AI News Today

Which is faster, keyboard or mouse? A large number of programmers believe that the keyboard is faster for all (programming-related) tasks. However, there are a few widely cited webpages on AskTog which claim that Apple studies show that using the mouse is faster than using the keyboard for everything and that people who think that using the keyboard is faster are just deluding themselves. This might sound extreme, but, just for example, one page says that the author has “never seen [the keybo

I often talk to startups that claim that their compensation package has a higher expected value than the equivalent package at a place like Facebook, Google, Twitter, or Snapchat. One thing I don’t understand about this claim is, if the claim is true, why shouldn’t the startup go to an investor, sell their options for what they claim their options to be worth, and then pay me in cash? The non-obvious value of options combined with their volatility is a barrier for recruiting. Additiona

Provalis Research is holding a three-day training workshop for QDA Miner 5 and WordStat 7 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The training will be held from August 16th to August 18, 2017 at the Provalis Research head office. It is also possible to register for a 2 day QDA Miner workshop only. However, when the number of participants […]

The ALS algorithm introduced by Hu et al., is a very popular technique used in Recommender System problems, especially when we have implicit datasets (for example clicks, likes etc). It can handle large volumes of data reasonably well and we can find many good implementations in various Machine Learning frameworks. Spark includes the algorithm in […]

The dstat is an awesome little tool which allows you to get resource statistics for your Linux box. It has a modular architecture which allows you to develop additional plugins and it’s easy to use. Recently I was profiling a Deep Learning pipeline developed with Keras and Tensorflow and I needed detailed statistics about the […]

A couple years ago, I took a road trip from Wisconsin to Washington and mostly stayed in rural hotels on the way. I expected the internet in rural areas too sparse to have cable internet to be slow, but I was still surprised that a large fraction of the web was inaccessible. Some blogs with lightweight styling were readable, as were pages by academics who hadn’t updated the styling on their website since 1995. But very few commercial websites were usable (other than Google). When I measured m

Datumbox Framework v0.8.0 is out and packs several powerful features! This version brings new Preprocessing, Feature Selection and Model Selection algorithms, new powerful Storage Engines that give better control on how the Models and the Dataframes are saved/loaded, several pre-trained Machine Learning models and lots of memory & speed improvements. Download it now from Github […]

Several interactive visualizations of a generative model of handwriting. Some are fun, some are serious.

At our last informal event at the old bar we had a look at these papers, what are your thoughts on them? A brain controlled drone race! Link Play a game of “20 Questions” using only brainwaves Link Will scientists soon be able to read minds? Neuroscientists are starting to decipher what a person is seeing, remembering and dreaming just by looking at their brain …

HN comments are terrible . On any <a href="https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1280651255275

Us neuroscientists have decided to take a trip to london to attend the BNA Christmas Symposium, with this years topic being Mental Health! It’s on Monday 12th, but we went all out and decided we want a full weekend in london. The plan is to get the megabus down on Saturday, the day after lectures finish for the term. We’ll stay in a hostel for 2 …

Our upcoming event on 25th October at the Old Bar, 5-6pm will concern the topic of consciousness. Come along to discuss! ‘Definition: the state of being aware of and responsive to one’s surroundings’. What is consciousness to you? How would you define it? We’ll be looking at scientific papers, less scientific and easy to understand articles as well as discussing recent research into consciousness going …

When we look very closely at images generated by neural networks, we often see a strange checkerboard pattern of artifacts.

There are a lot of “12 CS books every programmer must read” lists floating around out there. That's nonsense. The field is too broad for almost any topic to be required reading for all programmers, and even if a topic is that important, people's learning preferences differ too much for any book on that topic to be the best book on the topic for all people. This is a list of topics and books where I've read the book , am

Joel Spolsky has a classic blog post on "Finding Great Developers" where he popularized the meme that great developers are impossible to find, a corollary of which is that if you can find someone, they're not great. Joel writes, The great software developers, indeed, the best people in every field, are quite simply never on the market. The average great software developer will apply for, total, maybe, four jobs in their entire career. ... If you're luc

I can't think of a single large software company that doesn't regularly draw internet comments of the form “What do all the employees do? I could build their product myself.” Benjamin Pollack and Jeff Atwood called out people who do that with Stack Overflow. But Stack O

Following a huge turnout at our intro event, we invite you to join us for our first formal event! Where? Baines Wing 2.16 When? 11th October 5-6pm We have two level 3 Neuroscience students: Molly Campbell from the All That is Neuro blog presenting her article on Musicogenic Epilepsy.. can Sean Paul really cause a seizure? Alice van der Schoot talking about a hydrocephalus project she …

Developer compensation has skyrocketed since the demise of the Google et al. wage-suppressing no-hire agreement , to the point where compensation rivals and maybe even exceeds compensation in traditionally remunerative fields like law, consulting, etc. In software, "senior" dev salary at a high-paying tech company is $350k/yr, where "senior" can mean "someone three years of out school" and it's not uncommon for someone who's considered a hig

TUESDAY 26 September 5-6pm Location: Baines Wing 2.16, University of Leeds https://www.facebook.com/events/1220078328065408/ During Fresher’s week we had people signing up from different fields, such as medicine, psychology, philosophy and yoga. We will explain which kind of activities we will be doing this year: 1) giving students the opportunity to practise presentations of neuroscience-related topics (no marking, no lecturers, no pressure!) 2) informal chats at the …

Tavish Armstrong has a great document where he describes how and when he learned the programming skills he has . I like this idea because I've found that the paths that people take to get into programming are much more varied than stereotypes give credit for, and I think it's useful to see that there are many possible paths into programming. Personally, I spent a decade working as an electrical engineer before taking

A visual overview of neural attention, and the powerful extensions of neural networks being built on top of it.

