cosmic_ape

A good journal needs good reviewers.

The quality of peer-review at conferences for example is terrible, and that is well known. Even at not very big conferences, and despite the usually hard work of the organizers.

So establishing a good review process is not easy and perhaps that is what is stopping the open access model rather than just the prestige issue mentioned in other comments.

I think their hype got even you a little bit. That is revealed by the word "even" in the phrase: 'people calling CNNs or even non-deep-learning models "AI"'...

As other comments mention, if Tensorflow is seen for what it is - a framework for computation, rather than just "a deep learning thingy", it may be pretty useful.

It is probably quite far from a standard usage, but Tensorflow may be used to write some custom graphical models inference, for example. To be practical these algorithms can not be implemented in, say, pure python.

The point is Tensorflow gets you pretty close to assembly level computation. The alternative is to write in, say, cython - which is much more time consuming to write, and does not give you parallelization for free. Another alternative I guess would be torch, but that is the same as tensorflow the way I see it.

Still don't quite get it. Additional power sold to the grid means competition to the coal-burning power plants. Assuming the plant's only goal is profit, would they just produce less power and lose money? Or would they try to lower the prices, to possibly lose a little less money? And then, if the prices do drop, the demand may rise due to the drop, and could even lead to producing more power by the plant. So Google selling that electricity could yield to even higher carbon emissions. No?

Thanks, this explains it. Do you think there are numbers somewhere about how much carbon is saved globally due to this? Them selling the energy may drive down the prices, increasing demand. So it could be that more energy is consumed at the same carbon level, rather then less carbon emitted. Perhaps they are paying for someone's bitcoin mining.

Can anyone explain this: If all they do is buy and sell electricity from renewable sources, while using the regular grid to actually power the data-centers, then why do they do it at all? Is it a form of philanthropy?

Not only corporations abandon real fundamental research, but people like the the author of that blog start referencing things like AlphaGo as "fundamental research" comparable to Shannon's or Turing's work.

AlphaGo is a good and necessary engineering, but the ideas are pretty old, and not especially illuminating. Start confusing it with fundamental research often enough, and people will start to believe it. And then, corporate managers, and academic research grants, and academic publishing venues, like conferences, will start expecting "fundamental research" to be like AlphaGo instead of actual fundamental research.

SymPy does not take Latex as input, but it has symbolic equivalence checkers.

Methods are highly heuristic, and some languages (all expressions with,say, \pi, and exp function, or something similar) are in general undecidable.

So here's the ultimate, highly scientific jerkness test proposed by the article: Think about this article sometime later today, sometime when you are surrounded by other people—maybe in the lunch line, or at a department meeting, or at a party, or in a crowded plaza. Notice the people around you. Are they fools and tools, or do they sparkle with interesting individuality?

Exactly what kind of individuality sparkles do most people in a crowded plaza emit? Their clothes, face expression at that moment, pace of walk?

The danger in this kind of whooshy-mooshy is that some people might start to believe that these things do constitute an individuality. To the benefit of the fashion industry, and probably to our loss as a society.

Look for survey papers in the fields you are interested in. These papers are written exactly for your situation - to provide a glimpse of the field assuming little prior knowledge.

regarding: >>Plus, you can ignore the math part and yet appreciate the beauty of Bitcoin

you can appreciate the beauty of car and even be a mechanic without physics, chemistry, and mathematics (!), but to understand cars...

That person approaches the issue as his personal problem. However, there are likely many other students around him with the same problem. It is a problem of the whole field recently.

One solution would be simply to a arrange a local seminar, and understand a couple of papers in full detail. It would help to invite a couple of mathematically aware students, from mathematics, physics, or the part of cs faculty where they prove stuff. They should be able to explain and answer questions immediately, which is way more effective than reading whole books or taking courses. Those can be read for details later.

If the papers for the seminar are deep learning papers, part of the outcome of the seminar is likely to be an understanding that the authors of these papers do not necessarily understand the mathematics themselves.

I think there are a couple of really different types of situations these actors resolve.

The fake groom for a wedding is just a workaround for a cultural issue, maybe not uniquely Japanese. The society requires a groom, so here is one. I wonder how many politicians today have fake family lives due to similar reasons, for instance.

But there are other situations, like fake boyfriends/girlfriends. What the company provides here is trust, sort or removing counter-party risk. The client needs to know that the friend will confirm to certain protocol, will be in a certain way. Many people would do that for free, but the actors are guaranteed to do that. If there was some mechanism to establish that kind of trust without the company, that would be nice. Without that trust, its just the usual dating, of course.

And then, there is a commitment aspect. That man acted as a father for 8 years. The must have been growth in that relationship. The actor and the girl developed an inner world in which they exist, are part of each other's lives, and, the girl at least, relies on him to be there in the future. Many man could probably act as fathers for some time, but 8 years, they'd actually have to want to be fathers.

edit: maybe its worth adding that this is not a suggestion that that business is a good thing overall. Just an attempt at the analysis of why it might be "booming" (if it indeed statistically is).

That's a terrible team, hopefully non representative. I haven't ever seen a work environment that would be even close to producing something like this.

However, looking at the article itself, there is some irony in using a picture of a woman in a bra, tousled hair, as a title picture for an article on sexism.

Is this how the author comes to work? Is this how a woman programmer should be pictured? Its also not the first time these type of articles, with these type of pictures appear, even here on HN.

I think the the way this article is written, is both the symptom, and a factor helping the proliferation, of the issue it discusses.

It is more or less a trivia style collection of references and anecdotes, from different sources related to the topic. It feels a bit like a tweeter feed itself, if you search #anxiety - a really wide collection of tangentially related observations (haven't actually tried that, no twitter account, but you get the point). No attempt of synthesis, no deeper analysis of the connections between topics, no statistics.

The way I understand it, when there is no core but a shattered collection of associations, that by itself can cause anxiety. Because the reader now has him/herself to build connections, or leave that as uncertainty, and uncertainty will cause anxiety. And to expect the reader will do that is unrealistic - even the skilled reader will need time for that.

Also, consider how the article came to existence: The author seems to be a professional writer, 2-3 articles a month, half of them about hand watches. You have just read a socio-cultural analysis by the author of hand watch surveys. On nytimes.com.

Granted, life of writers is tough and jumping to conclusions here would be premature. But even if the author is capable of writing a thoughtful piece, writing that kind of article on a serious subject should be a violation of some kind of writer's version of Hippocratic Oath.

Couldn't nytimes.com find a reasonable expert to write that? It could, but it wouldn't for some reason.

Finally, the first paragraph mentions Sarah Fader, "the Brooklyn social media consultant", "who has generalized anxiety disorder" with her tweet - apparently a gesture by one of the common people. One of the last paragraphs mentions her again, but now "the Brooklyn social media consultant who also runs a mental-health advocacy organization called Stigma Fighters". So perhaps more a calculated step rather than a gesture, but why spoil the hero story right in the first paragraph?