pitchka's comments

pitchka | 10 years ago | on: Learning Chess at 40

The research on young and successful isn't really showing any causation.

Maybe being young and concentrating on a single thing makes you more obsessed about it? So you end up spending a lot of time on just it.

Maybe the older you get the less obsessed you can be, having the interest spread around on family, work, and other thoughts?

Maybe accumulated knowledge makes you slower at learning and playing because you're more cautious due to the mistakes you made before?

The research showing the decline is really weird. As I've got older I felt I learned stuff much more quickly than when I started college. I know so much that this knowledge allows me to avoid traps. Far sooner I have a feeling of understanding and can demonstrate it to someone else.

If your whole life is oriented on learning and improvement it's weird to think that will slow down.

People, as they age, lose interest in learning and rarely become obsessed about something, for most it is right after highschool, for some after college. No wonder the performance drops and IQ too. No one is using that brain as hard as it was used before.

pitchka | 10 years ago | on: I was an undercover bot for 2 months

Bot can be made where one doesn't have to parse commands.

The author of the article could have collected all the conversations and learned a bot that would correctly converse with people asking similar questions.

there's no reason that having the same question asked in different ways should be a problem.

language is structured. structured learning and prediction exists for more than two decades and just recently there have been very nice improvements to known methods (learning to search, neural networks for structured learning etc.).

one can try to summarize an answer to a question from relevant fetched documents. summarization is a structured prediction task.

for example, in the conversations with a bot, you store all of the questions and your answers.

your answers were formed by using documents that contain the needed information. now you're trying to find a mapping that will successfully fetch the relevant documents for the question, and then summarize all of the documents to as close as possible summarization (summarized text should be similar to your stored answer).

structured prediction techniques use simple methods such as pos tagging and then pruning the dependency parse tree of sentences in document to shorten it, excluding whole sentences or text-between-commas or unneeded-adjectives etc. (these methods are based on statistical machine learning, not some silly rule based technique, one can incorporate word2vec features or other neural network magic)

it's not impossible, given enough data, to build a bot that would interact successfully.

sarcasm, and emotions are still a bit away, mostly because they require knowledge about the world, and if your world is a small set of documents you won't successfully get the sarcasm or emotions. this is also the case with people when they come to a different culture.

pitchka | 10 years ago | on: The Sugar Conspiracy

There is no evidence. This whole thread is filled with misinformation and anecdotal evidence. The article lays its foundation on Lustig claims while his Bitter Truth talk had outright wrong claims.

There have been studies pointing out fruits even help decrease symptoms of diabetes.

http://nutritionj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1475-28...

The conclusion of the randomized study above was that the intake of fruit should not be restricted, despite the fear that sugar makes you die.

http://www.cabdirect.org/abstracts/19711408038.html;jsession...

This one has a mainly fruit diet for its participants. 2500kcal of fruits per day. No one had any serious side effects.

These "not man-made", paleo, keto, low-carb and other diets are all fads. All of them. They promote an unhealthy relationship with food. Not unhealthy as in philosophy but unhealthy scientifically (orthorexia + the humongous evidence that food is not poison).

It's a much higher chance that the American population is extremely orthorexic and that they avoid fruits and veggies thinking that pesticides and sugar will kill them. This unhealthy relationship results in overeating highly caloric foods like meat, dairy, eggs, drinks etc.

I highly recommend

In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

http://www.amazon.com/Defence-Food-Nutrition-Pleasures-Eatin...

The Gluten Lie

http://www.amazon.com/Gluten-Lie-Other-Myths-About/dp/194139...

for anyone thinking they have an unhealthy relationship with food that could cause them to have an unhealthy diet.

pitchka | 10 years ago | on: The Sugar Conspiracy

No, there has been no evidence.

Yes, consuming high amounts of fructose on a daily basis has some serious side effects. Consuming the same amount of glucose doesn't.

This just means that the amount of fructose intake should be moderated.

Seems to be that the majority of this community believes there are concept such as healthy food, unhealthy food, superfood etc. These concepts are scientifically non-existent.

There's such a thing, scientifically, as an unhealthy diet and healthy diet.

Sugar can be a part of a healthy diet. So can hamburgers, so can everything else.

There's been bunch of evidence for UK and Australia (where fructose intake decreased over the years) but they still got fatter and fatter.

Sugar tax is idiotic.

Lustig: Sugar makes people obese.

Reality: Carbs, fat and sugar makes people obese.

American population started eating ridiculously huge amounts of food. They'll get fat no matter what they eat if the caloric intake is 3700kcal per day.

pitchka | 10 years ago | on: The Sugar Conspiracy

Definitely. Lustig made numerous claims in his Bitter Truth talk that were just incorrect.

Here are articles that are unbalanced but on the other end of spectrum (pro sugar).

http://anthonycolpo.com/sweet-stupidity-part-1-is-sugar-real...

http://anthonycolpo.com/sweet-stupidity-part-2-the-bitter-tr...

It's interesting that in the USA the calorie consumption rose from 80s to 00s from 3100 to 3600.

In the UK and Australia they eat less fructose but more calories.

Everyone keeps on getting fatter.

