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jkbycon Show HN: Isopolis – Isometric pixel map of SF

> You are doing a hobby project, why do you fixate about results?

You're assuming his goals are the same or should be the same as yours.

IMO, it looks really cool, I'm sure it took lots of effort despite the AI coding help, and I thoroughly enjoyed looking at it and taking the tours.

Just because it's possible to create things like this doesn't devalue the work of true pixel artists.

jkbycon U.S. national-security leaders included me in a group chat

One EU AI startup even named itself after these bottle caps:) https://www.bottlecapai.com/

jkbycon Can logic programming be liberated from predicates and backtracking? [pdf]

There's an insightful critique of the paper on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammingLanguages/comments/1g1su... ...agree that it's weird the paper doesn't mention constraint logic programming, but it's perhaps pointing at it implicitly by saying "Replacing backtracking by complete search strategies"

jkbycon Boris Vallejo and the pixel art of the demoscene

You might enjoy an entire talk on using a limited color palette for graphics in early games and how it stimulated creativity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0

"In this GDC 2016 talk, Terrible Toybox's Mark Ferrari discusses and demonstrate some of his techniques for drawing 8 bit game graphics, including his celebrated methods for use of color cycling and pallet shifting to create complex and realistic background animation effects without frame-animation

GDC talks cover a range of developmental topics including game design, programming, audio, visual arts, business management, production, online games, and much more. We post a fresh GDC video every weekday. Subscribe to the channel to stay on top of regular updates, and check out GDC Vault for thousands of more in-depth talks from our archives."

jkbycon Reddit CEO doubles down on attack on Apollo developer in drama-filled AMA

A slightly different but related topic - Chomsky on why (humanitarian) intent doesn't matter: https://youtu.be/syikF6gNJDk

jkbycon ChatGPT Explained: A normie's guide to how it works

That's called Toolformer (Facebook AI Research): https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04761 Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools

jkbycon The simplest of slumbers

And an interesting comment of someone on FB:

Hydra

Hydra have a diffuse neural system

But no brain to speak of

A simple creature echoing older, more primitive forms

They doze off, so we've found

Using familiar chemistry

To slumber every four hours

When I sleep I descend like a bathysphere Down through layers of earlier incarnations

Dipping below the surface

Leaving the airy light of consciousness behind

To enter the involuntary dream world of Freud and Jung

Deeper still then dreams themselves disperse

Slipping away like darting fish

Leaving me reptilian, autonomic, just breath and pulse

But there's further to go - into the abyssal dark

To reach my fundamental hardware

Where I am the hydra

https://www.facebook.com/QuantaNews/posts/1789738887890362

jkbycon Web Scrapers Claim to Sell Personal Data on Facebook Users on a Hacker Forum

It could be more than that. Vodafone broadband Internet (used to be UPC) is down in all of Czech Republic since about an hour. Their website is down (vodafone.cz), their mobile Internet seems slow. Coincidence?

jkbycon What I Worked On

The Lesson to Unlearn http://www.paulgraham.com/lesson.html (I think)

jkbycon When a customer refunds your paid app, Apple refunds its 30% cut [edited]

same like all Apple pricing, no? Seems just above reasonable, rubs you the wrong way, yet you still go for it. Sort of perfect from their perspective

jkbycon Color Hunt – Color Palettes for Designers and Artists

I used to use this site: https://www.colourlovers.com/palettes but I see it's become a bit bloated. It used to look more like colorhunt

jkbycon Drugmakers Play The Patent Game To Lock In Prices, Block Competitors

The related trend is called the Eroom's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eroom%27s_law

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CUGxcfOUEAAuseO.png:large (graph, "Overall trend in R&D efficiency" from https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd3681 )

or https://www.google.com/search?q=eroom%27s+law&source=lnms&tb...

jkbycon Ask HN: What are some great books that are relatively unknown in the US?

My mom used to read these to me and my brothers when we were little, we all really enjoyed it and had a lot of fun.

