Hacker News Reader

ma2rtenon Indian inventor dies in homemade helicopter accident

Maybe either would have worked: learning less or learning more.

ma2rtenon Big Tech Is Coming to Small-Town America, but at What Cost?

I believe even the janitors needed a security clearance.

Makes sense because people might leave sensitive documents around.

ma2rtenon Mozilla Common Voice Adds 16 New Languages and 4,600 New Hours of Speech

But it's easy to do that for a small subset for finetuning compared to cleaning up the entire dataset.

ma2rtenon Mozilla Common Voice Adds 16 New Languages and 4,600 New Hours of Speech

Are you sure it's not fair use? I believe most legal experts agree that language models such as GPT-3 are not violating copyright due to fair use.

ma2rtenon Mozilla Common Voice Adds 16 New Languages and 4,600 New Hours of Speech

Why does data for speech recognition need to be prefect. That's certainly not the case for other machine learning applications. Can you train the less clean data and fine-tune on a clean subset?

ma2rtenon Mozilla Common Voice Adds 16 New Languages and 4,600 New Hours of Speech

I think this dataset is mainly for speech recognition and not text to speech. Speech recognition should be able to recognize as many different accents as possible.

ma2rtenon Wealthy people are renouncing American citizenship

A lot of people who take this drastic step are tech zillionaires: Eric Schmidt, the former Alphabet CEO, has applied to become a citizen of Cyprus.

This is such lazy reporting. Is there any data showing the connection to tech? Is there any indication that Eric Schmidt would renounce his American citizenship if he becomes Cypriot? What is a zillionaires?

ma2rtenon Airyx OS

"eventual compatibility with x86-64 macOS binaries (Mach-O) and libraries"

ma2rtenon Airyx OS

I think are underestimating in general how much work it is. ReactOS has been developed for 23 years and is not in a useable state yet.

ma2rtenon PhD student in Switzerland expelled after criticizing the CCP in Twitter

He hasn't tried to reenroll, because he was unable to find an advisor in the same department. Taking an advisor from a different department would mean to start over on his thesis. I'm not sure what would have happened if he was still enrolled in this case. It seems to me that no one can force an adviser to work with him, so this talk about enrollment is a moot point.

Also, according the professor, the only Chinese pressure was an email from a Chinese foreign student in Canada who felt offended by the cartoon. It seems like the initial email from the professor was just not worded carefully and had some speculations about visa repercussions and that is what the entire article is based on.

ma2rtenon How Google quietly funds Europe’s leading tech policy institutes

In the US the way to influence politics is campaign contributions to politicians. In Europe that kind of blatant influence is frowned upon, but it seems like companies are still trying to take a page from the same playbook by influencing politics through academics instead.

ma2rtenon The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

I think a legitimate use-case is asking for confirmation before leaving the page when filling out a form so that the user doesn't loose their data.

ma2rtenon Perceptual distortions in late-teens predict psychotic symptoms in mid-life

I think it's a common misconception that Psychopathy refers to antisocial personality disorder. It's a related but distinct concept.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_Checklist

ma2rtenon The mermaid is taking over Google search in Norway

I don't think it necessarily shows that. Their good ranking could be completely unrelated to bouceback.

ma2rtenon Netcat – All you need to know

Wouldn't it have been easier to use another cloud-based service such as Slack?

ma2rtenon Google results for PHP tutorials contain SQL injection vulnerabilities

This doesn’t seem like something that could be fixed by using a rule based approach, because it would require actually understanding the subject matter.

ma2rtenon Language records reveal a surge of cognitive distortions in recent decades

I don’t think the methodology is showing anything conclusively. The peak could be due to a linguistic shift or due to a difference in the type of work being published. Even if books use phrases like “I am a” more often I don’t think that necessarily means people have more cognitive distortions and if people have more cognitive distortions that doesn’t necessarily mean they are more depressed (only the inverse has been shown afaik).

ma2rtenon A YouTube chat about chess got flagged for hate speech

But they are not naturally so. We decided to make them that way.

ma2rtenon A YouTube chat about chess got flagged for hate speech

You know that many people are advocating for replacing the terms whitelist and blacklist, right?

I don't see how chess is any different.

ma2rtenon AlphaFold 2 is here: what’s behind the structure prediction miracle

There is something like this: https://bigscience.huggingface.co/en/#!index.md

ma2rtenon The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday

I heard this saying attributed to Larry Page.

ma2rtenon Inside Facebook's Data Wars

The problem that Facebook has compared to those other industries is that journalists blame Facebook for the decline of journalism and view Facebook as a gatekeeper. Those other companies on the other hand are valuable advertisers.

ma2rtenon Why Google's bookmark manager and Docs have purposefully bad UI

Google Drive has basically all the features that Google Docs supposedly doesn't have. Just go to drive.google.com instead of docs.google.com.

ma2rtenon What DeepMind’s AlphaFold 2 really achieved (2020)

It could have learned abstractions which help it to predict how proteins fold but these do not correspond to the real underlying causes.

ma2rtenon What DeepMind’s AlphaFold 2 really achieved (2020)

(2020)

ma2rtenon Three programmers got fired, including me, due to a single app crash

If she has not put the name in the post it was most likely on purpose, however I would be interested what country this was.

ma2rtenon A bitter pill for Microsoft Copilot

The article says it is unclear if it covers generative models.

ma2rtenon A bitter pill for Microsoft Copilot

Do you have a reference? Does this cover generative models?

ma2rtenon Instacart CEO will be replaced by Facebook executive

I don't think it's a very common expression, but I think I might have heard it before.

ma2rtenon Google Internal Comics

I think what Thiel is referring to is that advances in computer vision which are published in scientific papers enable others to build better surveillance systems.

This criticism doesn't just apply to DeepMind. The reason that he is mentioning them specifically is because was an early investor so he has access to their team.