Jürgen Schmidhuber says he'll make machines smarter than us - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-15/google-amazon-and-facebook-owe-j-rgen-schmidhuber-a-fortune <comment><USER2> To cut through some of the drama that risks being amplified by profiles like this, here are Schmidhuber's [1] and Goodfellow's [2] papers, plus the NIPS reviews [3] that recognized the linkage (not equivalence) between the two.

This is the review process working as it should: helping situate work in a longer dialog so that readers can follow a chain of reasoning. Much of the rest of the drama discussed in this article is about allocating the celebrity that manifests when a technique suddenly becomes useful, through some combination of changes to the environment, theoretical improvements and reduction to practice. It's a very human concern, but it's more business (or politics) than science.

[1] ftp://ftp.idsia.ch/pub/juergen/factorial.pdf [2] [http://papers.nips.cc/paper/5423-generative-adversarial- nets...](http://papers.nips.cc/paper/5423-generative-adversarial-nets.pdf) [3] [http://media.nips.cc/nipsbooks/nipspapers/paper_files/nips27...](http://media.nips.cc/nipsbooks/nipspapers/paper_files/nips27/reviews/1384.html)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for this, the reviews for this paper were very interesting.

I do wish that they provided the meta-review, however, which summarizes the ultimate decision. Meta-reviews are written by area chairs, which are the final arbiters for whether or not the paper is accepted. Seeing their perspective on this paper would be very interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For what it's worth, I'm certainly glad Schmidhuber is around. Not only for his great accomplishments but also for the humanity he brings to science and scientific research. In history, accomplishments of this kind are overlooked at times as nothing more than footnotes in time completely overlooking the human dynamics that exist in these highly competitive communities. The "drama" is just as valuable as the resulting research. How many remember or even know the spats between Newton and Leibniz? Tesla and just about everyone in his time (Einstein, Marconi, etc)? He's right in bringing attention to all those that contribute and to demand proper recognition.

Moreover, I also appreciate his focus of AI outside of the marketing/advertising world. Google - just as an example - employees more PhDs than any other public or private organization. All that brain power for the sake of creating a better human trap - aka adtech. Jürgen's most important plea is to use all this AI for real and tangible human progress. Nothing wrong with that in my book.

</comment><comment><USER5> A related article by the same author (Ashlee Vance) two days later:

Apple and Its Rivals Bet Their Futures on These Men's Dreams – An oral history of artificial intelligence, as told by its godfathers, gadflies, and Justin Trudeau.

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-17/apple- and...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-17/apple-and-its- rivals-bet-their-futures-on-these-men-s-dreams)

<comment><USER6> When LeCun only speculates on when the next advances (5-15 years) will come and thinks that it will "take decades" to build systems on what we have... I understand why "His (Schmidhuber's) peers wish he'd just shut up."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Most software excels in a single domain: driving, flying, recording, parsing, etc.

I think AI being smarter than us in a single domain like investing is feasible. But to be smarter than us in all domains, even parenting, love, intuition, etc. sounds infinitely more challenging.

I think AI is usually thought of in terms of solving computationally-heavy or data-heavy problems. But to be "smarter than us", it would need to be better at emotional, conversational and relational problems as well.

<comment><USER8> Investing is not even remotely a single domain, unless you constrain it down to something fairly trivial like making minority investments in publicly traded US common stocks where being smarter doesn't really count for much. There is so much trading activity now that the markets have become quite efficient. In order to consistently generate alpha as an investor like Warren Buffet you need access to material nonpublic information (proprietary research), or some form of structural advantage. Those things require a huge range of human skills, not just raw smarts.

<comment><USER9> > material nonpublic information (proprietary research)

Agreed. Insider Trading.

<comment><USER8> Doing your own research isn't insider trading unless you get it from an insider.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Schmidhuber sounds like the Nassim Nicholas Taleb of neural networks. Good ideas, complicated personality.

<comment><USER11> I consider myself a fan of Schmidhuber.

He gives a talk that he starts with a joke. It's a self-referential self- deprecating joke about Austrians, _and it 's funny_! The audience laughs.

I watched that and thought to myself, "This is a formidable man."

[http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/](http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/)

Cf. Gödel machine [http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/goedelmachine.html](http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/goedelmachine.html) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del_machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del_machine)

Also, "Deep Learning in Neural Networks: An Overview" ("88 pages, 888 references"!)

> Abstract. In recent years, deep artificial neural networks (including > recurrent ones) have won numerous contests in pattern recognition and > machine learning. This historical survey compactly summarises relevant work, > much of it from the previous millennium. Shallow and deep learners are > distinguished by the depth of their credit assignment paths, which are > chains of possibly learnable, causal links between actions and effects. I > review deep supervised learning (also recapitulating the history of > backpropagation), unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning & > evolutionary computation, and indirect search for short programs encoding > deep and large networks.

[http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning- overview.html](http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning-overview.html)

<comment><USER12> From [http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning- overview.html](http://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/deep-learning-overview.html):

> Pronounce: You_again Shmidhoobuh

That's pretty good for a self-deprecating joke

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'd never heard of him, but certainly I'd heard of his LSTM network. Mostly I've learned about the well know members of the AI community through Andrew Ng's interviews with them in his coursera courses. Jürgen Schmidhuber is a notable absentee (but I haven't done all the courses yet).

Plus the company he works for Nnaisense was the NIPS 2017 winner for the 'Reinforcement learning with musculoskeletal models' mentioned yesterday here on HN [0].

[0]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17092321](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17092321)

</comment><comment><USER13> Unfortunate hit piece.

Even worse than having your peers crap on you, is the author stating that you wish these crappy remarks don't define your profile (like they did previous profiles), and then having exactly that happen.

This will now probably forever be his angle in the popular media: Godfather of AI, mistaken, scoffed at by his peers. Not necessarily wrong, but not flattering either.

I can relate to the gut-wrenching feeling of seeing your ideas being bandied around as original, without any attribution. Of course someone in the field of reinforcement learning is obsessed with the credit assignment problem, no matter the time passed. How can AI researchers hope to solve this pressing problem, when they can't even assign credit to the originators of their ideas?

I wonder if this harsh piece would have been written the way it was, if the author realized that Schmidhuber may be on the spectrum, and that his erratic and obsessive behavior is an ailment, not a deliberate choice.

