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divbiton Dual Numbers and Automatic Differentiation (2014)

Super cool. In this example, it's differentiation of a one-dimensional curve, but one can use the dual numbers to compute tangent spaces of more interesting algebraic objects as well. See, e.g. remark 5.38 here: http://www.jmilne.org/math/CourseNotes/AG500.pdf

divbiton PathNet: Evolution Channels Gradient Descent in Super Neural Networks

loss function tournament winner replacing hash winner in something like bitcoin mining

divbiton Show HN: Generate a quiz from a Wikipedia page

srry readme a bit out of date..

divbiton Show HN: Generate a quiz from a Wikipedia page

"grok" mode does a quiz on all notes of a certain topic

divbiton Show HN: Generate a quiz from a Wikipedia page

thats the idea behind http://github.com/divbit/grimoire as well, except more for private notes.

divbiton PathNet: Evolution Channels Gradient Descent in Super Neural Networks

Well yes, you could use neural net for the tournament selection, but I was thinking of a much dumber competition that involves a whole lot more distributed GPU power.

divbiton PathNet: Evolution Channels Gradient Descent in Super Neural Networks

"During learning, a tournament selection genetic algorithm is used to select pathways through the neural network for replication and mutation."

Trying to think of another 'tournament' like process that would allow for a massive distributed network where each node already has a decent GPU, where something like this could be successfully run. Maybe someone could help me out here...

divbiton Ask HN: I’ve been applying to a million jobs

Several of the comments here are pretty harsh about your works- to balance that out, I thought they were pretty cool, but then again I like retro / minimalistic things, and am not really a design expert.

divbiton Whole Foods is struggling

The draw imo is the following: you try to find e.g. a tortilla at 'average big chain supermarket' without any hydrogenated oils, and it's going to take 20 minutes of reading ingredients, and even then maybe there just aren't any. At Trader Joe- the standard tortilla (i.e. the trader joe brand tortilla) is made of basically the same ingredients you would use if you made it at home, and the price is reasonable. Whole foods is like a version of that, but rather than having everything be 'whole foods' brand, it's a bunch of fancy hipster brands. Sprouts is like that but with a very large selection of fruits and vegetables of usually higher quality than you can find at your standard grocery.

divbiton Pugs are anatomical disasters. Vets must speak out–even if it’s bad for business

15 km/h is quite fast

divbiton Pugs are anatomical disasters. Vets must speak out–even if it’s bad for business

What I am trying to point out is that it should be impossible to enjoy prolonged daily aerobic exercise under the constant respiratory distress the article is claiming for 'all such brachycephalic dogs.' Let me quote directly from the article: "The only time these dogs are not in some degree of respiratory distress is when you have them intubated under anaesthetic." What I am claiming, as a proof by contradiction of sorts, is that with proper exercise, it is possible that such a dog will not suffer from respiratory distress all the time, like the article is clearly claiming.

divbiton Pugs are anatomical disasters. Vets must speak out–even if it’s bad for business

Ok I will take the bait - breathing, especially over the course of lets say ~45 minute run should definitely have some relation to the part of anatomy the article was talking about (specifically, the vets are claiming that the smashed nose shape makes it harder for them to breath, in relation to other dog breeds). Surely being able to breathe correctly is necessary to run for 45-50 minutes continuously? What I am claiming, with my anecdote, is that maybe exercise can help alleviate problems related to being out-of-breath (certainly it does for people!) Based on my anecdote, one might suspect that the vets conclusions do not hold true for 'all' pugs. Maybe their argument is statistical, based on an analysis of a large number of pugs. Personally, I have seen many more out-of-shape pugs than in-shape pugs. On the other hand, maybe they are specifically arguing against very inbred variations, in which case, they are making a point against very in bred variations, and not pugs in general.

divbiton Pugs are anatomical disasters. Vets must speak out–even if it’s bad for business

Before I had to give my pug up this past summer - I used to take him for good length jog daily, and he would frequently out pace me. If a pug is in shape, it will do great. If you just feed it hotdogs all day and only infrequently give it proper exercise, then yes, I could see it being an anatomical disaster. Compare this dog's fitness http://imgur.com/a/doIi9 with the dog in the linked article.

