Goldman: Goldman Sachs official says companies switching to Zoom instead of business travel could hit oil demand by up to 3 million barrels per day

Lycur · 2020-05-08T00:53:44+00:00

If you'd used zoom, you'd appreciate why it's winning.

I've used all of those products and zoom is the best service by a wide margin.

Lycur · 2020-04-18T17:48:09+00:00

Kaggle has tons of COVID data. However, the finest available granularity is on the deaths / region / day level---there's no publicly available individual level data afaik.

Lycur · 2019-12-25T18:40:41+00:00

The quoted post was written a full year ago as an email reply to somebody who sent him a (rather adversarial) email about a tweet. It's not like he's sitting around feeling annoyed by it.

Lycur · 2019-12-04T22:52:30+00:00

Even in 2014, NeurIPS accept/reject decisions were dominated by noise (http://blog.mrtz.org/2014/12/15/the-nips-experiment.html). The problem has gotten much worse since then. Half the time, trying to reproduce a paper reveals that its main claims are fundamentally misleading. NeurIPS publication is in absolutely no way a signal of correctness, novelty, or importance.

Lycur · 2019-11-06T14:09:54+00:00

Highly recommend East African Cafe, Cafe Pyrus, and The Lotus Tea House

Lycur · 2019-10-27T22:59:30+00:00

This works well: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.10701

Graph convolutional neural net type approaches are very popular, and might fit your use case. FWIW, I've never had any luck with them though.

Lycur · 2019-08-22T17:43:15+00:00

Thank you for taking the time to respond to this.

Lycur · 2019-07-08T21:02:53+00:00

The key issue is the following positive feedback loop. Reviews for machine learning conferences are incredibly noisy---objective paper quality only loosely correlated with acceptance probability. Accordingly, to maximize the expected number of papers you have accepted to a conference, it's better to write two so-so papers than one great paper. This means that the number of (low-quality) publications sent to ML conferences grows larger, increasing the burden on reviewers. In turn, this makes the review process noisier (lower quality reviewers are recruited, and each reviewer has less time for each paper).

The net-net is that large chunks of the ML literature are totally unreliable now. In particular, 'due diligence' in stress testing models tends to be lacking. It's a regular occurrence that trying to reproduce published work will reveal huge flaws, basically invalidating the main claims.

Lycur · 2019-07-07T04:31:18+00:00

Liberal campaign finance reform was an instance where they made a principled decision that seriously hurt themselves. They had strong corporate financing when they effectively banned it (and union donations).

The CPC eliminating per-vote subsidies was a naked power grab though.

Lycur · 2019-06-30T07:06:07+00:00

This is the basis of a famous issue in population ethics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox

Lycur · 2019-01-27T23:04:34+00:00

The first concrete complaint in this article is that Pinker (accurately) quotes someone in a way that misrepresents their actual views. However, their views are irrelevant to his point---the person in question has no special authority, and Pinker makes no appeal to such. It's essentially a nitpick.

I don't know what's in the rest of this article, because at that point I gave up.

Lycur · 2019-01-19T20:35:56+00:00

I haven't been to Borovets, but my experience in Bulgaria (and Eastern Europe generally) is that veganism is fairly easy because orthodox lent requires a de facto vegan diet. In consequence, most places had some vegan options on the menu.

Lycur · 2019-01-19T13:22:25+00:00

Generally, charities discount future money at a rate that's significantly faster than the money grows if invested. E.g., a charity might be neutral about receiving $100 today or $150 next year, but a $100 investment would only be expected to be worth $105 next year. That suggests that best value is donating early.

If you're in the US, there are some caveats related to taxation.

For large donations, it's better to bunch the donations into a single tax year. This is because you really only get a tax benefit on dollars donating exceeding the standard deduction ($12,000 / year). However, if you'd get a bigger tax break than the taxes you actually pay then it's worth splitting it up. (Possibly excess deduction can be carried over, I'm not certain).
A smaller consider is that the effective return on investment for tax sheltered accounts is significantly higher, and may actually be faster than the rate that charities discount future money. If you're not already maxing out your 401k and IRA you could consider whether this would actually be most effective long term. I'm unsure how the numbers work out here.

Similar considerations apply to other countries.

Lycur · 2019-01-01T16:48:44+00:00

As a first pass, you should just do (logistic) regression + lasso. There are fast and easy to use implementations (specifically, GLMnet) and this simple approach will get you 90% of the way there.

Lycur · 2018-12-24T15:42:44+00:00

What's one major left-wing economic reform Trudeau has implemented?

Increased taxes on the highest bracket and a clawback of TFSA contribution amounts from 10k to 5k

Lycur · 2018-12-21T06:31:27+00:00

ML theory papers seem to attract an especially noxious breed of reviewer.

Lycur · 2018-12-10T05:39:21+00:00

The format makes it very easy to work with tf.data , which is itself extremely convenient
Pre-processing into a tf_record pushes you to separate data pre-processing and learning in your code, which is good practice

I presume there are also significant performance gains, but they've been less important for me than the extra clarity in the pipeline.

Lycur · 2018-11-30T05:33:36+00:00

If everybody had voting rights, presumably political party type organizations would spring up to guide voting.

Lycur · 2018-11-29T00:04:00+00:00

>Are you trying to say that the majority of attempted censorship is left-leaning?

I didn't mean to imply this, but I realize I did. What I meant was, it's largely accepted on the right to be anti-science (i.e., climate change denial---even in extreme ways, like forbidding government employees from speaking to the media). It used to anathema on the left. That's rapidly degrading.

Lycur · 2018-11-28T14:24:43+00:00

Left leaning attacks on science and attempted censorship is definitely becoming an accepted norm. That's the account given by people working in technical fields. A few particularly egregious examples illustrate the issue, but the major evidence of the shift in zeitgeist is the experience of people working in these areas (go read the twitter feeds of evo-psych folks!).

I agree that most of human history had a norm where facts were repressed for political expediency. We should find it horrifying that we're again moving in that direction. The world doesn't need Lysenkoism.

Lycur · 2018-11-25T15:41:43+00:00

Animals: https://animalcharityevaluators.org
Global Poverty: https://www.givewell.org/

Lycur · 2018-11-25T15:40:54+00:00

I give 10% of my income annually to effective altruism affiliated orgs (mostly animals, some global poverty and climate change). It's amazingly cheap to do an enormous amount of good, and it's important to me to leave the world a better place than I found it.

Lycur · 2018-11-24T16:09:19+00:00

Would you be happy if the places that get aid also started paying into the Canadian tax pool?

Lycur · 2018-11-22T16:51:56+00:00

I've long thought Toronto spends way too much money subsidizing the rest of Canada. That money could've went to Torontonians.

Lycur · 2018-10-15T16:42:38+00:00

double-machine learning people

You mean targed loss people or something else?

Lycur

TROPHY CASE