HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

mike_n

71 karma · joined November 3, 2017

submissionscomments
mike_n··on Ask HN: Buying Yourself a Job
Similar situation. I ended up paying a few bucks for an extension/guest access pass at the local university. I just started auditing lectures in any and all departments, 20+ hrs/week for a few semesters. Eventually I found myself getting really interested in one subject, took all the classes available, and that's what I decided to do for career 2.0
mike_n··on Samsung asks for planning permission for 11 fabs in Texas
Wouldn't it be prudent for them to ask for 11 fabs in 11 states, and get 11x more politicians lobbying for them?
mike_n··on Standard Ebooks
Is there a set of standard open-source textbooks for k-12 levels? If not, can we make it happen?
mike_n··on Ask HN: What to buy/visit when in SF?
Boudin is junk, no local would eat there. there are so many better local bakeries. Gharardelli, Pier 39/Fisherman's Wharf, and Union Square are touristy. There's nothing you can't buy there that you can't find online.

Do bring a jacket so you don't end up surprised by the weather.

Alcatraz and Chinatown and Golden Gate Park are interesting/pretty enough.

Better ideas... Eat some dim sum or a burrito. Rent a car and go to Muir Woods. or kayak and oysters in Pt Reyes. Or wander around Stanford/Cal campus. or drive to Yosemite or Tahoe. or go wine tasting and inner tubing in Guerneville. Or find a concert (jambase, songkick...) or baseball game. or take the ferry to sausalito or angel island. or Exploratorium or MoMA or other museum. or aquarium in Monterey and beach in Carmel. or go to the exploratorium. or try the Church of John Coltrane. or the Church of 8 Wheels. go sailing. lots of world-class dinner options. find random happenings on funcheapsf. etc.

Just don't go to those touristy places, yuk.

Source - am local yokel.

mike_n··on I think the Dakotas are already at herd immunity
it does seem very plausible that undetected cases are several times higher than confirmed/symptomatic cases. and/or, perhaps when things start to spike locally people begin to take it seriously and change their behavior a bit -- distancing/masks were not very common in the Dakotas before the post-Sturgis wave.
mike_n··on Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?
I worked for a solar co in the US for a while, 10yrs ago or so. It was a very interesting time, the hardware (solar panels, inverters) part of our Cost of Goods Sold fell considerably over the course of a few years. I'll suggest a few reasons, as I saw them: 1) Larger-scale, fully-automated manufacturing facilities were coming online. Some mfrs were reputable and high-quality, some not so much. But the abundance of supply caused these vendors to compete for business on price/warranty/etc terms, which drove down our cost to build systems. 2) Lots of developers were also bidding for projects, and utilities forced solar/wind developers to compete to offer lower prices for their power. 3) Government/utility subsidies helped get manufacturing facilities up and running, and made marginal projects more affordable to build/buy. Some incentive programs were well-designed, some were not. The markets that offered the best total return to investors got done first -- the lowest-hanging fruit for solar was in areas with relatively good sun, expensive grid power, and perhaps some extra tax/etc subsidies. Same idea for wind (or any infrastructure or real estate investment, really). 4) Attractive project margins encouraged lots of developers to enter the market, which increased competition and resulted in innovation in business models and processes. 5) Manufacturers scaled up further to satisfy increased demand, resulting in lower hardware costs. 6) Larger investors started angling for a slice of the action. VCs were looking for unicorns, MBA students were looking for jobs. Bankers wanted to make loans and do IPO/M+A work. Big renewable projects/portfolios of >$100M are pretty much the minimum interesting size deal for big project financiers, small deals don't move the needle for them. In fact, if you can put $1B+ to work in a responsible manner, that's even better. Banks are risk averse and renewables were a new/unproven (and thus risky) asset class, and in the early days it was hard to get any sort of financing, at any rate. As more projects demonstrated good ROI, more banks did the work to understand the (hardware/warranty/operational/etc) risks and became willing to lend in this sector. The IRS issued clear guidance on some tax issues which further reduced uncertainty (=risk) for would-be investors. As more financiers entered the market, they competed for deals and the cost of capital for high-quality developers/borrowers fell by several %. 7) Over time, the subsidy programs faded away, but (as intended) during that time hardware costs fell considerably. As developers got more experience, they also got better at reducing ancillary costs (sales, development, legal, etc).

And so it goes, a nice virtuous cycle of competition, some subsidies to help a nascent industry, decent deal economics for investors and early adopters, and manufacturing scale-up.

