I feel like there's a small minority of people who enjoy elevating kurzweil into a quasi-religious genius figure because of his speculations on the singularity, but he's really just an above average software engineer who happened upon some ideas which captured the public imagination. Easy to forget he's human too sometimes.
cmon now. This is a good attempt at pandering to the hackernews audience by being skeptical and cynical, but Quantum Supremacy is a big deal. From the same article:
If I have any policy advice, it’s this: recognize that a clear demonstration of quantum supremacy is at least as big a deal as (say) the discovery of the Higgs boson. After this scientific milestone is achieved, I predict that the whole discussion of commercial applications of quantum computing will shift to a new plane, much like the Manhattan Project shifted to a new plane after Fermi built his pile under the Chicago stadium in 1942.
the documentation here is quite sparse, so correct me if i'm wrong. This seems like a dressed up theorem proving system like PROLOG dressed up as something new.
you don't need to understand statitstics. calculus (calculus is a high school subject and is hardly deep), and what is "algorithmics"? If you mean the study of any and all algorithms, then sure,
one big dimension here, the "implementation error" can be easily be debugged. Gradients can be checked numerically. The model can be checked to work by looking at the optimality conditions (not just the loss function go down). This shouldn't be an issue for anyone from a traditional coding background.
a rather awful essay not worth reading. This sounds like a rather large sum of money you're paying for few minutes of internet attention on your half baked ideas about the current american political system.
You may disagree with Peter Thiel's philosophy (as I do), but you cannot deny he is a thoughtful and intelligent man who has some interesting conjectures about the future which are (in my assessment) likely to be wrong. Furthermore Thiel himself hasn't personally made any investments (apart from the trump donation) which I find personally objectionable. If you had specific quarrels with his ethics, apart form his association with trump, it'd be a different story. Your essay betrays none of that.
quasi newton methods are not square in the dimension of the problem (think limited memory L-BFGS), and can be run in linear time. In my experience, however, they're 2-3 times slower than regular methods like ADAM.
The most infuriating argument against GMO's (2) might the "unknown unknowns" argument, because it sounds so reasonable. Hey, the just say the Jury's still out, so its best to be cautious yes?
But the truth be said, by not eating GMO's, you are too making a decision. And we don't know what we're doing eating good old fashioned food either. And the argument from historical data "we've been doing this for thousands of years, so it must be ok" is a pretty weak one. We've been smoking for over 7000 years now. We've filled our guts with carcinogens, practiced sham medicines and doing plenty of stupid things for a long time now. We did it not because it was "healthy", or out of some ancient wisdom, we did it because it was we knew, and we were making the best of a strange situation.