131–140 of 197 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not saying that Pleskov is a sociopath, but I’m beginning to see how sociopaths manage to make their way in the world without getting punished.
You're not too far off, it usually starts with the family attitude.
It really worries me how many people are so quick to forgive him and tell him so. In my family if someone cheated they got called a cheater and suffered consequences. At least, they would have, if someone did something like that. But my parents didn’t raise mendacious villains. Look at this crap on Twitter: “Everyone makes mistakes. Thank you for the apology”. “Kagglers will still love to have you back” “It's great t…
I’m not saying that Pleskov is a sociopath, but I’m beginning to see how sociopaths manage to make their way in the world without getting punished.
Some headhunters specifically try to identify high-performing sociopaths for top management positions.
Never understood Kaggle. The Netflix Prize was great. Now it’s just people gaming Kaggle to get a job.
How is that different from "LeetCode PhD" doing "DP Hard" for 6 months to get into FAANG?
Never understood Kaggle. The Netflix Prize was great. Now it’s just people gaming Kaggle to get a job.
One of the Kaggle competitions was used as an assignment for the Statistics course at my university. IIRC it was really fiddly.
I'm not going to defend Pleskov but organizers shouldn't have put out the competition with money attached that can simply be solved by scraping data. Good ML competition in fact should even invite cheats because the end goal is not ML for the sake of ML but rather cracking the prediction problem by whatever shortest path possible.
If one can excuse scraping the data to build a better model, I can't see how one can excuse this.
He wasn't really making predictions at all, just looking up the answer.
And the goal really is a prediction system, not something that looks up previously known answers.
I'm not going to defend Pleskov but organizers shouldn't have put out the competition with money attached that can simply be solved by scraping data. Good ML competition in fact should even invite cheats because the end goal is not ML for the sake of ML but rather cracking the prediction problem by whatever shortest path possible.
He scraped the test set's labels. How is that useful? It's not about "ML for the sake of ML", it's the equivalent of stealing the answers to a math test then writing them down. Why should that be rewarded? The goal of this competition is to build a system (using ML or not) which is useful for predicting how quickly pets will be adopted. Any information used during the competition should be realistically available at…
My two nuggets. This reminded me of Ijon Tichy's saying after one of his voyages: " Thus concluded one of the most unusual of my adventures and voyages. Notwithstanding all the hardship and pain it had occasioned me, I was glad of the outcome, since it restored my faith, shaken by corrupt cosmic officeholders, in the natural decency of electronic brains. Yes, it’s comforting to know, when you think about it, that onl…
It was briefly discussed about 7 days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22045696 I posted there, same self-addressed question, that I cannot figure out the answer to... It seems that intensives to cheat, and environment where 'means justify the ways' -- are overpowering. For people who are naturally gifted, successful at young age -- why cheat? Was this historically, always like this? These insensitive to che…
Many are used to being the best. There’s an old saying that 90% of students aren’t in the top 10% at Harvard. When your entire life, you’ve been the smartest kid in your class, it is a tough adjustment when that is no longer true. So they try to find ways to get that top rank again.
How can you ensure your kid can handle this? Make sure they are exposed to situations where they aren’t the best and reward them for giving their honest best.
> The goal was to create an algorithm that could predict how quickly a pet would be adopted based on its profile details, from its photo to its breed, sex, size, age, and whether it had been vaccinated or not. > These predictions would be used to optimize and tweak future critters' profiles so that they are adopted as soon as possible. Sorry but, how is this useful? You can't just change the age of an animal to make…
I have my doubts too, since there are quite likely ceiling effects. Perhaps the competition was set up out of desperation, or because the non-profit still had 25k to burn who knows? But I would be really interested to see if it really has an effect, and if that effect can be sustained.
I think this is the closest to the truth, but that Google spent the money.
Google wants to show usefulness of ML. Marketing person comes up with competition and backs it. Pet adoption org just has to provide some data and says why not? At the very least, it is free publicity for minimal effort.