bpires
Joined 11 years ago
Karma
134
Submissions
23
Member since
Mar 5
Recent submissions
Comment · 10 years ago
Comment · 10 years ago
Reminds me of http://www.nina4airbnb.com/ who made an extensive analysis of where airbnb should target next in an attempt to convince airbnb to hire her.
After her website went viral, she did eventually get an interview with airbnb. While making such an analysis is no guarantee of a job, she was rejected because the interviewer couldn’t contextualize her experience because she "hadn’t worked at facebook or google or studied at stanford".
She did however in the process land several interviews with different companies and picked a company called upwork in the end. So this kind of work can have several positive side effects even if your initial objective is not reached.
Her complete report can be read here: http://eatwritewalk.com/2015/07/14/the-good-the-bad-and-the-...
Comment · 10 years ago
Quite interesting how the authors even mention that this strategy is very economically viable.
From the paper: 'Assuming a selling price of $2 per 1,000 solved captchas, our token harvesting attack could accrue $104 - $110 daily, per host (i.e., IP address). By leveraging proxy services and running multiple attacks in parallel, this amount could be significantly higher for a single machine.'
Comment · 10 years ago
The author did compare their performance with captcha-solving services. His accuracy is comparable to the service with no extra cost to the attacker.
From the paper: "We compare our performance to that of Decaptcher, the (self-reported) oldest captcha-solving service. We selected Decaptcher for two reasons. First, it supports the image reCaptcha, charging $2 per 1000 solved captchas. [...] Interestingly, some of our summitted challenges rejected due to the service being overloaded, and had to be resubmitted at a later time, and received a time-out error as the solvers did not provide an answer in the time window allocated by the service. 258 challenges (36.85%) were an exact match. When taking into account the flexibility, 321 (44.3%) of the captchas were solved. The average solving time for the challenges that received a solution was 22.5 seconds. While the accuracy may increase over time as the human solvers become more accustomed to the image reCaptcha, it is evident that our system is a cost-effective alternative. Nonetheless, our completely offline captcha-breaking system is comparable to a professional solving service in both accuracy and attack duration, with the added benefit of not incurring any cost on the attacker."
Comment · 10 years ago
A little hard to take seriously considering the author works for Canonical. Even so the author didn't seem very excited about it, it felt more like an acceptable phone and not that it's better than Android or iOS.
Comment · 10 years ago
I wonder how much faster the new Tesla P100 is compared to the Tesla K40 in training neural networks. The K40s were the best available GPUs for training deep neural networks.
Comment · 10 years ago
I thought Jeff Dean was the 'Chuck Norris' of programming. He designed (with others) a lot of Google's biggest infrastructure projects as well as multiple iterations of the main search infrastructure.
Among others, the projects he's worked on include:
Spanner - a scalable, multi-version, globally distributed, and synchronously replicated database
Some of the production system design and statistical machine translation system for Google Translate.
BigTable, a large-scale semi-structured storage system.
MapReduce a system for large-scale data processing applications.
Google Brain a system for large-scale artificial neural networks
LevelDB an open source on-disk key-value store.
TensorFlow an open source machine learning software library.
Comment · 10 years ago
Referendums don't really solve anything. Here are some of the questionable ones that have passed:
1.Minarets can no longer be built in Switzerland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_minaret_referendum,_2009 2. Immigration quotas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_immigration_referendum,_...
I'm not an european citizen, have a job offer to work in a big tech company in Zurich and will not be able to get a visa even though I've got my Bachelors and Masters degree in Europe. Since the referendum passed, they're now requiring 3 years full-time work experience regardless of which education degree you hold.
Comment · 11 years ago
Did you read what I said? I've went through the visa process.
[0]: http://pjreddie.com/darknet/yolo/
[1]: http://www.cvlibs.net/datasets/kitti/
[2]: http://host.robots.ox.ac.uk/pascal/VOC/