Four short links: 10 April 2018
Deep Learning Learnings, Reverse Engineering WhatsApp, Database Client, and Social Science
- Lessons Learned Reproducing a Deep Reinforcement Learning Paper — REALLY good retrospective on eight months reproducing a paper, with lots of lessons learned, like starting a reinforcement learning project, you should expect to get stuck like you get stuck on a math problem. It’s not like my experience of programming in general so far where you get stuck but there’s usually a clear trail to follow and you can get unstuck within a couple of days at most. It’s more like when you’re trying to solve a puzzle, there are no clear inroads into the problem, and the only way to proceed is to try things until you find the key piece of evidence or get the key spark that lets you figure it out.
- Reverse Engineering WhatsApp — This project intends to provide a complete description and re-implementation of the WhatsApp Web API, which will eventually lead to a custom client. WhatsApp Web internally works using WebSockets; this project does as well.
- DatabaseFlow — an open source self-hosted SQL client, GraphQL server, and charting application that works with your database. Visualize schemas, query plans, charts, and results. You can run Database Flow locally for your own use, or install to a shared server for the whole team.
- Code and Data for the Social Sciences — This handbook is about translating insights from experts in code and data into practical terms for empirical social scientists.