In the future, Schmidhuber will be mentioned in the same breath as Turing. Of his peers wishing he'd shut up, I don't have the same expectation.

</comment><comment><USER14> From the headline, I knew it would be about Schmidhuber. Isn't this shtick getting a little old? I don't see how he is being suppressed, when I see him give talks and lead symposiums at conferences all the time ...

> The most prestigious AI conference goes by the unfortunate acronym of NIPS, > or Neural Information Processing Systems.

The name is likely getting changed this year.

<comment><USER15> To PNIS ?

<comment><USER16> I've seen some people use NeurIPS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> __"All the impressive achievements of deep learning amount to just curve fitting," __

</comment><comment><USER18> _Much of the AI community has decided to ignore Schmidhuber and hope he goes away._

Just like computer history still forgets Konrad Zuse's 1941 Z3. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_\(computer\))</comment>


Tax crackdown on banks and multinationals 'to raise £5bn' - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-30310832 <comment><USER2> "Profit" is very easy to hide. Income, not so much. The difference is 'net' vs 'gross'.

The horrid nature of current tax law is geared towards lawyers and accountants being creative. The system is geared to reward con-men and punish the honest.

A flat-rate tax system based on income might be more effective but the real danger is the tax-breaks that companies get. I see this all the time with Ford/Chrysler/GM. "We will build a factory in your city/state/county if you give us X-billion in tax breaks."

My thoughts: You want to sell your product don't you? In Canada we had a law called "The AutoPact" [1] which basically said that for every 3 cars that you sell in Canada, 1 must be built here.

Corporate welfare will always be a greater hindrance to tax-coffers then personal welfare will ever be.

Why are we paying companies so they have the privilege of taking our money?

[1][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93United_States_Au...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93United_States_Automotive_Products_Agreement)

<comment><USER3> _Why are we paying companies so they have the privilege of taking our money?_

Companies don't pay taxes. Ever. Their money comes from customers buying their products and services. If they are not taxed, they can offer a lower price to the customers. If they are taxed, that simply means higher prices for customers.

Ultimately, individuals always pay the taxes.

<comment><USER4> Your argument fails when we see Starbucks selling expensive coffee while avoiding tax.

Starbucks does not avoid tax to give me a good deal. Starbucks avoids tax so that Starbucks can make more money.

<comment><USER5> I don't think it does. Any sensible business avoids tax i.e., minimizes its tax bill. If it gets up to what are perceived as evident shenagans to do this, governments can change the law (as has been announced today in the UK) and consumers can decide if they still want to do business with the company. 'Don't drink their coffee' would be the advice re Starbucks, would it not? Good deals usually but not always add up to good business which equates with making more money. If Starbucks offer a lousy deal then presumably they'll either have to change the deal or go down. Plenty of other places to drink coffee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As far as I can tell, they shift profits overseas by shifting extra, semi- fictional 'costs' to the UK subsidiary - for example, if the UK subsidiary of Starbucks makes $100m profit, but has to pay the Canary Isles subsidiary $100m in licensing costs, suddenly the UK subsidiary owes no tax.

Given this structure, how does the HMRC plan on distinguishing between legitimate costs and semi-fictional ones? I imagine as soon as the law is changed, the companies will alter their books so that they shift all their 'legitimate costs' to the UK subsidiary.

I suspect that this shift will end up benefitting tax accountants and lawyers.

<comment><USER7> Some of the arrangements can get pretty complex.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement)

Basically, sending the money from Germany (or wherever) -> Ireland -> Netherlands -> Ireland -> Cayman Islands results in no taxes being paid (or legally due).

<comment><USER8> Which is why tax law should be a judgement call by authorities rather than a mathematical operation. As long as you follow the spirit of the law you pay the mathematical tax. If you are found to evade tax by any scheme such as expensive international inter-company loans or excessive license fees, then the authorities step in and simply tax you for the amount you would have paid withiut using those schemes.

<comment><USER9> Arbitrary judgement calls by authorities are, well, arbitrary. Not a good idea, rule of law is better even if the law is not perfect.

<comment><USER8> Judgement and law interpretation is used for all other areas of law. It's still "rule of law", still subject to appeal and so on. If laws can't be made that covers loopholes then just outlaw loopholes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'll be interested to see how this is implemented in practice. The way this kind of tax avoidance works is for subsidiaries in low-tax jurisdictions to charge the ones incorporated in higher tax jurisdictions high fees for things like access to IP.

This "artificially" inflates the profits for the low-tax company and depresses the profits for the high-tax company.

Artificially is in quotes because it's hard to establish a legal rule to determine what is and isn't fair pricing for IP and services which is why I'm interested in seeing how this will be enforced.

Edit: the reason that so many of these were based in Ireland was because until 2015 Ireland won't have rules on this sort of intra-group "transfer pricing" transaction. You can't do this between two US or a UK and a US company because those countries have rules that prevent it.

<comment> grey-area I suppose one way to clamp down on any such activities would be to simply class all payments to subsidiaries in low-tax jurisdictions as qualifying for this extra tax. That would avoid any arguments over what exactly is a fair price for certain services or whether certain services/fees qualify.

<comment><USER11> And intra-group licensing costs and royalties should also be disregarded as costs for tax purposes, since there's no real or opportunity cost to allowing one part of the group to use another's IP _except_ for the cost savings that can be generated by shifting the tax burden.

<comment><USER12> Imagine a scenario where McDonalds corp has both company owned stores and franchisee-owned stores and that both are charged the same, substantial amount for the use of McDs trademarks.

Should the McDs owned store be wildly more profitable in the eyes of the tax authorities?

Suppose that the franchisee and the company store both use the McDs supply chain to buy ingredients. Are those costs "real enough to count"? If not, why not? If so, why aren't the trademarks "real enough"?

If the trademarks don't count intra-group, what if the trademarks are only licensed (for $1) subject to the use of the company supply chain for ingredients? This serves a legitimate purpose of protecting the trademark and giving the customers a uniform experience at all stores, or it serves as an underhanded tax dodge, depending on which reporter is writing the article...

I'm merely suggesting that trying to author precise legislation around this area is inherently a slippery slope and "intra group IP licenses are barred" isn't going to be perfectly effective. Lawmakers have a legitimately hard problem to solve and their "attackers" have a lot at stake to find/exploit intended or unintended loopholes.

