skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem with targeted advertising in free elections is that voters need to know what the candidates are saying everywhere. Transparency is not the enemy of free speech, at least with respect to elections. Either voters need access to all campaign ads (and to whom they are targeted), or targeted campaign messages need to be eliminated, or some combination.

Or maybe there's a better solution, but at least let's agree on the transparency problem.
If it can be explained in terms of precise rules, that's called programming.
It's not that accuracy will always be sacrificed if one wants an explainable model. The point is: if interpretability is an important constraint, it could prevent improvements on accuracy.

Sometimes, the best interpretable model is as good as a black box, and that's great.

When this is not the case, the trade-off is that one should see what's more important for the actual problem. Perhaps interpretability is not a big deal.

Another solution is to try to extract interpretability from the more accurate black box model with something like SHAP.
> [...] these black box models are created directly from data by an algorithm, meaning that humans, even those who design them, cannot understand how variables are being combined to make predictions.

So uhhh, isn't this like not science? Like my biggest problem with "machine learning" is people assume the data they have can correctly answer the question they want to answer.

If your data is off, your model might be incredibly close for a huge portion of the population (or for the biased sample you unknowingly have), but then wildly off somewhere else and you won't know until it's too late because it's not science (e.g. racist AI making racist predictions).

A model cannot be accurate if it doesn't have enough information (like predicting crime, or the stock market). There are an insane amount of statistical tests to detect bullshit, and yet we're pushing those and hypothesis testing right out the window when we create models we don't understand.

Like I just don't get how some folks say "look what my AI knows" and assume it's even remotely right without understanding the underlying system of equations and dataset. You honestly don't even know if the answer you're receiving back is to the question you're asking, it might just be strongly correlated bullshit that's undetectable to you the ignorant wizard.

I find it pretty hard to believe we can model the physical forces inside a fucking neutron star (holla at strange matter) but literally no one in the world could pen an equation (model) on how to spot a fucking cat or a hotdog without AI? Of course someone could, it would just feel unrewarding to invest that much time into doing it correctly.

I guess I can sum this up with, I wish people looked at AI more as a tool to help guide our intuition helping us solve problems we already have well defined knowledge (and data) of, and not as an means to an end itself.
I also struggled with books. Despite being an avid WW2 and science fiction fan I avoided lengthy texts and just got my information online.
As has been said many times over that information is often, although not always, low quality.
For me I never connected my dyslexia with my inability to read (obvious I know) then I discovered audio books and my world changed.

I’d recommend also trying audio books. The format is not for everyone, but quality stories, be they fiction or non-fiction expand the mind.

Someone here recommended the Count of monte cristo as an amazing read, and I'm currently half way though, its thrilling! Thank you to that person btw.
My own predictions:

1)Either the UE will become a superstate with countries relegated to the role of provinces with much less power than before or the UE will start breaking apart due to the inadequacy of the Euro currency and the disparity between the successful European countries such as Germany and France and the less successful ones such as Portugal, Italy and Greece.

In the second scenario, one major country may be in the process of exiting the EU and go back to using its own currency or has already done so by the end of the decade.

3)Russia will become a food superpower due to rising temperatures making it an ideal place to grow lots of food. This will help keep the oligarchs in place and no real political change will happen within this decade.

4)China will not see a change in its political system. Xi Jinping will still be ruling China but there will be political turmoil due to his failing health.

5)A mega recession will happen and subsequently, asset prices will be cut in half around the globe due to QE and low-interest rates having pushed the prices of shares and real estate to levels completely disconnected from the real world economies.

6)The pace of Automation will continue to increase and 10s of millions of people will be out of work as there won't be enough time to retrain them to find a new job.
This will force governments to increase unemployment benefits dramatically or implement UBI to appease the population of the countries most affected by this.

7)Crypto currency may or may not be mainstream by 2030

8)Apple will enter the healthcare space with a major and still unannounced product, potentially a wearable device that would monitor your well being 24/7(not a watch)

9)Phones are starting to be replaced by AR glasses or contact lenses.

10)Facebook’s median user’s age is 45 years old in 2030.

11)The price of a secondhand Tesla car is roughly equivalent to that of a secondhand ICE car.

12)Self driving level 4 is mainstream.

13)Elon Musk is the richest man in the world with a net worth approaching 200Bn

14)New electric cars have an autonomy of 1000 miles on a single charge.
The first time I heard about a DNA neural network (from moss) was in the scifi book Slant by Greg Bear.
Yeah, said a dude who posts on medium in 2020
It only effects card payments. Cash still works. It appears the CA certs may have expired and a secure connection to the credit card server can't be established.

