chroem-

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Ask HN: Under what circumstances is it acceptable to patent an algorithm?
3 points by chroem- 8y ago|8 comments
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by chroem- 8y ago
The housing crisis is fundamentally a transportation problem. The bay area has intentionally made it impractical to own a car, so everyone is forced seek housing within walking distance of a limited number of public transit lines. The &qu
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by chroem- 9y ago
As someone with vision loss, this is a wonderful feel-good story, but I think the reason why Amazon PR picked it up in the first place is because it's a surprising exception that proves the rule. I've interviewed with quite a few
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by chroem- 9y ago
This is a very dangerous way of thinking. I can think of at least five people in my social network who have died as a direct result of seeking naturopathic medicine for their serious illnesses instead of proper medical care. Please do not
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by chroem- 9y ago
The fact that people need a source of income to live, and that they have very little influence on the price of their labor without collective bargaining.
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by chroem- 9y ago
While that may be true, it's also passing the buck since there are a lot of economically productive cities where commuting is practical and rents are cheap.
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by chroem- 9y ago
But that wouldn't be an issue if you could just commute from somewhere else.
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by chroem- 9y ago
No, the point is that the Bay Area is too congested (and to some extent intentionally congested) to allow for an appreciable amount of commuting. One person's sprawl is another person's affordable housing.
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by chroem- 9y ago
This is how SF-style housing crises are made. When you force everyone to be very geographically close to their place of employment, it has the dual effects of reducing the effective supply of available housing options, while simultaneously
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by chroem- 9y ago
Montreal seems to be an outlier according to https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/how-does-montr... There are also much cheaper driveable cities (e.g. Knoxville, TN) and much more expensive non-driveable
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by chroem- 9y ago
$60k a year in St. Louis dollars translates to $94k a year in Seattle dollars. So that assertion is false. https://www.nerdwallet.com/cost-of-living-calculator/compare...
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by chroem- 9y ago
Let's do some napkin math and put these assertions to the test. Average rent for a 1 bedroom apartment in Seattle, WA is $1869 a month [1]. A PugetPass costs about $80 a month. Living in Seattle without a car costs $1949 a month, or
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by chroem- 9y ago
There is also a very strong, but potentially unpalatable, correlation between driveable cities and highly affordable housing. Something having to do with supply and demand.
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by chroem- 9y ago
That's what you would initially think, but a clever adversary can produce arbitrarily many identities, so even if results agree, there is a non-zero chance that all of the agreeing nodes are compromised. Even if you begin blacklisting
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by chroem- 9y ago
I actually made this a few years ago for an ill-fated application to YC (I was still a sophomore in college). The first big problem is that you can't trust any of the results that you receive from the workers. You can alleviate this s
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by chroem- 9y ago
If you look at the highly affordable and working class friendly cities in the midwest and Texas, the one thing that they all share in common is that they are all highly driveable cities. Rents are driven by supply and demand, so by allowin
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by chroem- 9y ago
Even maintaining current capacity would be an improvement over what's happening right now. They are intentionally trying to reduce the number of drivers before the transit system is ready to handle them.
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by chroem- 9y ago
That's wonderful, but now you're trying to solve mass transit and affordable housing at the same time. The fact of the matter is that a war on driving is a war on the working class. You can get a used car for just above $1000,
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by chroem- 9y ago
We are shooting ourselves in the feet by intentionally diminishing road traffic capacity before the alternative is ready. You are not serving the underprivileged by making it too expensive to drive, since middle and lower income people can
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by chroem- 9y ago
>In general, focusing on transit at the expense of drivers is simply the smart thing to do Light rail will not reach Snohomish County until the mid 2030's. That is not an acceptable answer.
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by chroem- 9y ago
Hi there, Yes, I hope to add that feature soon-ish. The reason I left it out of this first release is that computing Delaunay triangulations scales very poorly with dimensionality. That was why TRIOPT was restricted to low dimensional spa
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by chroem- 9y ago
Hi there, While it shares a lot of similarities with conventional Bayesian Optimization, I was reluctant to call it BO since it doesn't have a concept of explicit error bounds.
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by chroem- 9y ago
I ran into some issues when comparing the two algorithms, but here is a comparison with CMA-ES. https://github.com/chrisstroemel/Simple/blob/master/cma-comp... Simple is a constrained optimizer while CMA
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by chroem- 9y ago
Hi there, Generally speaking the heuristic for applying BO to optimization problems is that the objective function must take at least as long to evaluate as an iteration of BO. For an equally sample-efficient algorithm with negligible over
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by chroem- 9y ago
Hi there, Very loosely, but not particularly. Simple makes an effort to interpolate between points rather than using the Lipschitz constant to estimate an upper bound. This is important for regions of the search space which are "obje
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by chroem- 9y ago
Hi there, Unfortunately I have quite a backlog of other projects that I need to clear out, though Simple is AGPL so anyone is free to fork it. However I am also looking for employment opportunities. Simple is already highly parallelizeable
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by chroem- 9y ago
Hi there, That's a fair point about the time complexity, though the algorithm does at least demonstrate a real-world speedup of several orders of magnitude against fmfn's Bayesian Optimization implementation. However, I am not su
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by chroem- 9y ago
Hi there, I'm currently away from my computer but I can produce a comparison animation in a few hours. While I am biased, I strongly suspect that Simple will have superior sample efficiency and at least similar performance.
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by chroem- 9y ago
Hi there, You're right that it's tricky to make a direct comparison between different shaped optimization domains, however in the comparison animation each algorithm was given an optimization domain of equal area. For comparisons
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Show HN: A radically more scalable alternative to Bayesian Optimization(github.com)
96 points by chroem- 9y ago|22 comments

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