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knbknb

258 karma · joined July 10, 2017

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knbknb··on Ask HN: How do I learn drawing?
Apple has a series of free Books "Everybody can be creative". One of them is called "Everybody can be creative - Drawing". It has some interesting projects to get started with the Apple Pencil, (which you already own, you said). Get it from Apple Books
knbknb··on Unfinished Metropolis: once and future Berlin (2020)
tl,dr;

This article is about an exhibition that ran (in Berlin) until Jan 03, 2021. It's over.

The book mentioned in the article is the exhibition catalague.

knbknb··on Joint Chiefs remind U.S. forces that they defend the constitution
I think the US-military leaders prefer to not take orders from a person who has completely lost it and knows no bounds.

Moreover these destructive key-decisions would be most likely outrageous and against the interests of the country.

knbknb··on Reverse Engineering the Source Code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine
Has anyone come up with an answer for the question that you posed mid-text?

The question about the one base change that did _not_ lead to an additional C or G, the CCA -> CCU modification?

(Note to myself: I think the question is: Why CCA -> CCU and not CCA -> CCG)

knbknb··on Reverse Engineering the Source Code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine
Patents
knbknb··on Reverse Engineering the Source Code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine
In the the footer of the blog post 'BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine', the author links to many of his previous blog posts and talks, videos that do just that.

Key Sentence

'In addition, I’ve been maintaining a page on ‘DNA for programmers’ since 2001.'

https://berthub.eu/amazing-dna

knbknb··on MuZero: Mastering Atari, Go, chess and shogi by planning with a learned model
I'm not a ML expert or ML researcher.

I still have question, as a non-expert who wants to develop his own long-term learning path (or at least have my own educated opinion about the current fast-paced AI hype):

To become more familiar with Reinforcement Learning (RL), is it useful to turn my attention to basic Agent-Based Modeling first (like the NetLogo App does it) in order to learn some basics about RL first, and then add in more math and ML stuff gradually?

It seems to me like most prospective data-scientists move on a path like this: Linear regr. -> Supervised ML -> Unsupervised ML -> NNs -> DL -> RL .

Agent-Based Modeling seems undertaught.

knbknb··on MuZero: Mastering Atari, Go, chess and shogi by planning with a learned model
This thread is underrated ...

Maybe you should post again, with "author here" at the beginning, in a more popular HN discussion-thread on MuZero? According to Algolia HN search, this thread has the most comments, n=76) currently (Dec 25 20202) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25519176

knbknb··on Legendary Science Fiction Author Ben Bova Has Passed at the Age of 88
Impressed me too, when I was a teen. On a second reading as an adult, I thought: the book starts off great, but becomes a bit boring at the end, or full of clichés.
knbknb··on Is carbon capture a viable solution?
Carbon capture from power plants would contain a mixture of CO2, NOx and SOx, and very few projects (see article) have ever attempted to capture this corrosive mixture, on an industrial scale, for a very long time. It is quite a complicated and energy-intensive process (collect the gases, compress/liquify/make supercritical, transport, convert P/V/T again, pump it down).

I know that the Norwegians (or perhaps various multinationals) have been doing this for decades, capturing CO2 at the source, at the Sleipner giant oil field in the North sea . But that is not a power plant.

knbknb··on Why did Europe become less religious over time and the US didn't?
My estimation:

Germany - Former GDR (East) : 2%

Germany - Protestants (North) : 10%

Germany - Catholic (South and West): 20%

optimistic values, added lots of slack. Based on gut feeling.

knbknb··on Another Now by Yanis Varoufakis
I also think that that Varoufakis likes to give speeches, and that's about it.

In his long rants, there occasionally appears an interesting hypothesis, but this might be due to chance. And it is not followed up upon with any clear reasoning, but mostly with overly self-confident blather.

Fair enough, this article of his in the Guardian is a more polished piece.

knbknb··on Google users locked out after 15 years' use
fellow chromebook users:

If you had a Chromebook, and Google locked your account. Does the scenario described in the article imply that you can no longer can log into your own laptop?

knbknb··on Large 2000-year-old cat discovered in Peru's Nazca lines
Seems like a jaguar to me
knbknb··on French judge rules GPL license must be enforced via contract law, not copyright
The article contains a link to GPL3. So I assume that was the controversial license actually referred to in the trial?
knbknb··on Examples of ImageMagick Usage (2016)
This page is also worth taking a look: "Fred's ImageMagick Scripts" [0]

Fred seems to be an Imagemagick Expert who has written a lot of free shellscripts, over the years.

