Recent submissions

Comment · 5 years ago
people want to go back to monoliths, but don't want to lose the upsides of microservices. once you get a taste of serverless, it's really hard to go back to overprovisioning. at the same time, distributed state and logic that crosses service boundaries is hard. I don't know what comes next, but what I _want_ to come next is powerful static analysis that works across languages and services, that can "compile down" to serveless services
Comment · 5 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
The Fed's policies (at least since 2008) could be described as "socialism for the management upper class" - they got free money that they gave to themselves as bonuses. Their companies were buoyed up, regardless of what the market wanted or whether the business was sound.
Comment · 6 years ago
There was a great article on the front page yesterday, When to Assume Neural Networks Can Solve a Problem, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22717367 . Case 2 is very relevant here, basically: if you have solved the problem with access to lots of data, usually you can adapt to a lower-data regime.

I am way out of my element talking about brain surgery and sensors. However, one thing that I do well is say "you shouldn't bet against neural networks", which is a great way to be right on a few-year time horizon.

Comment · 6 years ago
Given this perspective, I would postpone investment as long as possible then.
Comment · 6 years ago
Comment · 6 years ago
Comment · 7 years ago
Google's AutoML produces black box models that are only available over a network call. This services seems to produces downloadable models, and a notebook with Python code that creates the model. If that is the case, this is substantially better than GCP's offering.

AWS consistently releases similar products after GCP... but they are much more well-thought-out, as AWS has to support them indefinitely...

Comment · 7 years ago
Comment · 7 years ago
They give examples of problems their model could solve that Mathematica couldn't (within a 30 second timeout) - and that's awesome. Destroy Mathematica. But, I did anyone notice if there were problems that it couldn't solve that Mathematica could?
Comment · 7 years ago
I was hoping that this would be related to Colah's "Neural Networks, Types, and Functional Programming" https://colah.github.io/posts/2015-09-NN-Types-FP/ (but it is not). In it, he establishes correspondances between different NN architectures and different FP tricks like `Zipped Left & Right Accumulating Map = Bidirectional RNN`.

Does anyone know any other resources that take this approach?

Comment · 7 years ago
I think the reason the parent mentions GraalVM instead of Jython is that Jython can't use C libs like numpy. But GraalVM lets you compile JVM to a native binary, so maybe there is some way to use Cython in JVM.
Comment · 7 years ago
Comment · 7 years ago
Leo Breiman [0] (inventor of bagging and random forests) wrote a paper called "Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures" [1], and since I read it, I see it everywhere. The basic idea is that Statisticians place(d) too high an emphasis on model interpretability ("data modeling" in the paper), and as a result, missed out on the revolution of machine learning ("algorithmic modeling" in the paper). In the author's words (parenthetical added by me), "[T]he focus in the statistical community on data models (simple, interpretable models) has [l]ed to irrelevant theory and questionable scientific conclusions."

In this TDS post, the author says "Statisticians and Actuaries are at the bottom of the heap as a prior role for existing data scientists." Maybe this isn't a coincidence? Plenty of companies had statisticians on staff, but the explosion of data science happened anyway. Why? Because data scientists do the same types of tasks as statisticians, but while statisticians are of the data modeling culture, data scientists are expected to be of the algorithmic modeling culture. It seems that the market is saying that the algorithmic modeling culture is getting results.

The author references "Type A vs Type B Data scientists" [2], which seems to be getting at the same thing: "The Type A Data Scientist is very similar to a statistician... Type B Data Scientists share some statistical background with Type A, but they are also very strong coders and may be trained software engineers. The Type B Data Scientist is mainly interested in using data "in production." They build models which interact with users, often serving recommendations (products, people you may know, ads, movies, search results)." For whatever reason, there is a correlation between Algorithmic modeling / Type B and "getting things done".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Breiman

[1] https://projecteuclid.org/download/pdf_1/euclid.ss/100921372...

[2] https://www.quora.com/What-is-data-science/answer/Michael-Ho...

Comment · 7 years ago

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