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chundicus

208 karma · joined October 25, 2019

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chundicus··on Show HN: Twitch Roulette – Find live streamers who need views the most
What about https://nobody.live/?
chundicus··on DuckDB: Querying JSON files as if they were tables
For me it depends a lot on the context. JSON is often very human readable (as long as it's not too deeply nested), fairly well defined (compared to CSVs), and most languages and software have easy out of the box support for parsing and manipulating it.

If I were building a system that had to deal with large amounts of tabular data that isn't directly consumed by humans, JSON wouldn't be my first choice nor my last.

chundicus··on Why thinking hard makes us feel tired
> Garbage collection tasks are postposed to when we're asleep, but they can only be put off for so long and there's a capacity for "stuff to consolidate later" that fills up

Do we have a strong reason to believe that? I know brain and sleep mechanisms are tricky topics with lots of unknowns, but I thought I had read research that showed sleeping brains likely perform a chemical analogue to "garbage collection".

chundicus··on Fretastic: Guitar fretboard visualizer – scales, intervals, backing tracks
Great tool! Nice way of condensing and displaying a lot of information. Doesn't look like 'intervals' is working though.

I'll have to use this to brush up on scales and see how it goes.

chundicus··on Meta Unveils New AI Supercomputer
I can't shake the feelings that a trillion or a quadrillion parameters won't solve the fundamental shortcomings of ML models not being models of artificial intelligence. I guess there's no way of knowing until we reach AGI, but I've never heard a compelling argument for why pure ML would get us there. GPT3 seems more like an argument against that hypothesis (in my view) than for it. Even the best, most expensive models today are incredibly brittle for enterprise usecases that shouldn't necessarily require AGI.

I've always imagined AGI (perhaps naively) as being achieved by clever usage of ML, plus some utilization of classical/symbolic AI from pre-AI winter days, plus probably some unknown elements.

chundicus··on Veloren – Open-source MMORPG written in Rust
Data races is what I meant; good catch.
chundicus··on Veloren – Open-source MMORPG written in Rust
Likely a joy for Rust and a desire to try something ambitious that hasn't really been done.

Rust doesn't have the mature libraries that C# offers, but it isn't barren anymore either. It does offer nice assurances like entirely avoiding race conditions by default (when using safe Rust). Rust often leads to performant code, but it's hard to say if that's really a feature of the language or just a bias due to the kinds of people using it and the projects they work on.

If you're just looking to get into game development without any other goals in mind, then C# is a safer choice

chundicus··on ColdMac – a 2009 iMac self-serving graphs of it’s temps in a cold outdoor shed
This is such a silly but entertaining project. I love that it's the server for the website as well.
chundicus··on Coronavirus is in the air – there’s too much focus on surfaces
I would imagine money primarily. On top of that, the larger the room gets the more costly and ineffective this becomes.
chundicus··on CD Projekt Red is under investigation
Agreed. By "this" I actually (confusingly) was more so referring to the general negative feedback Cyberpunk has been receiving.
chundicus··on CD Projekt Red is under investigation
I hope this will encourage big studios to stop releasing broken games, but I doubt it will. The incentives are just so broken due to ease of patching, a need/desire for cash after a drawn out dev process, and a general disrespect for their customers.

I think releasing a "broken" game in the form of "early access" from smaller studios can be good in terms of iterative and community development, but also that can be abused too. These bigger studios really don't have as much of an excuse in my opinion.

The only solution I see is to stop pre-ordering games and don't reward studios that do this, but easier said than done.

chundicus··on U.S. Bill H.R.69 introduced – To make daylight savings time permanent
Wow, that's pretty interesting.
chundicus··on U.S. Bill H.R.69 introduced – To make daylight savings time permanent
I didn't know they didn't have time zones. Are people there just used to the fact 8am will look very different depending on which region your in?
chundicus··on Quitting a New Job
Yeah people are "lazy" in that they don't want to spend precious few free hours of their weeks grinding out a gimmicky skill-set that is at best tangential to the actual work they would be doing.

I understand there is no simple solution to how to hire software engineers, but you should be able to recognize why a lot of us don't like the current status quo of interviewing (even if you thrive in it).

chundicus··on Vapor – Decentralized Web over Bitcoinized HTTP
I still don't see how this has anything to do with decentralization, and frankly the way you're justifying it sounds like you wanted to use a clickbaity word that doesn't really apply here.

How does this help data ownership? How does this decentralize the 'power structure'? The ownership and power is still in the hands of the server. The benefits you highlight here are addressed by SSL. Is this trying to address the downsides of SSL? I can't see how it is/would.

