naturalgradient

There is just no winning in the following chain of arguments:

- We can debate anything

- However, some views are too harmful to be debated

- Whoever is most vocally outraged decides the boundary between open to debate/too harmful

How do you mean? Aside from being the literal headline of the NPR article and thus being right for HN, what would you suggest?

Was going to suggest this and potentially make it possible to get another quote via arrow keys

Do you have some examples for this type of service? I understand if someone needs, say, a gardener or cleaner or (if per email) translator, this would work.

I read that most employees have a strike price above $15. I think this is an unmitigated disaster for employees, especially with the vote structure etc prohibiting the board or any major investor taking influence.

I personally would probably recommend to cut losses and run - it looks more like Groupon, Gopro or Twitter right now than anything else.

Who is to blame? CEO and underwriters for overpricing their IPO? To me it looks like Snap was simply strangled by Instagram in the worst moment. The last private round was priced when it still looked like Snap would continue growing explosively, IPO was hence massively overpriced and employee options as well.

It probably is not helping company moral right now that the CEO gave himself an $800 million bonus for the IPO.

Source (paywall but free figure at the top):

https://www.theinformation.com/soon-free-to-sell-few-snap-em...

Care to elaborate?

I am the only one thinking of http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html?

Why place an over one year old alleged offer in the media today?

Because the shares are free-falling, user growth quarter-over-quarter will likely be abysmal and float will drastically increase in 2 weeks.

The only possible sliver of hope for shareholders right now is a potential buyout. Remember how many times Twitter rallied on 'chatter' of a Google bid?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/08/twitter-s...

https://www.cnet.com/uk/news/twitter-buyout-rumors-google-sa...

Edit: interesting number of down votes, is this such a far fetched conspiracy theory? If it was such an open secret at Snap, why has this not come out yet?

What do you mean? The reality is that African-American people are incarcerated and convincted at very high rates, in great part thanks to policies that very specifically designed to target them (re: war on drugs).

I think it refers to the 30 years war:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War

'More experts: Of course, our systems are only as good as the the data they’re based on. Over the past weeks, we have begun working with more than 15 additional expert NGOs and institutions through our Trusted Flagger program, including the Anti-Defamation League, the No Hate Speech Movement, and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue'

This makes me cringe. Every single one of these organisations consists of people with specific political views of acceptable and not acceptable content.

In Europe, the 'no hate speech' idea has very quickly expanded the concept of hate speech to include any rightwing opinion around certain topics (mostly religion and immigration related).

More people feel disenfranchised and excluded from the discourse, more grandstanding around fighting hate speech where the existence of countless organisations, consultants, experts and so forth can only be justified by uncovering more hate speech. Quite literally the growth of their economy requires expansion of the concept. The divide continues.

I hope this redesign does not turn into a LinkedIn style disaster. Sometimes I wonder if these redesigns happen not for some well-argued business purpose but for overinflated departments having to justify their existence (which I strongly suspected in the case of LinkedIn's redesign which made the site unusable for months).

This is somewhat ironic considering how Elon Musk's claims on the danger of AI are viewed in the more serious research community (as overly dramatic).

The consensus amongst many researchers in the area seems to be that we should focus on the dangers of narrow AI applications (social media filtering, targeting) and privacy concerns.

I liked a comment I saw somewhere on r/machinelearning (or twitter) where someone said if you have a text about the consequences of AI and cannot replace 'AI' with statistical learning and then read the text with a straight face, you are probably overdramatising.

Ah rather thinly veiled blog advertisement?

Really? From what I gather from projects like RethinkDB or this:

https://www.influxdata.com/the-open-source-database-business...

open source is a forever struggling business model.

This seems rather dated, considering that Ian Goodfellow is not at OpenAI any more.

The articles also goes on about universe, which has long been abandoned because the VNC/realtime stuff does not really work well (according to them). According to r/machinelearning, a bunch of engineers on that project got laid off (cannot confirm).

I have to say I got a similar vibe from his writings, it's hard to pinpoint, but a weird sense of cultural entitlement: 'Why are they not as progressive as me and why don't they appreciate me criticising their culture?'

If I understand the project correctly it precisely does not advocate default hyperparameters but exposes all configurations through the declarative interface.

Presumably because of better portioning. For a lot of meals, you only need a very small amount of one ingredient which you cannot buy in that quantity. Meal kits come with the right proportions for every ingredient.

I dont understand. Is this supposed to imply this rapper will somehow invest and personally try to ensure soundcloud will survive?

Or did he call the CEO, the CEO told him 'Yes we will stay'? I mean what is he supposed to say?

'No, don't bother uploading new songs, we will run out of cash soon, thanks for the call'?

Archiveteam seems like a really cool project, what I was wondering (and couldn't find in the FAQ) is who is paying for all the storage? Is it donated by big tech companies?

