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What I Worked On

paulgraham.com

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Re: What I Worked On

#101

Post by skybrian »

colincooke wrote: post #59
whatshisface wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Word on the street is the level of superficially attractive papers with no merit is very high in ML literature.

That is absolutely correct, but is sadly the case in a lot of fields. It doesn't mean that the practical results we see (AlphaFold, Imagenet Performance, NLP performance, Robotic control with RL) isn't amazing progress. Luckily due to so many people using ML these days, what's useful vs. fluff gets sorted out over time.

Is AlphaFold a practical result? Winning a competition isn't the same as production use. It would be interesting to read about how it's being used.

This is a good list of promising work, but showing practicality would need more explanation.

Re: What I Worked On

#102

Post by Spinnaker_ »

alberth wrote: post #38

How does PG recall so much about college. I was a computer science major as well. I made good grades. I went to university similar to PGs. I’m younger than PG and it wouldn’t surprise me if I’ve forgotten that I even took a particular class, let alone recall the professor and certainly don’t recall the small details described by PG. Just curious if I’m the only person who can’t recall as vividly courses as PG can.

Go have a beer with a college roommate. I bet the memories will come flooding back.

I have a terrible time recalling stuff like this. But then I meet up with an old friend and I start remembering a huge amount of stuff I hadn't thought about in a decade.

Re: What I Worked On

#104

Post by btilly »

aborsy wrote: post #95
nmfisher wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you used speech recognition (or speech synthesis) lately? It's incredible, leaps and bounds ahead of where it was a decade ago. Not everything in ML is as rosy as the papers make it out to be, but to call it a "hoax" is going way too far.

There are a lot of things that look incredible, but don’t constitute much progress scientifically. For example, a rocket landing on moon looks incredible. But I don’t think physicists would consider moon landing notable progress. So, with data and compute you could do applications.

Do you have any idea how many areas of science were opened up by our attempt to get to the Moon?

The range is literally from discovering that unit tests are good in software to discovering the Van Allen belts to learning about the geology and history of the Moon from the rocks that we brought back.

Could we have learned more science by doing something else with the money? Of course. But it is a dramatic overstatement to say that the Apollo program didn't "constitute any progress scientifically."

Re: What I Worked On

#106

Post by yters »

igravious wrote: post #90
yters wrote: post #33

Ironic pg passed up philosophy in his search for immortality. Not only is that a focus of philosophy, even in today's materialist worldview, but philosophers are some of the most ancient and best preserved thinkers. The ideas of the ancient greek philosophers still hold sway today, even in popular culture, see Plato and The Matrix, or how the US government is organized in checks and balances to preserve liberty. In f…

pg has a whole essay[0] where he dismisses practically the entirety of Western philosophy and the value or use of the study thereof. consider the difference between, “All I knew at the time was that I kept taking philosophy courses and they kept being boring.” and, “All I knew at the time was that I kept taking philosophy courses and I kept finding them boring.” recasting the first as the second puts some of the onus…

Yes, pg comes across as remarkably uninformed about philosophy. But, it is a general tendency I notice among programmers, including myself, to dismiss philosophy as vague speculation. The accusation is as old as Aristophanes' play The Clouds mocking Socrates for his questioning of the status quo. Yet you don't condemn bumbling absentminded professors to death, as Aristophanes did to Socrates during his trial. I believe the dismissal of philosophy has a deeper cause, perhaps because it poses uncomfortable questions.

Regarding PG's essay, I don't think it is fair to say metaphysics is a failed project. For instance, deeply thinking about whether things can be infinitely divisible led to the concept of the infinitesimal, which led to the discovery of calculus. If any field of math can be said to be useful, calculus surely is. None of our modern IT would exist without it, nor things like rockets, flight, material engineering, etc. Yet calculus is based on the non physical notion of infinite division that Aristotle discussed in his metaphysics.

As for Plato and math, in Meno Socrates leads a boy to understand the existence of irrational numbers, which the Pythagoreans had executed its member for discovering. So not only are ancient Greek philosophers discovering deep useful mathematical truths, they are also speaking truth to power at the same time. Imagine if math were outlawed under threat of death!

Re: What I Worked On

#107

Post by twiceinawhile »

alberth wrote: post #38

How does PG recall so much about college. I was a computer science major as well. I made good grades. I went to university similar to PGs. I’m younger than PG and it wouldn’t surprise me if I’ve forgotten that I even took a particular class, let alone recall the professor and certainly don’t recall the small details described by PG. Just curious if I’m the only person who can’t recall as vividly courses as PG can.

PG remembers because he actively tried to remember it to write an essay. If you sat down and tried to write down your college memories, I'm sure you'll remember many things. Your memories are on the hard disk, you just have to bring it to RAM.

Try thinking about data structures, programming language, AI, OS, networking, etc classes you took. You must remember something about the lectures. If not, certainly the projects that you worked on.

Re: What I Worked On

#108

Post by dang »

nerdponx wrote: post #96
timr wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do people feel entitled to "usable" ML at all? Yeah, people are annoying, with their demands to use software themselves. It would be much easier for everyone if computers were controlled by an elite group of engineers who could hide the complexity from the rest of us. Perhaps they could wear labcoats. > What the fuck more do you want? If I knew the answer to that, life would be a lot simpler.

Yeah, people are annoying, with their demands to use software themselves. It would be much easier for everyone if computers were controlled by an elite group of engineers who could hide the complexity from the rest of us. Perhaps they could wear labcoats. What are you even talking about? It sounds like you're upset that cutting-edge technology still requires training & expertise to use and deploy effectively in indus…

Hey, can you please not take HN threads further into flamewar? We're trying to avoid that sort of thing here. If a comment contains a swipe, please don't escalate. Also, it's good to check if there's something in your earlier comment that might have been provocative in its own right (which there was: "What the fuck more do you want?" is a hop flameward).

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: What I Worked On

#109

Post by dang »

timr wrote: post #89
nerdponx wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people feel entitled to "usable" ML at all? In the last 5 years, we have made incomprehensibly huge improvements in power and usability. It's an active field, and improvements are still coming at a steady pace. We have already revolutionized search, natural language processing & machine translation, image/audio/video processing, robotics, game AI, and advertising (for better or worse). And on top of all this,…

> Why do people feel entitled to "usable" ML at all? Yeah, people are annoying, with their demands to use software themselves. It would be much easier for everyone if computers were controlled by an elite group of engineers who could hide the complexity from the rest of us. Perhaps they could wear labcoats. > What the fuck more do you want? If I knew the answer to that, life would be a lot simpler.

> Yeah, people are annoying, with their demands to use software themselves. It would be much easier for everyone if computers were controlled by an elite group of engineers who could hide the complexity from the rest of us. Perhaps they could wear labcoats.

That's clearly not what nerdponx meant. Can you please stick to the site guidelines? "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> If I knew the answer to that, life would be a lot simpler.

That was a nice de-escalation.

Re: What I Worked On

#110

Post by johnyzee »

Great read!

Reading about PG doing things that don't scale (building storefronts for customers), I am reminded of how Commodore became a dominant player in the early computer industry. When they first made the 6502 processor, Chuck Peddle would tour the country and sit down with customers and design devices for them. Super high-touch manual work that made no economic sense. But in the end resulted in the 6502 becoming the basis for so many early microcomputers, including the Apple II.

I'm sure there are many similar stories that illustrate the wisdom of this, otherwise counterintuitive, approach.

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