dmvaldman

My real point is that thought is not visual or textual. Those things are simply ways of transmitting thoughts. When I have a thought, and I write it down, and you read it, I am simply hoping you are now having a thought related to the one I had. Some interaction in your brain is similar to the one in mine, when I had the thought. Civilization has spent a lot of time in mechanisms that correlate thoughts between people. Hence, language. Hence literacy. Etc.

Now we are trying to create a shared language between humans and computers, where we both understand each other with minimal effort.

Conventional programming languages is one answer. They associate programs with text. Some believe there is another way, by associating programs with diagrams. A more abstract example: machine learning associates programs with parameters and weights.

In some weird way, I feel these are all skeuomorphisms. We choose text because that's how we comprehend literature. We choose diagrams because we are visual. We choose ML because we mimic how our brains work.

We don't, however, try to understand what "thought" is, and work backwards to form a representation of it.

For example, take thinking of programming textually. Text assumes a beginning, an end, and an ordered sequence between them. But in this small programming example, is there a well-defined ordering?

a = 0; b = 1; c = a + b;

Since the first and second lines can be switched, in some sense Text itself does not do Thought justice.

Visual representations like the one in this video also have their shortcomings. The most obvious being, a monitor is 2D. Thought is not 2D. Going to 3D won't help either. Thought also not only spatial and temporal. For example, how would you represent concatenating strings visually?

I think the more interesting question is how we can accurately represent thought?

Know programming patterns. Be able to categorize a problem as an instance of a pattern (or not).

Know what you don't know.

Execute.

Being better at debugging is more valuable than coding faster.

Train those junior to you as if you want them to replace you.

Use the Socratic method. Ask a lot of questions. Over-communicate.

Be able to adapt yourself to the person you're talking to.

Be able to manage "up." People should trust you not only because you can get things done, but also because they are well informed that things are getting done the way they want.

Personal opinion: Amazon is not interested in creating supermarkets/wal-marts. Instead it wants to sell an ML solution to other brick & mortar stores, and this current effort is to prove plausibility. Selling an ML solution, with cameras and software, is harder to compete with than a tagging solution (especially if based on open and accessible hardware).

C, in the front-end world, has less of a direct equivalent, but can be thought of as your router, which React also has as a separate entity.

What MVC does not have an opinion on, is that the M is really one giant object, where each component receives a sub object of it. Where MVC can go wrong is when many objects have dependencies between their state. React comes along and says that two objects with a dependency should derive this shared state from something above them, not inside them. This is a useful pattern. It is still merely an opinion on how to organize Ms in an application. It is not something "different".

In functional programming, in its purest sense, there is no M. That's different.

"Lol dude, I don't know what kind of whistleblowers, dissidents, spies, and revolutionaries you're messaging but mine send all the best gifs."

It's a UI library for animating 3D web stuff, so it should look pretty. Suggestions to improve are welcome!

There was a voting graph in the background. Nodes are users and edges between users are weighted by the total number of mutual upvotes they had over all stories. With this graph you could give more weight to a story to a particular user if "similar" users had upvoted it, and everyone sees a unique front page.

One of the hard parts was how to sort stories based on these new weighted links. HN never reveals how they sort, though there is some historical evidence when things were simpler. However I found if the sorting was linearly proportional to votes, and a power law in time, then it didn't matter so much what the particulars were, and you could still reorder posts in an HNy way.

If anyone wants to talk more about this I'd be happy to revisit this project! :-) Contact info is in my profile.

Personally, I believe the pay of a profession has little to do with the profession itself, and more to do with the system that surrounds the profession. There is not just the economics of supply and demand for the profession, but also at every level of the system.

For example, doctors and police offers both save lives. It's unclear to me why doctors would make 8x the salary of a police officer. However, doctors require 10 more years of schooling and long hours of practice in the early years. This is part of the system of early education that surrounds the profession. But the interesting thing is I feel most of these requirements are unnecessary and are more vestiges of an evolution of the market that define them. Doctors don't need to work such long hours in residency if we only accepted more residents. But that would lower the salary of doctors. That's one supply/demand system. Also the ridiculous educational requirements of "pre-med" is mostly a deterrent to stop more people from becoming doctors. The only reason to go through the suffering is to have the opportunity of a high salary. If the salary was low, no one would do it. Another supply demand system.

There are many economic "markets" along the way to a profession, that have little to do with the profession itself, but have a lot to do with computing the salary of the profession. Ultimately you'd think the markets would "equilibrate" to a just one. But is seems there are many "unfair" equilibria.

When I read this I thought, "nah"... but some digging later and

http://orbides.org/page.php?id=703&lng=eng

You may as well replace the phrase "correlation implies causation" with "correlation implies effectation".

For a careful treatment on correlation and causation, you should read Judea Pearl, one of the great living computer scientists. I highly recommend this casual read: https://www.nyu.edu/classes/shrout/SEM06/pearl.pdf

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomis

A JS library for the mobile web. Originally a fork of famo.us, where I was Chief Architect.

Check it out if you're interested in bringing complex 60fps animation, physics, gestures and 3D rendering to a website.

It's awesome because, you can push UI on the web further without sacrificing on performance. Moreover, it sets a path to decentralize apps. No app stores, distribute your app with a link. No install/uninstall. Index apps with pagerank. Deep linking for free. App updates on refresh. Etc etc.

http://pilotonline.com/news/local/crime/police-can-require-c...

Happy to answer any questions.

ML for complex systems that haven't been as explored, for instance agriculture. ie grow crops better by analyzing the billions of ways to do it

ML for the genome is another

If you were interested in the library and are sad that this pivot means it won't be supported, I want to mention there is ongoing work in the OSS community outside the company supporting the pre-pivot vision.

I've personally been working on a fork called samsaraJS (http://samsaraJS.org), and there is another community effort at infamous.io.

These are both early stage labors of love, and always looking for contributors!

See Noether's theorem.