It clearly says, "the prediction is just categorical and is not an ‘image’ itself."
From the article:
>Neural decoding is performed using pattern recognition programs, also known as “decoders,” that learn statistical relationships between several pre-specified visual images and the corresponding brain activity patterns. Although this approach can predict which stimulus is presented among a set of pre-specified categories (e.g., horizontal or vertical grating), the prediction is just categorical and is not an ‘image’ itself.
In other words, this similar to saying, "Reconstruction of password using CPU activity" and then being able to tell which of a pre-specified list of passwords was used, based on clocking the CPU.
1. ("risk-free" versus asymmetric wrt market rates of return)
i'm completely with the quoted response "Entrepreneur: It’s difficult to accurately describe the company, myself, and everything else in a single paragraph. To write something so small but somehow include every important aspect is near impossible, if not impossible. My company is too complex to be described in a single paragraph."
let's get formal.
there is a market theory of efficiency which says that it is impossible to make investments that have a higher rate of return than the "risk-free rate of return", without taking on commensurate risk. according to that theory, it is impossible for someone to find gold bullion stuck in some part of their property that requires extraction, and therefore to offer any investor (even semi-outside) a 200% rate of return on putting up some money to help them get it out, so you can sell it. If you offer a 200% return, that means you're asking them to take a huge risk on losing the money they put up, acccording to that theory. (Due to the sole fact that 200% is more than some arbitrarily-defined "risk-free" rate of return backed by the government or whatever else the theoretician chooses as the basis for the risk-reward trade-off. simplifying here slightly.)
that theory is wrong. the example above makes it obvious.
it also makes it clear that the "investor" is both stupid, and wrong, to ask you to describe "in a paragraph" what you need the money for. 1 paragraph would be: "I have some gold on my property and need to get it out". A real proposal includes an extensive history of you, your purchase of the property, its history, exact description of your discovery of the gold, the research you put into legalities, your detailed plan for extracting it and getting the investment back to the investor, market research into other people who have done this succesfully, even quotes from companies that have a proven history of doing this or being able to, and everything else, including why other investors aren't investing, why you aren't doing it with a bank loan, on your credit cards, or by working a job until you can afford the extraction, etc. Among other things, you should obviously give a very compelling reason why you can't just raise enough money on your own to extract even in an expensive way, a small piece of the bullion, and then sell it to get the money to get the rest. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You are saying something extraordinary: so, prove it.
Anyone who can offer anyone else more than 7-10% return annually should not be writing a paragraph about it.
2. (truly successful investments)
the "investor" in this article might have some way to get a good return on his money. but never a spectacular one. let's get into this.
basically, this article is one in another in a around here which all repeat a mantra of not creating a pitch for a long-term, hugely succesful company, (giving extensive justification of how this is about to happen) but instead, in a quick little web site that can probably pay for itself and then make enough for a decent return on, at most, a few server's worth of investment.
This never works for identifying big, succesful companies.
How could any one paragraph, have explained why anyone should have invested in Google when it was some servers in stanford. a diamond in the rough.
even though it was a bit more than a paragraph, reading it is the only way you could have gotten in on that company, or separate it from others with different long papers that aren't worth investing in.
reading it is what allows you to get a better than risk-free rate of return. you want one paragraph, here: "This FDIC-insured bank account comes with a 1.7% annual interest rate. we are one of the biggest retail banking instititions in america, you can trust us and the FDIC." bam, done.
anything more than that - as explained in the analysis above, requires commensurately more justification and information.
Well, a programmer can - in a matter of hours, or at most days/weeks - assemble a factory performing the work of 10,000 full-time highly trained workers (actually more, we're talking billions of operations per second), at a total direct cost of a couple of coffees and use of a device costing few hundred dollars new, and then fully own all rights to the factory, and operate it full-time for about the cost of a normal person's phone bill per month (server instances). So the question isn't why there are millions of high-paying jobs to do so for someone else with the resulting rights and ownership by someone else:
the question is why anyone takes any of these jobs. why not build your own damn factory. It's usually only because you lack some of the skills (design, business development, marketing, choosing what to produce, etc).
so, team up with a cofounder. hence: hacker news. well, there is one downside here. the programmers who work here would never team up with a designer who knows just what to build. instead they both get hired by someone who does. the designer gets hired at a low rate, then the programmer gets hired at a high rate, just because the person hiring the two knows what is needed to get the factory producing something people will pay for: but the programmer (readers on this very article right here at hacker news), doesn't.
so yeah there are millions of jobs for you to build value for others, but it's just because you're not quite wise enough enough not to need these jobs.
(among other things, i'm such a designer. split a company 60/40 with me? No, you would not. But work for 1.5 my wage at the same company, so that neither of us gets to reap the benefits. yes you would.)
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this post is tagged #creative and written from that perspective.
to be honest, this is why i don't work in an it office full of poorly adjusted creeps. it's not that these guys are racist. it's not that they're sexist. they're just insensitive jerks. this actually comes across every moment of every day. it's your fault for working for them if you're white. i won't say 'it's even worse' for working for them if you're black, i will just repeat the sentence.
it's your fault for working for them if you're white. it's your fault for working for them if you're black.
get to a more sensitive, creative place. have a look around. do you see anyone like yourself? then it's time to head for the fucking door.
this goes for someone who is just creative as much as anything else.
to be honest maybe 1 out of 50 programming or internet startup places is even worth lingering for more than a hundredth of a second in.
