New comment by drongoking in "2020 Pulitzer Prize Winners"

drongoking — Tue, 05 May 2020 07:15:50 +0000

That's an insanely broad brush. The mainstream press includes the NY Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, The Atlantic, and NPR. Please explain how they fabricate narratives, how they destroy the lives of those who accidentally enter their crosshairs, and how they retroactively alter their archives to change history.

I'd expect your summary dismissal of the mainstream media from a Trump supporter. I'm surprised to see it on HN. So please elaborate.

New comment by drongoking in "CEO of Banjo admitted to being a Neo-Nazi skinhead in his youth"

drongoking — Tue, 28 Apr 2020 15:44:55 +0000

"Direct connections to the KKK" ? Did you read the article or his statement? He was 17 and fell in with white supremacists after/during an abusive childhood. If you want to dispute this account, fine, let's hear it. If you want to claim Banjo is otherwise an evil company, OK, it may be, but that's a separate point. But claiming that this episode as reported constitutes a direct connection to the KKK, and implying it's ongoing, is off the mark.

New comment by drongoking in "Eloquent JavaScript 3rd Edition (2018)"

drongoking — Mon, 27 Apr 2020 00:15:01 +0000

Is this worth buying/borrowing if you already know programming languages but not Javascript? Or is there a better approach?

New comment by drongoking in "Mental Model Fallacy (2018)"

drongoking — Wed, 22 Apr 2020 21:30:37 +0000

Chemistry, biology, botany, and geology are dead?

New comment by drongoking in "Mental Model Fallacy (2018)"

drongoking — Wed, 22 Apr 2020 21:29:25 +0000

This whole article, and your agreement, rests on a false dichotomy. "Fallacy" implies learning about mental models is useless. No one said mental models replace experience any more than good notetaking can replace thought; but both are useful in thinking and learning.

New comment by drongoking in "Shirt Without Stripes"

drongoking — Tue, 21 Apr 2020 15:09:23 +0000

I don't agree. Paisley is a well-known pattern type and some people really dislike it. "Shirt without paisley" is not a common request but its meaning is clear (if you do an image search for paisley you get lots of fabric images, so it's not like search engines don't know it.) I'd say the same for "shirt without red buttons." In general the pattern

without shouldn't be that difficult for search engines---especially since many are tuned for consumers.

New comment by drongoking in "August Engelhardt"

drongoking — Fri, 10 Apr 2020 05:47:36 +0000

"He developed a philosophy that assumed that the sun was the venerable source of all life, and since the coconut was the fruit that grows nearest the sun, it must be the most perfect food for people."

That may sound comical, but I think the reasoning behind some modern diets (e.g. Paleo Diet) isn't too different.

New comment by drongoking in "Zotero: Personal Research Assistant"

drongoking — Thu, 26 Mar 2020 19:59:33 +0000

Mendeley and Zotero are both free, but both have storage limits beyond which you have to pay (Zotero is 300M, Mendeley is 2G). If you only store references and annotations you'll likely never exceed those limits, but if you use them as a paper archive you may. (I have a 3G archive)

New comment by drongoking in "Lets Use ML for Insights"

drongoking — Tue, 24 Mar 2020 03:47:36 +0000

Knowledge discovery used to be a big part of ML, and the KDD conference included papers on association rules, clustering, rule learning, interpretable classifiers, etc. In my experience, even with predictive analytics the knowledge discovered along the way was often as valuable as the final application --- although it's easier to sell a predictive capability than "we're going to find something interesting in your data."

New comment by drongoking in "AutoML-Zero: Evolving machine learning algorithms from scratch"

drongoking — Wed, 11 Mar 2020 06:21:09 +0000

My reaction too. They've reinvented genetic/evolutionary programming. They should probably read some of the decades of work that have already been done on it.

New comment by drongoking in "The Perils of Private Provision of Public Goods"

drongoking — Sat, 07 Mar 2020 21:08:25 +0000

The word is commonly misused. What they probably mean is sympathy, but that isn't really right either. The correct word would be compassion or altruism.

But /altruism/ is a word that sometimes sets people off.

New comment by drongoking in "CDC declined to test new coronavirus patient for days, California hospital says"

drongoking — Thu, 27 Feb 2020 20:23:34 +0000

As opposed to corporate bureaucracies? If you think the free market magically makes everything efficient and free of politics and bureaucracy, try spending some time in a big company.

Remember this folks when voting for people who advocate for privatizing or de-regulating industries.

New comment by drongoking in "Machine Learning, Kolmogorov Complexity, and Squishy Bunnies (2019)"

drongoking — Thu, 27 Feb 2020 06:16:45 +0000

There's an odd jump in this narrative. PCA is indeed a great technique, but the essay goes from PCA to neural nets without explaining why. PCA was around for a long time before NNs and there are fast incremental ways to do it. Why bother with a million-weight NN if PCA will do the job?

