Hacker News: aglionby

New comment by aglionby in "Tell HN: Airbnb just stole me 5 minutes of my time adding dices"

aglionby — Mon, 21 Feb 2022 10:34:13 +0000

I don't know - with some edge detection I think you could distinguish between the faces of each die, and some heuristics would probably get you the upwards-facing one. Another thing that may be useful is that in each image the only face that is fully visible for all dice is the upward one (who knows if that is just for this example though).

New comment by aglionby in "BibTeX Tidy"

aglionby — Thu, 25 Nov 2021 12:23:38 +0000

This is great! Especially nice to be able to remove entire fields.

Relatedly, here are a couple of tools to ensure that references are complete (e.g. updating arXiv papers to their published versions, mostly for computer science papers):

- https://github.com/yuchenlin/rebiber (CLI, web interface)

- https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~ga384/bibfix.html (only *ACL papers, web interface with diff, disclaimer: mine)

New comment by aglionby in "Emoji Under the Hood"

aglionby — Fri, 26 Mar 2021 10:40:43 +0000

Great post, entertainingly written.

Back in 2015, Instagram did a blog post on similar challenges they came across implementing emoji hashtags [1]. Spoiler alert: they programmatically constructed a huge regex to detect them.

[1] https://instagram-engineering.com/emojineering-part-ii-imple...

New comment by aglionby in "Amazon buys 11 Boeing 767s to expand its cargo fleet"

aglionby — Tue, 05 Jan 2021 23:19:57 +0000

I'm guessing they won't come unless you chase it. Nothing happened to my refund for May flights until I called, after which the money came within a week.

New comment by aglionby in "Chess’s Cheating Crisis"

aglionby — Mon, 19 Oct 2020 14:08:55 +0000

It isn't fair (in the statistical sense) to make a comparison on the basis of rank between an over- and under-represented group. Interesting read here https://en.chessbase.com/post/what-gender-gap-in-chess

No = More Time

aglionby — Wed, 26 Aug 2020 15:11:04 +0000

Article URL: https://no-moretime.net/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24283148

Points: 26

# Comments: 7

New comment by aglionby in "The growing short case on Facebook and Google"

aglionby — Sun, 12 Jul 2020 23:38:41 +0000

2002 was the year of the Nokia 7650, their first phone with a camera - 0.3MP which it displayed on its 176x208 screen. It cost €740 in 2020 money (€550 back then).

In 2020 you can buy a second generation iPhone SE for €489, with a 1334x750 screen (at >6x pixel density) and 12MP camera.

These are not roughly equivalent pieces of hardware, and the software they run differs immensely. MMS is not Instagram.

New comment by aglionby in "Pinboard Turns Eleven"

aglionby — Fri, 10 Jul 2020 15:12:36 +0000

> system where I actually refer back to things because I seem to google for the same things over and over again

Yep, this often frustratingly turns nothing up for me. Hence, Pinboard :)

New comment by aglionby in "Pinboard Turns Eleven"

aglionby — Fri, 10 Jul 2020 11:36:50 +0000

I have two use cases. The first is to keep track of interesting articles I find and plausibly want to refer back to in the future. A 3rd party browser extension and mobile app make saving very easy, and then I tag each item with a high-level category. This is also pretty painless, and brings a lot of value (otherwise you just have an unsorted collection of links - not helpful). An example is my 'long reads' tag https://pinboard.in/u:guyaglionby/t:long-read/. The 'unread' feature is also useful here - I've got >10 long reads banked for when I'm looking for things to do.

The second is as a kind of mechanism to give myself permission to close a bunch of tabs every time they accumulate. Each is _obviously_ open for a good reason and I may want to read it at some point, so sticking it on pinboard is a nice way of shoving them elsewhere. I don't save everything - curation is important (in the same way as with tagging). Lots of what remains are things that may be useful for me in the future but are not immediately, like design guides https://pinboard.in/u:guyaglionby/t:design/. Some of these things I leave as 'unread'; others that feel more like reference material I mark as 'read' immediately so as not to have them in my to-read queue.

New comment by aglionby in "The Bitter Lesson (2019)"

aglionby — Thu, 09 Jul 2020 18:23:46 +0000

My background is in NLP - I suspect we'll see similar in language processing models as we've seen in vision models. Consider this[1] article ("NLP's ImageNet moment has arrived"), comparing AlexNet in 2012 to the first GPT model 6 years later: we're just a few years behind.

True, GPT-2 and -3, RoBERTa, T5 etc. are all increasingly data- and compute-hungry. That's the 'tick' your second article mentions.

We simultaneously have people doing research in the 'tock' - reducing the compute needed. ICLR 2020 was full of alternative training schema that required less compute for similar performance (e.g. ELECTRA[2]). Model distillation is another interesting idea that reduces the amount of inference-time compute needed.

