Hacker News: willis77

The State of Machine Learning Competitions – 2025 Edition

willis77 — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 15:14:34 +0000

Article URL: https://mlcontests.com/state-of-machine-learning-competitions-2025/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47074674

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by willis77 in "I'm sorry but I cannot fulfill this request it goes against OpenAI use policy"

willis77 — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 19:21:56 +0000

The fine folks at FOPEAS would never tarnish their good name by stooping to such a stunt. I mean, we might expect such shenanigans from the likes of SMURGBLOZ, KINSURGE, or GSIROOZ, but not FOPEAS, fine purveyors of `FOPEAS an AI Language Model I do not Have Access to The Context of The SFD You are referring to. Can You Please Provide me with More Information so That I can Assist You Better`

New comment by willis77 in "Deep Learning Foundations to Stable Diffusion"

willis77 — Wed, 05 Apr 2023 15:14:50 +0000

The year is 1900. College-bound nephew says "what's the point of a physics major anymore?" I asked "what do you mean?" and he goes "Newton's Laws".

The State of Competitive Machine Learning – 2022 Edition

willis77 — Tue, 07 Mar 2023 22:21:21 +0000

Article URL: https://mlcontests.com/state-of-competitive-machine-learning-2022/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35062095

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by willis77 in "Kaggle's Annual Holiday Optimization Problem – The Christmas Card Conundrum"

willis77 — Wed, 30 Nov 2022 22:49:19 +0000

Each year Kaggle creates a for-fun, Santa-themed optimization problem. This year's is about controlling a robotic arm to efficiently print cards.

Kaggle's Annual Holiday Optimization Problem – The Christmas Card Conundrum

willis77 — Wed, 30 Nov 2022 22:49:19 +0000

Article URL: https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/santa-2022

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33809105

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

New comment by willis77 in "Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms"

willis77 — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 15:56:40 +0000

The digits of pi contain every pdf that ever could and ever will exist.

Kaggle’s 5 remote-first tips for new WFHers

willis77 — Fri, 27 Mar 2020 16:43:20 +0000

Article URL: https://dev.to/mrisdal/kaggle-s-5-remote-first-tips-for-new-wfhers-3a4g

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22704426

Points: 6

# Comments: 1

New comment by willis77 in "Too Clever by Half"

willis77 — Thu, 17 May 2018 13:42:26 +0000

Any dog ever would gladly trade a few zaps for a wide open place to explore outside. Cruelty is depriving dogs of exercise and outdoor time and stimulation and the chance to run, not invisible fences.

New comment by willis77 in "macOS lock screen: “I just sent my session pass to my whole team”"

willis77 — Fri, 08 Dec 2017 20:42:52 +0000

Same issues here. I dread having to unplug or shutdown my MBP connected to 2 external monitors because it means I'll have to reconfigure the displays.

New comment by willis77 in "Apple scientists disclose self-driving car research"

willis77 — Wed, 22 Nov 2017 18:58:00 +0000

As of 2015, there were 9 car models without recorded deaths - https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/record-9-models-have-...

I'm not sure how statistically significant the numbers are, but it's something!

New comment by willis77 in "Bayesian ranking of items with up and downvotes or 5 star ratings (2015)"

willis77 — Fri, 17 Nov 2017 16:27:09 +0000

Yeah, my above comment was not using a text search, hence no "relevant" option (i.e. if you just drilled down the department hierarchy to, say, the TVs department).

> the core need, is that you want control over the model that Amazon is using to sort what you see and to have some input on what that looks like

Indeed, but I'm not even looking to have that much granular control over it. I just want "sort by rating, but toss out all the obscure crap that has 1 or 2 ratings, because that rating is meaningless."

New comment by willis77 in "Bayesian ranking of items with up and downvotes or 5 star ratings (2015)"

willis77 — Fri, 17 Nov 2017 02:00:01 +0000

Amazon has the default "Featured" sort (I'm not sure what is behind this, but it intuitively seems like some combination of popularity + availability + rating). If this default doesn't fit your needs, your only option is to change to sort by "Avg. Customer Review", which gets you a list that is sorted by average rating regardless of the number of reviews. Evan called out nearly 10 years ago in the post that OP's article mentioned - http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating..... The root problem is that one random obscure product with a single 5-star rating out-ranks something with 499 5-star ratings and 1 4-star rating.

I'm often looking for what is the best/highest-quality item in a category, meaning I want not just a high average, but a high average that is statistically meaningful. I'm just surprised Amazon hasn't offered a way to do that (and have read umpteen threads on HN in the past years expressing the same frustration).

New comment by willis77 in "Bayesian ranking of items with up and downvotes or 5 star ratings (2015)"

willis77 — Thu, 16 Nov 2017 14:24:44 +0000

Anyone here have thoughts on why, all these years later, Amazon still doesn't have a sort option along the lines of these proposals? It seems like such an easy win and an easy technical change. Do they have some business reason not to change their default sort?

New comment by willis77 in "The State of Data Science and Machine Learning"

willis77 — Mon, 30 Oct 2017 18:09:27 +0000

Nothing warms our icy, cold, statistical hearts quite like hearing that a randomly chosen person is near the median. <3

New comment by willis77 in "Breach at Sonic Drive-In May Have Impacted Millions of Credit, Debit Cards"

willis77 — Fri, 29 Sep 2017 13:28:08 +0000

I don't know who this James Mickens fellow is, but I like the cut of his jib.

New comment by willis77 in "Why Amazon is eating the world"

willis77 — Mon, 15 May 2017 18:13:28 +0000

Sort by rating you say? Sure, here's 3 pages of sketchy, out of production, third-party seller items with one 5-star review, followed by the 4.97 star item with 3,880 reviews that you actually should buy. Enjoy!

New comment by willis77 in "Using Deep Learning and Google Street View to Estimate Demographic Makeup of US"

willis77 — Mon, 27 Feb 2017 15:03:34 +0000

> Our results suggest that automated systems for monitoring demographic trends may effectively complement labor-intensive approaches

New comment by willis77 in "The Programming Interview from Hell"

willis77 — Mon, 20 Feb 2017 15:50:26 +0000

But who has access to writeStatus.txt? Classic rookie mistake. You needed a writeStatusWriteStatus.txt.

New comment by willis77 in "Statistical Thinking: My Journey from Frequentist to Bayesian Statistics"

willis77 — Mon, 20 Feb 2017 14:34:33 +0000

I agree, and suspect many people (outside of the statisticians who have had the time and space to digest the philosophical underpinnings) who claim to love Bayesian methods do so because they have been told it's the right thing to love. There are a lot of hand-wavy explanations out there that tell you what each side believes, but I have yet to see something that truly ELI5s it.