sudoscript

This is what progress looks like. This is what it takes.

It's a dataset of questions marked as duplicate, so it could be used to train on semantic understanding. There are 400,000 pairs -- that's not huge, but it's not bad either.

He is a writer at a mobile games startup in San Francisco. Both kidneys still somehow intact.

In practical robotics, how often do the assumptions hold? Is it really usually true that the variables have only a linear relationship?

I wish more math papers did this. It's a nightmare for someone who doesn't read equations all day for a living.

That's pretty cool. For me, everything changed when I started thinking in terms of column spaces and linear transformations. Matrices are not just a series of multiplications and additions. They describe so much more.

Oh, I definitely agree. I am not a UBI supporter by any means. Still, I think if the left can prove that it works on a smaller scale, and change people's mind, I'd be willing to reconsider (which is my default position on almost anything -- prove it and I'll believe it). But it's a long shot.

Politics is not just about being right. It's about convincing others you are. That's where the left has failed (if you agree with their positions).

Agreed, the left has real ideas for solutions to middle America. But these ideas are not what people want, so the burden is to prove that they work. Unfortunately for many of those ideas, such as universal income, it is still too early to say. Meanwhile other ideas, such as the current implementation of healthcare, is actively being rejected by voters after it was tried, i.e. it does not work (they're like a product customers do not buy, even if it's good for them).

You're also right that Trump's voters all not all poor and living in trailer parks (they also weren't all old people). I haven't seen data on socioeconomic background, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were essentially middle of the road. But for good reason, they are afraid for their economic futures. It's a justified fear, and it's good cause for feeling desperate.

Not everyone believes that the solution to poverty is welfare. I imagine many of his voters believe the solution looks more like protectionism. Which is basically what his plan is.

I'm not claiming they're right. I'm just claiming that you can be a fiscal conservative and still think you have the solution to poverty.

> The third major failure has been a general apathy about politics amongst my colleagues here in the Bay Area. When many of the best minds in machine learning have decided that the most existential threat to civilization is the rise of Skynet, we have had a major failure of group think.

I cannot agree more. I am also in the Bay Area, and I feel surrounded by people who are deeply out of touch with the rest of the country.

There is real desperation in this country. That's why Trump is President. People didn't vote for him because they are racist. They voted for him because they worry about putting food on their tables. They worry about being left behind in a world that has fewer and fewer ways for the average Joe to dream about a future. They're angry, rightfully so, and in Trump, they found someone willing to listen.

They sure as hell didn't find it in us. Sure, we've given them lip service. We've looked at them through our rose-tinted Google Glasses, and at best, we've felt a twinge of regret at the way the world is going. Not enough to do anything. For all the efforts to teach girls to code (a problem deeply related to our own talent shortage), how much have we done to figure out what a blue-collar worker in rural Indiana is supposed to do when the sole factory in his town shuts down?

Because let's face it -- we look down on them. We call them hicks and rednecks. We scoff at their lack of high-falutin education. We think they got left behind because they're not good enough. Because they didn't pass the tests we did, didn't have the ambition we do, didn't try as hard as we do. It's a nice thought if you want something to let you sleep at night, but it's not true. Those people aren't worse than us. They're not left behind because they're stupid. They're being left behind because people like us stopped giving a damn a long time ago.

The solutions we did offer were exactly the ones you'd expect from a far-removed elite aristocracy. Teach everyone to code, or throw them money. Neither of which they want. So the people you laughed at, the people you thought yourselves better than, the people you offered little more to than pie in the sky techno-utopian dreams -- is it any surprise they turn around and elect someone you don't even understand? You never understood them anyway.

How do you know your own thought processes aren't a part of the simulation? Logic is a great tool to analyze the simulation unless it's been baked on purpose by our overlords.

On a different note, does simulation hypothesis strike anyone else as the idea God just explained in pseudo scientific/computing terms?

That's a really neat way to brainstorm. Let me add one more thing.

The big companies have an advantage in hardware and research. But they dont care about niche applications of their tech, because prizes worth less than $1B don't matter at their scale. That's where I try to focus on.

