revalo

This is amazing. I've been looking forward to such a thing for a while now.

It's much easier to work with LISP. It's functional, trees are easy to reason about. We're using an even more simplified language in this work. It's kind of like the MNIST for progsynth research. Scaling this to real and useful programming languages and domains is still non-trivial, and is a major drawback of our work here.

Changing tokens in a program is not differentiable. For me, the key idea is that you can train a neural model to suggest edits to programs by randomly mutating nodes. And when you run this neural model, you get to make edits that are syntactically correct (i.e., a number will only replace a number etc.) according to a context-free grammar.

I wasn't talking just about the US, I think we need very high levels of vaccination everywhere to make it statistically not a threat. We need to control the spread of the virus to levels where it's not mutating at evolutionarily scales, _everywhere_, and the only way to effectively do that is vaccines.

It's not a threat at this very moment, for this very point in time, but since we're allowing the virus to spread at such evolutionarily scales, inside and outside the US, a new variant popping up that evades vaccines is statistically very possible, and pose a significant threat to my own and society's well being.

I'm trying to argue that this is not a personal choice issue, rather a public health one.

Adding to the thoughts before, letting the virus spread and mutate among the unvaccinated to create a new variant sounds like a reset on the progress we've made. With the Delta we got lucky, our vaccines still largely work. I'm not sure how long the luck will hold on with more variants.

I'm all for leaving people alone to their own decisions. But with this, their decisions greatly affect me and society at large.

I've engineered it to be very inexpensive to run. I work on high efficiency video codecs, so one benefit is that I get to sometimes test my codec's and get real user feedback.

I personally don't find virtual stuff fun, the pandemic is really sad, so wanted to make something available for public use. :)

miss you too fam <3

Hey HN! I am a TA for a large undergraduate class at MIT. Teaching virtually definitely comes with its challenges, but the biggest challenge for me was holding office hours.

We used to have a queue system, with hundreds of students trying to get the first spot, with me (along with the other TAs) trying our hardest to keep the queue moving quickly, but algorithmic discussions need time and frequent pauses to think.

I experimented with lots of alternatives, but none of them scaled to hundreds of students (inexpensively) or had strong permission systems. We wanted a clear separation of permissions between the Instructors, TAs, and Students. Having a multiplayer code editor is a nice extra feature that has been useful to help students debug their code.

If you're in a similar position, or just want better breakout rooms, feel free to use the system. The default cap is 100 users to prevent abuse, but I can happily raise it if you reach out.

Would love any feedback!