akg

Ministudio AI | {ML, Computer Graphics, iOS} engineer | Remote / NYC | Full-Time

Ministudio is a funded AI startup based in NYC building creative tools for children to unleash their imagination with the power of AI. We combine traditional computer graphics / vision methods with modern advances in generative models, e.g., LLMs and Stable Diffusion. You will be joining a stellar team of experienced founders working on cutting edge technology to make creative tools accessible to children. As an early stage employee you will have the autonomy and responsibility to drive our next phase of growth.

We are looking for folks proficient in computer graphics/vision, game development, applied machine learning, AI research, or iOS development.

Please get in touch with CV and/or links to projects you've worked on: akash@ministudio.ai

Working on making quick dashboards/data visualizations in your browser. Would love to get feedback on the kinds of features that folks would find useful and what problems you run into with current offerings.

Incidentally, there is a whole conference dedicated to commercial uses of Haskell: http://cufp.org

"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" -- Alan Perlis

It's not solely just about if it is ready for commercial/real-world applications right now. The language itself is interesting and it definitely shapes a different mode of thinking.

Haskell is evolving rapidly and in interesting ways and those that are interesting in programming (as most of us here are), it's a good place to look and learn from.

I read somewhere (references below), that most "gluten sensitivity" cases in the US is actually sensitivity to certain pesticides that are used in wheat farming. That's why most people who suffer from gluten sensitivity in the US do just fine when they eat bread in Europe. Have you considered moving to non-GMO certified organic wheat products and seen any difference in your health?

http://sustainablepulse.com/2014/02/19/roundup-linked-global...

http://www.alternet.org/food/meet-controversial-mit-scientis...

http://www.gmwatch.org/index.php/news/archive/2013/14764-com...

Here are some that refute the above: http://www.examiner.com/article/bogus-paper-on-roundup-satur...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tamar-haspel/condemning-monsan...

http://ultimateglutenfree.com/2014/02/does-glyphosate-cause-...

Are you using any sort of acceleration data-structures to manage your voxels or just storing everything in plain 3D array of positions? I imagine you can run into memory issues there if you don't account for spatial sparsity in your voxel data?

I'd be curious to know if you're something something like run-length encoding (RLE) or something hierarchical such as a B-Tree?

This seems to be one of those arguments where we programmers tend to optimize for the wrong problem. Sure, we may be able to input more text more comfortably with the merits of one text editor over another, but really, I think most of the time spent during programming is reading APIs, headers, other code and most importantly thinking. Typing is hardly the bottleneck.

Looks like they have enabled answer checking again .

Amazing work! Congratulations on the release.

Any insights during the development? What worked? What didn't? How big was your team? How did you split the work? How long did it take from inception to release? Would love to hear your thoughts.

I think this is a fairly typical scenario. The "honeymoon" period as you call it is the phase when everything thing is new and you are learning quite a bit in this new environment. Meeting new people, learning new processes, dealing with new problems. After a couple of years you've become the cog in the machine and little new is left to learn -- it becomes routine allowing you more time to pay more attention to management decisions without actually being in their shoes.

Just like any relationship that fizzles out after the initial honeymoon phase when you're learning about each other, it becomes your responsibility to keep things interesting. Take initiative on starting new projects, look for needs and innovate from within the company (being an entrepreneur doesn't always mean you have to start a new company), and most importantly always keep you manager in the loop.

I would be curious as well. What is your marketing plan? I also released a game a month ago after working on it for about a year, but soon realized that it is very tough to break through the noise on the app store and get your game noticed.

What has your experience been with this? I see that you are doing pay-up-front model. I'd be curious to get your sense of why you went with that as opposed to the freemium + IAP model.

I also released as a paid app initially, it almost seems as if there is an expectation that games should be free to try and then either progress via upgrades or IAPs.

It seems that the new updated features are not ready for Mac OS yet? I tried updating but have not noticed anything new?

Now only if Dwarf Fortress would be open sourced and combined with the amazing effort presented here -- that would make for an epic game.

This is excellent!

Out of curiosity, how do developers "stay in business"? Is Wildfire making enough off of donations and kickstarter-like campaigns to keep development going strong?

