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nathanathan

31 karma · joined May 9, 2013

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nathanathan··on Show HN: I Derived a Pancake
I love this
nathanathan··on Kevin Langdon's 'Omni' IQ test
My system prompt tells it to occasionally teach me Chinese words and phrases.
nathanathan··on Kevin Langdon's 'Omni' IQ test
It was interesting to see how ChatGPT performed on the word problem about determining which weight is inaccurate: https://chatgpt.com/share/67611e29-6db4-800b-9ebd-00d7938380... I was surprised by how poorly it did.
nathanathan··on Do-nothing scripting: the key to gradual automation (2019)
Combining this technique with an automation website like Jenkins and a "no code" programing language could be an interesting product. I imagine having a UI where prompts can be specified and predefined components like send X an email can be dropped into the workflow. Acknowledgments that steps and complete can be tracked, and long running workflows could be shared between users.
nathanathan··on Lawrence Livermore claims a milestone in laser fusion
Why is the power density of the ARC/SPARC reactor problematic?
nathanathan··on Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions?
1. Soli style gesture controls will be ubiquitous.

2. Construction will begin on a structure that will be taller than anything we have now and use an active support system.

3. A child will be born that lives to be 234.

4. Andrew Yang will be elected to some office, but it probably won't be president.

nathanathan··on The Theory of Interstellar Trade
Cells might be worth transporting. Although the DNA can be sent as data and reconstructed, de novo reconstruction of the rest of the cellular machinery needed to run the DNA might not be practical.
nathanathan··on Lossless Web Navigation with Trails
I would like to see a split screen mode applied to trails. Seeing the current page along side the page I visited to get to it would work well on a lot of the sites I visit. For instance, it would be useful to see the main page of HN along side pages I reached from it and be able to click on the HN links to alter the content of the other panel similar to the way side navs work in many apps.
nathanathan··on Operating Systems
FLOSS has a warm-hearted host with some good computer stories but it's not really a call-in show. They do answer some chatroom questions.
nathanathan··on Chrome is developing a Sidebar API
I've been working on a graphical command-line for manipulating webpages with natural language queries (https://contextscript.com). So far I've been using a bookmarklet, which has the benefit of working across browsers, but it has a lot of drawbacks too. If I go the browser extension route, this looks like it would be very useful for developing the UI.
nathanathan··on Show HN: Context Script – Share natural language commands for the web
Thanks for trying it out! I haven't noticed problems with cors enabled sites in general, so I'm curious what you tried to do. The bookmarklet doesn't with with websites that use headers to block scripts and css from unknown domains. Github is one example.
nathanathan··on Show HN: Learn Chinese Through Novels
Nice work! I'm thinking about buying the novel but I would like to be able to use Paypal.
nathanathan··on Wave-particle duality is the uncertainty principle in disguise
> The particles pile up behind the slits not in two heaps as classical objects would, but in a stripy pattern like you'd expect for waves interfering. At least this is what happens until you sneak a look at which slit a particle goes through - do that and the interference pattern vanishes.

Could any of the physicists here verify whether it is the case that detecting the slit the particle passes through destroys the interference pattern. I had the impression that the path of the photons could be determined without destroying the pattern.

nathanathan··on Researchers Announce Advance in Image-Recognition Software
A browser extension that uses this to fill in missing image alt text could be really useful for the vision impaired.
nathanathan··on Amazon Echo
I would like to know if the question answering system is all in house tech or if Amazon is using 3rd party services like Watson.
nathanathan··on Amazon Echo
Defining commands and their corresponding actions is something I think an open source could actually do much more effectively than companies. When everyone in the world can contribute commands rather than a single team of software devs it is possible build up a much larger collection of them. I would really like the ability to add commands to a natural language command system when a command I use doesn't work. Also, I think that a reprogramable command system would open up an interesting programming paradigm where one could define new commands and actions in terms of other commands in the system. For example,

What's new?

> Unrecognized command

When I say "What's new" read the "In the news..." section of Wikipedia's main page.

