cogware

TLDR for the article: The nascent field of AR games has not, heretofore, produced compelling experiences. There now is one wildly successful AR game, but it is successful because it taps into a massive, well-loved cultural phenomenon. This is "tragic".

My thoughts: I've met dozens of people while playing Pokemon Go in the past few days. Seen many clumps of strangers trading tips about where different Pokemon are and comparing the ones they caught. The gameplay is not particularly polished or deep, and the servers are constantly being overwhelmed by the game's success-disaster, but overall, I see a lot of promise. If they add more mechanics that encourage people to form groups and play together, it can drive a lot more positive, serendipitous connections in the world - a rebuttal to those who think that smartphones will necessarily make us more introverted and asocial.

I don't fault Niantic at all for the bugs, crashes, or capacity issues. Most apps have bugs and issues on their first release. Almost never do they surpass Twitter's DAU within their first week of launch. They should be lauded for such a great success and for keeping the lights on with so much usage.

One nice feature is that TensorFlow includes TensorBoard, a bundle of visualization tools (e.g. model visualizer and various charts). You can see an example here: https://www.tensorflow.org/tensorboard (try clicking around the tabs on the top).

(Disclaimer: I work on TensorBoard)

This article is pure polemical, without any justification for its claims (not even a back-of-the-envelope estimate of what kind increase in taxes would result from ending offshore tax evasion). Outrage is not a substitute for mathematics or economics.

I personally support UBI, but we need to ensure that it's sustainable.

This seems like an interesting article, but I found it very difficult to read. For example, from the introductory paragraph:

This literature equates the possibility of time travel with the existence of closed timelike curves (CTCs) or worldlines for material particles that are smooth, future-directed timelike curves with self-intersections.[3] Since time machines designate devices which bring about the existence of CTCs and thus enable time travel, the paradoxes of time travel are irrelevant for attempted “no-go” results for time machines because these results concern what happens before the emergence of CTCs.[4] This, in our opinion, is fortunate since the paradoxes of time travel are nothing more than a crude way of bringing out the fact that the application of familiar local laws of relativistic physics to a spacetime background which contains CTCs typically requires that consistency constraints on initial data must be met in order for a local solution of the laws to be extendable to a global solution.

I'm not sure what the intended audience for this is; combination philosopher physicists? Given that it's on SEP it seems unreasonable to assume that CTCs need no other explanation than that they are smooth, future-directed timelike curves with intersections. I would love it if someone would ELI5 this concept, though.

Agreed, it would have been wiser for his post to just be about LambdaConf and FP.

How is LambdaConf "destroyed"? That seems like pure hyperbole. The conference will go on, and most people won't remember this Moldbug business longer than 15 minutes.

It's also not clear to me what is the "intolerance" that they are tolerating. Can you provide textual evidence for Moldbug being intolerant? In the post, he comes across as tolerant, albeit with a narrative outside the political mainstream.

I'm really impressed with how quickly the Typescript team is adding new features - it feels like every time I check in on them they have something new in the works that I really care about. Great work!

Great tutorial - Well written and good patterns for TensorFlow usage, e.g. checkpointing, name scopes for cleaning up the graph visualization, and using summaries/TensorBoard, and also nice explanations of the concepts.

Though I'm curious why you used VALID padding not SAME for the conv layers? It seems like it would be simpler to use SAME.

Also, minor nit: TensorFlow and TensorBoard should both have two letters capitalized

"Two large YC companies (both with machine learning teams) have told us that they consider interest in ML a negative signal."

I wonder why this is? Since ML/AI are currently "hot" those programmers may be trend followers? Or maybe interest in ML is correlated with being a junior programmer (those that are more senior specialized when ML/AI were not so cool and consequently are in different domains)?

Plottable.js (http://plottablejs.org/examples/) is another library that takes a similar approach: reusable components written in D3, and a table-based composable layout system.

Here's the TensorFlow whitepaper http://download.tensorflow.org/paper/whitepaper2015.pdf

Great to see the Blockchain on the cover of the Economist, with a proper emphasis on underlying technical promise and not distracted discussion of Bitcoin. Also promising:

"Drawing up regulations for blockchains at this early stage would be a mistake: the history of peer-to-peer technology suggests that it is likely to be several years before the technology’s full potential becomes clear. In the meantime regulators should stay their hands, or find ways to accommodate new approaches within existing frameworks, rather than risk stifling a fast-evolving idea with overly prescriptive rules."

Yep, it was specifically when I wanted an application that would run a game loop involving round trips to the backend for every step that I ran into a lot of difficulty. Ports were not very clearly documented and I didn't find any examples, so I wound up writing Javascript instead.

My experience with Elm was that it's very elegant and fun to work with if you are building a purely clientside application, but once you need communication with server the APIs are not very well developed and it becomes a major headache.

Note that none of the examples in this page (or in any Elm tutorial I found) flesh out interaction with a backend.

I'm excited by this. I think that moving to Github will help the image problem Typescript has and make it a little more accessible, and it's actually a very useful + powerful technology. Compiler errors on refactors are great :)

On a 7kloc codebase it was around 3 seconds before the new compiler, seems to be about 1 second after.

Check out Plottable (https://github.com/palantir/plottable/). It's an open source library for data viz / charting, written as a layer on D3, and it's developed in Typescript. They have a mostly incomplete Github page here (http://palantir.github.io/plottable/) with a tutorial (http://palantir.github.io/plottable/tutorials/)

This post makes assertions based on a paucity of evidence or sound argument. "Her book fought the web and the web won". How did it "fight" the web? By ignoring it? Is my car "fighting the web" every morning?

I find the font uncomfortably small - make the styling more like HN?

I like to blame Microsoft for everything as much as the next guy, but the admittedly obnoxious blurb on Bitcoin doesn't seem to have anything to do with Microsoft. The article is written by "John Lyons, chief executive, International Cyber Security Protection Alliance", and I don't see evidence that Microsoft is affiliated with this group. The next page in the document is a Microsoft ad, but doesn't have anything to do with bitcoins.