vonnik

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421.
by vonnik 9y ago
One of the most annoying things about Bostrom, Tegmark and other amateur sci-fi authors is that they have chosen parables as their medium. Bostrom likes his sparrows and owls[0], Tegmark likes thinly veiled references to DeepMind with Team
422.
by vonnik 9y ago
Fwiw, here are the links for our ETL tool DataVec (it vectorizes data, or tensorizes it if you prefer): https://github.com/deeplearning4j/datavec https://deeplearning4j.org/datavec The thing to remembe
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by vonnik 9y ago
Thanks! I'm not sure that Yahoo's TF on Spark is fully baked, but maybe its users can tell me more about that. I know it's not commercially supported. That's more a business model distinction, but it has technical conseq
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by vonnik 9y ago
That's nice of you. :-) It's mature now, which is why this was the moment to move it into Eclipse. It means that DL4J & suite is now vendor neutral. On the Skymind side, we will continue to develop all those open-source projec
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by vonnik 9y ago
The interesting thing about this process is timing. You shouldn't really contribute a code base to a foundation until it's mature enough. I think any group of people developing an open-source project wants it to develop quickly an
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Show HN: Eclipse Deeplearning4j(projects.eclipse.org)
73 points by vonnik 9y ago|38 comments
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by vonnik 9y ago
cx: people who are *not Americans
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by vonnik 9y ago
That's a very narrow view, and it's not really the point. America's national interest is tightly linked to whether or not it's able to attract tech talent from around the world. No law forbids US tech companies from doin
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by vonnik 9y ago
Not sure what your argument is here, Matt. Are you saying the US should try to keep foreign talent out and that tech companies and investors should direct their time and resources at Americans? If so, do you know how Silicon Valley works an
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The brain’s 7D sandcastles could be the key to consciousness(newscientist.com)
8 points by vonnik 9y ago|3 comments
431.
by vonnik 9y ago
Fwiw, I got readers a few years ago, when I was working 12 hour days in front of a screen. They're weak lenses. When other eyeglass wearers put them on, they think they're fake. But they make a huge difference for me, just by dimi
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by vonnik 9y ago
I totally buy that Norway has many strengths, and like I said, I was really impressed with the entrepreneurs I met there. I think the problem with cultivating a tech ecosystem in many first-world cities is the lack of capital channeled thro
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by vonnik 9y ago
One interesting point is the relative prevalence of different programming languages in data science vs. data engineering. Python and R are obviously dominant in data science, while Java and JVM languages are more widespread in data engineer
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by vonnik 9y ago
Wow. I just learned about this on a visit to Norway. The way it was explained to me, this is one factor that could hold the Norwegians back as they move toward a post-oil economy, because they're going to need to focus on sectors like
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by vonnik 9y ago
PyTorch adoption is growing quickly among ML researchers. TensorFlow made a splash in 2016... Jeremy Howard gives his reasons for switching to PyTorch from TF here: http://www.fast.ai/2017/09/08/introducing-py
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by vonnik 9y ago
We have a semantic disagreement. I'm saying startup means something different to people in SV and on HN than pizzeria or local accounting firm. A better term for those is SMB: small and middle size business. And for startup, we reserve
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by vonnik 9y ago
I'm totally in support of this. Strangely, the second thought after "wow" that I had was: I wonder what the backlash will be. I think my big, pessimistic lesson from the Obama years was that moves that I see as progress will
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by vonnik 9y ago
People interested in perf and big data ETL for the JVM may want to check out DataVec: https://github.com/deeplearning4j/datavec https://deeplearning4j.org/datavec It vectorizes/tensorizes most maj
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by vonnik 9y ago
And even more damning: "In total, Uber had failed to report six sexual assaults, two public order offences and one assault to the police. This had lead to delays of up to 7 months before they were investigated. Particularly damning, wi
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by vonnik 9y ago
I'm not saying that small businesses are somehow worth less than startups. I'm saying that they are different in many ways: intent, team, sector. And because they are different, increases in the rate of their creation mean differe
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by vonnik 9y ago
It would be useful, at least on HN, to distinguish small businesses like a new pizzeria from what most of us call a startup; i.e. a tech company that's probably building software to solve a problem and scale. That aside, I would point
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by vonnik 9y ago
The challenges facing media are complex. The subscription model encourages publications to become luxury goods, just as the pace of the Web pushes print editions to become future-focused and heavy on analysis. Subscriptions can sustain nich
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by vonnik 9y ago
Your entire comment misses the point. What I'm saying is that most journalism was always this way. Algorithms don't exacerbate this tendency any more than daily sales did for the Sun. As a former reporter for the NYT, I can say th
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by vonnik 9y ago
Ironically, the premise of this critique of journalism is as false as the Amazon story it cites. Algorithms and the Internet didn't ruin journalism, and this is not the end of the world. Journalism was corrupted by sensationalism as so
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by vonnik 9y ago
There are basically two approaches to geo-engineering, and they both have unpredictable consequences: * reflect sunlight back into space through "albedo modification", either by spraying sulfates high in the stratosphere to mimic
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by vonnik 9y ago
It is a story. But it's a predictable drama, and the story is just as much about the researcher's naiveté as Google's inevitable reaction. A lot of outrage was circulating about this, and I'm incapable of sharing that ou
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by vonnik 9y ago
I don't find this very shocking or offensive. Pragmatic people don't bite the hand that feeds them. That means that every think tank will have at least one blind spot in the form of its major donor. This is also true of many media
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by vonnik 9y ago
Said a journalist working a 9-to-5 job by choice.
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by vonnik 9y ago
Thanks for your clear answer. I appreciate it. I'm a bit surprised so many people have the time and inclination to be upvote police.
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by vonnik 9y ago
Red Cross absorbs a lot of donor dollars to run a large bureaucracy with a questionable donation/impact ratio.

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