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I’m building PaperDrop it's a research workspace that turns PDFs and new arXiv papers into something you can actually work with (notes, questions, cross paper comparisons). Would love feedback from people who read a lot of papers: https://paperdrop.xyz

It's still early prototype / beta, but wanted to share it anyway!


i love this, thank you!

Indian and Chinese are not languages


I'm very aware of this. The project does not specify more than an in- and zh- prefix.


Voices, not languages. The "English" one is American though.


According to Crunchbase, Loopt raised $39.1M.


How many years did it take to go from 39 million to 43 million in value? Would've been better off in bonds, perhaps.

This isn't a success story, it's a redistribution of wealth from investors to the founders.


Ah, the much-sought-after 1.1X return that VCs really salivate over.


From the github issue referenced in the FAQ, I think they mean that because TensorFlow only natively supports CUDA, TensorFire may outperform TensorFlow on computers that have non Nvidia GPUs, such as the new MacBook Pro.


In the past, i've found that these higher level libraries built on top of TF are useful for quick model building, but should be used cautiously. By having default hyperparameters it can be easy to blindly build semi-working models without knowing what's happening. I would recommend either reading the associated papers or implementing the models in code (at least once) before using these pre-built models. That being said, i'm really excited by this project! I think it'll save researchers a bunch of time.


Disclosure: I work at Google.

This is great feedback! I'd love to hear more - if you'd like to send me some examples of what you've seen in the past with pitfalls, I'd love to share them with the team.

Thanks! aronchick (at) google


I like their focus on flexibility. I've tried a few deep RL implementations in the past and run into issues like their DQN or A3C implementation being hardwired in a number of ways to working only on ALE, with no way to use it on other problems (eg the CNN dimensions are hardwired).


If I understand the project correctly it precisely does not advocate default hyperparameters but exposes all configurations through the declarative interface.


I may have used the term hyperparameter too loosely. Yes, this project does a good job on taking a configuration first approach, but even they set some defaults. For example, they set relu as their default layer activation function. I haven't had time to see what other such defaults are being set.


Thanks for your feedback! To clarify our philosophy regarding default configurations: On the one hand, we try to make all hyperparameters and settings of the agents/models centrally configurable, by specifying one configuration object/file. On the other hand, we try to provide a set of default values, where it makes sense for the applied user, for whom the full range of hyperparameters is probably not interesting. In doing so, we try to combine "the best of both worlds", but sometimes that might lead to conflicts. This is something we're actively working on, to get the balance right (and comments are very welcome, best on GitHub).


I think he maybe referring to this:

Bannon responded: “When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think . . . ” he didn’t finish his sentence. “A country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society.”

http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/16/13653490/steve-bannon-tru...


From the Verge article:

> While Bannon didn’t explicitly say anything against immigrants, he seemed to hint at the idea of a white nationalist identity with the phrase “civic society.”

That seems like a pretty big jump from him citing a common stat to Verge accusing him of calling for a white nationalist state. He didn't say anything close to that.

He may hold nationalist ideas where he wants more American's founding good companies domestically. But I'm not really seeing where he is calling for a white society or for an end of Asians starting companies? It could easily just as much imply that he just wants to see more Americans being successful founders in the US tech industry in addition to Asians?

From someone outside of the industry it may be a rational concern question to ask why there aren't more Americans starting those top companies? You can ask that and be concerned about that while not being characterizing the problem as Asians taking some fixed amount of jobs.

The insistence of people to fill in all the blanks of everything Steve Bannon doesn't say with some generic white supremacist viewpoint is really strange to me. Like there's an attempt to discredit any of his ideas by associating them with white nationalism. Usually by cherry picking statements and inventing a bunch of implied underlying meaning - that may or may not actually exist - to fill in the gaps until a narrative is complete. It's actually quite brilliant from a partisan character assassination perspective.


Knowing that explicit white nationalism could be problematic, a white nationalist might speak in code. This is similar to the way someone might speak in code when discussing criminal activity, since it's illegal to surveil non-criminal discussion. The question in court is whether a reasonable person would interpret a conversation as normal speech or criminal code. "The eagle flies at midnight," is obvious code. Other speech is not so clear.

> It could easily just as much imply that he just wants to see more Americans being successful founders in the tech industry in addition to Asians?

First, Asians can be and often are Americans.

Second, why would Bannon bring up this point that more "Americans" should be successful founders? Is it that our schools are failing? No, because Asians attend the same schools. Ah, I've got it. Perhaps there's a cultural problem with white anglo-saxon protestants: anti-intellectualism and anti-education. Is that what Bannon is getting at?


Knowing that explicit white nationalism could be problematic, a white nationalist must speak in code.

You have got to be kidding me. Ok, let me play along.

Xapata is clearly a white nationalist! How do I know it? He doesn't speak in white nationalist terms! Those white nationalists need to speak in code, so the evidence is clear!


Not kidding at all. Was my comparison with drug-speak not clear? Let me try again.

