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sadfaceunread

771 karma · joined September 14, 2010

Hard Science / Data Science.

I apply machine learning to problems in chemical and pharmaceutical industries.

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sadfaceunread··on Twitter Gave Meerkat Two Hours’ Notice before Cutting Access
Fully agreed. That sounds like very bad behavior.
sadfaceunread··on A Tiny Minority of Elite Grad Schools Produce Most Tenured Academics
This really isn't that surprising. It could also be explained largely by self selection. If one believes that top schools by prestige also attract the top students, and that these schools are reasonable efficient at selecting among these applicants we'd expect a strongly one sided distribution of talent.

If the top 10 institutions have the vast majority of the top 1% of grad students, I'd expect they produce the vast majority of professors.

sadfaceunread··on Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Courses
So what about any charitable effort that discriminates on the basis of a protected class. If you can't do something for free to help one group without excluding some others no charity would be possible. Should MIT/Harvard intentionally avoid captioning? No. Should the government force them to use CCing? Hell no.
sadfaceunread··on Harvard and M.I.T. Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Courses
Penn&Teller covered the ADA in this episode of their TV Series Bullshit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLfo979TDaY . The sue first model of accessibility is sickening especially in this case.
sadfaceunread··on Deleting any Facebook album
It seems like Facebook's Bug Bounty Program payment processor bugbountypayments.com is down http://isup.me/bugbountypayments.com . Anyone have any experience with that site? I haven't heard of it coming up before in security program discussions on HN or elsewhere.
sadfaceunread··on $500k of Azure credit for YC startups
In addition to the Azure credit I'm interested in the CloudFlare and DataStax enterprise services value. Cloudflare at least reports an average for enterprise services at $5k/mo.
sadfaceunread··on Abusing Contributors is not OK
I agree. This is a click bait title. The words abuse and harassment should not be used about as freely as they are in current meta-discussions of online discourse.
sadfaceunread··on Abusing Contributors is not OK
Overall, I don't think this post is very good. It tries hard to ride the wave of several important, valuable, and popular sentiments but I think that the ways in which it misses the mark, mars its purpose.

I don't understand why Nick (the author) chose to group a bunch of unrelated stuff in to an otherwise pretty reasonable post on decreasing personal attacks in OSS communications.

The parts about systemic biases and asking speakers about them has essentially nothing to do with the first part of the post. Essentially the entire "What Can We Do About It" section reads like it was written for an entirely different purpose than the rest of the post. It is fine to promote those ideas but to tie the idea of increasing civility in communications as an idea of countering systematic biases against certain demographics is a faulty alignment of ideals.

Saying read a wiki on feminism as a way to reduce personal attacks in email threads is bizarre. The notion that people are "experiencing harassment over your identity rather than being critiqued solely based on the quality of your work." is not related at all to my experience in OSS communities.

sadfaceunread··on Study: The Effects of Line Length on Reading Online News (2008)
You could test this hypothesis on a website and get 100x the data (with more noise) pretty easily.
sadfaceunread··on MIT indefinitely removes online physics lectures and courses by Walter Lewin
This is exactly my opinion as well. We don't remove books from the library because the author had moral failings, or even if the author committed genocide. The content has value and should be preserved. The removal of the content from OCW is the step too far. Lewin absolutely should be restricted from further teaching at MIT or on MITx but the work itself should not be considered problematic.
sadfaceunread··on Two Seamless members say hackathon misattribution was unintentional
This article is a follow up to another piece in MIT's newspaper about a "disqualification"[1] related to misrepresentation of work in presentations from MIT's student hackathon. The comments of this article and the original are the kind of local bickering and political wrangling and blame shifting that occurs all the time, but I think the broader question of what happens in hackathon presentations is interesting.

[1] http://tech.mit.edu/V134/N53/HackMIT.html Exactly what happened and if it was a disqualification are subject of much discussion in the comment sections and this follow up article.

sadfaceunread··on Gift from Ballmer Will Expand Computer Science Faculty at Harvard
I don't know what to say besides kudos. Harvard will need to build a new building for CS now.
sadfaceunread··on Show HN: Songftware – Music Written Like Software
Very cool. A couple questions: is the song really the right vehicle to pass around? By analogy isn't that like moving the binary instead of the code? I understand the lack of DAW cross-compatibility but it seems like you might need all of the components that make up a song along the way in order to work on a subsequent task.

It looks like this is still in the experimental/conception stage. Right now it seems more like a mental model for music than actual tools. I'd be interested in seeing what analogies besides code would be applicable or might have lessons learned. For example, I know that collaboration and sharing of mechanical engineering design software is relatively less useable/mature than sharing a git repository. For artists that collaboratively work on 3D models or images I'd imagine that the workflow is passing around .psds or whatever, rather than final images because everyone is on the same platform.

