cobaltblue · HackerTrans

cobaltblue

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vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

This is not quite correct either. 1p is of course generally much stronger than an arbitrary amateur dan (even some (many? most?) 9d amateurs) and you can advance up the pro ranks quickly by winning certain games, but you can see the histograms yourself that while there's a clump of 9ps everywhere but China there's still a distribution. http://senseis.xmp.net/?ProfessionalRankHistograms Another problem is you don't lose your 9p rank once you earn it. It would be nice if there was an international Elo system tracking all the 9ps of various countries to rank them properly... Maybe someone's tried to calculate rankings independently? Still, I think it's pretty uncontroversial that someone who's been a lower-rank pro for longer than a few years is going to be significantly weaker than their higher-rank peers.

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Very nice. How come you guys didn't enter the UEC Cup? (Edit: rereading this it kind of sounds snarky, not meant that way. Really impressive if you can kick CrazyStone's teeth in...)

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Oh man overblown article.

Fan Hui is 2p, so very skilled, but the ranking system goes up to 9p. To give a sense of how large a gap that is, there is and has only ever been one Westerner to achieve that rank, Michael Redmond. The article states they plan to face off against Lee Sedol 9p, and if they beat him in a no-handicap game, that will be as impressive as Deep Blue against Kasparov.

You'll want to watch this year's Computer Go UEC Cup[0] in March, with Zen and CrazyStone being the typical victors. (CrazyStone in particular has sustained a 6d rating on KGS, a popular Go server, but lately has been at 5d. In the past it has beaten a 9p with a 4 stone handicap, which is impressive, but that handicap is huge and it hasn't yet won with 3 stones.) Of interest this year is that Facebook is competing, and AFAIK they seem to take a similar approach as Google by training the AI using deep learning techniques and then strengthening it further with MCTS. In their public disclosures they claim to beat Pachi pretty often, which puts their bot around 4d-6d, it'll be interesting to see how it fairs against Zen and CrazyStone in the Cup and if it wins against a 9p.

[0] http://jsb.cs.uec.ac.jp/~igo/eng/

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

The only one who knows if the input is needed anymore is the caller, not all callers will agree, so it's bad form to let the called function decide automatically unless it's very clearly marked as a mutating, list-destroying function.

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

Besides, all the ARIA stuff isn't free. It only benefits screen readers and bots that aren't Google's. The rejection from lack of accessibility is as strange as rejection from lack of functionality in IE 8 or less (which has perhaps 2-4x as much market share as that of all screen readers). For any website or webapp you should know your market and make the call whether you need to spend time upfront, burn the time now, or delay indefinitely or forever, on supporting these low market share alternatives.

vor 10 Jahrendiscuss

There already are tax and welfare benefits to having children, and indeed it does incentivize having them when you really can't afford them. It doesn't seem sustainable long term, but we'll see. I don't think it's a problem with basic income any more than the current system. The bigger issue I find with basic income is that proposals typically don't include any mention of price control on the seller side and purchase control on the buyer side. Poor people are often trapped there because every local actor selling them stuff is trying to maximize rent extraction, and they continually buy things that are expensive and bad for them (case in point the recent cigarette article). Landlords get a lot of money from rent extraction, since they're paid in rent directly. It's even worse with universal, unconditional basic income. If as a landlord I hear everyone in my apartment complex is now getting an unconditional basic income of $20k/yr, guess what, next year rent prices are going up by around $20k, with lowered adjustments to account for other actors (like local food suppliers) also competing for this extra $20k/person/yr. This is basically the same thing that has happened to student loans. Without authoritarian measures to restrict economic freedom, which in addition to being authoritarian must also be good measures so as to not backfire as every other centrally planned economy has, basic income has no real chance at a large scale. In America in particular, authoritarian anything is a no-go.

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

What is this total inequality you talk about? It seems like you're picking the inequality of 0 and infinity. But we live in a finite world, this total inequality is impossible. Furthermore, whether we introduce an infinite inequality or a finite inequality, there's no reason the lower bound should be at 0 (where people starve and die). Suppose we have a society whose inequality range generally falls within 1 and 1,000,000. 1 is a sustenance standard of living, any unfortunate event could totally wipe you out, but it's pretty much maintainable with little effort provided that unfortunate event doesn't happen. Somewhere around 3 being the poverty line and somewhere around 8 being a decent standard of living so long as you're working to maintain it, and somewhere around 50-100 is enough for most people to effectively have that same decent standard of living as 8 but without having to maintain it so hard e.g. through a job. What's wrong with this lower bound increasing by 1 every year (with its associated low level of upkeep remaining the same) while the upper bound increases by 2 every year? The inequality is growing with each year, but in 2 years there is no one below the poverty line, and in 7 years everyone has a decent standard of living but they don't really have to put in effort for it. Why is inequality the issue here?