There's not a single food to blame. Any food can't be healthy or unhealthy. Diets can be healthy or unhealthy. Thinking otherwise is a sign of unhealthy relationship with food. Avoiding stuff because it is carcinogenic (processed meat) or correlates with cancer (red meat) is ridiculous.

Eating large amounts every day (which is what most of the obese do) isn't?

I don't care if apples have cyanide or 60g of fructose will give me liver disease. I won't eat 50 bananas a day, I won't eat 100 apples a day, I'll eat agave syrup all over my pancakes and won't feel a thing. It's food. I enjoy it. Having fructose in it, or animal products just means I can easily overdose if I consume it every day but I won't.

pitchka | 10 years ago | on: The World Is Getting Fatter and No One Knows How to Stop It

Eating veggies and fruits is more expensive? How can that be since one needs tons of grains to feed a cow, tons of grains to get milk?

I think you've been scammed by the "organic and natural" veggie industry.

As for time consuming, have no idea why. Most of the dishes that I do take from 15-30 minutes to prepare.

This fear of processed foods is without grounds.

pitchka | 10 years ago | on: The World Is Getting Fatter and No One Knows How to Stop It

It's very hard to eat less when you eat sugar and meat. The most calorie dense foods on the planet.

Having a diet abundant in veggies allows you to eat as much as you want any time you want. The best diet for those who like to eat a lot and often.

Given the evidence it is obviously true that majority of people have no emotional maturity to control themselves. They've been given, through tax incentives of meat and dairy, an opportunity to fill themselves with large amounts of cheap meat, and it is easy to overdose with meat.

Try eating carrots, kale, lettuce, eggplants, legumes, beans, buckwheat, corn like a madman (which is what obviously the majority is doing with meat) and see if you get fat.

People think meat has a place in every meal. It's obviously not a good choice.

pitchka | 10 years ago | on: 20 lines of code that beat A/B testing (2012)

John Langford and the team (Microsoft Research) have built a contextual bandit library in Vowpal Wabbit.

It can be used from active learning to changing webpage layouts to increase ad clicks. It has the best bounds out of all exploratory algorithms.

Structured contextual bandits that come with LOLS (another algorithm present in vowpal wabbit) is extremely powerful.

All for free under BSD3.

pitchka | 10 years ago | on: GitLab Pages

Cache headers are set to expire after 10 minutes at GitHub pages.

Which is a bit too restrictive on js, images or css files.

It would be nice if these cache headers could be set to a larger period (1 year, or something similar). I'm not certain if any engineering hurdles or dangers exist in doing so, and I'm not implying this is something that can easily be done - since obviously GitHub didn't do it for their Pages.

pitchka | 10 years ago | on: GitLab Pages

Well, now if only I can change the max-age of some resources (images, css, js) it'll get better than github.

Good job!

pitchka | 10 years ago | on: Dominions of fizz: the carbonated-drinks industry and public health [pdf]

Just like the statistic of sweet beverages. Of course that beers that include fish stuff require more or less water.

Of course that wine produced in dry climate requires a lot of water.

Producing a cow, chicken or pig will take a lot of water, probably not much of a difference if animal is located at northern/southern parts or in some shed at equatorial region.

I don't understand what is misleading. Data of water pollution should be of more concern than how much water something needs to thrive.

This data shouldn't influence your decision of what to consume. Data of pollution should.

If you're worried some categories are incorrect then at least you have a lower bound there. Add the water footprint of food that cow or pig eats and then you'll get more accurate. It's no-brainer that raising 60 billion land animals yearly takes a lot of water but it's a silly statistic. The pollution of water that the process creates is more important and a much more relevant statistic.

pitchka | 10 years ago | on: Dominions of fizz: the carbonated-drinks industry and public health [pdf]

Another nice comparison:

Milk: ~1000 liters of water per liter

Chocolate: ~17000 liters of water per kg

Beef: ~15000 liters of water per kg

Sheep Meat: ~10000 liters of water per kg

Pork: ~6000 liters of water per kg

Butter: ~5500 liters of water per kg

Chicken meat: ~4500 liters of water per kg

Wine: ~400 liters of water per liter

Beer: ~300 liters of water per liter

source: http://www.imeche.org/policy-and-press/reports/detail/global...

(pdf report on the right)

pitchka | 10 years ago | on: Researcher links mass extinctions to 'Planet X'

Well, it's good that the problem solvers of the world are not as optimistic and wish to solve the problems.

Otherwise we'd all be like "good, in a thousand years everything's going to be ok, 'cos science".

pitchka | 10 years ago | on: Researcher links mass extinctions to 'Planet X'

It's weird how we seem to understand exponential growth of technology but have a hard time grasping the exponential build-up of excess greenhouse gases due to the exponential growth of human population and economy.

I wonder how these thousand years might look if currently there have been temperature difference of extremes by 20 degrees, with average already raised by 2.

For example, mass extinction of oceanic ecosystems is due to somewhere around 2050s. Whole oceans will get empty very quickly. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/314/5800/787

Collateral victim count of ~3 trillion yearly deaths of oceanic animals is a big contributor.

We'll see how the world will cope when main oxygen producers disappear.

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