<comment><USER11> Sure, the McDs-owned store generates substantially more profit for its ultimate owner (the shareholders of MCD) than the franchise does for the franchisee, so I can't see any logical reason why McDonalds or its subsidiaries shouldn't pay more tax on that store than the franchisee.

Of course there will still be loopholes. But the left hand of the business paying royalties to the (tax-advantaged) right falls under the heading of palpably ridiculous, especially when unlike the hypothetical McDs example the royalty rates are set by the tax planning division of an accountancy rather than the market.

<comment><USER12> My example was meant to consider only the tax generated as a result of the activities of the retail fast-food location.

Of course corporate McDs will pay (the same) tax on the IP-related and/or supply chain profits generated by either store.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> At least it hasn't taken the Tories nearly a whole term to begin to address this issue...

Got to say I agree with this [http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/politics/article4285739.e...](http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/politics/article4285739.ece) (paywall).

Summary: Hodge wants to make it a criminal offence to sell or promote illegal tax avoidance schemes in the first place. So if HMRC challenge a scheme and it's found illegal, the lawyers/accountants who developed it can be criminally prosecuted as well as those who used it.

<comment><USER14> > Hodge wants to make it a criminal offence to sell or promote illegal tax > avoidance schemes

Isn't promoting something illegal already illegal by definition?

<comment><USER13> Apparently not:

"HMRC can prosecute tax advisers if they try to hide schemes, but has no sanction against those that create and sell artificial trading arrangements designed solely to dodge taxes."

That's what she wants to change.

<comment><USER15> That's hardly likely to make any difference. The accountants and lawyers will simply move to wherever their activity is legal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Here's a list of all the companies registered in the UK with the string 'Google' in them, that aren't listed as 'dissolved' (there are a lot of those), and aren't obviously registered by morons[0][1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] who think they can infringe on the trademark.

        BR017040    GOOGLE COMMERCE LIMITED UK ESTABLISHMENT
        FC031970    GOOGLE COMMERCE LIMITED UK ESTABLISHMENT
        5903713     GOOGLE PAYMENT LIMITED
        3977902     GOOGLE UK LIMITED
        9183796     GOOGLE VENTURES UK MANAGEMENT COMPANY, LIMITED

I believe the first two are part of their Double Irish tax dodge: [http://vimeo.com/68581263](http://vimeo.com/68581263) so those should disappear soon.

[0] [http://www.endole.co.uk/company/09054162/google-ninjas- limit...](http://www.endole.co.uk/company/09054162/google-ninjas-limited) [1] [http://www.endole.co.uk/company/08533581/google-pizza- ltd](http://www.endole.co.uk/company/08533581/google-pizza-ltd) [3] [http://www.endole.co.uk/company/08770094/google-it- ltd](http://www.endole.co.uk/company/08770094/google-it-ltd) [4] [http://www.endole.co.uk/company/09263100/google- internationa...](http://www.endole.co.uk/company/09263100/google- international-web-ltd) [5] [http://www.endole.co.uk/company/08537202/google- ads-ltd](http://www.endole.co.uk/company/08537202/google-ads-ltd) [6] [http://www.endole.co.uk/company/08497535/google-analytics- li...](http://www.endole.co.uk/company/08497535/google-analytics-limited) [7] [http://www.endole.co.uk/company/08615290/google-logistics- lt...](http://www.endole.co.uk/company/08615290/google-logistics-ltd) [8] [http://www.endole.co.uk/company/09042316/google-property- lim...](http://www.endole.co.uk/company/09042316/google-property-limited) [9] [http://www.endole.co.uk/company/08573677/google- recruitment-...](http://www.endole.co.uk/company/08573677/google-recruitment- limited)

<comment><USER17>
        9054162     GOOGLE NINJAS LIMITED
        8533581     GOOGLE PIZZA LTD.

OK. Had to highlight these two.

<comment><USER18> Ninjas and Pizzas - the list is missing turtles.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Missing end of the sentence: "...which they then artificially shift abroad."

Details aren't very clear. It's called the Diverted Profits Tax, there's a longer article here: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-30306266](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-30306266)

</comment><comment><USER20> In order to make this workable, the government would assume that certain industries make certain profit margins e.g. 8% assumed profit for the sale of goods to 32% assumed profit for the sale of services. [0][1]

According to the FT:

"the new tax would be a "deemed profits" tax rather than a corporation tax, so as to sidestep issues about double tax treaties.

[...] the Treasury would identify profits that escaped tax in the UK because of royalty arrangements or the absence of a taxable presence.

[...] It seems to be something completely novel . . . It is a huge stick that will stop this artificial avoidance. The difficulty will be how it is defined in practice." [2]

[0] Similar way to the way the UK flat rate VAT scheme works

[1][http://www.internationallawoffice.com/newsletters/Detail.asp...](http://www.internationallawoffice.com/newsletters/Detail.aspx?g=df76beff-e892-4399-a960-04b1de632483)

[2] [http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/127010ea-7af9-11e4-b630-00144feabd...](http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/127010ea-7af9-11e4-b630-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz3KqqtmghP)

</comment><comment><USER21> I wonder if this will affect Ikea, which pretends to be a charity [1], as well as the usual Starbucks/Amazon/Google suspects.

[1] [http://www.economist.com/node/6919139](http://www.economist.com/node/6919139)

<comment><USER22> It's not a charity, it's a non-profit. The comparison with the Gates Foundation makes no sense, there's no expectation that it should have a charitable purpose, it's simply a legal entity that has other goals instead of having a fiduciary duty to shareholders.

In particular, it only receives tax benefits if it's classified an "Institution for General Benefit" (ANBI) by the Dutch IRS, which IKEA _isn 't_.

<comment><USER21> From the article:

"What emerges is an outfit that ingeniously exploits the quirks of different jurisdictions to create a charity, dedicated to a somewhat banal cause, that is not only the world's richest foundation, but is at the moment also one of its least generous. The overall set-up of IKEA minimises tax and disclosure, handsomely rewards the founding Kamprad family and makes IKEA immune to a takeover."

<comment><USER22> I know what the article says. I'm saying it's wrong. It's trying to apply the US concept of "foundation" to the Dutch concept, which is invalid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Funny how the say banks and multinationals will pay, I really think they should in turn put on every receipt how much the end consumer is actually paying in tax, all under the idea of disclosure.

Food places like starbucks and McDonalds they could put it next to the mandated calorie count. This sandwich will cost 400 calories and 40 cents in built in taxes and twenty cents in sales taxes.

