Fede_V

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241.
by Fede_V 11y ago
I have a very charming Larry Wall story. He came to give a seminar to the research center where I was working, and gave a fantastic talk on Perl 6. Late in the evening, I ran into him and his wife on the bus when getting home from work - a
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by Fede_V 11y ago
Thanks for your point of view - that actually makes a lot of sense. I really dislike the escalation of pitches. As you said, almost everyone says that 'we will become a billion dollar company' or similar claptrap - but that just
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by Fede_V 11y ago
Short of banning math, how exactly can you prevent people from using strong encryption? Even assuming the government can convince a lot of big corporations to put backdoors in their products, tech literate people will just use niche open so
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by Fede_V 11y ago
Yeah, the paper in itself is interesting, not sure why they had to give it that completely misleading title.
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by Fede_V 11y ago
Yeah, exactly right. Not all opinions deserve to weighted equally.
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The number of olfactory stimuli that humans can discriminate is still unknown(elifesciences.org)
9 points by Fede_V 11y ago|3 comments
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by Fede_V 11y ago
It's very possible that I've made some unfair assumptions. Could you give me a more fair representation of what goes into the mind of someone selling surveillance software to Sudan or Omar?
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by Fede_V 11y ago
I do not want to sound shockingly naive, but I wonder how these people can sleep at night. You've just sold software to some of the most brutal governments in the world, who will use your technology to track down and brutally torture
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by Fede_V 11y ago
I really dislike the protectionist barriers that exist to keep competition away from taxis, pharmacies, etc... but the people that are currently in those jobs often got themselves into a massive amount of debt to buy a license. We should ge
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by Fede_V 11y ago
This is probably the clearest explanation I've seen. The reddit community has always been a very proudly geeky bunch that enthusiastically embraced internet culture. It's really hard to describe internet culture to someone for wh
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by Fede_V 11y ago
So, two distinct comments: - We, as a species, tend to attribute way too much credit to the people in key roles and not enough to the people around them. You see this in sports, in tech, and in politics. I wish there was a name for this c
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by Fede_V 11y ago
Yes, that's correct, but if you are using semi-complex objects, then you have to invoke the python interpreter and lose most of the advantage of going to Cython in the first place. Even for things like ints, floats, etc - if you want t
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by Fede_V 11y ago
It's hard to convey how bad the housing situation is in London to people that have not lived there. Starting income is much lower than Silicon Valley (a very, very good pay for your first job is around ~40,000 pounds/year), housi
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by Fede_V 11y ago
What do you mean by 'people in tech'? I don't think any of the engineers like it, VC probably do, but that's a very small subset.
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by Fede_V 11y ago
If you'd like, I can dig up several instances of the daily mail being terrible (specifically, their reporting about 'soandso causes cancer', their use of single outrageous instances to infer non-existing trends, the horrendou
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by Fede_V 11y ago
Great, so we will have a racist and reactionary AI that thinks celebrity gossip and immigrant bashing are the most important things in the world. For the non-AIs reading this thread, I highly reccomend https://addons.mozilla.org&
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by Fede_V 11y ago
I wanted to focus on one thing which I really liked in that list. The author stresses the need to explain the rationale for decisions (aka, why we are going to focus on x, instead of y) rather than presenting all decisions as unquestionabl
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by Fede_V 11y ago
Being able to signal that you are respectable is very important, especially if you are a member of a minority group that faces constant stereotyping, and I think the author makes this point very vividly. However, the way you signal that you
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by Fede_V 11y ago
I have nothing but empathy for her grief - everything I've read about her makes her seem like an amazing woman, but I am very deeply uncomfortable with public displays of emotion like this. I guess this is one of those dumb culturally
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by Fede_V 11y ago
It can. However, Julia made a very strong push to target the scientific computing niche (very strong array support, ease of writing tight loops in native code, etc) - and such it has a very quickly growing ecosystem of high quality scienti
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by Fede_V 11y ago
It's not multinationals in general, it's that Nestle has a horrendous ethical track record. For example, they pushed for powdered milk in Africa with absolutely tragic consequences. http://www.theguardian.com/busi
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by Fede_V 11y ago
Excellent clarification, thank you.
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by Fede_V 11y ago
I hope I'm not reading what you wrote uncharitably, but, by rewarding people with positive results, we are inevitably encouraging people to either design their experiments in ways that confirm their hypothesis, or at worse, to falsify
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by Fede_V 11y ago
The incentive system in science is immensely screwed up. Researchers are rewarded not for high quality work flows, reproducible results, and solid methodology but for neat, linear stories with a simple high impact result. Imagine that a sc
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Alan Turing: The Applications of Probability to Cryptography [pdf](arxiv.org)
47 points by Fede_V 11y ago|3 comments
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The Economist on how to join the global elite(economist.com)
1 points by Fede_V 11y ago|0 comments
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by Fede_V 11y ago
Have you taken a look at this ? https://github.com/HIPS/autograd and paper http://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.03492.pdf They reverse the computation of the gradient to calculate the derivative wrt the hyp
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by Fede_V 11y ago
I am honestly completely unqualified to comment on how good their product is. I know very little about the 'dating application' space. I did find the comments about finding funding to be somewhat entitled, but I guess most peopl
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by Fede_V 11y ago
I'm assuming that the person telling the story did not flagrantly lie. Obviously, before proceeding with professional/legal repercussions, all the claims should be heavily scrutinized. However - if the claims are true, you do not
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by Fede_V 11y ago
Let's say for the sake of argument that you are completely, 100% right about the difficulty of fundraising and how 'banal' their product is. Even given that, the kind of shady behaviour that the investors tried to pull (grop

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