HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

willwhitney

1,119 karma · joined April 12, 2011

ML researcher.
submissionscomments
willwhitney··on Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?
Would it be bad if we made advertising... illegal? In small part because it would reduce the principal-agent disparity between what you want to do and what Google wants you to do, but more importantly because it would remove the incentive to create blogspam and game the results.

Advertising serves a positive purpose by informing people about products that they will like and otherwise would not find. It also serves a negative purpose by attempting to cause people to make decisions which are not in their best interests.

I am genuinely curious what proportion of ads seen serve each of those two purposes.

willwhitney··on America's True Unemployment Rate
That dip is more than 4M people, so I think it's still unexplained. Perhaps due to a shift in response rates or another artifact of COVID churn in the survey methodology?
willwhitney··on Ask HN: Favorite note-taking software?
You can actually drag and drop multiple notes into a tag, no find and replace necessary. Minor point though.
willwhitney··on Show HN: Unlimited UI design
They have a grammatical error ("deliciously looking") in their (2) step.
willwhitney··on Beating the World’s Best at Super Smash Bros. with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Handling delays (and the uncertainty they entail) is a huge challenge, and I think it'll be a rich area of research. The simplest part of the problem is that delays in action or perception also slow the propagation of reward signals, and credit assignment is still a really hard problem.

Thinking further afield, future models could learn to adapt their expectations to fit the behavior of a particular opponent. This kind of metalearning is pretty much a wide open problem, though a pair of (roughly equivalent) papers in this direction recently came out from DeepMind: https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.05763 and OpenAI: https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.02779 It's going to be really exciting to see how these techniques scale.

willwhitney··on Beating the World’s Best at Super Smash Bros. with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Yup, it's definitely an advantage to get all the correct values from the game state. But not as much as you might think; the vision portion of a DQN or similar trains quite quickly.

Plus, our bot doesn't have any clue about projectiles. We don't know where they live in memory, so the network doesn't get to know about them at all.

willwhitney··on Sunrise is shutting down
Once a startup gets bought, I look for alternatives.

If they don't shut down, I still learned something new! But usually they do.

In this case, I landed on Fantastical [1] — it's a little pricy but completely worth it. (Mac/iOS only.)

[1]: https://flexibits.com/fantastical

willwhitney··on Himawari.js: Download real-time images of Earth from the Himawari-8 satellite
I independently wrote a version of this for OS X: https://github.com/willwhitney/live-earth-desktop
willwhitney··on Ask HN: What do you do if someone is already building what you wanted to build?
Help.
willwhitney··on Show HN: Hydrogen Brings Light Table to Atom
I'd love to do live variable inspection (like the Chrome Dev Tools) — it's something I'm thinking about for the future.

There's a (nascent) project called `jmp` (for Jupyter Messaging Protocol) that implements kernel communication in JS: https://github.com/n-riesco/jmp. I'll probably contribute to that and factor out my kernel communication.

willwhitney··on Show HN: Hydrogen Brings Light Table to Atom
:D

I mean, if you're offering...

willwhitney··on Show HN: Hydrogen Brings Light Table to Atom
Right now it only works with local kernels, but that's on the to do list for sure.
willwhitney··on Show HN: Hydrogen Brings Light Table to Atom
The development experience for statically typed languages is often _amazing_ compared to that of dynamically typed ones; we sometimes choose dynamically typed ones anyway because of the flexibility and speed of development they give. I'd be very happy with an environment that provided dynamically typed languages the same analysis, checking, completion, etc that statically typed languages take for granted.
willwhitney··on Show HN: Hydrogen Brings Light Table to Atom
I haven't tried the Ruby kernel - let me know how it works, and post an issue if anything breaks!
willwhitney··on Show HN: Hydrogen Brings Light Table to Atom
Thanks Bill!

Atom has been improving really fast - it's my editor of choice now.

willwhitney··on Show HN: Hydrogen Brings Light Table to Atom
I'm looking forward to that Elixir kernel!
willwhitney··on Show HN: Hydrogen Brings Light Table to Atom
Jupyter provides a spec for a ZeroMQ-based messaging API, which kernels in each language have implemented. Hydrogen acts as a client to those kernels the same way that the Jupyter frontend does, sending execution requests to the kernel and displaying responses.

I'd love to see live test results in Atom too! It would make it so much easier to be confident in your code's correctness.

willwhitney··on Show HN: Hydrogen Brings Light Table to Atom
I like to break my code up into little functions that are easy to test, so that flow works well for me.

Even more powerful, though, is autocomplete from the running environment. It means that (just like in the Chrome Dev Tools) when you start typing something, the autocomplete suggestions include all of the valid names that are defined. It really helps in navigating complex APIs like Torch: https://www.dropbox.com/s/e6hriw5quwct65a/Screenshot%202015-...

willwhitney··on Show HN: Hydrogen Brings Light Table to Atom
Thanks for the support!

I've been thinking a lot about what makes for a good development experience, and how to properly "factorize" an IDE to provide a consistent experience across different languages. The monolithic IDE experience can be great (once you get it set up) if all your work is in a single language. But for people like me, having a confusingly different development environment for each project is a nightmare.

This is a tiny step toward the dream of having a consistent core editor but with powerful tools for each language that allow introspection into the state of the running machine.

willwhitney··on Show HN: Hydrogen Brings Light Table to Atom
Most of the credit goes to the Jupyter team and the people who have implemented the kernels for various languages. The Jupyter API spec is what has made this possible. I'm really looking forward to what can be done next (hint: https://github.com/jupyter/notebook/issues/99)
willwhitney··on Show HN: Hydrogen Brings Light Table to Atom
I'm actively using it with Julia and Torch. It should work with any Jupyter kernel (and there are lots: https://github.com/ipython/ipython/wiki/IPython-kernels-for-...).

In practice, different kernels have various oddities or holes in their implementation of the spec. I'm accommodating them when I can and posting issues when I can't. Let me know if you find a kernel that doesn't work!

willwhitney··on Show HN: Hydrogen Brings Light Table to Atom
Shit, really?

<Googles>

Huh. I just banged this out in ten minutes when I needed an icon for autocomplete. I'll change it.

willwhitney··on Coming Soon to Hacker News: Pending Comments
Is the lock on new comments not per-thread?
willwhitney··on Android development fragmentation
Good question — the Android tools in Eclipse can export an Android Studio project.
willwhitney··on Android is for startups
Pocket Casts actually wrote a great blog post about this: http://blog.shiftyjelly.com/2013/02/20/why-android-first/

Because some niches are really poorly covered on Android, apps that fill those may have greater success than they would on iOS.

willwhitney··on Show HN: Mobile feedback your users will love
Great to know — thanks for the info. We got a sharp rise in feedback when we were using this in our app, but like you say, it's probably to some extent dependent on the particular app.
willwhitney··on Show HN: Mobile feedback your users will love
We only upload files that are at least two seconds long to prevent exactly this problem.
willwhitney··on Show HN: Mobile feedback your users will love
We're also working on offering transcription, so the devs can pick whether they want audio or text.
willwhitney··on Show HN: Mobile feedback your users will love
From our pseudo-scientific testing, we got ~5x voice feedback over email feedback. We're still early in the process, so we don't have any rock-solid numbers.

One advantage we found from spoken feedback is that on mobile, people tend to be unwilling to type out a very detailed report, whereas that same level of detail is pretty fast to say.

And yeah — you can definitely tell how happy (or unhappy) they are with the product :)

willwhitney··on Show HN: Audobox – Android Voice Recorder
I just pushed a version with moment deletion to the Play store. Should be live in a couple of hours.
Page 1 of 2Next →