People really need to understand just how much they are truly taxed, far too many see only the sales tax and not many more understand payroll. Indirect taxes is the big skeleton in the closet.

<comment><USER24> The tax incidence of profit taxes falls pretty much entirely on the shareholders. The consumer is unaffected.

Companies that have their profits taxed at higher rates would sure LOVE to raise their prices to compensate for lost profits, but a little thing called competition prevents them from doing so.

>People really need to understand just how much they are truly taxed

Indeed. The level of tax literacy and misunderstanding among the general population appalls me sometimes. I can think of at least one example right now...

<comment><USER25> > The tax incidence of profit taxes falls pretty much entirely on the > shareholders. The consumer is unaffected.

Well, only if you believe profits aren't used for anything except dividends. The "consumer" can be affected when they don't get new products, or existing products are worse, or when they fail to be hired as an employee, etc.

<comment><USER24> Theoretically if the profit tax approaches 100% then nobody will form companies because what's the point?

Rest assured, though, the levels we are discussing here will have zero effect on Starbucks' ability or desire to bring us new pumpkin vanilla spice lattes every winter season.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If I glossed over that correctly, it seems more like a "Bank tax rule tightening", they estimate 5B over 5 years, 4 of which come from changing/tightening banking regulations and 1B (over 5 years) of which comes from mutlinationals operating in the UK. Not sure if that's ~200M a year or if there's some front/back loading and I really have no clue as to UK revenue/profits for all multinationals combined but (fuzzy math) is 200M a year for all of them a significant change? Does this only target companies of a certain size/category?

<comment><USER27> I don't know about overseas, but here in the states every time politicians give out an estimate on how much revenue a new tax will generate they tend to be grossly incorrect at the end of the year. The reason is that if you tax an activity then people do things to avoid paying the tax for that activity; stop, move, or avoid.

Sad thing is, the politicians make the revenue announcement so they can go ahead and spend the money as if they've already collected it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Devil will be in the detail, and he's not giving any details yet.

Without significant simplification of the tax system, no such tax bill will be accountant-proof, or treaty-proof.

<comment><USER29> I'm going to assume that any significant off-shore charges from subsidiaries will be considered profit and the company will need to prove otherwise. Should cause a few cases to go through the law courts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Good luck with that. There is no way short of global world government to force a company with subsidiaries and business all over the world to pay taxes everywhere.

<comment><USER29> Don't think it's about everywhere. What they are trying to stop is the profits made in the UK being offset against artificial debts from another division of the same company in a different more tax efficient country.

<comment><USER25> The problem is profits aren't made in the UK at all. For big tech companies usually they have a subsidiary in a given country, and that subsidiary charges the parent company for access to its work/innovations/whatever. The subsidiary does not itself receive payment for the global companies operations in that country, despite how unintuitive it is.

This is why the UK arms of these companies don't make any profit - they charge the parent companies more or less at cost. Meanwhile people who want to buy their services sign a deal with the Irish subsidiary. But legally these are different companies.

Additionally it's impossible to say how much profit is being made in a particular country. You can count _income_ quite easily, but then what percentage of the cost of developing Facebook can be accounted to servicing the UK market? It wouldn't make sense to allocate ALL the cost of creating Facebook to the US market and treat every other country as pure profit, as obviously there are costs involved with being international.

I'm not convinces Osborne has any real clue about the morass he's wading in to here. It gets worse when you think about the possible future impact. Imagine Google and Facebook didn't have any UK presence at the moment but were looking to hire people there, because of an abundance of skilled people in, say, London. But entering the UK suddenly means a 25% tax on their UK sourced income. Why would they ever hire the first employee? If they stay out entirely, they aren't in UK jurisdiction so there'd be no reason for them to pay any tax there.

<comment><USER31> Yeah but this is an artificial construction which only exists on paper, in reality, Google is indeed making profit in the UK, that's the point.

<comment><USER9> This "artificial construction" is called the EU Single Market, where the idea is that a company in, say, Luxembourg, can sell to the UK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Funny how the same UK government propose to have devolution of corporation tax in Northern Ireland (NI), which is still part of the UK so the NI Government can match the corporate tax of the Republic of Ireland.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern- ireland-30131556](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-30131556)

</comment><comment><USER33> Much ado about tax collecting. Less ado about how, and on what, big governments spend the tax money.

<comment><USER5> Now you're on to something really important! I am not aware (granted - I guess because I happen not to have seen it) of any really wide ranging high level discussion on this massive subject nor do I expect there to be. Sheep probably debate in their sheepish style, pecking orders but probably not the sheering.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I think this is good news. Companies such as Google and others have been avoiding paying taxes for too long. They do this in ways which up until now were fraudulent but technically legal, by creating fictional companies or by laundering money via havens.

<comment><USER3> Technically legal is by definition "not fraudulent." It is their duty to their shareholders to pay the minimum tax they legally must pay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> The term "google tax" made me think is was related to google having to pay ISPs for using their tubes. Glad to see that is about actual tax evasion.

<comment><USER36> Evasion !== Avoidance

At least in the UK, these two words have entirely different meanings when applied to tax. Tax evasion is not paying tax which is due. Tax avoidance is arranging your activities to reduce or minimise the taxes which are due.

<comment><USER37> The activities that giant multinational corps take part in it is effectively the same thing.

<comment><USER38> Only if we pretend that individuals don't do the same thing.

When I check the box to count my daughter as a dependent, I am "avoiding" taxes. When a multi-national corporation inverts their company to Canada, they are "avoiding" taxes. So long as all of the above are within the rules, neither act is immoral.

<comment><USER39> Or both are. Here in the UK I've never made any attempt to optimize my taxes; I called HMRC once (when I saw a big increase in how much tax I was paying over the previous month's payslip) and they told me everything was fine, and that's the total extent of my interaction with them. (I even avoid ticking the gift aid box on charitable donations, as I think that's immoral). I agree that there is no legal obligation not to minmax your taxes, but I think there is a moral one.

<comment><USER40> Gift aid is a specific scheme created by the government to increase charitable giving. At the 20% income tax bracket, it makes no difference to you but helps the charity, and at the 40+% brackets it makes a difference to the charity and provides you with a fraction back.

You still end up with less money than had you not given to charity, and it's MEANT to work this way. It's a very different kettle of fish to exploiting tax loop holes.

