HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

mooneater

1,583 karma · joined October 12, 2007

robin@pathwayi.com

Head of Engineering @ SF VC AgFunder. Reinforcement learning fanatic. Host TalkRL Podcast talkrl.com Ex-Microsoft Technical PM Alum Waterloo Computer Engineering Alum Woodstock School

Vancouver BC area.

submissionscomments
mooneater··on Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?
I work for a VC, in case you are seeking funding for your startup, Material Science is interesting to us robin@agfunder.com
mooneater··on Relativistic Spaceship
If you fly backwards, its just all black
mooneater··on Strange Ways AI Disrupts Business Models
Good topic but I felt the types of disruption listed by the author were rather near term and short sighted.
mooneater··on Why people care about PostGIS and Postgres
Yeah I like transistor for my reinforcement learning show https://www.talkrl.com/ , their design has really improved
mooneater··on Why people care about PostGIS and Postgres
Because postgres and postgis are awesome!

I migrated to them in 2005 (from mysql) and was amazed by how much happier I was. And it never cost me a dollar.

I loved it so much I visited its authors in Victoria and bought consulting from them. They are amazing folks.

mooneater··on The Decision Book: Fifty models for strategic thinking (2019)
In those images I see: - complete graphs (the triangle matrices) - incomplete graphs (the circular ones with only some segments conntected)

And those are excellent ways to visualize these types of objects.

He built knowledge graphs.

mooneater··on Git-sim: Visually simulate Git operations in your own repos
Its... cool?

Alternative would be: clone the repo, do your changes, run gitk to be sure.

Which has advantage that result looks exactly the same as it will in production (no new diagram type b/c only using git and gitk), with zero risk that sim differs from reality.

mooneater··on Found ChatGPT’s Humans in the Loop
Wrong. No way they could scale using humans. Humans were used only for training data.

ChatGPT itself says all kinds of things; journalists using it as a source are either badly uninformed or purposely misleading readers.

mooneater··on Quitting the rat race
How much of this would be fixed if you lived in the woods and did the same job remotely (which is my situation with similar work).
mooneater··on Ask HN: I'm 40 and feel my mental ability declining. Programming seems harder.
You might try lions mane, a mushroom that noticeably boosts my mental clarity.

Also, being older we have a lot more on our mind. So methods to help organize and focus are more useful than ever to me now. Take notes, keep logs, etc.

mooneater··on Show HN: Pressn't – a site where you can only have a single post
Reminds me a bit of a social network concept of mine from years back: "Karachter"

"Imagine a social network where you only need, in fact you are only allowed, one friend. Imaging a messaging service so personal, so patient, and yes, so damned meaningful, that it only transmits one single character, to your one friend, each day. "

http://randomfeelsgood.blogspot.com/2014/02/announcing-karac...

mooneater··on The Society of Mind (1986) [pdf]
Sounds similar to what Google's SayCan is doing. https://say-can.github.io/

They taught it separate skills. When a situation arises, the skills (which you could almost consider sub-agents) compete to decide who is most likely to be relevant here. Then that skill takes over for a bit.

They also have a version called "Inner Monologue" in which the different parts "talk to each other" in the sense of collaboratively creating a single inner monologue, allowing for reactiveness/closed loop behaviour.

I interviewed 2 authors of SayCan/Inner Monologue here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/karol-hausman-and-fei-...

mooneater··on Ask HN: In-depth sites for various industries' news?
Ag and food tech industry news: https://agfundernews.com (disclosure: I work for Agfunder)
mooneater··on Waymo's collision avoidance testing
Is any of Waymo Driver's design published? Like do they use RL or how do they approach control.
mooneater··on Google Zanzibar Through Our Eyes
I love the annotation interface, did you do that all yourself or use a tool? Ty!
mooneater··on Show HN: Web search using a ChatGPT-like model that can cite its sources
I interviewed an author of WebGPT here, OpenAI co-founder John Schulman if you're interested, and he talks about it https://www.talkrl.com/episodes/john-schulman
mooneater··on D2, a diagram scripting language that turns text to diagrams, is now open source
20+ year fan of graphviz here, love seeing what you are doing with D2!

Any examples of larger diagrams (1000+s of nodes) and how does that perform in layout?

mooneater··on Basics of Concrete Barriers (2000)
I'm glad they are thinking through the details on barrier design.

Lets not forget that is only necessary because the automotive industry is barbaric to begin with. Let's recall why trains dont require advanced crash barrier design like this.

mooneater··on US annual inflation declines to 7.7% in October vs. 7.9% expected
Does anyone actually think this number is accurate to a decimal place?
mooneater··on Our brains 'time-stamp' sounds to process the words we hear
I remember in grade 8 my geography teacher noticing I wasn't paying attention and asking: "What did I just say?"

The sound of his last couple sentences were in my recent memory (timestamped?), but it seems I hadn't fully parsed them yet. When he asked, I took a brief moment to parse them, then to his disappointment I repeated them verbatim to him.

I'll never forget the way my brain processed delayed audio that day!

mooneater··on ‘Putin’s chef’ admits to interfering in U.S. elections
> there are things we the public NEED to do

I dont disagree, but my take is relying on public changing its behavior is not exactly a hopeful strategy.

mooneater··on ArriveCan’s $54M price tag ‘outrageous,’ tech leaders say
So glad our high taxes are being put to good use, merci notre gouvernement fédéral
mooneater··on Tell HN: I'm Afraid We're Shutting Down
Love the vision, respect the dedication, thanks for the inspiration! A true gentleman and scholar tips hat.
mooneater··on Donald Knuth on work habits, problem solving, and happiness (2020)
> not prediction based on anything statistical but based on one's understanding

It is still statistical. You still want to predict a distribution over expected next token.

However, the function needed to estimate the likely next tokens are not simple max over enumerated next tokens like in a language model. It's more like a transition model in reinforcement learning.

mooneater··on Donald Knuth on work habits, problem solving, and happiness (2020)
> trying to work the concepts out in my own mind and to anticipate what the authors are going to say before turning each page. I usually fail to guess what the next page holds, but the fact that I've tried and failed makes me more ready to understand why the authors chose the paths that they did

TIL Donald Knuth operates a bit like GPT-3 but for research paper narrative.

mooneater··on Donald Knuth on work habits, problem solving, and happiness (2020)
> they haven’t learned the fundamental ideas of algebra

I'd very much love to know exactly what Knuth considers the "fundamental ideas of algebra"!

mooneater··on Ask HN: Have we screwed ourselves as software engineers?
Unneeded complexity is the greatest enemy of the software engineer.

Unnecessarily complicated is the default. Choose the elegant thing wherever possible (its not always possible, but often is).

Actively avoid complexity, or it will shackle you.

mooneater··on The best engineering interview question I've ever gotten
can you say more about how you detect instinct?
mooneater··on ACM Opens First 50 Years Backfile
Downvoters: fine downvote me, but can you also name a perk that matters?
mooneater··on ACM Opens First 50 Years Backfile
Go further, open it all.
Page 1 of 18Next →