vtantia
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3 years ago
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on: Ask HN: What were the papers on the list Ilya Sutskever gave John Carmack?
vtantia
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5 years ago
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on: A Sober Look at SPACs (2020)
Good point. Unfortunately, I couldn't find where their funding comes from from a quick cursory search (and I don't just mean the funding for graduate students, or salaries). If anyone could provide details about this, I would much appreciate it
vtantia
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5 years ago
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on: A Sober Look at SPACs (2020)
That is a good point but this is temporary. SPAC lords will reduce these margins soon enough. It is in their direct incentive to do so. This is a speculative assertion by me (one that I'm quite confident about), but I'm not sure one can be certain about the future
vtantia
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5 years ago
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on: A Sober Look at SPACs (2020)
Look at the comments below which mention 1 bullet point and do not look holistically at the problem and the solution. I have been finding this to be the case on a lot of HN comments recently
I do not claim to be making an impartial analysis myself. Just putting out some points which have been omitted by the Wall Street-funded academic paper
vtantia
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5 years ago
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on: A Sober Look at SPACs (2020)
Whenever you have some instrument attacking Wall Street (in this case, the IPO itself), papers come out trying to protect them. This does not mention drawbacks of the IPO the SPAC is getting rid of - the 6-7% investment banking fee, the hassle of doing several roadshows, the near 100% IPO pop due to which the company raises half of what it would have (amounting to a 50% fee so to say which goes into the pockets of institutional investors) amid other things. It is sad that critical reasoning is dead on HN. Nothing is ever purely good or purely bad. An impartial cost-benefit analysis needs to be done which is sadly impossible for someone whose funding comes from the deep pockets of Wall Street and institutional investors.
I have not even begun diving into the benefits of SPACs - some of which are the opportunity for audacious bets like Virgin Galactic holdings which Wall Street would assume to be a loss making company, benefits of PIPEs in SPACs (which would be the topic for a whole new post), the speed of going public.
vtantia
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5 years ago
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on: ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook: A SIMD Benchmark
I'm not quite sure that SIMD is a relevant benchmark for comparing the processors. Wouldn't the GPU and/or neural engine take care of SIMD on the ARM Macbook?
vtantia
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5 years ago
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on: Underwriters and Short Sellers Manipulate Share Prices
I think it might be a great business model for movie theaters to offer themselves. This would be true especially if their gains from selling subscriptions (and from selling food) outperforms their marginal loss on opening up more shows in theaters. I think the margin loss on opening up shows should be quite low, assuming real estate and buying permission to screen movies be the main cost. I believe the marginal cost of more shows - hiring employees to clean up the seats, manage crowds (including entry / ticket checking), and wear and tear of seats might be relatively lower.
The business model just doesn't make sense if you're buying seats at a high cost from cinema theaters, and selling subscription passes. The trump card here would be to get movie chains to offer unlimited seats on your platform in return for a high percentage of the subscription fee. Negotiation skills matter!
vtantia
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6 years ago
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on: Congolese doctor discovered Ebola, but didn't get credit until now
Does the article mean credit in the part of the world influenced by the Western media?
vtantia
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6 years ago
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on: Ask HN: How Do You Read?
I have similar experience while reading any other material as well or while watching a TV show like Billions. However, I currently believe that is part of the value and not majorly a distraction. That exploration leads me to discover directions which the author has not taken, tie the story to my own experiences, think about it further and internalize what I have read if it is important.
vtantia
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7 years ago
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on: Google’s new conversational AI could eventually undermine our sense of identity
The way our current algorithms are designed, the computer only plays dumb if it's training data has dumb humans. It cannot think on its own
vtantia
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7 years ago
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on: Google’s new conversational AI could eventually undermine our sense of identity
I am not saying there is no risk. What I am saying is it is nearly impossible with the machine learning/deep learning technology we have now (AI simply isn't smart enough). The training data Google obtained could be from Google voice calls by people which is available for free in the US (I am not sure about this).
What I am sure about is that the current AI will fail badly without the training data.
vtantia
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7 years ago
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on: Google’s new conversational AI could eventually undermine our sense of identity
I don't think there is a remote possibility of this happening in the near future (10-20 years). I work in one of the best deep learning research groups in the world. We were discussing this. And the first question one of my friends asked was- "so the Google assistant knows how to book appointments between 10 and 12pm". Meaning, if you change even a few conditions in the request which is not present in the training data, the call won't go as expected.
However, there is a risk of the AI manipulating us. This is only due to the mistakes by Google engineers not because of the AI becoming "smart".
