for Nintendo Switch 2
If someone has a switch, gifting a steam deck isn't an upgrade necessarily. You're giving them a platform that can't play most of the games they probably love. Not because of specs of course. A switch 2 is actually an upgrade. Almost all of their current games will run better and they'll be able to play more demanding switch 2 only games as they continue to trickle out.
darkxanthos··on TinyLoRA – Learning to Reason in 13 Parameters
This hit me too hard.
darkxanthos··on The Future of SCIP
This is what I clicked for.
darkxanthos··on eBay explicitly bans AI "buy for me" agents in user agreement update
The purchasing itself can important for it to jump on a great price. Maybe it finds what you're looking for at 1a while you're sleeping for example. Also if this were a business and you were going to resell it the AI could also create the listing as soon as the item is purchased.
darkxanthos··on Thesis: Interesting work is less amenable to the use of AI
It's definitely real that a lot of smart productive people don't get good results when they use AI to write software.

It's also definitely real that a lot of other smart productive people are more productive when they use it.

These sort of articles and comments here seem to be saying I'm proof it can't be done. When really there's enough proof it can be that you're just proving you'll be left behind.

darkxanthos··on AI agents get office tasks wrong around 70% of time, and many aren't AI at all
I agree with the idea that true agentic AI is far from perfect and is overused in a lot of low or negative ROI contexts... I'm not convinced that where the ROI is there, even if the error rate is high, that it isn't still worthwhile.

Augmented coding as Kent beck puts it is filled with errors but more and more people are starting to find to be a 2x+ improvement for most cases.

People are spending too much time arguing that the the extreme hype is extremely hyped and what can't be done and aren't looking at the massive progress in terms of what can be done.

Also no one I know uses any of the models in the article at this point. They called out a 50% improvement in models spaced 6 months apart... that's also where some of the hype comes from.

darkxanthos··on Agentic Coding Recommendations
I stumbled into Agentic Coding in VS Code Nightlys with co-pilot using Claude Sonnet 4 and I've been silly productive. Even when half my day is meetings, you wouldn't be able to tell from my git history.

My thinking now is removed from the gory details and is a step or two up. How can I validate the changes are working? Can I understand this code? How should it be structured so I can better understand it? Is there more we can add to the AI conventions markdown in the repo to guide the Agent to make fewer mistaken assumptions?

Last night I had a file with 38 mypy errors. I turned it over to the agent and went and had a conversation with my wife for 15 minutes. I came back, it summarized the changes it made and why, I debated one of the changes with it but ultimately decided it was right.

Mypy passed. Good to go.

I'm currently trying to get my team to really understand the power here. There's a lot of skeptics and the AI still isn't perfect and people who are against the AI era will latch onto that as validation but it's exactly opposite the correct reaction. It's really validation because as a friend of mine says

"Today is the worst day you will have with this technology for the rest of your life."

darkxanthos··on Show HN: I used OpenAI's new image API for a personalized coloring book service
Wow a lot of criticism. I'm considering a similar business. I think this is too expensive when printing this is so easy these days. But charging some small about per printable coloring book would be very attractive.
darkxanthos··on Spoiler Alert: 'Star Trek: Discovery' Officially Erased from Canon
Not all fiction is equivalent. When you are actively world building making explicit revisions is useful for those trying to follow along. If you'd prefer a different word you should say so.
darkxanthos··on Developing Inside a Container (2022)
We've been using this where I work for over a year and I'm never going back.
darkxanthos··on Why Steam Deck Is One of the Most Significant PC Gaming Moments in Years
My friend has been playing Dead Space on it for the last few days and has been quite happy. I think they released a patch recently. Give it another go if you’re interested!
darkxanthos··on Pinterest to price IPO below last valuation
This isn’t actually the title of the article. Should this be renamed?
darkxanthos··on Data science is different now
The differentiator is breadth over depth. Not getting much into theoretical underpinnings.
darkxanthos··on Data science is different now
Yes. The point I took away from this is that this is not at all a focus of most academic settings. This ends up leaving a huge gap and leaving candidates with an academic DS background woefully unprepared and undesirable.
darkxanthos··on Ask HN: High-Quality Online Degree for Mathematics?
A very tangible reason to care if a degree is regionally accredited is that your degree will transfer to just about any other school. If my bachelors wasn’t regionally accredited I wouldn’t have gotten into my current masters program for example.

Like the other comments say as well... it’s basically what qualifies a “real” degree.

darkxanthos··on Ask HN: High-Quality Online Degree for Mathematics?
I was looking for something similar 6 years ago or so. “High quality” is difficult... but regionally accredited and a real degree does exist.

I went to Southern New Hampshire University and got my BA in Math w/ concentration in Applied Math. I started grad school at GA Tech for an MS in Operations Research via their distance learning program. I also got into USC and Kansas State.

I learned about this other degree after I was done though so you have at least two accredited options. It is slim pickings though: https://www.tesu.edu/heavin/ba/mathematics

darkxanthos··on What You Need to Know Before Considering a PhD
I’m doing this with my masters right now. Taking distance courses in Operations Research at GA Tech. I’m 36 and have two years of part time grad school to go but it’s been an awesome experience. If it’s for you, im not sure why age matters?
darkxanthos··on China is winning the global tech race
Per capita this doesn't seem as terrible. Is that the wrong way to look at this?

China has ~1.38 billion people USA- ~326 million

darkxanthos··on Math from Three to Seven: The Story of a Mathematical Circle for Preschoolers [pdf]
Very helpful. Came into comments looking for someone to address the gender issues.
darkxanthos··on Stock Price Prediction with LSTMs
Ditto. There’s no way this is projecting almost a year into the future and maintaining accuracy. It’s being trained on the test somehow or it’s doing something different from what I’m interpreting.
darkxanthos··on Message-Oriented Programming (2017)
I like the general idea and have felt the same way for a while. For the benefits they list a message bus isn’t necessary. Even dispatching to multiple subscribers can be straight-forward with a proxy object. Instead you can design your OOP system to behave as though it’s passing messages and get a majority of the benefit along with a straight-forward path to refactor towards a message bus if/when you’re ready.
darkxanthos··on Ask HN: How to self-learn math?
Exactly. What’s really being referred to? Lower cost and more scheduling flexibility perhaps?
darkxanthos··on Ask HN: How to self-learn math?
An author of a book is still a teacher... we’re just debating the personalization of the teaching at this point.
darkxanthos··on I’m 35 and I may suddenly have lost the rest of my life
In this case, living for "expected value" only makes sense if you live enough times to exploit the central limit theorem. If you review actuarial tables, you can see that at 35 (and male) you have 0.93% chance of not living to see your 40s. That is small... but it isn't vanishingly small. (source: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html)
darkxanthos··on On average, skipping college and investing tuition costs nets a higher return
Software engineering absolutely. You need to be self-driven and somewhat ambitious but many (myself included) have done it. EE I'm not sure.
darkxanthos··on Ask HN: Is it a waste of time to teach yourself data science without a degree?
I'm a lead data scientist and I don't have a degree. I do have programming/technical chops though which helped a ton.
darkxanthos··on Startup Serves Up Chicken Produced From Cells in Lab
Exactly. One can make an extreme example and ask how they would feel about someone lovingly slaughtering their husband/wife and children.
darkxanthos··on Bootstrapped – A Python library to generate confidence intervals
Just to make sure your comment is clear, the powerful portion of your quote "In short, don't use it." is strictly intended for the percentile bootstrap. Immediately after the paper says "Use the empirical bootstrap instead..."
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