<comment><USER39> > it makes no difference to you but helps the charity

And penalizes the government. I'm happy giving my own money to Music For Rich Old White Dudes, but I don't think it's moral for me to take money away from the general taxation pool for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> VAT 0%,5%,20%. 1% revenue tax, companies can deduct only 30-80% VAT. No corporate Tax, no income Tax. Tax land and properties a lot.

</comment><comment><USER42> Google is investing £1bn in a new headquarters building in London. Seems an awful lot, for a country where they make no profit.

</comment><comment><USER43> I'd rather see profits in the workers pockets than the UK government's coffers. If we keep ramping up taxes on large corporations, they're just going to move abroad.

Take Starbucks for example, they're not even turning over a profit in the UK... yet they created thousands and thousands of jobs.

We'll keep ramping up taxes, they'll close down stores, move abroad and then wonder why youth unemployment keeps rising.

<comment><USER44> Genuine question: Is there any evidence that Starbucks 'created' more jobs than it 'destroyed' through competition? I.e. It's not as if there weren't thousands of people working for coffee/tea shops before Starbucks came along.

<comment><USER43> I'd argue they brought coffee culture more to the British high-street. Coffee shops were few and far between and the demand was fairly low say 10 years ago.

This also coincides with a lot of pub closures due to certain government regulations and increased taxes on alcohol.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Low taxes? I almost fell off my chair. With all of the rules, regulations, not to mention v.a T. A 25% additional because we can tax doesn't seem very low or fair.

If my company was having these taxes imposed on me, I would move all of my offices and companies out of the U.K. within the next couple of years. I will be interested to see what happens to the economy after these changed.

<comment><USER46> You'd have to stop selling in the UK as well - that's the point.

<comment><USER47> SWIFT transactions are pretty easy and establishing a network of professional resellers should not be hard.

<comment><USER48> Oh, so you propose a prohibition-style network of underground resellers and whitewashing of money? You know that this way lies the need for a personal army, a white cat and an Italian accent, right?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Entrepreneurial Sales Lessons - <AUTHOR> http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/65497/3-Quick-Entrepreneurial-Sales-Lessons.aspx <comment><USER2> I think that the hardest lesson to internalize over here is, "every no gets you closer to a yes". Most hackers thrive on finding, solving problems and getting the solution just right. Intractable problems are apparent at the surface and they can get shrugged upon, at least for a while. The trouble wit people is that it isn't obvious when they are intractable, so there isn't a way to know if it's your failure, or if it's a fact about the client. Sometimes the person just doesn't want/need your goods, and no amount of persuasion will budge their mind, but it isn't possible for the seller to know that, so it's easy to chalk it up as a failure.

I think that if one doesn't recognize this subtlety, it's easy to fall spiral into negativity and lose hope. Since we're social animals, this comes across to the customer and it further reduces the chances of closing a deal, thus creating a vicious cycle that's difficult to recover from.

So, if you're a startup founder, do yourself a favor. Get some chart paper and magic markers, and paste a giant sign saying "Fail. Learn. Iterate."

(BTW, to be clear the learn doesn't imply that it's your fault, it simply means extracting lessons from the experience)</comment>


Crowdsourced Mapping of North Korea - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.loc.gov/maps/2016/02/north-korea-uncovered-the-crowd-sourced-mapping-of-the-worlds-most-secret-state/ <comment><USER2> "he employed Google Earth to create "North Korea Uncovered." "

And by that creating derived work over licensed data. The press release says "publicly available satellite imagery", but that doesn't mean you're allowed to use it for tracing.

If the data remains in a Google Earth project it might be fine. But it's not open/free data, e.g. you wouldn't be able to import it into OpenStreetMap or make it available as download.

(With OpenStreetMap Bing allows tracing [http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Bing#Bing_Aerial_Imagery](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Bing#Bing_Aerial_Imagery)).</comment>


Billionaire (Sergey Brin) Aids Charity That Aided Him - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/us/25donate.html?partner=rss&emc=rss <comment><USER2> _"One of the most important things that Sergey Brin's gift signifies . . . is the possibilities inherent in being a refugee. The debate over immigration has frequently become so bitter that an important element has been lost: refugees are as varied in their skills sets and contributions as the rest of us."_

Okay, this will probably sound cheesy beyond belief, but: this is the American Dream, in purest form. In all the angry arguments about immigration we lose sight of the fact that the USA has always been a nation of immigrants; many of us are only a handful of generations removed from people who came to this land, often with little to their name, to build a new life.

All the practical issues aside, I've always felt that anyone who wants to come to this country to live and work is already an American in spirit--far more so than the angry xenophobes who were merely _born_ here.

      . . .
      Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
      With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
      Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
      The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
      Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
      I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

\-- The New Colossus, by Emma Lazarus, inscribed on a plaque in the Statue of Liberty

<comment><USER3> Immigration is fine, as long as it's an even playing field. The problem is that immigration right now is treated as a source of cheap labor by the companies. The policy needs to be that if you come to this country, you are officially an American, and should be paid a proper wage. Instead of being forced to work 60 hours a week for $30K.

This way companies won't get to drive down salaries by just importing a bunch of Indians to work for slave wages.

Call it Patriot Wage Freedom Act. Which would make it a form of discrimination to pay less than fair wage for employees based on their immigrant status. You make it illegal for companies to pay $10/hour for a C++ developer with 10 years experience in California and you can import as many programmers as you wish.

<comment><USER4> Forgive my language, but even playing field my ass. This kind of stuff really makes me angry.

Do you think when millions of starving Irish refugees turned up in the 1840s it didn't depress wages for existing American workers at the time? Or the Poles, or the Germans, or the dozens of other nationalities?

Immigration is an economic force which moves labour from areas of high supply to areas of high demand. The result, considered globally, is greater prosperity for everybody.

The American economy is and always has been fuelled by cheap labour in the form of unskilled immigration -- forget $30k, the people who _really_ get the economy moving are doing shit work for $8/hour.

Lower wages means goods are cheaper, which means you can buy stuff that's cheaper, and when we export it we make more money. Lower wages are _GREAT_ for the economy -- even, in the long run, for those in the industries affected, because their savings are bigger (cheaper stuff) and worth more (lower inflation), and their standard of living is higher (more stuff).

And it's as true in high tech as it is in blue-collar industries.

