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pmorais

14 karma · joined March 31, 2019

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pmorais··on The software industry's greatest sin: hiring
Why? None of what he said suggests to me than an incompetent women would be hired over a competent man. The outrage over incentivizing minority hires is ridiculous to me. You’re more likely not to get hired because of random noise in the interview process than because you happened to apply at the same time as an equally qualified minority. If companies like google were actually actively discriminating against competent asian/white male developers in favor of minorities their engineer demographics wouldn’t be 80%+ asian/white male. There’s also legitimate business interests for a company to have a diverse body of engineers and managers.
pmorais··on A googol-to-one gear ratio [video]
It’s actually much worse than that because of reflected inertia. The inertia of the first gear as seen from the last gear is proportional to the square of the gear ratio
pmorais··on SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son Speaks to an Almost Empty Room at Saudi Summit
The US government DOES have such a fund though. It’s called DARPA/ONR/whatever other military research wing. They all invest heavily in startups.
pmorais··on Military Has Been Researching "Anti-Gravity" For Nearly 70 Years
That’s not really true. The other 3 “fundamental” forces are irreducible yet still entirely explained by the standard model.
pmorais··on Algebra, Topology, Differential Calculus, and Optimization Theory for CS and ML [pdf]
I don’t think this kind of insight even exists into deep learning stuff (yet). One of the main reasons people even care about SVMs is that they have nice analytical properties
pmorais··on Robel: Robotics Benchmarks for Learning with Low-Cost Robots
You’re not the intended audience. This is meant for small research labs that are just starting up and want to enter the RL/Robotics research space and can’t afford a $400,000 PR2 or $150,000 shadow hand.
pmorais··on Y Combinator Top Companies List 2019
You realize you have to pay an employee to do that right? Odds are it’s still more cost effective to just buy ads.
pmorais··on What a Senior Staff Software Engineer Does
I mean, once you hit a certain salary more money doesn’t even appreciably increase your quality of life. And I think most good software engineers are already close to that asymptote
pmorais··on Elon Musk Gambled Tesla to Save SolarCity
That’s revisionist nonsense.
pmorais··on Root: CERN's scientific data analysis framework for C++
Basically of modern convex optimization is heavily dependent on SNOPT. Deep learning research is heavily dependent on cuDNN
pmorais··on Why do developers at Google consider Agile development to be nonsense? (2016)
I feel like this hubris is why almost every google product I use is riddled with horrible bugs. The cursor move functionality on Gmail for iOS has been broken for TWO YEARS. It’s also why the tensorflow API is a horribly over-engineered abomination when Pytorch is almost at feature and performance parity with something exponentially simpler and more consistent/elegant. That “biggest baddest solution” culture makes sense for Bigtable; it’s god-awful for anything remotely customer facing.
pmorais··on Why do developers at Google consider Agile development to be nonsense? (2016)
Still missing Hangouts, Chat and GChat
pmorais··on Why do developers at Google consider Agile development to be nonsense? (2016)
I have never heard of a tech company that doesn’t require that you explicitly give up ownership rights to software written on the job, so good luck with that
pmorais··on One man, eight years, nearly 20k cat videos, and not a single viral hit
Internet 1.0 didn’t have video...
pmorais··on It’s time to move on from OOP?
I’d argue that until C++11 C++ was /objectively/ a terrible language and the only reason people used it (and continue to use it) is because it’s nearly 40 years old and therefore ubiquitous. C++ is a language that is literally famous for being famous. I know I certainly wouldn’t be using it if I had any other viable (high performance) language with the same ecosystem, support and tooling. It’s not “battle tested” it’s just too big to fail, and therefore a lot of smart people have dedicated a lot of effort to developing tools and standards that make it just barely passable for enterprise use.
pmorais··on Tesla Enters “Whistleblower Hell”
Disappointing that the majority of the comments here are conspiracy theories about nefarious short-sellers somehow influencing coverage (including this article) and not a single person is discussing the seriously damning allegations of 1) millions of dollars of embezzlement 2) connections to organized crime and Mexican drug cartels 3) systematic firing of those who report impropriety to upper management and 4) using law enforcement to intimidate whistleblowers

Seriously this comment section of conspiratorial Tesla apologists is pathetic.