Viewing profile — jfv

Do you still see ads? Yep.

I've been asking myself this question for over 20 years: who are these people that click on ads anyway? Ads are inherently going to be the opposite of Google's values, yet Google d…

I think it's highly probable that either the technology will be rebuilt in a way that makes abuse possible (Google being relatively open with their technology has this side effect)…

This is clearly not a good-faith effort for Google to have you stop wasting time. Youtube has been around for over a decade and they're just getting to this now? I think this is cl…

I don't need reservations that badly. But the difference between having to specify Mechanical Turk work and just talking to a Google appliance is pretty huge... We're talking hours…

People that are excited by this are being way too naive here.

I feel like this is going to make the world even flakier than it already is. If I can waste people's time without even the few minutes it normally takes to make a phone call, what'…

This is advice for Amazon employees specifically. The incentives are not for him to give advice on how to become Jeff Bezos.

Easy for him to say. If you're at the bottom, you get little satisfaction or recognition for performing well, and are instead judged based on things like how much time you've spent…

I agree. It's (usually intuitively learned) reasoning that's very similar to the logical reasoning of mathematics. I think if you were to study, say, calculus in a manner typical o…

I think if you're a programmer wondering what math will help you in your career, which is the question this article is trying to answer, this article is misleading. Most working pr…

I think this is how we should revamp science education. Teach people how to examine the evidence and how one can fool themselves. Less inclined plane problems, more scientific reas…

This book made proof based math approachable for me. There are mechanical aspects to proofs that are probably best practiced in a structured way and this book does that by also acq…

Do NOT read Rudin. He is terse and unless you are already well versed in mathematics it is simply incomprehensible. My recommendation would be Spivak’s calculus. There are a millio…

Everyone gets into coding a different way. If she is inclined toward design, I would definitely start with HTML and go from there. As a new coder even things like learning the tree…

Maybe someone with a knowledge of nutrition and medicine can clear this up for me. As I understand it, there are two types of fiber that are lumped into the term "dietary fiber": s…

Sure... have worked over the last 15 years in software startups and large companies as everything from an engineer to an adviser.

I’d say having virtually nobody dying of overdoses, going through withdrawals or detox, or being dependent makes it not a big issue, yes.

Drug abuse is not a big issue in SV in general. There are a few general themes: 1) Some startups have a heavy-drinking bro-y environment. 2) Weed is common outside of work (in all …

Proprietary software vendors market their software as being more secure through FUD in general. This isn't specific to the car industry. What's sad is that this article uses exactl…

I've always found that being in a serious/stable relationship tends to slowly cut people off over time. I honestly like being single in my mid-30's because there's always a little …

Are you a working software engineer already? If so, you might want to wait until you know what you want to study before aimlessly pursuing a degree. Also this is a pretty lazy post…

To be fair, reinforcement learning can be done with neural networks and can be seen as a form of "unsupervised learning". The results aren't as spectacular (yet?) as what we've see…

Hmm, don't think I understand your first argument. If 72% of MIT undergraduates graduate without loan debt, this almost certainly includes all of the students (29%) coming from the…

MIT is known for having a good financial aid program and a large endowment (MIT's is around a third of Harvard's!) could improve that even further. I can imagine that being very im…