Hacker News: ionforce

New comment by ionforce in "Why I left Google: work-life balance"

ionforce — Wed, 11 May 2022 18:27:01 +0000

What have they done since to repair their image?

New comment by ionforce in "At SpaceX, I couldn't stop getting sexually harassed"

ionforce — Tue, 14 Dec 2021 20:40:36 +0000

Some people lack the emotional maturity and respect for other human beings.

New comment by ionforce in "Functools – The Power of Higher-Order Functions in Python"

ionforce — Fri, 09 Jul 2021 12:33:30 +0000

After having done Scala for a few years, it's finally a pleasure to be able to read and understand a thread like this.

FP gains are real. Anyone who tells you otherwise doesn't know what FP is.

To anyone out there who isn't on the FP train yet, get on. You'll become a better programmer for it.

New comment by ionforce in "Learnimprov – Just the first improv game site"

ionforce — Mon, 15 Mar 2021 17:21:12 +0000

You should totally do it. You can do it from the comfort of your own home now.

New comment by ionforce in "Diagram Maker: Open sourcing IoT visualization"

ionforce — Mon, 05 Oct 2020 19:44:11 +0000

Sorry, dog. Gonna need a markup mode.

New comment by ionforce in "Spritely – leveling up the federated social web"

ionforce — Tue, 29 Sep 2020 18:04:56 +0000

Completely agree. It's like engineers consistently fail to recognize that users generally don't care about the internals. If it doesn't LOOK like FB why use it?

New comment by ionforce in "Important non-programming skills for programmers"

ionforce — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 14:55:22 +0000

I want to see "The Most Important Programming Skills for Non-Programmers"

New comment by ionforce in "Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up"

ionforce — Wed, 23 Sep 2020 07:26:35 +0000

No incentive, I guess, is the explanation for any stagnant system.

New comment by ionforce in "GitHub Readme Templates"

ionforce — Sun, 26 Jul 2020 15:00:47 +0000

This is the new MySpace.

New comment by ionforce in "Perl 5.32 Released"

ionforce — Sun, 21 Jun 2020 18:05:46 +0000

If you value your mental health and your earning potential, you'll avoid Perl.

So many better languages with better mental models. And I say this with a decade of Perl experience.

Don't suffer from the blub paradox.

New comment by ionforce in "It's not what programming languages do, it's what they shepherd you to"

ionforce — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 03:23:01 +0000

A loss of local reasoning. You don't know which functions will touch the variable and when.

You might know at a high level on paper, but you won't have clean, easy-to-read and easy-to-predict life times. Then you'll have race conditions.

New comment by ionforce in "It never makes sense to use foldl on lists in Haskell (2019)"

ionforce — Sat, 21 Mar 2020 04:08:54 +0000

Poorly written headline.

New comment by ionforce in "Ask HN: How do we stop the polarization/toxicicity filling the web?"

ionforce — Fri, 31 Jan 2020 17:44:52 +0000

More moderation. More value judgements (and actions) need to be taken against content that is deemed unsavory. Bans, etc.

Higher barriers of entry. The right to comment and occupy mind space is given away too easily. Penalize new accounts, start with limited capabilities, disallow short comments, etc.

Highlight exemplary content.

New comment by ionforce in "Facebook Discovers Fake AI-Generated Profiles"

ionforce — Fri, 20 Dec 2019 23:13:04 +0000

I would love an online forum with aggressive verification. It would really weed out the noise.

New comment by ionforce in "Dota 2 with Large Scale Deep Reinforcement Learning [pdf]"

ionforce — Fri, 13 Dec 2019 23:14:01 +0000

That's not misleading if it's literally true.

New comment by ionforce in "Monads, or Programmable Semicolons (2014)"

ionforce — Fri, 06 Dec 2019 02:24:33 +0000

Now that I'm on the side of "I know what a monad is", let me just say 95% of what people say monads are is complete trash and unhelpful. This includes calling them "semicolons".

I don't think this analogy sets up anyone for success. For a long time now I've wanted to do a series on "FP for OOP folks".

New comment by ionforce in "How we built Uber Engineering's highest query-per-second service using Go (2016)"

ionforce — Thu, 14 Nov 2019 16:38:29 +0000

> They delivered value to the business. That's the only thing that matters.

But this bit isn't true during the interview process.

New comment by ionforce in "Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning"

ionforce — Fri, 01 Nov 2019 03:06:21 +0000

Yeah. I think watching it split a line of Stalkers into two flanks that isn't done with a rectangular selection is crazy unfair.

I think you're saying does it suffer from occlusion during selection. Based on how APIs typically work, I would say no it does not. So yeah that's another thing humans can't do. AlphaStar could hypothetically stack units into a singular mass and it would be discretely untargetable by human players.

New comment by ionforce in "Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning"

ionforce — Thu, 31 Oct 2019 20:41:55 +0000

Everything about AlphaStar is typed and discrete. It has perfect inputs because it uses an API (and does not read pixel data).

Human limitations that AlphaStar shares:

- Data that requires the camera to see (e.g. enemy location, enemy HP)

- Inability to examine/target cloaked units

Possibly unfair, super-human things AlphaStar has access to:

- Instantaneous awareness of cloaked units

- Knowledge of things humans need to infer/click (e.g. upgrades)

- Global map awareness of unit positions (taking into account fog of war)

Definitely unfair:

- Can select arbitrary collections of units, including outside of camera view

New comment by ionforce in "Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning"

ionforce — Thu, 31 Oct 2019 16:45:40 +0000

You wouldn't be the first person to say this. But it only proves that the unit isn't useful __ as piloted by AlphaStar __.

Based on the initial AlphaStar against TLO/Mana, you would think that Stalkers are insanely OP and the only thing worth building.

I (and others) have wondered that if you continue to lower AlphaStar's APM, you would see a diversity of units. The money would be in where AlphaStar decides to spend its really tight APM budget. Is it worth casting that Psionic Storm?

I personally feel like it has an insane micro advantage by being able to select arbitrary units on the battlefield, as opposed to dragged squares or control groups. But I'm not a pro gamer, so I don't know what that feels like.