hooande

70 ms·

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by hooande 13y ago
For better or worse, our educational system is centered around the idea of exposure to potentially worthless experiences. Everyone knows people who haven't had to think about concepts from trigonometry or algebra 2 since school. Childr
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by hooande 13y ago
There is nothing more reviled by people who were born during the cold war than a criminal who defects first to china and then to russia. No amount of tech industry pr can facilitate a comeback from that. Almost half of the people in this co
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by hooande 13y ago
Most machine learning concepts are very simple. I agree with the author that mathematical formulae can be unnecessarily confusing in many cases. A lot of the concepts can be expressed very clearly in code or plain english. For example, a ma
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by hooande 13y ago
Drones are just like any other tools of war. The fact that the combatant is sitting very far away from the battle doesn't make the killing any less real, the stakes any lower or the human cost to the operator any cheaper. War is hell b
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by hooande 13y ago
One thing I learned from watching this episode of Frontline was that we aren't doing a lot of research into new antibiotics. Companies like Pfizer (the original makers of penicillin) would rather create drugs like Lipitor or Prozac, th
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by hooande 13y ago
How to compose a successful critical commentary: 1. Attempt to re-express your target's position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your target says: "Thanks, I wish I'd thought of putting it that way." 2.
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by hooande 13y ago
This seems like it would be useful for advertising, but it probably won't be. It's still difficult to link a social profile to a particlar web page view. Google and Facebook have a lot of information about everyone but they still
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by hooande 13y ago
Lethal Autonomous Robots are inevitable. They think faster than humans, are much more tactically coordinated and all of them can be updated with new instructions and bug fixes. Just ask a marine captain how difficult it is to bug fix and up
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by hooande 13y ago
Socher thinks his model could reach upward of 95 percent accuracy, but it will never be completely perfect. Ridiculous accuracy for something as complex as sentiment analysis. You don't hear established researchers say something like
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by hooande 13y ago
There are several fundamental problems with prediction markets: 1) Every market participant is not a savvy investor. InTrade was notorious for political bias and emotional trading (check out the comment section). The idea is that a true ins
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by hooande 13y ago
This article raises some interesting science fiction-y ideas. Quite a long and in depth read, but worth it because gwern's mind is one of our real treasures. Two things I found interesting: 1. If everyone in the world had the exact sam
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by hooande 13y ago
It's worth pointing out that Nate Silver is a rare individual. He's been wildly successful with data science despite not having a deep academic background, which is not the common case. His story is a useful data point though. Do
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by hooande 13y ago
"If a patient ends up dying because of preventable circumstances, that's not going to be acceptable because we are trying to save money" Let's not pretend that every anaesthesiologist has a perfect track record. Machines
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by hooande 13y ago
I find it hard to disagree with Louis on this one. Overstimulation is a thing, and we live in a culture where the common case is for a room full of people to be staring at hunks of plastic instead of talking to one another. Let's be ho
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by hooande 13y ago
There were a few points that the article didn't bring up. I was surprised that they didn't discuss the speculative value of bitcoins. There's no way that the value of a dollar in your pocket will suddenly double, but the valu
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by hooande 13y ago
It's very easy to underestimate the power of human ingenuity. The things we do routinely today would seem to be beyond magic to someone who lived 100 years ago. How do you even convey the concept of "automated car" to someone
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by hooande 13y ago
The argument of "I can't find someone to clean my house for $10/hr, so everyone must be lazy" is specious at best. Occams Razor says that you're mostly likely not soliciting labor from the right people. It's li
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by hooande 13y ago
The author might be underestimating the NSA's technical ability. The logic here is that each person has ~300 friends, and three hops is 300 x 300 x 300 = 27 million. This is a big number, but the NSA doesn't have to give the same
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by hooande 13y ago
This seems like another argument for Basic Income. A lot of young, jobless people (males especially) isn't only a moral problem, but it's a sociological problem. The young jobless commit more crimes, are more likely to join gangs
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by hooande 13y ago
There's no need for a basic income to be set so high that it subsidizes infinite children. If the BI for a family of four was $25,000 in today's money for example, any more children than two would be as financially uncomfortable a
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by hooande 13y ago
In reality garbage men make more money than any basic income would pay. The misconception is that a BI would cause no one to work because they were too busy driving ferrais and eating cuisine with their government money. But we're talk
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by hooande 13y ago
Mechanical Turk and its ilk are very important. One of the biggest barriers to achievements in machine learning and optimization is a lack of processed and labelled data. A lot of statistical inference is about algorithms and formulae, but
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by hooande 13y ago
From what I understand Snowden's father is very eager to get him back to the US. As long as he has "iron clad assurances of his constitutional rights", which is kind of silly. This is an incredibly high profile case and the J
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by hooande 13y ago
The current venture capital model is all about social dynamics. Almost everything that VCs do is intended to remind founders that they are the supplicants asking for money, and the VCs are the wealthy financial professionals who are the gat
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by hooande 13y ago
The difference between now and 1970 is clear: NSA surveillance doesn't affect the lives of the average american. Spying or not spying, the lives of most people are the same as they have been. The NSA has been doing what its doing for y
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by hooande 13y ago
Some thoughts on this: 1. Surprising to see an article on innovation that mentions Kickstarter only as a footnote. One of the reasons we lack innovation is because we've let one group of people, big name venture capital investors, to d
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by hooande 13y ago
The reason that FISA warrant requests have such a high acceptance rate is because a federal prosecutor wouldn't ask for one unless they were certain it would be approved. They don't have to file a request every time a federal agen
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by hooande 13y ago
This story needs some historical context. This is pointed out in the blog post, but the main reason for wiretapping King wasn't his civil rights advocacy, but his communist leanings. This in no way excuses or apologizes for the dirty t
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by hooande 13y ago
I want to provide some perspective here, at the risk of being downvoted. To compare what the US government is doing to a truly oppressive regime is insulting. People in the world today live in fear of physical harm from their own government
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by hooande 13y ago
The taliban operates like the mafia in Afghanistan. They go from provincial village to village, effectively saying "Hey, nice village you have here...it would be a shame if something were to happen to it" They do provide legitimate protecti

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