Easy fix but you do need to update your machines from time to time...
Visual neurons don’t work the way scientists thought
Absolution of liability. Why else use the term "AI" to describe your heuristic?
The problem is spam. The big providers providing hosted emails do a lot of work to make sure the emails people send with them actually end up at the recipients inbox and not in spam quarantine - but that doesn't work if the provider is then used by spammers. So the limits are set to discourage spammers while making most use-cases for email still possible.

If one were to ask me what to do, I'd say emails should cost 0.1 cent each, to be paid to the recipient...
The amount you are willing to pay is limited by what's available to you.

The amount you agree to accept (and likely pass down to your inheritors) is basically unlimited.
Agreed. I'm teaching my kids the things they need to be competitive - by out-thinking or out-doing the people around them. Addition: What you'll find is most of life, is people acting on unsound strategies, poor fortitude, or poor self control, or having personality preferences that are easy to predict, or thinking in group think.

Let school handle the mundane, I'm teaching them strategy, leadership, multiple scenario event planning & prediction, personality types and the strengths and weaknesses of each, multiple types of investments & investment patterns, asset strategies, the agility that creating options give you - rather than having it given to you.

I'm teaching them how to avoid the types of people and thinking that takes down people and everyone around them. The types of events that downfall a person, and how to get out of the way when people display them. How to read the market, and get ahead of it for prosperity.

These things were not taught to me by my smart firefighter father, or great mother (teacher/nurse) - but I was keen to pick up by observing the world and reading, taking stupid risks, and growing. I'm jealous of my future kids - I wish someone had handed these to me.
> Have you ever tried to burn a chunk of concrete (good luck)?

Try chlorine trifluoride :)

Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants by John D. Clark (1972)

https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd...
I like that your focus is on people being comfortable enough to ask their own questions. That's a clear, concrete goal that gets right to the heart of the issue you describe, in the library setting.

One simple strategy is to close any bit of teaching you do with the phrase, "What questions do you have?" This is a subtle but important change from "Does anyone have any questions?" The first phrasing assumes people will have questions, and implies that you are looking for and welcoming questions.

When people do ask questions, you can ask how many other people had the same question. If you have more than just a handful of students, it's quite likely that if one person asks a question then others will have the same question. This normalizes the mindset of having questions, and not understanding everything as soon as it's presented.

It sounds like you are probably modeling a good atmosphere for asking questions. I think it's important to understand that you can't make everyone immediately comfortable asking questions. If people have been ignored or made to feel stupid when they've asked questions, it will take a while for them to trust you and the overall environment enough to start asking their own questions.

I taught high school math and science for 25 years, and always heavily emphasized that all questions are welcome. It took new students a while to understand that this was sincere; many of them had been told long ago to stop asking so many questions, or been publicly embarrassed for asking questions. Same goes for making mistakes; it's beyond infuriating that some teachers still intentionally embarrass students for not knowing things, or not getting things right on the teacher's schedule. Those practices are intellectually traumatizing to many people.
We need to prize garbage and the environment. Otherwise we will just continue as is and that will be bad for the future environment.
> Work that e.g. tries to approximate neural nets with decision trees have yet to be applied to very large models

Well, that and a decision tree isn't any more interpretable if its nodes are all filled with `Pixel[i,j] > Threshold` -- or is the idea that you would somehow extract logical predicates by tracing paths through the tree or glean interpretation from those predicates?
Building a BitTorrent client from the ground up in Go
Could you be more specific with what sentences or paragraphs in the article have been debunked? I can’t find where the author questions ketosis is happening or incorrectly defines gluconeogenesis or parrots 1950s AMA talking points. I’m not trying to start a long argument but would be very interested to learn where my own knowledge on the subject may be in error.
When I see articles with so many various facts assembled together, I have to remind myself that the author cannot possibly be an expert in all of them, and so the story is just that - a story.

Which doesn't change the fact that something needs to be done, or that many of the predictions will come to pass, just, the full story is never going to work out quite how anyone expects. And that's enough to have some hope.
I do wonder however whether there exist a deep learning architecture built with real neurons.
Who else is there to read? They didn't do to much literary theory in my engineering courses :-). I am finding lately the humanities do have something to offer after all.
I guess the bubble popped early for that area of tech?
For the same reasons the time format HH:MM:SS is objectively correct and and not HH:SS:MM, SS:MM:HH, MM:SS:HH, SS:HH:MM, or MM:HH:SS.
What's their record abandoning actually used products? Sheets is literally 13 years old and is heavily used internally and externally. The odds of it going away are very small.

