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skndr

636 karma · joined December 25, 2011

Formerly at Experiment (W13)
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skndr··on Show HN: Using 3D Convolutional Neural Networks for Speaker Verification
Any hints about future improvements for open set speaker diarization?
skndr··on Building a lamp you can talk to
Interesting. Is Alexa the primary provider for speech recognition?
skndr··on Wrong signal
Why do you think that might be? I can imagine that requiring others to open their source makes their implementation verifiable.
skndr··on Really Bad Chess makes chess fun even if you’re really bad
I imagine it's more fun to play with many more interesting pieces.

> Yet, in spite of this, after playing Really Bad Chess for the past week, I’ve found myself with a much better understanding of the game, and how the various pieces interact with each other.

Not to mention that you can potentially learn tactics much quicker with more practice using the interesting pieces.

skndr··on RethinkDB is shutting down
Mike has been one of the most genuine and helpful people I've met - always offering to lend an ear or offer suggestions and feedback. It must be really difficult to stop doing something that's been such a core part of your effort and thoughts for so long. I hope you and the team find interesting and engaging things to work on.
skndr··on Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny
I read it as "...I have to think YC [can someday be] hugely important to that growth," not that it already was.

That said, although VC funding might be a small percentage of investment overall, it has a leveraged impact on the economy as a whole [0]:

"According to a study conducted at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, 43% of U.S. public companies founded since 1979 were funded by venture capital. These companies now comprise 38% of all employees, 57% of the total U.S. market capitalization, and account for 82% of all R&D spend — a proxy for further innovation growth — in the United States."

[0] http://a16z.com/2016/09/11/vc-economics/

skndr··on Neural Photo Editor
Github: https://github.com/ajbrock/Neural-Photo-Editor
skndr··on “In The Zone”
Fair enough! Perhaps "also known as..." would have been better.
skndr··on “In The Zone”
Now known as a state of flow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
skndr··on Elon Musk on How to Build the Future
I built this thing if you want to follow along. Unfortunately no video, but at least you can copy the text:

https://jotengine.com/t/elon

skndr··on Sampulator.com – make and record beats with your keyboard
I'm really enjoying this. Great set of default samples, it seems to limit the paradox of choice.

I also can't resist sharing mine:

http://sampulator.com/skandermz/cruisin

skndr··on Introducing OpenAI
Sure, though you can't extrapolate future technological improvements from past performance (that's what makes investing in tech difficult).

Just as one discovery enables many, human-level AI that can do its own AI research could superlinearly bootstrap its intelligence. AI safety addresses the risk of bootstrapped superintelligence indifferent to humans.

skndr··on Introducing OpenAI
Improvements in AI aren't linear, though. Artificial Superintelligence, after reaching AGI, might happen in the span of minutes or days. I imagine the idea here is to guide progress so that on the day that AGI is possible, we've already thoroughly considered what happens after that point.

Secondly - it's not necessarily about 'evil' AI. It's about AI indifferent to human life. Have a look at this article, it provides a better intuition for how slippery AI could be: https://medium.com/@LyleCantor/russell-bostrom-and-the-risk-...

skndr··on PresidentObama on GitHub
For this analogy, a bill should actually be a pull request and a signed law is a merged request. I think the problem is that an 'issue' should be a proposal, a bug report, etc. In this case, none of the 'issues' being created are intended to be closed.
skndr··on SpaceshipTwo crashes shortly after Mojave test flight
The other efficient forms of propulsion actually require you to be in space due to low thrust-to-weight. Chemical rockets get us off the planet first.
skndr··on StackOverflow Update: 560M Pageviews a Month, 25 Servers
Conversely, you might be able to iterate faster with a 'web' language and create a product people really use in a shorter time frame and worry about scaling later!
skndr··on The Highest-Paid CEOs Are The Worst Performers, New Study Says
This is a Common Sense Fallacy[0].

Playing devil's advocate, the result could have been that CEO pay was very well correlated with performance. The company doing well can justify a higher compensation.

Of course, this is probably the argument that gets used.

[0] http://corkskeptics.org/2011/05/03/the-common-sense-fallacy/

skndr··on U.S. Agent Lures Romanian Hackers in Subway Data Heist
> He paid a steep price for the estimated $12.5 million in losses inflicted on financial institutions and the $5 million Subway spent upgrading its cyber security systems.

Seems a bit silly to say they're annoyed that they had to spend money to upgrade their broken security.

skndr··on How we restarted our company in two weeks during Y Combinator
It's a simple solution if you don't want to spend a lot of time on a name. It means you can get back to providing an amazing service or product all that much quicker.
skndr··on What to say when someone is being an asshole
Founders aren't fungible.
skndr··on How we increased chat performance by 10x without writing any code.
I was first introduced to this concept by Discourse, where the frontend immediately puts into effect whatever you want to do - whether it's deleting or editing a post, and then using a callback if an error occurs. For precisely the same reasons you state, it feels faster but still gives you the option to backtrack if things go wrong.
skndr··on Watch Steve Perlman demo his ‘transformative’ pCell wireless tech
This actually has tons of applications. Low-power, high-bandwidth connections can enable the Internet of Things, always-on video recording (through things like Glass). This can enable having the internet everywhere.
skndr··on Sam Altman for President
Congrats Sam! I've come to anticipate your essays as a way to inform my own thinking. I'm certain this is excellent for YC and the entire startup ecosystem.
skndr··on Google Has Officially Penalized Rap Genius For Link Schemes
It's a pyrrhic victory. Now, the best lyrics site can't be found and Google itself is less useful for it.

At least https://duckduckgo.com/?q=it+was+a+good+day+rapgenius seems to work fine.

skndr··on Rainforest (YC S12) Launches On-Demand QA as a Service
Alternatively, he could mean even less than low maintenance :)
skndr··on How to Make Perfect Photos
[Take pictures of] things people people want [to see].
skndr··on Study concludes that chewing makes advertising ineffective
Perhaps they could have given some people liquid smoothies and others more solid smoothies with chunks of fruit.
skndr··on Typed Clojure Game of Life
The width of each window isn't the same for Scala compared the others. It'd have been nice to see them all the same width with text wraparound.
skndr··on Google timer
It's also probably a product that didn't take too many lines.
skndr··on Show HN: Mobile feedback your users will love
At the same time, the thing in your hand is also a phone.
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