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

The entire thrust of our medical regulatory system, from the Flexner Report to today, is the belief that it's better for 1000 patients to die of neglect, than 1 from quackery. Until this irrational fear of quack medicine is cured, there will be no real progress in the field.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3819346

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

They'll probably succeed for the most part, too. Who's going to spend their time playing cat and mouse when they can just unsubscribe and torrent? If you're not seeding, you're breaking the same law of unlicensed access to content either way.

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

I remember looking at Beeminder, probably around the time that article was written unless you promoted/were promoted on LW before then. How much would you say you've improved the service since then? It definitely looks better than I remember... I think I'll test it out this weekend since I can see it being pretty helpful for those long term yet easily measurable goals, two of which I have under "lose x lbs" and "read y books this year". I'm not so sure it would be that helpful for the smaller goals, though, especially ones that require more subjective measurement ("you've been on your cell phone too much today") or ones that require frequent measurement updates from the individual ("out of this list of whitelisted sites that are directly work related your fraction of time spent on other sites over the last time period is x%, which happens to be too much"). Anyway I wanted to ask if you're familiar with any research on akrasia correlated with childhood. I have no idea if or how much things like divorce, loose parenting, strict parenting, or a change in style as the child transitions into teenage years affects anything. It was just an idea I had this morning when I realized my above comment is really just asking for a strict parent who in the process of looking out for my own best interests (that as an adult I can now agree with are such, or at least rationally argue otherwise and be taken seriously) can do such a wide variety of things like taking away my phone for a set period (while still letting me answer any important calls that might come in), or periodically poking me with a stick if I'm staring at my screen seemingly frozen and there isn't a code editor open.

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

If you include thinking about work, then even work-from-home people could reach the 50+ figure relatively easily since you include weekends and trying to get to sleep. But then you might easily get into low numbers of hours per week, 15-30, if you subtract things like spending some large % of your time doing non-productive non-work (happy hours, lunches not at your desk, watercooler talk, browsing HN) even though you're at work.

Work time should generally only be the time between clock-in and clock-out. For professionals that are freed from clock-in-clock-out, I think they would still clump around that 40 hour figure if you made them clock-in-clock-out for the data rather than for the pay.

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

Non-judgmental fair third-party oversight who has free action only reversible by themselves over your environment.

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

Whence the high performance claim? I tried finding some benchmarks, and apparently they used to be on the home page since this was on HN about a year ago, but I didn't find any recent ones. It would be nice to see it compared to, say, Rust, Nim, Haskell, OCaml, C...

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

Looking at your portfolio -- are you applying for video game jobs or generic Big Co software engineer? Or pretty much anywhere you can find / that reaches out to you? Try for something outside of your experience, or even something you might think is "beneath you", selling yourself as a new college grad eager to grow your experience and be part of a team. Also consider applying for SDET jobs after learning some basics about in-vogue testing philosophies. Other than that, I second the advice that it's just a numbers game, keep trying as long as you're able, and if you can up your job search into a full-time activity (i.e. 8 hours a day spent on job search) that's even better. Once you get your foot in the door, even as an engineer-in-test, you can start transitioning within the company more easily as well as continue looking elsewhere without the stress of "I need a job now to pay bills."

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

Unfortunately he picked the wrong unjust laws to break, the wrong targets to go after. The problem with being a true believer... http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/01/noam-ch...

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

I still sympathize with a subset of the ICs, those that must see so many problems (maybe even futilely trying to fix them) but being crippled from doing much by internal dynamics. I wish them the courage to pack up and leave for someplace better, while on those who have been responsible long-term I agree with you.

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

It's more like x86 beat everything, which is also saying that externally CISC/RISC didn't matter so much. I like the section on RISC here: http://danluu.com/butler-lampson-1999/ Specifically part of the last paragraph: "It’s possible to nitpick RISC being a no by saying that modern processors translate x86 ops into RISC micro-ops internally, but if you listened to talk at the time, people thought that having a external RISC ISA would be so much lower overhead that RISC would win, which has clearly not happened. Moreover, modern chips also do micro-op fusion in order to fuse operations into decidedly un-RISC-y operations."

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

I wanted to recommend Nim elsewhere in the thread, too. For a lot of serious game devs, a language with a forced GC is often a no-go, for good reasons or bad, so that immediately eliminates a lot of potential candidates to replace C or C++. The only objections I frequently see people have with Nim once they look deeper into it are on syntax (not so much on indentation as on the symbol identifier rule -- case and underscore/dash insensitive except for the first character), current usability (not being 1.0), and expected longevity. Basically the same objections to Rust. (I think Rust can convert a lot of C++ game programmers eventually, I'm not so sure it can convert a lot of C game programmers because of the additional mental complexities in the name of safety, a low priority on a game dev's list.)

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

Odd to see it not mentioned as another benefit, but by targeting C instead of say direct assembly you benefit from the decades of optimization research that has gone into modern C compilers.

vor 11 Jahrendiscuss

Can you name three? In any case, a good economist typically just says what the state of the world is or will be given x, y, z, not what should be. I can think of one economist (Robin Hanson) who doesn't say "we should reduce financial inequality".