Saying you don't think there should be programmers working for $30k is exactly like those idiot auto workers who formed unions which demanded that they all be paid $60k/year to do the same assembly work people in Asia are doing for $30k. As a result, they're now either out of work or YOU are paying their ridiculous $60k wage out of your tax money after the bailouts. Not exactly the American Way.

Even if you shipped over every single able and willing programmer in India and China to California tomorrow wages wouldn't drop to $10/hour. There are just not that many programmers in the world.

But because some Americans are terrified that rampant immigration will mean they earn $95k instead of $100k/year, every time they get they opportunity they vote to make it harder for hard-working, skilled immigrants to enter and stay in this country. In so doing, they save that $5k but never earn the $50k they would have earned as the stock market rose on the strength of all that immigration-fuelled growth. But because you can't _see_ money you never earn, few people complain.

Do you know how many H-1B visas (the most common skilled tech worker visa) are granted every year? 65,000. That's 0.02% of the population. You could let in 10 times as many people every year and nobody would even notice.

America's anti-immigration policies are stupid and self-defeating on a purely economic analysis, before you even get into the issue of a nation of white immigrants suddenly deciding that immigration is bad because the new guys are all brown.

<comment><USER3> We don't have a high demand, we have 10% unemployment, we don't need more people to take away jobs. This country is a country for Americans first, once we take care of our own, then we can start inviting more people to fill the demand.

Yes they do shit work for $8 an hour...but does that mean that you need to turn high paying professions into "shit work" just because the companies want to save a buck? Programming should not be an $8/hour job, no matter what kind of language you are using. Hell have you even read some of the code written by these guys? Calling it garbage would be insulting to garbage.

Oh please, lower wages for skilled labor doesn't mean squat for a company's bottom line. When you are making billions, paying a few less million in wages won't change anything.

Wages have ALREADY dropped to $10 an hour. Go hit up craigslist, PLENTY of companies looking for software developers with 5 years experience, and offering $10 an hour. And the screwed up thing, is that they'll get it. Some programmer, who's been out of work for a year or two, because the market is crappy, will do the job because he has to put food on the table. That is if he is lucky, because he'll have to compete with 100 other people for the position.

This is America, we need to take care of our own first, before we decide to help the rest. When the times are good noone cares about immigrants, but when you see people being laid off left and right to be replaced by incompetent immigrants...then it's time to put the foot down.

If you think increasing the # of people won't change anything you are smoking crack.

Why are they stupid? Are we blocking all immigrants? No, we are letting in the 65K like you mentioned. That just means that we are getting the cream of the crop. Why do you want to lower the quality? You only lower the restrictions when you are in need of more people. That is not the case now.

Hey I'm an immigrant myself, first generation too, and as someone who went through the process, I want STRICTER control on immigration. We came during the time when America needed new talent. That's not the case now. We are over capacity. Sorry, the country is full...come back when we recover.

<comment><USER5> So you are one of those who says "Please close the door right after I get in". "We came during the time when America needed new talent."...well, the kind of talent that got in is not cutting it right now. May be we need a new crop of immigrants to stir up the economy? or the kind of wage drops that you hate will cause the profitability of these companies to go up and stir the economy.

<comment><USER3> We have 10% unemployment. Are you telling not one of those people cuts it for the job?

When times are good, fine let everyone in. But when people end up unemployed for 2-3 years at a time, letting more people to expand the # of unemployed is just plain stupid.

How will these immigrants stir up the economy? They don't come here with a job like H1B Visa guys, they come here penniless, with crappy English and no connections.

Yeah they'll stir up the economy alright, by adding more unemployed, desperate people willing to work for nothing, just to pay the bills.

I'm not for closing the door right after I get in, I'm for closing the door, because the times are tough and the country is fucked. Once the economy starts expanding again, sure open the door. But until then, when jobs are limited, the last thing we need is bring in more competition.

<comment><USER6> Again this notion that immigrants "take jobs". And therefore immigrants increase the unemployment rate. This is simply counter-factual. People doing work lead to more people doing work, regardless of the work they do. People doing the same work for less pay arguably reduces the unemployment rate (due to multiple factors).

<comment><USER3> So how exactly do immigrants create jobs?

They increase unemployment rate because they come here to get jobs.

Why can't the same people be some of the 10% of unemployed in this country? Sure it reduces the unemployment rate, but only if it's the same 10% going for it, if you add an extra half a million unemployed workers, them taking jobs does nothing for unemployment

<comment><USER7> "So how exactly do immigrants create jobs?"

The same way newly born Americans do: they consume goods and services.

<comment><USER6> That's the "broken windows" theory, which is half right. They actually create jobs by doing work.

Imagine the simplest case of 2 people (Alice and Bob) and a single $100 bill. If Alice is kind hearted and gives Bob $100 every time she is able but Bob pays $100 for Alice's work (say, making a chair, painting a house, etc.) this isn't a functional economy. All of Alice's labor goes to benefit Bob, Alice would be better off abstaining from the "economy" and using her labor to benefit herself.

Now imagine that Alice gives Bob $100 for work that Bob's done, then Bob gives Alice $100 for work that Alice has done, etc, etc. Alice then ends up with the fruits of Bob's labor, and Bob ends up with the fruits of Alice's labor, if they have unique skills then this true economy could be mutually beneficial.

The trading of money is just a proxy for the bartering of goods and services, money is just paper. Doing work contributes positively to the economy, it's the fundamental building block of the economy (not spending money).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Isn't Sergey by most any measure an outlier however? Using him as anything more than anecdote about immigration isn't really clear thinking, is it?

<comment><USER6> Isn't the US itself an outlier? It is both a rare, large immigrant nation and it is the largest first world economy in history.

Do people think these are connected by happenstance?

"Give me your tired, your poor"

"The wretched refuse..."

America takes the refuse of the world, and rather than treating it as refuse we give everyone a chance. We put everyone to work and let everyone realize their potential, amortized over millions all those potentials, even the small ones, add up. And we let the outliers that the rest of the world cast away as refuse shine. Carnegie, Einstein, Fermi, so many more.

If he had not emigrated to the US in the 30s, John von Neumann may well have ended his life in the mid-40s in a Nazi oven instead of making key contributions to physics and computer science.

Let me state this in the clearest possible terms.

Prejudice is a losing strategy.

You can't predict with any certainty the degree to which someone will succeed or fail in their lives. The best you can do is give damned near everyone an equal chance to PROVE themselves. This is the American model. It is through this method that the many, many outliers tossed away as refuse by the rest of the (judgmental, prejudicial, biased) world come to America and realize their full potential. America is the land where a destitute immigrant or a college dropout can become the richest man in the world (Carnegie & Bill Gates respectively).