This "Google cancels everything" is pretty much a viewpoint I hear only on HN. I don't know what reality some people are living in.
Culture and shared values are not "individual" matters; they tend to affect society as a whole, or at least non-trivial fractions of it. But they are 'institutions' only in the broadest possible sense, and ones that seldom get acknowledged as such.
> Except - there is almost no cash welfare system in the US

Now; there is LESS cash welfare in the US than there was. TANIF was reformed in 1996. There is still SSI/Disability, SNAP, child support as cash or cash equivalency. I support those programs, but also recognize that it is possible government handouts have contributed to the decline of the nuclear family.
> So uhhh, isn't this like not science?

Very little of technology has anything to do with validating hypotheses.

> meaning that humans, even those who design them, cannot understand how variables are being combined to make predictions.

The intention is to not rely on the explanation to evaluate the effectiveness of the model. This does not preclude any of the infinite narratives that might explain the model.

This is fundamentally a cost saving mechanism to avoid hiring engineers to code heuristics useful to business. There is nothing related to science here at all. A "black box" model is fashionable to those who prefer to observe and not create meaning, even if the observed meaning is deeply flawed from a human perspective. After all, people spend money based on less all the time.
I use to only program in assembly in the 80s because I “lacked control” higher level languages....

What perceived “control” are you missing?
You actually can - for example https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.10574
Do you look at a thermometer and ask "Who thought a progress bar made sense for the weather? 130 degrees should not be a goal for climate change!" and try to shit on designers for ignoring usability or do you just read it as a meter to see what the temperature is?

Not every bar is a progress bar.
lols whats wrong with medium
Over the holidays, I challenged myself to learn Go by torrenting the Debian ISO -- from scratch. This post is a bit of a brain dump about everything I've learned over the past week.
>Growing up with the Internet, I always assumed that everything could be found for free online. I spend most of my day reading online articles/conversations, watching videos, and listening to podcasts. I have thousands of non-fiction (mostly self-improvement) books in my reading list on GoodReads, but almost never bother to read any. I assume that the best part of the best books will surface in daily conversations, YouTube videos, CliffsNotes, podcasts, Reddit posts/comments, blog articles, etc.

Why read books when you can have a shallow understanding of everything through internet posts?

Why learn anything from millennia of human experience or get to see the perspective of others through literature when you can watch YouTube?

Why try to get the subtler side of things, when you can read a PowerPoint / cliff notes style "good parts"?
HN has HTML emails?
Thank you. I set up my Future of Energy College on a low budget, to go beyond normal studies. We have branched out into documentary films. Any support we get will make our film on Space Solar power even better. We are definitely making the film. Please join us and help.
Paragraph two cites the inspiration for this piece, a 2017 article by Molly Sauter: https://reallifemag.com/instant-recall/

And he points to three other sources right in the first paragraph.
Alpha zero is not conservative at chess or go. It doesn’t have to have seen a position before to evaluate it.

You can always train a model to reject a class just as easily as you train it to accept a class. So train it to reject a common class and accept a mutant and it will function more like an evolutionary algorithm that protects against bad luck like bacteria with antibiotics.

I am way more optimistic for AI I guess.
"The company will spend 20 trillion won ($17.4 billion) a year"

Hyundai is big, but that is insane amount of money. They're going to have to finance a lot of it since their profit is "only" $5 billion per year.

Good on them for such bold decision.
Save This Flooded 1999 Lamborghini Diablo VT Roadster from Its Watery Grave
Sounds a bit like slavery. Try to save up and then get the ACLU or some human rights organizations involved.
If. COP25, the 25th year, was a farce of self-interest from fossil producers. Australia found a way to fiddle their historic figures to claim they need take no action! No one's listening to the IPCC, except those not running countries (except maybe some of the smaller, poorer ones).
> if your family argues

You do know that arguing is normal and that suppressing it or hiding it from children fucks them up even more right? Part of being a functioning member of society requires being able to argue.
The comments make that clear.
> I see the fallout (famine, disease, death, etc) as a natural corrective mechanism

Correct me if I'm wrong but I guess that most people who say these sorts of things don't believe that this natural corrective mechanism will affect them personally.

We (as a species) did survive world wars indeed, but I wouldn't envy anyone who had to live through it.
Machine Learning 102: Logistic Regression with Polynomial Features
I find this thread interesting, but I believe many commenters are rationalizing why books are good by focusing too much on arguments around information quality, or trying to draw some differences between the motivations for paper vs digital writing, ... but I don't see it that clearly. I'm personally much more curious about others like:

- how much influence does it have the fact that you have to actually sit down, focus on something, sit somewhere comfortable, or not so comfortable but ready to work on a material... or the fact that it's a book, that it's long, probably dense to read, much more dense to write, that there's some sacrifice there, so you face the material in a completely different way you would face a random post or youtube video? we also definitely value very differently the things we pay for than those that are free. if you paid for it, you might want to rationalize it was worth it, and that might actually lead you to try to get something more from it that you would generally get if it was free and you didn't care. if you paid for it there's also a higher chance you were looking for it consciously, etc.

