vonnik

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241.
by vonnik 5y ago
I saw this flower in person. There was a line about a quarter block long, distanced and in masks because that's how people were doing it on Alameda. One by one, the people in the line would go up to the flower and circle it taking a vi
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by vonnik 6y ago
Related thought: https://commoncog.com/blog/get-numb-get-good/
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by vonnik 6y ago
For anyone interested in Anglo-Saxon writings from that period, this book: https://www.amazon.com/Word-Exchange-Anglo-Saxon-Poems-Trans... Is a great set of translations (with the original on the facing page). Powerful stuf
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by vonnik 6y ago
Good point! I'm certainly not denying that the ROI was high. And of course, Bel's story is not over yet.
245.
by vonnik 6y ago
I think it's important that PG published this essay this week. And that he included projects that were wildly successful (YC) as well as projects that didn't get the traction he wanted (Bel). To me it shows two things: 1) that som
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by vonnik 6y ago
It would be interesting to see an update on this article, especially how the conversation has evolved, and its quality preserved, with moderation from @dang and others since 2014. https://blog.ycombinator.com/meet-the-people
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by vonnik 6y ago
Simulations are one of the ways we can see where complexity leads. The work of OpenAI on Dota show how RL can produce a successful emergent behavior in response to complexity.
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by vonnik 6y ago
A lot of Krugman's academic work on economics, before he became an NYT columnist, was focused on transport costs: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/krugman_lecture.p... https://pr.pri
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by vonnik 6y ago
Anyone curious about how the Amazon evolved as a worked landscape (like the grain fields of Europe), should read Charles C Mann's books 1491 and 1493. What the developed world sees as an untouched wilderness threatened by development w
250.
by vonnik 6y ago
[disclosure: I work in this space and make another kind of optimizer.] Sorry to talk about a competing product here... We've been applying deep reinforcement learning to various scheduling problems (which are hard!), and it has shown p
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by vonnik 6y ago
I agree so much with this. You need "cold eyes". One important function of copy editing is to check your assumptions, and make sure everything is explained that needs explaining. That's almost impossible to perform on one&#x2
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by vonnik 6y ago
Quick background. Hypothes.is was founded by Dan Whaley: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danwhaley Dan built and sold an Internet travel app in the 90s, and then became involved in climate work. He's been committed to
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A.I. Steered Doctors Toward a Possible Coronavirus Treatment(nytimes.com)
1 points by vonnik 6y ago|0 comments
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by vonnik 6y ago
This is a great piece by Orhan Pamuk. Broad similarities in how authorities and populations react to pandemics. Also interesting to note the Orientalism that colors how the West thinks of new infectious diseases.
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by vonnik 7y ago
This was an extraordinary book review, and an extraordinary life, even if you discount for the biographer's positive bias towards his own subject. Hoover is really under-rated, and unfairly remembered for some of his policies at the st
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Commure: SDKs and Tools for Healthcare(developer.commure.com)
2 points by vonnik 7y ago|0 comments
257.
by vonnik 7y ago
Since we're recommending other language tools, I've found the Michel Thomas method to be really effective. Better than Pimsleur: https://www.michelthomas.com/
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by vonnik 7y ago
@ptrott2017 - i'd love to speak with you about this. please ping me at chris at pathmind dot com if you're open to a conversation.
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by vonnik 7y ago
I think Ben's advice is really targeting founders and CEOs in order to get them to think in a certain way. Whether or not anybody cares isn't the point. The point is that the person best placed to save a company in trouble should
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by vonnik 7y ago
Both. Depends on the size and skills of the company. Like most semi-rare skills, simulation modeling is something that large companies both perform internally and ask external consultants to do with them.
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by vonnik 7y ago
We see it up and down the supply chain, from manufacturing to warehouses to transport nodes.
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by vonnik 7y ago
Disclosure: My company, Pathmind, works in a space adjacent to digital twins. Digital twins are an interesting idea that, like "cognitive computing", is easily abused by marketing, and will probably rake in a lot of consulting fee
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by vonnik 7y ago
I think this is a crucial point. Based on Ben's premises, his conclusions make sense. But what if you alter the premises, for example, by assuming that compute will happen on another substrate? If you choose a biological substrate, the
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by vonnik 7y ago
Who says progress can't be sad? The consolidation you're talking about was a massive disruption, which brought a lot of change to families and societies. Most kinds of change are painful even when they lead to greater efficiency.
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by vonnik 7y ago
Some research indicates that acupuncture's effects operate through fascia: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13608...
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by vonnik 7y ago
Joel's blog about software is also amazing for those unfamiliar with it. Still worth reading posts that are more than a decade old. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/category/reading-lists/top-10...
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by vonnik 7y ago
There are a couple points not generally made in discussions of data and the great AI race. Most data is crap. So the mountains of data that are supposedly an advantage, in China or in the vaults of the large corporations, are not fit for pu
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by vonnik 7y ago
Fwiw, Scott Alexander wrote a couple great articles about depression in 2017: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/12/toward-a-predictive-th... https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/13&#x
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by vonnik 7y ago
Ray user here. Their adoption is exponential. Much faster than Spark when it was "the same age." It's not limited to AI workloads, that's just its flagship use case with RLlib.
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by vonnik 7y ago
A lot of Silicon Valley tech companies are actively trying to hire remote engineers all over the US and the world. Market forces are doing the job better than a government initiative could.

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