Hacker News Reader

netvarunon Building a Content-Based Search Engine II: Extracting Feature Vectors

Facebook's FAISS might be of interest to you: https://code.facebook.com/posts/1373769912645926/faiss-a-lib...

netvarunon Ask HN: Notable Black Friday/Cyber Monday 2017 Deals

We built a dashboard in partnership with Slickdeals on this! https://holidaysales.live/

netvarunon Ask HN: What are some interesting papers in CS for a beginner?

A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks by Edgar F. Codd [Turing Award Winner]

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.98....

This is the seminal paper that laid the foundation for RDBMS systems.

At my university (NUS) the CS program had a research paper reading program, where sophomores were tasked to read and summarize a well known paper and this was one of the most popular.

netvarunon A Decade of Dynamo

Direct link to the Dynamo Whitepaper PDF: http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/files/amazon-dynamo-sosp...

netvarunon Coding the History of Deep Learning

IMHO the ImageNet 2012 competition and the winning solution AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.) was the pivotal moment in which (deep) neural nets went from a field only a few wizened academics cared about to becoming today's buzz word.

It did 3 things:

1. Provided a usable solution for what was previously an intractable real world problem, large multiclass image classification, with decent accuracy

2. Crushed the prior benchmark on this task

3. Found a practical workaround to what was the biggest bottleneck, computation time, by utilizing GPUs (and made Nvidia stock explode /s)

The subsequent ImageNet competitions then later provided the perfect catalyst to refining and making deep neural nets mainstream. In parallel the sudden interest from everyone else who in turn started applying neural nets to pretty much every domain out there under the sun, was what I think ultimately made deep learning as it is to what it's today.

netvarunon Coding the History of Deep Learning

I'd also recommend Andrey Kurenkov's well written multi-part series on the history of neural nets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10910887

[The author of the paper mentioned on parent comment is Jürgen Schmidhuber - inventor of LSTMs and a very colorful character in neural land. The NYTimes did a nice profile on him a while back: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/27/technology/artificial-int... HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13066646]

netvarunon Building a Blockchain in Go (Part 1)

All 6 parts have already been written/published - https://jeiwan.cc/

netvarunon The invisible harp. A 3D camera and Python hack

Here is the direct link: http://bharathpatil.com/?p=492

netvarunon How to Read a Schematic

One trick I learned at university while analyzing a circuit is to identify the various 'design patterns' in it - just like software engineering, circuit design also features a lot of recurring common patterns.

Here is a fantastic post on it: http://www.arachnidlabs.com/blog/2013/10/17/electronics-patt...

netvarunon Row over AI that 'identifies gay faces'

There was an interesting comment by hn user aub3bhat a while back about the political pitfalls of facial recognition tech:

"But face recognition is a sensitive/politically-charged topic, I know several grad students (including me) who inspite of having ready-to-deploy scalable software and datasets (~10M instagram images) stay away from doing this type of a demo because reputational risks are enormous. Consider the controversy around geofeedia etc. The last thing you want as a PhD student is press interpreting your research incorrectly and blaming you for causing widespread harm. It happened to a student/professor in my department and even then the infamous study in question was in collaboration with the social network."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14580985

netvarunon Ask HN: Please critique my personal digital security strategy

Just a word of caution on google Authenticator - the iOS version didn't seem to be maintained and it didn't have any sort of export or backup feature. I lost all my codes due to a factory reset of my phone. I've ever since (dec 2016) switched to using Authy for my codes.

netvarunon Bitcoin lecture series (2015)

I found this to be useful in understanding some of the low level details of the bitcoin implementation circa 2015 - http://davidederosa.com/basic-blockchain-programming/

netvarunon Continued G4 (Severe) Geomagnetic Storming Observed

Sf has one of them - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_Bay_Cable

On a related note, there was a fascinating article on sf's dc grids by Spectrum https://www.google.com/amp/spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/da... (pardon the amp link)

My office building taps into it to power the old school loading elevator!

netvarunon Show HN: eth-private-net – Tooling to run a private Ethereum network locally

Here is a similarly great post if you'd like to get your feet wet on running the bitcoin network locally (via regtest mode):

https://witestlab.poly.edu/blog/get-rich-on-fake-bitcoins/

netvarunon Monopoly Without a Monopolist: An Economic Analysis of the Bitcoin System [pdf]

On a related note there was a paper presentation on the economics analysis of the blockchain from the Toulouse School of Economics a few months back.