I think it would be interesting to measure those and others by collecting writing from different sources and presenting it on different formats. while I agree that on average the quality and the signal provided by a book is higher than that of a random video or blog post, I feel in many cases we are biased to give books too much credibility, and we really underestimate a lot of online content. there are many other factors, but I think we should open the perspective a bit more if we really want to discover why books are so good
>The people in the self-help section need something else. Those things (philosophy, literature, history and science) are the luxury of folks who aren't struggling with e.g. depression, abuse, drugs & alcohol, co-dependency, etc.

Actually it's the inverse. A healthy dose of philosophy, literature, history and science are what people suffering from "depression, abuse, drugs & alcohol, co-dependency" can use to liberate themselves, understand their situation, and get above it.

The rest (99% of the self help shelves) is snake oil sold by marketeers to the gullible...
All you need to do is remove ‘/amp’ from the end.
They can also partially reallocate their current development spending toward that goal. They are also most probably already spending significant amounts in this area.
I read probably over 1000 books, many more than once, and I think it was worth it. It helped me build a culture one cannot get from Internet, I read books that stimulated my imagination and also books that gave me information or perspective I never considered (ex: some books about China, Iran, Hong Kong and Russia). I learned so much from the books, much more than what I will be able to experience myself. Now I find myself reading a lot about technology and less fiction, mostly because after you read the top 10-20 books in each area it is hard to find something interesting that you did not already read.
/ The Internet gets severed/fractured within 5 years due to a combination of tax domain disputes (Italy, France), cyberwar claims/threats (NK, Iran) and political maneuvering (Russia, China). Internet Pangaea/Pangea was nice while it lasted, but tectonic shifts will happen with digital borders that were nowhere on the Internet roadmap

/ Insoluble food kicks-off a new trend of calorie displacement ingredients/meals

/ The tween activist movement gets pranked so hard with a global tide-pod viral moment that we all should have seen it coming when you get that many willing kids that will blindly repeat anything (words and actions) into large groups

/ Companies/Governments start sending waves of bots/mechs to the moon/mars to start building infrastructure and reserve human space exploration for a later decade

/ Incompatible, human interface, solidstate networks and pithy become the most overused buzzwords of the decade

/ Hemp goes mainstream and replaces all of the low hanging fruit in textiles, food and biocomposites within 10 years
Traditional wisdom believes logistic regression is great for linear classification, while we can predict binary cases by including polynomial features in the logistic regression.
I think a "low level function for an embedded device" is probably the riskiest well-defined software problem you might ever run into.

It isn't unlike tying your contract to the behavior of a poorly documented remote API provided by another company that won't respond to any of your requests.

The risks include: the hardware being flaky. The hardware being undocumented. The hardware having no run control. The function relying on another piece of hardware or environment not provided.

I once spent two weeks looking for a single bit not-so-helpfully labelled "WinCE" in Texas Instruments' documentation.
Of course, yet life doesn't really work out to be a nicely aligned set of ideal conditions. The gasoline equivalent to that would be to top-off your gas tank in 5 minutes every day (which is silly).

I do want to clarify that my comment has nothing whatsoever to do with the cultural phenomenon of prepping. We are not preppers at all. We have some supplies at home for earthquake preparedness because, after having lived thorough a couple of large quakes, it would be silly not to have learned from the experience and be a reasonably ready.

The perspective we gained by observing what happened during this last fire and power-outage season drove home a point we really had considered much prior to that event.

Perhaps this was because we were within a couple of months of ordering our first of two Teslas that we became a bit more critical and analytic about the decision. I don't know. A friend of ours reached exactly the same decision without any input from us. In their case they had placed a deposit on a Rivian SUV. They live in Northern California. When I told him of our decision to not order our Tesla's he revealed they had made the same decision with respect to their Rivian order. They turned around and bought a Suburban instead, replacing their old one.

I think this is a real issue. It's disconcerting that this can't be discussed with honesty in a place like HN. I want electric cars, with Tesla and Rivian being the top contenders for our eventual purchase. But, I have to tell you, it's really disconcerting to see, feel and be at the receiving end of something that has become a religion. Try to have any reasonable conversation about Tesla on HN where you might disagree with the cult and you'll be treated to a bunch of down-votes (read: silly, childish passive-aggressive behavior) and even personal attacks. The good news is that facts don't require belief, which means that the truth is what it is, downvotes or otherwise.
To be fair, this was posted in 2017