gh0std3v's comments

> Pay attention to your team. Build closeness. Get to know about everyone’s family and private life. Take mental health seriously and talk openly about it. It may seem like prying, but you might catch a wobbler with a team member that you can address early.

While I think it's important for workplaces to take care of their employees, I feel like Pete's issue was that he was too close to work. And on top of that, he wasn't even an employee, just a contractor with no benefits, PTO, etc.

The real problem here is that Pete was not integrated as an employee. If he were, he could have taken PTO, accessed health benefits, and gotten help. I don't know the complete story, so I won't extrapolate further, but I feel sad thinking that this team almost feels "responsible" for his suicide. It wasn't the remote team's fault for not catching on, it was the company's fault for not acknowledging the health and security of their contractors (who, I reiterate, should have been employees).

Don't mean to offend anyone, I just felt the way contractors are treated is sometimes unjust.

It's late at night so apologies if this seems incoherent. I recently applied to college and I got into a university that is pretty good. I'm pretty happy with where I am and I consider myself fortunate in every regard to be going to college.

That being said, I have some reservations about the college admissions process and I think this Twitter thread addresses it well. In particular, I think there is an ongoing trend to eliminate standardized tests in favor of more "subjective" and "holistic" measurements like your essays and extracurriculars. While I think it's perfectly fine to have students write about themselves and their achievements, I think it's still way too integral to the admissions process and there needs to be more balance. Personally, when I wrote my essays, even though I was trying to be authentic and I did write about experiences that were meaningful to me, I always felt as if it wasn't enough. I just kept wondering, "what are they looking for?" And I couldn't really get a good grasp of whether what I was writing was "good" or not. To me, the essays completely obscure the nature of the admissions process because no college can clearly tell you what they want. Hell, even some admissions officers seem to dodge the question when you ask them what they look for in an essay (or they provide really vague answers). I think it's silly to make the essays so critical to the process when they clearly don't allow anyone to extrapolate concrete things about a person's abilities or skills. Many smart people I know were rejected from universities that I think they should have gotten into even though they easily would fit in and thrive in those places.

By the end of the college admissions process, even though I was happy with the college I got into, I honestly felt a little jaded. Sure, I'm happy that I got in, but I feel as if I couldn't properly communicate my skills to the admissions officers. It just makes me feel as if your skills matter less than your ability to impress people. Maybe it was naïve of me to think that it would be different in an academic institution compared to the corporate world, but it is a little disheartening in the end.

I know a lot of people will disagree with this, but this post resonated with me and I felt that I needed to share my thoughts.

I don't care about whether there's more sunshine in the morning or not (that's why I have blinds!). What I do care about is the fact that DST introduces needless complexity into the task of keeping time.

I know it's stupid, but I just think DST is really unnecessary because of the fact that we have to adjust the clock on our microwaves, ovens, and cars. Not to mention, because not everyone observes DST, it leads to a lot of additional complexity when scheduling international meetings.

Overall, regardless of your preferences, the world would be better if we didn't have to adjust the clock for no reason.

I agree. To me, the ancient Greeks were an extremely advanced civilization and we don't often comprehend quite how rich their intellectual culture was.

It turns out that Archimedes had actually discovered some of the foundational principles of integral calculus centuries before Newton or Leibniz even considered it [1]. In fact, Eudoxus — another Greek mathematician — had created a "method of exhaustion" which was essentially an informal, geometric method for computing limits (though he tried to make it as rigorous as possible) [2]. And if they don't impress you, then Euclid on his own is an extraordinary mathematician. The Elements is a modern mathematical marvel, with all of its theorems on foundational geometry and algebra stemming from 5 axioms.

Astronomy was a critical part of many ancient cultures, from the Aztecs to the Indians (and of course, the Greeks). After some pondering, it makes sense why they would invest so much time, energy, and innovative zeal into creating a device as intricate as the Antikythera. I wonder how many other inventions and revolutionary ideas created by ancient cultures have been lost to time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Method_of_Mechanical_Theor...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_exhaustion

While I want to believe this is true, I think the above response was more a lack of Gopher's ability to analyze mathematical equations properly than an attempt to display a sense of humour. Many NLP approaches work by creating word embeddings, which don't always help the model to understand "first-order logic" language mixed with spoken language.

Though who knows, maybe it does have a sense of humour.

> "The lead epidemic is the longest-running epidemic in our country"

This is probably one of the most depressing lines I read in this article. I've watched some of John Oliver's videos on PFAs and Lead (regardless of what you think about his other political views, I would say his videos on subject matter like this is quite informative). It's astonishing to think that organizations like the EPA were formed in the latter half of the twentieth century to remedy the negligence in making chemically and biologically safe products for human beings to use.

Seriously, up until the 50s we were making "radioactive toothpaste" and advertising it to the general population as being safe and effective: https://awesci.com/radioactive-toothpaste-shocking-ad-50s/

Yeah, math (or any subject really) takes a lot of time to learn, and Knuth’s books do a good job of providing plenty of exercises and explanations. I was just saying that it can initially be overwhelming for some, which is why they might want to try attacking something smaller and more broad (though this has more to do with someone’s mentality than the book itself).

I said my example was contrived because I didn’t test the prompt (admittedly I should have tried to).

I still think there’s a lack of explainability to the whole model though, and I struggle to understand how we could continue improving these models without understanding how they fundamentally make their decisions.

That being said, after reading some more output from GPT-3, it is more coherent than I remembered.

