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koningroboton Automatic Differentiation via Contour Integration

This reminds me of Squire & Trapp[1] which seems to be a special case. That paper provides a way of estimating Jacobian-vector products (aka forward-mode autodiff) by adding a tiny imaginary noise vector to the input. The complex output will have the function value in the real part and the Jacobian-vector product in the imaginary part.

The cool thing is you can make the noise vector arbitrarily small (up to machine precision), so it doesn't have the issues that finite differences has. I'm not sure if the same is true of the method described in the article.

[1] Using Complex Variables to Estimate Derivatives of Real Functions, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3de7/e8ae217a4214507b9abdac...

koningroboton Open letter concerning Facebook's proposals to apply end-to-end encryption

It doesn't sound so bad when you put it like that.

koningroboton Effectively Using Matplotlib (2017)

Another option is to use plotnine, which is intended to be a ggplot2 clone. It uses matplotlib under the hood, so if something isn't right you can tweak it. That was the main drawback I found with Altair: your declarative code is almost literally dumped to a json file and then rendered by a process external to Python, so good luck tweaking your plot.

https://github.com/has2k1/plotnine

koningroboton Stephen Fry reveals he attempted suicide in 2012

Stephen Fry should speak for himself. People can have very good reasons to want to die. Reasons that are so good that, besides outweighing the value that their life has to them, still have enough oomph to carry one over the high doorstep of fear and pain that comes with taking one's own life.

Life is not infinitely valuable. Its goods can be outweighed by bads. People who really just want to go should be respected and we should help them get out of here.

koningroboton The Best

Yes. To say people and the connections we build to them are what ultimately matters is an applause light. People and the connections we build to them are only means to the end of happiness.

That isn't cold or selfish. Surely we would all rather live in a world full of disconnected happy people than in a world full of (amicably) connected unhappy people?

koningroboton Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

Math is a model of reality. Math does not exist in your DNA; DNA exists subject to the rules of that which math models.

koningroboton Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

I don't understand what bearing this should have on the probability of AGI succeeding. What we (should) care about is not whether the system is conscious or even human-like. What matters is that it performs well on the tasks it is assigned. I consider it highly likely that we can do better than evolution did, in less time than evolution took.

koningroboton Noam Chomsky on Where Artificial Intelligence Went Wrong

The point of AI is not conscious machines but machines that can do useful things. Consciousness is not useful except to the extent that it helps a machine do useful things.

koningroboton I am a statistician and I buy lottery tickets

This is because you're not after money but after welfare (whatever that is).

koningroboton The science behind how your productivity is chosen by what you eat

Keto absolutely works for lots of folks. Protein is filling and delicious.

I've spent some time among "ketards" and they ate much more fat than they did protein. I think the recommended ratio was around 80% fat vs 20% protein.

koningroboton Suicide is Cheaper

I agree. Death is always an option, and sometimes it's the best (equivalently "least bad") one. Despite the title, the article actually argues from the point of view that death is never an option. This is a harmful black-and-white view. If you assign effectively infinite disutility to death then you can no longer say, for instance, that a painful death is worse than a painless one. Surely we can all agree that this is the wrong way to go about decision-making.

koningroboton Seven habits of effective text editing

Possibly, but I doubt that that is ever the reason for choosing one over the other. These productivity claims only serve as rationalizations of choices already made.

koningroboton World wide wasteland

What a karma-whoring red herring. But I'll bite. There's nothing fundamentally special about humans. There's also nothing fundamentally special about love. Not even if you use the word "love" to mean three different things in a single comment.

koningroboton Say No to Reproduction: Your declaration of your stance

I think you need to read the post that lays out the argument -- the lack of purpose is not considered a negative. Also, I think your assertion that life is awesome would carry more weight if the things you listed were things you experience daily rather than once in a blue moon.

If you are interested in having a discussion about this, comment on the blog post that presents the argument. I'm sure the author will engage (gently).

koningroboton Say No to Reproduction: Your declaration of your stance

FWIW, I do not agree entirely with the author's conclusions, but his intentions are good and I thought the entrepreneurial/change-the-world nature of his project would make it a good fit for HN.

koningroboton What My Son's Disabilities Taught Me About 'Having It All'

The winning move was not to become the Ideal Male Seen On Magazines, but instead to grow into my identity.

Sounds like you've traded one mythology for another. I doubt there was any "identity" that you pin-pointed, decided you wanted to grow into, and worked toward growing into. Rather, I think that "to grow into my identity" here means "to grow into that which I will grow into", making it self-fulfilling.

Evolution gave us pain and suffering; indeed we shouldn't glorify it. But we should also not glorify the way things are as the way things should be. Can we all please deal with our insecurities in some other way than by making up a story saying it's all okay? The world is on fire. All is not okay.

koningroboton Bitcoin just crossed $7.00.

