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basman

Re:Something weird is happening with LLMs and Chess on Friday November 15, 2024 @05:37PM (#42152031)
Based on looking at the games at the end of the post, it seems unlikely. Both sides play extremely poorly — gpt-instruct is just slightly less bad — and I don't see any reasonable engine outputting those moves.
Re:No-kill, lab-grown meat to go on sale for first time on Wednesday December 02, 2020 @11:02AM (#25277597)
Also a bad argument: rephrasing GP's "We don't know enough to be sure this is safe" as "This is definitely unsafe".
Re:Q-Learning on Friday August 23, 2019 @10:04PM (#20784719)
The raycast probably disambiguated the state pretty well, such that it essentially had to memorize a few hundred actions, so that it did end up basically doing a sort of asynchronous distributed Dijkstra's algorithm.
Re:Ten seconds of math on Thursday November 27, 2014 @12:27AM (#8666107)
352 with all options and limit 1000. Anyone do better? :)
Re:What makes for a stable marriage? on Saturday October 11, 2014 @03:17PM (#8443145)
This is a misleading article in the following sense: the implication is "here are these seven surprising factors that are correlated with successful marriages". Except, in recent decades US divorce rates have bifurcated into two groups — well educated, affluent people who get married later and have lower divorce rates, and less well-off people who have a higher divorce rate. Given this one fact, most of the factors in the article are completely unsurprising. For example, it would be surprising if going on a honeymoon was not correlated positively with a successful marriage given that it is positively correlated with income.
Re:Why we love Scala at Coursera on Tuesday February 18, 2014 @02:23PM (#7260414)
So yes, they would be runtime errors in Python. But that's not such a catastrophe, actually. The way I write Python is by being in an IPython shell, writing short functions, unit-testing them as I go. So the development-time cost of those runtime errors is not very high, and in my experience offset by the flexibility and interactiveness. Writing in a functional style without much mutable state is really the thing that I find saves development/debugging time.
Re:Why we love Scala at Coursera on Tuesday February 18, 2014 @01:42PM (#7260064)
Your type checker catches array indexing bugs? Impressive.
Re:Free Online Book: Bayesian Reasoning and Machine Learning on Friday October 19, 2012 @04:55PM (#4675352)
Not a book, but Andrew Ng's coursera course (or Stanford class video lectures) are great and have lots of practical tips.
Re:Game Over on Sunday October 14, 2012 @10:03PM (#4653369)
This blog post? http://antirez.com/post/different-take-sexism-it.html

I'd be curious how many people here find this beyond the pale. As a data point, I didn't. I don't agree with all of it, but I don't see what part of it counts as sexist, in the sense of advocating discrimination based on gender.

Re:Why should I have written ZeroMQ in C, not C++ on Thursday May 10, 2012 @11:49PM (#3957544)
Or, perhaps easier:

scoped_ptr<Image> image(allocate_image(...));

What about the fact that 13 of the warmest years on record happened in the last 15 years?
Re:Ingo Molnar on what ails the Linux desktop on Saturday March 17, 2012 @10:49AM (#3717183)
> He basically wanted to upgrade just one (obscure) app, and the process triggered the automatic removal of Gnome2 and installation of Unity. Just _IMAGINE_ how nightmarish this must look for normal users. You simply dont remove somebodys installed desktop sneakily from under their feet. You simply dont. That feels like the total loss of control over your computer.

Hmm, that's not exactly what happened, according to the link: "I upgraded to Ubuntu 11.04 a week or so back in order to get a more recent version of SCons."

Your overall point is well taken, but I wonder how much it affects what I think of as "normal users", who don't care so much about upgrading to the bleeding edge of scons. Consider a hypothetical user of Hardy, so they've had it for four years: what are they actually missing if what they do is web surfing, email, and maybe document editing?