It's the same sort of "let the doers prove themselves" system that has evolved into the startup world of recent times.

It's a damned amazing thing and it's something I'm utterly proud of.

Please, all you short-sighted, small-minded, prejudiced people out there who don't realize how this works and want to close off America's borders and gut the goose that lays the golden eggs: DON'T FUCK IT UP!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I can't help but feel "$16 billion, and the best thing you can think of to do with it is _give it away_?"

For a bit of perspective, the Wikipedia list of countries by GDP shows his personal wealth is more than the GDP of the lowest _one hundred_ countries. More than Nepal, Afghanistan, Jamaica, not far away from Iceland. More than Tuvalu's GDP for _a thousand years_.

 _The Manhattan Project_ cost about $22 Billion in today's dollars (says Wikipedia).

He is in an incredibly rare place where an individual has the economic power of a small country, a big company, a city council. That much cash channeled into one area could work wonders. World changing wonders.

How much would a "Manhattan Project" push for any one of the scientific holy grails cost? (Room Temperature Superconductivity, for instance).

It seems almost a waste to just give it to charity and ignore such a large and rare opportunity to do what almost no other person can afford and no company or government can justify.

</comment><comment><USER10> My god, imagine if Bill Gates gave money to an organization that would aid his specific ethnic group.

</comment><comment><USER11> They forgot to mention that his mother is the director of this organization :)

</comment><comment><USER12> Same group helped me immigrate in 92, for same reasons. I am very grateful to Brin for this.</comment>


Certificate and Public Key Pinning - <AUTHOR> https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Certificate_and_Public_Key_Pinning <comment><USER2> An entire article on key pinning and the word "intermediate" is not used once? Pinning leaf certificates often causes more problems/outages than whatever security it provides.

See also: [https://twitter.com/tollmanz/status/559920714774355968](https://twitter.com/tollmanz/status/559920714774355968).

<comment><USER3> This isn't a very good article, and, in general, OWASP is a pretty poor source for cryptography topics.

<comment><USER4> What do you recommend instead?</comment></comment></comment>


Wang Tiles and Turing Machines - <AUTHOR> https://grahamshawcross.com/2012/10/12/wang-tiles-and-turing-machines/ <comment><USER3> These are a very interesting part of Greg Egan's Diaspora: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_\(novel\))

<comment><USER4> FWIW the short story that that part of the book is based on is available for under a dollar

Wang's Carpets, by Greg Egan [https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B009ZVKQVS/](https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B009ZVKQVS/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Here's another post which goes into more detail about the mapping from Turing machines to sets of Wang tiles: [https://moyix.wordpress.com/2012/04/06/computing-with- tiles/](https://moyix.wordpress.com/2012/04/06/computing-with-tiles/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Wang tiles remind me quite a bit of the Game of Life. From the article, tiles were found to be Turing Complete in the '70s.

Wasn't Conway's Game proven to be Turing Complete much later? I find that a little surprising if so.

<comment><USER7> Yes, with a right set of Wang tiles, once you set a row, there is only one solution for each of the other row, and they can be built using local rules. So it's really like a 1D cellular automaton if you put each time step of the automaton on top of each other.

I can't find an early proof of Turing-completeness of Life. there is a paper from 1974 has all the building blocks [1], but the authors got lazy: "From here on, it is just a matter of engineering to construct an arbitrarily powerful (albeit slow) computer. Our engineer has been given the tools - <USER2> him finish the job"

[1]: [https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=811303](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=811303)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Magic: the Gathering is also Turing complete.

[https://www.toothycat.net/~hologram/Turing/](https://www.toothycat.net/~hologram/Turing/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Got to see these used by Nicolas Schabanel, Damien Woodz and others for DNA (the molecule) computing. Quite mind blowing.</comment>


FriendFeed CEO Paul Buchheit Discusses Facebook Acquisition (video) - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/18/video-interview-with-friendfeed-ceo-paul-buchheit-on-facebook-acquisition/ <comment><USER2> There was nothing new in this video, really.

Buchheit seems to be pretty good at talking without saying anything.</comment>


Grooscript – Transpile Groovy to JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://grooscript.org/ <comment><USER2> As a java/groovy programmer, all I have to say about this is SUPER LOLZ. What would be a use case for something like this? Could it make spock tests into javascript tests?

<comment><USER3> I came across this as we were looking at different JavaScript transpiler options for our project (where the backend is a Spring Boot app using Groovy).

Fun, but it sort of felt like an example of "every language has a JavaScript transpiler".</comment></comment>


MNIST Handwritten Digit Classifier – beginner neural network project - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/karandesai-96/digit-classifier <comment><USER2> Nice. Recreating these methods in simple code for yourself is definitely the way to check you understand it. This demo looks nice, clean, and straightforward. (Although I'd rename or comment variables x and y, or give some sort of guidance on what way around the weight matrices are within the code itself.)

It's also worth checking out existing neural net code-bases to see what tricks they have. The fine details usually aren't in papers, and they're not all in the text-books either.

The first potential problem that jumped out at me in this code was the initialization:

        self.weights = [np.array([0])] + [np.random.randn(y, x)
                for y, x in zip(sizes[1:], sizes[:-1])]

If the number of units in a layer is H, the typical size of the input into the layer above will be √(H). For large H, the sigmoid will usually saturate, and the gradients will underflow to zero, making it impossible to learn anything. There are some tricks to avoid the numerical problems, but even if you avoid numerical-underflow, things probably aren't going to work well.

I'd multiply those initial weights by a small constant divided by the square- root of weights going into the same neuron. For multiple layers you might consider layer-by-layer pre-training. For other architectures, like recurrent nets, definitely find a reference on how to do the initialization.

PS I would definitely add a test routine to check that the gradients from back-propagation agree with a finite difference approximation. It's so easy to get gradient code wrong, and it's so easy to test.

<comment><USER3> 'It's also worth checking out existing neural net code-bases to see what tricks they have. The fine details usually aren't in papers, and they're not all in the text-books either.'

Given that you are a person who is highly-qualified to answer, I am genuinely curious why do you think that is? Reimplementing algorithms from scratch is an efficient way to learn, understand the underlying concepts and attempt improvements in a research context.

