Translation: "Tunnel Vision" and "Lack of diversity"
199 karma · joined August 28, 2012
Ouch. How do your engineers ever get anything done?
I'm guessing that receiving a 40k/yr offer from a small-town business on the other side of the country means they clap their hands and claim their prize. Of course they want you to have the biggest salary you/they can find within 6 months, but other than that, location and conditions and other factors are irrelevant. If that's all they can find for you, they'll take it, and from what I could tell of the fine print you either take it too or pay the remaining 10800$ in full immediately.
What happens if what you have isn't 100R, but a company that hires one contractor part-time to build houses and make food at a flat 1$ upstream resource cost using machines that currently have 90% idle time? Wouldn't this situation mean that giving everyone that second 1$ let everyone have a home and food and solve the problem entirely? The company is also happier due to more profits and higher efficiency.
But that's probably not very helpful. By "for programmers", I assume you want something that can be relatively unobtrusive when needed, that keeps conversation logs, and that can be linked up / hacked with for whatever particular tricks you need. And by "for small teams", I assume you mean you want something that can handle chat rooms with joining and leaving of users at any time. Maybe you even want it to remember and show what other users discussed while you were gone.
For this, the most common de facto choice is Hangouts. Other software, some embedded in larger software solutions, is also used with varying degrees of satisfaction. My personal favorite is Slack(1), and it seems to be gaining popularity quickly. Other (relatively known) examples include Campfire(2), Atlassian's HipChat(3), FlowDock(4), and so on.
A google search for variations on the theme "team collaboration chat", mixing up the keywords "realtime" and "logs" and "persistent" as needed, can bring up more options than you have time to try. Pick a few that seem to do what you need and try them out.
[1] https://slack.com/ [2] https://campfirenow.com/ [3] https://www.atlassian.com/software/hipchat/ [4] https://www.flowdock.com/
Moot point if the logistic curve leads us well past the human-imaginable level of intelligence before reaching a zero with its cost/benefit differential.
Taking better actions is the whole point of knowledge. In that respect, some of it (e.g. specific knowledge of current politics for someone who is not an activist and doesn't even vote) can be beyond utterly useless or actively harmful. On the flipside, some (e.g. knowing there is a tiger behind the first door, and no danger behind the second) have huge visible effects (taking the second door, improving survival chances from 50% with zero knowledge to 100% with knowledge of the tiger).
I'm rather partial to imposing a tax on self-delusion and refusing to update beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence.
Also, the normal distribution part is plainly unjustified. The scientific consensus on various climate change topics is widely accepted to a high confidence by many, and widely denied with even higher confidence by many others. Bayesian belief networks are better models for individuals, and if we were to put belief in a given generic climate-change-related claim on a curve with 1:1 confidence in the middle and "certain true/false" at the extremes, you'd have a valley, not a normal. An asymmetrical valley, to boot.
He is, after all, the only australian freelance journalist whose essay on how his own wikipedia page bypassed the wikipedia notability filters spurred on a debate on his own notability. The delicious (and unique) recursive meta here is, IMO, more than enough to keep the page.
In retrospect I'm quite happy you didn't take it the wrong way, or worse take the bait.
The real problem lies in the numbers: To put it simply, the cost (salaries + funding) to research this issue and evaluate a good scheme and then implement it could be much higher than several years' worth of "noisy" police calls. Add this up with the opportunity costs (what those thinkers/researchers aren't doing while they're busy with this) and it's probably all the way down to "Will Do This Only If My Next Election Depends On It".
It seems to presume the simplest possible Game-Theoretical scenario is fully representative of reality, and ignores all the factors that forced us to create representative governments in the first place or that are included in the common usage meaning of the word "politics".
To illustrate this, imagine an isolated SmallTown™ in northern Alaska, where relocating a family to anywhere else in the world costs upwards of 50 000$ (fictive figure). Mr. Daddy has a job and a family in this town. Suddenly, he's told that he now has to work 90h/week rather than 30h/week, and for whatever reason this is fully legal for his occupation and employment conditions. Now he has effectively no time to devote to his family. There are no other jobs available in this town where Mr Daddy has the skills for being hired that also pay well enough to support the family. "Not happy with the schedule change? No problem, you can just quit whenever!"... and have the family starve, as they're unable to relocate and there are no other options available.
The above scenario is an extreme where I've cranked up the scarcity level to 100%. However, even if you're a senior programmer in Bay, the problems and consequences and mathematics of quitting a job don't entirely go away. Depending on the situation and individual, the collaterals associated with quitting the job might be five times worse than accepting unfairly imposed conditions, where the situation could easily be resolved to everyone's benefit in a different configuration (think Nash equilibria vs Pareto optima).
And if you're not happy with this comment, well, obviously you should just go read another one. (heh)
That's just the first three nodes of a N>10^8 causal graph.
Wasting police time is an issue, yes. It would be even more of a waste of time trying to establish whether this person had reasonable cause to call the police or was just trolling. Not to mention the other consequences I touch on above.
Multiplayer gamers everywhere just did a giant Hoo-ah to that. I think the network admins are already drunk.
(for some categories of games!)
I'm almost nitpicking here, but it's important to understand the distinction where when trying to build "human-like" AI that players feel are like the real thing, you also want to emulate human shortcomings. Sometimes it might not be cheating per the rules, but still be obviously outside the realm of current human capabilities.
e.g.: An AI opponent with perfect arithmetical abilities in a game like Scorched Earth: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorched_Earth_(video_game)
First, and the most critical to most games, is basic behavioral AI. This includes things like pathfinding, locating targets, attacking, and otherwise making an entity in the game interact with the environment in the game.
