Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Papers you read in 2015?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 46 posts

Re: Ask HN: Papers you read in 2015?

#31

Post by MichaelGG »

DanBC wrote: post #13

National Confidential Inquiry into Suicide and Homicide by People with Mental Illness (UK): http://www.bbmh.manchester.ac.uk/cmhs/research/centreforsuic... That paper tells us that pain medication is often used in completed suicide (paracetamol; paracetamol and opioids combined; and opioids; are three of the top five most commonly used meds) So I have an interest in pain medication from the angle of suicide preventio…

It's a bit confusing. For instance around page 80:

Table 5: Male suicide deaths and those aged 45-54 in the general population, by UK country vs Table 7: Patient suicide: male suicide deaths and those aged 45-54, by UK country.

Table 5 shows the rate. Table 7 shows the actual numbers. Why? Even the first key finding speculates about patient suicide increase due to higher numbers of patients. Do they not have this seemingly important statistic? A quick search says "a quarter" of the population will have a mental illness during the year. If true, then we'd expect around 25% of suicides to be from patients, right?

Why separate the APAP/opiod combination in light of suicide if the APAP wasn't a relevant cause? It seems like respiratory depression and liver poisoning aren't that synergistic are they? An opiate naive user with 10/325 oxy/apap would almost certainly hit opiate overdose before liver damage was a life-threatening issue.

The study recommends "safe prescribing" but then shows the majority of opiate suicide isn't with a prescription, and prescription overdose is skews heavily to older females with a "major physical illness". And no comparison on how rx abuse compares with non-mentally-ill patients. Edit: And rx rates, too. I'm guessing older patients generally get way more opiates prescribed than younger ones.

Interesting read though, thanks.

Re: Ask HN: Papers you read in 2015?

#32

Post by NotOscarWilde »

Elaine Levey, Thomas Rothvoss - A Lasserre-based (1+ε)-approximation for Pm∣pj=1,prec∣Cmax http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.07808

People are very excited about graph isomorphism being solvable in quasipolynomial time, but there are a few more problems from the seminal Garey, Johnson book that are still unknown to be in either P or NP-c or neither. One of them is computing the optimal schedule for three machines processing some tasks (jobs), when the tasks have all the same size, but there are dependencies among some of them and you have to do them in order.

This paper proves that there is a (1+ε)-approximation of this problem in "slightly more than quasipolynomial time" (I love this phrasing).

The technique they use is a Lasserre hierarchy which is a very exciting tool in theoretical computer science, although there still exist only a couple results where this hierarchy approach brings more to the table than other methods for designing efficient algorithms. This is one more to the list!

Re: Ask HN: Papers you read in 2015?

#33

Post by wodenokoto »

sgt101 wrote: post #27
nrmn wrote: post #22

I've been trying to read a paper a day since midsummer. These are a few of the interesting, for me personally, since then: Generating Sequences With Recurrent Neural Networks - http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.0850 Older one, but important to understand deeply since other recent ideas have come from this! Unsupervised Representation Learning with Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Networks - http://arxiv.org/abs/1511…

Crumbs, it takes me about two weeks to get through a paper properly!

I can't speak for parent, but I believe people who read a paper a day, don't try to understand it deeply enough to be able to start implementing whatever the paper talks about. Rather it is read to get an idea of the approach and what kind of results it will give and what kind of problems it can solve.

Re: Ask HN: Papers you read in 2015?

#34

Post by mrswag »

I've read two rather old papers on different cross-validation techniques:

A Study of CrossValidation and Bootstrap for Accuracy Estimation and Model Selection (1995) http://robotics.stanford.edu/~ronnyk/accEst.pdf

Improvements on Cross-Validation: The .632+ Bootstrap Method (1997) http://www.stat.washington.edu/courses/stat527/s13/readings/...

And one on MIMO techniques:

V-BLAST: An Architecture for Realizing Very High Data Rates Over the Rich-Scattering Wireless Channel (1998) http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~jiantan/E6909/wolnianskyandfosch...

I find it to be a good way to get concise and accessible introductions (with the associated results) to current practices.

Re: Ask HN: Papers you read in 2015?