How is that bad treatment? I for one would welcome an instant, painless death.

koningroboton How Depressives Surf the Web

If everyone is happy, then nothing is broken.

koningroboton Museum of Endangered Sounds

I would agree that it's unnecessary, but it seems that your problem is not so much with its NSFWness but with its misogyny.

koningroboton Please don't learn to code

I think the most profound lesson to be learned in programming is how complex everything is. Computers aren't "dumb" -- they just don't share our language, culture, biases, etc. You have to specify everything exactly. If anyone has to be dumb, it's going to have to be us. Evolution helped us make sense of the complexity with a bunch of highly complex and very leaky abstractions -- "person", "God", "love", "nature", "property", "fairness", "consent" etc. Only when you try to describe these concepts to a clean slate such as a computer do you realize how complex the world really is. Moreover, these allegedly meaningful things all boil down to meaningless physical states and interactions, so you also get to realize that everything is pointless and what was it again that we are doing here?

koningroboton Enough with the movements

Is there a list somewhere of concrete things that we know about software engineering?

koningroboton Eight years today

You can tell yourself some story that whatever happens is "beautiful" in the end, or that accepting the present moment is somehow "virtuous". Or you can acknowledge the truth, which is that reality sucks, that we weren't made for it, that it wasn't made for us, and that nothing is accomplished by us simply remaining to exist in the face of that. That's right, there's more we can do than just be nice to each other: we can refrain from creating the next generation of sufferers.

Life is unfair, you say. Let's recognize that and act accordingly.

koningroboton We're Underestimating the Risk of Human Extinction

The one thing that's always skipped over in this kind of article is... Why? The universe doesn't care whether we're around or not. It sure as hell doesn't affect us whether people are around even as nearby as a thousand years from now. If you're worried about future generations suffering, then don't make them. That's a lot cheaper than spending fortunes on a technological solution. The money saved can be used to help those suffering now.

koningroboton The Command Line Challenge.

For those looking for a keyboard-driven browser, try http://conkeror.org/

koningroboton Gamers Launch Harassment Campaign Against BioWare Writer

That first they get on the high horse of respecting everyone, and then they slam a particular minority. They even came up with a condescending word for it: misogynerds.

koningroboton Regrets of the Dying

Remember, a classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read. Spending time with family/relatives/friends is something that everybody wants to have done and nobody wants to do. Hard work is something that everybody wants to have done and nobody wants to do. Don't be afraid to just do what makes you feel good (unless it causes others significant trouble), regardless of what some sacred social convention dictates.

Remember also that the grass is always less brown on the other side. The moment you entertain the thought that some other situation would be better, you suffer. If you think some choice you made in the past was a bad one, it might be because you've only seen the consequences of the one option you chose. The other options might have been just as bad.

It's already hard enough to stay sane here on planet shithole without romanticizing Things As They Aren't.

koningroboton Gamers Launch Harassment Campaign Against BioWare Writer

From the "About Us" blurb: The Border House is a blog for gamers. It's a blog for those who are feminist, queer, disabled, people of color, transgender, poor, gay, lesbian, and others who belong to marginalized groups, as well as allies.

From the article: But more importantly, she’s talking about making games more inclusive and suggesting that people play games for different reasons and in different ways. This is at the heart of why the misogynerds are so angry: the industry is changing, it’s been changing for a long time, and it’s no longer the sole domain of misogynist nerds like them.

koningroboton WikiLeaks begins publishing 5 million emails from Stratfor

The context for the control quote is here: http://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/202526_re-insight-venezuel...

koningroboton Towards the Perfect Browser

Well, I don't think their concept of perfection is in line with mine. Theirs is more like "perfect despite the fact that it still leaves a lot to be desired". See http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ObjectBrowser to get an idea of what the perfect browser could be.

koningroboton Best Practices of Variable & Method Naming

12. Use meaningful names for methods. The name must specify the exact action of the method and for most cases must start with a verb. (e.g. createPasswordHash)

This depends. My classes often have side-effect-free methods that just return a value based on the state of the object. They are just properties the storage of which would be redundant. I never put "get" in front of the names of these methods. For instance, in a math Vector class, I don't have getNorm(), getUnit(), etc., I just have norm() and unit().

I struggle with what to name methods that compute, for instance, a dot product of two vectors. I don't like a.getDotProduct(b), nor a.dot(b) for that matter. The way the implicit parameter ("this") is special-cased in the notation makes everything so ugly. Nowadays I usually just have a class V with static methods that act on double[]s (so I end up with V.dot(a, b), which still sucks but at least isn't so confusing).