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neuralk

348 karma · joined October 4, 2013

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neuralk··on Wittgenstein’s Legacy: The Principles of the Private Language Arguments (2018)
Wittgenstein argues that there is no such thing as a private language.
neuralk··on Ask HN: What are you working on?
Besides the course you are taking (is it an in-person class, or online perhaps?), are there any resources for learning Sanskrit that you'd recommend? I have the same long term goal as you! I'm looking to self-study the language since there aren't local courses where I live.
neuralk··on What Is Electricity? (2013)
Beautifully presented! Thanks for sharing, these notes are inspiring, I especially like the simplicity of the presentation's design paired with interactive elements. Too often I find material with the latter to be extremely busy. As someone interested in instruction, I'm taking notes from this!
neuralk··on Why play a music CD? No ads, no privacy terrors, no algorithms
This feels like a business opportunity. Or, at least, an open source repo + a tutorial article that would attract donations.
neuralk··on Twitter’s Plan to Get People to Stop Yelling at Each Other
I never (no longer, that is) see tweets that other people like. I think there is a setting to disable them from appearing now. At the very least, whenever one appears you can click the little arrow next to it and select "see less often" (or equivalent).
neuralk··on Google Fights Back
>Do you want an unsorted list of all websites that contain your keywords?

Yes, because then I could apply my own ranking. More realistically, it would be useful as various web services could select from among various forms of ranking as desired by their users. Right now, the internet as a collective is at the whim of the particular ranking Google elects to use. If they don't like you, too bad, you lose.

What's more, I would even settle for a sorted list of all websites that contain my keywords, but Google provides no such thing. Google's algorithm has changed significantly in just the past few years, making it very difficult to do research of unusual topics, no matter how broad or specific you make your search. For instance, just today I was looking up information related to an event in the life of Andre Gide. After you get through a few pages (maybe 150 or so useful links from the grab bag of what appears), Google makes it such that you can explore no further. Entering a new term with a slight variation can yield a set of another ~150 results with no overlap with the previous search's results, making any kind of exhaustive research quite frustrating.

neuralk··on Nassim Talebs case against Nate Silver is bad math
Taleb's response to this article: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1115684446081040386
neuralk··on Remastering Star Trek: Deep Space Nine with Machine Learning
No, it is not just interpolating. The underlying algorithm uses machine learning by applying a trained deep neural network. So there is value added besides a mere upscale.

You're ultimately right, though, and that a true HD is only going to come from the raw film content. What the neural network gives us are essentially plausible higher-res hallucinations.

Edit: as per the other comment, if the original exists only on video and not film, perhaps this is the best we're going to get.

neuralk··on The impact of color palettes on the prices of paintings (2017)
The article is paywalled, unless you have access through a university or other library.

The high price you'd pay for paywalled papers goes in large part to the publisher for no real tangible benefit. Most research, and likely the linked article, are funded either directly or indirectly through public funds like taxes. So it is especially obnoxious to see an interesting article like the one linked be locked down.

As for why it's bad etiquette on the front page of HN, the free-and-open ethos common among hackers (at least, old school ones...) would usually see someone link directly to a pdf, instead of this.

neuralk··on A Heretic's Guide to Deplatforming
>Freedom of speech is a right provided by the constitution

No, it is not. It explicitly is not. Freedom of speech is one right among many other unstated rights held in common by the people. The first amendment merely prohibits Congress from passing a law that restricts it. The wording is clear that this freedom is something that exists inherently beyond the scope of the Constitution, and is certainly not "provided" by the document. We naturally have rights such as freedom of speech. It is from institutions like the government that restrictions are placed on them.

Also, the 9th amendment was included precisely to clarify and codify the fact that the Constitution, in enumerating the rights, is not itself granting those rights or even stating that these are the only rights people have.

neuralk··on To Remember Everything You Learn, Surrender to This Algorithm (2008)
Spaced repetition software? A requisite post is gwern's excellent and comprehensive article on them https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition
neuralk··on Snapchat Source Code GitHub Leak Caused by Bad iOS Update
Exactly what I was wondering about -- couldnt illegitimate DMCA requests be an attack vector to shut down a public GitHub repo temporarily? There wasn't much to the quoted DMCA request.

Edit: I'm guessing there's enough in the redacted part of the notice to prove SC's identity. But I think the question of DMCA abuse remains.

neuralk··on LocationSmart Leaked Location Data for All Major U.S. Carriers in Real Time
If the researcher had done that -- queried every cellphone and published it -- I fully expect they'd receive the same treatment from law enforcement that weev and Aaron Swartz got, if not worse
neuralk··on Is capitalism a threat to democracy?
An article with a title like this, people are only responding to the question (which is rhetorical anyway). The OP submission has only been up 1 hour at the time of this comment and the vast majority of the 100+ comments here are addressing only the title question or reactions to it. None mention Polanyi and few discuss the author's most salient points at the end of the article.
neuralk··on Ask HN: Are there any purely keyword-based search engines with no NLP?
Not yet! I'm still on the hunt, but now I am searching for books. I suspect it will require checking out a few tomes from library to find what I'm looking for.
neuralk··on Ask HN: Are there any purely keyword-based search engines with no NLP?
I was wishing for old-school keyword search just this morning! Nice synchronicity.

I must completely disagree with the other posters claiming that keyword searches are not useful. For niche research, they are extremely helpful or even necessary. Google and Bing have reached the point where it is impossible to do real, niche academic research on them. For instance, I had a very specific thing I was trying to look up involving medicine, religion, and Marco Polo.

