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daralthus

810 karma · joined February 11, 2010

twitter: @bonsaielectric
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daralthus··on Phase 3 clinical trial of Ambroxol for Parkinson’s confirmed
Ambroxol is a common ingredient of cough syrups that promotes the clearance of mucus.
daralthus··on Ask HN: How did you find joy in life?
Read Impro by Keith Johnstone. Had a lot of practical games I could try to enhance my playfulness, imagination, social abilities, etc. He also started with the exact same problem you mention.
daralthus··on Statements vs. Expressions
I would like to see a programming language where there is no distinction between the two. This might sound silly first, but once you start thinking about homoiconicity or about function approximations, like neural nets that can represent any function (as sort of a compressed lookup table) then you can start to imagine how a sufficiently advanced compiler should be able to inline approximate representations, or switch to calculating on the fly depending on needs and available resources.
daralthus··on Ten Percent of the Brain Myth
Finding something in a sorted list is O(log n) instead of O(n) in non-sorted. Finding a good representation for the problem matters.
daralthus··on CandyCodes: Simple unique edible identifiers for authenticating pharmaceuticals
Also mentionable that you can collect data on who took what and when.
daralthus··on Ask HN: What are some good inspirational and uplifting books?
Impro - Keith Johnestone
daralthus··on Long-Chain Omega-3 Fatty Acids Improve Brain Function, Structure in Older Adults (2014)
Isn't the Omega-3 to Omega-6 ratio the more important over just consuming enough Omega-3?
daralthus··on Managing Python Versions with Pyenv
Never tried Pyenv, but I can highly recommend Mamba a fully Conda compatible package manager that is insanely fast solving dependencies.

Installing python: `mamba install python=3.9`

daralthus··on Scallop: A Neurosymbolic Programming Language
Just based on the docs, on the lowest level they both create a mapping from input features to relations. Then NeuraLogic has an example for implementing GCN like message passing with a simple relational rule:

``` node2(X) <= W node1(Y), edge(X, Y) ```

Do you know, is it possible to implement something on Scallop as well, or are the differences much larger?

daralthus··on Scallop: A Neurosymbolic Programming Language
How does this compare to NeuraLogic?

https://github.com/LukasZahradnik/PyNeuraLogic

daralthus··on From context collapse to content collapse (2020)
- context collapse: different personal identities collapse onto one social media

- content collapse: different mediums (tv, radio, newspaper) collapse onto a feed

- reality collapse: different forms of content, fictional or real collapse onto a single stream: propaganda, marvel universe, GPT-3, Dall-E, etc.

Could be a nice sci-fi theme.

daralthus··on France's Jean Zay supercomputer now has an integrated photonic coprocessor
It does random projections [1] which is really useful for dimensionality reduction.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_projection

daralthus··on Mechanical Computer – Basic Mechanisms in Fire Control Computers (1953) [video]
As a fun exercise add erosion into the picture as a memory mechanism. Then just imagine a river flowing, rocks tumbling, birds chirping...
daralthus··on Ask HN: How do you build your personal start page?
I forked https://github.com/antonycourtney/tabli to show the same UI on new tabs as well. It's a good enough solution to tab overload and helps me organize and re-open the appropriate contexts to work or research.
daralthus··on Every pricing page should have GIFs
Also if you are not doing it yet, demonstrate and announce every new feature in Slack to your team in a dedicated channel. With gifs.
daralthus··on Ask HN: Why is machine learning easier to learn than basic social skills?
The book, Impro by Keith Johnstone was very practical for me. If you take part in an actual improvisational workshop even better.

It's not for everyone and it might be less general than what you aim for, but imho it' a good start.

daralthus··on Psychonetics: A nerd's toolset to work with mind and perception
Perhaps a note about grounding techniques form psychology should be added here, as many of the exercises may cause anxiety or even psychosis.

If you happen to feel uneasy try this:

Look around and take a mental inventory of things around you: "This is a lamp. This is a table. This is a room..."

daralthus··on Intestinal drug shown to boost memory and cognition
No surprise here, starvation also enhances your senses, but you wouldn't want to do it all the time...
daralthus··on AngelList Stack
Anything like this for EU?
daralthus··on Multiperspective Diagramming – A guide for system engineers
It's like projections of a graph. Been looking for something like this for so long, wow!
daralthus··on Multicomputation as a General Paradigm for Theoretical Science
Seems like an application of the ladder of abstraction. [0] That is, abstracting over every possible value of a variable in a system.

In this case we abstract over time in a system of computation. To be more precise the system is a non-deterministic automata, so we abstract over time and all the possible branches too.

Mapping out all state of a non-deterministic automata, you eventually find overlaps of different branches. To Wolfram this is a big revelation since instead of the system getting more complicated you found some simplification, aka. generality.

[0] http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/

daralthus··on Hash collision in Apple NeuralHash model
Putting aside the original intent what else can they scan for that's worth doing in the aggregate with this tech?
daralthus··on Introduction To Program Synthesis (2018)
Perhaps https://ml4code.github.io/tags.html#benchmark
daralthus··on Launch HN: BlackOakTV (YC S21) – Netflix for black people
When it comes to tech, look around for Netflix as a service providers out there so you can just focus on content. One of the bigger ones I know is https://www.accedo.tv but I am sure the commenters will help you find more.
daralthus··on Overcoming Tab Overload
Skeema sounds something I would try, but fully open source is a must.
daralthus··on Overcoming Tab Overload
I can highly recommend Tabli [1] an open source chrome extension that you can use to save and restore groups of tabs very quickly.

[1] https://www.gettabli.com/

daralthus··on Avoiding Leetcode Anxiety
When starting with Leetcode you face two questions:

1. Which ones should I do to be prepared?

2. For a given problem how do I find the knowledge that should have helped me recognise and solve it?

Imho, the Competitive Programmer’s Handbook [1] does answer these, every trick and pattern is explained in the most succinct way, in the order you would want to progress on leetcode to see all the basic problem formulations. Afaik every random interview question would fit into one of these.

Let me know if you know a better one.

[1] https://cses.fi/book/book.pdf

daralthus··on Why not faster computation via evolution and diffracted light?
I don't get the negativity. This is indeed an emerging field, so just going to throw in a few examples:

- Google using RL for chip layout optimization [1]

- Stanford profs optimizing lenses end to end with image processing [2]

As for the "diffractive deep neural network" paper it is not really a deep network as they don't implement the non-linearities in the optical domain. That still is the hard bit, so maybe the monocle is not realistic, but fortunately there are ways it can still speed up computation.

There is a general consensus that GPU-s enabled the current deep learning revolution and perhaps as argued by the Hardware Lottery paper [3] backprop is really just the current lucky ticket. So why not try to evolve hardware with ML for other algorithms too?

As for the questions raised, I do want to know your answer to this:

> a question for computer scientists, what single question would you ask if you have a dedicated computer that was [that multiplier] faster?

[1] https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/04/chip-design-with-deep-rein...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJdsxXOfqvw

[3] https://hardwarelottery.github.io

daralthus··on Prisma – ORM for Node.js and TypeScript
Can someone compare to Hasura please? What has been your experience?
daralthus··on Pulumi 3.0
<3 Pulumi. It's really nice defining what you want to exist at a cloud provider or as a k8s service, and it will make sure that it is there and nothing else. All in typescript.
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