7 ms·

She makes a number of fair points, but: > Can you really explain eight self-driving car trade secrets in 45 minutes? Maybe I'm fooling myself, but I think I c

• phil21 9y ago
  None of which would be useful for a judge or jury. Heck, I'm generally pretty decent technically compared to the rest of the population and what you wrote here is barely relevant to me.
  • manux 9y ago
    Sure what I just wrote is technobabble, I don't have much self-driving car expertise, but it was just to make a point. From my experience with large scale engineering projects, especially ones with ML involved, the tiniest details can make the stupidest difference.
    • pvg 9y ago
      Sure what I just wrote is technobabble So you are saying you are fooling yourself and you can't do it in 45 seconds.
      • hateduser2 9y ago
        You’re being obtuse
        • dang 9y ago
          Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
          • hateduser2 9y ago
            Is this uncivil? I can see why its unsubstantive (Although my parent wasnt exactly substantive either). Whether or not its against the rules - do you understand my point?
            • dang 9y ago
              Yes, "you're being $pejorative" is uncivil. The parent was also a bad comment that deserved to be flagged, but since you took a step further in the wrong direction, yours was the one I chided.
              • pvg 9y ago
                Hah, ur fase is a bad comment that deserves to be flagged! The original comment suggested part of the analysis by a reporter and lawyer who is closely following the case got something wrong because hey, they can apparently outline 8 technical trade secrets in 45 seconds by knowingly typing gibberish. The poster wondered whether they are fooling themselves in doing that. By their own words, we can answer that in affirmative as well as recognize they have not, in fact, outlined 8 trade secrets in 45 seconds.
              • hateduser2 9y ago
                It doesn’t matter, but for the record I don’t think you’re right to assert this is uncivil. I didn’t write it pejoratively, I thought he was focusing on an extraneous detail and missing the bigger picture, which is (imo) the meaning of obtuse. I think if you’re in battle mode then you’d be inclined to take it as an insult, but I don’t think it must be one (and I don’t think it’s wise to write as though everyone’s in battle mode - to cater to that)
                • dang 9y ago
                  I believe you that you didn't intend it pejoratively, but if you post a comment that takes that form and don't provide information that clearly signals your intent, plenty of people are going to take it that way. That's not a question of stylistic taste, it's an empirical observation about how internet forums work. Even if 90% of readers guess your intent correctly—an unlikely number—that leaves hundreds if not thousands who read it the other way. It doesn't take much to provoke some of them into replying in kind, and that's the downward spiral we're trying to avoid here.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
• verroq 9y ago
  Parameters are probably the lowest hanging fruit in any machine learning optimisation, being a trade secret is a big stretch. Also use LBFG so you never worry about learning rate.
  • deepnotderp 9y ago
    "Also use LBFG so you never worry about learning rate." Literally never happens in practice.
  • eachro 9y ago
    Hyperparameter optimization for neural networks can be insanely expensive though[1], to the point where there are even startups (e.g: SigOpt) that do this. [1] https://twitter.com/beenwrekt/status/961263599674150912 https://twitter.com/beenwrekt/status/961263599674150912
    • kirillseva 9y ago
      the tweet you link to is architectural search, or figuring out what the neural network should look like (along with its parameters). If self-driving car ML is "data scientists replacing a driver with computers", architecture search is computers replacing data scientists. $1.2M is roughly 3-4 data scientists' annual compensations at a company like Google or Uber. Finding hyperparameters for an existing architecture is much easier because you would typically deal with a much lower cardinality in hyperparameter space. SigOpt is helping with that. Google has an internal solution that is able to take advantage of parameters within their job scheduling infrastructure (they actually have a bunch of them, the one I'm talking about is called hyperband [0]). CERN, as far as I know, was using hyperopt [1]. Avant uses an open-source version of SigOpt that we wrote in 2016 called loop [2]. [0] - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.06560.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1603.06560.pdf [1] - http://hyperopt.github.io/hyperopt http://hyperopt.github.io/hyperopt [2] - https://github.com/avantoss/loop https://github.com/avantoss/loop
      • pc86 9y ago
        Before this gets inundated with people making comments about Googler data scientists making $400k, these are folks with PhDs in math or statistics, very accomplished academic literature, leaders in their fields. These are not people messing around with Haskell on the weekends and leaving an insurance firm's IT department to go to Google.
• alex_young 9y ago
  How long do you think it would take to explain that to 10 random strangers?
  • cbhl 9y ago
    Not even ten random strangers. Ten strangers that are almost certainly not technical, since lawyers always try to dismiss smart people from juries?
    • cicero 9y ago
      As someone who has been on two juries, I object! Jury selection is complicated, and there are limitations to how many potential jurors can be struck. There are also multiple strategies that legal teams may adopt. In my last trial, the plaintiff made a very emotional case, but the defense presented a very logical case. There were two jurors who I would say were logically minded, and we were able to influence the rest of the jury, who were tending to stick on what I thought were irrelevant points. A lawyer friend of mine said that she has seen that one or two logically minded jurors can often steer the jury, and if she is able to put together a logical case, she wants to get some logical people on the jury. (However, being a public defender, she is not always able to put together a nice logical case. She has to do the best she can with what she has to work with.)
      • pc86 9y ago
        Aren't you proving cbhl's point? When she can't put together a logical case and has to rely on "this person has kids please don't send them to prison for this crime they obviously committed," she's going to be trying to keep off the most logical and articulate people at any costs.
        • rexaliquid 9y ago
          chbl wrote: "Ten strangers that are almost certainly not technical, since lawyers always try to dismiss smart people from juries" The point is that smart people are not always dismissed. Different legal strategies work better with different jury selections.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• whack 9y ago
  The 45 minutes she's referring to, is the 45 minutes that Waymo spent talking about it in court. Not 45 minutes that Levandowski spent talking with Uber employees.
  • anfedorov 9y ago
    If all of the models line up a ton, an expert witness could explain that these the chances of reaching the same tuning on all these choices via independent work is practically 0.
• samstave 9y ago
  So, I am sure this will get downvoted, but thi is not my field - but as a curious person.... can you please explain in-long-hand-but-still-like-I-am-5 what your comments means? I dont understand it, but I want to.
  • kirillseva 9y ago
    coursera has a great course on self-driving cars. the only prerequisite is a college course in linear algebra and some python knowledge. If you don't have either of the two the course is still very much approachable - you'll just have to learn two (or three) things at the same time, so expect to double (or triple) the time you sink into it. It's worth it