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BickNowstromon Facebook Bans Louis Farrakhan, Milo Yiannopoulos, InfoWars and Others

People use the bucket "fringe" to marginalize and ridicule people. To say how they are wrong and that the majority has the right answer.

Did you know they are putting chemicals in the water that change the sex of frogs? Did you know that the government has weather weapons? The article supporting the claims talks of disturbing and ridiculous conspiracy theories, while these theories are factual.

Even the pizzagate emails deserve scrutiny. How is this in any way normal?

>> We plan to heat the pool, so a swim is a possibility. Bonnie will be Uber Service to transport Ruby, Emerson, and Maeve Luzzatto (11, 9, and almost 7) so you’ll have some further entertainment, and they will be in that pool for sure.

BickNowstromon Facebook Bans Louis Farrakhan, Milo Yiannopoulos, InfoWars and Others

In the deposition he clarifies this out-of-context (it is not the full sentence and not even a correct quote) statement and puts it into context. At that time, he did not think the whole thing was staged, but that the way the media handled it, used it against gun owners, was synthetic. He says some reports about the incidents were covered up. He says he thinks there was a cover-up of some of the negligence in the town and of the school. He did think there was some cover-up, but it was not that the whole thing was staged. Specific areas were faked, not in a totality. He believes school shootings happen, and now believes that Sandy Hook happened.

Even if, it is a far cry from promoting harassment of victims.

Edit: I did that edit not in response to you (I had not read your response yet, just like I made this post without reading your edit), but because people cite news stories, instead of Alex Jones. I am sure you can find news stories stating that Alex Jones instigated harassment of victims, as it was one of the big justifications for deplatforming, but I never saw Alex Jones say anything to that effect. The direct quotes are just not there... Even for your "quote" that is attributed to Alex Jones, it is not a correct quote, nor is it the full sentence, it seems to be Chinese whispered from a reddit thread. I myself got tricked by taking news stories about Alex Jones as factual, but when I saw the actual direct quote/news clip, I saw how what was presented as fact, was the journalists' biased interpretation. I read a news article stating Alex Jones was transphobic and promoting transphobia, but then I saw he was talking about this: https://mediadc.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/1179838/2147... and saying it looked demonic to him, and that he did not want this normalized. It was very much in the style of: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/forget-mr-rogers-drag-que...

About moving the goal post: The lawsuits are about making misleading statements, not about instigating harassment of the victims. Alex Jones did not instigate or promote harassing the victims of Sandy Hook. Some of his deluded followers took that upon themselves. You can find direct quotes where he says they should not do that and that it is wrong.

BickNowstromon Facebook Bans Louis Farrakhan, Milo Yiannopoulos, InfoWars and Others

I am familiar with those lawsuits. Alex Jones did not promote harassment. He did not even factually conclude that Sandy Hook was a hoax, just floated the possibility.

He reported on anomalies, on the conspiracy, on using Sandy Hook as a pretext to take away guns, on Adam Lanza probably using big pharma drugs. He stated that he understands why people would see Sandy Hook as a hoax, because history shows other events have been staged to further a political agenda.

Alex Jones was himself a victim of the media, who put weeks long pressure on SV tech companies and made it look like Alex Jones was sending his followers to harass the victims, long after Alex concluded it was not a hoax, and that Adam Lanza was the killer. They purposely took his statements and unhinged rants out of context and painted him as a transphobic, violence instigator, and maker of death threats.

The trick to attack free speech that is opposed to yours, is to make it seem like violence instigation or racism, so then it does not deserve the protection of free speech. The other is to put pressure on advertisers and commercial platforms and make them guilty by association. We've seen both of those tricks and they are dangerous and spell trouble for the future.

BickNowstromon Facebook Bans Louis Farrakhan, Milo Yiannopoulos, InfoWars and Others

Jones never promoted the harassment of victims of crimes. Can you support your statements with some direct quotes? Or are you promoting the harassment of Jones with unfounded lies?

Undermining the public trust of institutions is alive and well in the discourse of the US president, who openly erodes trust in the media, the FBI, the DNC, and the IC (including limited support of anti-vax views https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/44952526852981555...). Should the president enjoy protection against de-platforming when others get banned for less?

BickNowstromon Facebook Bans Louis Farrakhan, Milo Yiannopoulos, InfoWars and Others

You think Alex Jones is a 100% sane? And no need to guess, all those conspiracy theories discussed on his show had already been talked about by others. The product line is a strawman.

BickNowstromon Facebook Bans Louis Farrakhan, Milo Yiannopoulos, InfoWars and Others

One poll results that over half (54%) of all Americans believe the government is concealing information it has on 9/11. Eminem co-wrote a song about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polls_about_9/11_consp... https://blogs.chapman.edu/wilkinson/2016/10/11/what-arent-th...

