alook

This is awesome. Some friends and I have a group chat called ThingFaces where we do the same thing.

We noticed that there's organic ones (in tree knots/clouds) or random ones (cracks in cement, rust peeling) or man-made ones (anything designed).

I especially love ones involving a shadow hitting something at just the right angle - those feel extra hard to find :)

Thanks for sharing this!

I just wanted to chime in and thank you for sharing your prompts like that!

It feels like which prompts people are using (even from developers on the same team) is often opaque. It's a great learning resource for people to see under the hood of each other's AI coding workflows, and I hope to see more folks doing this.

(Link for anyone who wants to check them out): https://github.com/minimaxir/ballin/blob/main/PROMPTS.md

I laughed out loud at that 100 number too when I was reading statuspage :P

They definitely do train their own models, the founders have described this in several interviews.

I was surprised to learn this, but they made some interesting choices (like using sparse mixture-of-experts models for their tab completion model, to get high throughput/low latency).

Originally i think they used frontier models for their chat feature, but I believe theyve recently replaced that with something custom for their agent feature.

The book of shaders is fantastic:

http://www.thebookofshaders.com/

There are apps that help you hide unused menu bar apps - this one works well: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hidden-bar/id1452453066?mt=12

I love this work by Otoro / David Ha.

For come context, this uses a technique called CPPN’s (compositional pattern producing networks), where the inputs are (x, y, sqrt(x^2 + y^2)) and then there are several neural net layers with different activation functions and randomly initialized weights. It actually resembles the optical physics of light reflecting through glass (which explains why it sometimes looks like light reflecting through a gem).

Otoro wrote some great blog posts on this:

https://blog.otoro.net/2016/03/25/generating-abstract-patter...

https://blog.otoro.net/2015/07/31/neurogram/

https://github.com/hardmaru/cppn-tensorflow

Love this advice. I’ve always struggled with the same thing.

One friend started telling me to get over myself and publish, then he reworded it to:

“Get over being under yourself.”

For some reason that one stuck with me and gave me the strength to ship my first few pieces of writing.

At a startup I worked at, one of my cofounders was an incredibly skilled designer, and he took a lot of pride in the design of our homepage. He spent a lot of time in particular finding the right fonts, and would often complain when he saw other company homepages with inappropriate font choices.

One April fools' day, we thought it'd be funny to make him think that we'd changed the company homepage to have a comic sans font. Of course it'd be going too far to actually change the website publicly, so we decided to set up a DNS proxy inside the company office.

We took our company homepage, recompiled a static site with comic sans, and hosted it on an internal server. Then we set up a DNS proxy that resolved our company homepage for requests coming from inside the office to our comic sans static site, but otherwise the internet worked normally.

We made sure that everyone else in the company would feign outrage when he came in and checked the website, so the joke lasted for a couple hours before he thought to check the website from his mobile phone. Later, he appreciated the joke and figured he should have connected the dots sooner and realized that it was April Fools' day.

Also would love to hear an answer to this

These results are beautiful!

Just curious, how did you end up on fxhash?

Did you consider any other platforms, or was hicetnunc the only comparable platform you’d use for this kind of thing before fchash came around?

These are awesome! Thanks for putting your work out into the world, turtlesoup.

In my free time I make paintings of outputs from GANs/Deepdreams/etc. I've been wanting to paint something based on a model trained on illustrations, but I hadn't seen anyone decent GAN trained on that kind of dataset yet. Thanks for sharing your code, this is really exciting to see!

Look at some good open source projects, and look at the overall project/module structure as well as the OO graph.

Re: high-level project layout: - where are their build files? - how are the source packages broken up? - where are the tests stored?

Trace back from the entry point to the code and look at how things are encapsulated, where code gets re-used.

Diagramming out with something like UML is cumbersome but can be helpful to visualize the structure as you're getting started.

Looking at software design patterns (while often overkill) can give you a good sense for some common ways people try to re-use code. For example: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns#Patterns_by_Ty...

It's true that there aren't too many practical applications of GAN's yet, but I'd argue that transfer learning is already pretty powerful. It's fairly commonplace to approach a compute vision task by starting with VGG/AlexNet/etc and fine-tuning it on a relatively small dataset.

URX is hiring! San Francisco, CA

URX is building the Mobile App Search API for Developers

[ http://developers.urx.com/ ]

We're hiring Senior Software Engineers:

=== The Role ===

URX is looking for an experienced software engineer to take URX’s architecture to the next level by working on projects that touch all components in URX’s technology stack. As a polyglot organization, URX looks for versatile problem solvers with strong CS fundamentals who are excited to learn new languages and frameworks. The ideal candidate will not only build solid systems, but also excel at sharing knowledge with teammates and guiding the architecture of systems developed by the team.

=== Responsibilities ===

* Scale high-traffic web services * Build distributed systems and data pipelines * Design and own end-to-end, multi-tier architectures

=== Requirements ===

* BA/BS in Computer Science, or a related field * Strong knowledge of Python, Java, Go, C, and/or Scala desirable * 3+ years experience building distributed systems * Experience designing, documenting, and building an API in a production environment * Understanding of data flows and data integrity * Interest in machine learning and information retrieval * Experience with Lucene is a plus

=== Where to Apply ===

http://urx.com/careers/engineering

CTO of URX here - thanks for the feedback!

