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greenmountin

119 karma · joined September 7, 2012

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greenmountin··on K2pdfopt
The app works for 1) arXiv papers 2) any url of a paper obtainable from the address bar of your phone.

If you copy-paste, or copy and use the clipboard button, it will try to identify the arXiv identifier from the url, and then show you the title + abstract. Then you have to download the PDF, preview the transformed copy (copy stays in the cloud for 24h), and finally request a fully reflowed copy. The reflow is limited to about 30s via AWS Lambda, so this is not for dissertations -- this is for 2-20 page papers you can reasonably read on your phone. Nevertheless, there is a progress bar at the top of the screen to show you it's working, at that stage. These steps are pretty much reproduced in the app store images.

For a non-arXiv link, the only difference is that there is no abstract. But note, the link can't just be to the journal page, you've got to get a PDF mime-type when it's requested.

There are some things I should change, but it's very useful to me, and I just verified it works for both arXiv and non-arXiv. If it's not working for you, I would suggest deleting and reinstalling (sorry!).

greenmountin··on K2pdfopt
I will look into it!

edit: fyi it's originally because the information about Encryption Compliance is so confusing. I just use HTTPS and I'm pretty sure the documentation has gotten clearer in the meantime, so I'm optimistic.

greenmountin··on K2pdfopt
I wrapped this for iOS, and linked it to Twitter. If you connect it to your account, there is a separate feed of any tweet with a PDF, and one for any arXiv or PDF tweet that you've liked. [You don't have to connect, you can also just input the URL or quick-paste].

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tweedf/id1434462362

It's great for following your favorite scientists and professionals, and now I favorite more of their posts, which makes me happy because I feel like I am spreading more love in the world.

greenmountin··on Bezos Selfie Controversy Triggers Alarm for Billionaires Worldwide
There is an early-stage community-sourced device which does processing offline: mycroft.ai
greenmountin··on OpenAI Five at Dota 2 – The International [video]
Interesting that the draft was predetermined (unlike the previous exhibition, which was live), allowing OpenAI to train ahead of time on a restricted set of matches. I wonder how long that was?
greenmountin··on Hawaii's Final Sugar Cargo Departs Maui Aboard 'Moku Pahu'
TFA says the plantation took a $MM loss on their last sugar harvest, and intends to "diversify". According to another article about the company [0], this diversification is:

"""

• Energy crops: “HC&S has initiated crop trials to evaluate potential sources of feedstock for anaerobic conversion to biogas,” stated the company’s press release. The statement added that HC&S has entered into “preliminary, but confidential, discussions with other bioenergy industry players to explore additional crop-to-energy opportunities.”

• Cattle: As noted above, HC&S is “working with Maui Cattle Company to conduct a grass-finishing pasture trial in 2016.”

• Food crops: “A&B plans to establish an agriculture park on former sugar lands in order to provide opportunities for farmers to access these agricultural lands and support the cultivation of food crops on Maui.” Former company employees would get preference in leasing lots.

"""

[0] http://mauitime.com/news/business/as-the-sun-sets-on-maui-su...

greenmountin··on What Percent of the Top-Voted Comments in Reddit Threads Were Also First Comment?
How do you beat the "tyranny of the reply"?

Automatic karma deductions for 3rd tier replies? Detachment + quoting after the 2nd tier? Positioning based on the cumulative karma of the whole tree? Automatic collapse of higher tiers (a la reddit...) Super-powered collapse buttons, for when people get tired mid-tree

I wish something were done, but I bet it will be an addon, not HN, first.

greenmountin··on Amazon sells out of the NES Classic Edition in less than a minute
Thought of this when I was browsing AliExpress for Singles Day, today, and found this:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Video-Game-Projector-PGS-Con...

Available cheap for another 8 hours, maybe something to tide them over?

greenmountin··on Statistical Machine Learning, Spring 2016
Thanks! One thing that can definitely set a course apart is having advanced topics + downloadable videos + captions. I really enjoyed the Stanford NLP CS224d videos, which hit all 3 and even have their own torrent [1].

Does anyone know if there's a platform for crowdsourcing video captions, maybe from the anime world?

Edit: it appears as though you can correct the auto-generated captions on Youtube videos (perhaps only if you're the owner). What a great way to get labeled Speech Recognition data for free.