I don't think whiteboard programming is really a good metric for measuring someone's skills for a normal software engineering job.

However, assuming that extensive knowledge of certain algorithms (like merge sort), data structures, or computational methods are necessary for a particular job, I think a better question to ask isn't "how do you implement merge sort" but instead to present the merge sort algorithm and then ask the interviewee how it works based on the code given. Obviously still not the best way to assess someone's skills, but I think it's better than just memorizing a bunch of algorithms without being able to explain how they work.

I get an error 403 message through this link.

I know that Knuth has some introduction in the beginning, but he goes over it pretty quickly, which is why I was saying that some primer material is helpful just to get a headstart and not feel confused (plus Knuth himself says that you should just skim over the beginning material if you want to get to the "exciting" stuff).

> Spend days or weeks per section, or even on a single page if you get stuck.

This is asking a lot for people who don't have much time to spare. That being said, it's also why many people struggle to start Knuth's books. Most people have forgotten high school math at this point, and it's hard to learn and re-learn when you get older. I think some introductory coursework like the book posted by OP might be more fast-paced for people looking to start learning about algorithms.

I wasn't very clear when I said this. I wasn't talking about "natural intelligence". I was referring to the fact that GPT-3 tends to produce sentences that don't really make sense in the wider context of the passages that it writes. For example, let's say you input the following sentence:

Bob went to the store to get apples for his restaurant. He needed to cook food for an important dish. Bob came back home, and cut the apples using a ________

Most human readers would think of the word "knife". However, GPT-3 might fill in the blank with the word "machete" or "sword". While these words grammatically make sense, they don't make sense in the wider context of the sentence. Admittedly, my example is a bit contrived, but if you read through enough text, you can find this type of strange writing from GPT-3. That is what I meant by incoherent.

Also, by "explainability" I'm referring to the ability of engineers to understand why a model decided to choose a particular word or phrase versus another (in my apocryphal example, this would mean understanding why the model chose "sword" instead of "knife").

For anyone with LG TVs, iirc there’s a project called OpenLGTV which is working to reverse engineer LG software. Maybe it could help disable some of these “smart” features?

> I find some of these negative comments to be overly hyperbolic though. It clearly works and is not some kind of scam..

It's not a scam, but I think that it is severely lacking. Not only does the model have very little explainability in its choices, but it often produces sentences that are incoherent.

The biggest obstacle to GPT-3 from what I can tell is context. If there was a more sophisticated approach to encoding context in deep networks like GPT-3 then perhaps it would be less disappointing.

> I suppose the target groups of people studying his introductory book is not any random junior student at a random CS department if he is expecting them to pick up Knuth's Art of Computer Programming right after Introduction to Algorithms.

I don't think he's expecting a student to do that. He recommends the book in response to the question "What’s next?", implying that if a student would like to learn more, they should go to Knuth's books. Also, judging from the Quora link, he assumes the student has had a course in discrete mathematics, so they should be familiar with mathematical proofs and be comfortable with some level of rigor.

I don't think Knuth's books are impossible to read, but a primer to some of the material can help (and understanding mathematical proof is a prerequisite).

> What you are proposing are what I think would be called a security theater.

I don't think putting people to prison for, say, flipping a Tesla by screwing with its computer vision algorithm is security theatre. Rather, it's accountability. I'm pretty sure most people are aware that you cannot stop a determined attacker from breaking a system (which is exactly why Spectre mitigations were implemented as soon as the vulnerability was discovered: it's hard to exploit, but still possible).

Defining a legal code for exploiting computer systems through their hardware or their software is not security theatre, it's to ensure that we have a system to punish crime.

> It sounds like you should find a company that agrees with this opinion. I don’t agree.

I agree that on-call is necessary in certain professions (e.g, doctors). I also agree that if an employee is willing to do on-call and they are compensated accordingly, then the practice is still ethical.

However, to call someone to do work outside work hours is unreasonable. On-call is considered work time, so I am expecting to be contacted during that time. However, if I'm not on-call, then it is not time for me to work, and I shouldn't be contacted by my company and feel pressured to answer the call.

> With the removal of dislike stats from the YouTube API, our backend will switch to using a combination of scraped dislike stats, estimates extrapolated from extension user data and estimates based on view\like ratios.

In case anyone is wondering, the extension seems to calculate the dislike count from the average rating, which is something that the YouTube API still returns. The average rating is calculated as follows [1]:

(like * 5) + (dislike)

---------------------- * 5

(like + dislike) * 5

If you do some algebra, the dislike count is calculated as (likes * (5 - rating)) / (rating - 1), which is what the author uses in their code [2]. I'm not sure what they mean by using "a combination of scraped dislike stats, estimates extrapolated from extension user data, and estimates based on view\like ratios" because I don't see them explicitly using anything like that in their code. Maybe it's something for the future. Hopefully someone can clarify what they mean by this statement.

[1] https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/29663#issuecom...

[2] https://github.com/Anarios/return-youtube-dislike

I’ve used this for a lot of math and CS textbooks. I’m not sure if this has been posted before, so feel free to flag it if it has.

I hate the term “computer science”. It not only conceals the true nature of the field (one that is deductive and mathematical rather than inductive and empirical) but it has been excessively conflated with programming and IT literacy.

Forget computer science or programming; IT literacy itself is manifold in nature. We need to analyze the goals of computer and IT literacy before we even begin teaching it.