Homunculiheaded

16 ms·

91.
by Homunculiheaded 12y ago
"post-scarcity" is an illusion presented to people living at the very top of the economic pyramid. I'm sure most HNers are in the top 90th percentile of US household income on their own, living in a world mostly surrounded by
92.
by Homunculiheaded 12y ago
My suspicion is essentially the opposite: Tor is secure, but the two high profile arrests (Freedom Hosting and Silk Road) where given priority to make the general public a.) feel that the entire function of Tor is illegal and often repulsiv
93.
by Homunculiheaded 12y ago
I would highly recommend reading Cryptography Engineering [0] cover to cover. It's amazingly readable, covers the basics, the theory necessary to understand how things works and includes ample practical advice and observations on the i
94.
by Homunculiheaded 12y ago
I was interested in Buddhism for awhile, and even spent a fair bit of time reading through translated segments of the Pali Cannon. I've seen a critique of Job's "Buddhism" discussed quite a bit, but it's important t
95.
by Homunculiheaded 12y ago
My personal opinion on this issue is that we already have a pretty good sense of public/private spaces in the physical world. The problem is that most people assume that if your computer is in a private space (ie your bedroom) then it
96.
by Homunculiheaded 12y ago
To be fair though a huge difference is that the deaf community is bound together by a common language. Language is hugely important in human social groups. A "free fix" for members of this community comes at the cost of the eventu
97.
by Homunculiheaded 12y ago
I've personally found a great alternative to living in major cities is not the suburbs but smaller cities. I grew up in the Northeast and now live in a smaller city in the West (pop ~250,000). I can get to SF in a few hours, but locall
98.
by Homunculiheaded 13y ago
The thing with R that I think is important to note is that you don't have interactivity to support code (eg in ruby and python the huge advantage of the repl is to interact with the code you are writing while you're writing it) bu
99.
by Homunculiheaded 13y ago
Also no graphviz![0] I know gephi is gaining a lot of ground, but for a wide range of visualizations requiring actual graphs it is still very hard to beat the simplicity and power of graphviz. [0] http://www.graphviz.org/
100.
by Homunculiheaded 13y ago
"The techniques of the police, which are developing at an extremely rapid tempo, have as their necessary end the transformation of the entire nation into a concentration camp. This is no perverse decision on the part of some party or g
101.
by Homunculiheaded 13y ago
I would suggest that you put together a quick monte-carlo simulation for any of the models you're experimenting with to see how well they perform when you actually know the true conversion rates. There's plenty of theoretical issu
102.
by Homunculiheaded 13y ago
Except in that example the author is choosing E based on the observed difference between two means (which is the exactly the unknown you're trying to determine, so it makes no sense to use it as a constant in a formula), rather than th
103.
by Homunculiheaded 13y ago
There are several things that help. Firstly you're not just looking for a red light/green light significance. Since you're actually modeling the beta distribution for each conversion rate you not only can ask "what'
104.
by Homunculiheaded 13y ago
confidence in your own decisions can also be referred to as a Bayesian prior ;) I've treated the A/B tests I've run pretty much as a case of Bayesian parameter estimation (where the true conversion of A and of B are your para
105.
by Homunculiheaded 13y ago
I hear more and more chanting of "correlation does not equal causation!" which is great if your goal is to form a causal model of the world, but there are plenty of insights you can arrive at from correlation alone. For starters i
106.
by Homunculiheaded 13y ago
Feature extraction can be aided by unsupervised data but will certainly work with labeled data. One of the advancements bundled under 'deep learning' is how we can leverage unlabeled data (which is much easier to come by) to impro
107.
by Homunculiheaded 13y ago
Not articles but there are two very excellent books on the subject that I can't recommend enough: If you read calculus with about the same fluency as the comic books then "Data Analysis: A Bayesian Tutorial" is awesome http:
108.
by Homunculiheaded 13y ago
One of the leading villains of Breaking Bad is most definitely the US healthcare system. There is no doubt that in either show stellar acting and writing are what make the show, but part of stellar writing is touching on the anxieties of yo
109.
by Homunculiheaded 13y ago
The biggest thing that R has is just an incredible amount of really well documented packages, that are quite frequently cutting edge (unless you want to do any deep learning work). Not to mention that the base R has just a tremendous amount
110.
by Homunculiheaded 13y ago
I'm pretty confident that in 55 more years we'll be at the point where the state of the art in programming language will be to simply rediscover Common Lisp.
111.
by Homunculiheaded 13y ago
I sometimes think that progress in the 21st century will be summed up as: "The realization that the normal distribution is not the only way to model data". Taleb's favorite topic is the "black swan event" which is s
112.
by Homunculiheaded 13y ago
Without "modern philosophy" the idea of falsifiability would not be a major component of the modern science. Much of what is now considered to be standard scientific practice is the product of Karl Popper's philosophical work
113.
by Homunculiheaded 13y ago
From the Investopedia: "In the year 1999, there were 457 IPOs, most of which were internet and technology related. Of those 457 IPOs, 117 doubled in price on the first day of trading."[0] We're not seeing this type of investo
114.
by Homunculiheaded 13y ago
One of the functions of the prior in Bayesian analysis is to incorporate this "gut feel" into your calculations. Given that you have a strong prior belief and weak data (ie not much data) your belief will strongly influence the po
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by Homunculiheaded 13y ago
About a year ago I repeated this experiment (well a very simplified version) with MegaMan sprites, including a quick write up of the process for anyone interested: http://willkurt.github.io/EigenMan/
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by Homunculiheaded 13y ago
I live in an area with pretty much 0 worthwhile tech jobs. I've been working remote for a while now and done so with 3 very different organizations doing very different types of work (plain old software dev to machine learning research
117.
by Homunculiheaded 13y ago
The biggest difference I see is that while I know many non-developers wanting to get into software, only those that actually become strong developers make it. In the 90s it wasn't just that HTML was new, anyone that was "good with
118.
by Homunculiheaded 13y ago
The Sokal affair is a lot less shocking when you realize Social Text was not peer-reviewed at the time and the article was for a special science issue of the journal. If you've ever had misfortune of having to review submission for non
119.
by Homunculiheaded 13y ago
Please let's not mindlessly post this comic and act that because rubber hose crypt-analysis exists we shouldn't even bother. One huge point I keep trying to bring up to friends when I talk about security is: yes if you are the spe
120.
by Homunculiheaded 13y ago
"This is despite the fact that science, alone, can lay claim to a wealth of empirical evidence on the psychological effects of surveillance." Why do people ever expect reason to be a part of this? This quote shows exactly the poin

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