Hacker News Reader

dschn_dstryron Phone and laptop searches at US border 'quadruple'

When I worked for a german research institute we had this policy for all US travels. They did not see a necessity to do this for any other country.

dschn_dstryron Phone and laptop searches at US border 'quadruple'

No, for entering the US.

dschn_dstryron In Beijing, it’s often cheaper to have food delivered than to get it yourself

Yes. More specifically, the Communist Party of China is very proud of its ideological roots going back to Marx, Lenin and Mao. They call their economic system socialism with chinese characteristics. But they don't see the current stage to be the full realization of socialism, but as being in the beginning stage of building socialism.

dschn_dstryron U.S. Changes Visa Process for High-Skilled Workers

HN should make a rule against articles behind paywalls.

dschn_dstryron LG Releases Gram 17 Laptop: An Ultra-Thin Notebook with a 17.3in Display

No one forces you to run windows on this machine.

dschn_dstryron Ask HN: Is neuroscience-inspired machine learning the next big thing?

No. Or it depends on what you mean by inspired. There is no need to build airplanes with flapping wings, but you could still say that human flight is inspired by bird flight. When we look at the brain we have no way of disambiguating which properties are implementation details and which properties play an important role in learning. We made much more progress of understanding learning in the bottom up approach, where we find from first principles what kind of computations enables us to create certain behaviors. Connections to neuroscience are mostly interesting parallels that are found post-hoc. We don't even know if the human brain is actually good at what it's doing.

dschn_dstryron Bill Gates: “I never said '640K should be enough for anybody'” (1996)

I don't quite reach that number. According to Landauer's principle the minimum energy required to flip a bit is 0.0172 eV. Times 2^128 is ~10^18 J. The first google result for boiling all oceans puts it around 10^29 J. Even at realistic energy values for current hardware (10 fJ), we are still 5 orders of magnitude short of boiling all oceans.

dschn_dstryron Tencent loses $143B in market value

And it's still higher than one year ago.

dschn_dstryron Generative Adversarial Networks for Extreme Learned Image Compression

No, the tradeoff is actually the other way around. Encoding with a neural network can potentially be faster than the exhaustive tree searches that are done in current compression methods. On other hand, current decoders are fairly dumb and extremely optimized for speed. Neural networks will probably have trouble competing. In the design of video codecsan increase in decoding time is considered at least 10x more costly than the same increase in encoding time.

source: I worked with both HEVC and neural network based compression.

dschn_dstryron How I implemented iPhone X’s FaceID using Deep Learning in Python

Yes and it's not even close.

dschn_dstryron Who Built the Pyramids? (2003)

There is no historic evidence for the jews ever being in egypt.