theideasmith

Spinoza understood thought and extension were unified. A change in extension is a change in thought and vv.

Hi HN. I'm a relatively new coder so I have only just begun to play around with more sophisticated issues like running code on clusters, networking (ports and stuff like that).

I was hoping someone could kindly explain what a task queue is used for. If I understand it correctly, a task queue would be used for running automation code that is written during the development of a python project? But that doesn't sound right.

Can someone please tell me what a "task queue for python" means in context

This would be about 100x cooler if there was an environment you could fly through and not just empty grass.

I'm an undergrad doing some neuroscience research; I think the existence of such tools are essential to progress. As soon as you can start doing CompBio on the web, more people (i.e. students, non scientist programmers) will be encouraged to start playing around which will lead to more progress in our understanding of complex biology, and spur the people's excitement about recent progress in the field. The beautiful thing about code is that it is tremendously empowering – your writing a computational biology library for the web will empower individuals to get into computational biology. Furthermore, it will enable individuals to write blog posts with live JS examples, etc all to further broader progress. Lastly, I'm sure it will a learning experience for you too (albeit probably of much lower magnitude than a PhD). I say do it!

Thanks for your explanation. So what this really does is enable one to train code using machine learning techniques such as gradient descent, traversing a code-space instead of traversing a space of numbers?

Does this only work for mathematical programs? I don't understand how this would work for more general computations, involving loops, writes to files, etc.

so what does it actually mean to differentiate a program?

This looks really interesting but I just don't understand it. Can someone with more expertise explain in layman's terms what this paper is about?

It is very important this research was shared. However, the very difficult and likely impossible part is to actually change the emotional and interpersonal ethos of society. Given the very intangible nature of the problem, no one in power will care enough to initiate a national program to motivate such social change. Therefore, it must come from us, the people. We ought to stand to the call and do something of value to nudge society towards a more interactive state.