It seems like 'frictionless monetization' is the only thing this really addresses, and even that I'm skeptical of.

I don't mean to be such a detractor, but you really need to reconsider what the purpose of this technology is and sell that purpose better. Because your current explanation makes no sense.

chundicus··on Vapor – Decentralized Web over Bitcoinized HTTP
does Vapor solve any of the issues with SSL? I'm genuinely asking because I can't see that it does
chundicus··on Ask HN: How does one lead a team in a hackathon?
I led a hackathon team in an in-person 24 hour hackathon, so it's not exactly the same but here's my advice:

- Getting people excited means giving a good elevator pitch and following up with any specifics you've mapped out. Tell them what you're trying to solve, why you're solving it, and how. Engaging with feedback/criticism of the plan will help get interested people on board. Make sure you try to match people's interests to the work to be done. I.e. assigning a backend-oriented person to do frontend work is a great way to kill motivation (unless of course they've requested it).

- For remote: make sure you have clear lines of communication and a clear delineation of work. Be available at a moment's notice to answer any questions.

-- a Slack channel (or something similar) for your team for ad hoc, asynchronous communication is a good idea

-- daily standups over video/voice would be a good idea. Make sure to take longer conversations offline as to keep everyone productive.

- As far as structuring the week that's harder to answer. Map out the work to be done, break it up by person, and then giving a loose timeline with some wiggle room. Something like a Gantt chart could help here, but there are a number of ways you could organize this.

chundicus··on Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up
I wouldn't care as much if they weren't simultaneously sacking their work force and ending work on popular products. I'm sure Google is trying to paint them in a bad light, but honestly it's not hard with the current leadership and doesn't take any dishonesty.
chundicus··on Cameras on San Diego streetlights turned off until ordinance in place
Interesting! I guess that makes sense but I definitely would have underestimated that cost.

In this case the cost seemed to apply in part to 3,000 cameras. But solely based on the article, it's hard for me to tell what portion of that $30 million went to upgrades/maintenance and what portion went to the cameras. However it does clearly say it would be another $7 million to maintain the cameras over the next four years.

chundicus··on 2020 has been a year without a flu season in the southern hemisphere
Depends what your metrics are, but very likely no. Even if you could prove it was a "good trade off", good luck convincing anyone. In America we're seeing how stubborn people are to take any actual steps against a deadly virus, they would absolutely scoff at any intrusive measure meant to prevent the flu.
chundicus··on Cameras on San Diego streetlights turned off until ordinance in place
$30 million dollars? Feel like we could have used that money in many better ways...
chundicus··on GitPals – Find team for cooperative development
Are you serious? This sounds truly awful.
chundicus··on How we learnt to stop worrying and love web scraping
why would it?
chundicus··on The Computational Power of Biological Dendritic Trees
Okay, what models?
chundicus··on Covid vaccine makers commit to not seek approval until complete Phase III trials
My understanding is that the data has to be overwhelmingly good to stop the trial early.

I suspect the Trump administration's ability to actually fabricate trial data would be pretty limited without collateral damage (i.e. whistleblowing). Their ability to push it out of Phase III prematurely however is more debatable.

chundicus··on The Computational Power of Biological Dendritic Trees
For early perceptrons, maybe; even that feels like a stretch. Every neural network model that has been created after that has nearly zero relation to any sort of biological, cognitive system.
chundicus··on Reading mind and Visualizing thoughts using AI
This feels pretty sensationalist given the methodology and results, but it's an interesting avenue of research nonetheless. I'm curious about the limitations of fMRI or any other "external" data collection. I'm not eager to see things like NeuralLink be effective, but it feels more likely in some ways.
chundicus··on Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver
Sorry for my daftness, but what is the incentive behind intentionally losing a bunch of staff before 'exiting'? Just to reduce your cash burn?
chundicus··on Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver
As someone not too familiar with the ins and outs of acquisitions or IPOs... is it unusual to get acquired after laying off a big chunk of your staff? Is that an indicator that they probably accepted a lower valuation than they would have before that layoff?
chundicus··on Russia opposition leader poisoned with Novichok
Okay I'm sure there is always some post-Soviet era bias being applied, but does that change anything substantially? Did the "West" also lie about this Novichok attack on UK soil? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Sergei_and_Yulia_...

Your baseless tinfoil skepticism is extremely useful to fascists like Putin who thrive off of spreading disinformation and uncertainty.

Do Western countries lie to benefit themselves geopolitically? Of course they do, but let's apply Occam's Razor here and not go looking for a global conspiracy when the answer and motivations are so blatant.

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