Recent submissions

Comment · 6 years ago
That's an insanely broad brush. The mainstream press includes the NY Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, The Atlantic, and NPR. Please explain how they fabricate narratives, how they destroy the lives of those who accidentally enter their crosshairs, and how they retroactively alter their archives to change history.

I'd expect your summary dismissal of the mainstream media from a Trump supporter. I'm surprised to see it on HN. So please elaborate.

Comment · 6 years ago
"Direct connections to the KKK" ? Did you read the article or his statement? He was 17 and fell in with white supremacists after/during an abusive childhood. If you want to dispute this account, fine, let's hear it. If you want to claim Banjo is otherwise an evil company, OK, it may be, but that's a separate point. But claiming that this episode as reported constitutes a direct connection to the KKK, and implying it's ongoing, is off the mark.
Comment · 6 years ago
Is this worth buying/borrowing if you already know programming languages but not Javascript? Or is there a better approach?
Comment · 6 years ago
Chemistry, biology, botany, and geology are dead?
Comment · 6 years ago
This whole article, and your agreement, rests on a false dichotomy. "Fallacy" implies learning about mental models is useless. No one said mental models replace experience any more than good notetaking can replace thought; but both are useful in thinking and learning.
Comment · 6 years ago
I don't agree. Paisley is a well-known pattern type and some people really dislike it. "Shirt without paisley" is not a common request but its meaning is clear (if you do an image search for paisley you get lots of fabric images, so it's not like search engines don't know it.) I'd say the same for "shirt without red buttons." In general the pattern <article of clothing> without <feature> shouldn't be that difficult for search engines---especially since many are tuned for consumers.
Comment · 6 years ago
"He developed a philosophy that assumed that the sun was the venerable source of all life, and since the coconut was the fruit that grows nearest the sun, it must be the most perfect food for people."

That may sound comical, but I think the reasoning behind some modern diets (e.g. Paleo Diet) isn't too different.

Comment · 6 years ago
Mendeley and Zotero are both free, but both have storage limits beyond which you have to pay (Zotero is 300M, Mendeley is 2G). If you only store references and annotations you'll likely never exceed those limits, but if you use them as a paper archive you may. (I have a 3G archive)
Comment · 6 years ago
Knowledge discovery used to be a big part of ML, and the KDD conference included papers on association rules, clustering, rule learning, interpretable classifiers, etc. In my experience, even with predictive analytics the knowledge discovered along the way was often as valuable as the final application --- although it's easier to sell a predictive capability than "we're going to find something interesting in your data."
Comment · 6 years ago
My reaction too. They've reinvented genetic/evolutionary programming. They should probably read some of the decades of work that have already been done on it.
Comment · 6 years ago
The word is commonly misused. What they probably mean is sympathy, but that isn't really right either. The correct word would be compassion or altruism.

But /altruism/ is a word that sometimes sets people off.

Comment · 6 years ago
As opposed to corporate bureaucracies? If you think the free market magically makes everything efficient and free of politics and bureaucracy, try spending some time in a big company.

Remember this folks when voting for people who advocate for privatizing or de-regulating industries.

Comment · 6 years ago
There's an odd jump in this narrative. PCA is indeed a great technique, but the essay goes from PCA to neural nets without explaining why. PCA was around for a long time before NNs and there are fast incremental ways to do it. Why bother with a million-weight NN if PCA will do the job?
Comment · 6 years ago
At one point Microsoft would refuse to interview you unless you were their first and only choice. If you ever hinted you were considering other companies---interview over.

Probably all the 900-pound gorilla companies go through that period of extreme arrogance when everyone's knocking on their door. Until they're not.

Comment · 6 years ago
I'm surprised it's taken this long. There is no peer review to arXiv. If you've ever reviewed for a conference or a journal (10-30% acceptance rates) you've seen the "raw feed" of submitted papers and you realize the average isn't very good. Many get rejected because they simply have a few flaws, but some are badly flawed (or just plain wrong) and shouldn't be published anywhere. ArXiv has no peer review so it's virtually the raw feed. I cringe whenever I see arXiv papers cited as if they were published work --- doing an end-run around peer review can't be good for science.

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