Suppose I'm a nice girl. A guy just asked me if I was free to go to dinner tonight. I don't want to offend, so I say, "I'm sorry, I'm washing my hair tonight." The guy now has a conundrum. He can interpret the statement literally and ask if I'm free for dinner tomorrow night, or he can interpret it as that I do not want to eat dinner with him. Humans speak in codes and implications regularly.

In Bannon's case, we must decide what interpretation of his thought is the most plausible cause of his speech. I can come up with two options:

1. Bannon believes there's something hindering the ethnic and cultural majority from technological entrepreneurialism and we should address that problem.

2. Bannon believes the number of ethnic minorities achieving economic success will decrease the prevalence of the historically common culture. Being of that culture, he dislikes this trend.

Are there any other interpretations? What's the most plausible to you?


>Knowing that explicit white nationalism could be problematic, a white nationalist might speak in code.

This is a terribly dishonest debating tactic.


Yes, it's quite frustrating to try to discuss topics when people won't speak clearly.


I meant on your part, obviously. Once you start assigning new meanings to other people's words you can make them into any kind of people you want.


Not obvious at all. I thought we were sharing a frustration for the recent trend in politics to make implications rather than explicit statements.

I didn't think I was assigning new meaning, but only exactly what Bannon intended. I can, obviously, never be certain I've understood him correctly, so I just make my best guess. It's reasonable to expect that different people will make different guesses.

What is your interpretation of Bannon's words?


>I didn't think I was assigning new meaning, but only exactly what Bannon intended. I can, obviously, never be certain I've understood him correctly, so I just make my best guess.

Why are you guessing at all? Why are you assuming he isn't saying what he means?

>What is your interpretation of Bannon's words?

What they mean in English.


> saying what he means

> What they mean in English.

If I told you to "take a hike" would you believe I was encouraging you to walk outdoors?


> What they mean in English

Let's pretend English is my second language. Could you paraphrase Bannon to help me understand him more clearly?


What a surprise, a request for citation of an outrageous anti-Trump claim results in an avalanche of irrelevant links.


> outrageous ... irrelevant

The citation seems quite clear to me. Perhaps I'm missing something. Was Bannon not complaining about the number of ethnic minorities?


A generous interpretation of Bannon would be that he simply wants to see more domestic workers founding successful tech companies. He might see these statistics not as a reason to get rid of ethnic minorities, but rather as a sign that something about American culture is discouraging Americans from entrepreneurism.


Why would he not finish his thought to clarify that Americans are not as entrepreneurial as Asians? That seems like an easy thing to say if that's what he meant.


It's possible he didn't think it needed clarification. This discussion took place within effectively a far-right echo chamber where everyone was already more or less on the same page. It's also possible he didn't even feel very strongly about this point to begin with and decided he didn't like it before even finishing his sentence. It's really impossible to say. During live, unscripted discussions it's very common for someone to begin a thought, decide they don't even personally like it while in the midst of saying it, and then cut themselves off.


> on the same page

So... that page is the understanding that the majority culture suppresses the entrepreneurial spirit or are bad at math and science? If that's the echo chamber of the far-right, that's a big surprise to me.

> decide they don't even personally like it while in the midst of saying it, and then cut themselves off.

That's possible. Indeed it sounds like Bannon cut himself off, but more for disliking the clarity than the content of what he was saying. It sounded like he caught himself and chose to insinuate rather than elucidate.


I have a old Chromebook that I am using as my primary dev machine (at home). Was hoping to upgrade it to a MBP, but now i'm not sure. I know they are two different classes of machines, but what really struck me in that I can literally buy 10 Chromebooks for 1 MBP.


Which Chromebook do you use for dev, and how do you set it up for your dev env (a quick name of a site to read would be awesome)


Not OP, but r/crouton works pretty well


Hmm, I also have uBlock Origin on, and the website renders perfectly for me (on chrome). I think this is might be a firefox specific issue.


It also renders fine in Firefox with default settings/filter lists.


All ML networks are inherently biased towards its creators. My colleague recently described this issue to me as the "Old, white, male" problem. This is why most voice recognition services drastically fail when they are shown foreign accents.


> This is why most voice recognition services drastically fail when they are shown foreign accents

As someone with a broad Norwegian accent: This has gotten massively better over the last few years.

Not that long ago, my local cinema chain started using voice recognition to discriminate between a list of city names, and it would consistently think I said "Birmingham" when I said "London" (!).

These days, both my Amazon Fire and the Youtube app will correctly recognise most things I throw at it, including e.g. names of random Youtube channels that bear no relation to real English words.

It's by no means perfect, but it's getting there. In relation to the "old, white, male" problem (well, I do somewhat fit that), presumably because these systems are now finally trained on huge and varied data sets.


There are so many theories on what is happening, let me propose yet another. Satoshi Nakamoto is akin to the Dread Pirate Roberts. Who knows how many Satoshi's there have been? Some may have died, some may have lost interest, but the torch continues to burn, and must be passed on.


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