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jbelanich commented on Andrew Ng and the Quest for the New AI   wired.com/wiredenterprise... · Posted by u/ivoflipse
gavanwoolery · 12 years ago
Hmm...I don't mean to be a skeptic, but I do not see any new theories here. Neural networking has been around for a long time, as have an abundance of theories and implementations around it...some people have gone so far as to build an actual brain replica (a digital version of the bio/analog thing). Neural networking is extremely powerful, but to be of any use, you need a lot of computing power. As it turns out, our brains are really good at massively parallel tasks like image and motion processing; these things can be done explicitly on a computer with some ease, but having a computer learn on its own from scratch how to do them is not easy.
jbelanich · 12 years ago
You're correct in that neural networks as a model have been around for a long time. However, those networks were restricted to be shallow because backpropogation didn't work well on networks with many hidden layers. Only recently have researchers developed learning procedures that can learn these deep architectures efficiently, using some clever unsupervised learning techniques. And surprisingly, they are finding that these deep networks perform remarkably well, beating the state of the art in a number of benchmarks.

You are also right that you do need a lot of processing power to get neural networks to work well. But that is changing rapidly. Hinton's convolutional neural network has the state of the art in the ImageNet benchmark, yet was trained using significantly less power than google brain. Regardless, you don't need google scale computation to get deep networks to work well. The point of google brain is to see how far one could push neural networks.

jbelanich commented on Stop externalising your life   jshakespeare.com/stop-ext... · Posted by u/daGrevis
bobwaycott · 12 years ago
> He was painting a picture ...

Exactly. Stop there. The irony is that he did exactly what he was complaining about, but in words, not pictures. He apparently missed the part where that is externalizing his life. I'm more careful than you to eschew attributing intentionality, but the effect is the same--he externalized his life via a blog post that decried externalizing one's life.

It's all about words. If he'd been more mindful, he could have written everything in that paragraph with less-externalizing language--no mention of where he was, what he did, how long he was there, etc. But it's much more difficult to hit the point of non-externalizing language.

We're always externalizing our lives, irregardless of medium.

More importantly, though, the OP's point is just weak. He commits fundamental attribution errors and compounds it with fallacious mind projections. He sees errant personality traits in [over]sharers where context and circumstance might hold greater explanatory power. He assesses his own behavior and intentions, then projects that onto the Reality of Others, as if he's grasped the fundamental psychological happenings of all the millions of people who [over]share. It's useless nonsense. He ignores the complexities inherent to human terminal and instrumental values, as if he possesses the acumen to tease them out in a few hundred words. Values are complex, nuanced objects. He sweeps everything about sharing one's experiences into a simplistic and negative You're externalizing your life. Stop it!

Externalizing one's life is not an intrinsic negative. Sure, there's a lot of stuff people share that I might find useless. But that's a measure of my value judgments, not theirs.

jbelanich · 12 years ago
Ironically, "painting a picture" is exactly what the author said you should do:

"Write about it in more than 140 characters; on paper even. Paint a picture of it. Talk about it face to face with your friends. Talk about how it made you feel"

It doesn't seem the author is complaining about all externalization, just the externalization that takes place during experiences, like posting pictures of yourself eating a meal while eating said meal. I just don't see the irony you mention, as he is doing exactly what he said people should be doing.

As for the rest of your comment...I'm inclined to agree that the author's post is an overgeneralized complaint, perhaps even with fundamental logical flaws. However, hidden in the haphazard argument there seems to be a tinge of truth regarding over-sharers.

jbelanich commented on Stop externalising your life   jshakespeare.com/stop-ext... · Posted by u/daGrevis
pepperp · 12 years ago
>What were people actually saying by Tweeting about their visit?

They are telling others about their life experiences. It's called communication, we do it in real life all the time, why can't we do it online? If somebody told you what they did on the weekend, do you respond "you are fulfilling your obligation to have to share"?

jbelanich · 12 years ago
The crux of the argument seems to be the time and place of sharing. Before the advent of social media, sharing used to happen after the event. Now, it happens during it. The author doesn't seem like he is against sharing in general, just the sharing that interferes with the sensory experience of the event itself.
jbelanich commented on Stop externalising your life   jshakespeare.com/stop-ext... · Posted by u/daGrevis
tedks · 12 years ago
"you are not enriching your experiences by sharing them online; you’re detracting from them because all your efforts are focussed on making them look attractive to other people."

Humans are social animals. Everything we do is focused on making ourselves look attractive to other people. People who don't do this are typically not liked by others. The fact that most people do the behaviors the author describes and yet are liked by others seems to indicate that they've succeeded at making themselves look attractive.

Of course, there are plenty of strategies to make yourself look attractive. Some people might dress in mainstream fashion, hoping to pull it off well enough that they can distinguish themselves from all the other people doing it. Others get tattoos and piercings and make themselves unappealing to all but a niche subgroup, within which they have less competition.

I find it hilariously ironic that the author is engaging in the very same behavior (right down to posting the hacker news discussion link in the footer!) as the people they attack. Only humans can do this.

jbelanich · 12 years ago
I don't think the author is against sharing in general. It seems to me he is trying to say there is a time and place for sharing, and that is not during the event itself. Perhaps I'm getting the wrong impression from the post. Anyway, this is why I don't find the post as ironic as you do: clearly this post wasn't written while he was visiting Singapore.

Second, I don't necessarily believe the "humans are social animals" argument. I completely agree with you about that fact. But that doesn't mean it is good for us to try and make ourselves look attractive to other people, or that it makes us happy. I tend to think of it more as a drive or an itch. We don't receive happiness in the act of posting things on twitter (modulo the excitement that comes from anticipating for acknowledgement), but we "scratch the itch" when we get recognition. Is that scratching worth being dissociated with what is going around you? I don't really know, maybe it is for different people. In either case, arguing that posting to twitter is fine because "thats what people do" doesn't seem very satisfying to me.

jbelanich commented on Hire talent, not five years with Java   gillesleblanc.wordpress.c... · Posted by u/bleakcabal
justin_vanw · 12 years ago
Who is the target audience for this sort of advice?

The people who will understand this figured it out long before they were in a position to hire other people. It's just obvious and is repeated so much (don't hire for specific experience) that it is a cliche.

The people who don't get this will never get it, even if you paste stickers that say it on the windshield of their car and whisper it in their ear as they fall asleep each night.

So it's all great to repeat this for the 3 newbs who joined our community in the last 5 minutes and haven't heard this 80 times already this week, but it shouldn't be on HN's homepage.

jbelanich · 12 years ago
There are also people who get it but don't care. Not all companies need, want, or can keep the most talented developers. For them, it is fine to have someone who just has "5 years programming with java". This advice is too general and doesn't apply to everyone.

u/jbelanich

KarmaCake day15March 18, 2013View Original