svv · HackerTrans

svv

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Submissions

Yandex announced the launch of a machine intelligence and research group

venturebeat.com

3 pointsby svv9 anni fa0 comments

How to Disappear a Jetliner

slate.com

1 pointsby svv12 anni fa0 comments

Spotify Acquires The Echo Nest

techcrunch.com

4 pointsby svv12 anni fa0 comments

Telegram’s Cryptanalysis Contest

cryptofails.com

189 pointsby svv13 anni fa130 comments

Video Interoperability on the Web Gets a Boost From Cisco’s H.264 Codec

blog.mozilla.org

1 pointsby svv13 anni fa0 comments

The Supreme Court Case Looming Over Angelina Jolie's Breast-Cancer Column

theatlantic.com

1 pointsby svv13 anni fa0 comments

comments

9 mesi fadiscuss

> - the KPI "do-more-users-leave-our-platform-earlier-if-our-matching-algo-is-just-too-good" - I promise: In alle the years, this question WAS NEVER - NEVER!!!!!!! - raised, regardless wich Manager or which Exec. This metric isnt even debated.

What labels do they use for training their algos though? What is their definition of a successful match, is it a date, a recurring date, or something closer to a long-term relationship?

If matches predominantly result in "failure" they might just not have enough "long-term success" labels to go by, and their proxy labels will be biased towards short-term successes.

8 anni fadiscuss

I've cancelled by NYTimes subscription just a few months ago. Didn't have to do any phone calls-- just answered a few questions in the chat, right there on their website.

8 anni fadiscuss

They do have NFC and usb-c options (separately, though), and are planning to launch lightning as well

https://www.yubico.com/2019/01/yubico-launches-the-security-...

8 anni fadiscuss

This is a good quote. One similar way to state it is by using the System 1 / System 2 [1] terminology. Manipulation is when someone pushes the audience to System 1 reasoning, diverting them from using System 2.

It's not a perfect distinction (there probably are cases where appealing to System 2 might look a lot like manipulation), but it's succinct, ends-neutral and not too subjective to be useful in practice.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_process_theory#Dual-proce...

9 anni fadiscuss

This falls under the Explanation #2: Human capital. By the way, the post does not mention whether the study controlled for wives staying at home.

13 anni fadiscuss

Why is the parent being downvoted? Multiple codecs are a real problem for video-streaming services, and introducing a new one definitely has potential to bring more compatibility problems. Patent trolls are also a real obstacle (clean-room implementation provides no guarantees against patent infringement).

If you believe there're reasons that this specific codec will not cause such problems, please explain it in the comments instead of just downvoting.

13 anni fadiscuss

Well, pure mathematic models also don't have any real-world meaning, and no predictive power with regard to the real world events. Still, nobody thinks that the analytical proof of the Pythagorean theorem is somehow inferior to the empirical one (involving multiple reproducible experiments that measure sides of the actual triangles drawn on a piece of paper with a ruler). We are content with mathematics being consistent within itself.

However, if we (1) add certain assumptions about, say, physical laws, the structure of the reality, the way we can observe it, (2) propose a reasonable way to map some aspects of the world to our mathematical models, (3) calibrate the result according to the future experiments/observations -- we might get a quite useful natural science like physics or astronomy. The pure math will serve only as a low-level tool. That's how the Austrian economists see the place of the pure economics theory: just an analytical tool to be used along with the other disciplines/sciences for solving real-world problems.

For example: Austrian economists believe that it can be deduced from the first principles/axioms that enforcing minimal wage above existing market wages results in involuntary unemployment (most of the non-Austrian economists also believe this is the case, although their methodological basis is different). Assume there was a policy act that included, among other things, raising the minimal wage. A year passed, and it so happened that there have been changes in the economy indicators, including lower unemployment rate. The act was not the only thing that happened in that time; lots of factors may have contributed to the outcome. An Austrian researcher will definitely not count raise-the-minimal-wage factor as contributing in favor of the lower unemployment rate; the factor will be counted against the lower-unemployment-rate outcome, and will require further explanations, what other factors have outweighed its effect.

Using math (well, formal systems/notations) does not guarantee your whole research about the real world is correct, but it establishes a baseline for consistency and rigorous reasoning. It's the same with basic economics.

(My formal education was in mathematics / CS. I study economics, epistemology etc. only as a hobby.)

13 anni fadiscuss

> incredible track record of dead-wrong predictions

The Austrian School economics methodology does not allow for making predictions. See e.g. the note at the beginning of http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Austrian_predictions It provides certain tools and models that one can use for explaining events and reasoning about policy options. These reasoning can be used as a basis of predictions (along with the other, non-economics-theoretic assumptions), but the predictions themselves will fall outside of the economics science in the Austrian School sense.

