It's interesting to see Quanta make a foray into print publishing. I've long-wished for a print form of Quanta math articles in a monthly magazine, so maybe there is some hope for that eventually?
Readit NewsI remember reading a book on web usability well over a decade ago, and one of the things it pointed out was how Google ensured that the links you wanted to click were "above the fold" --- not ads, but honest-to-goodness search results.
Recently, after they added AI-generated search responses (which seem to be wrong a considerable percentage of the time, at least for things I search for), and the inlining of ads to the search results page, I've found I have to scroll at least a full screen height to actually get to the search results a significant portion of the time.
The level of blindness to user experience at Google that has allowed the state of search to get to this level is staggering.
The core argument here is: LLM docbots are wrong sometimes. Docs are not. That's not acceptable.
But that's not true! Docs are sometimes wrong, and even more so if you could errors of omission. From a users perspective, dense / poorly structured docs are wrong, because they lead users to think the docs don't have the answer. If they're confusing enough, they may even mislead users.
There's always an error rate. DocBots are almost certainly wrong more frequently, but they're also almost certainly much much faster than reading the docs. Given that the standard recommendation is to test your code before jamming it in production, that seems like a reasonable tradeoff.
YMMV!
(One level down: the feedback loop for getting docbots corrected is _far_ worse. You can complain to support that the docs are wrong, and most orgs will at least try to fix it. We, as an industry, are not fully confident in how to fix a wrong LLM response reliably in the same way.)
> There's always an error rate. DocBots are almost certainly wrong more frequently, but they're also almost certainly much much faster than reading the docs.
A lot of the discourse around LLM tooling right now boils down to "it's ok to be a bit wrong if you're wrong quickly" ... and then what follows is an ever-further bounds-pushing on how big "a bit" can be.
The promise of AI is "human-level (or greater)" --- we should only be using AI when it's as accurate (or more accurate) as human-generated docs, but the tech simply isn't there yet.
apnorton commented on Introduction to the A* Algorithm (2014) redblobgames.com/pathfind... · Posted by u/auraham
The article doesn't explicitly state it in this manner in one concise place, but the way I would always think about A* from a "practical/easy-to-remember" perspective back when I was doing competitive programming is that they're all the same algorithm, but with different priorities on the priority queue:
Breadth-first Search: Priority is order of discovery of edges (that is, no priority queue/just a regular queue)
Dijkstra: Priority is distance so far + next edge distance
A*: Priority is distance so far + next edge distance + estimate of distance to target node.
This also helps me remember whether the estimate must over- or under-estimate: Since Dijkstra is making the estimate "0", clearly the "admissible heuristic" criteria must be an under-estimation.
apnorton commented on Generate art from any text with deep learning comet.ml/site/clipdraw-ga... · Posted by u/ChefboyOG
This is really cool. I wonder if you could use it to generate images instead of this SSH message:
> The authenticity of host 'mint.phcomp.co.uk (78.32.209.33)' can't be established. RSA key fingerprint is 6a:de:e0:af:56:f8:0c:04:11:5b:ef:4d:49:ad:09:23. Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? no
That way you could check the fingerprint for the server visually. Of course you'd first have to have a way to deterministically generate a description of an image from a sequence of random bytes.
The [Drunken Bishop](https://www.jfurness.uk/the-drunken-bishop-algorithm/) algorithm works well for this purpose, without needing a GPU. :)
apnorton commented on Happy Birthday, OpenStreetMap tomtom.com/blog/maps/tomt... · Posted by u/kikibobo69
This is cool data! ...however, I must ask --- where does the data come from?
HN certainly has a side that loves open-source data, but it also has a privacy-loving side. Focusing on the privacy aspects, has TomTom given any consideration to how it respects the privacy of its users/does it allow for opt-out of storing and analyzing its users' GPS traces?
One of the things that baffles me the most about SO is that I can't sort answers by _newest first_.
If I search for something related to javascript for example, I know there will be a ton of answers for older versions that I am most likely not interested in. However I can only sort by oldest first (related to date).
Old answers are definitely useful a lot of times, but the fact that there's not even the option to sort them the other way around tells me that SO somehow, at it's core, considers new answers less important.
A strange decision if you ask me, considering software changes so much over time.
If anyone has a possible explanation for this I'd love to hear it.
There are three buttons that act as sorting directions at the top of the answers section: "Votes," "Oldest," and "Active." The "Active" option sorts by most recently modified, which is _usually_ what you'd want instead of strictly newest. (i.e. an edit would update the timestamp, making that answer have a more recent activity date)
So, I guess the answer to your question of "why can't I" is "good news! you can" :)
From another view, Adelson-Velsky and Landis called their tree algorithm "an algorithm for the organization of information" (or, rather, they did so in Russian --- that's the English translation). RSA was called "a method" by Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman. Methods/algorithms/numbers/theorems/etc. generally are not given overly specific names in research papers, in part for practical reasons: researchers will develop many algorithms or theorems, but a very small proportion of these are actually relevant or interesting. Naming all of them would be a waste of time, so the names tend to be attached well after publication.
To name something after oneself requires a degree of hubris that is looked down upon in the general academic community; the reason for this is that there is at least a facade (if not an actual belief) that one's involvement in the sciences should be for the pursuit of truth, not for the pursuit of fame. Naming something after yourself is, intrinsically, an action taken in the seeking of fame.