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* this post has a tag, #creative - if you prefer the #rational tags you probably won't like it - but i think it's important for you to read it all the same
I won't use two accounts because I'm a uniter, not a divider. I'd like each side to pay a lot of attention to the other, and I think they're wrong (actually worse than wrong) not to. The rational is worse than wrong not to pay more attention to the creative, and the creative is worse than wrong not to pay more attention to the rational.
only a few, as i explain in one of them. some of my other comments if they are extremely technical and analytical might instead contain a rational tag :)
I did notice that, and agree with you. The minimal example continues: Apple does not care about standards very much, in this case doing something (caps html) for arbitrary reasons and counter to best-practice (and the standard), while actually very nearly being the current standard. But nobody notices or has much of a chance to notice. I have a lot of trouble imagining Google doing the same thing on the source code - I can only imagine Google using lowercase letters in the source, as is standard and "right". This is what separates Google from Apple. (many, many examples of this.)
...meanwhile, microsoft doesn't come within a mile of a current standard - it uses a .txt file (backwards compatibility to, in this case, 1982.)
I'm serious in kind, but not degree :) I do realize it's pretty frivolous, and a bit funny.
It's also a good minimal example!
Even though it is only meant to be used as a literal in a program to check against with a regex, still, someone has to write that regex. Someone will either write in "Success" or write in " -- i just flipped tabs, clicked a link, then flipped back to finish this sentence -- "Microsoft NCSI".
so, ha-ha, but a little serious. it's a good example that pervades every other creative choice made at the two companies.
I like this idea, but the results have what I would say is "very low momentum" in them (not speaking with any kind of terminology here, just ad hoc) meaning that just as when you write L E T T E R S e..x..t..r..e...m...e...l...y... s--l---o---w---l---y you get much more wiggle in them, the two images on this page are very very wavy, as though the pen that drew them had no momentum.
isn't there a way to have lines be drawn by a hand that has inertia/momentum and is trying to follow the logical curve, but just wavers a certain percentage and correct as it goes along? This is what gets (in my opinion) the result we see. Someone drawing at a good pace by hand and correcting while he does so. not a "random deviation" around the logical path, whch is what these results seem to be more like.
I was specifically talking about that one page and its location. It is English, meant to be parsed as a literal by a program, it's not a random number or a response to a query, that .txt file is literally logically equivalent to the "succss" html page.
so, why is it so convoluted English instead of also just reading "Success"? It's just Microsoft being Microsoft.
this is not trollish of me in the slightest. if it doesn't apply to you, please just ignore it. I stand by the statement.
i won't comment on the differences, which include the meaningless URL and useless "ncsi" in the text, and the fact that it still looks like an error rather than a successful test page.
The Apple page is absolutely minimal. Yet everything is in its place, and it can't leave any developer confused for a millisecond, or make a typo, as it's a human English word at a human, English URL.
Apple is Apple. Microsoft is a split millisecond of headache for a developer who rechecks his spelling of "ncsi" and the whole meaning of the ncsi concept three times to make sure his code is correct.
[1] This post is tagged as being creative (as opposed to rational). as a note, about half of my posts speak to creativity and design and half speak to rationality and logic. most people only do one or the other, so i can understand why each group is confused by the other. this lets me build two brands. just ignore the posts that don't apply to you.
Three founders is three too many. Businesses don't need founders. They need owners and they need managing directors. Too many people think that becoming the former magically makes them into the latter.
Here is a test for the next time you are founding something. If you weren't a founder, you were just hired labor, and someone tried to give you 93% of this company and total autonomy in exchange for running it full-time, but NO other support of any kind and you would be completely on your own in every aspect of running this company - would you accept this?
For most ideas, the answer is, "Hell no. I have a lot better things to be doing with your time than running your worthless company without any support from you, full time in exchange for 93% of it."
People somehow fail to apply the same standard to their own ideas. They accept this bad deal just because the person who "gives" them 93% (or 100%) of the company is one and the same person, themselves.
Let me illustrate with an example. Think of an idea for a web site that you have.
If someoe approached you with that idea and asked you to code it, but they would not help in any way, would you do so in exchange for nearly 100% of it? Probably not.
But when you make YOURSELF the same proposition, you often end up saying, "Yes. I will code this since the result is mine."
You forget that the result is not worth the work and you would not accept it under more neutral terms.
This is simply illogical. Stop thinking like a founder, and start thinking like a managing director.
From the article:
>Neural decoding is performed using pattern recognition programs, also known as “decoders,” that learn statistical relationships between several pre-specified visual images and the corresponding brain activity patterns. Although this approach can predict which stimulus is presented among a set of pre-specified categories (e.g., horizontal or vertical grating), the prediction is just categorical and is not an ‘image’ itself.
In other words, this similar to saying, "Reconstruction of password using CPU activity" and then being able to tell which of a pre-specified list of passwords was used, based on clocking the CPU.
This is not exactly reconstruction.