I'll be paying attention as this develops.

sadfaceunread··on Elon Musk: ‘With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.’
Terrible title.
sadfaceunread··on Vatican Library Puts 4,000 Ancient Manuscripts Available Online for Free
Can we change this link to the actual source? http://www.mss.vatlib.it/guii/scan/link.jsp

Or the Vatican library homepage or this tweet: https://twitter.com/vaticanlibrary/status/522270002012246016

sadfaceunread··on As Many as 5K .Com’s Taken Away by Sealed Court Order by Verisign
Yes the comments of the original blog post have been really interesting to read.

The domain name community looks to be all over the comment section of the original post.

sadfaceunread··on As Many as 5K .Com’s Taken Away by Sealed Court Order by Verisign
I'll be following this case. I don't understand why this would be filed under seal. I'd enjoy some legal experts comments on the matter.
sadfaceunread··on As Many as 5K .Com’s Taken Away by Sealed Court Order by Verisign
Out of court settlement. Microsoft and No-ip both issued press releases/updates to their original blog posts about it.

No details about the settlement were released but No-IP certainly got paid.

sadfaceunread··on After raising $50M, Reddit forces all remote workers to relocate to SF
The amount of remote worker angst in these comments is pretty ridiculous. Yishan has seemed reasonable enough and has come to terms with the fact that some parts of Reddit's operations aren't being run how they should be.

Saying 'fuck reddit' for a reasonable business maneuver is pretty out of line. Reddit had remote people other than just developers, managing those relationships remotely may have been part of the issue.

sadfaceunread··on Artificial sweeteners linked to glucose intolerance
This is an impressive piece of work but I worry that a larger amount of work is needed in the relationship between glucose intolerance, diabetes and metabolic syndromes in general. The fact that glucose intolerance is induced by a high sugar diet and leads towards a path of clinical outcomes ending in diabetes, doesn't necessarily indicate that glucose intolerance developed via artificial sweetener consumption is indicative of being on the same clinical pathways towards metabolic syndrome and diabetes.
sadfaceunread··on A Neural Network for Factoid Question Answering over Paragraphs
I just started downloading the code and training data, I'm interested in what quiz bowl packets were used as the training data. Most college level quiz bowl packets are posted publicly on the web but are copyrighted by the original authors and are unlikely to be licensed for such a purpose.
sadfaceunread··on YC Investment Policy and Email List
Removing the signal of YC Partner investment is probably good for YC batches as a whole.
sadfaceunread··on White House Names Google’s Megan Smith the Next CTO of the US
Having briefly met with Megan a couple years ago, I'm pleased with this appointment. She asked good questions and seemed to think through the consequences of rough conceptual ideas diligently.
sadfaceunread··on On Being a Female in Venture Capital
Important follow up from the same author on the ramifications of this post: http://blogs.wsj.com/accelerators/2014/08/22/erica-swallow-t...
sadfaceunread··on HackMIT Puzzle Guide
Pretty tough puzzle. The audio part certainly seems the hardest but it looks like there were some other clues ;) on that page to get you to that.
sadfaceunread··on Thanks, HN: You helped discover a disease and save lives
Very impressive management of the situation. This story is pretty incredible and really exciting for the ability of researchers at different institutions to somewhat effectively collaborate.
sadfaceunread··on Update: Details on Microsoft Takeover
I really wish settlement details were public or at least semi-public. No-IP had to have received some $$$ from this.

The 200,000 bond MS put up better have been just the tip of the iceberg.

sadfaceunread··on Microsoft takes down No-IP.com domains
Anyone got a link to the TRO? Is this part of the public record?
sadfaceunread··on Rental home shortage is America's next housing crisis
Yup. The level of new construction in areas outside the waterfront is essentially 0. Which is preposterous given the current state of rental affairs. I'd bet you could count on two or less hands the number of new low rise buildings built in Cambridge this year.
sadfaceunread··on Confirmed: Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel Is Kind Of An Ass
This is such a non-story. The content of those emails is really really tame. Go read totalsororitymove.com or totalfratmove.com and you'll find equal levels of college drunk hookup culture openly displayed. Or go read textsfromlastnight. Young people say things in some contexts that they wouldn't in others. I bet you can find old usenet posts from currently respected senior people in all sorts of fields that are equally troubling, and these posts weren't written for public consumption.

More importantly the email leaker is quite the jerk for releasing them. There is no smoking gun here, just some moderate embarrassment for a moderately famous person.

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