harperreed

Peter Thiel's CS183: Startup - Class 1 Notes Essay

Here is an essay version of my class notes from Class 1 of CS183: Startup. Errors and omissions are my own. Credit for good stuff is Peter’s entirely.

CS183: Startup—Notes Essay—The Challenge of the Future

Purpose and Preamble

karpathy

""" Trains an agent with (stochastic) Policy Gradients on Pong. Uses OpenAI Gym. """
import numpy as np
import cPickle as pickle
import gym

# hyperparameters
H = 200 # number of hidden layer neurons
batch_size = 10 # every how many episodes to do a param update?
learning_rate = 1e-4
gamma = 0.99 # discount factor for reward

evancz

A vision for data interchange in Elm

How do you send information between clients and servers? What format should that information be in? What happens when the server changes the format, but the client has not been updated yet? What happens when the server changes the format, but the database cannot be updated?

These are difficult questions. It is not just about picking a format, but rather picking a format that can evolve as your application evolves.

Literature Review

By now there are many approaches to communicating between client and server. These approaches tend to be known within specific companies and language communities, but the techniques do not cross borders. I will outline JSON, ProtoBuf, and GraphQL here so we can learn from them all.

taylorza

Filling an array or slice with a repeated pattern

Looking for an efficient pure GO approach to copy repeating patterns into a slice, for a toy project, I ran a few tests and discovered a neat approach to significantly improve performance. For the toy project, I am using this to fill a background buffer with a specific RGB color pattern, so improving this performance significantly improved my acheivable framerate.

All the test were run with a buffer of 73437 bytes, allocated as follows

var bigSlice = make([]byte, 73437, 73437)

Fill the slice with the value 65 by looping through each element and setting the value