Hacker News: willwhitney

Computing Inside an AI

willwhitney — Sat, 14 Dec 2024 01:18:58 +0000

Article URL: https://willwhitney.com/computing-inside-ai.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42413823

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Learning 3D physics simulators from video

willwhitney — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 14:48:34 +0000

Article URL: https://willwhitney.com/learned-simulators.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39204418

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by willwhitney in "Ask HN: Has Google search become quantitatively worse?"

willwhitney — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 18:20:17 +0000

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.

Parallelizing neural networks on one GPU with JAX

willwhitney — Tue, 26 Jan 2021 20:43:10 +0000

Article URL: http://willwhitney.com/parallel-training-jax.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25920807

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

The New York Times

willwhitney — Fri, 22 Jan 2021 02:48:38 +0000

Article URL: https://www.robrhinehart.com/the-new-york-times/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25867717

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by willwhitney in "America's True Unemployment Rate"

willwhitney — Tue, 20 Oct 2020 15:13:14 +0000

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?

There’s no better time for cities to take space away from cars

willwhitney — Mon, 23 Mar 2020 20:06:42 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/23/21191325/cities-car-free-coronavirus-protected-bike-lanes-air-quality-social-distancing

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22668176

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by willwhitney in "Ask HN: Favorite note-taking software?"

willwhitney — Sun, 15 Jul 2018 13:53:07 +0000

You can actually drag and drop multiple notes into a tag, no find and replace necessary. Minor point though.

New comment by willwhitney in "Show HN: Unlimited UI design"

willwhitney — Sun, 13 Aug 2017 14:28:47 +0000

They have a grammatical error ("deliciously looking") in their (2) step.

New comment by willwhitney in "Beating the World’s Best at Super Smash Bros. with Deep Reinforcement Learning"

willwhitney — Thu, 23 Feb 2017 00:42:01 +0000

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.

New comment by willwhitney in "Beating the World’s Best at Super Smash Bros. with Deep Reinforcement Learning"

willwhitney — Thu, 23 Feb 2017 00:30:35 +0000

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.

Beating the World’s Best at Super Smash Bros. with Deep Reinforcement Learning

willwhitney — Wed, 22 Feb 2017 23:27:17 +0000

Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.06230

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13710253

Points: 202

# Comments: 55

New comment by willwhitney in "Sunrise is shutting down"

willwhitney — Wed, 11 May 2016 17:57:55 +0000

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

Understanding Visual Concepts with Continuation Learning

willwhitney — Thu, 25 Feb 2016 19:03:13 +0000

Article URL: http://willwhitney.github.io/understanding-visual-concepts/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11176851

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by willwhitney in "Himawari.js: Download real-time images of Earth from the Himawari-8 satellite"

willwhitney — Fri, 12 Feb 2016 15:11:50 +0000

I independently wrote a version of this for OS X: https://github.com/willwhitney/live-earth-desktop

Ask HN: Blacklist Forbes?

willwhitney — Sat, 09 Jan 2016 14:53:01 +0000

Would it be possible to blacklist forbes.com links? They now block viewers who are using ad blockers, and have recently been serving advertising malware to visitors [1].

They also have awful interstitial ads [2] and, while they masquerade as a news organization, are actually a blog farm [3].

Blocking Forbes would be no great loss in terms of content, and would avoid a surprising amount of advertising- (and malware-) generated pain.

[1]: http://www.extremetech.com/internet/220696-forbes-forces-readers-to-turn-off-ad-blockers-promptly-serves-malware

[2]:

[3]: https://np.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3zs6qk/gq_and_forbes_go_after_ad_blocker_users_rather/cyp2uls?context=3#cyowy51

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10871410

Points: 164

# Comments: 41

Popcorn time revived

willwhitney — Tue, 01 Dec 2015 04:27:34 +0000

Article URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/PopCornTime/comments/3sbsz6/download_working_installers_or_fix_your_current/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10653632

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by willwhitney in "Ask HN: What do you do if someone is already building what you wanted to build?"

willwhitney — Fri, 19 Jun 2015 18:50:15 +0000

Help.

New comment by willwhitney in "Show HN: Hydrogen Brings Light Table to Atom"

willwhitney — Thu, 21 May 2015 13:16:46 +0000

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.

New comment by willwhitney in "Show HN: Hydrogen Brings Light Table to Atom"

willwhitney — Wed, 20 May 2015 23:44:07 +0000

I mean, if you're offering...