Hacker News: jeffbradberry

New comment by jeffbradberry in "The RAM shortage is bringing back DDR4"

jeffbradberry — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 18:51:41 +0000

Desktop. I have 3 old machines, just decommissioned at the beginning of the year, that I've been kicking around the idea of making into a cluster.

New comment by jeffbradberry in "The RAM shortage is bringing back DDR4"

jeffbradberry — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 15:28:29 +0000

I have some old machines that take DDR3. What do you have?

New comment by jeffbradberry in "Ask HN: Is there anyone here who still uses slide rules?"

jeffbradberry — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 20:50:41 +0000

What I _really_ want, now that I have the Faber-Castell, is a Curta.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curta

New comment by jeffbradberry in "Ask HN: Is there anyone here who still uses slide rules?"

jeffbradberry — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 20:42:57 +0000

I have four now, and even go out of my way to use them a bit.

My favorites from my collection are a little Dietzgen No 1773, which is surprisingly featureful for something that can fit in a pocket, and a Faber-Castell Novo-Biplex 2/83N, which is kind of one of the big guns for slide rules.

New comment by jeffbradberry in "417-megapixel Andromeda galaxy panorama took over a decade to make"

jeffbradberry — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 15:11:00 +0000

That is not accurate -- the Andromeda Galaxy is over 3 degrees wide. About 6 full moons.

New comment by jeffbradberry in "The Quadrantid meteor shower 2024 peaks tonight alongside a bright moon"

jeffbradberry — Thu, 04 Jan 2024 14:36:32 +0000

This seems like a cool concept, but it's broken for me.

Firefox 113.0.2 shows the orbits and background, but no particles as far as I can tell.

Chromium 120.0.6099.129 shows just a black screen plus the widgets, nothing else.

Both on amd64 Debian Linux.

Update: bumping FF to 121.0 did not seem to help.

New comment by jeffbradberry in "A Romanian economist legally gamed the lottery"

jeffbradberry — Sun, 23 Jul 2023 15:22:36 +0000

There is a fixed probability of matching all numbers but the value of doing so varies, so sometimes the EV can be positive.

New comment by jeffbradberry in "The cursed computer iceberg meme (2021)"

jeffbradberry — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 04:08:42 +0000

Here it is as a pdf: https://rifters.com/real/shorts/VampireDomestication.pdf

New comment by jeffbradberry in "The cursed computer iceberg meme (2021)"

jeffbradberry — Sun, 28 Aug 2022 14:37:59 +0000

This should be the page, but it requires a Flash plugin (so doesn't work for me): https://rifters.com/blindsight/vampires.htm

New comment by jeffbradberry in "How to become haunted by path dependence"

jeffbradberry — Fri, 03 Mar 2017 13:18:18 +0000

Sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expedition_%28book%29

Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 – Zooniverse

jeffbradberry — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 12:42:31 +0000

Article URL: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/marckuchner/backyard-worlds-planet-9

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13659438

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by jeffbradberry in "Iceland’s psychedelic Stonehenge"

jeffbradberry — Wed, 21 Sep 2016 12:16:08 +0000

http://www.thefoamhenge.com/

New comment by jeffbradberry in "Wow, Perl 6 [video]"

jeffbradberry — Fri, 01 Apr 2016 13:18:51 +0000

It looks like revealjs.

New comment by jeffbradberry in "Introduction to Monte Carlo Tree Search"

jeffbradberry — Sun, 13 Sep 2015 19:37:28 +0000

In what appears to be the originating paper for UCT ("Bandit based Monte-Carlo Planning", L. Kocsis and C. Szepesvári, 2006),

* The choice of action to be returned is the one "with the highest average observed long-term reward"

* For simplicity, the payout value used in the paper is 1=win and 0=loss, which will result in the agents maximizing their wins. Presumably one could choose other payout values (i.e. points for that player in games that have that concept) to adjust the priority of the agents. The mathematics does not seem to forbid it.

* This paper uses as their first experiment a multi-player game. They state, "...for P-games UCT is modified to a negamax-style: In MIN nodes the negative of estimated action-values is used in the action selection procedures." It is straightforward and more generalizable to games with N > 2 players to simply record values from that player's standpoint in the first place, instead of manipulating it after the fact in this manner.

I hope this clarifies some things.

New comment by jeffbradberry in "Introduction to Monte Carlo Tree Search"

jeffbradberry — Sun, 13 Sep 2015 17:33:24 +0000

Excellent. I did want to eventually write something showing how to modify this algorithm to handle games with randomness, and ISMCTS at a glance looks like it does just that. Thanks!

New comment by jeffbradberry in "Introduction to Monte Carlo Tree Search"

jeffbradberry — Sun, 13 Sep 2015 17:30:48 +0000

I've updated the diagrams with a set of node values that (hopefully) make sense.

New comment by jeffbradberry in "Introduction to Monte Carlo Tree Search"

jeffbradberry — Sun, 13 Sep 2015 15:58:14 +0000

Since the win counts are only incremented for nodes "moved into" by the winning player, UCB does correctly model the opponent's behavior here.

New comment by jeffbradberry in "Introduction to Monte Carlo Tree Search"

jeffbradberry — Sun, 13 Sep 2015 14:48:03 +0000

Actually, I think it should be 3/8, since it's supposed to be the opposing player's win count.

These diagrams were supposed to just be an update of the diagrams from the MCTS Wikipedia article, adding the correct backpropagation values, but I see there are more problems than that.

New comment by jeffbradberry in "Confessions of a Git Skeptic"

jeffbradberry — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 19:10:12 +0000

A fair point, but in practice I get fellow engineers trying to quote the sequence numbers at me.

New comment by jeffbradberry in "Confessions of a Git Skeptic"

jeffbradberry — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 18:32:36 +0000

I don't understand this obsession with sequential commit numbers. These may vary from repo to repo depending on your commit/pull history.