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tomdre

36 karma · joined April 6, 2017

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tomdre··on Go Fishing
Any recommendation for fishing around the Bay Area? I read that the water's quality of nearby lakes and rivers is pretty low.
tomdre··on Ask HN: Which YouTube channels do you watch regularly?
Marty Music for guitar lessons https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmnlTWVJysjWPFiZhQ5uudg
tomdre··on Why does deep and cheap learning work so well?
One of my dreams is to do something similar by simplifying neural nets via (bi)simulation (something along the lines of quotient automata).
tomdre··on Ask HN: Books you should have read when you start a career in SE / CS?
Never had the chance of studying it. I'll give it a closer look. Thanks.
tomdre··on Ask HN: Books you should have read when you start a career in SE / CS?
"Introduction to Algorithms" by Cormen et al. is one of my favorite books. It gave me a deep understanding of algorithms and data structures.
tomdre··on Ask HN: What do/see in SF
My recommendations:

Cafes: Caffe Trieste (North Beach)

Restaurants: The Ramp (Dogpatch), Sunday morning brunch at Thai Temple (Berkeley), Fish (Sausalito)

Sights: Twin Peaks, Coit Tower, Berkeley hills (Grizzly peak)

Weird shit: The Saloon (North Beach), Ruby Room (Oakland), parties at 20 Mission (Mission), Li Po Cocktail Lounge (Chinatown)

tomdre··on Self-driving Uber car kills Arizona woman crossing street
This is not a really strong argument against self-driving cars. The fact that a problem is NP-hard doesn't make it untractable. Every day we use apps that deal with NP problems (e.g., routing problems, packing problems, etc.). Also, note that there're P problems whose instances can be harder than (smaller) NP ones.
tomdre··on Ask HN: What is the best process to learn a new language?
My steps for learning French and Spanish were: 1) 1/2 months nonstop on Duolingo 2) Cartoons/books for kids 3) Spending free time with French/Spanish speakers (gotta mention that I was lucky because my native language is romance and I lived in both France and Equador)
tomdre··on Ask HN: What's an (article|book|vid) that changed the way you view programming?
"The Art of Computer Programming" by D. Knuth taught me the beauty of well designed algorithms. "The Art of Prolog" by E. Shapiro opened my mind to new programming paradigms.
tomdre··on Show HN: My embarrassing personal website from the 90s
Jaron Lanier's "You Are Not a Gadget" has some nice thought about this point, claiming that the web in the 90s was a way more creative and personal space than today.
tomdre··on An Italian Song That Sounds Like English But Is Nonsense
I find even more hilarious the opposite phenomenon: English songs with fake Italian. My favorite example "zooma zooma baccala'" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Msbx4onTzFU
tomdre··on Ask HN: What is the most nonsensical crypto currency you have seen?
Titcoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titcoin
tomdre··on “Deep Learning has outlived its usefulness as a buzz-phrase”
Couldn't agree more. A technique should be judged by its usefulness. Not by its catchiness.
tomdre··on “Deep Learning has outlived its usefulness as a buzz-phrase”
Off topic. Yann LeCun really looks like Michael Moore who looks like Peter Griffin.
tomdre··on Ask HN: Which are the best conferences or summits on ML and AI
SOCML (Self-Organizing Conference on Machine Learning) is really nice. Open discussions and interesting people. It's not the classic academic conference.
tomdre··on Ask HN: Has anyone tried speed reading? Would you recommend practicing?
A long time ago I read "Speed Reading" by Tony Buzan. It provides plenty of techniques, tricks, and exercises.
tomdre··on You Can Learn Glass Blowing (1938)
Murano's glass blowers (Venetian lagoon) are the craftsmen that I admired the most. It's a pleasure seeing them at work. Immense skills and tradition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murano_glass
tomdre··on Ask HN: Best books you read in 2017?
Jaron Lanier's "Dawn of the New Everything". Beautiful description of his journey in VR and how Silicon Valley has evolved from the early 80s.
tomdre··on Show HN: Fruits and vegetables in season in your zip code
Here in Berkeley there's this amazing company https://www.imperfectproduce.com/ that delivers veggies that are not nice enough for markets.
tomdre··on Ask HN: What are some interesting papers in CS for a beginner?
I love Fermat's Library http://fermatslibrary.com/

It provides a good selection of classics annotated with the purpose of guiding you through the paper.

There's also the seminal Bitcoin paper http://fermatslibrary.com/s/bitcoin

tomdre··on Using neural networks to detect car crashes in dashcam footage
Check out "domain adaptation" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_adaptation
tomdre··on Fooling Neural Networks in the Physical World with 3D Adversarial Objects
If I stick a picture of a dog on a car and my neural net detects a dog instead of a car, can I claim that I've invented an adversarial generator?
tomdre··on Symbolic Algebraic Library written entirely in C#
Thanks! I'll have a look at it for sure. During my phd I developed a tool for reachability analysis of polynomial dynamical systems https://github.com/dreossi/sapo I needed expression manipulation to compute Bernestein coefficients of polynomials
tomdre··on Symbolic Algebraic Library written entirely in C#
I worked with GiNaC https://www.ginac.de/ and noticed that the bottleneck was variable substitutions, e.g., replace a variable with a constant and simplify the expression. I'm still dreaming of an efficient CAS.
tomdre··on Ask HN: Coffee table books
I really liked "Visual Complexity" by Manuel Lima:

https://www.amazon.com/Visual-Complexity-Mapping-Patterns-In...

tomdre··on Europilot: A toolkit for Euro Truck Simulator to develop self-driving algorithms
Do you guys know if it's possible to programmatically alter ETS environment? (such as weather, brightness, traffic, etc). Thinking of using the simulator to generate augmented data.
tomdre··on Michelangelo: Uber’s Machine Learning Platform
Splinter is the best
tomdre··on Ask HN: Did you learn a language online? How fluent are you now?
When I moved to France from Italy I didn't speak a single word of French. I spent 5 months on Duolingo (en->fr), hung out with French colleagues, read books and watch cartoons for kids (Asterix and Tin Tin are my favorite).

After 8 months I was able to speak fluently French. A strong advantage was that I already spoke a romance language.

tomdre··on Ask HN: What are some good platforms for an online publication?
arXiv.org is the standard for scientific publications
tomdre··on Ask HN: What are the best books you've read that few others have?
A Treatise on Painting by Leonardo Da Vinci https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Urbinas
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