Hacker News: nora4

A Quick Puzzle on Filesystems and APIs

nora4 — Wed, 05 Feb 2020 17:34:30 +0000

Article URL: https://bavarian.dev/blog/file_puzzle/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22249081

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Optimistic Concurrency and Write Contention

nora4 — Wed, 25 Dec 2019 21:12:13 +0000

Article URL: https://bavarian.dev/blog/optimistic-concurrency/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21880493

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Open Source as Business

nora4 — Mon, 09 Dec 2019 17:34:33 +0000

Article URL: https://bavarian.dev/blog/open-source/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21744519

Points: 8

# Comments: 1

Living Proof: Stories of Resilience Along the Mathematical Journey

nora4 — Sat, 06 Jul 2019 15:48:00 +0000

Article URL: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2019/06/27/living-proof-stories-of-resilience-along-the-mathematical-journey/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20370219

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by nora4 in "Foundations Built for a General Theory of Neural Networks"

nora4 — Sun, 03 Feb 2019 23:17:53 +0000

Deep Learning is currently an empirical science guided by intuition of practitioners. A main principle in experimental sciences is that a theory without predictive power is not considered a full-fledged theory. As such, unless they are interesting predictions coming from their theory (rather than only barely justifying existing empirically observed phenomena), this is just speculative theory that I would not use the phrase "Foundations Built" for.

As an example of this general litmus test for a theory see e.g. Eddington's confirmation of GR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity#De... . If there are hitherto unknown phenomena in DL predicted by this theory then I'd stand corrected and concede that there may be something to these theories.

New comment by nora4 in "High Salaries Are Weapons in the AI Talent War"

nora4 — Tue, 13 Feb 2018 16:33:25 +0000

What people make is ultimately what demand & supply dictate. On the other hand, for one-off cases where the market is super small, people make what they can negotiate. Of course, even in that one-off cases there is data about the pay of superstar within previous movies/shows/engineering orgs to use as an anchor.

But what about your analysis which is based on unit economics. How does that tie in? (because it is of course relevant) By the fact that if you hire lots of super stars by market price, but your unit economic does not allow the operation to be profitable, you will eventually have to shut the operation down. Good bye super stars and whole operation!

New comment by nora4 in "Greedy, Brittle, Opaque, and Shallow: The Downsides to Deep Learning"

nora4 — Sun, 11 Feb 2018 04:47:17 +0000

See the references I give below; if he is talking about general trends in AI and is giving an estimate of 7 or 8 years for emergence of AGI, where is he basing it on? Is he basing the estimate on unseen breakthroughs (i.e. unknown unknowns) to occur within that 7 or 8 years frame, or is he talking about current DL techniques pushed to their limits? For the former, nobody can make a reasonable estimate (nature of unknown unknowns) and for the latter, most experts in the field seem to agree that that current techniques do not lead to AGI. (Like have you seen how hard it is do things like visual question answering (VQA) or text summarization tasks? These are much much simpler than AGI but like AGI do not lend themselves easily to supervised learning.)

New comment by nora4 in "Greedy, Brittle, Opaque, and Shallow: The Downsides to Deep Learning"

nora4 — Sun, 11 Feb 2018 00:51:29 +0000

I assumed akvadrako downvoted that since the vote and the comment appeared very close to each other and both right after my comment. But of course, I surely could be mistaken.

And anyways, downvoting is not a big deal and they have the absolute right to do so. It's just that stating why you disagreed or downvoted would be helpful.

New comment by nora4 in "Greedy, Brittle, Opaque, and Shallow: The Downsides to Deep Learning"

nora4 — Sat, 10 Feb 2018 23:03:05 +0000

See e.g. Smerity reporting on Elon's talk in NIPS 2017: https://twitter.com/Smerity/status/938994837323259904 as well as https://goo.gl/trX8SJ & https://goo.gl/aTMqv6

What's your evidence for saying he does not say so? A bit mean of you to downvote without asking for evidence.

New comment by nora4 in "Greedy, Brittle, Opaque, and Shallow: The Downsides to Deep Learning"

nora4 — Sat, 10 Feb 2018 22:50:15 +0000

Except for Elon Musk, who with all due respect, I believe does not count as an informed person in DL.

It really bothers me that he (who is clearly an excellent entrepreneur and human being in general) makes such strong statement on a topic he is clearly not an expert in and is so vocal about it too. Given the amount of influence and number of online followers he has, I find this irresponsible.

New comment by nora4 in "Airbnb’s Battle to Stay Private"

nora4 — Thu, 08 Feb 2018 05:04:59 +0000

To summarize your points AirBnB has these effects: 1) more supply & cheaper options for travelers/short-term renters 2) higher rent and less supply for long term renters. 3) More income for property owners (A more varied demand) 4) Less business for hotels/established incumbents.