#35

Post by drostie »

PeCaN wrote: post #30

Generalized LL Parsing - http://dotat.at/tmp/gll.pdf Parse ambiguous context-free grammars in worst-case cubic time and unambiguous grammars in linear time, with an intuitive recursive-descent-ish algorithm. GLL is the future of parsing IMO, more powerful than packrat/PEG parsers and comparatively easy to write by hand. It also handles ambiguities more elegantly than GLR, IMO. Dependency-Based Word Embeddings - https…

Thanks for the first of these, I've put it on my "eventually if I ever get serious about writing this programming language" list.

Re: Ask HN: Papers you read in 2015?

#36

Post by smhx »

wodenokoto wrote: post #33
sgt101 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crumbs, it takes me about two weeks to get through a paper properly!

I can't speak for parent, but I believe people who read a paper a day, don't try to understand it deeply enough to be able to start implementing whatever the paper talks about. Rather it is read to get an idea of the approach and what kind of results it will give and what kind of problems it can solve.

For people actively working full-time in the field, some of the papers which have simple but powerful ideas, reading the paper for 2 hours (or glancing at the key diagram / formula) is enough to implement it.

For example:

Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition

Fast and Accurate Deep Network Learning by Exponential Linear Units (ELUs)

Re: Ask HN: Papers you read in 2015?

#37

Post by PeCaN »

drostie wrote: post #35
PeCaN wrote: post #30

Generalized LL Parsing - http://dotat.at/tmp/gll.pdf Parse ambiguous context-free grammars in worst-case cubic time and unambiguous grammars in linear time, with an intuitive recursive-descent-ish algorithm. GLL is the future of parsing IMO, more powerful than packrat/PEG parsers and comparatively easy to write by hand. It also handles ambiguities more elegantly than GLR, IMO. Dependency-Based Word Embeddings - https…

Thanks for the first of these, I've put it on my "eventually if I ever get serious about writing this programming language" list.

Heh, that's where it is on mine too. :)

One of the things I find particularly nice about GLL is that it's much more friendly to parser combinators[1] than GLR. (LR-family parsers, and bottom-up parsing in general, is notoriously difficult to implement in a way such that parsers can be combined, and the result framework would be rather awkward to use.)

1: Indeed, it's already been done: https://github.com/bawerd/gll.js https://github.com/epsil/gll https://github.com/djspiewak/gll-combinators

Re: Ask HN: Papers you read in 2015?

#38

Post by DanBC »

MichaelGG wrote: post #31
DanBC wrote: post #13

National Confidential Inquiry into Suicide and Homicide by People with Mental Illness (UK): http://www.bbmh.manchester.ac.uk/cmhs/research/centreforsuic... That paper tells us that pain medication is often used in completed suicide (paracetamol; paracetamol and opioids combined; and opioids; are three of the top five most commonly used meds) So I have an interest in pain medication from the angle of suicide preventio…

It's a bit confusing. For instance around page 80: Table 5: Male suicide deaths and those aged 45-54 in the general population, by UK country vs Table 7: Patient suicide: male suicide deaths and those aged 45-54, by UK country. Table 5 shows the rate. Table 7 shows the actual numbers. Why? Even the first key finding speculates about patient suicide increase due to higher numbers of patients. Do they not have this see…

These are great questions. They're normally pretty good at responding if you want more information.

Here "patient" means "under the care of secondary MH services", so doesn't include people who are being treated by their GP rather than by eg a community MH team.

I think the opioid / APAP stuff is based on bots of history. Co-Proxamol was for years the most common med used in completed suicide. It was put on more restrictive prescribing, and use dropped. But then plain paracetamol use in completed suicide increased. (And also attempted suicide, for a while paracetamol overdose was 4% of UK liver transplants, (but 25% of the super-urgent transplants)). Rules about paracetamol tightened, so we've seen reductions in its use. So, from a public health POV, it's useful to see if plain paracetamol, or the combination, or plain opioids are being used more often, because that means they can look at what's driving sales or prescriptions.

About safe prescribing: one source of medication used in completed suicide is either from your own prescription, or from a relative's prescription. This is often a preventable cause of death, so it's useful to see if safe prescribing helps. It ties into things like "Triangle of Care" and also "Pills Project" (which I want to try to use outside care homes).

You're right about older people. They also often don't lock up the meds in a cupboard (they don't have children in the home anymore, they don't see a need) and tragically grand-children come to visit and accidentally overdose.

https://www.carers.org/triangle-care

http://www.health.org.uk/pills

Post reply on HN