Legit studies confirm that soy products adversatively alter testosterone in men. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15735098 http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/content/16/4/829?ijkey=4c972127... The meta-study from 2010 that is used to debunk the soyboy conspiracy also confirms that soy consumption lowers testosterone (just that it does not manifest the adverse effects associated with lowered testosterone) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19524224

PJW promoted and speculated on the chemtrail conspiracy (which is about weather modification, not mind control). The mind control part was later conflated and it makes the theory way less credible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgellons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation_controversy. The chemtrail conspiracy has its roots in this document: https://web.archive.org/web/20090716000939/http://www.fas.or... which is about weather warfare, which the US already engaged in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_warfare

Paul Watson does not incite hatred or violence against Muslims (can't source a negative, so you please source your affirmative). He even criticized Trump for retweeting anti-Muslim rhetoric https://www.businessinsider.com/infowars-paul-joseph-watson-.... He is very critical of radical Islam, but that is hardly a fringe position in the West.

BickNowstromon Facebook Bans Louis Farrakhan, Milo Yiannopoulos, InfoWars and Others

The government has weather weapons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_Modification_Con... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_warfare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Popeye

Chemicals in the water are turning the frogs gay.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-environment-potomac/sex-c...

For Mueller, Sandy Hook, and Pizzagate, Alex Jones speculated and reported on these existing conspiracy theories. He did not invent them. He apologized for Pizzagate and Sandy Hook, and blames his rants on psychosis.

BickNowstromon Notes on AI Bias

You are conflating bias (error) with bias (fairness).

BickNowstromon Some Reflections on Being Turned Down for a Lot of Data Science Jobs

Mentioning that you had another offer can be tricky. Did they ask you if you were seeing other companies? Did you just put it out there? Did you put them on a deadline?

Mentioning that you have another offer is seen as a negotiating tactic. Then they have to compete/bid against the other offer, and you are removing some of their leverage/power. A strong reaction to such a move can be to cut off the interview, so to regain back their power.

BickNowstromon World War Meme

There are at least a few Great Meme War veterans who truly believe they made a difference: "I helped meme a President into office, cucks" - Gab.ai CEO Andrew Torba.

If any effect came from 4chan /pol/ it was because the mainstream validated them and tried to categorize them as a coherent whole: The Alt-Right. Anonymous self-marginalizes. It was the Hillary campaign who drew attention to Pepe the Frog and made it part of the common discourse.

And no word (yet) in this article about Russian influence on social media and political campaigns. Even though the far-right plays a clear role in that propaganda machine.

BickNowstromon Deep Forest: Towards an Alternative to Deep Neural Networks

Academia does not have to run the model in production. It has few computational constraints, and most datasets do not have a feedback loop, requiring combating drift, debugging, and retraining. Papers are often accepted when they equal or beat state-of-the-art. Not many academics have to deal with the business side of running models in prod.

All of this leads to ease of implementation being overlooked. Especially on NLP, you see a lot of overengineering with deep neural nets (where the feature engineering is hidden inside the architecture). These models are hard to implement/reuse.

But yeah: academia/theoretical machine learning creates the very tools for applied machine learning.

BickNowstromon Deep Forest: Towards an Alternative to Deep Neural Networks

Random forests can be run on the GPU: https://github.com/EasonLiao/CudaTree

BickNowstromon Deep Forest: Towards an Alternative to Deep Neural Networks

http://xgboost.readthedocs.io/en/latest/model.html

http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~tqchen/pdf/BoostedTree.pdf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPqtzj5VZus Trevor Hastie - Gradient Boosting Machine Learning

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRktKszFmSk Ensembles (3): Gradient Boosting, Ihler

BickNowstromon Deep Forest: Towards an Alternative to Deep Neural Networks

The hype for neural networks is deserved. Some major contributions to the field resulted in increases in accuracy for fields like NLP, computer vision, structured data, machine translation, style transfer, etc.

XGBoost did not change much from the "Greedy function approximation: A gradient boosting machine." paper, but uses a few tricks to be much much faster, allowing for better tuning.

XGBoost is popular for structured data competitions on Kaggle. Even there: The winner is often an ensemble of XGBoost and Keras. And some structured data competitions are won by neural nets alone: http://blog.kaggle.com/2012/11/01/deep-learning-how-i-did-it... and https://www.kaggle.com/c/higgs-boson/discussion/10425 (Neural nets won the Higgs Boson Detection Challenge, where XGBoost was introduced)

I'd say Tensorflow/Keras can handle a wider variety of problems, with the same, or improved accuracy, than tree-based methods can. NN's do well on structured problems (the domain of tree-based methods), but also own computer vision and, increasingly, NLP. I agree on the pitfalls of applying neural nets vs. forests.

It is true that tree-based methods are academically a bit out of vogue: The exciting stuff is happening in the neural network space. You have more chance of getting published with deep learning (this used to be the other way around).