There are examples of multiline scripts for complex tasks (e.g. improving bad (greyed, inclined) scans or prints from a copymachine). Scroll down for illustrations, its a rather long webpage.

[0] http://www.fmwconcepts.com/imagemagick/index.php

knbknb··on Excalidraw whiteboard – easily sketch diagrams with a hand-drawn feel
Anyone knows if there is someting similar available, but for uploading and editing Screenshots ?

I'd like to have features "crop", "pixelize" and "add sequential-number label" available in a brwoser-based picture editor.

knbknb··on It's 2020 and I'm using image maps
Java Applets, Dynamic HTML, Perl/CGI, executable email attachments, MSIE vs Netscape
knbknb··on How do I learn to think better? (2019)
There is a course "The Philosopher's toolkit - how to be the most rational person in any room" at TheGreatCourses.com by Philosophy Professor Patrick Grim.

The first lecture is about about this very topic. How we think and how to think better.

I've ~~listened to some audio lectures once~~ taken the course and since then I am thinking a lot better.

No seriously He teaches a lot of tricks and techniques. FOr insstance: Ironclad, airtight validity. Thought experiments. Statistics. Really applying all this takes some effort of course

knbknb··on Tmux for Mere Mortals
Does Byobu run best on Ubuntu?

Or is Byobu not (or not any longer) tied to any particular Linux distribution (I am an ubuntu user) ?

knbknb··on Ask HN: What is the best way to learn Lisp in 2020?
If you like MOOCs and video training, checkout this introductory course for absolute beginners:

"How to Code: Simple Data" on edX, by Gregor Gregor Kiczales from the University of British Columbia.

https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:UBCx+HtC1x+2T2017/...

The course teaches the Racket language, but proceeds at a rapid pace. It follows the "How to Design Programs" methodology developed in the 1990s (?) at MIT (and elsewhere). This is a test-driven-design method, AFAICT. (I think the MOOC author co-developed it while at MIT).

https://htdp.org/2003-09-26/

Someone has ported all the SICP exercises to Racket, so you can follow along with that book, too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_Interpretation_o...

There is a follow-up course, "How to Code: Complex data" but I didn't take it.

knbknb··on Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?
The command line tools of the imagemagick suite, "convert", for batch-converting images to thumbnails, "identify" for extracting basic metadata, for instance.

https://imagemagick.org/index.php

knbknb··on Ask HN: How to properly manage a product roadmap?
Just yesterday 2020-04-11 Shreyas Doshi (@shreyas) posted a long thread of 30 tweets about "Good" vs "Great" product managers. Some pearls of wisdom are in there:

https://threader.app/thread/1249039638829793280

(He also admits he doesn't knwo any Great PM who has all of the 30 traits and does all those actions, all of the time.)

knbknb··on Venezuelan ship sinks itself after ramming cruise liner with a reinforced hull
Required reading for the Venezolan captain : "How to Avoid Huge Ships" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Avoid_Huge_Ships
knbknb··on Ask HN: Best Office Chair?
Years ago I have made a bargain deal by buying a used Vitra office chair https://www.vitra.com/en-us/office . Some company got rid of a whole lot of them, and another company refurbished them.

I think adjustable armrests are indespensable for a good office chair.

knbknb··on The Virus Can Be Stopped, but Only with Harsh Steps, Experts Say
Yes there is evidence. From Pro-Med Mail:

A second PCR-positive dog, Hong Kong

https://promedmail.org/promed-post/?id=7112693

Apparently it was a very old dog though.

Published Date: 2020-03-19 15:56:45 Subject: PRO/AH/EDR> COVID-19 update (45): China (Hong Kong) animal, dog, 2nd case PCR positive Archive Number: 20200319.7112693

knbknb··on Coronavirus may have spread undetected for weeks in U.S.
Do you know how they were tested?

By having a blood sample taken (the classic way), or was this one of the new quick-tests that the German Wikipedia article mentions?

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/SARS-CoV-2#Schnelltests

MSN: https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/other/coronavirus-outbreak-ne...

knbknb··on Varoufakis to Publish Notorious Eurogroup Recordings from 2015 Meetings
I agree with you. He likes to give long speeches, but doesn't have anything to say.
knbknb··on Wikipedia now has more than 6M articles in English
There was a behind-the-scenes talk at 36c3 in Dec 2019 where a few Wikipedia Admins show what the infrastructure looks like and what they actually do: Infrastructure of Wikipedia https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-73-infrastructure-of-wikipedia
knbknb··on Wikipedia now has more than 6M articles in English
Do we have a power-law distribution here? (They are rare)
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