If you like Jerome K. Jerome, you should also check out Saturnin: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1724928.Saturnin It has a great poetic and funny style of classical Czech works. There's a movie too. Just in case someone is interested, a movie with a similar funny and poetic style https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutting_It_Short (Postřižiny) and I'd also recommend checking out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valerie_and_Her_Week_of_Wonder... - a surrealistic horror film...I love the soundtrack https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPyPEraG74c ...and to make it relevant to the original request, there's a book of the same name by Vitezslav Nezval (I haven't read it though)

jkbycon Oh right, about those LEDs

"An IBM plant in Windsor, Ontario, is said to have ordered a shipment of components from a Japanese firm, specifying an acceptable quality level(AQL) of three defective components per 10,000 shipped. In a covering letter accompanying the shipment, the Japanese company apologized and said it had met with great difficulty producing these defective parts, and had been unable to understand why they were required. They wrote: “We Japanese have hard time understanding North American business practices, but the three defective parts per 10,000 have been included and are wrapped separately. Hope this pleases.”

This seems to be the oldest reference: Chris Taylor, (1995) "The case for customer satisfaction", Managing Service Quality: An International Journal, Vol. 5 Iss: 1, pp.11 - 14 http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/09604529510081... but behind a paywall

...it is referred to for example by http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-287-429-0_3... "The Effectiveness of Service Quality by Jabatan Agama Islam Wilayah Persekutuan (JAWI) Towards Customer Satisfaction"

jkbycon Major Linux Problems on the Desktop, 2016 Edition

Isn't this already happening? http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/desktop/

jkbycon A Guide for the Perfect Daily Standup

>> What if standups are misused for micromanagement?

> Then fix it.

That's easier said than done. It assumes that the micromanager has enough self-awareness and listening skills. If he had, maybe he wouldn't be a micromanager. I tried to fix it but eventually it was one of the biggest reason I left the company.

>> If there are so many ways standups can go wrong maybe its not a good generic tool after all?

> I don't think that's a useful conclusion to draw. Standups go wrong if they are too long, and that's about the only way they can fail.

Micromanagement is another way we already mentioned. Fabulating stories about work done as a means of avoidance is another (as your sibling suggests). I'd say there are even more ways they can fail in general. In specific cases they might still be indispensable.

edit: formatting

jkbycon A Guide for the Perfect Daily Standup

What if your work consists largely of research and experimentation? No tasks or stories, mostly many long spikes.

What if research and experimentation happens over a period of time and only later there is a period of focused prototype development?

Have you experimented with alternatives to daily standups? Standups three times a week? Changing the routine based on the stage of the work (research vs. development for example)?

What if standups are misused for micromanagement?

If there are so many ways standups can go wrong maybe its not a good generic tool after all?

jkbycon Exploring the Architecture of the NuoDB Database, Part 1 (2013)

Aphyr's dissection: https://aphyr.com/posts/292-call-me-maybe-nuodb

jkbycon Artificial-Intelligence Experts Are in High Demand

I believe the OP's point is that the demand is for applied statisticians and not for AI experts (in the sense exactly as defined by you).

jkbycon Learn Prolog Now

A year ago I asked about real-world use cases for Prolog, there were a couple of interesting ones: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/Examples-current-realworld-u...

People might not be aware that the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) specification includes a class verifier written in Prolog, see http://docs.oracle.com/javase/specs/jvms/se7/jvms7.pdf

Clementine -- a data mining application purchased by SPSS

SPARK toolset -- a rigorously defined Ada subset used for developing software correct by construction. This approach is used in areas like aviation, transportation, medicine, energy, etc. where failure is not an option.

ECLIPSE-CLP -- an open source constraint logic programming library used to solve various resource allocation problems. Think of it as a poor man's Operation Research expert.

Experian, the credit rating company, bought out Colmerauer's Prologia company: http://www.experianplc.com/news/company-news/2005/25-10-2005...

ContractExpress/DealBuilder from Business Integrity Ltd http://www.business-integrity.com/

InFlow from OrgNet http://www.orgnet.com/

GridMind tool - a for modelling and simulation new technologies implementation into energy grids (smart grids, smart metering etc.). They have to generate detailed complex models satisfying lot of rules which to make models realistic. Prolog together with CLP is excellent tool for that. Fast development, small code, elegant solutions. www.mycroftmind.com

David Warren (Leading Professor at Stony Brook University): "We at XSB, Inc. use Prolog and Java. We use Prolog for knowledge extraction and standardization and for ontology representation. We have (to me, somewhat surprisingly) found that our Prolog code is more stable and we spend less on maintaining it than we do our Java code. It may be programmer skills, but I think it is also due to the much more succinct expression of similar functionality."

The Nokia N900 phone used prolog to do ui state management .... prolog in a smartphone!