[1] http://academictorrents.com/details/dd9b74b50a1292b4b154094b...

greenmountin··on New lower Azure pricing
Does anyone know about Azure auto-scaling? It says "most [VM's] include load-balancing and auto-scaling free of charge", is that true and is it any more friendly to hobbyists than the other two?

It was very disappointing to see the auto-scaling services for GCP and AWS basically require a $20/mo load balancer right off the bat. I have an app that is quietly puttering away on a single Digital Ocean droplet, but could at any moment, uh, make it big and I want to be ready. But I can't really stomach the $20 just to turn on auto-scaling somewhere.

greenmountin··on I quit my job, bought an army truck, and spent 19 months circumnavigating Africa
He said [1] upfront costs were ~$100k, though recouped ~$30k by selling the truck at the end.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/53eqlt/i_quit_my_job_...

Reddit thread has NSFW tag for source pictures

greenmountin··on Age differences in learning from an insufficient representation of uncertainty
This headline (on yc) is missing a key verb from the actual paper's headline, making it confusing. The actual title is:

"Age differences in learning emerge from an insufficient representation of uncertainty in older adults"

greenmountin··on The Great Productivity Puzzle
One approach to understanding low productivity that I find interesting is covered in Jason Furman's very readable "Is This Time Different? The Opportunities and Challenges of Artificial Intelligence" report [1] -- he's one of Obama's lead economists.

In short, productivity growth may be lagging because of AI etc; it's because people have to spend time retraining for jobs not obsoleted by new technologies. He briefly states his rejection of Gordon.

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/page/files/20...

greenmountin··on $1,000 hikes hit some older Seattle rentals
Thank you for voicing this view, it seems at odds with the conclusion of the gp (which is interesting too, and the consensus here at HN when this sort of issue comes up).

I've been thinking about this for a while, and I would really like to see the evidence for your view. What are the cities that have begun to suffer for lack of zoning (in this context, or otherwise)? Is this a modern problem? Is there a textbook example?

Google suggests Houston has a lack of zoning; interesting, but clearly it has been able to grow via sprawl.

greenmountin··on ReactJS for Stupid People (2014)
This is really good to hear! I would really appreciate a single-page / pdf / ebook version of the redux documentation. Tough to read offline in the segmented pages. Maybe I'll get my wish, since it was rendered using "gitbook".
greenmountin··on Supreme Court Rules Extending Traffic Stop for Dog Sniff Unconstitutional [pdf]
The opposition did a terrible job of defending dog sniffs during the oral arguments. They could not articulate a reasonable rule for when they should be allowed (except that they were ok until the ticket was written).

The justices repeatedly presented hypotheticals, but the guy just didn't get it.

[1hr MP3 of oral arguments] http://www.oyez.org/cases/2010-2019/2014/2014_13_9972

greenmountin··on Transplant Brokers in Israel Lure Desperate Kidney Patients to Costa Rica
My favorite blogger that touches on these issues is Al Roth (http://marketdesigner.blogspot.com), a professor now at Stanford.

One of the coolest ideas there is the "organ donation chain." Think of one patient's spouse donating their kidney to another patient, and vice versa; now add an intermediary couple, and you've got a chain where more kidneys reach better compatible hosts. Unfortunately, because someone could always get cold feet, a lot of these chains had been carried out simultaneously, which naturally limits the size of such a chain.

So the cherry on top is a "non-directed" starter kidney. With this initial gift of altruism there's a little more leeway to arrange the matches and it's a disappointment but not a showstopper when someone finally stops the chain.

Anyways, it's always nice to think about the stopgaps between now and the sci-fi organ-growing future.

greenmountin··on Are processors pushing up against the limits of physics?
translated: "Just an aside: note that the speed that light travels in any medium is slower than it travels in vacuum. Its speed is no longer 3e8 m/s, but a third less in, for example, FR-4 microstrip (a popular prototype board dielectric). The effective speed is about 6 inches per ns, or at least, 6 inches per cycle of a 1 GHz clock."
greenmountin··on Why The Student Loan Market Is Insane
This is an interesting difference to bring up. I would trace the push for high graduation rates in the US to its inclusion as a parameter in the canonical US News college ranking equations. The oft-stated reasoning is that a top-flight college that allows even 10% of its students to leave without a degree in 5-years is failing them somehow.