Basically, if your analysis manages to reason away uncertainty of the future, you're not following Austrian methodology. And no, the Austrian methodology won't even let you quantify that future uncertainty in probabilistic terms: that would only be possible if it used causal explanations of human action; instead, it relies on teleological, goal-oriented explanations.

Now, questioning and disputing the value, coherence and real-world applicability of the Austrian methodology is perfectly OK. (Personally, I find the Austrian economists' disregard for formal notations very unfortunate, as I've mentioned in another discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1647747) Your comment, however, seems to be simply misguided, based on a flawed understanding of the issue, and the sarcastic tone is unlikely to facilitate a constructive discussion.

(Edited: spelling.)

13 anni fadiscuss

Great point, expect that no one is touching them. Deposits over EUR 100K are being hit /frozen, those up to EUR 100K are not touched

Yes, that's the current decision. The linked article was written at the time the Parliament was about to ratify haircut of the insured depositors along with the rest.

(There's no timestamp on the page, but I saw this text around 21th of March.)

15 anni fadiscuss

Economics is a value-free science, in that it analyses real-life processes and policy implications _without_ prescribing what specific goals are to be pursued by the policy makers.

Politics (unlike _political science_, arguably) is all about promoting specific values and fulfilling special interests. It's not necessarily "bad", it is just not what economics is about. Economics provides the tools for analyzing what _means_ are appropriate (or not) for attaining some or other ends, but the latter lie outside of the scope of economics as a science.

15 anni fadiscuss

Austrian school covers many disciplines -- economics, history, law, politics etc. One can reasonably disagree with their views on, say, economics science, but calling it all just "politics" is simply an incorrect portrayal of what they do.

15 anni fadiscuss

The RESTful way to solve such problems is not just by better conventions, but by conventions standardized by the appropriate media types. E.g., the REST service may define a

  Content-Type: application/vnd.acme-json-with-paged-hrefs

that means that all "href" properties are URIs that may be paged by appending "?page=NNN" to them. If both server and the client understand this content-type, the representation may omit the "rel:" part from the parent example altogether.

Constructing arbitrary URIs by the client is not RESTful; however in this case it's the server-side that is in control of URI generation mechanism (it could serve a different representation, with a different Content-Type:, if it chooses to) -- thus it's perfectly valid from the REST point of view.

This is the same story as with the HTML <form> element. It also allows client to construct URIs by the specific rules known to both sides -- because the rules are defined by the appropriate standards about text/html.

15 anni fadiscuss

Instead of buying the computer with paper money, consider buying the computer with gold bullions during the commodity boom. Why buy that Macbook Pro with x bullions today if you can buy it with x-y bullions tomorrow?

People have different time preferences. Some value Macbook today high enough to pay y more bullions than they would if they waited till tomorrow. There're many currencies that depreciate faster than the dollar, but it does not stop people stuck with those currencies from buying Macbooks -- even though they could theoretically change their money to dollars (or invest in gold) and wait.

Adam isn't arguing that "deflation is bad," but rather that the supply of Bitcoins as currency will dry up as their value appreciates.

There actually is a possible problem with Bitcoins "drying up" connected with its deflationary nature, but it is not the one mentioned by Adam. AFAIK there's a limitation on the minimal amount of Bitcoin transaction. That means that as Bitcoins appreciate in value at some point it may be impossible to set and pay small enough prices -- and such transactions will require alternative payment methods.

This is a pretty much technical problem with the current Bitcoin implementation. It might be perfectly possible to design a deflationary crypto money system without this flaw.

15 anni fadiscuss

Fragment identifiers are currently the only part of a URI that can be changed without causing a browser to refresh the page

This is actually the primary reason for most of the hash and hash-bang uris in today's javascript-heavy sites. Once all the popular browsers allow changing URI without reloading the page, the whole issue will become irrelevant.

I am actually a big fan of HTTP and REST (the real one, with HATEOAS), but browsers have a long history of making it hard to write RESTful web sites. HTTP methods had long been restricted to GET/POST; code-on-demand support before XHR had been very rudimentary (javascript was almost useless, and I don't even want to mention java applets); browser addressing conventions led to horrible (from the REST point of view) practices like redirect-after-POST etc.

16 anni fadiscuss

Slavery wasn't about pure economics. In fact, it is not that obvious that slave labour is more efficient from the purely economical point. There're problems with incentives, with hiring staff willing to manage the slaves, controlling abuse etc. Such critique was known at least since Adam Smith.