I actually had to think about this for a few minutes. I suppose having written a number of custom orchestration tools both in local clusters and the cloud, debugging distributed services is still incredibly tedious.

Yes, this comes especially handy when reviewers ask for additional experiments.

A few minutes - killing processes on one machine, restarting a database on another machine/cluster, reloading a schema, importing data (for some experiments), deploying a new service, loading tensorflow models, warming up benchmark clients. I found that the key of good research pipelines is having a really consistent way of passing around configurations between components.

My components arent strictly microservices (a mixture of open source components and handwritten tools) and they interact in all sorts o fprotocols with each other (importing jsons, csv, GRPC, HTTP), but I essentially treat the configuration flags as their API, so there are no implicit configurations that I could forget about. The rest is just naming things well, e.g. descriptive names for experiment result files etc.

Initially I thought everyone is doing that, but from talking to PhDs in other domains I noticed that there is a strong bias towards people working in any kind of complex distributed setting having these pipelines.

My friends who devise ML models and just test them on datasets on their laptop never had a real need to get a pipeline in place because they never felt the pain points of setting up large distributed experiments.

I take enormous pleasure in automating every part of my research pipelines (comp sci).

As in, I like to get my experiment setup (usually distributed and many different components interacting with each other) to a point where one command resets all components, starts them in screen processes on all of the machines with the appropriate timing and setup commands, runs the experiment(s), moves the results between machines, generates intermediate results and exports publication ready plots to the right folder.

Upside: once it's ready, iterating on the research part of the experiment is great. No need to focus on anything else any more, just the actual research problem, not a single unnecessary click to start something (even 2 clicks become irritating when you do them hundreds of times). Need another ablation study/explore another parameter/idea? Just change a flag/line/function, kick off once, and have the plots the next day. No fiddling around.

Downside: full orchestration takes very long initially, but a bit into my research career I now have tons of utilities for all of this. It also has made me much better at command line and general setup nonsense.

Because it's still the same case going through the motions.

What I find more interesting is the following on the Manhattan DA's wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_Vance_Jr.#2009_Manhattan...

'After Vance very publicly staged an accusation and spending 5 years and reportedly $10 million on prosecuting the Abacus Federal Savings Bank for larceny, the bank and its employees were found not guilty on all 80 charges. Despite its small size, the Chinese-American family-run bank was the only New York bank so charged during the Great Recession, despite Vance admitting that Citibank, among others, had behaved badly. The story is well told in Steve James' feature-length documentary, Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, September 11, 2016.'

n=2 is not much but there is at least initial indication of a pattern where this DA is very specifically seeking cases where he is in a much better position (more manpower, resources) than the prosecuted party to win. Going after the little guy. Nice.

The GP is likely referring to this story:

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

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2013/09/michael-lewis-goldman...

I am just now realising that this case is still ongoing. That's crazy. A DA literally made it his mission to get the verdict reinstated:

'On April 4th, 2016, almost nine months after Aleynikov was acquitted by the NY Supreme Court, the Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance's office filed an appeal seeking to reinstate the guilty verdict'

Not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I would not be surprised if Goldman kept applying pressure behind the scenes to ruin him.

Donation link to help fund appeal (his website): http://www.aleynikov.org

Have not used the product but have highly enjoyed reading their tech blog, great stuff.

I think the situation is not comparable at all precisely because Facebook did not have a larger network strangulating their growth.

I wonder if there is any precedent for a social network (or any large application for that matter) having their growth stalled to single-digits and then it picking up again.

To me, it looks like there is a very real possibility that facebook already killed them in the sense that they will never go beyond 250 million or so users, which does not support their valuation. So share-wise, they might end up a second Twitter, just with a much faster turnaround this time because user growth has already come to a grinding halt.

So I have briefly played around with this and it seems quite neatly engineered. Quick search.

I just have a hard time seeing how this will turn into a sustainable business.

One way of looking at this is that it is a high-end competitor to arxiv-sanity - at least in STEM. I understand that it integrates from many more sources but that actually is a problem.

A brief search for the niche I am in (a subfield of machine learning and comp sci) gives me thousands of results but hardly anything I would consider relevant in scope. It feels more like being inundated with anything remotely relevant, which is the exact opposite of what I want - it is already stressful enough to keep up with arxiv uploads.

I might not understand what the actual use case for this is and who would be the customer (as opposed to the user). Maybe it is more relevant to other fields (especially biology, medicine and so forth) as I have a hard time thinking of anyone in my research circle who would get value out of a subscription here. Then again, this is a highly biased view as STEM has made greater strides in open access than other fields. Nonetheless, I would not be surprised if researchers in other fields might feel inundated with new work just the same.

Not worth the click.

TL;DR: Freelance, build a website like this one and monetise it, build apps.