To some extent, this is true -- I have personally seen brilliant friends drop out of a stressful college when clearly the university was not serving their reasonable needs.

greenmountin··on Red wine health benefits 'overhyped'
It was kind of surprising to hear how just fraudulent the research on reservatrol (characteristic red wine chemical) was. The guy was a regular feature[1] on Retraction Watch until he passed away...

[1] http://retractionwatch.com/category/by-author/dipak-das/

greenmountin··on Anki – Powerful, intelligent flashcards
Flashcards are great, but I can't do the initial learn that way. Does anyone know of a way to do SRS but also generate a classic memorization sheet with 2 columns and like 20 pairs?
greenmountin··on Seth Roberts has died
I can't tell if you're being serious or not, so I will note for other readers that there is a lot of irony in saying this about Seth. His most public experiments were the ingestion of large quantities of olive oil for appetite control and daily butter consumption to aid sleep. A more appropriate sentiment might be to salute Seth for his radical health experiments, and the great risks he assumed in performing them on himself.
greenmountin··on Spaced Repitition
My problem with SRS is that it is useless for the first stage of memorization. The "vocab sheet" (20 word+definition lines, on a sheet) style is much more effective for me, and if this was available for any of the SRS vendors I would start using it immediately.
greenmountin··on Mt. Gox – Business Plan 2014-2017 [pdf]
I hadn't realized how much equity the CEO retained, 82%?. Am I interpreting this number wrong? This seems like as good of a reason as any to suspect either his team was grossly incompetent or significantly underpaid. Karpeles doesn't strike me as being a Zuckerberg, and you don't get to Mt. Gox market cap without giving up a little share to your collaborators.
greenmountin··on New jailbreak available for iOS7 by the evad3rs
1) Firewall program that disallows internet access for specific programs. 2) Cellular data swipe on/off in the quick dropdown window.
greenmountin··on T-Mobile Rocks
Two year contracts are a lie, a prop, an illusion. If you break it, you basically pay back the prorated part of the phone discount you got. If you go to a carrier without phone subsidies, they'll charge you less month-to-month an amount equal to the monthly prorated phone discount.

This was my realization when pricing out basic phone service with T-Mobile, ATT, etc. You have to really work hard to pay different. Just don't be afraid to break the contract, it's not a real penalty.

greenmountin··on The Future of Programming
You may not like LabVIEW, but it is extremely useful in some areas. For lab scientists who need to iterate quickly between taking useful data and running the experiment, it's nice to just copy and paste instead of naming new variables, etc.

Currently other solutions are either Matlab (which sounds soul-destroying) or Python (which is still nontrivial).

greenmountin··on SIM Cards Have Finally Been Hacked, and the Flaw Could Affect Millions of Phones
Sounds like a lot of work. I don't trust LastPass et al., and really just need a single encrypted password file. My method doesn't provide a driver secure channel, but it is achievable today.

1) Buy a slim ipod touch 2) Jailbreak (unnecessary) 3) App CryptMe allows transfer of plaintext from your computer through iTunes, password unlock on the device, quick search (nice), and according to Firewall iP (Cydia program) doesn't connect to the internet (or you could just always keep wifi off).

greenmountin··on QCL - A Programming Language for Quantum Computers
> The current version of QCL is 0.6.3 (Dec 14 2006):

In reality, programming quantum computers is still complicated by the changing hardware. Think about it, if your goal is to do something cool with 1 or 2 bits, it doesn't make sense to build a grand architecture which will let you factor 2^25-1. In fact, when I see grad students / postdocs / professors talking about this, it's a big warning sign.

If you're interested in what could be done in the field, I would start by taking a look at QuTIP (https://code.google.com/p/qutip/), learning LabVIEW (It's effective, useful, and everywhere), or maybe becoming a topnotch Verilog coder. FPGA's are the future of QC.

greenmountin··on 'Likes' are a Flawed Currency
Are you sure FB doesn't rate limit the exposure of your likes to uninvolved parties? I am too stingy with likes, but have fantasized about going bananas.
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