To take a more modern example, the same is true about compulsory military service. Many people once believed and many still believe that conscription is simply way cheaper than voluntary military service. However, the people that are drafted into the military service could instead have been involved in the productive work in the regular economy, and paying taxes that may be used to pay volunteers.

In short, "pure economics" doesn't automatically go in favour of slavery.

Slavery was a sustainable institution not just because it was perceived as cost-efficient. It required general acceptance of the idea that it's OK to deny certain classes of people -- e.g., according to their origin -- their basic rights. And that is pretty much about racism.

16 anni fadiscuss

6 - To paraphrase "ISPs should be free to put whatever they want in their contracts". The reality is that 'freedom of contract' is not fair when there is a huge difference in bargaining power, the markets can't sort it out for the reasons discussed above, and government intervention is appropriate.

Even if there actually is a huge difference in bargaining power, it does not follow that government intervention is appropriate. Existence of some sort of "unfairness" in the market does not mean (1) that restricting people from entering such contracts is moral and (2) that government intervention will result in a better outcome.

7 - To paraphrase, "Network operators own their equipment and should be able to do what they like with it". That is like saying gun owners should be able to do what they like with their gun, even shoot people. [...]

Not it is not. Shooting (innocent) people infringes on their rights. "Exploiting a market position", even if one believes it to be a reasonable issue, does not. The analogy does not apply at all.

The point here is that network operators to not have the obligation to use their own property to provide services to anyone, in the first place. There's nothing wrong if they decide to start offering those services for a ridiculously high price -- it's much better than no service at all. And there's nothing wrong if they also decide to offer bandwidth discounts to certain web sites.

16 anni fadiscuss

Vernor Vinge's "True Names" came out even before Neuromancer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names

16 anni fadiscuss

Austrian economics is heavily into modeling, even though they don't usually call it that. In fact, its immersion in the ontological, methodological and epistemological issues around economics (and some nearby social sciences) is in many aspects unique in comparison with the more mainstream approaches.

The thing is, most "Austrians" traditionally avoid conventional mathematical models, as well as formal notations, preferring to use plain textual reasoning. In some aspects it's good: they do not limit themselves only to what is easily rendered to math (correlations go well with maths, causal relations not so well (but perhaps manageable), formalizing teleological reasoning about human choice-making is much harder).

In other aspects, the lack of formal notations is really bad: most modern economists have mathematical, not philosophical training, and to an unaccustomed eye the Austrian texts actually do look like non-sensical hand-waving. It takes quite some studying to see the actual rigorous structure and careful choice of terms behind those walls of text -- and I won't go into why there aren't that many incentives for most people to study those kinds of books.

I actually think Austrians would gain a lot from adopting more formal notations (perhaps not of the kind adopted by mainstream nowadays). After all, Hayek himself have failed to finish his own book on the theory of capital (which is one of the distinctive concepts in the Austrian economics), because of the sheer complexity of it. Keeping rigor and precision without the formal language is really hard; and formalized representations might be better suited for independent review and verification.

However, in case of economics, the problem domain doesn't lend itself for easy formalization.

> Does Austrian economics make an testable predictions? Is it based on empirical data?

These are some hard questions about Austrians that pop up quite often. It's true that at its heart much of Austrian economics is based on deductive reasoning from a priori assumptions (the correct analogy, they say, is mathematics, not physics). Theories do not follow from the facts; instead, the observed facts are explained on the basis of the theories we find reasonable, and the best theories are those that provide the best (i.e., the simplest and the most general) explanations. This is not really a uniquely Austrian approach, but I believe it's a good way to approach their research.

However, there's not a single strong view on apriorism even within the Austrian school. Mises indeed was quite a radical a-prioist. Hayek and Menger much less so -- and that, I believe, for a good reason.

16 anni fadiscuss

This syntax is similiar to Stephen Colebourne's FCM proposal: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddhp95vd_6hg3qhc

That proposal also used the "#" symbol, with the following rationale: "The symbol is already used within Javadoc to separate the class name from the method name in exactly this manner. The method literal syntax merely brings the Javadoc convention into Java source code."

It's a reasonable choice for full first-class methods; it doesn't fit quite as nicely if Oracle only introduces closures as a syntax sugar for anonymous classes.

But I think it's OK anyway -- it's concise and even looks a bit like clojure :-)

16 anni fadiscuss

Just scroll to the bottom of the page -- the transcript is right there below the comments.