191–197 of 197 posts
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He made a good career in quant finance before diving into ML and Kaggle
I wouldn't necessarily describe him as having a 'good' career in quant finance. He spent 18 months as a quant and then left to go and cheat at ML competitions. It's not a traditional sign of a successful quant - giving up after 18 months.
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> There is no such thing as "training code". I'm by no means an expert in ML, but my understanding is there's some code that is run to train the modal. I meant that by "training code". My regrets if my terminology was unclear. > They took the official training set. Said, we need more. And scraped websites to get a bigger, illegal training set. This is against the rules and is cheating. They got caught. No, this is wr…
No it isn't. See above. Overfittiing to a holdout set is so easy and common you usually need to take steps to avoid it. See my comment directly above. Best.
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 confused by this reaction here - this was a _brilliant_ hack of the system and I think his work should be celebrated. Was it in keeping with the intention of the competition? Of course not. Were lives threatened by their creative solution to the competition? Also no. At the end of the day it was a fun, inventive approach to a made-up problem. So what's the problem?
Jesus fucking christ. He fucking ran MD5 on some shit he pulled down from a web crawler.
Over-training a model on the validation set would be a lot more "brilliant", and even that is a dumb script kiddie level hack. Maybe finding an algorithm that computes weights s.t. the preimage of the training algorithm on the training set matches the result of training with truly random weights using the validation set. That could be a "clever hack". And even then _brilliant_ would be.... a real fucking stretch.
I was pretty surprised by how common this type of behavior is on Kaggle. I work in machine learning and data science, but I don't use Kaggle much because it quickly became clear competitions boiled down to who could eek out the last hundredths of a percent in accuracy from models trained for weeks on multithousand dollar machines, and because the behavior described in the article was surprisingly common. That said, t…
Is a "multithousand dollar machine" supposed to be expensive? Any company with even half-decent resources should be able to put hundreds of thousands of dollars of hardware toward training a model.
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…
Hello fellow non native speaker. You don't mean "insensitive[s]", but " incentive[s]". On topic: My university offers "Ethics for Nerds [=CompSci]" lecture. The lecturers have degrees in both CS and Philosophy, and the stated goal is to make compsci students more aware of ethical implications - plus giving them some tools/thinking to assess these implications.
I also took an ethics course, but in there it was mostly about AI impacts on society, and what will happen when people loose jobs that will be automated away...
I should keep up to date on it, as mine was many years ago.
After all, being a computer programmer has to be more than about VC funding, mobile apps, functional programming, AI and kubernetes. :-)
To me, the seeming prevalence of cheating through out the society, and its tacit encouragement, by lack of effective proactive and reactive deterrence - is a cultural, as we well legislative problem.
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I would have a different interpretation. If he cheated once, he has most likely done it before and since the competition in question. Usually when 'good people' cheat there is a series of escalating transgressions before they get caught.
He in fact did cheat previously with a similar technique: https://www.kaggle.com/c/quora-insincere-questions-classific...
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I have noticed that it doesn't have much effect after a while. The students are like, meh, someone gets an award every week, and eventually it rolls around to my turn unless I really screw up. The effect on parents seems bigger, which is a good thing, I suppose, since parents then give their kids to some positive feedback.
For monthly things, it does have some effect. I participated in some of them before due to the visibility. People from your class may know you but others, not so much. In the absence of time and other signals, management would often pick someone who is highlighted to represent something. A lot of big people at those events generally don't mind giving contact information to young kids asking for help as much. From the…