romaniv

27 ms·

121.
by romaniv 8y ago
Find a reasonably self-contained problem that doesn't involve too many interactions with the "environment". For example, ask the candidate to refactor an existing piece of code.
122.
by romaniv 8y ago
The pressure of a whiteboard interview has nothing in common with the pressure of a short deadline. It's like testing people for Tour de France by putting them on a unicycle.
123.
by romaniv 8y ago
Do you design clever search algorithms during outages?
124.
by romaniv 8y ago
Letting candidates to do actual coding on a computer.
125.
by romaniv 8y ago
>I don't get why Lambda gets all the love while Google Cloud Functions doesn't. The cynic in me says that a in lot of cases this has something to do with people ensuring their own job security. A lot of AWS technologies I&#x2
126.
by romaniv 8y ago
I'm not proposing anything. I'm saying that training should be factored in when considering development costs. The notion that training is always a one-time investment that can be pretty much ignored if you plan to stick with some
127.
by romaniv 8y ago
Training also takes time.
128.
by romaniv 8y ago
It could have been AuroraDB, DynamoDB, NeptuneDB, RDBS, and RedshiftDB. At least people would be able to tell that all of those are databases.
129.
by romaniv 8y ago
>It has terrible naming too: a lot of services are acronyms, it makes them difficult to understand for outsiders. I almost think this was a deliberate choice. Makes the services sound more important than what they are. At any rate, man
130.
by romaniv 8y ago
The simplest counter-example is Wikipedia. Most links on any page could lead to generic term definitions, or they could link to explanations of how those terms work withing the context of the page. I.e. a link to "synthesizers" on
131.
by romaniv 8y ago
Some users of this website might never go to libraries, but every time I go to our local library there are tons of people there.
132.
by romaniv 8y ago
This is a very important point. Libraries do more than just lend books. They are institutions that preserve and promote knowledge and have certain values "built in". They also often serve as local community centers of sorts. Havin
133.
by romaniv 8y ago
Even chess isn't tractable in terms of pure brute force search. And yet a computer won against arguably the best human player in 1996. It was mostly a PR stunt by IBM. We had 20 years of doubling of computing power before Lee Sedol mat
134.
by romaniv 8y ago
In 1996 IBM made a system that was better than any person at playing chess. Chess has roughly 400 moves possible at any point. In 2016 Google made a system that was better at any person at playing Go. Go has roughly 130,000 moves possible a
135.
by romaniv 8y ago
What about AlphaGo Zero? I'm honestly not sure why a system that plays board games is seen as some kind of giant leap in AI. Seems mostly a result of Google's marketing.
136.
by romaniv 8y ago
Expert systems had industry funding in the 80s. And contrary to what some people here keep implying, they delivered results. Some of them are still used right now.
137.
by romaniv 8y ago
Another way of putting it: AI research of the 60s-80s was extremely impressive and is ridiculously underappreciated right now. Many ideas were simply way ahead of their time. It's sad that most software engineers today do not bother le
138.
by romaniv 8y ago
> If there is a very low-dimensional manifold in parameter space that accounts for all the predictive power, that would be a very easy thing to diagnose from a neural network model. People wouldn't waste time researching neural netw
139.
by romaniv 8y ago
>What do you mean by “gravitational theory” apart from “correctly accounts for predicting the gravitational effects that we observe”? F = G (m1 * m2) / r^2 Newton's theory of gravitation identified the relevant variables and
140.
by romaniv 8y ago
>I’m saying the development of a model that yields scientific progress doesn’t have to have a connection to the parent comment’s proposed definition of interpretability Let's say someone used a neural network to predict planetary
141.
by romaniv 8y ago
>But then in a practical setting, the model doesn’t correspond to something physical or to the inference goal of a practitioner. How does this invalidate the notion of interpretability? A model can be both wrong/misapplied and ful
142.
by romaniv 8y ago
>It is now possible to grab a pretrained model and start producing state-of-the-art NLP results in a wide range of tasks with relatively little effort. Are there any applications/websites where this can be seen in action? It'
143.
by romaniv 8y ago
Complex system simulations (look up Net Logo). Distributed, fault-tolerant data processing systems. The latter is harder to back up, because all real-life "agent" systems I've worked with are rough approximations of "age
144.
by romaniv 8y ago
I think that's a different kind of "agent". http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~mt/thesis/mt-thesis.html
145.
by romaniv 8y ago
The problem here is that modern machine learning is rarely more than a computerized way of building statistical models based on observed data. And the bias mitigation techniques I've read about all revolve around (indirectly) manipulat
146.
by romaniv 8y ago
I wish agent-based programming was more popular today. It's an extremely powerful way of thinking about complex problems and distributed solutions. And it has much more actual theory behind it than things like SOA (which is mostly a re
147.
by romaniv 8y ago
That's a great way of putting it. Also, GUIs attempt to use human natural reasoning (about objects, space, movement, etc.) and have some kinesthetic components (the mouse, pointing, dragging).
148.
by romaniv 8y ago
It's interesting to think about. In some ways GUIs are more primitive than text interfaces. The scathing characterization of GUI as "caveman's point and grunt interface" isn't entirely wrong. But at the same time,
149.
by romaniv 8y ago
I think answers here will be skewed, since people who work on trivial programming tasks often don't visit websites like this. I've worked on moderately interesting problems in some positions, and I've also worked in positions
150.
by romaniv 8y ago
>I judge companies on current behavior and Microsoft seems to be doing far more right than wrong. This isn't about behavior. This is about product management. As a reminder, Microsoft's current products include TFS (and I don

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