[1] Presentation http://econ.sciences-po.fr/sites/default/files/file/melissa/...

[2] Presentation https://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/TSE/documents/doc/...

netvarunon Show HN: eth-private-net – Tooling to run a private Ethereum network locally

By OCM you mean a one-click miner?

netvarunon Show HN: Idea Generator That Uses YC as Data

http://ycremix.com/js/define_data.js

netvarunon Show HN: RESTful Doom – HTTP+JSON API inside Doom

Since this has 'native' integration it could be a great testbed for learning/applying reinforcement learning algorithms in a fun setting without having to deal with the 'heavier' (but more comprehensive) vnc based tooklits such as openai universe.

Awesome work, btw!

netvarunon How Shor's Algorithm works (2007)

After Shor's algorithm a good follow up would be to learn about Grover's Algorithm[1]

Here is a fantastic explanation of it: http://twistedoakstudios.com/blog/Post2644_grovers-quantum-s... [More technically involved explanation]

Interesting factoid: Scott Aaronson[2] interned with Lov Grover[3] at Bell Labs as a teenager!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover%27s_algorithm

[2] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/scott-aaron... [This is a great interview, btw!]

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lov_Grover

netvarunon Ways a VC says no without saying no

"Let me circle back."

netvarunon Gpu.js – GPU Accelerated JavaScript

Next steps: A computational graph based deep learning system with a Tensorflow like API on Javascript/Node lala-land.

https://github.com/tqchen/tinyflow would be a great showcase (and useful) project to port for Gpu.js

netvarunon Gpu.js – GPU Accelerated JavaScript

That's my alma mater! ;)

netvarunon Ask HN: What API do you wish you had while building your product?

Shoot. My apologies about any confusion on the sign up process. I have reached out to you on email.

netvarunon Show HN: 15-question language identification quiz

Can concur. I managed to get all correct, but that one question that almost tripped me was the PHP question.

As an ex-perl dev, (looks at self) shrugs in disbelief!

netvarunon Show HN: Proof Companion – Geometry proof practice for students

It'll be great if all the theorems from this are loaded in for practice ;) - https://www.mccme.ru/~akopyan/papers/EnGeoFigures.pdf

netvarunon Dutch app gives elderly pedestrians extra crossing time at traffic lights

Singaporean here. Wow, I've never seen nor heard about this before! Thanks for sharing. Did some digging in on our local newspaper: http://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/more-locations-for-sch...

Looks like the proof of concept was started way back in 2009!

netvarunon Ask HN: What API do you wish you had while building your product?

My startup Semantics3 works on this problem - https://semantics3.com/

We have a standardized taxonomy and ontology to which we map all our products to. It's a garbage in garbage out problem but as long as the product has the information in some sort of semi-structured or unstructured form, we typically can infer attributes and standardize them based on their ontology (i.e. They have 4 USB ports)

netvarunon Ask HN: Train neural network for cheap

You can try [1]FloydHub (more akin to Heroku) or [2] Paperspace (more akin to Digital Ocean)

[1] https://www.floydhub.com/

[2] https://paperspace.com/

netvarunon Galois Theory for Beginners (2010) [pdf]

This document was also mentioned yesterday on the 'Why is the quintic unsolvable?'[1] post. The post also has some additional interesting references in the comments. Worth checking out!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14685466

netvarunon Spending three days as a hunter-gatherer to see if it would improve gut health

Of late I have been enthralled by this show called 'Life Below Zero' (It's on Netflix and I really recommend watching it) - it's a reality TV show which profiles folks living in the Alaskan Bush. It primarily revolves around 4-5 different folks who live in various extreme remote parts of Alaska.

Reading this article, it really reminded me of one of the lead characters, Glenn Villeneuve (http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/life-below-zero/articl...), who lives a very spartan and primitive (by his own choosing) hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the Brooks Range (Chandalar, AK). He hunts for all his food and just boils them mostly (and often times eats them raw). He doesn't not use seasoning at all. I am guessing his gut microbes must be pretty robust and diverse.

Main difference between Hadza and his place is that food sources are very spread out and thin in Chandalar. Most of the show is just following him trying to find his food.

[OT: I generally dislike watching reality TV shows (and also TV in general). But this show has made me change my opinion on reality TV. Or it could just be because Alaska has a special place in my heart :)]