BickNowstromon Deep Forest: Towards an Alternative to Deep Neural Networks

NFL is probably the worst mis-quoted theorem in ML.

The subtle elements of the theorems (both for inference and search) have had huge impact on the field of optimization theory. They touch upon (Kolmogorov) Complexity, Incompleteness, Halting Problems, and later related work on the physical limits of inference: One can not know everything about the universe, if you are a part of it, and philosophy: Is the universe itself a computer?

That different algorithms and search strategies will succeed for different tasks, does not imply that we have to try them all: We can use prior knowledge on what worked on related tasks. Also the tasks we care about, is only a very small (explorable) subset of all possible tasks.

BickNowstromon What we found when we tested tools on the world’s least-accessible webpage

But websites that don't bother to make their websites accessible without JavaScript have a bad track record for implementing ARIA (correctly).

Good accessible design has benefits for everyone, not only the disabled. For instance, that half of the web breaks when you turn off JavaScript, turned into a security issue when Tor Browser enabled it by default (to not confuse their users with a broken web).

Progressive enhancement and accessibility go hand-in-hand. If not for accessibility reasons, then develop websites with accessible JavaScript for security, SEO/automated access, or progressive enhancement reasons.

BickNowstromon A Google a Day

These days, you can not have Pub Quizes with at least a few teams cheating by using a phone to Google the answers. Knowing trivia of the top of your head seems to have become as useful a skill as calligraphy.

A friend of mine was about to fall for a hoax/scam. And even though they changed the words and meaning of quite a few elements, I was able to pinpoint the exact scam using carefully crafted Google queries.

With Google there is just no way to bullshit people anymore. Someone would tell a strong story in the 90s during a birthday, and you'd have to go to library the next day to verify or discard it. Not anymore.

Someone asked why those old modems made noise, and instead of giving an answer right away, it took all of 15 seconds to find the answer online, much better than I ever could answer it.

I remember my first job skill test. It was multiple choice and you were allowed to use the internet. I answered all questions by Googling keywords from the question, in combination with keywords from each answer, and looking which combination gave the most results. Answering this way I got a near perfect score. There were questions about programming languages I hadn't even written a "Hello World"-example for.

With all this goodness, comes of course the danger of relying on Google for all your answers. If it is not on the first page of the results it is not true. Especially younger people believe a lot of facts they find online. Another danger is using Google for confirming a bias: With so many pages online, there is bound to be a page in the results that agrees with your initial hunch, however incorrect it is.

I participated in the pilot for Google Answers. There were people there that, if the answer was to be found anywhere online, could answer it, no matter their expertise on the subject. Googling well is a valuable skill.

BickNowstromon Most scientists 'can't replicate studies by their peers'

I am somewhat disappointed with the lack of replicability in the field of machine learning and computer science. I think there is not much excuse for releasing a ML paper on a new algorithm or modeling technique without a link to a source code repo. Sure, your research code may not be pretty, but that should not be a deal-breaker. I hope reviewers start rewarding papers with links to source code. This should also stimulate refactoring, documenting, and cleaning up the linked source code.

Also a standard unified process for replicability, reproducibility, and reuse is needed. Dock points for not stating random seeds, hardware used, metadata, etc.

BickNowstromon Silicon Valley Hedge Fund Takes on Wall Street with AI Trader

> How is it possible to generate seven years of convincing sample data

From the article:

> These genes are tested by giving them hypothetical sums of money to trade in simulated situations created from historical data.

So they simply use historical data (going 7 years back). This is fed into a simulator (a trading day where you have access to the data of all days leading up to the simulated trading day).

> without overfitting your models?

Traditionally backtesting is used: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/backtesting.asp

Care should be taken to run the tests over significant periods of time (to reflect changing market conditions) and to have a final out-of-time holdout set to lessen the effects of picking "winners" that were winning purely due to chance (introduced by cherry-picking winners from thousands of models).

BickNowstromon Silicon Valley Hedge Fund Takes on Wall Street with AI Trader

Let's assume your algorithm moves the market: 1) This is not a big problem: Lots of machine learning and control theory involves dealing with feedback loops. 2) If it moves the market in a predictable way, you can use this to make money.

The Western world is capitalist, not a Platonic ideal. Even if you strongly feel that people should have different reasons to invest, you will not be able to sway them (unless you can show that your alternative makes them even more money).

If you claim that long-term outperforming of the market is highly unlikely, you contribute outperforming to short-time flukes: The stock market is essentially unpredictable or in perfect equilibrium.

Unpredictability implies all these hedge funds would do better consulting random number generators, instead of well-paid quants.

Equilibrium implies the current market is operating at maximum efficiency, yet one currently makes money by exploiting non-equilibrium and erroneous evaluations.

