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Deep-Fried Data

idlewords.com

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Re: Deep-Fried Data

#41

Post by AceJohnny2 »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #37
joshu wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Needs to out a bit more" given the context is hilarious. I bet a cool $20 he is more widely traveled than you - both physically and digitally.

Indeed, as would I, on further reflection. I wrote a postscript at the bottom to this effect, more or less. I write most of my HN comments in the spur of the moment. As a result, they're often inaccurate, idiosyncratic, poorly explained, or just weird. If anybody asks, I ususally try to clear up any confusion. This isn't necessarily a good idea, but if I thought too much before I spoke, beyond a cursory look to see i…

Maciej/IdleWords is a bit of a sacred monster around here. He loves to hate on the HN crowd, and he definitely has a dim opinion of the VC/get-rich-quick internet schemes that one could characterize the Valley for. He provides a great reality check for the kind of internet bullshit that flies around a lot.

He's featured here frequently: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=idlewords.com

On a lighter tone, I highly recommend his "Argentina on Two Steaks a Day" [1] and "The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel" [2], each of which had me laughing harder than anything else in my life.

[1] http://idlewords.com/2006/04/argentina_on_two_steaks_a_day.h...

[2] http://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_t...

Re: Deep-Fried Data

#42

Post by edmccard »

eanzenberg wrote: post #31
gabrielgoh wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

grad students are put in the same category as interns and teenagers, a naive type of person still in the making. i dont think there's any ill will intended.

You are dim witted. No ill will intended.

>No ill will intended.

Is that a new short version of Hanlon's Razor?

Re: Deep-Fried Data

#43

Post by mamp »

leesalminen wrote: post #34
pimlottc wrote: post #19

> Many [programmers] work jobs that are intellectually stimulating, but ultimately leave nothing behind. There is a large population of technical people who would enjoy contributing to something lasting. This hits pretty close to home.

Same here. I was just talking with a friend last night about how software developers should have a creed, like how doctors have the Hippocratic oath. We could potentially cause far more harm than doctors nowadays.

Interesting, but note that the Hippocratic Oath doesn't work so well with preventable errors in health care the 3rd leading cause of death in the US https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2016/0...

Re: Deep-Fried Data

#44

Post by keyle »

pimlottc wrote: post #19

> Many [programmers] work jobs that are intellectually stimulating, but ultimately leave nothing behind. There is a large population of technical people who would enjoy contributing to something lasting. This hits pretty close to home.

Same here. I'm battling with this thought a lot. Beyond jobs, I think there should be communities of developers, designers, producers, writers, getting together and figuring out this stuff. And I don't mean open source projects. Let's group together smart people wanting to make a difference and have a hit list of things we (people) actually need. A group that would organise people into mission driven development.

I'm so fed up of getting paid to potentially make founders rich. Or to be a small cog in a gigantic machine on a slow decline. I'm also unemployable because I can't buy into the corporate BS anymore. And where I am, there doesn't seem to be design/dev jobs that actually want to make a difference. It's an economy problem.

The startup thing seems to be the best way we go about solving problems in the world today. But if you happen to _not_ be at the right place at the right time, meeting the right people, poof, it's gone. I can't imagine that an advanced specie would operate this way. We should be focused on solving problems, instead of being focused on escaping the rat race, to then be able to solve problems.

I'm glad I am not alone seeking purpose. There goes a point where you're technically advanced, you have itches to fix things and all you see is the broken economy of consumerism and "let's give kids video clips and smileys, derp".

Re: Deep-Fried Data

#45

Post by erichocean »

> Publish your texts as text. Let the images be images. Put them behind URLs and then commit to keeping them there.

I sounds like he's saying ephemeral content is worthless and should be shunned.

I, and hundreds of millions of others, disagree. You want a bland, awful, boring society? Easy: make everything you do stick around forever—like a promise. And then watch the world self-police as the lifeblood drains out of it.

You'll get…Facebook. No thanks.

Re: Deep-Fried Data

#46

Post by Asparagirl »

> I’ve saluted the efforts of Archive Team and the Internet Archive, but their activity is like having a museum curator that rides around in a fire truck, looking for burning buildings to pull antiques from. It's heroic, it's admirable, but it’s no way to run a culture.