I think culture is a big part of it and promoting the right people. Most companies when it becomes the size of apple are riddled with politics and the people on the top get there not because they create/design great products but know how to play the "game".

One thing that strikes me about apple is their culture of secrecy. There are departments within the same company that are not allowed to talk to one another. When you have no idea what other people are doing, it's very hard to play politics and the only thing you can do is just do great work.

How does their data-encryption relate to something like Mega (https://mega.co.nz/)?

I agree with #12 and although it is important to enjoy your work, I find it is very useful to take initiative and really think about "Why" you are doing something. The "Why" helps me get past many hurdles, keeps me motivated even during boring tasks, and almost always ends in a result I can be proud of.

Very interesting and not at all surprising. Humans are very good at developing intuition about a problem space given that they can interactively tinker around with different solutions and get immediate feedback about it's validity. Part of my research relies on this premise and I try to build tools that provide the right "knobs" for someone to build intuition in some design space and take it further than what I, as the tool maker, could have originally envisioned.

Would love to see how these results compare to some of the web frameworks for concurrent functional languages like Erlang/Haskell: Nitrogen, Chicago Boss, Snap, Yesod, etc.

I've been looking for this for quite some time. Thanks for posting! I'm a heavy VIM user and now with clang support I don't have to go into bloated Xcode to do autocomplete.

Has anyone had luck integrating LLDB externally into vim?

I think what makes one great in craft is deeply caring about the craft. It's not just a means to an end, it is something one truly feels passionate about. When one has that visceral calling for something, I think they find ways to get better at what they do. The greatest attribute of humans is that they adapt and learn.

I know several people who could be great programmers, in terms of the ability to solve complex problems, but they do not care enough about their code to do so; which is fine, they find passion elsewhere.

Programming is not for everyone, but I do think that it can be learned over time with patience, passion, and practice.

Simply beautiful! I love how advances in technology (like the ability to view these fractal patterns) allows us to expand art as well as our understanding of the world around us.

Right, but I think Mark's point was that great companies can also be built slowly. These may not be the "best" companies but great one's can be built brick-by-brick. I feel that most startup founders today strive for a large funding round before focusing on building a solid business foundation.

For some businesses, it is not possible to create value until you have a large amount of capital in-hand (e.g., Aerospace, Automobiles) but for most it is and we shouldn't lose sight of that. People solve problems, not money; and it is unlikely that a large pile of cash will be the solution to your problems if you don't first start with a good business model.

I believe GMail already does the chat <-> email conversation quite seamlessly

It's like PG says in his essay,"The Island Test":

"The notebook and pen are professional equipment, as it were. Though actually there is something druglike about them, in the sense that their main purpose is to make me feel better. I hardly ever go back and read stuff I write down in notebooks. It's just that if I can't write things down, worrying about remembering one idea gets in the way of having the next. Pen and paper wick ideas."

Although, I find that most of the time I toss-and-turn b/c my mind is continuously thinking about solving some problem at hand. It's 3am and I should go to bed, otherwise I'll be a zombie at the office tomorrow, but there is this problem that I have to stop thinking about first. Creativity doesn't really follow the same schedules as "business hours"; I would suggest that if you can, stay awake thinking/working/doing until you can't anymore.

Would be really awesome to see a write up about what powers all this on the back end.

Awesome! It would be really cool to see an overhaul of current research papers to be more suited in digital form. A static PDF with words just doesn't do justice when you can enrich research and content with animations and interactivity. Heres an excellent example: http://worrydream.com/ScientificCommunicationAsSequentialArt...

How did they get her to the hospital if she needed to be upside-down the entire time?

I don't think I prefer scalability and low-latency over a high-quality of people discussing things I care about. The focus should be on community, not handling a large number of users.

Interestingly there seems to be a recent trend of not being a slave to your email, twitter, FB, etc. I suppose people are starting to realize that urgent things don't necessarily come from these mediums and as much as we have come to rely on them, they provide us with more noise than useful data.

I've been trying to check email twice daily at scheduled times and respond to emails in "batch" instead of as they come in. It's definitely increased the number of "concentrated" hours I put into a task.