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kurumo | 12 years ago | on: Ask HN: How do I explain Tor to my Mom?

Imagine I want to send a letter to someone, but I am worried that it may be intercepted (by the government, for the sake of argument). So instead of sending it directly to my recepient, I make arrangements with some reliable friends so that if they receive a letter from one of us, they take it out of the envelope and put it in different one, addressed to another friend. To make sure the letter doesn't travel forever we add dots at the end; once there are more than three (four, five...), we send the letter to the original intended recepient. Nobody knows for sure who is the person who sent the letter originally (as I can put different number of dots at the end of the letter). We can also make it so that none of the intermediate parties know what the message says (possibly even who is the final recipient?) by encoding the message at every step and using extra envelopes. At the outset I write my letter, add some dots at the end and send it to one to my friends, picked randomly, together with an extra envelope addressed to the intended recepient.

That should do as far as Tor goes, but the more general problem of explaining why is such a thing needed by your mom is much harder. (Unless she lives in North Korea or some such place).

kurumo | 12 years ago | on: Bill Gates loses to Magnus Carlsen in 9 moves

There is an IM in Boston who routinely gives people, mostly without regard for their rating, 30 seconds to 5 minutes odds with no increment. I have seen him win these controls against other masters. So comparatively it is not too surprising that Carlsen would be willing to accept these odds against an unrated amateur. Chess with this kind of time controls is basically a different game, which requires emphasis on different skills than do standard time controls.

kurumo | 12 years ago | on: Bill Gates loses to Magnus Carlsen in 9 moves

That is simply incorrect. A GM can perhaps give a strong amateur (2000+) 1 to 5 time odds, maybe 1 to 7, in under a minute time controls. Larger odds would be arrogant, foolish or even suicidal, depending on the specific GM (rating, opening repertoire, etc.)

kurumo | 13 years ago | on: Things I Learned Building The Most Powerful Language Processing Engine

Fair use or not, if you could do it I would buy it :) Fine, forget conference papers. If you can demonstrate fast NER in multiple languages, across domains, with competitive precision/recall metrics, I will buy it. The rest of it is not particularly interesting to me because it's frankly not that hard.

kurumo | 13 years ago | on: Things I Learned Building The Most Powerful Language Processing Engine

Thanks, that's somewhat helpful. I am not particularly interested in the summarizer plugin itself (mostly because we have one, built in house), but I would love to talk about the underlying pipeline. If you have e.g. a named entity recognition library that performs as well as you say in Romance languages on standard data sets, you have material for at least one conference paper, and furthermore a product much more valuable than the summarizer itself.

My question about speed referred to syntactic parsing specifically. I am sure you can do entropy scoring faster than 200ms per sentence, but unless you have access to parses you are unlikely to be able to do more than purely extractive summarization. That's what Summly does, and every other summarizer on the planet as well. (Except perhaps Columbia's Newsblaster, but that's a bit of a different story).

kurumo | 13 years ago | on: Things I Learned Building The Most Powerful Language Processing Engine

What precisely makes this particular engine 'the most powerful in the world'? Does it do domain independent named entity recognition with an F score better than 0.8? For what classes of entities? Is it at least adaptable without oodles of training data? Does it do syntactic parsing? With F scores of 0.9 or better? Faster than 200ms per sentence? Across domains? Does it do anything at all in languages other than English? If there is a page on that site where it answers these types of questions I couldn't find it..

kurumo | 13 years ago | on: Ask HN: FizzBuzz for mathematicians ...

It tells me if they can at least minimally apply their knowledge and reason about a problem. It's a filter question. If a person with a college degree in math cannot solve this, what's the likelihood they will be able to solve an actual real problem I need them to work on?

kurumo | 13 years ago | on: Ask HN: FizzBuzz for mathematicians ...

I have been using this when interviewing people with math degrees:

Two players play a game with a single six-sided die. The player that starts can only win by rolling a 1. If he or she doesn't win, the other player gets to roll; he or she can only win by rolling a 6. The game continues until one player wins. What's the probability the first player wins (eventually)?

kurumo | 14 years ago | on: Tor-ramdisk

Now, how hard would it be to design a sort of minimal virtual machine that can run this in parallel with e.g. a Windows host OS? Distribute it via some existing delivery vector, et voila...

kurumo | 14 years ago | on: Standard & Poor's gives Google the U.S. debt treatment

That is not entirely correct. If you have already acquired credibility (somehow, doesn't matter how for the purposes of this exercise), your estimate or advice can (and frequently does) become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Knowing that a significant number of investors will follow your advice gives you information which can be used in the market. It then stands to reason that the most profitable thing you could do would be to give this advice to the maximum possible number of people.

kurumo | 14 years ago | on: Estimate your English vocabulary size

29,500, non-native English speaker (but studied in the US). Retook the test and omitted all the words I could not define with total confidence on the spot; the original score was 31,400. The test is peculiar in that the distribution appears to be uneven. Subjectively there is a sharp break between words that one would know from Shakespeare, Tolkien and Dunsany, and words no one would ever know unless they studied the OED. For statistical significance they would need more words.

kurumo | 15 years ago | on: Lichess - Don't register. Play Chess.

Not bad at all as far as interface goes, but their timer is buggy. In 5 0 it ate 15 seconds of my time, apparently due to lag. A thought I had for a while: do analysis on games as they occur and try to estimate opponents' strength, as a way to detect cheating of the type where one of the players mimics a computer. Computationally expensive, but would be fun to try.
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