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liviu-

235 karma · joined December 15, 2014

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liviu-··on The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)
>Torrents don't really work for music

How come? I know What.CD closed down, but I remember that RuTracker had quite a large selection of high-fidelity music records.

liviu-··on “We have decided to disable IMDb's message boards”
Not at all: please check out /r/TrueFilm and /r/flicks.
liviu-··on Ask HN: Which developers do you closely follow?
I suspect he's referring to following HN and similar communities.
liviu-··on This AI Boom Will Also Bust
My understanding is that the grandparent comment was referring to _software_ engineers.
liviu-··on Top Books on Amazon Based on Number of HN Users Linking Them in Comments
>Surprised SICP isn't in there.

I'm sure people are more likely to link to the actual SICP page [1] rather than the Amazon page, especially as it's free on the website. If the discussion was in the context of buying the book, I would personally still link the MIT Press page [2], rather than the Amazon page.

Searching for "https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/" on Algolia's HN search engine results in 72 hits [3].

----

[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/

[2] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/structure-and-interpretation-...

[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=https://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/...

liviu-··on Show HN: Lightweight time-management CLI tool
Ding has `--version`, and a help message too :P

To be honest, a big chunk of it is just handling user input and attempting to provide useful error messages.

liviu-··on Show HN: Lightweight time-management CLI tool
Great point -- there's a pull request addressing this issue just now: https://github.com/liviu-/ding/pull/4
liviu-··on Show HN: Tomato – Pomodoro Timer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomodoro_Technique
liviu-··on SSL considered bloated
The "one-line" server is just multiple commands separated by ';' and joined into one line. At best a pointless exercise, and at worst a deceiving one.
liviu-··on Why I Live in IRC (2015)
projects ML?
liviu-··on A Visual History of Which Countries Have Dominated the Summer Olympics
Is there a name for this type of graph?
liviu-··on More microbursts are coming
So the International Energy Agency predicts that by 2035 humans may disappear? What about more recent predictions?
liviu-··on Image-diff – Create an image differential between two images
>It doesn't depend on ImageMagick (a bonus in my book)

Why is it a bonus besides lowering the number of dependencies?

liviu-··on Ask HN: Why can I only downvote some comments?
Especially given that HN offers no support for saving items other than upvoting.
liviu-··on Sorry ARIMA, but I’m Going Bayesian
I found it quite interesting to compare HN and /r/statistics in terms of the tone difference in the comments when discussing this article: https://www.reddit.com/r/statistics/comments/4fw1bn/sorry_ar...
liviu-··on Have You Tried Using a Nearest Neighbor Search?
> I quickly discovered that such a system was overkill for me, and resorted to using an open source implementation of a simpler algorithm [1].

Maybe worth pointing out that the "simpler algorithm" they used seems to be a cascading ensemble of adaptive boosting algorithms, technique similar to the ones used on Kaggle to win the big prizes. Maybe simpler than some neural nets in some ways, but nothing close to the simplicity of nearest neighbour search.

[1] http://docs.opencv.org/2.4/doc/tutorials/objdetect/cascade_c...

liviu-··on What Software Engineers Earn Compared to the General Population
http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/mar/25/uk-incomes-how-...
liviu-··on What Software Engineers Earn Compared to the General Population
Both arithmetic mean and median are averages, so unless they specify what average they used for the annual income, you may only assume what the author meant.

EDIT: Never mind, the author also says:

>Moreover, we compare median annual values for software engineers with mean annual values for the general population

liviu-··on I’m not a human: Breaking the Google reCAPTCHA [pdf]
TL;DR from https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/4dvifg/im_not_a_hum... (though you may be overly-cautious as blackhat.com seems to be the webpage of a computer security conference [1]):

"""

Live attack To obtain an exact measurement of our attack’s accuracy, we run our automated captcha-breaker against reCaptcha. We employ the Clarifai service as it shows the best result amount other services.

Labelled dataset. We created a labelled dataset to exploit the image repetition. We manually labelled 3,000 images collected from challenges, and assigned each image a tag describing the content. We selected the appropriate tags from our hint list. We used pHash for the comparison, as it is very efficient, and allows our system to compare all the images from a challenge to our dataset in 3.3 seconds. We ran our captcha-breaking system against 2,235 captchas, and obtained a 70.78% accuracy. The higher accuracy compared to the simulated experiments is, at least partially, attributed to the image repetition; the history module located 1,515 sample images and 385 candidate images in our labelled dataset.

Average run time. Our attack is very efficient, with an average duration of 19.2 seconds per challenge. The most time consuming phase is running GRIS, consuming phase, as it searches for all the images in Google and processes the results, including the extraction of links that point to higher resolution versions of the images.

"""

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

liviu-··on Free “Deep Learning” Textbook by Goodfellow and Bengio Now Finished
For anyone interested, Goodfellow is answering questions about the book at: https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/4domnk/the...
liviu-··on Sci-Hub, spiritual successor to Aaron Swartz, angering publishers all over again
Or just http://libgen.io/ for a more friendly URL.
liviu-··on Publicly Funded Research Should Be Publicly Available
Could you please elaborate for those unfamiliar with their community?
liviu-··on AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol again in match 2 of 5
>It was noted that even in 9x9 Go, with a comparable branching factor to Chess, traditional Go programs are still no stronger than on big boards.

Are they not? MoGo beat pros of 9 Dan on 9x9 in 2011: https://www.lri.fr/~teytaud/mogo.html

liviu-··on The Unbearable Asymmetry of Bullshit
> a good Masters degree will definitely leave a motivated and skilled student with a good advisor a master of his or her specific field.

I'm having trouble believing this.

In UK, most Masters degrees last 1 year, and there are several degrees considered good such as Imperial's MSc in Machine Learning, Cambridge's MPhil in Machine Learning, Speech and Language Technology, Edinburgh's MSc in Cognitive Science, and others. Is it really possible to become a "master" of machine learning in one year?

Also, at least in Computer Science, most of the Bachelors degrees considered good in UK do not seem to focus at all on replicating science. In fact, for my final year undergraduate project, I was encouraged to find something novel, and at no point my supervisor hinted towards focusing on replicability.

Is it perhaps more common in US?

liviu-··on Why WhatsApp Only Needs 50 Engineers for Its 900M Users
Twitter does IM too: https://about.twitter.com/directmessages
liviu-··on Twitter Contest Winning as a Service
>In those cases, I just messaged them back and told them to give the prize to someone else.
liviu-··on Examining Microsoft Edge Browser Performance
Maybe you're right, but I feel like if there's one thing that will tip them off, it's the graphical similarity of the icons, rather than all the OS connections you've described.
liviu-··on Examining Microsoft Edge Browser Performance
Cause a) recently they've been showing more interest in developing for different platforms (OneNote, Visual Studio Code); b) the other major browsers have a Linux release; c) IE had a release for Linux at some point; and d) there is a market of people that might use their product.
liviu-··on Examining Microsoft Edge Browser Performance
>Renaming your browser won't change peoples' memory of Internet Explorer, even if Microsoft built Edge from the ground up. The average person is still going to be thinking IE when they see it.

Maybe I'm underestimating how culturally aware the average person is, but I doubt most people will care to make this connection between IE and Edge.

liviu-··on Examining Microsoft Edge Browser Performance
He means opening the previous page history-wise in a new tab.
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