upquark

9 ms·

31.
by upquark 11y ago
Much more likely just bad data (astronomically more likely)
32.
by upquark 11y ago
Hmm, let me see how I can explain this more clearly. "I'm not arrogant enough to do X" implies "Those who do X are sufficiently arrogant". Do you follow this far? Here's an example relating to your experience.
33.
by upquark 11y ago
Just say the safe word
34.
by upquark 11y ago
You're making a broad statement about a bunch of people without knowing what they know or don't, and one might say that statement is insulting. Right after that, you're criticizing a guy for making blanket statements about a
35.
by upquark 11y ago
> The better explanation, of course, is that consciousness somehow is the universe... What is love? How can an uncaring chunk of bones and flesh feel love? But we do fall in love, so it must exist in some form. Hence, love is the univers
36.
by upquark 11y ago
> I'm not arrogant enough to have a strong opinion either way > ...you start broadly ascribing motivations to an entire field... Do you see a contradiction? You're broadly calling a bunch of people "arrogant", who
37.
by upquark 11y ago
The space here is the space of probability distributions (each point is a distribution), not the sample space. So, no real connection with PCA.
38.
by upquark 12y ago
Possibly naive question: I'm a married guy in his 30s working at a major investment bank in NYC (lead quantitative role). I have a graduate degree from a non-elite school. No experience at top tech firms (had offers but didn't go)
39.
by upquark 12y ago
"Knowing everything" implies far more than our intuitions may initially tell us, and can lead to "a set of all sets" type of paradoxical problems (i.e. the premise of the argument is absurd). This and other philosophical
40.
by upquark 12y ago
What exactly do you mean by exponentially distributed randomness? LDA is typically applied to textual data, so the application would be to e.g. automatically tag/classify financial news. I don't think the prospects of ML are as gr
41.
by upquark 12y ago
Lots of ignorance in the article and some of the comments regarding data-driven decision making. Does the author realize how much of the civilization around us is built and guided by data-driven decisions? Also, people/companies not be
42.
by upquark 12y ago
> I have yet to meet a serious AI researcher who worries about AI ending the human race. As an industry practitioner of machine learning / data science, I believe AGI poses a genuine risk to humanity. Having said that, what I do for
43.
by upquark 12y ago
I wouldn't describe this as a brainteaser. It's a well-defined math problem, not some BS question about manhole covers or barbers in Chicago.
44.
by upquark 12y ago
I might be in the minority here, but I think saying "any theory of physics should explain consciousness" is exactly like saying "any theory of physics should explain love" (or replace love with patriotism, friendship, ca
45.
by upquark 12y ago
> I don't have to do any fancy interferometry or statistical inference to be aware of the cat You do though, you're just not consciously aware of it.
46.
by upquark 12y ago
Thank you for putting this together, looks like a great collection of resources.
47.
by upquark 12y ago
The list of topics at the end isn't necessarily "very easy to learn", but I do agree that fundamentals are essential. Depending on the mathematical background of the individual, they may need calculus and general mathematical
48.
by upquark 12y ago
What about this? http://www.cdc.gov/parasites/toxoplasmosis/epi.html Animal-to-human (zoonotic) transmission section: "Cats play an important role in the spread of toxoplasmosis"
49.
by upquark 13y ago
Wolves and dogs are the same species too, AFAIK
50.
by upquark 13y ago
You are taking an extreme stance on the topic. There's room for modeling and forecasting even in highly complex dynamical systems, the models are getting better with advances in applied statistics research. They are not perfect, but th
51.
by upquark 13y ago
Some academic types have no clue how far behind the rest of humanity is in terms of intellectual and technological readiness to use such tools. It could be an honest mistake and not a deliberate lie.
52.
by upquark 13y ago
- Most trivially, your prior distribution can assign equal probabilities to different outcomes, if you have no reason to do otherwise. Beta(1, 1) for modeling a coin's bias, for example, if you have no prior information about its bias.
53.
by upquark 13y ago
> The Greeks, Jews and Armenians left a long time ago "Left" is an understatement: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_Turkey > Still I wouldn't qualify Istanbul as a multi-cultural c
54.
by upquark 13y ago
The actual problem I described above (bulk de-duplication of records without any direct clues, such as unique ids, to decide whether two records are duplicates) falls under this category. The first paper I provided is a survey of commonly u
55.
by upquark 13y ago
Nope, there's plenty of math and stats involved in solving this problem correctly. The amount of math you would apply here depends on your familiarity with the problem domain (this is where CS education comes into play), and your willi
56.
by upquark 13y ago
>Math is totally unnecessary for everyday software development. You are writing the simplest possible CRUD app for storing / retrieving some client records. You have a database of these records on the back-end, and users can add&#x2
57.
by upquark 13y ago
Every now and then there's a discussion on HN about usefulness of math in software engineering / data science / economics / or another practical field. Some people claim it's not useful or relevant, and produce some
58.
by upquark 13y ago
This guy sounds like a complete joke. Standard deviation is an immensely useful tool in stats. It's not a historical accident we use it everywhere, for example it naturally appears in the very useful Chebyshev inequality, and a million
59.
by upquark 13y ago
> The reason why people can't do that calculation in their heads is because of our reliance on computers and calculators. No, we were never well equipped to do such computations, we didn't suddenly get worse at it with the inve
60.
by upquark 13y ago
Or, it's illustrative that what used to be truly middle class lifestyle can now be afforded only by people in top income percentiles, whereas the median income probably implies a lifestyle pretty close to poverty.

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