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harveywi

1,563 karma · joined June 1, 2013

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harveywi··on Foldit
They missed an opportunity to call it Texas Fold 'Em.
harveywi··on American Ornithological Society changing the names of birds named after people
Instead of giving people the bird, they take the bird away from people.
harveywi··on What the The end of 0% interest rates means for software engineers
Also known as going to graduate school.
harveywi··on John Deere Announces Strategic Partnership with SpaceX
This is the result of Elon Musk playing too much Harvest Moon.
harveywi··on Impacts of lid closure during toilet flushing
That is a bit overkill and lacking in energy efficiency and sustainability, though. A more environmentally conscious solution would be for western nations to bring back some French innovations from the centuries ago such as the bidet followed by the trebuchet.
harveywi··on The question of poverty vs. instability
Better yet, be a force multiplier who is willing to relocate. Then when times get tough you have your abelian group to lean on.
harveywi··on Mapping the semantic void: Strange goings-on in GPT embedding spaces
Maybe a dumb question: Shouldn't these be called immersions instead of embeddings?
harveywi··on Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas without credit
LeCuna (noun): An empty space in a list of citations where the works of Jürgen Schmidhuber should appear.
harveywi··on Ask HN: How are you dealing with the job market anxiety?
1. Read this great "Surviving A Layoff" essay [1] and build a plan for yourself.

2. Take the time to level up on one or two foundational skills whose barriers to entry are combinations of tenacity and intelligence, or tech stacks that are very close to a foundational skill. Something like "Fart App Framework" is not a foundational skill because it becomes obsolete in a very short amount of time. Things like mathematics, statistics, hard sciences, cryptography, security, etc. will carry you through the rest of your career and create a moat.

3. Network, network, network.

4. Remind yourself that nothing lasts forever, that you're not in control of everything, that feelings of safety/security are merely feelings, and that the root of all suffering is attachment. If something's making you feel anxious or vulnerable, ask yourself why until you get to the bottom of it.

5. If you're consistently having negative thoughts, frame this experience in terms of gaining something (resilience, experience, wisdom) rather than losing something.

Good luck, and hang in there.

[1] https://oursoc.io/f/surviving-a-layoff

harveywi··on $200M gift propels scientific research in the search for life beyond Earth
The real problem with previous efforts for finding extraterrestrial life wasn't the technology, it was the lack of competition plus the open ended and uncertain goal. A seed rounds of $50M should be given out to two groups of competing researchers: One group tries to find evidence of extraterrestrial life, and the other group tries to find evidence of the abominable snowman in the Tibetan mountain ranges. The first group to make a discovery takes home the remaining $100M and settles the SETI vs. Yeti debate once and for all.
harveywi··on Major outages across ChatGPT and API
Fortunately for OpenAI, they have no SLAs: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/5008641-is-there-an-sla-...
harveywi··on 1.3B Worldcat scrape and data science mini-competition
>Over the past year, we’ve meticulously scraped all Worldcat records. At first, we hit a lucky break. Worldcat was just rolling out their complete website redesign (in Aug 2022). This included a substantial overhaul of their backend systems, introducing many security flaws. We immediately seized the opportunity, and were able scrape hundreds of millions (!) of records in mere days.

>After that, security flaws were slowly fixed one by one, until the final one we found was patched about a month ago. By that time we had pretty much all records, and were only going for slightly higher quality records.

OCLC carelessly fiddlefarted around with their moat and lost it. Poof!

harveywi··on Lean 4.0
Awesome! Where did the "split_ifs" tactic come from though? Mathlib? In your opinion does it make sense to do program verification without using Mathlib, or would you recommend just using it pretty much all the time?
harveywi··on The cartel that controls the US meat industry
Instacartel
harveywi··on Functional Programming in Coq
What ever happened to the effort [1] to rename Coq in order to make it less offensive? There were a number of excellent proposals [2] that seemed to die on the vine.

[1] https://github.com/coq/coq/wiki/Alternative-names

[2] https://github.com/coq/coq/wiki/Alternative-names#c%E1%B5%A3...

harveywi··on Want to get stuff done? Build yourself a “friction tunnel”
Not to be pedantic but there is nuance: A frictionless tunnel is better for getting shit done. Know the difference.
harveywi··on Functional Python Programming
Shameless plug for Scala programmers who are marooned in Python land and grasping for something to help dig them out: https://github.com/miiohio/ziopy
harveywi··on Apple Vision Pro: Apple’s first spatial computer
"A new era of facial computing."
harveywi··on In vitro biological system of cultured brain cells has learned to play Pong
DishBrain's elevator pitch: Neural networks meet fava beans and a nice Chianti.
harveywi··on OpenAI Outage
Fortunately for OpenAI, they have no SLAs: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/5008641-is-there-an-sla-...
harveywi··on Apple to occupy 90% of TSMC 3nm capacity in 2023
Sweat bullets? You may be confusing Tim Cook with Tim Gunn.
harveywi··on Harry Belafonte has died
Ok - I bereave you!
harveywi··on Physicists discover that gravity can create light
All this time I thought that gravity creates heavy, not light.
harveywi··on Inmates in a Brazil prison shorten their sentences by writing book reviews
It is as if "Crime and Punishment" were written for this exact purpose.
harveywi··on Elizabeth Holmes loses bid to stay out of prison
The fundamental question is whether the law distributes over addition.
harveywi··on Real-time quantum error correction beyond break-even
Yes and no.
harveywi··on Long-Term Cannabis Use, Cognitive Decline, and the Hippocampus
You might say that article is, in many ways, a puff piece.
harveywi··on Visual ChatGPT
Meta will probably soon release a competing technology. It will be called "DALL-E LLaMA".
harveywi··on Parse, don't validate (2019)
Based on Conal Elliott's new formulation of two dual parsing implementations [1] using inductive regular expressions and coinductive tries, where the former corresponds to symbolic differentiation and the latter corresponds to automatic differentation, the dual statment of "parse, don't validate" might be: "Do or do not. There is no trie."

[1] http://conal.net/papers/language-derivatives/

harveywi··on A Vulnerability in Implementations of SHA-3, Shake, EdDSA
It may be helpful to give this vulnerability a name, contributing to public awareness of the issue. For example, The SHA-Shake Redemption.
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