Viewing profile — alexmlamb

I've used the McDonalds one in Canada and it seemed pretty good. I think the "options" button is partially an upsell, since they want to try to advertise extra stuff.

Has anyone done an analysis to see what fraction of the wealth generated by silicon valley ends up in the hands of people who happened to own land there? If normal houses cost mill…

Fake news concern isn't the right place to focus. News type content is low-volume, has a structured sharing model (i.e. people usually share the articles), is long-form, and requir…

Many of these fall under the pattern of comedic overexpression or tactical underexpression. For example, "You're really dirty, you literally smell like trash" obviously means "you …

Part of the purpose of activism is to exploit current laws for immediate change, but the other part is to create support for changing the laws to provide better protections. The id…

I've been using Bing primarily and it seems fine. It's stronger in a few areas like image search, customization, and weather. Translation is roughly equal. For code and paper searc…

It's having to write the parenthesis after print. No one wants that and it's been by far the largest complaint the community has about python3.

Yeah sometimes this is called a "subgradient".

It's interesting that some of his intuitions seem really really good like the idea that you'll get better results by using very large models. On the other hand, specialized hardwar…

The idea of Six Sigma never made sense to me. I read a book on it, and it basically said that you should optimize a business so that mistakes are extremely rare (the six sigma refe…

It seems weird to me to conflate "advocating the legal right to own technology that can be used to do X" with "doing X", even though obviously you can disagree with both.

"ridiculous situation in Hong Kong" How is it ridiculous? I can't think of any government, except maybe Canada, that would just allow a part of their country to secede, especially …

One idea: try using adversarial training (i.e. train the classifier on examples with bounded perturbations which maximize error).

I think this is a neat idea. Basically, you'd get more "credit" if you're cited by a good paper than if you're cited by a bad paper.

I don't think it's necessarily like that. The error could make the theorem wrong in all cases. I think it's more that the mathematician has a top-down way of reasoning, where they …

I think a lot of people see it as a slippery slope. Of course FTP is not so common, but what if at some point they remove the ability to visit general URLs and just let you either …

I'm just making a point about the abstract argument. I have no idea about whether Homebrew is technically impressive or not, but it sounds like people think that it is?

Is it just me or does this reasoning not make any sense? "NASA: 90% of our rocket scientists use the A/C you just fixed, but you can't explain how a rocket works so f* off" Presuma…

I guess you don't necessarily need data, but if you don't have data than you'd need a simulator, and we'd don't have simulators for most problems that we care about.

"Studies have shown that journal editors prefer reviewers of the same gender, that women are underrepresented in the peer review process, and that reviewers tend to be influenced b…

I lived in Baltimore for a few years in college. There are definitely some nice things about it, like the aquarium, and a decent choice of restaurants (however this should come wit…

(I work at Lyft) I've had it with you Scale.AI people always trying to take credit for Lyft's work. We've been working weekends and nights for years, even the hourly workers have h…

Why don't mainstream newspapers (like NYTimes, Economist, etc) include a list of citations at the end of articles the way that scientific papers do? It seems like this would be eas…

It's not exactly a quick fix, but how many generations would it take to breed cats with substantially softer claws? This could be an interesting program perhaps for the government …

Just to be clear, this doesn't necessarily mean that the students got the degree through fraud or low standards. Speaking and listening can be harder than reading and writing, so t…