JamilD

Many papers are written exclusively by Americans, but they're often not the best. That's what you're going to have to be content with, if you shut off immigration. Being okay, but not the best.

Imagine that those researchers couldn't go to the US. Imagine instead of Google DeepMind beating Lee Sedol it was a Canadian or Chinese company. Imagine if the first company to roll out mass self-driving cars would be Didi instead of Tesla. It's an inevitability, once all the top minds in the world go to companies outside the US. And as I said, it's not horrible for America, the country will surivive and do okay, but there'll be jobs lost and innovation will go somewhere else.

If you're able to interact with the smartest people in the world - and not just your own country - you end up forming more effective and larger companies. Which in turn create jobs.

If you shut out your country to the rest of the world, the next Google will be founded somewhere else.

And I'll dispute your claim that the US has enough talent. There was a submission on HN recently about the top deep learning papers. Go through it. Count the number of American-born people. Geoff Hinton? Yann LeCun? Russ Salakhutdinov? Demis Hassibis (of Deep Mind)? Virtually everyone on there was born somewhere else. They're not Americans, but they're mostly working for American companies and contributing their talent to YOUR economy.

[0] https://github.com/terryum/awesome-deep-learning-papers/blob...

Is the next step having an additional Canadian office for those that can't get US visas? Canada has a generous startup visa for founders coming from other countries [0].

[0] http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/business/start-up/

> At Apple, the company starts working on a new language by bringing in humans to read passages in a range of accents and dialects, which are then transcribed by hand so the computer has an exact representation of the spoken text to learn from, said Alex Acero, head of the speech team at Apple. Apple also captures a range of sounds in a variety of voices. From there, a language model is built that tries to predict words sequences.

Then Apple deploys “dictation mode,” its text-to-speech translator, in the new language, Acero said. When customers use dictation mode, Apple captures a small percentage of the audio recordings and makes them anonymous. The recordings, complete with background noise and mumbled words, are transcribed by humans, a process that helps cut the speech recognition error rate in half.

When I was learning, for example, the backpropagation algorithm, no amount of lectures could've helped me understand better than just drawing a network, thinking "what happens when I change the weights here?", and toying with the equations. It gives you an intimate familiarity and understanding that you can't get anywhere else.

· Sales and marketing integration

· Enterprise search

· Multi-platform marketing

· Slackbot for sales teams

· Predictive analytics on customer lifecycle

It's hard to explain how it feels for me, when I get to the Bay Area. Being able to talk to like-minded people, not feeling like an out-of-place weird nerd like I do at home. It's no coincidence that I made most of my friends out there.

And anybody I've met that generally wants to "emulate" SV elsewhere generally has entirely the wrong mindset — trying to copy (badly) the investment style, their view / the mainstream media view of "startup culture", etc; it's completely misguided.

It's not a hate campaign to call institutions out on their transgressions. It's not unfair to call out injustice wherever it exists.

It's not so much about the media piling on Uber, as employees feeling safe in talking about their company's problems.

I can watch as many lectures as I want, but nothing beats sitting down with a pen and a piece of paper, playing around with equations and developing a true, intimate understanding.

But why? This would be an incredible waste of time and resources, to rewrite perfectly functional and working code. Rewrite it when you need to. Bloomberg still has 25m lines of FORTRAN [0] — there's no need to rewrite code when it works fine already.

[0] https://etrading.wordpress.com/2006/06/01/25-million-lines-o...

[0] http://www.sciencealert.com/google-s-new-ai-has-learned-to-b...

Turns out that when resources are scarce, the optimal move is to knock the opponent away. I think this tells us more about the problem space than the AI itself; it's just optimizing for the specific problem.

By making it clear that these issues harm everyone, we can prevent these actions from happening to anyone. People are willing to take away the rights of others, but generally are not willing to sacrifice their own.

If you don't like what the company leadership says or does, you always have the option to sell your ownership and start a new company with your values and opinions.

In the meantime, public or private companies that take stances on issues like this can empower their employees, gain new customers, and enjoy the freedom to express their values.

I don't think I'd have as strong of an outlet for constant distraction without my phone.

My perspective on this (and feel free to point out if there are any flaws in my thinking) is that this tendency to "work within the system of evolution" is how humans evolved. With our consciousness and self-awareness, however, we've accepted that some things that run contrary to self-interest are sometimes "good" for society. We don't have a society of absolute Darwinian natural selection; we've set up some structures to make sure that everybody can live a life where certain rights and freedoms are protected. Things like Universal Basic Income would go against the author's apparent Social Darwinistic morality, even though it might be a net positive for society.

So I'm not sure I agree with that view of "good" and "evil", though it certainly is the most practical and effective when you're managing a company.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3_BjL20Roc

If this complex behavior can be explained using only 302 neurons, I have no doubt that the complexity of human behavior and consciousness can be explained using 100,000,000,000 neurons.

Not all leaks are made in the sprit of "whistleblowing". This article seems pretty misleading… many of these measures are designed to protect the company's intellectual property and secrecy, though I see how they can be abused. I would hardly call it a 'spying program' though.