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rripken

121 karma · joined February 11, 2015

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rripken··on How to Perfectly Crack an Egg (With One Hand) [video]
At 0:47 the video clearly shows three fingers on the "top" part of the egg. At 0:58 the ping pong ball exercise clearly shows three fingers on the top part. The break at 1:08 also has three fingers on the top. But then for some reason at 1:12 the performer switches to two fingers above the break. The double break at 1:33 also shows two fingers above the crack. Some of the egg breaks in the video pull the halves away from each other and other breaks use a slide or shearing/transpose movement to create gaps between the halves. There is nothing in the video about how close to hold the egg to the palm of your hand. With the dozen or so eggs I tried the key was (counter-intuitively) to hold the egg close to your palm so that the pads on your palm act as a fulcrum as you try to pull the halves apart. If you just hold the egg with the tips of your fingers its difficult to create the necessary space. But maybe that's just me and my lack of dexterity. I guess instead of complaining I should create my own video.
rripken··on Hallucineted CVE against Curl: someone asked Bard to find a vulnerability
How did you prompt Copilot to identify issues? In my experience the best I can do is to put in code comments of what what I want a snippet to do and copilot tries to write it. I haven't had good luck asking copilot to rewrite existing code. Nearest I've gotten is: // method2 is identical to method1 except it fixes the bugs public void method2(){
rripken··on Widely used chemical strongly linked to Parkinson’s disease
I roast my own coffee beans. I usually get decaf SWP beans from Sweet Marias. https://www.sweetmarias.com/green-coffee/decaf.html The decaf SWP beans start out a different color of green bordering on tan compared to the light green of regular "green" coffee beans. Its not just the starting color, they roast differently too. Coffee beans crack during roasting - there is a first crack and then if you want it dark there is a second crack. The sound is usually pronounced. With the SWP beans the crack sound is more of a poof. Apparently SWP changes the structure of the beans, possibly introducing cracks or holes. The roasted beans seem drier and duller brown in color, less mahogany, less shiny. Its hard to know what the flavor impact of SWP was b/c I haven't tried the same beans before they were made decaf. It could just be my own prejudice or lack of skill in roasting but I would say on average the decaf coffee turns out 5-10% worse in quality.
rripken··on Putting solar panels in grazing fields is good for sheep
https://archive.ph/YwBBB
rripken··on Starlink speeds in US dropped from 105Mbps to 53Mbps in the past year
Not sure I agree about the 4G/5G comment. I got an unlimited 4g/5g hotspot through Calyx Institute that uses the TMobile network ( https://calyxinstitute.org/membership/internet ). I now also have Starlink. The Starlink service is faster and lower latency. I have noticed Starlink getting slower over the past couple months but it is still quite fast. In my experience the downside to Starlink is that several times a week it drops out completely for 10-20 seconds. I thought I was going to have issues with the trees near the location of my antenna but the app shows almost 0 obstruction in the FOV Starlink cares about. It was surprising to me how far north the antenna wants to point. I was picturing it pointing south like a dish would for a geo satellite but Starlink aren't geo. I've also been a customer of two different local wireless point-to-point ISP. One worked great when it wasn't foggy and when the trees didn't have leaves - so only about 1/4 of the year. The other had 800ms pings and also went down frequently. Starlink has been game changing.
rripken··on The case against CS master’s degrees
I completed the program in 2018. I'm glad I did. It was a tremendous amount of work and I was already working full time with a lengthy commute and family commitments. Pretty much every minute of my weekends and 10pm-12pm most week nights. I had to do maybe 3 all-nighters when schedules didn't line up. Some of the classes are much harder than others and should be taken by themselves. Other classes are less demanding and you can 2x or 3x. The video lectures tend to be very well made. Some of the classes make extensive use of Piazza - which I grew to loath. The assignments can be challenging but also sort of fun. Each class is different though. You're welcome to email me at gmail or yahoo if you have specific questions.
rripken··on The case against CS master’s degrees
I also completed the program. Some classes did better at feedback than others. But honestly, whats so bad about getting feedback from teaching assistants? The TA for Reinforcement Learning wrote the book Grokking Deep Reinforcement Learning and has experience using RL in industry. If that is the worst they can say about OMSCS its sort of a pretty big endorsement.
rripken··on YaLM-100B: Pretrained language model with 100B parameters
I would not start with this model. Its impractically large.

Start here: https://www.vennify.ai/gpt-neo-made-easy/

rripken··on Andrew Ng updates his Machine Learning course
I took these courses from Georgia Tech via OMSCS but they are also on udacity.

https://omscs.gatech.edu/cs-7641-machine-learning

https://omscs.gatech.edu/cs-7642-reinforcement-learning (I took this before ML but its supposed to come after. There is some overlap. Probably my favorite graduate course.)

https://omscs.gatech.edu/cs-7646-machine-learning-trading (IMO not amazing)

Much more basic (took this before OMSCS):

https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-machine-learning--ud...

