I expect we'll be seeing many shakeups on what has (perhaps prematurely) become the established norms for NN architectures (CNN and RNN) throughout the next few years.
Its a great time to be alive!
422 karma · joined October 16, 2013
Its a great time to be alive!
My previous statement stands.
The "for no reason" part here is actually throwing me off. Not sure what you're implying.
I've made the statement that discussion on the topic is preferable to branding, even in the case where people feel alienated.
> He really doesn't seem to understand the difference between free speech and being free of consequences, and as a result he's in danger of suppressing free speech. He wants people to be able to say controversial things without there being blowback, but the only possible way to accomplish that is by suppressing the free speech of people who disagree. You're either for free speech- which includes the right to criticize ideas- or he's arguing that specific people's speech (the person with the "novel physics idea" for example) are more important than others.
Sam's article is a criticism of the form of criticism received when on the "losing" side of a controversial topic. The criticism is not of the opinion (which leads to actual discussion) but of the person. That criticism of the person tends to be over-the-top.
Pushing back against this over-the-top criticism will open up free speech by letting people who are scared to share their opinions for risk of extreme consequences (being fired?).
> His example of China, one of the worst human rights violators who has been known for violently suppressing free speech, is just a continuation of that. He's happy because as a privileged person with money China is super excited to hear his ideas, but he's also ignoring the fact that China literally jails and kills people who speak out with ideas that their government doesn't like.
I think you're making Sam's point for him. He feels more comfortable in a place as bad as china for speech than San Francisco. What does that imply? China's treatment may not be equal, but this is not the implication. The implication is in how uncomfortable he feels in SF.
> He completely ignores the damage done by hate speech. Just completely ignores it. If you were to read this blog as is it seems like he thinks people being driven out of companies, schools, education programs, and development communities by bigotry and sexism were never going to contribute or that their losses aren't as important as the ideas being lost to people uncomfortable being called out for bigotry.
You are ignoring the damage of calling someone a bigot for sharing their opinion. I think we both have a point here, and a further discussion would be interesting.
> The blog seems to put a higher value on innovation and corporations than it does people.
I'd assert it's putting a higher value on the quality of society which he asserts is improved when controversial topics are free to be discussed without risk of extreme personal attack. People make up society (and corporations btw), so it can be assumed that assertion of higher value applies to them as well.
In my opinion, Sam wanted to share this with the least possible likelihood that it would blowback (in a big way) on YC.
He did this by picking examples that would stimulate thought without a large possibility of himself being branded in some way regarding a controversial topic.
The agreement I referred to was in that others are also scared of the consequences of sharing their opinion here.
It doesn't even have to be the majority opinion. Just the opinion of someone with a loud enough voice.
> But I don't think he should be fired for simply holding the opinion. But he would be in todays world.
Sadly, he would be fired, publicly smeared, and become unemployable.
This is very interesting and I believe I tend to agree.
When a person is branded as a "heretic" for their ideas, doesn't it increase the division between those two groups? The winning group (the one doing the branding) begins to dehumanize and rage towards the losing group. The losing group has to find other ways to fight back or remain in insolent silence.
I'd assert the latter...
When the blowback is to smear your character, conflate it with other unrelated negativities, and avoid actual discussion on the topic at hand who can disagree?
Edit: several assertions therein, feel free to debate :)
(Writing this with an expectation of backlash) (irony?)
Everyone expects the judgement of their peers for their controversial opinions, which is one reason why people tend to have like-minded friends (as much as possible). Or at least friends open to a discussion.
The issue is judgements on controversial opinions turn into all-too-public smears on a person's character and that character is conflated with (over-the-top) negativity, which misrepresents the original context (sliding). Naming any such example bears the risk of the same thing happening to yourself (you know what I mean).
Anil is guilty of it himself, calling Sam's position "actually dangerous". When in fact, that labeling is the exact thing Sam is arguing against. Perhaps Sam isn't dangerous, but just opinionated?
TLDR: Controversial opinions lead to ad hominem attacks that use conflation with extremely negative topics to attack even the possibility that the position is debatable.
again...
IQ != intelligence
Reading through the comments I feel this needs to be expounded on. IQ is a barely useful metric in predicting achievement or success.
IMO thought structures and habits of thinking can be much more applicable in reality than a high IQ, leading to higher "intelligence" despite low IQ. See: Richard Feynman, idiosyncratic thinking (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr8sVailoLw)
Right now the available configuration for the generated docker image is limited, but the code of the tool is simple, so folks should be able to tailor it to their needs.
In terms of understanding of electric phenomena, its difficult to point at another with a similar level of understanding (or at least productive understanding).
With that in mind, it would seem he's quite a bit "smarter" than even very intelligent people, with the same life long pursuit.
React / javascript programming, is the most complex environment I've ever dug into, and it's only getting more complex.
create-react-app is great for hiding that complexity until you need to do something it doesn't support and then it's like gasping for air in a giant sea of javascript compilers.
If you're worried, get an attorney (who understands software IP) to read it. Get the company to reimburse you for the attorney fee (and maybe your time).
In the end, it was a reduction of the training rate (with SGD) that made things work in what felt like magic.
I've started reading the deep learning text book from Ian Goodfellow now (http://www.deeplearningbook.org). Hoping a solid foundation will build some intuitions for reasoning about these hyper parameters.
Forgive me if I am simply uninitiated, but what are the general advantages of graphQL over a typical backend powered by a SQL database?
Individuals with experience in specialized areas and in leading in those areas can make a large impact in any company (their own or otherwise). How can you assume that losing individuals making a large impact wouldn't have an impact itself?
This we can agree on.
> Personally, I'm not impressed at all with most software made in an Ops environment. I think it usually sucks and that sucky quality,
Not sure what is an ops environment although I'll agree with the general statement that most software I see sucks and is of sucky quality, but I think that relates back to your first point.
> In fact, this is how Ops used to work. You'd use humans to oil the machinery of the basic automation you put in place, and they were damn good at keeping uptime high and catching problems nobody thought of in their automation. Now people just automate and pray, it seems, and then play catch-up indefinitely, or waste time redesigning.
I'm not proposing that the rise of devops precludes the need for people specialized in it's use and implications. Instead that sysadmin is essentially becoming a branch of software engineering with the rise of devops. When setting up a system IS writing code, why is the "software engineer" different from the "sysadmin"?
Reading the article, the sysadmin is described as the person who constructs and maintains the environment the code runs in, including the physical machines, but also things like dependency management (I infer).
Given that just about everything except the physical machine can be handled through devops automation (from experience), and those things don't require "special" skills other than docker/ansible knowledge, why are sysadmins still considered separate from software devs?
On a more opinionated note, I think that using people, and not code to setup the operating environment of their application is pretty inefficient nowadays.