mike_mg

Predicting what people want to consume is hard, especially if # of impressions is your success measure. More broadly, I have been endlessly surprised by how users use my products and what in particular they liked. You do tend to get better at feeling this out from seeing people interacting with your product, but you stand to be bewildered, forever. If only you saw in what circumstances people read your posts!

At the same time, some might say it's about the area under the curve. If 10 folks get their mind blown by in-depth treatment of some curious topic, it's roughly same amount of utils as 1e5 impressions on some silly quip if you ask me.

I, for one, am perpetually grateful to lcamtuf. I have been looking up to him for like 15 years, and he has shaped me profoundly by showing what level of focus, productivity and insight is possible. You wouldn't think that someone's life trajectory can get changed by super detailed CNC lore write up, but here we are, years later (: Thanks!!

Also, if you're reading this lcamtuf, I would like to put one vote in favour of re-instating the American essays. Pls don't pull a Kafka on us! I did read your "choosing how to be remembered" post, but still, the fact that you took the American essays down feeds right into the topic of this current post. I found them positively entertaining and insightful.

wait, aren't "they" going to gather evidence on user of "my account" and associate the downloads from this domain to "me" and come after me and ask hard questions?

Indeed, citing animal studies for humans is a classic bio meme: https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice

I haven't seen huberman accused of this yet, interesting. Innocent until proven guilty?

Does anybody else feel that way?

oh yeah, sure!

2 actionable things that changed my view on this things completely:

1) Huberman lab podcast on dopamine: https://hubermanlab.com/how-to-increase-motivation-and-drive.... It's not some self help BS, all based on science, backed by publications.

TL; DR, you might be riding too high on dopamine / layering too many dopaminergic activities. You might need to lower your base dopamine level.

2) for dealing with youtube specifically, block youtube recommended. Like youtube becomes only search bar, no recommended, no follow up videos etc. Complete game-changer for me.

https://pawelurbanek.com/youtube-addiction-selfcontrol https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29485064 https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pawurb

@pawurb, thank you for changing my life by unlocking youtube for me, without the addiction. I am very grateful.

This is probably just caffeine addiction :)

One way that works wonders in terms of fixing bad coffee for me is diluting the drink with lukewarm, warm or hot treated water (mineral, brita, etc).

Thanks! Removed. What I meant by that is "maybe we will add donate button in the future"

My wife has made tool for doing this on your IPhone. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/take-control/id1499424011

+ it is completely free, no ads, no nothing paid, not snooping your data

+ you don't have to unlock your phone - you can just type what you are doing inside the notification itself / choose from list of your usual activities

For modern music, the definitive resource (in my experience) is RYM: https://rateyourmusic.com/. It has several advantages: 1) extremely broad coverage - it is almost "list of all music ever" 2) the community has rated all of this music and "has good taste" 3) nice sorting and search capability

How to use: a) For overview of most important albums which is at the same time a reasonable overview of modern music history, use the default sorting https://rateyourmusic.com/customchart b) after you get into specific sub-genre's, use the sorting. For example, you discover you like Japanese 90s city-pop? Here's the query for you https://rateyourmusic.com/customchart?page=1&chart_type=top&... c) for music discovery, browse recommendation lists of people there. It is a true gold-mine of great music

For completness, to rollingstone.com and npr, I add pitchfork.com which is arguably the most important "independent" medium

I find the inverse surprising: that many algorithms that work on real-life robots _do_ _provide_ error bounds and their optimality / convergence properties are proven in the papers that introduce them.

A great example of this is motion planning, where papers both on sample-based methods (such as SST), and on search based (descendants of the A* family) argue at length the theoretical optimality and convergence properties.

On another note, I think requiring more theoretical analysis as a guarantee of safety could partially be an AI-winter meme rather than practical solution. Point in case: do people run a quick check of aerodynamics maths before boarding a flight? No - they rely mostly on the engineering and regulatory process that gradually made passenger flights safer.

While I appreciate the efforts of authors and believe in long term mission, they seem to not mention anywhere some key shortcomings of Ray, while marketing it pretty hard (eg see the paper).

I have used ray (a year ago) in one of the advertised basic applications: parallelising the environments for RL. It was unusable back then, as it was clogging up the memory.

The plasma store which is backend for arrow was never cleaned which made the computation stop after 3 hours

Here’s the issue:

https://github.com/ray-project/ray/issues/2128

Or perhaps this has been fixed already?

+1 on that, that's a great project.

PyTorch with its explicit state that can be easily examined by hand in PyCharm debugger will be way easier for people coming into the field.

Funnily enough I did very very similar project half a year ago or so:

Code: https://github.com/ghostFaceKillah/mini-self-driving-car

Writeup: https://ghostfacekillah.github.io/car.html

Good job for getting PWM steering right, I had only 3 state steering (full left, center, right) and it turned out to be quite a limitation in the end.

Could you please explain me how? I watched the lecture, but can't make connection. I understand how neural networks work and how they are optimized. I'm stupid. Thanks

traffic issues aside, great job. Quality resource, will recomend to cs undergrad friends

Yeah that's a cool exercise and I try to do a lot of these!

I guess expressing it mathematically purely is already done in the code of the original solution, because in a way program == proof. If you have some time, here's a great read on this: http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/upload_library/22...

Given function that checks if given string is a word accepted by the game or a sorted good words list, I think I would be able to. It's a very similar algorithm to queens problem. I'll try doing this and tell you!

Wow, that's just great! Thanks for recommendation! I guess iOS integration for this power-up wouldn't hurt. I use my iPad a lot while processing my to-dos

it is sort of confusing... do you really consider it a hard problem? I am first year maths student at Uni Warsaw and we literally had this problem in the first month, and solution was found by most people in just a few minutes. It sometimes amazes me how people here at HN find some hard for me problems easy and vice versa

Trello is just great for doing this. I was also considering writing my own Trello clone with better integration of calendar and plan to do so if I have some spare time this month.