bdod6's comments

whoosh.

We're not sure about the copyright, but that's something we will look at doing if that's not an issue.

We might in the future, but we're unsure what the copyright is on those questions.

Yep! We felt the same way when we saw that question. I think HQ will prioritize questions that are hard but still feel possible. Otherwise their engagement will start dropping off.

I think anyone playing HQ should be encouraged by our results. I know a lot of people turned off by playing because of all the "bots" playing. Based on our analysis and results from over a hundred games...I think it's clear that bots are not sophisticated enough to solve HQ.

We're also using a more sophisticated approach than most bots I've read about, and we continuously train out model on new data. Even so, we would only expect to win 7 out of 100 games.

Our goal was not to hurt the HQ community, but rather to challenge ourselves into solving a difficult data science problem.

There's a lot less teabagging when we win.

Yes, we have been archiving each game going back to October. We augment the questions and answers though so that we get more relevant results when run our web scrapes.

Yep. I actually mention that specific question in the article as an unsolvable question for machine learning, at least given our current constraints.

Those are generally rare questions though because difficult questions for bots are also difficult questions for humans. HQ can't have too many of those questions without degrading the player experience.

Because of that, I don't think we will ever get beyond 10/11 questions right per game. That still leads to a decent chance at winning at least one game per week though.

Author here: At mux, we experimented using machine learning to predict HQ Trivia answers. We managed to get 80-90% accuracy across a dataset of around 500 questions.

The trickiest questions were relational questions (e.g. What's heavier, a pineapple or a Siamese cat?). Would appreciate any feedback on our approach (and happy to answer questions!).

If you calculate the gap for 4 to infinity and 6 to infinity, you can interpolate a pretty good approximation.

speaking from experience at Google, yes. Obviously depends on size of company, but many C-suite/SVP/High VPs would have a "chief of staff" type person reporting to them.

I wonder if debt is "not available" simply because it's not the standard for SV. I would bet that companies like Slack, Stripe, Stitchfix, etc could have raised considerable amounts of debt instead of raising money through their last rounds.

It's essentially a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I don't think debt would be worse for startups though. It's unlikely debt would wipe out a startup unless it continually finances through debt over a long period of time or just has really unfavorable debt terms (which wouldn't make sense for the debt issuer either).

The problem is getting debt financing...but I would imagine debt financing would make sense for 99.99% of startups.

Gold has centuries of historical data as a sensible value store. The 'gold rush' didn't RAISE the value gold; gold rushes happened because the value of gold was already high. If anything, gold rushes devalued gold because of the increase in supply. That's very different from what's happening with crypto, in which the run-ups now are happening from speculation. And speculation run-ups ALWAYS burst at some point.

While Bitcoin might have some floor as an investment at this point, it's nowhere near as stable as gold. Equating the two makes very little sense. It would more accurate to compare this to the Tulip bubble than to the gold rush days.

I can see some use of things like Nest which keeps your electric usage efficient and low. Agree that other things are way over-hyped though.

Look at how hard Amazon has been pushing Alexa for years now, and the shopping experience on it is still terrible. For very specific use cases, it works kinda well (i.e. order more household supplies that I've ordered 100x before). For anything else, it's much easier and faster to use a phone or computer. Amazon is devoting hundreds of millions to solve a problem that literally doesn't exist.

Seems very similar to using RL to tune the hyperparameters. Surely that means there are hyperparameters for PBT that need to be set, such as the exploration vs exploitation tradeoff.

They are using AI for natural language processing though. Heuristics would be if they just scanned a post for keywords or waiting for a suicide reporting. The article suggests they are using reporting as labeled training data, and eventually they'll be able to detect posts/videos that indicate suicide.

I agree that AI term gets thrown around a lot these days but don't think that's what is happening here.

Many of these articles seem to gloss over the fact that bitcoin is the currency of choice for darknet-type transactions.

How does Elemental compare to the existing options on the market? (e.g. something like this https://mux.com/video)