Do concurrency bugs matter? From the literature, we know that most reported bugs in distributed systems have really simple causes and can be caught by trivial tests, even when we only look at bugs that cause really bad failures, like loss of a cluster or data corruption. The filesystem literature echos this result -- a simple checker that looks for totally unimplemented error handling can find hu

This is one of those “N technical things every programmer must read” lists, except that “programmer” is way too broad a term and the styles of writing people find helpful for them are too different for any such list to contain a non-zero number of items (if you want the entire list to be helpful to everyone). So here's a list of some things you might want to read, and why you might (or might not) want to read them. <a href="https://shipilev.net

The book starts with a story about a time Margaret Hamilton brought her young daughter with her to NASA, back in the days of the Apollo program. During a simulation mission, her daughter caused the mission to crash by pressing some keys that caused a prelaunch program to run during th

An acquaintance of mine, let’s call him Mike, is looking for work after getting laid off from a contract role at Microsoft, which has happened to a lot of people I know. Like me, Mike has 11 years in industry. Unlike me, he doesn't know a lot of folks at trendy companies, so I passed his resume around to some engineers I know at companies that are desperately hiring. My engineering friends thought Mike's resume was fine, but most recruiters rejected him in the resume screening phase. W

These are archived from the now defunct su3su2u1 tumblr . Since there was some controversy over su3su2u1's identity, I'll note that I am not su3su2u1 and that hosting this material is neither an endorsement nor a sign of agreement. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality full review I opened up a bottle of delicious older-than-me scotch when Terry Pratchett died,

These are archived from the now defunct su3su2u1 tumblr . A Roundabout Approach to Quantum Mechanics This will be the first post in what I hope will be a series that outlines some ideas from quantum mechanics. I will try to keep it light, and not overly math filled- which means I’m not really teaching you physics. I’m teaching you some flavor of the physics. I originally wrote here “you ca

Perf is probably the most widely used general purpose performance debugging tool on Linux. There are multiple contenders for the #2 spot, and, like perf, they're sampling profilers. Sampling profilers are great. They tend to be easy-to-use and low-overhead compared to most alternatives. However, there are large classes of performance problems sampling profilers can't debug effectively, and those problems are becoming more important. For example, consider a Google search query. Below, w

2015 was a pretty good year for Intel. Their quarterly earnings reports exceeded expectations every quarter. They continue to be the only game in town for the serious server market, which continues to grow exponentially; from the earnings reports of the two largest cloud vendors, we can see that AWS and Azure grew by 80% and 100%, respectively. That growth has effectively offset the damage Intel has seen from the continued decline of the desktop market. For a while, it looked like <a href="//

Have you ever mentioned something that seems totally normal to you only to be greeted by surprise? Happens to me all the time when I describe something everyone at work thinks is normal. For some reason, my conversation partner's face morphs from pleasant smile to rictus of horror. Here are a few representative examples. There's the company that is perhaps the nicest place I've ever worked, combining the best parts of Valve and Netflix. The people are amazing and you're given near tota

There's a meme that's been going around for a while now: you should join a startup because the money is better and the work is more technically interesting. Paul Graham says that the best way to make money is to "start or join a startup", which has been "a reliable way to get rich for hundreds of years", and that you can "compress a career's worth of earnings into a few years". Michael Arrington says that you'll <a href="https://www.jwz.org/blog

<p>After immersing myself for years and years in the world of finance (specifically, options market making and algorithmic trading), there was no escaping this mantra of “no risk, no reward.” Most of the time, my (trading) style was fairly risk-averse. I knew how to find the signals of opportunities among the daily noise to reap small rewards. Fortunately, I also learned how to think about the outliers and to take the occasional big but calculated risks.</p> <p> <a href="https://signal.org/blog/

<p>TIL that Bell Labs and a whole lot of other websites block archive.org, not to mention most search engines. Turns out I have <a href="https://github.com/danluu/debugging-stories/issues/3">a broken website link</a> in a GitHub repo, caused by the deletion of an old webpage. When I tried to pull the original from archive.org, I found that it's not available because Bell Labs blocks the archive.org crawler in their robots.txt:</p> <p></p> <pre><code>User-agent: Googlebot User-agent: msnbot User-

<p>Why are people so concerned with hardware power consumption nowadays? Some common answers to this question are that <a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/3/9/8178213/apple-macbook-all-batteries">power is critically important for phones, tablets, and laptops</a> and that <a href="ftp://ftp.cs.utexas.edu/pub/dburger/papers/ISCA11.pdf">we can put more silicon on a modern chip than we can effectively use</a>. In 2001 <a href="http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=912412&url=http%3A%2F%

<p>There's an ongoing debate over whether "AI" will ever be good enough to displace humans and, if so, when it will happen. In this debate, the optimists tend to focus on how much AI is improving and the pessimists point to all the ways AI isn't as good as an ideal human being. I think this misses two very important factors.</p> <p>One, is that jobs that are on the potential chopping block, such as first-line customer service, customer service for industries that are either low margin or don't c

<p><em>Winter Break Of Code Day 2</em></p> <p>Because I might get sappy, here’s a picture to ease that before I let it all out.</p> <p><img src="/blog/images/wboc-hanaleitown.jpg" class="nice" /></p> <p>After being promptly woken up by numerous roosters at 7:30 AM, I still can’t believe I’m here. My application was pretty last-minute, completed when I was in a state of droopiness and scholarship-application-hyperdrive. But I got on a plane from the Midwest, went from cloudy, 20 degrees with wind

In this guide we are going to discuss how to install and use the Datumbox Machine Learning framework in your Java projects. Since almost all of the code is written in Java, using it is as simple as including it as dependency in your Java project. Nevertheless a couple of classes (DataEnvelopmentAnalysis and LPSolver) use […]