New comment by drongoking in "Google interviewing process for software developer role in 2020"

drongoking — Tue, 25 Feb 2020 04:19:59 +0000

At one point Microsoft would refuse to interview you unless you were their first and only choice. If you ever hinted you were considering other companies---interview over.

Probably all the 900-pound gorilla companies go through that period of extreme arrogance when everyone's knocking on their door. Until they're not.

New comment by drongoking in "Detecting manuscripts and publications from paper mills"

drongoking — Sat, 22 Feb 2020 01:51:43 +0000

I'm surprised it's taken this long. There is no peer review to arXiv. If you've ever reviewed for a conference or a journal (10-30% acceptance rates) you've seen the "raw feed" of submitted papers and you realize the average isn't very good. Many get rejected because they simply have a few flaws, but some are badly flawed (or just plain wrong) and shouldn't be published anywhere. ArXiv has no peer review so it's virtually the raw feed. I cringe whenever I see arXiv papers cited as if they were published work --- doing an end-run around peer review can't be good for science.

New comment by drongoking in "MIT 6.S191: Introduction to Deep Learning"

drongoking — Fri, 21 Feb 2020 01:08:32 +0000

Any idea on how this compares with the other deep learning intro courses available?

New comment by drongoking in "Show HN: A stream of AI-generated art"

drongoking — Mon, 17 Feb 2020 03:36:52 +0000

> I actually do appreciate many forms of art, but I feel that many artist (that I know) are just a mixture of regurgitators and expert salesmen. They make something random, then come up with a backstory that makes it somewhat interesting.

I wouldn't call your relationship with art "appreciation". Sounds more like undisguised disdain.

New comment by drongoking in "Awk As A Major Systems Programming Language, Revisited (2018)"

drongoking — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 16:33:56 +0000

Good answers.

(And I hadn't realized Apple was planning on getting rid of Python, Perl, and Ruby from default installs! Wow.)

New comment by drongoking in "Awk As A Major Systems Programming Language, Revisited (2018)"

drongoking — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 06:34:23 +0000

Sure, but you can invoke nearly all languages (and write one-liners) at the command line, e.g.:

python -c 'import sys; f=open(sys.argv[1]);print(len(f.readlines()))' .zshrc

But I wouldn't recommend python as a good one-liner language. So the question remains, what is awk particularly good at?

New comment by drongoking in "Learn X in Y minutes Where X=Prolog"

drongoking — Wed, 05 Feb 2020 06:29:50 +0000

As a long-time user of Prolog I didn't find the explanation so horrible. Unification is indeed like variable assignment in the constraint-satisfaction sense: bindings are not stateful. As for equality, I believe the author meant == rather than =, or more accurately the 'is' operator in Python and Perl. But maybe regular expression matching would be a better analog for Prolog's theorem proving.

Your statement 2==1+1 is (I'd claim) a weird case in Prolog. Unless you want to code the Peano postulates you need some way to do numerical calculations, and "2 is 1+1" does indeed work in the body of a clause.

Your mathematical explanation of Prolog's theorem proving is precise and correct but almost impenetrable to the average software engineer trying to "get" Prolog. Such explanations only make sense once someone already mostly understands what's going on, and hence aren't useful for beginners. As a first approximation I thought the OP's work wasn't bad.

Hacker News: drongoking

New comment by drongoking in "2020 Pulitzer Prize Winners"

New comment by drongoking in "CEO of Banjo admitted to being a Neo-Nazi skinhead in his youth"

New comment by drongoking in "Eloquent JavaScript 3rd Edition (2018)"

New comment by drongoking in "Mental Model Fallacy (2018)"

New comment by drongoking in "Mental Model Fallacy (2018)"

New comment by drongoking in "Shirt Without Stripes"

New comment by drongoking in "August Engelhardt"

New comment by drongoking in "Zotero: Personal Research Assistant"

New comment by drongoking in "Lets Use ML for Insights"

New comment by drongoking in "AutoML-Zero: Evolving machine learning algorithms from scratch"

New comment by drongoking in "The Perils of Private Provision of Public Goods"

New comment by drongoking in "CDC declined to test new coronavirus patient for days, California hospital says"

New comment by drongoking in "Machine Learning, Kolmogorov Complexity, and Squishy Bunnies (2019)"

New comment by drongoking in "Google interviewing process for software developer role in 2020"

New comment by drongoking in "Detecting manuscripts and publications from paper mills"

New comment by drongoking in "MIT 6.S191: Introduction to Deep Learning"

New comment by drongoking in "Show HN: A stream of AI-generated art"

New comment by drongoking in "Awk As A Major Systems Programming Language, Revisited (2018)"

New comment by drongoking in "Awk As A Major Systems Programming Language, Revisited (2018)"

New comment by drongoking in "Learn X in Y minutes Where X=Prolog"