> Acknowledged.

nathanathan··on The Flaw Lurking in Every Deep Neural Net
The way people classify hybrid images is a function of how far away they are. I wonder if these are essentially hybrid images for neural nets. It seems like the noise being added is very high frequency. Given that, I would bet that neural nets classify typical hybrid images the same way as they would the sharper image component.
nathanathan··on The Quest to Build an Elevator into Space
I've asked about the concept here as well: http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=109979 I suggested a two designs and the one I mentioned on hn has an ascii drawing about halfway down the page.
nathanathan··on The Quest to Build an Elevator into Space
I would like to know if electromagnetic flux pinning is strong enough to use instead of a cable. I'm imagining a scenario where pairs of rotating superconductor panels in orbit lift a giant solenoid into space by flux pinning its magnetic field as they rotate upwards.
nathanathan··on How to spot first stories on Twitter using Storm
For the problem of filtering out false alarms, this paper seems to have made some significant advances over the fscore for baseline nearest neighbor approach: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.221.... They report an average f-score of 0.541 on a standard TDT corpus. For comparison, their implementation of the NN algorithm had an f-score of 0.450. There's still a long ways to go on this problem.
nathanathan··on Enough Machine Learning to Make Hacker News Readable Again [video]
It would be nice if scikit-learn included an "autolearn" function based on this flow-chart.
nathanathan··on Ask HN: Idea Sunday
[X-post from the previous Idea Sunday thread that didn't make it to the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7616132]

Idea: Git-story, a website that generates summary narratives from git commit histories and other github data.

Here's a brain-dump with some ideas for the specifics:

Use foreshadowing: "It all started with one person, X, spending months to gradually build what would one day become Y, a project forked by hundreds and starred by thousands."

When someone makes their first contribution to a project give them a brief introduction, like a shorter version of http://osrc.dfm.io/

Use sentiment analysis on commit messages to say things like "Frustrations mount as...", "the developers rejoice after..."

When people work on multiple concurrent branches use use phrases like: Meanwhile, X and Y toil away on the new Z feature.

Use the time between commits to chunk them into single sentences/paragraphs. Also, add comments if the project goes dormant, or if there is a spike in development.

Use keywords in commit messages like merge, revert, resolve to generate events in the story.

When bugs are resolved look for linked issues and use the age of the bug and number of comments to say thinks like "X finally fixed the controversial Y bug"

nathanathan··on [dead]
Idea: Git-story, a website that generates summary narratives from git commit histories and other github data.

Here's a brain-dump with some ideas for the specifics:

Use foreshadowing: "It all started with one person, X, spending months to gradually build what would one day become Y, a project forked by hundreds and starred by thousands."

When someone makes their first contribution to a project give them a brief introduction, like a shorter version of http://osrc.dfm.io/

Use sentiment analysis on commit messages to say things like "Frustrations mount as...", "the developers rejoice after..."

When people work on multiple concurrent branches use use phrases like: Meanwhile, X and Y toil away on the new Z feature.

Use the time between commits to chunk them into single sentences/paragraphs. Also, add comments if the project goes dormant, or if there is a spike in development.

Use keywords in commit messages like merge, revert, resolve to generate events in the story.

When bugs are resolved look for linked issues and use the age of the bug and number of comments to say thinks like "A finally fixed the controversial B bug"

nathanathan··on Zapier Email Parser: Extract Text From Automated Emails
I made an open source tool that does something like this using a modified version of the Levenshtein distance algorithm: https://github.com/nathanathan/fuzzyTemplateMatcher

Here's a demo you can play around with: http://nathanathan.com/fuzzyTemplateMatcher/

nathanathan··on How pCell works and why its a bigger deal than anyone realizes
If this kind of technology were to fall into the wrong hands would we even know? Would it appear as though the victims had a heart attack or stroke?
nathanathan··on Building Cordova apps for Firefox OS
Phonegap Build has some useful features for packaging, debugging and distribution that could eventually become available to Firefox OS Cordova apps.
nathanathan··on A simple no-brainer approach to patent trolls
Maybe there is a a way to avoid the protection racket issue by a setting up the insurance organization as a self-governing non-profit. By self-governing I mean anyone who pays into the organization can submit proposals for cases that should receive it's funding and vote proposals up or down. The top X proposals would be funded. Perhaps votes could be weighted in proportion to the amount the member pays into the organization.
nathanathan··on Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?
I'm working on a game based on memorizing Chinese characters. It's cool because it uses the qualities that motivate people to play farm sims to encourage players to study a language. Players plant character-flowers and must pass quizzes in order to pluck them. This website has more information and a download link for the beta, which only works on android at the moment: http://zhongwengarden.com/
nathanathan··on Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?
I experimented with using cfgs in a code editor before but with the aim of making it easier to code on touch screen devices where curly braces and the like are difficult to type. Here's a prototype I started for writing Json. http://nathanathan.com/cfg-gen/
nathanathan··on Appmaker
I really like the concept of building apps out of widgets connected by broadcast events. It reminds me of meemoo (http://meemoo.org/).
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