The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,330 posts.
Explaining the basic ideas behind reinforcement learning. In particular, Markov Decision Process, Bellman equation, Value iteration and Policy Iteration algorithms, policy iteration through linear algebra methods. It includes full working code written in Python.
Why do some English plurals end in "en" instead of "s"?
In this series of posts, I am going to create a clone of the classic arcade game, space invaders, in C++ using only a few dependencies. In this post I will set up a window with an OpenGL 3.3 context u
The Visitor Pattern is one of the most mis-understood of the classic design patterns. While it has a reputation as a slightly roundabout technique for doing simple processing on simple trees, it is actually an advanced tool for a specific use case: flexible, streaming, zero-overhead processing of complex data…
Thanks for the featured writeup Hackaday! Make sure to check out the comments over there as well. Looks like Hackernoon picked it up as well, make sure to check in with the comments there too. It would be great if you could also head over to Hacker News, give an upvote, and join in the comments there. Let's get this…
We have a new vehicle, a Honda Odyssey Elite customised for my wheelchair, and for me to drive with hand controls.
The end of semester is here and, as I grade our students semestral works, I get to use CMakeLists of dubious quality. After seeing the same errors repeat over and over again, I decided to write a short tutorial towards writing simple CMakeLists.
The past month has seen one blockbuster revelation after another about how our mobile phone and broadband providers have been leaking highly sensitive customer information, including real-time location data and customer account details. In the wake of these consumer privacy debacles, many are left wondering who’s…
When you read up on the DisplayPort connector in the VESA specification, it will show that both the source and the sink are supposed to provide power at 3.3V+-10% and 500mA on the DP_PWR pin, pin 20, of the connector.
There is a lot to say about parallelism in PostgreSQL. We have come a long way since I wrote my first post on this topic ( Parallel Sequen...
I have in front of me two books that immediately struck me with their similarity: The c Programming Language 1 1 The c Programming Language ; Kernighan & Ritchie; Prentice Hall; 1988. and The awk Programming Language 2 2 The awk Programming Language ; Aho, Kernighan & Weinberger; Addison-Wesley; 1988. Available…
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Since writing this post back in 2018, I have extended this to a 4-part series on causal inference: * ➡️️ Part 1: Intro to causal inference and do-calculus [https://www.inference.vc/untitled] * Part 2: Illustrating Interventions with a Toy Example…
There have been many announcements about what would be the next generation Intel Xeon platform with integrated FPGA, also on this blog. Now Intel has finally announced that they are shipping their …
Federal prosecutors have charged three men with carrying out a deadly hoax known as “swatting,” in which perpetrators call or message a target’s local 911 operators claiming a fake hostage situation or a bomb threat in progress at the target’s address — with the expectation that local police may respond to the scene…
Sixteen years ago, we started StumbleUpon to help people discover new webpages. The idea was simple: click a button to find a cool webpage…
Question for Quote Investigator: There is a popular humorous maxim about history that is usually attributed to Mark Twain. But there is so much uncertainty about this ascription that a top business columnist for the “New York Times” wrote the following: 1
Understanding the differences between aggregators and platforms matters for companies interacting with them and also regulators considering antitrust.
For me, the most favorite type of a computer program is an emulator. Being able to run code from a completely different hardware architecture always seemed like a magic. The old computers are great on their own, so this kind of connection between historic machines and the modern computing environment feels almost like…
Machine learning algorithms are not like other computer programs. In the usual sort of programming, a human programmer tells the computer exactly what to do. In machine learning, the human programmer merely gives the algorithm the problem to be solved, and through trial-and-error the algorithm has to figure out how to…
My son (5y) asked me today: If there were a kind of a fireman's pole from the Moon down to the Earth, how long would it take to slide all the way from the Moon to the Earth?
