karmacondon

Why not? Zuckerberg is clearly a smart man, and he seems to be as qualified as any one else. Infinitely more qualified than the current occupant of the office. Just because you don't think of him as a politician doesn't mean that he won't do a good job.

Does anyone have link to papers about the technology behind Libratus?

By definition, a whistle blower must reveal evidence of the commission of a crime. The term does not extend to "actions by the government that I disagree with" or "things that violate my personal interpretations of the Constitution"

If you misuse the term, you make it more difficult for legitimate whistle blowers to get the protection they deserve.

If the two options are retraining vs an overhaul of the economic system, I think retraining is much more likely.

No one wants to change careers. I certainly don't. But the economic realities are what they are. It would be nice to change the economy with basic income or government work programs, both of which I'm in favor of. I just don't see how that will realistically happen in the next 10-15 years.

So we need to make retraining great again. Invest time and money into making the process easy, affordable and open to as many people as possible. Maybe we need more schools, or organized apprenticeship programs or maybe teaching robots. This is a problem that has to be solved with innovations in business and/or technology. At least until we can gain the political position to make major changes to our financial and economic ways of life.

Please, name for me one thing that he has successfully distracted the 24 news cycle away from

I don't know why we couldn't have voted on this. Whether it's a good idea or not, trying to impose something so broad on a community of hackers is an exercise in masochism.

I agree with everyone who has said that we're capable of making up our own minds about what to talk about. I don't think political discussions were ever a problem

Many algorithms have parameters that have be tweaked, and dreadful nights are common with any machine learning concept.

Deep learning is not "better" than other forms of algorithmic prediction. There's a best tool for every job

OP was running for state office, not the local city council. 31% is quite good

Practically this almost never works out. The 10% cluster is using a very small dataset and will produce inferior results. If you train a model based on only 10 people, you're prone to overfit that small sample

Right is right and wrong is wrong. You have to stand up for the right thing even if that means telling other people that they are wrong, or even stupid.

You don't have to be smug about it, but that can be a tricky line to walk. Personally, I think it's better to advocate for certain values as respectfully as you know how and not worry about offending people who disagree. Placing too much emphasis on phrasing and tone is what people refer to derisively as "political correctness". It's best to focus more on saying the right thing, and less on how you say it

Insane. No politician is calling for a complete elimination of guns. That idea has never been proposed or discussed seriously in any way. I don't think even the fringe of the anti-gun lobby wants to get rid of all guns.

This is probably one of the most successful strawmen in all of US politics. I don't think anyone on either side actually believes that the government would ever try to confiscate all guns

Github! This should be on github

I have a similar list of useful concepts. My goal so far this year was to expose myself to those concepts as often as possible. I made an app for my phone that displays the concept of the day on my home screen (right now it's the rhetorical concept of periodic sentences). I also made images for each of the concepts that I use as my chromecast backdrop. I've seen each of them dozens of times by now, mostly unconsciously.

So far, mixed results. I would like to say that I think of "Bayes Theorem" at the perfect time because I wrote it on a list, but that never happens. I guess I've benefitted from thinking about these concepts more, but that's almost impossible to measure. A list of 100 useful mental models has limited value if you can't hold all of them in memory at once and retrieve them at the right time. I'm still trying to come up with a solution for this. Unfortunately I think this might be a fundamental limitation of human learning.

I don't think this is true at all. 10,000 people are just going to have more ideas and better individual ideas than 100 experts. The impact of that much creativity and perspective can be exponential, and it's hard to duplicate.

When I'm designing a system, I hate to have to try to out think everyone on the internet. If you have a known set of opponents you can predict what they might do. When you're up against anybody from anywhere, you never know what you're going to get. Global scale collaboration is a very powerful thing because it allows a complete exploration of the solution space, and it's difficult to stop.

That was inartfully worded. Respectable journalism organizations don't invade people's privacy in a way that would lose a lawsuit. Woodward and Bernstein were on Nixon's enemies list, but they weren't convicted of a crime or found liable for damages in any court.

If you're going to cross that line, you'd better do so carefully. At the very least don't antagonize someone who can rightfully sue you into oblivion.

Thiel is a billionaire, he could destroy many companies out of pure spite. If a startup founder looks at him wrong he could throw millions of dollars at one of their competitors, or pay someone to start a competitor purely for vengence. This may be petty, but it's entirely legal.

It seems like you're discussing a situation other than this case, but I can't figure out what it is. The court ruled that Gawker unlawfully invaded someone's privacy. They are clearly in the wrong no matter how you look at it. This isn't a case of rich people abusing the court system or using money to gain an unfair advantage. This is justice being done in the service of revenge, which is the usual way in which justice gets done.