ELI5 "what is a deep link?": mobile deep links mean registering custom URI schemes for your app, and registering a URL dispatcher within your app. The end result is that users can be sent directly to a specific page of content within your app. For example,

  spotify:artist:0X2BH1fck6amBIoJhDVmmJ

...will take you to the in-app version of this experience:

  https://open.spotify.com/artist/0X2BH1fck6amBIoJhDVmmJ

The intuition is that sending users to in-app content is preferable to web content; IMHO, this is especially important for apps that have rich content or have logged-in functionality.

Example of a bad experience for apps that don't use deeplinks: have you ever clicked on a LinkedIn email on your mobile device and landed on a sign-in page in your mobile browser? If they used deeplinks, you're probably already signed into your LinkedIn app and wouldn't need to go digging for your password. This has been a common pain point in people we've talked to.

As a developer, allowing your app to be indexed will make it easier for other developers to send you traffic. Currently, we believe that the limiting factor preventing a "link graph" from existing across apps, is the challenge developers face in discovering how to find (a) which pieces of content are relevant to a page within your app, and (b) how to contruct a deep link URL to send users to those pieces of content.

Does this only apply to UI changes? Or can i fix, say, a logic bug as well?

Also, what kind of performance concerns might I see?

It's exciting to see under-appreciated math techniques in use for modern-day data science!

Under Marissa Mayer's watch, Yahoo has been investing tremendous effort in refining the UX on their web/mobile properties like Yahoo Weather [1], Flickr [2], and Yahoo Sports [3].

Seems like they're giving people a reason to use their products, and then making a play to have an OAuth-level relationship with the users. Maybe they want visibility into how a user authorizes third-party apps (FB gets an awful lot of insight from FB connect!) or maybe they just want to solidify their user lock-in.

Either way, I can't imagine they justified the engineering work for massive redesign on seemingly not-profitable properties like Weather/Flickr without having a solid long-term plan for how to capitalize on that.

[1] http://www.engadget.com/2013/08/15/yahoo-weather-android-red... [2] http://blog.flickr.net/en/2013/05/20/a-better-brighter-flick... [3] http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/03/yahoo-sports-gets-ios-7-red...

Great article - I think lots of first time founders don't spend enough time planning out their budget pre-seed round

Agreed.

Transitively-resolved, platform-independent binaries are the big win coming from maven. Only once have I worked with a project where I required new system-level dependencies to compile & run a maven project; and I have never had a cross-platform issue when carrying projects across Mac & Linux.

To be fair, the import-compiled-transitive-dependencies-as-binaries pattern that Maven likes to employ is probably less easily adapted to natively compiled languages like C/C++ than it is to managed runtime languages (Java/Erlang) or scripting languages (Ruby/Python).

As much as it's a pain to work with "maven plugin spaghetti", it's at least deterministic and keeps things easy to figure out.

There are those dependencies that you learn to remain wary of (asm/cglib/antlr/jline/etc), but at the end of the day I'm happy to work in an ecosystem where I don't have to compile every single line of third-party code myself.

This is really exciting - as a Java/Python guy who recently made forays into C++, I was disappointed at the state of dependency management and the lack of standardization across build tools. So many projects use submodules instead of cleanly declared dependencies.

I hope that a project like this can motivate the C++ community to provide some more centralized support for creating shared libraries, managing third-party dependencies, and other areas where the language falls short today.

Exactly - we figure that our biggest strengths as a team (given a combination of Machine Learning/Data Mining/Information Retrieval backgrounds and a strong Design/Mobile contingent) will be in indexing deep app content (which obviously is a much richer dataset in commerce apps than it is in, say, mobile games).

It seems like Facebook sees the same thing happening.

Of course, I am curious to see how this affects game developers - I've encountered a few who have rolled their own retargeting solutions on top of house ads. It seems like game developers are especially reluctant to pay for anything except to pump up their install count in order to reach the top of app store rankings (seems like using SEM to boost your SEO).

Any predictions?

Personally, I think about this differently; Startups who are outspoken about what they do early on are generally hoping to benefit from inbound interest.

From what I observed in YC, launching a TechCrunch article typically doesn't lead to a ton of inbound interest (at least for B2B companies this is true - if you're Uber/Vine/Tinder/Grouper, it's a different story).

For B2B companies, press helps get investor attention, can help with inbound hiring, and can potentially help get clients, if your press releases are well targeted enough (which most aren't).

From our perspective, staying quiet was the default. Now we're at the point where we're interested in reaching a slightly broader audience.

Thanks! We think it's an exciting space, and feel strongly that deep-linking is a good starting point to begin breaking down some of the silo's that exist between apps on our smartphones.

Is your friend anyone we would have heard of? If he's working on deeplinks, we'd love to get his feedback on our open-source project, Turnpike [1], which helps developers enable deeplinks in their apps.

[1] http://urxtech.github.io/turnpike-ios/