I'm sure there are many more.

rripken··on Bill to require job postings to include salaries passes Washington Senate
Sure, candidates can also easily skip companies where HR plays silly games.
rripken··on Tqdm (Python)
It never occurred to me that chat posts could be quickly edited to make them dynamic. Maybe other chat-bots do that too. Its definitely a cool add-on.
rripken··on Tqdm (Python)
I use tqdm (with argparse) in a pyinstaller packaged exe. 5-stars - Its great! I call the exe from Java to do some ML and forward the tqdm progress and status messages to a Swing progress bar. It makes the user experience seamless. Depending on the task and the user's settings the tool usually takes about 7-8 seconds(including the PyInstaller extract) but it can also take up to a minute. When its 7-8 seconds the progress messages fly by and the tool feels snappy. When its 50-60 seconds the users are very grateful for the progress bar. Meanwhile I can develop and test the tool from the command-line and see progress info and when I want to run the ML code in Jupyter notebooks the progress bars can still be made to work.
rripken··on Why do antibiotics exist?
How would you go about reducing profits? If you add costs, the farmers will either pass them along to the purchaser or they will get out of the meat business. That means either higher prices (which should lower demand) or lower supply. In either case it looks like consumers eat less meat. I'm not trying to defend antibiotic usage. I'm curious what a reduced profit solution would look like, maybe I'm imagining it wrong.
rripken··on Controlled indoor cultivation of black morel
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https%3... Also: https://web.archive.org/web/20211206194029/https://thedanish...
rripken··on How LambdaMART works – optimizing product ranking goals
I recently completed a Learn To Rank (with LightGBM) recommendation system at work and I agree. For how powerful the libraries are you would think there would be many more examples. Have you collected or posted your questions anywhere? I hit an error I didn't understand and posted questions on a related LightGBM issue and LightGBM devs responded with enough detail to at least get me unstuck.
rripken··on Ask HN: Messed up my education, now 30 and regretting it. What to do?
You're right. I overlooked that part of their question.
rripken··on Ask HN: Messed up my education, now 30 and regretting it. What to do?
Are you willing to put in a significant amount of work? Look into Georgia Tech's OMSCS program. Do some searches, read (or watch) some of the press coverage of the program. Its very affordable. But the program is not a gimme - you will have to do significant amounts of work. When you complete the program you will have the knowledge and credentials to pursue some of those cool jobs you see. Seems like the credentials matter less and less these days but for some people/jobs its still necessary. Make sure you do the work. You will only get out what you put in. Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Reinforcement Learning, AI are all greatest hits/best of courses. You will learn amazing things and have very challenging assignments. If you don't have a ton of free time you can take one class each quarter and finish in 3 years. You don't have to quit your well paying software job (at least I didn't). Have kids? wife? pets? volunteer work etc? Its still doable (I did it). Just plan ahead and don't leave things until the last minute.
rripken··on USC pushed a $115k online degree – graduates got low salaries, huge debts
Just a few evenings? I spent entire weekends, sometimes all-nighters and even taking days off from work to finish big assignments. But I was working full-time with a significant commute and family responsibilities. Btw, I enjoyed every minute of it.
rripken··on An app called Libby and the big business of library e-books
If the book isn't found at the library you are on I believe you do have to switch to other libraries until you find it. The most annoying part is when you are entering the title in the search box and it auto-completes the full title but then you issue the search and get back "No results".
rripken··on An app called Libby and the big business of library e-books
If you've found the book but it isn't available you can search all your other cards by touching the two color card icon on the search result. It then searches for that book across your cards. Not an easily discoverable feature but its amazing when you find it. I only know about it b/c the app's ui choices didn't always make sense so I went through the tutorial hoping it explained something else.
rripken··on OpenAstroTracker: A cheap 3D-printed tracking mount for DSLR astrophotography
That really is a great hack if your camera is light enough. Genius.
rripken··on OpenAstroTracker: A cheap 3D-printed tracking mount for DSLR astrophotography
Barn door trackers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barn_door_tracker

https://hackaday.com/2013/08/08/building-a-barn-door-tracker...

rripken··on No Python interpreter? this simple RAT installs its own copy
What you are describing sounds like the onefile mode. Pyinstaller also has a onedir mode which is much faster to start. I packaged some python ml models into a pyinstaller built exe and a larger java application calls them. Onedir makes for a big install but they only take a second or two to run.
rripken··on Visualization of 40M Cell Towers
OpenCellID shows an LTE point in an agricultural field near me. There definitely isn't a cell tower there in the traditional sense of cell tower. There is an Emergency Call Box located there so maybe that is what is getting picked up?
rripken··on Spirulina Algae Photobioreactor (2017)
Are you suggesting that the parent should grow spirulina and feed that to BSFL and then feed the BSFL to the fish?
rripken··on Spirulina Algae Photobioreactor (2017)
I remember a great article in Make Magazine that described growing Spirulina. I believe it was this article by Dr. Aaron Wolf Baum:

http://www.algaelab.org/2011/05/09/algaelab-diy-spirulina-ar...

A recent post (11/20/2020) on that blog announces that Dr Baum has started GreenSpring Farms in Brentwood,CA and is selling fresh Spirulina.

https://www.freshspirulina.com/our-spirulina

rripken··on Reversing Safeway's private APIs to automate coupon collection
Uses javascript to find all the page elements with the coupon add button styling attributes and then uses javascript to click each add button.
rripken··on Scientist Behind Navy's “UFO Patents” Filed One for a Compact Fusion Reactor
I would read that if it was a novel. Picturing legal thriller blended with scifi. Maybe some military/political drama thrown in. Grisham/Clancy/Crichton
rripken··on Tracking leaks on NDA beta Xbox 360s by embedding serial number on-screen
I agree - Steganography applied to the textures. I haven't seen steganography used that way before but if its done right you don't see it at all.
rripken··on Boring Co. Drops LA Westside Tunnel Plan
Why wouldn't you?
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