BickNowstromon The Netherlands Closes Prisons Because It Doesn't Have Enough Prisoners

Some positive contributing factors are:

Crime is decreasing. Violent crime is decreasing.

Electronic ankle bracelet house arrests are both a cost saving measure (~50k euro a year per person) and contribute to rehabilitation.

These rehabilitation programs in the Netherlands are top-notch, lessening the recidivism rates.

Progressive (hard) drug laws target dealers and manufacturers over (recreative) users. Hard drug addicts have (sponsored) access to rehab programs, also inside prisons.

No, or little, privatization, makes prisons focus on quality and long-term efficiency, not quantity and short-term profits.

BickNowstromon Data from man's pacemaker led to arson charges

For international laws, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_disclosure_law

Specifically for the US, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit#Suspension_and_gag_ord... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Fricosu

BickNowstromon Launch HN: RankScience (YC W17) – Automated Split-Testing for SEO

Thanks! Though my (dated?) concern is probably not all that common, you could think of adding something like "Split-testing to improve SEO is a perfectly legitimate marketing technique" in your FAQ/technical copy.

BickNowstromon Launch HN: RankScience (YC W17) – Automated Split-Testing for SEO

My post was in response to the homepage copy:

> RankScience sits next to your website, making thousands of experiments to tweak your HTML in order to improve your page rankings.

This seems to me an attempt at reverse engineering the ranking algorithm. Is my interpretation correct? And if so, is this allowed / in scope of the guidelines?

BickNowstromon Launch HN: RankScience (YC W17) – Automated Split-Testing for SEO

Though using A/B testing to improve user experience or conversion rates is fine, I thought using A/B testing to reverse engineer the ranking algorithm was against the guidelines. Has this been updated?

From https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7238431?hl=en

> Best practices for website testing with Google Search

> The amount of time required for a reliable test will vary depending on factors like your conversion rates, and how much traffic your website gets; a good testing tool should tell you when you’ve gathered enough data to draw a reliable conclusion. Once you’ve concluded the test, you should update your site with the desired content variation(s) and remove all elements of the test as soon as possible, such as alternate URLs or testing scripts and markup. If we discover a site running an experiment for an unnecessarily long time, we may interpret this as an attempt to deceive search engines and take action accordingly. This is especially true if you’re serving one content variant to a large percentage of your users.

Next to this, the advice is to use rel="canonical" to avoid duplicate issues with Googlebot crawling your variations. When using rel="canonical" this should not show you how a variation influences ranking.

> If you’re running an A/B test with multiple URLs, you can use the rel=“canonical” link attribute on all of your alternate URLs to indicate that the original URL is the preferred version. We recommend using rel=“canonical” rather than a noindex meta tag because it more closely matches your intent in this situation.

BickNowstromon Welcome, ACLU

Your concern/question is akin to a fallacy of relative privation. Another name for this style of argument is the "not as bad as"-argument.

To answer/satisfy your concern/question is impossible without inaction. The cases you mentioned already happened and are in the past. In essence you are proposing that YC does not act to help solve this current issue, because worse issues happened in the past, and YC did not act then, so it does not deserve to act now (at least, without being accused of hypocrisy and selective outrage). This mode of argumentation results in nothing happening to solve the current issue, just by virtue of there existing past worse issues. I don't think you are really in favor of this.

As for the marketing argument, sure, I can agree this playing a minor role in this decision. But not a major one. There is not much evidence I am aware of, or that you pointed out, signaling that YC does not act in good faith. Though absence of evidence, is not evidence of absence, this alone is not a solid basis for posing that any action that YC takes is purely profit/PR-driven.

Likely, this decision was not instigated out of marketing motives, but like any good decision for a for-profit company: it aligns with marketing motives.

Another angle to look at motives for problem solving: Is the crime of having a less than glamorous motive worse than the outcome of solving the problem? Donating to non-profits makes me feel good. Is this egocentrism worse enough to stop donating?

BickNowstromon High-Speed Traders Are Taking Over Bitcoin

The writing does not exclude proper backtesting. A more favorable reading would have him/her use a holdout or test set that is in the future of the historical data used for training. Then there would be no problem with that approach in regards to overfit/poor generalization.

BickNowstromon Integrating GTA V into Universe

In ARMA opponent AI is a parameter. When you have a lot of players on one server, you turn down enemy AI so you don't bog down the entire server with pathfinding calculations.

BickNowstromon The spy with no name

Karl Koch and his buddies were recruited by a KGB spy posing as a casino croupier in exchange for gambling money and cocaine.

A hotel waiter or a concierge is in the perfect position to mingle with the rich and powerful.

Upper class people use hotels for extra-marital affairs and business trips in unknown cities. You do not need a first degree connection with the military to get an in.

The bar of a famous Dutch hotel was known to be frequented by American spies and drug agents looking to ensnare peons of the local drug maffia, working their way up from there.