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tree_of_item

2,524 karma · joined October 30, 2009

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tree_of_item··on Doctors warn of alarming C-section 'epidemic'
The fact that it is a hole is relevant to this discussion. The physics and safety of a large object passing through a relatively small hole are the entire thing in question.
tree_of_item··on Cellular automata as convolutional neural networks
Turing completeness is often too coarse-grained of a view to be meaningful. The interesting thing here is that convolutional nets and cellular automata perform a similar kind of spatially partitioned computation, so connections between the two may be enlightening.
tree_of_item··on Spice is throwing up problems not seen with other drugs
Cannabis is a relevant comparison because the only reason people are using this stuff is due to cannabis prohibition. Are you really not getting this part? Cannabis being illegal is a large part of why they are making spice in the first place.

You are correct that the effects are much more dangerous than those of cannabis; that's why so many people in this thread are saying cannabis prohibition as had a negative effect in this particular way.

tree_of_item··on Spice is throwing up problems not seen with other drugs
> Okay, why there are using cannabis as an example and not other substances that react with those receptors, like chocolate?

Because these substances are obviously and explicitly marketed as substitutes for cannabis. Cannabis is the relevant comparison. There's no agenda, just reality. You're being very dramatic calling this a "disgrace" when it's really very mundane.

tree_of_item··on Ask HN: Is anyone working on ML based code/program generation?
Yes, you will want to research "program induction" and "program synthesis". For a review of recent work in both, see https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.02353

For program synthesis applied to the "Atari" deep learning benchmark check out https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.05695

tree_of_item··on The Little Typer
They're very difficult to use and they make code more complicated.
tree_of_item··on WwwBasic – An implementation of BASIC designed to be easy to run on the Web
It's completely nostalgia. BASIC doesn't have any redeeming features except being in the right place at the right time.
tree_of_item··on You can’t “turn off the borrow checker” in Rust
I don't see what there is about C that forces things to crash early. It's more like the difference between full of bugs that no one sees (C), and get the problem with your approach highlighted by the type system (Rust).
tree_of_item··on Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality
How would we get accurate information on the number of lives Tesla's "autopilot" has saved?
tree_of_item··on Misskey, a decentralized microblogging platform with ActivityPub support
Is this just a fork of Mastodon?
tree_of_item··on A Constructive Look at TempleOS (2015)
No, because his behavior really is over the top and is going to draw attention every single time.
tree_of_item··on Can Beethoven send takedown requests?
> capital-L Librarians

I didn't know they had a stake in this.

tree_of_item··on Q3VM – Lightweight, embeddable Quake III Interpreter/Virtual Machine
WebAssembly is a better choice today. This thing is interpreting C, so just embed wasm instead so people can use stuff like Rust too.
tree_of_item··on Go 2 Draft Designs
What a strawman. Adding a basic PL feature means we're gonna rewrite the STL? Come on.
tree_of_item··on JupyterCon: I don't like Notebooks [slides]
The problem here is not notebooks, it's Python. Notebooks don't have tons of hidden state, Python does. Fix the language and notebooks are incredible.
tree_of_item··on Elm 0.19 Broke Us
Go's approach? Go has the same extreme BDFL approach to ignoring community feedback in favor of the leader's vision. I don't see what is different about Go.
tree_of_item··on Go 1.11 and Beyond
"Solved" by having lots of meaningless unsafe glue code. That's not a solution.

It sounds like you're going to reject proposals for generics on the grounds that "you could just cast values of type `interface{}`" unless someone can show you a situation where you can't do that. The problem is that the people who want this sort of feature don't think that's even a solution.

tree_of_item··on The Future of Notebooks: Lessons from JupyterCon
Are you kidding? The shell is a massively important part of modern computers, and making it more expressive would be a huge win. You might be familiar with TermKit[0] which also tried this.

[0]: https://github.com/unconed/TermKit

tree_of_item··on OpenAI Five at Dota 2 – The International [video]
Why doesn't it come up with strategies? The program is doing a massive search over an action space, of course it will find things there.
tree_of_item··on OpenAI Five at Dota 2 – The International [video]
Is that supposed to remove the amusement and irony? "We're creating friendly AI! Well, it thinks it's friendly, since to it, everything is just a numerical reward signal."
tree_of_item··on The Commons Clause is an existential threat to open source
Money is a part of the health of the ecosystem.
tree_of_item··on More Americans report near-constant cannabis use
No, I don't think TV, video games and the Web really count as sitting "still". They don't fulfill the spirit of that quote. "Sitting still" in this context is about being contemplative, not being distracted by a glowing box.
tree_of_item··on Safety-first AI for autonomous data centre cooling and industrial control
You were downvoted but I think you're right. Netflix's Chaos Monkey is a similar idea: https://github.com/Netflix/SimianArmy/wiki/Chaos-Monkey
tree_of_item··on Markov Chains Explained Visually (2014)
I'm not sure how Dyer's thing works, but I can describe the paper I linked to:

A "stack" is a stack of (vector, scalar) pairs (a vector and its "weight"). At each time step, the stack has three inputs: the vector to push, the weight to push it with, and the weight to pop off the stack. Its output is the top 1.0 weight of the stack. The stack's behavior on a time step is divided in to three parts:

1. First, that pop weight is removed from the stack. For example, if you want to remove 0.6 from a stack like [(a, 0.4), (b, 0.4)], you'd remove all of a leaving you with 0.2 to remove from b, so the final stack would be [(b, 0.2)].

2. The pushed vector is placed on the stack with the given push weight.

3. The top 1.0 of the stack is blended together and returned. For example, a stack like [(a, 0.4), (b, 0.4), (c, 0.8)] would take 0.4 of a, 0.4 of b, and 0.2 of c.

This process is differentiable, and you can combine this with the usual recurrent loops to make a recurrent stack machine.

tree_of_item··on Markov Chains Explained Visually (2014)
See [0] for a way to make recurrent neural nets in to pushdown nets.

[0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02516

tree_of_item··on Markov Chains Explained Visually (2014)
Isn't this like an "auto-regressive feed forward neural net"[0]?

> Instead of making predictions from a state that depends on the entire history, an autoregressive model directly predicts yt using only the k most recent inputs, xt−k+1,…,xt. This corresponds to a strong conditional independence assumption. In particular, a feed-forward model assumes the target only depends on the k most recent inputs. Google’s WaveNet[1] nicely illustrates this general principle.

[0] http://bair.berkeley.edu/blog/2018/08/06/recurrent/

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.03499

tree_of_item··on TinyWM – A tiny window manager in around 50 lines of C
It's meaningful. X11 is a part of the structure of reality now, it's not going anywhere. Why can't you assume it?
tree_of_item··on Functional Bits: Lambda-calculus based algorithmic information theory [pdf]
That Arxiv link is fascinating, thanks for that.
tree_of_item··on Google AMP – A 70% drop in our conversion rate
Why do you think Google Wave was user-hostile?
tree_of_item··on Deep Learning and Free Software
Huh? I just showed you reinforcement learning from pixels on Atari with CPU...
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