The key challenge is data. Too many AI startups get stuck in the "give us your data and we'll do some awesome stuff." That almost never works. [This](http://mattturck.com/2016/09/29/building-an-ai-startup/) talk does a really good job explaining why. The trick is figuring out how to get enough initial data to deliver value upfront.

As someone self-studying measure theory right now, I completely agree on the quality of math textbooks for more esoteric subjects. It's like the authors expect the books to only be used in conjunction with TAs or classes.

Any advice on how to use those textbooks the best way?

A quote I read once: "History works slowly at first, and then all at once."

I still think it's too early to tell what the impact of events like Brexit and Euro crisis will be. As humans, we're wired for immediate feedback loops, but that's not usually how the world works. We (and particularly the media) tend to look for immediate impact, but it's way too early to say that there will be no consequences from all the things that have been happening in 2016.

> All of this is handled by a graphics operating system with capabilities that would have seemed unbelievable only 15 years ago.

Assuming this refers to the introduction of GUI based desktops (1984), I'd say this was written around 1999. I think that would match to the 40GB disk and 128MB memory as well.

Memes are a great example of this. They form, spread, and evolve so much more quickly on online communities than in the real world. I wonder if this represents a faster evolving community online, or one with weaker bonds because they're always in flux?

[1] Memetics is a theory that the base unit of culture is a "meme" (in the Richard Dawkins sense of shared worldview, not in terms of Pepe. But him too) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics

I can't tell if this is a good deal for Uber investors or not. As I understand it, Uber will own a 20% share in the combined company. The combined company is valued at $35 billion, so Uber's share of the value will be $7 billion (actually less, since they also need to share it with Baidu which invested directly into Uber China too). $7 billion doesn't sound too bad as an exit.

However, if Uber's China business is worth only $7 billion, and their current valuation is $68 billion, does that mean the rest of the world is worth 9x China, even though China is one of their largest and highest potential market? Suddenly the valuation of Uber's business outside China looks very inflated (even more than before). Doesn't it?

Wow. I just stayed up late to read that. Completely worth it.

What else has he written?

Also millions of miles of fleet learning a day, which Uber doesn't have, since they don't own the cars. Self-driving cars is a supervised learning problem, and he who has the data wins

Well before Krugman, it was Kurt Vonnegut. In 1952, he published his first novel Player Piano, which describes a society where most jobs are automated. There's a sharp class divide between the few "managers and engineers" who work and most people who live in an unemployed underclass.

It's very prescient and very very good. Highly recommend.

Programming has an instant feedback loop -- you know almost immediately if what you wrote works or doesn't. Math is more abstract, and doesn't have that. As humans, it's much easier to learn something on your own when you have immediate feedback. I think that's why programming is an outlier for people who are self taught.

Ah my mistake. I thought dangs reply was in response to the top level comment. Yeah this is pretty unwarranted.

Editing my comment to reflect my mistake. Thanks.

EDIT: Looks like the comment in question was about India being better off under the British. Which probably deserves deletion. Leaving my comment for posterity but nothing to worry about here.

I'm sorry, but I feel like the comment from OP does have a place in this discussion, given the context of the article. I agree it could have been worded in better ways, but an argument that India's bureaucracy is corrupt is not a groundless insult nor completely irrelevant to the article here. I'm not sure how closely you follow Indian politics but I'd refer you to the last national election and the emergence of the Aam Admi Party, both driven in large part by popular frustration at pervasive bureaucratic corruption (eg how telecom spectrum was awarded by the previous administration). In fact, it'd be hard to argue that India's bureaucracy doesn't have a history of bribery to some degree, especially in cases when it comes to regulators and companies.

Again, I think OP could have done a better job phrasing his point, perhaps pointing out how regulation unfavorable to Apple actually might point to less tolerance of corruption at high levels. But I think simply censoring dicscussion of corruption as nationalistic grandstanding is heavy-handed. In other contexts, making comments about political lobbying in the US as corruption would not be considered nationalistic. I don't see why it should be here either.