divbiton Looking for Work After 25 Years of Octave

Grant applications, at least in academia, I've heard take lots of time / etc away from actual work - Although if this became the norm maybe it would lower the hurdle - Alternatively, an nomination system could be used, or something based on stars / forks / etc of a repository?

divbiton Free Barrett Brown donors sue DOJ, FBI for right to give anonymously

Ok, first amendment has been effectively nullified. Was not aware.

divbiton Fluid Paint Simulation

This is great for calligraphy with surface pen - can't find the black ink though.

divbiton Free Barrett Brown donors sue DOJ, FBI for right to give anonymously

IANAL but freedom of religion is the first amendment, and basically what the country was founded on: Matthews 6:3-4 "But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4 so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you."

I don't know if it applies in this case, but that's what I think of when I read this...

divbiton De-Anonymizing Web Browsing Data with Social Networks [pdf]

(From memory, so possibly miss some details)

Differential Privacy uses the concept of adding 'noise' to a dataset to make it statistically provable, that, if queries are supposed to only be A, B, C... then the adversary can only tell the target from noise with some probability - The point of restricting access to a subset of queries isn't really the main point of how DP improves privacy, but rather, restricting access to a subset of queries makes the formal proofs of things doable.

divbiton Ask HN: What are the most requested algorithms during technical interviews?

I am by no means good at programming interviews but

1. Generate all subsets of 1-n using the proof of cardinality of the powerset

2. Filter to subsets of size k

3. If it's an array of letters, use the filtered subsets to index the array

https://github.com/divbit/tspm/blob/master/example-projectEu...

divbiton Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads

I don't know much about gigabytes, but that seems like a lot

edit: (I'm guessing the downvotes are because I phrased it like a meme, but to clarify, this was a genuine compliment in response to a 'look what this person did' type post- it's inspiring stuff)

divbiton RethinkDB Relicensed under Apache 2.0

Am I reading this right? Rethinkdb is now under apache 2? That's awesome news - such great software.

divbiton As a conservative Twitter user sleeps, his account is hard at work

> wonder why Twitter is so popular

Anecdotally, I've found several useful tidbits on twitter that are less than newsworthy (maybe because they are not interesting to a large subset of people) but that never popped up other places- I'm probably not using it correctly though.

divbiton [dead]

"Third, objectivity. As long as the news media cling to the idea that “staying neutral” and “not taking a position” are the journalistic holy grail, they’ll leave the judgments on current events to the historians."

In case you don't take time to read, I guess one of the things this article is doing is calling for journalists to be less neutral and objective.

divbiton Ventusky – Weather data visualization

Beautiful. This should be used to introduce vector fields in Calc 3 / Manifolds type courses.

divbiton Ask HN: Coding notes – how do you do them?

https://github.com/divbit/grimoire

Example output pdf for sharing:

http://docdro.id/QPKoLBh

You can also style the notes by simply dropping a <style> some css element { some css thing: some number } <style> at the top of the note, which can make for decent good looking documents (on par with word etc if you are a css wizard). Also it has built in spaced repetition studying thing, which (the code is there, but I'm in the slow process of debugging it since I messed it up when I moved the state to redux, so it will be back in the next few commits).

You can copy/paste images to there, and write with markdown / latex, which is why I wrote it, since I couldn't find anything that did all those things conveniently.

divbiton Delete your account

(Server) Looks cool. What is the intended benefit over something like express?

divbiton Succeeding Against the Odds Can Make You Sick

I assumed, on reading, that they were suggesting it was due to some societal factors (e.g. racism) that makes it harder for black people, but maybe I misinterpreted it.

divbiton Succeeding Against the Odds Can Make You Sick

There is a also a wikipedia article on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomie which is a term I hadn't heard before.

divbiton Succeeding Against the Odds Can Make You Sick

TLDR (or at least what I took from it): Too much adversity produces stress that is bad for the body in that it ages your immune system much faster than it should.

Sounds plausible.

divbiton Ask HN: What's stopping you from using Firefox as your primary browser?

It was a bad cookie I think.