Try searching for "marco polo doctors" on Google and witness it giving very counterintuitive, one-sided results that may align with the current zeitgeist of interest from people searching Google, but diverge completely with the aim of literal, precise keyword search needed by academics. I did work to improve or hone the search down, looking up Kublai Khan, doctors, atheism brings up blogspam articles on doctors and atheism, but scant results on the 13th century Mongol emperor's religious medical interest. Trying to narrow the search further by including variations on Cambulac, Cambaliech, trying to find any info beyond surface-level on John of Montecorvino and his retinue... all is impossible with search engines in 2018.

neuralk··on AI-assisted fake porn are being used by people on Reddit for self-completion
No, that video is real. Those are morph cuts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6wPUtKg-Ac

neuralk··on Sheep learn to recognise celebrity faces from different angles
Move over deep learning, hello sheep learning.
neuralk··on Macron Campaign Says It Was Target of ‘Massive’ Hacking Attack
Thanks for the condescension, but really we weren't talking about the justice system.
neuralk··on Macron Campaign Says It Was Target of ‘Massive’ Hacking Attack
>your entire point rests upon the incorrect assumption that the other side isn't corrupt.

no it doesn't. Anyone's corruption should be exposed for the betterment of society.

Rather, it is your argument that solely depends on the belief that others ("the other side") MUST be guilty. I understand emotions run high to match the stakes since it was the presidential election after all, but you'll note I didn't make any value judgments either way. Just because we are convinced one party is guilty doesn't mean we should ignore evidence of another's corruption out of fairness.

neuralk··on Macron Campaign Says It Was Target of ‘Massive’ Hacking Attack
This is a verifiably false comment that I hope was written from ignorance and not something else.

Seth Rich was not killed by "inner-city violence." He was killed by an unknown assailant, presumably in a mugging but it is again unknown. It was also not in the inner city, but in the Bloomingdale neighborhood which is rather nice and you can read about it here [1].

>Given the fact that you can't walk around America's inner cities without getting shot

Again, this is far from what I'd call a "fact" and is rather ignorant. Plenty of people live and work in inner cities across America without ever being shot or shooting someone. Your bizarre appeal to authority with quoting Obama doesn't have any bearing in reality. Seth Rich's murder may have been, and likely was, a random act of violence. But that does not justify the assertions of your comment.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/express/wp/2016/08/12/heres-w...

neuralk··on Macron Campaign Says It Was Target of ‘Massive’ Hacking Attack
Funny how people seem to care more about who was targeted or how they got the leaks, rather than the content of the leaks themselves.

You'd think evidence of corruption would be relevant and worthy of mass coverage, no matter who committed it or how it was obtained.

neuralk··on New male contraceptive may be submitted for Indian approval this year
Cyberpunk headline of the day!
neuralk··on Images that fool computer vision raise security concerns
I was thinking the same thing until I scanned through the paper linked above. While neural networks are indeed non-linear, some NNs can still exhibit what amounts to linearity and suffer from adversarial linear perturbations. Example of linearity in NNs that the authors are considering from the paper:

>The linear view of adversarial examples suggests a fast way of generating them. We hypothesize that neural networks are too linear to resist linear adversarial perturbation. LSTMs (Hochreiter & Schmidhuber, 1997), ReLUs (Jarrett et al., 2009; Glorot et al., 2011), and maxout networks (Goodfellow et al., 2013c) are all intentionally designed to behave in very linear ways, so that they are easier to optimize. More nonlinear models such as sigmoid networks are carefully tuned to spend most of their time in the non-saturating, more linear regime for the same reason. This linear behavior suggests that cheap, analytical perturbations of a linear model should also damage neural networks.

neuralk··on Machine intelligence, part 1
I never said that. I think karpathy (also an AI researcher) summed up my feelings, particular the Ryan Adams quote: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9109140

edit: apologies about the 'no background' part

neuralk··on Machine intelligence, part 1
Why are all these people (Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, now Sam Altman) who have no background in Artificial Intelligence coming out with these alarmist messages (particularly when there are more plausible imminent threats such as nuclear warfare, superbugs, etc)? As a grad student doing work in AI, I find it really frustrating. Why not instead talk to some current practitioners such as Mark Riedl, who is one of the premier researchers in computational creativity -- you'll get a different story [1].

[1] https://twitter.com/mark_riedl/status/535372758830809088

neuralk··on If Data You Have, Consume It They Will
The definitive word on the Star Wars canon was given earlier this year: only the six films, Star Wars: The Clone Wars series, Star Wars: Rebels, and new content are considered canon.

Also, Wookiepedia is doing an excellent job differentiating Canon and Legends, so you can take your cues from there.

neuralk··on Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason
They cover slightly different territory. The post you linked is more about the aesthetics of good UI, with a little bit about functionality and UX. The solutions there do not solve or address the problem brought up in the OP here, which is more about UX and the modification of existing user interfaces. For instance, it wasn't the updated graphical style of the keyboard that the OP complained about, but the rearranged placement of keys.

That said, both are good reads and complement each other.

neuralk··on Show HN: Mojulo – Pixelated Math Rendering Sandbox Toy
Very fun, and the gallery is a nice touch. Here's my contribution:

  (r *(2*sin((-A*time)/10))^100)  * ((r * r ) % 2)
http://maxbittker.github.io/Mojulo/#KHIgKigyKnNpbigoLUEqdGlt...
neuralk··on HFT in my backyard – II
Fantastic article, even better than the first. This is exactly what I enjoy discovering on HN.

I hope he suffers no repercussions with respect to his trespassing, although it seems the worker who left the tower open and unattended might have some explaining to do. You think since another tower had been attacked earlier this year they might have installed security cameras. I wonder why these towers seem to lack security given their importance to their owners.

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