mike_n··on Facebook isn’t happy about Apple’s upcoming ad tracking restrictions
I'm sure they have plenty of other data points to help them get a pretty good idea of who the phone belongs to
mike_n··on Coding and drawing
perhaps OP has aphantasia? Seems fairly common among engineers (and even some artists) -- https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2019/apr/...
mike_n··on New Google default wipes users' location, web history after 18 months
I'm sure the data is still there on a server somewhere for legal/marketing reasons, but now the show_history_to_user field is just set to FALSE.
mike_n··on Whale fall
One reads stories of pork/etc carcasses that aren't being processed right now, perhaps we could ship those onto barges and into the ocean and dump them overboard to seed new pockets of offshore life on the sea floor.
mike_n··on Tesla’s Fremont factory forced to shut down under shelter-in-place order
Perhaps they can retool and crank out ventilator/etc parts
mike_n··on AI can detect coronavirus from CT scans in twenty seconds
Do human doctors have a better rate? And at what cost/throughput?
mike_n··on Pornhub's Premium Content Is Free All Month to Italians Stuck in Lockdown
And with the other hand... unzips
mike_n··on Amazon battles counterfeit masks, $400 hand sanitizer amid virus panic
Perhaps Amazon should manufacture masks/sanitizer/etc via its house brand, and churn them out by the billion.
mike_n··on Bill Atkinson: Reflections on the 40th anniversary of my joining Apple
I'd wager a large percentage have ;)

it can be mind-bending for sure, it's hard to describe. You might have profound ideas, or not, it's hard to predict; and not all of these will seem so profound when sober the next day. It does seem to increase one's senses of curiosity and wonder and open-mindedness. You might also get new focus/energy/direction/ideas about your passions and life trajectory generally. art/music/nature are enhanced as well.

it almost certainly won't make you an overnight savant (speaking a new language, factoring 4096-bit numbers in your head). but if you're already good at something (musical instrument, painting, engineering/programming, etc) and you are able to spend a bit of your trip thinking hard about a problem you are trying to solve in that domain, you might indeed have some new perspective on the matter. Visualizing abstract CS/math-y things (data structures, networks, algorithms, linear algebra, etc) is great fun. Good luck!

Smile, relax, and remember that you are great.

mike_n··on Ask HN: I lost my ability to focus for hours on coding. How to regain?
Hang in there, you'll figure it out.
mike_n··on An open letter to FB, Twitter, Instagram regarding algorithms and my son's birth
from a marketer's perspective, it's one of the most lucrative life events, along with weddings and buying a house and falling ill -- huge amounts of money being spent on goods and services and new behaviors.
mike_n··on Understanding Science: An overview
I don't know, I think I have a pretty good natural instinct for science...
mike_n··on The Board Game of the Alpha Nerds (2014)
https://www.playdiplomacy.com/
mike_n··on Naming the Unspoken Thing:Inside the Bay Area’s crazy secret underground parties
Having been to Burning Man and various parties/raves/festivals of all sorts, AND several of the aforementioned 'Clambakes' in the article, these are different than usual. Some overlap, not necessarily better or worse, but definitely a distinct niche. It seems like more of an event for all the weird kids from HS drama/art/AV clubs, big emphasis on theatrics and assuming roles. A sort of fuck-you humor, not for gentle souls. Good times.
mike_n··on Interview with Dr Erika Camacho on the Hartman-Grobman theorem [audio]
Imagine you're looking at a ball rolling around on a complicated curved surface defined by differential (non-linear) equations, which can be a tricky system to analyze.

If the ball is near some sort of a saddle equilibrium point, the theorem says that you can simplify things by flattening out a small patch of the surface if you are (very) near that point.

This is a lot easier to analyze using simple linear algebra tools, and still gives good results for predicting what happens next.

mike_n··on Job Ads You Can’t See on Facebook If You’re Older (2017)
instead of (perhaps illegally) recruiting for people of a certain age group, why not just search for people who liked (for example) Fortnite or Harry Potter or similar categories?

Sure, you might get a few false positives (showing your ad to a few older people) or false negatives (missing some of the target group), but it probably works just fine and isn't technically age-oriented. The company could just say that it likes people who are into hobbies (eg - reading fantasy novels or mobile games).

mike_n··on Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction
as if we don't have our own Wag-the-Dog-ish distractions also?
mike_n··on Australian regulator investigates Google data harvesting from Android phones
Is it not assumed/expected that if you're using android then google has access to all your phone's data/sensors?
mike_n··on MoviePass no longer lets you see the same movie more than once
also, you are the product, of course -- https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/05/moviepass-ceo-proudly-says...

kinda crappy business model... but kudos to them for being transparent about it, i guess?

also, there really hasn't been more than 1 good new movie per month on average lately. mostly it's just kids movies and superhero stuff. i'd say i'm breaking even on it.

mike_n··on Facebook is storing an updated copy of your phone Contacts, nicknames included
And probably your calendar events and who they're with and any associated info, etc... including any confidential corporate/health/other info

oh, and so does any other app that has calendar permissions (uber, etc)

mike_n··on Deep Quaternion Networks (2017) [pdf]
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c3b3/9a378e6f805d6cae5b05f5...
mike_n··on Deep Quaternion Networks (2017) [pdf]
perhaps, but i would think that if you threw another tool (a different way to relate some inputs) at a neural net, it might figure out some way to exploit it, even if it's not clear to you or me. just like a RL agent sometimes finds + exploits bugs in the environment.
mike_n··on Deep Quaternion Networks (2017) [pdf]
if quaternions, why not octonions?
mike_n··on Agones: Open-source, multiplayer, dedicated game-server hosting on Kubernetes
is this a way for google to get a lot of data? for example, more info about players, their preferences, etc.

Also, maybe they can get a large training set of how human players act/spend/etc in complex games, which could be a very useful training data set for their own reinforcement learning/AI efforts?

Page 1 of 2Next →