It's a very hard tradeoff. I can't tell how to argue for one side or the other. Should we use regulation (or enforce existing ones) to help the long-term renters at the expense of travelers? Or should we let free unregulated market roll? It's not clear-cut case for me either way.

New comment by nora4 in "Airbnb’s Battle to Stay Private"

nora4 — Wed, 07 Feb 2018 18:08:43 +0000

So the question is are laws sacred things that should never be broken. I don't think so. I think there are cases that people should break the law so we progress.

In other words, our laws are not the word of God (so to say), they are the word of men (genderless ofc). Good things can happen when you break them and demonstrate how much value can be unlocked or how much a better society we can become without them. By ignoring the laws you ultimately can become a force for change of the law. Those laws usually are there for a reason, of course. But the point is that sometimes those reasons are antiqued or irrational.

I don't know about the case of AirBnB and zoning laws. Don't know enough to have an opinion there.

New comment by nora4 in "Airbnb’s Battle to Stay Private"

nora4 — Wed, 07 Feb 2018 17:43:20 +0000

Hotels/hostels are not supposed to not list on AirBnB I thought. (I stayed at a very low-end hotel booked from AirBnB in, and I was very disappointed. When I book an AirBnB I hope for a real host, conversation, see how they live and what I got was a stupid hotel... but I digress.)

They can choose to delist the properties that have a separate channel, by crawling the web, or just querying google, query, etc. to find out if the listing is just a shell. Or they can look at the messages to see if the host suggests book instead on this website. (That of course doesn't prevent direct email communication through which the same outcome transpires. It just catches the most naive showroom cases.)

New comment by nora4 in "SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy successfully launches"

nora4 — Wed, 07 Feb 2018 16:03:52 +0000

Very good points; I'm in general though space skeptic in the following sense. Human race as a whole always seeks more, bigger, further, faster as solution its problems. I don't think space is the solution to our earthly problems.

Maybe 1000 years from now, people look at us and say god damn it. I wish they had stayed there and learned how to live in earth well. We are now speared all over the place and we all hate hate each other; and just right now I hear Martian went ahead and annexed Venus and they also seem to be interfering in Andromeda elections.

New comment by nora4 in "Airbnb’s Battle to Stay Private"

nora4 — Wed, 07 Feb 2018 15:49:58 +0000

I wonder if they start somehow "cracking down" on that. For now, it might not be worth it but eventually?

New comment by nora4 in "Airbnb’s Battle to Stay Private"

nora4 — Wed, 07 Feb 2018 15:45:07 +0000

Well, I hadn't heard of them till this minute.

If they did bizarre things so they start getting mentioned more in HN or TechCrunch I guess it'd help their cause :P

New comment by nora4 in "Airbnb’s Battle to Stay Private"

nora4 — Wed, 07 Feb 2018 15:00:09 +0000

AirBnB is such a great business. No significant competition for now among startups. Primary (initial) market is different from the incumbents (hotels) and it can gradually chip away from their market share too.

It also has better network-effect than say Uber (which has per-city network effect but no significant global network-effect) and less competition than latter. The "moat" is super strong and the leadership (Brian, Joe et al.) seem to be really good.

I'm so in awe of their prospect. My only misgiving is that they rejected my application (which proves no one's perfect after all - as they seem to also make hiring mistakes:P)

New comment by nora4 in "What people actually do at WeWork"

nora4 — Sun, 04 Feb 2018 15:28:12 +0000

I guess purely logically, you are right. But I would be against the underlying theme behind that general type of thinking. If you take that line of thought and extrapolate it, it starts getting close to a socialistic/anti-economic progress point of view.

New comment by nora4 in "What people actually do at WeWork"

nora4 — Sun, 04 Feb 2018 12:38:39 +0000

That's a great point. Hip, cool, modern entrepreneur types can easily work as agents of gentrification which as you pointed out can lead to massive increase in wealth for nearby properties owners (at the expense of previous occupants/patrons, some will argue).

New comment by nora4 in "What people actually do at WeWork"

nora4 — Sun, 04 Feb 2018 06:05:56 +0000

I feel like for WeWork style business, it should be a race to the bottom (in terms of prices). Once the idea is validated, there would be (as there are) lots of local clones that would try to make a more cool indie version of WeWork. The resulting price-cutting and heavy competition make business rather difficult.

As such, I'm not sure where the economy of scale will come from and why should this be a sustainable business? To be fair, Starbucks and other coffee/restaurant chains also have similar general business characteristics.

Along this note, I don't understand why WeWork is a venture-backed business as opposed to a normal bootstrap business (with more emphasis on early cash-flow and less on growth) as it's usually the case with the above type businesses.