[1] https://thegradient.pub/nlp-imagenet/

[2] https://openreview.net/pdf?id=r1xMH1BtvB

New comment by aglionby in "The Sci-Hub Effect: Sci-Hub downloads lead to more article citations"

aglionby — Thu, 02 Jul 2020 16:48:23 +0000

There's some similar work out that analyses the impact on conference paper acceptance of having deanonymised arXiv versions of papers available before review. They look at ICLR papers for the last 2 years.

I've not read it in a lot of detail but it looks like there's a positive correlation between releasing papers and having them accepted. Not sure how they've controlled for confounders (you only release papers you're confident in the quality of on arXiv?) https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.00177.pdf

New comment by aglionby in "Elevator.js – A “back to top” button that behaves like a real elevator"

aglionby — Wed, 24 Jun 2020 11:13:17 +0000

Home and end are most useful for me when I'm writing or programming, so both of my hands are on the keyboard anyway. I think I actually find these key combos more useful than a dedicated home or end button, as I'd have to move my hands a lot further for those.

New comment by aglionby in "Restaurants rebel against delivery apps as cities crack down on fees"

aglionby — Tue, 26 May 2020 09:55:36 +0000

Dominos in the UK has similar incentives but put in place less rigidly - any medium/large pizza will run you £18-£20, but there are loads of 40%-50% discount above £x (x >= 35) or 2-4-1 deals. This makes it more difficult to justify a solo order (unless you get 2 pizzas, which, fair enough) and incentivises ordering with friends or not at all.

New comment by aglionby in "Why Common Sense Is Not So Common in NLP"

aglionby — Mon, 04 May 2020 15:41:46 +0000

This problem of inferring something's truthfulness based on the number of times it's written down is nicely explored in the paper "Reporting Bias and Knowledge Acquisition".

https://openreview.net/pdf?id=AzxEzvpdE3Wcy

New comment by aglionby in "Facebook agreed to censor posts after Vietnam slowed traffic – sources"

aglionby — Wed, 22 Apr 2020 15:25:40 +0000

> It's an amazing channel for businesses to reach their customers.

Do you have any insight on how consumers find this? I can imagine it's nice to hear (rarely) from a few places that you care about, but taken too far I think I'd find the mixing of messages from friends and companies pretty annoying.

New comment by aglionby in "Shirt Without Stripes"

aglionby — Mon, 20 Apr 2020 17:12:55 +0000

Depends on your audience, but I imagine many find the answer boxes on Google search pretty useful. Getting the population of a city without having to click any links is probably good for your perceived value. For this you need some NLP tech to extract intent from the query and match it to the right entity in their knowledge graph (in addition to something to help you build the graph in the first place).

Google have a blog post from October last year with some more complex examples of where more sophisticated NLP helps https://www.blog.google/products/search/search-language-unde...

New comment by aglionby in "Ask HN: What's an unsolved problem in your field?"

aglionby — Fri, 17 Apr 2020 15:43:04 +0000

Relatedly, I'm curious about different ways that CS education can be framed. Speaking to teachers, one of the main reasons why many kids (and, crucially, parents) aren't interested in CS is the misconception that you can't be creative with programming. When kids find out that this is not the case, engagement rises. (There's also the point that CS seems to invariably be folded into programming, but I'm not sure this is the biggest problem.)

I wonder what the impact on uptake would be if the focus was shifted towards CS as a venue for building things and being creative and away from lines of monowidth code and indecipherable errors. More to the point, I wonder how this might be done.

New comment by aglionby in "YouTube accidentally permanently terminated my account"

aglionby — Sun, 12 Apr 2020 20:49:52 +0000

Isn't taking this as an absolutist view kind of myopic? Sure, people don't pay anything to watch and each person's eyeballs aren't worth that much. But pretty much the entire value of the service is locked up in the crowd of these people, led by the minority who actually create things. Annoy enough of the creators (or lose the trust of those who see what happens to their peers) and they'll start to leave, taking your advert-viewing crowd with them. The network effect makes this really difficult and slow to begin with, but we're already seeing attempts by people like Wendover Productions with things like Nebula and CuriosityStream. I'm curious to see how this plays out over the next few years (and if it's similar to anything that's happened historically?).

New comment by aglionby in "Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it?"

aglionby — Tue, 07 Apr 2020 11:16:16 +0000

I guess it depends on what you're writing about: tech might benefit more from a date than philosophy. I'm sure he's written multiple times about this, but patio11 has a thread you might be referring to here https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1234141833661440001 .

New comment by aglionby in "Rough.js – Create graphics with a hand-drawn, sketchy, appearance"

aglionby — Sun, 05 Apr 2020 20:24:17 +0000

Good example of where this has been used https://www.jwilber.me/permutationtest/