Re:Google's "free food" is not free on Sunday January 22, 2012 @03:30AM (#3496045)
I found it interesting that their claimed value of 15-20k a year went unquestioned. At ~300 days a year, that's $60 a day. I'd value free food at a quarter of that at most.
Re:The single most useful Emacs feature on Tuesday December 06, 2011 @07:50PM (#3321911)
The nice thing is that many commands set the mark automatically. So in your example, there's no need for the initial C-SPC.
The way it works in Jeopardy is that after the question is read, there's a guy who flicks a switch after which the betting window is open (and there's a visual cue so the players know when this happens). If you buzz before that you get briefly locked out.
Re:Machine Vision made Easy - SimpleCV on Friday November 11, 2011 @07:18PM (#3226693)
How does this compare with OpenCV's existing python interface? The examples at http://opencv.willowgarage.com/documentation/python/cookbook... look fairly simple.
> Wine experts don't judge the quality of the wine but the quality of what the wine is supposed to taste like based on it's appellation controléé

If that's really true, why do they bother tasting the actual wine?

Re:Ask HN: What API to the physical world do you wish existed? on Saturday September 24, 2011 @03:44PM (#3034167)
Partial solution: http://www.bodymedia.com
Re:Why I Go Home: A Developer Dad's Manifesto on Friday September 16, 2011 @01:08AM (#3003272)
No guessing needed. You could have just read his comment to find the answer.
Re:Why I Go Home: A Developer Dad's Manifesto on Friday September 16, 2011 @12:39AM (#3003221)
The arguments about mature programmers being more efficient with less time are a red herring. The point is, given this guy working 40 hours a week and an equally mature (presumably childless) programmer working say 70 hours a week, I'd go with the second one. It's just that there aren't a lot of the second to go around.
Re:A Peek at Emacs 24 on Sunday September 11, 2011 @12:11PM (#2984022)
Anyone know the release schedule for this?
Re:Deft -- easy note taking for Emacs on Saturday September 10, 2011 @08:03PM (#2982841)
I haven't used either of these, but they seem to fill a useful niche. What do you find are the pros and cons of deft vs. org-velocity?
Re:Facebook First Half Revenue Hits $1.6 Billion on Wednesday September 07, 2011 @05:07PM (#2971454)
OK, so if you replace his 38% chance of $200B with 28%, the valuation is still $79B. I think the qualitative point about upside potential stands, unless you find it completely unlikely that they will succeed big.
Re:Code Quarterly's Interview with Rich Hickey on Friday June 10, 2011 @12:41AM (#2639824)
What are some examples of functions that take advantage of having this sort of dictionary-like access to objects?
Re:Working with git? These aliases will save you hours on Friday May 20, 2011 @11:53AM (#2568169)
I use the g=git alias :) Are there any negative consequences I should be aware of?
Re:Neural Networks making a come-back? on Sunday May 01, 2011 @08:05PM (#2504453)
That's an orthogonal distinction. The methods thus far have typically been parametric, in that there's a fixed network topology and the learning algorithm adjusts the (fixed set of) weights on the edges. There's no reason, though, why you couldn't have a nonparametric version that adaptively chose the number of hidden nodes in the networks and the connectivity structure.
Re:Neural Networks making a come-back? on Sunday May 01, 2011 @08:02PM (#2504448)
In my experience, the reason is less due to speed and more because there's a perception that training algorithms for things like RBMs still involve a certain amount of "black magic" in tuning parameters, deciding when it's converged, etc, in contrast to linear/logistic regression or support vector machines, where you can basically turn a crank and get an answer out.
Re:Facebook Hits Record $75 Billion Valuation on Saturday March 05, 2011 @03:20AM (#2291082)
To play devil's advocate, the relevant number is expected future earnings, not current ones: at a 0.95 discount rate, $75 billion amounts to an income stream of $3.75 billion a year. Clearly they're not making that now, but: 1) there's a good chance that they will have far richer data, and therefore the ability to target ads better and more profitably, than google 2) there's a nonzero chance that they will be able to monetize micropayments in a far bigger way than paypal ever did.

There are plenty of other potential revenue streams, but these two alone make the valuation seem like not so much of a stretch — they might just be a $20b company, but then again, they could conceivably end up being a $200b company.

Re:Bing Beats Google In 20-Search Shootout on Wednesday January 12, 2011 @07:38PM (#2098328)
So let's say you're doing an everyday search for something such as researching a new camera. Would you consider the probability of someone eavesdropping on your communication times the amount of harm they could likely cause to you using that information to outweigh any amount of improvement in search result quality? I'm not trying to be facetious — just genuinely curious if that's how your utility function works.
Re:Facebook Messages: The Worst Thing That Ever Happened on Monday November 22, 2010 @01:52PM (#1930863)
Source?

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