_dps

20 ms·

331.
by _dps 15y ago
Well, I'm biased but also experienced (former academic, now industrial practitioner doing a startup). My advice to the people who think that industrial ML/AI is "just applying some base cunning to 1970s problems" is to try to trade equities
332.
by _dps 15y ago
Thanks! I'll ask one more question while I have your attention. The first thing I searched for on that SEP page was "Popper", because my "how do we know a car engine is not conscious" stems from trying to apply falsifiability to my intuitiv
333.
by _dps 15y ago
I once did some reading about this so I'm curious for more information (since you seem to know what you're talking about). This is probably a stupid question (my favorite kind): Are there good arguments for why a car engine isn't consciou
334.
by _dps 15y ago
Reading your comment, I think I could be giving the business caricature too much credit; I've certainly heard the "ivory-tower wankery" line. I guess I always interpreted it as a dismissive (rather than hostile) attitude, but you make a goo
335.
by _dps 15y ago
Could you elaborate? In my experience the relationship is highly asymmetrical, in that the two communities are talking past each other (disclosure: former academic who is now doing a startup). (Caricatured) Businesses think most of academic
336.
by _dps 15y ago
Out of curiosity, did you compare to any other baselines? I suspect you did a lot better than you think you did, because that particular baseline is actually very misleading for ranking/recommendation tasks (this is a common source of conf
337.
by _dps 15y ago
I don't know for a fact, but I doubt that this specific detail is enshrined in law. Much more likely is that the law requires certification from a bureaucrat that you are not carrying some terrible disease. Greek bureaucrats have a lot of l
338.
by _dps 15y ago
When you substitute "people" for police, you're missing a crucial ingredient; other police officers have an institutional alignment with their fellow officers, and will continue to interact with other officers. Further, they are likely to n
339.
by _dps 15y ago
I would ask: a waste of money over what time-scale? I agree that the ROI over the next decade or two seems low. But at some point, if we plan to ever get humans to other planets, we're going to have to do the low ROI slog of figuring out th
340.
by _dps 15y ago
Agreed re:being weaselly about your number. Given that someone has to say a number first (absent weird note-trading schemes), not saying a number first is (game theoretically) tantamount to saying "I'm hoping you'll unwittingly make an of
341.
by _dps 15y ago
Sorry, I didn't mean to align myself with specific monetary policy. I barely know anything about it. The only point is that I personally can't call up Bernanke for a Fed Funds loan, so the expansion of the money happens asymmetrically acros
342.
by _dps 15y ago
I often play "defender" of the finance industry among my friends, but I think we should separate two claims: 1) finance, as a whole, is "bad" for whatever reason 2) separate from (1) the people and companies involved in finance are "b
343.
by _dps 15y ago
I had dug into the math behind this at some point and recall that Borda was argued (e.g. by Saari's "Basic Geometry of Voting") to be the "best" in the sense of invariance under impossible-to-satisfy group preference cycles (A > B >
344.
by _dps 15y ago
I think you're mostly right, and your example (sales work with big companies) is well aligned with your theory, but there are plenty of schlepps that are not conceivably anyone's passion because they don't require any differentiated work. M
345.
by _dps 15y ago
I have no specific information on the humanities side aside from anecdotes and personal experience, so I'd be interested if you could elaborate. Is it perhaps possible that most of the students that are accepted are fully funded, but that
346.
by _dps 15y ago
I'd be grateful for clarification here, as I am indeed not a lawyer. My understanding of vicarious liability ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicarious_liability ) is that the corporation is liable for actions of the employee in the course of
347.
by _dps 15y ago
Yes, sorry that's indeed an important distinction but I don't think it changes the substance of my comment; the people who form corporations to do business receive privileges. Also, it's not just the owners; employees acting as agents are t
348.
by _dps 15y ago
I think a demand that businesses undertake some social responsibility is sensible, given the privileges corporations receive (like limited liability). I think many people overlook that corporations are granted real privileges beyond those g
349.
by _dps 15y ago
I ask this as an honest question so please forgive the directness: in what sense, aside from the parent comment's "trying to remain relevant" theory, is the community-building the "actual point of a library"? I completely agree that librari
350.
by _dps 15y ago
I concur, though it's important to note the STEM bias in statements like "[most PhD Students] get paid a stipend". I can assure you my friend studying the history of Eastern European Political-Economic Thought is not receiving a stipend. Fu
351.
by _dps 15y ago
Yes, I don't think I ever implied that that the flow is unilateral, but I feel like this is indicative of the broader point. The sensitivity to US exceptionalism has made it hard to say something seemingly trivial like "the US is a huge, ri
352.
by _dps 15y ago
Having spent many of my childhood years in Europe (and being of European origin), I agree that US exceptionalism is a problematic phenomenon, but I also think that lately it has become a thought-collapsing meme amongst intellectuals. One
353.
by _dps 15y ago
Having formally studied law, mathematics, and programming, I find it odd that you could say "the beauty of law is that someone is actually right" especially in comparison to any formal system like programming or mathematics. The law is not
354.
by _dps 15y ago
I enjoyed the piece and it echoed several thoughts I've had about the non-profit model (and in general, the "do good" model of design/innovation which poses many interesting ethical questions). I thought I'd comment on one common sleight-of
355.
by _dps 15y ago
I wonder whether there's some hidden wisdom in the terminology. Agile "sprints" are (in the folk-wisdom) ideal for getting somewhere quickly precisely when you don't know where you want to finish. In this case a "quick sprint, rest, reorien
356.
by _dps 15y ago
Completely agree that the questions should be asked honestly and with an eye on social benefits and costs. I'm no fan of the copyright system as-is precisely because I think those tradeoffs are poorly balanced given modern technology. As fo
357.
by _dps 15y ago
People certainly get attached to their historical revenues, but let's not forget that businesses like books, movies, and music all have hit-dominated economics under the current model and that this has co-evolved with the kinds of products
358.
by _dps 15y ago
I agree with your analysis and the injustice of outcomes depending so strongly on the specific twelve jurors for cases involving a strongly held small-minority opinion. On the other hand, I'm not really optimistic about the strategy of elec
359.
by _dps 15y ago
I find the latter to be a weird claim; there's very strong theoretical and empirical evidence that Naive Bayes is significantly worse than other algorithms that can model cross-feature correlations (including really dumb linear regressions)
360.
by _dps 15y ago
I like to view copyright as a short-circuit path to fast promise-exchanges of the following form: "I have a really interesting piece of information. In fact, I create this information, and it takes a lot of work. For whatever reason, you wa

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