Random_ernest (u/Random_ernest)

Random_ernest commented on Array Programming with NumPy nature.com/articles/s4158... · Posted by u/hardmaru

jofer · 5 years ago

Don't underestimate the impact this has on getting funding or even just tenure/etc recognition for working on numpy. I'm in industry these days, but coming from the academic side, it's _really_ hard to get recognized for building the underlying infrastructure that tons of people use. I've built and maintained libraries that are used in a ton of publications, but was always told my work was "utterly and completely useless". It was also always unpublishable, as methods are never publishable in my field. Numpy has (obviously) vastly more respect and impact than my work, but the general problem remains.

Articles like this are a _huge_ deal for that reason. It's an immense delayed recognition for over a decade of work from a lot of folks.

Random_ernest · 5 years ago

I recall a story where a friend was unable to publish a paper in which he wrote an alternative to a very commonly used commercial tool (that virtually everybody used) with roughly 10 times better performance. He open sourced it and all, it was extremely useful, but there was no new methodology, it was simply very well implemented.

At a talk of his it lead to a very heated discussion where an older professor accused him of wasting government money on such nonsense.

Random_ernest commented on Ask HN: How to Sell Software? · Posted by u/tingtok

j_autumn · 6 years ago

Asking myself the same question, it seems hard while starting out especially for B2B.

A “good way” seems to be to cold call / cold e-mail businesses that would benefit from the product. This is sadly considered illegal in germany. The only way to get in contact with them would be if they sign up for a mailinglist, which needs a lot of marketing money. Maybe someone knows other good ways?

Attending events, conferences, etc. is not possible either during the pandemic.

2020 doesn’t seem to be a good year trying to start a company :(

Random_ernest · 6 years ago

Cold calling businesses is definitely not illegal in Germany if you got the contact info from their website.

Random_ernest commented on Do countries lose religion as they gain wealth? (2013) cbc.ca/news/world/do-coun... · Posted by u/rustoo

johnnujler · 6 years ago

I have a strong feeling that it is not an either/or situation. In the ladder of unknown, if spirituality is the first step, religion is the final. And I am seeing a huge increase in spirituality in developed and wealthy countries. It is as if you drop the current one only to eventually create/adopt a new one. For all we know it could be a variant of science the way people are appealing to scientists as high priests. It seems to me that it is too complex a phenomenon to categorise based on the average proportion at any given point in time.

Adam Smith has this wonderful quote on why it is difficult to model humans and societies in the theory of moral sentiments, which I feel holds even today:

> The man of the system. seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society,every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it.

Random_ernest · 6 years ago

The huge difference between spiritualism and religion is that religion is dogmatic and systemically organised. In my opinion freeing spirituality from the clutch of religion is the final step, not the other way around. So being spiritual but not religious is in my opinion not something that inevitably leads to religion, but if we do it right there is no need for oppressive religion anymore.

Random_ernest commented on Bayes Theorem: A Framework for Critical Thinking neilkakkar.com/Bayes-Theo... · Posted by u/neilkakkar

new2628 · 6 years ago

Controversial opinion: Bayes Theorem is overrated. In real life usually we have no idea about priors, and we have close to zero chance to get any good estimate of the true probability of something. But we can still get by fine for the most part, by focusing on limiting possible loss and staying on the safe side with large margins.

Many of the claimed cognitive biases go away under this view. One textbook example of Bayes theorem is how doctors overestimate the probability of being positive for a disease. But what are the priors? Maybe those who visit the doctor did something risky the day before or are feeling funny. Maybe the cost of false positive is negligible compared to the cost of a false negative, etc. People are less stupid than what the TED talk crowd claims.

Random_ernest · 6 years ago

Bayes Theorem is one of the most fundamental theorems in the history of mathematics. I have yet to work in a field where it doesn't have deeply fundamental applications. In many cases expert knowledge or heuristic rules serve as prior.

Saying it is overrated is like saying sun or air is overrated.

Random_ernest commented on Universal Basic Income is Capitalism 2.0 timjrobinson.com/universa... · Posted by u/TimJRobinson

xg15 · 6 years ago

If the only thing that matters is GDP growth (as the article tells pretty openly) and if UBI really only has the purpose to keep lower classes in the consumption loop (not because they need anything but so companies can keep selling stuff, so their revenue will grow, so the GDP will grow), couldn't this all be structured a lot more efficiently by automating consumption?

You could imagine an army of robot consumers who are each allotted some amount of monthly UBI and who are programmed to automatically buy products chosen by certain criteria (or at random).

Then you can combine this with fully automated production and you finally have a fully automated economy where the GDP growth rate is just a line in a config file...

Random_ernest · 6 years ago

> by automating consumption

It's called the subscription economy for a reason. Automated consumption exists and is constantly growing. The money spent on subscriptions grew in the US by >50% from 2010 to 2015.

Random_ernest commented on Launch HN: QuestDB (YC S20) – Fast open source time series database · Posted by u/bluestreak

Random_ernest · 6 years ago

Testing out the demo:

SELECT * FROM trips WHERE tip_amount > 500 ORDER BY tip_amount DESC

Very interesting :-)

Random_ernest commented on Nvidia will build 700-petaflop supercomputer for University of Florida venturebeat.com/2020/07/2... · Posted by u/elorant

abainbridge · 6 years ago

Does anyone know why everyone is still buying Nvidia instead of custom AI accelerators from other vendors? For example, on paper the new Graphcore machines look like an easy win, or at least a risk worth taking. (I see this particular supercomputer was funded by Nvidia but my question is about the general trend).

Random_ernest · 6 years ago

From my very limited understanding the Graphcore machines outperform CUDA only significantly in inference, in training the improvements might not be sufficient to switch technology.

Random_ernest commented on Breach exposed more than one million DNA profiles on a major genealogy database buzzfeednews.com/article/... · Posted by u/pseudolus

dcgudeman · 6 years ago

So I should get the consent of my entire extended family before I ever submit my DNA to a service for analysis?

Random_ernest · 6 years ago

With likely very dire results, yes I think you should. If your mothers insurance rate goes up, since you got one of these dna tests for Christmas, she should be involved in the decision to publish this data in the first place.

Random_ernest commented on Neural programmer better than Quicksort arxiv.org/abs/2007.03629... · Posted by u/nl

ukj · 6 years ago

99% of the time it works all of the time.

Like humans.

How do we deal with problematic humans?

Retraining or replacement.

Random_ernest · 6 years ago

But the problems where we apply human labour are vastly different from the ones where we apply machine labour. In (most) tasks where we apply human labour a few errors are tolerated.