baron_harkonnen

18 ms·

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by baron_harkonnen 5y ago
It's still quite strange to me that we're at a point in tech where technical skill becomes a penalty. This is not to say that non-technical skills are not important and often more important, but for both myself and friends &quot
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by baron_harkonnen 5y ago
Why in the world is this comment being downvotes? There is nothing in this comment that I see is incorrect, and if you’re going to vigorously down vote because “I don’t like things that make me feel bad!” you at least ought to comment as to
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by baron_harkonnen 5y ago
> Now if you send in a paper that has a radically new idea, there's no chance in hell it will get accepted, because it's going to get some junior reviewer who doesn't understand it. Or it’s going to get a senior reviewer w
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by baron_harkonnen 5y ago
To add to your point, any psychology/sociology researcher trained in quantitative methods will immediately recognize that “happiness” is a latent variable. Quantitative psych people are well versed in how to think about and model laten
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by baron_harkonnen 5y ago
I would argue that the publish or perish culture coupled with a creation of funding focused peer-review system in the 1970s has lead to much worse science. There are plenty of cases where good researchers can't get published because pe
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by baron_harkonnen 5y ago
> If you say: My science is published in journal X, then the funding agency will think it is good science/bad science without actually trying to understand what your science is about. Not only is this correct, but it is the origin
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by baron_harkonnen 5y ago
> Paul Graham is indirectly talking about I find it strange that for someone that is a relatively immune from any real scrutiny, and constantly claiming to be a bold thinker, PG is always so coy in his writing. I would find PG's rec
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by baron_harkonnen 5y ago
I’m still surprised that Tor hidden services never filled that gap. As more and more stuff disappears from the clear web, I assumed more people would realize that .onion sites don’t have to be a wasteland of largely spooky scams. But if any
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by baron_harkonnen 5y ago
If you know a bit of linear algebra the transformation is surprisingly intuitive. Your goal is to create a set of orthogonal vectors, each that captures the highest amount of variance in the original data (the assumption is that variance is
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by baron_harkonnen 5y ago
> Considering that PCA also complicates things from a model interpretability point of view This is a strange comment since my primary usages of PCA/SVD is as a first step in understanding latent factors which are driving the data. L
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by baron_harkonnen 5y ago
> Data Scientists in 6 months In my experience, anything more is dangerous. The signal to noise ratio is so awful these days that it is a serious liability to understand what you're talking about in data science interviews. I have s
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by baron_harkonnen 5y ago
Insight grads, in my experience, have been a notorious joke. Nothing has diminished my respect for a PhD from a top-tier institution more than the people I have worked with coming out of that program.
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by baron_harkonnen 5y ago
Every B2C startup I have ever worked at has basically put a non-trivial component of their "product" efforts into finding some clever way to screw over customers and feel good about it at the same time. I've had YC startup te
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by baron_harkonnen 6y ago
This might come as a surprise to some, but it turns out your mind is also in your body
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by baron_harkonnen 6y ago
People have been making individual choices to improve CO2 emissions for decades and the only thing that reduced global emissions was a pandemic. You need structural change or it all really doesn't matter. Now maybe you think that struc
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by baron_harkonnen 6y ago
> Seth Godin - a marketer! Like most clever things marketers do, that quote is borrowed nearly verbatim from a much older quote without reference. "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet." From Douglas Hofstadter quoting La
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by baron_harkonnen 6y ago
By the same logic we should print charts of heart rates and body temperature from starting from 0. Regional temperature over time plots should always start from 0 kelvin, Google's stock price should displayed from 0 to 3000, etc. I don
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by baron_harkonnen 6y ago
> Most chief executives said they wanted vaccination rates to exceed half the population before they started to encourage staff back to the office - a target which is close to being met in Britain but remains distant in much of Europe. I
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by baron_harkonnen 6y ago
Then you will really enjoy the work of Daniel Wegner. Most of his research is summarized in the book "Illusion of the Conscious Will". His main argument is that we have two causal models to understanding the world, direct physical
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by baron_harkonnen 6y ago
It should not be surprising at all. How many companies have you worked at where part of your performance review involves dividing and averaging ordinal numbers? If you give someone some sort of numeric rating in N categories you cannot ma
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by baron_harkonnen 6y ago
> If you’re a materialist, you probably think that rabbits are conscious... But only someone who is coming from a perspective outside of materialism would find this "consciousness" some magical property. The conclusion that &qu
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by baron_harkonnen 6y ago
Capitalism always seeks a very local optima of maximizing profit with absolutely no question about the cost of "externalities". I put that in quotes because on a finite planet (that at the dawn of industrialization felt infinite
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by baron_harkonnen 6y ago
> That paper actually defines quite a bit What's interesting about this comment is that Butler defines three terms explicitly in that sentence. The 'in which' can be read as 'defined as' a structuralist account
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by baron_harkonnen 6y ago
> is close-to-incomprehensible to me Because it's written for an audience of people who are very familiar with structuralism, Althusser, and the general development of Marxist philosophy over a 200 year period of time. This is no di
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by baron_harkonnen 6y ago
It's hard to believe that there are still people writing the old "post-modernist philosophers are bad for civilization!" rant. One thing that always surprises me about these posts are that they always fail to get the arrow of
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by baron_harkonnen 6y ago
It requires less land because of the heavy use of fertilizers and non-reproducing hybrid grains. It's literally and unquestionably and unsustainable process. The CO2 emissions per person, which is a much better way to measure how much
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by baron_harkonnen 6y ago
> It's the most practical method we have right now for efficiently allocating those resources. This is where true why is our way of life less sustainable today than it was 1000 years ago? Nearly all first nations tribes lived in a
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by baron_harkonnen 6y ago
This is a wildly out of touch view of how economic growth works. First off, where do you think "the cloud" comes from? Even if we assume 100% renewable grid (which is currently impossible) the computers that run the cloud require
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by baron_harkonnen 6y ago
> is super safe if you're on the far left Liberals are not considered the "far left" and people on the far left dislike them as much as people on the right do. This isn't a "no true Scotsman" issue either, t
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by baron_harkonnen 6y ago
> lack of community in their lives when so many people live in isolated areas. Isolated areas, or at least small towns, tend to have much stronger communities than I've found in cities. Anytime I've lived in a city most "c

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