London-based startup Texrazor performs text analysis via API and the engine behind it is coded in Prolog http://www.textrazor.com/technology

Prolog does social and organizational network analysis for clients around the world. http://orgnet.com/inflow3.html

Orgnet, LLC also uses LPA Prolog to do data analysis, especially for hidden relationships and patterns in business data... for examples, see: http://thenetworkthinkers.com

etc., see the discussion on LinkedIn

jkbycon Scala: Where it came from, Where it's going

When there's lack of objective direct information, the evidence of adoption or "churn" might be a good substitute: http://www.quora.com/Is-LinkedIn-getting-rid-of-Scala Of course, it's difficult to judge LinkedIn's motives but it certainly raises valid questions and concerns.

jkbycon Too Much Calculus – Gilbert Strang (2001) [pdf]

My linear algebra professor insisted that we, as computer science graduates, know and can reproduce most if not all the proofs of the theorems presented in the class. He didn't have such demands for math majors. His point was that we as computer scientists / software engineers / programmers will always have to understand and construct all the minutiae of the programs we write (otherwise they won't work). In contrast, mathematicians could use a lot of it "just" as tools.

I also had to go through a lot of heavy calculus courses which were very proof-centric and built from first principles. Rarely we skipped a proof of a theorem and we were expected to be able to reproduce and understand all of them at exams. I hated it often back then. However, these days I can appreciate the rigor it has taught me and I would wish I could send some of the programmers I met to similar courses so that they would learn to think clearly and precisely and be able to spot unmet or missing assumptions.

Our teachers and the creators of the curriculum were not stupid or naive. They knew well how much of hands on calculus we would use in practice vs. algebra or linear algebra. One of their main reasons for including calculus was to teach us rigor. I know that once someone overheard two teachers talking - the calculus teacher was asking someone from a CS department what to teach the CS graduates and the reply was that he can teach us whatever he wants, he just should make sure to teach us to think. I think they were quite successful at it even if it wasn't a very pleasant experience for most.

That also reminds me of this very relevant and true comic: http://savethepenguins.net/image/237344573 ("Wtf, man. I just wanted to learn how to program video games.")

jkbycon Bash process substitution

I sometimes use it to do parallel greps on large files:

  zcat large_file.gz | tee >(grep -F pattern1 > pattern1_results.txt) >(grep -F pattern2 > pattern2_results.txt) > /dev/null

If you stick _pv_ between zcat and tee you can even get nice info about the progress.

jkbycon Bash process substitution

  $ echo "Process substitution is fun" | tee >(rev)
  Process substitution is fun
  nuf si noitutitsbus ssecorP

jkbycon How strong would a magnetic field have to be to kill you?

tattoos can be a problem, right?

jkbycon Ask HN: How should I best invest £5000?

There might be. One financial sage gave the following example: buy nickles. Currently, the value of the material is ~30%(?) higher than the nominal value of the coin. Therefore at some point in future the government will have to switch to a different material. At that point you'll be able to sell at 30% gain. If this for some reason is not possible then you'll still have whatever you started with. This way you are sure not to lose any money (except due to inflation) and possibly make 30% profit. You have to consider the likelihoods of both outcomes, etc. Anyway, he bought nickels worth of a couple of million dollars.

jkbycon MIT professor explains: The real oppression is having to learn to talk to women

another article about Scott Aaronson's comment 171: http://www.newstatesman.com/laurie-penny/on-nerd-entitlement...

and the related HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8809982

jkbycon MIT professor explains: The real oppression is having to learn to talk to women

Scott Aaronson's response: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2119

jkbycon [dead]

Learn about positioning (market segmentation, differentiation). Think about what clients want, resp. what your ideal client would see as ideal service. Do they care about how good/pretty your designs are? Or maybe do they care about making money? They care about achieving a goal with that design - getting more users, building their trust, converting them, ... Do they know how to achieve all that? Probably not. How do you help them with it? What are they afraid of? (missing deadlines, overspending, lack of visibility into what you're doing, having to handhold you too much). How do you overcome that? How do you communicate it? Network. Find your ideal clients. Approach them. Read comments of HN users such as patio11. Check out what Ramit Sethi has to say (and many others).

jkbycon Complications in Physics Lend Support to Multiverse Hypothesis

Check out The Reference Frame blog if you want to read more (and more in-depth) about naturalness. For example: http://motls.blogspot.cz/2012/07/diphoton-higgs-enhancement-... http://motls.blogspot.cz/2013/12/doubly-protected-higgs-is-n...

Otherwise: https://www.google.com/?q=site:motls.blogspot.com+naturalnes...