jsyedidia
jsyedidia on Hacker News
ebitengine is "a dead simple 2D game library for Go". I like it.
Posted by
jsyedidia on Wednesday May 11, 2022 @03:40PM
from the github.com dept.
You can send your CV to me. I run a research group working in that area. My email is myfirstname.mylastname AT analog DOT com.
The book will be released on February 2. "Ideas That Created the Future: Classic Papers of Computer Science" edited by Harry Lewis, and published by MIT Press.
Also, he's written an incredible series of groundbreaking papers throughout his career, going back to 2005. His papers tend to hold up very well. At this point, I carefully read any paper with his name on it, and I believe he very much deserves the honor.
For deaths, the USA has a total of 1,184, and the 8 countries of Western Europe have 15,437, or about 14 times higher on a per-capita basis.
One should of course normalize by population. The USA has a population of 327 million. Eight nations in Western Europe (France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany) which are the core of the EU, have a population of 303 million. The US has 82,612 cases today according to worldometers.info. Those eight nations in Western Europe have a total of 289,767 cases today, which is about 3.78 times the US rate on a per capita basis.
Posted by
jsyedidia on Tuesday February 11, 2020 @05:44PM
from the github.com dept.
When my son was around 12 years old we gave him the book "Hello World: Computer Programming for Kids and Other Beginners." It teaches programming with Python and targets making games and was perfect for him. Five years later now, he's really a great programmer, proficient with many languages and techniques. Here's his github site:
https://github.com/zyedidia
Somewhat related is MyHDL, a hardware description language implemented as a Python library, that was mostly done by a single individual (Jan Decaluwe). See
http://www.myhdl.org/
That's why we developed the "Boundary Forest" algorithm which is a fast nearest-neighbor type algorithm with generalization at least as good as K-NN, while being able to respond to queries very quickly.
It maintains trees of examples that let it train and respond to test queries in logarithmic time with the number of stored examples, which can be much less than the overall number of training samples. It thus maintains k-NN's property of very fast training time, and is also an online algorithm, and can be used for regression problems as well as classification.
See our paper that was presented at AAAI 2015 here: http://www.disneyresearch.com/publication/the-boundary-fores...
I would not lump edX in with Coursera and Udacity. As noted in Wikipedia: "EdX differs from other MOOC providers, such as Coursera and Udacity, in that it is a nonprofit organization and runs on open-source software."
At first, it seemed to me like Coursera, Udacity and EdX offered similar quality courses. But at this point, I think that, on average, the EdX ones tend to be significantly better. And that difference does seem to me to be related to the fact that EdX is not a for-profit institution trying to extract money from you. Also keep in mind that the EdX systems were largely developed at MIT, and EdX was originally intended as the improved version of OCW.
They are responsible for approving funding, and the mayor appropriated $6 million for the project without getting their approval. They would now have to find a way to pay for it, but their main point is that he overstepped his authority. It is unlikely to have been approved by the council if it was brought to them, because probably a majority of the council believe it's a poor use of Indianapolis' funds.
The above information is based on a quick Google search.
One difference is that Literate isn't tied to a particular text editor like org/babel is tied to Emacs. You can edit .lit files in any text editor. That said, while there already exists a Vim plugin to handle .lit files, there isn't yet any Emacs mode, or plugins for other text editors. Such contributions would be welcomed.
The output is basically designed to look like the output of Knuth and Levy's CWEB tool. Maybe a better example to look at on the "try it" page is the wc.lit example, which makes a word count program. It's based on Knuth and Levy's wc.w tutorial example, and gives a similar output.
Of course, there are advantages of Literate's output compared with CWEB's; it's more flexible in that you can embed arbitrary HTML in the output, so you can easily put images into your explanations, and you can put as many code blocks and text blocks as you like in each paragraph.
That's an excellent idea. I don't think it would work for all languages, but it's still a good solution, and will be added to the TODO list.
Thanks for the comment. Because this "Literate" software outputs nicely formatted code (including automatically included comments identifying code blocks) in the target language, it's not too big a deal, you can just see what line the compiler errors are referring to in the target source code. CWEB's approach of treating the tangled code as only intended for machine reading has the major drawback that you can't share the target source code with others and expect them to be able to read it; they need to buy into CWEB too. So there's a trade-off here.