Second, you've got the more abstract parts, the "high-level decisionmaking". This is the AI's strategies and tactics, such as communicating with other AI, coordinating with squad members to circle an enemy, deciding when to change weapons or throw a grenade or pull back to reload, etc. In most cases, developers put in many crude heuristics here either because they don't have time to think of anything better, or for performance reasons. This will look like "if known nearby enemies > 2 and ammo < 20%, find safe point to fall back, reload". The developer thought up this quick rule of thumb and told the AI to do this, without having to code the AI with the intelligence and information the developer used when making up this rule of thumb.
Third, bot creation (for the usual "hacker" version/meaning of the term, as in e.g. bots used by AFK players to farm) is significantly different than making an "official" AI as a developer or writing a replacement AI using available scripting in some games. For most games, bots will involve various hack techniques for retrieving information about the game world (occasionall literally involving visual pattern recognition, which is a whole other ball of yarn (and separate type of "AI") you don't want to mess with just yet). Bots will also usually involve indirect control of the game character by using some third-party program to "send" keys to the game using OS functionality. This is probably not what you're interested in, and you'd need to learn at least some basics of the first two to be able to achieve anything here.
One thing that was rather popular a while ago is to just dive into a game like Robocode[1] and work up your way until you can code one robot that will on its own beat various competition-grade robots without user input to adjust for the opponent's strategies.
rel q(y)
y = true
y = false
rel p(s, x)
if(s = ‘a’)
x = 0
else
x = 2
rel main()
k = q()
if(k)
s = 'a'
else
s != 'a'
p(s,x)
println(x)
Um. I'm not quite sure the set "thinks this is interesting" is entirely included within "has the ability to contribute to the Webtorrent project". In fact, I think the former more than likely has a bigger intersect with "will probably break the Webtorrent project and/or disrupt the community" than with the positive contributor set.
> Should I learn R or Python (nltk, scikit-learn, pandas etc.)?
Honestly, whatever is most convenient at first. Getting a good grip on your first one is orders of magnitude more important than what language or system it is, and since convenience and ease of use help a lot with focusing one's attention on learning an mastery, that's what counts. Eventually you might grow out of the one you picked, and if you keep coding stuff you'll inevitably branch out to other languages and systems. All the data scientists I know know and use both R and Python (with bells and whistles). All of them.
> Should I learn hadoop or focus more on machine learning techniques?
From what I read, and from what one of those data people told me, hadoop can be a waste of time in many situations. Namely, for almost anything small enough to store and process on a desktop computer, you'll probably do it faster using something else (and with less headache). But hop to page 8 of this survey for a better picture from the horse's mouth: http://www.paradigm4.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/P4-data-...
The rest of the survey I linked above is probably well worth your time as well. Obviously, take into account the survey was run and presented by paradigm4, and do your mental corrections and debiasing accordingly.
"Rare" = 99 in 100 people have this antigen, while you do not.
"Very Rare" = 9999 in 10000 people have this antigen, while you do not.
That's all it says.
If you lack an antigen, but at least 1 in 100 other people also lack this antigen, then your blood is only of the "Rare" category. If you lack an antigen and you'd have to go through 10 000 other people to find someone else lacking this antigen, your blood qualifies for the illustrious title of "Very Rare".
Uhm. This already includes phone numbers called, calls received, dates, durations. Also, it's well-known among even amateurs and armchair intelligence analysts that "metadata" is usually more than sufficient to obtain a complete profile of an individual's private life, and it's been confirmed at least once by US Mil-related interests that they have killed foreign terrorist suspects based only on conclusions drawn from metadata.
So even if it "just contains so-called metadata", that's probably still enough data to know the exact time you use the toilet in the morning, and for how long. Literally. (ref: Dozens of recent papers on metadata profiling)
Ah. There's the hiccup. It wasn't my intent to be communicating anything about admissibility of evidence. Archiving, sharing, obtaining, perusing, using for original purpose and using for a tertiary purposes are all different actions, and which of these actions were taken and in what contexts would be evaluated differently by a judge ruling on a "borderline" case that is up to legal interpretation.
The Supreme Court, to reuse your example, has effectively ruled that DNA collection is, upon arrest, legal for use in all above activities, if I understand correctly. To throw in what I did think, no, I didn't know it worked that way, and I'm pretty happy no government database currently has my DNA data (time to look up relevant Canadian laws to see if this is true here as well).
I don't have anything particularly solid to back up the claim that most states would not automatically grant all the actions above as "legal" if any given one of them is legal in a given situation (like the Supreme Court apparently did for DNA swabs). It just seemed particularly likely given my priors and whatever equivalent situations or contexts I could remember (I've read two US state codes of law (Ohio and Texas), and I'd estimate 20% of USA federal laws, that are available online on their respective public websites).
EDIT: To clarify first paragraph: I'm talking here mostly about situations such as someone suing a police force or suing the state over privacy breach or somesuch, not about whether a judge would use what police did with phone records and whether they shared it in a Fusion to dismiss a case about child pornography, for instance. That's a whole other (and more complicated) ball of yarn, IMO.
Notice, if you read correctly, that I didn't make any particular judgment as to whether or not I think it's legal or not, or whether I think it should be legal or not.
My intent was simply in pointing out that the commenter's assumptions and logical deductions were unsound as far as a judge looking at a court case might be concerned.