Fede_V

27 ms·

211.
by Fede_V 11y ago
The poster didn't write that science explains everything. They wrote that science can explain everything. There are some philosophers like Colin McGinn that think that some features of empirical reality are in principle impossible t
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by Fede_V 11y ago
Ben Goldacre's excellent book, Bad Pharma, discusses doctor-pharma bribery in detail. One fact which stuck with me was how, doctors are universally concerned about how other doctors are constantly being gifted and dined by other phar
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by Fede_V 11y ago
I would agree with this if researchers were not under insane pressure to produce findings (as opposed to understanding). If a researcher designs a great experiment, but after collecting and analyzing all the data comes to the conclusion tha
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by Fede_V 11y ago
This is a difficult topic to study properly, because: - Coffee consumption is not uniform throughout the population. For example, I'm willing to wager that people that eat a lot of truffles and Beluga caviar are among the healthiest a
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by Fede_V 11y ago
If it's just a matter of speeding up a tight loop, I find numba performs admirably and it's a lot more convenient than Cython. When you need to wrap some c code, or use high-level data structures (that cython handles beautifully w
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by Fede_V 11y ago
I think from a strictly economic point of view, a graduate degree is a terrible investment. Look at it this way - you could spend the 4+ years you spend in grad school working in a high paying job, investing all the difference between grad
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by Fede_V 11y ago
I mostly agree, but I don't think that it's just a matter of money. Money is a way to motivate people - but for lots of people, the ability to work on a system that will cause a huge improvement in the lives of hundreds of millio
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by Fede_V 11y ago
The solution proposed to fix this mess is insane. A '96 hour training course' at the end of which you are able to handle 100+ million projects? That's 2 weeks of work + change. Does anyone think that they could end up qual
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by Fede_V 11y ago
A bit of a pet peeve, but futurism already has a meaningful definition - it refers to an art movement at the start of the 20th century. Just because you like how the word sounds, it's pretty poor form to recycle it to indicate a parti
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by Fede_V 11y ago
There is another incredibly interesting meta-discussion implicit in that article. How does someone very intelligent like Peter Thiel make investment decisions in an area where he lacks a huge amount of background knowledge? He can obviousl
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“This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University”(facebook.com)
279 points by Fede_V 11y ago|133 comments
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by Fede_V 11y ago
I benchmarked Assimulo vs LSODA (the function wrapped by SciPy odeint) and LSODA was significantly faster for bigger problems. Assimulo has a lot more features though, like adjoint sensitivity, etc...
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by Fede_V 11y ago
We would definitely be very interested. If the code is in Python, I can even sign up to review it.
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by Fede_V 11y ago
The main advantage of replicable science is that it forces authors to be very explicit about their datasets and all the steps that make up their data analysis pipeline. A lot of computational analysis (at least in biology) is done by studen
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by Fede_V 11y ago
Ugh, this is a terribly click-baity article. Facebook has really, really good people working on machine learning. What Facebook wants to do is use whatever features it can scrape from your profile to accurately price your odds of defaultin
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by Fede_V 11y ago
During my undergrad in the UK, all the doctors and members of the NHS that I interacted with were always kind, helpful and professional. Admittedly, they were sometime a bit brash because they had a lot of patients to see. Of course, diffe
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by Fede_V 11y ago
As an extreme example of power cycling, I was refactoring a slow function in some simulation code and replacing some hash-based look ups with some pointer arithmetics. I must have spent several hours writing and re-writing that function, an
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by Fede_V 11y ago
I am very excited to see the focus on tooling. Rust is a kick ass language, but imagine how awesome it would be to have an IDE to help you with lifetimes, inline documentation, etc... C#'s best feature is its integration with visual s
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by Fede_V 11y ago
Yeah, I was prepared to see some Lovecraftesque template metaprogramming implementation of lambda calculus just to calculate the fixed point of a function.
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by Fede_V 11y ago
Actually, resources are the least of your concerns when it comes to DL. DLs have a shitload of hyper-parameters (effectively, the entire architecture) which is mostly built by trial and error + intuition. There was some really exciting wor
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by Fede_V 11y ago
I wonder why nvidia refuses to release their public API unless you sign an NDA. Are they just worried people will buy cheaper cards and overclock them?
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by Fede_V 11y ago
Yeah, this is a brilliant series of articles. I really enjoyed it.
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by Fede_V 11y ago
I hate it when some relatively simple piece of math is described in the most complicated/impressive possible terminology to give the biggest splash. They used a machine learning algorithm to reduce their food waste. Cool! That's
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by Fede_V 11y ago
Very interesting article. There was a data viz (gender vs visits) that was needlessly flashy, when a simple x-y scatter would have been more clear. One part struck me though: Erwin sees evidence of it already, pointing to the recent debut
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by Fede_V 11y ago
Local minima are only nearly as good as global minima in very very deep networks.
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by Fede_V 11y ago
I was a bit curious, so I did a short experiment: http://nbviewer.ipython.org/urls/dl.dropbox.com/s/l9naqibqyt... Using numba, and adding a one line decorator to the function (without any changes whatsoever)
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Ioannidis discusses the lack of meritocracy in Greece(america.aljazeera.com)
1 points by Fede_V 11y ago|0 comments
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by Fede_V 11y ago
This is a bit of a pet-peeve of mine, but I really dislike it when people focus on the aesthetic or the presentation style of Musk or Jobs. Musk gives great presentations, but the reason he is widely respected is because he was actually abl
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by Fede_V 11y ago
For those that care about philosophy of science and mathematics, Poincare` wrote a few excellent short books/long essays. In particular, he has some very interesting books about the psychology of mathematical researchers and the role
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by Fede_V 11y ago
For the company, there's an obvious upside in maintaining secrecy. But, for people working there, what exactly do they gain by keeping their wages secret? Google pays very generously, but it seems to me like workers have everything to

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