Posted by
jsyedidia on Saturday September 05, 2015 @11:38AM
from the literate.zbyedidia.webfactional.com dept.
If you don't like to read long articles, don't read them. I like to read them; they tend to be much easier to understand than artificially shortened articles. It seems to me that complaining that somebody wrote a long article because they take too long for you to read is exactly analogous to saying that since you only like to read short stories, nobody should write a long novel because it would take too much time for you to read.
What a strange attitude! There's plenty of zero-cost bits available to allow for articles of all sorts of lengths. For example, the "Foundations and Trends" journals (e.g. Foundations and Trends in Machine Learning, or Foundations and Trends in Optimization) publish articles that are usually at least 100 pages long. These articles tend to be well-respected and highly cited.
Longer articles have many advantages in allowing for a more in-depth explanation, and it is certainly not the case that every reader wants papers shoe-horned into an artificial page limit.
Maybe they didn't know about the ideal gas law. It seems like very few other people do. Maybe they did know about the ideal gas law and took advantage of it. In any case, they followed all the rules "to the letter", at least if you believe they did what they said they did. Most people say that when you follow all the rules, you are not "cheating".
Let's take it as a given that the Patriots balls deflated and the Colts balls didn't (we don't actually know that for certain, but I think it's reasonable to assume it's true). We know that if the Patriots prepared their balls indoors and worked on them up until the moment they gave them to the refs as they claimed they did and as is legal, the ideal gas law predicts a deflation of the Patriots' balls approximately equal to what is being rumored.
So the thing making people speculate the Patriots cheated is that the Colts' balls didn't deflate, combined with a lack of understanding of the ideal gas law, or a refusal to take it into account.
I take it as a given that the ideal gas law holds. That means that for the Colts' balls not to deflate when going from indoors to outdoors they must have prepared them differently than the Patriots. A simple explanation is that the gas inside their balls had already equilibrated to the outdoors temperatures before the balls were given to the refs (e.g. the Colts threw them around outside). It is speculation, but it seems to me more reasonable than the assumption that the Patriots' and Colts' balls both managed to evade the workings of the ideal gas law, and the Patriots' balls deflated because the Patriots cheated.
The reason that they didn't correct the pressure at game-time is that after the Patriots give the balls to the referees 2 hours and 15 minutes before game time, they are not allowed to touch them, and the refs do not have the procedure of re-checking them and correcting them. I imagine that there might be a rules or procedure change so that they do, and as early as the Super Bowl.
The "evidence" for my explanation is the ideal gas law and what Belichick said his team did in his press conference today. If the Patriots followed that procedure, which there is no reason to believe they didn't, and which is legal, one expects from the ideal gas law that their balls would seem under-inflated at half-time. It's basic physics and easy to understand theoretically and reproduce experimentally.
My speculation for what the Colts did rests on the reports that their balls did not deflate. For that to hold, given the laws of physics, something like the balls equilibrating to the outdoors temperatures before giving them to the refs must have happened.
No the BC professor speculated that they over-inflated them. I speculated that they prepared the balls outdoors. The reason for the speculation is that I know the ideal gas law holds. Therefore, if the Colts balls did not deflate when they took them to a colder temperature, there must be an explanation. I think the likeliest explanation is that the gas inside the balls had already equilibrated to an outdoors temperature.
Many people are speculating that the Patriots cheated on no grounds except that the balls deflated when taken outdoors, which is exactly what you expect from the laws of physics.
"They had the deflated footballs for a reason.": It's called the ideal gas law.
http://nesn.com/2015/01/boston-college-professor-weather-had...
If you're concerned that the chairman of BC's physics department didn't do his calculations correctly, I also have a Ph.D. in physics and corroborated them. Make sure you use both absolute pressure and absolute temperature if you want to do the computations yourself; it's really quite simple.
By the way, about why the Colts balls didn't deflate: the BC professor says they may have over-inflated them, but I think a simpler explanation is that if the Colts prepared their balls outdoors and they equilibrated to outdoors temperatures before giving them to the refs, you would not expect them to deflate. Watch Belichick's press conference today, with an understanding of the ideal gas law, and the fact that working in a ball will also increase the temperature of the gas inside it, and it becomes obvious that if they followed the legal procedure Belichick claimed they followed, the Patriots did not cheat, unless you think having your footballs obey the ideal gas law is cheating.