...but in the meantime, here's an obligatory and shameless plug for donating to the Internet Archive[1] (tax-deductible in the US), or better yet making a recurring monthly donation so they can more accurately forecast revenue for the year, or better still getting your employer to make a nice big donation to this crucial bit of Internet memorybanks.

And as for Archive Team, we're always looking for a few good geeks.[2] Run an instance of the Warrior on spare cloud servers, or help patch and ship code at GitHub.[3]

[1] http://archive.org/donate/

[2] http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

[3] https://github.com/ArchiveTeam/ArchiveBot

Re: Deep-Fried Data

#47

Post by crzwdjk »

morecoffee wrote: post #39

Giving up control is harder than the author makes it seem. It isn't so much that you give it up, but that you give _to_ someone else. Picking that someone else is extremely difficult and a wrong choice will destroy your community. Using machine learning on the other hand is a safe bet. It is much easier, I would assert, to write machine learning code to organize data than to curate a community of humans to organize d…

For example, it is clearly easier to write a machine learning system to find interesting articles and highlight insightful commentary, compared to using something so crude as a group of people on a website collectively voting on which stories and comments they like... wait a minute...

Re: Deep-Fried Data

#48

Post by codezero »

Asparagirl wrote: post #46

> I’ve saluted the efforts of Archive Team and the Internet Archive, but their activity is like having a museum curator that rides around in a fire truck, looking for burning buildings to pull antiques from. It's heroic, it's admirable, but it’s no way to run a culture. ...but in the meantime, here's an obligatory and shameless plug for donating to the Internet Archive[1] (tax-deductible in the US), or better yet mak…

I've got a VPS sitting around doing very little – what's the easiest way to get started?

Re: Deep-Fried Data

#49

Post by Asparagirl »

codezero wrote: post #48
Asparagirl wrote: post #46

> I’ve saluted the efforts of Archive Team and the Internet Archive, but their activity is like having a museum curator that rides around in a fire truck, looking for burning buildings to pull antiques from. It's heroic, it's admirable, but it’s no way to run a culture. ...but in the meantime, here's an obligatory and shameless plug for donating to the Internet Archive[1] (tax-deductible in the US), or better yet mak…

I've got a VPS sitting around doing very little – what's the easiest way to get started?

Run a Warrior! Many flavors available: VirtualBox, Dockerfile, AMI (for Amazon EC2), you name it.

http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=ArchiveTeam_Warrior

It would deeply unethical for me to point out that you could also run the Warrior on free server space that your company might not notice, kind of like the karmic inverse of a bitcoin miner. Deeply unethical. So I won't mention it.

Re: Deep-Fried Data

#50

Post by aub3bhat »

Frankly as a grad student (The kind that the author apparently considers "dim witted"), the entire article is meaningless babbling without any underlying theme.

I wonder if the author truly understands "Machine Learning", what are his qualifications? A degree in Art History, and some "programming experience" aren't very assuring. E.g.

>> "The names keep changing—it used to be unsupervised learning, now it’s called big data or deep learning or AI"

WTF?? The author should enroll in a beginner Machine Learning course on Udacity or Coursera before making philosophical statements about fields he has zero clue about.

It seems the only skill the author has is piecing together meaningless arguments that appeals to average HN users incapable of distinguishing between informed opinions and pseudo-scientific rants. Hell at least bad graduate students have to give examinations, read papers and make original contributions that get peer reviewed (otherwise they fail/get-kicked-out/drop-out). Not like this guy who does not understands difference between "supervised" and "unsupervised" machine learning, yet feels comfortable in making "prophetic" statements about machine learning.

Also

>>> "These techniques are effective, but the fact that the same generic approach works across a wide range of domains should make you suspicious about how much insight it's adding."

What does he means by "same generic approach". If we assume he is implying specific algorithms then we have a good "No free lunch" theorem that shows that a single algorithm is not effective across all domains. Now if by "generic approach" the author mean "machine learning" in general then its as ridiculous as saying

"Mathematics is effective, but the fact that the same Mathematical approach works across a wide range of domains should make you suspicious about how much insight it's adding."

The entire article is filled with "truthiness" and "feel-good" statements, which fall apart on closer examination.

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