I'm going to stick by the idea that people can use their money however they want within the boundaries of the law. The idea of not making powerful enemies is sound because there are countless ways that someone can use resources to make life difficult for someone else. It would be impossible to outlaw all of them, and you wouldn't want that even if it could be done.

I'd still love to hear how Thiel using his money to bring about a just outcome does harm to the integrity of the legal system.

You're the expert, but I don't see the harm of "maintenance". If Boella was wronged legally, he should be made whole. Whether he uses his own money to make his case doesn't change the correctness of the ruling.

People use the courts to get payback all the time, in a variety of ways. It's not about what's right, its about what's allowed. People with a lot of money have a big advantage in that regard. If we try to change that, we'll have to redo a lot of the legal system.

Thiel can do whatever he wants with his money, including using it on legal cases. The key rule that Gawker broke here was "Don't make powerful enemies"

There will be no ceiling effect because real journalists stay within the bounds of the law. Equating a self proclaimed gossip website with real reporting is disingenuous and insulting to journalists.

If the National Enquirer broke the law and was sued, do you really think it would affect decision making at the NYT or Washington Post?

Thiel was well within his legal rights. "Both sides are wrong" is a common cop out. False equivalency isn't helping

I recently switched to Google Compute Engine. It's cheaper and so far more reliable than AWS. Might be another option for some people here.

I don't know what Snowden expected. Was the NSA supposed to cancel its multibillion dollar program because it went against a contractor's interpretation of the Constitution? It seems to me that the system worked. He raised his concerns and they were duly noted. I don't think he presented any new information that the IG wasn't aware of.

I understand that the NSA is extremely unpopular here, but their actions had the implicit consent of every branch of the US government. I don't see anything in this lengthy article that makes me think they should have acted any differently than they did. The only person that has veto power is the president. Everyone else has to go through proper channels, and should do so with the expectation that nothing will change.

This happens now, all the time. There isn't a government office of "I need money because my car broke down". Soup kitchens will still give out food and the Salvation Army will still provide shelter. Perhaps even more so, because Basic Income will allow more people to donate time and money to charity in their communities.

This is a good idea for a product. I guess it's kind of like a super grep

This is very true. But you aren't the Secretary of State. I'm sure there are people at a high enough level at wherever you work now that the normal rules don't apply to them. That's the nature of any organization. C-level executives, military generals and high level politicians can all decide not to follow certain rules if they choose, especially when it comes to IT policy. I'm not saying that what Clinton did was right or good, but this kind of thing does happen at a large number of organizations. It should not be surprising that an internationally famous figure would be treated differently than a mid level employee.

A rough analogy for this situation would be if a company had an "employees must use blackberries" policy, but the CFO of the company outright refused because he wanted to use his iPhone. Are they going to fire the CFO over that? Possible but not likely, especially if he is doing a good job otherwise.

In the same way, the Secretary of State can also refuse to comply with government policy (not law). You can't fire the Secretary of State for using the wrong email server. It just doesn't work that way. The fact that national security is involved does change things, but organizational politics is pretty much the same all over. If Clinton's email server contained the nuclear launch codes or the contents of Area 51 then the government would have handled it differently. It's unlikely that any lasting and serious security threats were exposed.

Is this really a problem? The author doesn't say that anyone from his linkedin network contacted him and asked "Are you a white supremacist?" Most people would see the headline and immediately realize that it was an algorithm error, a common part of daily life. Anyone who was invested in the author's reputation would probably check the details of the story and see that it was talking about a completely different person. I have a hard time imagining that anyone was fooled by this.

If someone could possibly confuse me for a white supremacist Donald Trump delegate then either 1) that person isn't trying very hard and I probably don't want to work with them or 2) I need to take a serious look at my life choices

I would pay for summaries like this.

I see the value of this as a resource to compare different languages. But for me "Hello world" is about all of the admin/setup work that has be done in order to get the most basic program to run. It's more like install python, deal with dependencies and conflicts, make sure my PATH is set and the right port is open on the server. Etc and so forth.

And all of that is why "Hello" and "world" are two of my favorite words. It can take so much effort just to see them.

I think the biggest problem with twitter is that people follow too many other people, and the feed becomes overwhelming. It's hard to increase the signal to noise ratio because it's difficult to know in advance who will post interesting things. The only thing I know for sure is that if I unfollow someone, I will never see any of the good things they post in the future. I feel like there should be a name for this, like "The Twitterer's Dilemma"

I don't think there's a technical solution. The more people use twitter, the spammier and less interesting it will be. It's the same problem that every online community faces. More traffic almost always leads to lower quality. On the whole I think twitter serves its purpose well. Always room for new ideas though.

The upvote button wasn't enough for me. Thank you for extending the ideas of that work place sabotage concept for modern tech work, like Stross implied he would. I'm not sure what to really learn from this sabotage idea, but your comment pointed out many of the obvious flaws in how things are done currently.