<comment><USER2> A lot of machine-learning papers are eight pages. Speech conference papers (heavy users of neural nets) are often only four. Some details aren't part of the main message, so don't make it in. Often code is available, and initialization and other tweaks can be found in there (even if you aren't going to use their code).

That said, there are also whole papers, even collected volumes, on initialization and other practical details.

Textbooks aren't always up-to-date with the latest practical knowledge, as deep-learning practice is moving quickly. Or they simply don't want to clutter their high-level maths descriptions with code-level implementation details. Teaching stuff is all about tradeoffs. I'm sure several books _do_ mention the scale of weights for simple feed-forward weights though, as it's not an implementation-level detail, and it's probably been well known since the 1980s.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Can someone explain how this repo is so popular/ why it's so popular here? This is a basic implementation of a relatively simple algorithm that you learn when initially starting with ML/DL.

I do not want in any way to sound critical and am genuinely curious about the dynamics of why people would find this interesting given it's reduced complexity.

<comment><USER4> [https://xkcd.com/1053/](https://xkcd.com/1053/)

<comment><USER5> Haha nice comic ! :-D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have an old one written some time ago by myself too, in node.js/javascript: [https://github.com/crystalline/dnnjs](https://github.com/crystalline/dnnjs) It is a simple multilayer perceptron with ReLU nonlinearity, it can achieve 1.7% error on MNIST which is bad compared to convnets but good enough for multilayer perceptron. Training a model is as simple as running "node node- mnist.js" in terminal.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm seeing a lot of comments about the lack of non-MNIST neural network tutorials. Well here's mine. It uses financial data and the goal is to build a trading strategy. Its a work in progress and comments/criticism is welcome.

[https://github.com/LiamConnell/deep- algotrading](https://github.com/LiamConnell/deep-algotrading)

<comment><USER8> Thanks. This looks really great!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> If you want to jump into this sort of thing, I highly recommend Google's Udacity course for deep learning. [https://classroom.udacity.com/courses/ud730](https://classroom.udacity.com/courses/ud730)

<comment><USER10> it's very good, but personally I'd start with the Andrew Ng and Hinton courses

[https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine- learning](https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning) [https://www.coursera.org/learn/neural- networks](https://www.coursera.org/learn/neural-networks)

I think the Udacity course is best if you know principles of machine learning and want to apply them in a more professional toolchain and learn Tensorflow

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I thought Neural Networks nowadays use ReLU instead of Sigmoid? Especially in the context of deep learning

<comment><USER12> Looks like this implementation is based (in part) on the Stanford ML course, which teaches nnets using sigmoid activation.

Given that it's intended to introduce to beginners how nnets work, the choice of activation is an aside anyway - the real meat is back/forwardprop.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely, though I'll put in softmax, tanh and ReLU activation functions in near time. It isn't that difficult. Putting in more docstrings is also one of my todo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I found the Arrayfire examples in c++11 very approachable: [https://github.com/arrayfire/arrayfire/blob/devel/examples/m...](https://github.com/arrayfire/arrayfire/blob/devel/examples/machine_learning/neural_network.cpp)

The softmax_regression and logistic regression examples are even easier.

There are bindings for nodejs, python, other languages.

But it's so nice to be able to follow the definitions of each symbol and function in visual studio, not to mention being able to step through the imperative code.

And it's fast.

<comment><USER14> Thank you for the kind words. If there is anything we can do to help, let us know.

*I work at ArrayFire.

<comment><USER13> Will do. Thank you for Arrayfire.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I kind of with people would stop using MNIST for NN tutorials. There are a billion of them already. Do something different.

<comment><USER16> Suggestions for other interesting starter projects? Doing something with NN is on the learning list...

<comment><USER15> The difficulty is always getting a dataset.

I've started trying to get a network to recognise different vowels ("aaahhhhhh", "eeeeee", "ooooooo", etc.). Relatively easy to generate data - you just need your voice and a microphone. Downside is all the NN systems are much more set up for images than sound.

Or what about neural net fingerprint recognition. There must be databases of fingerprints somewhere. Or irises.

Recognise a type of wood from images of its grain?

Or activity recognition from accelerometer data. I think Pebble recently open sourced their recogniser and it was surprisingly not a neural network. I'm sure a neural network could do better. Might be hard to get a decent amount of data here but this could be a good incentive to do exercise!</comment></comment></comment>


Earth Hour is a colossal waste of time — and energy - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/project_syndicate/2013/03/earth_hour_is_all_wrong_we_need_more_electricity_not_less.html

<comment><USER2> "Today, we produce only a small fraction of the energy that we need from solar and wind—0.7 percent from wind and just 0.1 percent from solar. These technologies currently are too expensive. They are also unreliable (we still have no idea what to do when the wind is not blowing). Even with optimistic assumptions, the International Energy Agency estimates that, by 2035, we will produce just 2.4 percent of our energy from wind and 0.8 percent from solar."

That's just one massive wall of text that needs numerous {{Fact}} tags slapped onto it. Something every "climate change skeptic" seems to frequently require when they quote "facts" or "statistics".

 _"Today, we produce only a small fraction of the energy that we need from solar and wind—0.7 percent from wind and just 0.1 percent from solar."_ \- source? And why is that - is it possible that's because there are less solar and wind farms than there are other energy sources?

 _"These technologies currently are too expensive."_ \- source? A few issues: governments are introducing carbon taxes to take into account the impact of sources that produce carbon in the atmosphere. The technology has been used for some time, but further research is and will increasingly reducing the cost of photovoltaics and other renewable, less carbon polluting energy sources.

 _"They are also unreliable (we still have no idea what to do when the wind is not blowing)."_ He conveniently only mentions wind, no mention of why solar is so unreliable. No mention of geothermal, or even biomass. Perhaps he should also look at energy spot markets a little more to see how the real energy market works.

 _"Even with optimistic assumptions, the International Energy Agency estimates that, by 2035, we will produce just 2.4 percent of our energy from wind and 0.8 percent from solar._ Seriously, [citation needed].

<comment><USER3> > "Even with optimistic assumptions, the International Energy Agency estimates > that, by 2035, we will produce just 2.4 percent of our energy from wind and > 0.8 percent from solar." Seriously, [citation needed].

Okay, so I actually looked it up, and your hunch is correct. According to the International Energy Agency's "World Energy Outlook 2012":

 _"A steady increase in hydropower and the rapid expansion of wind and solar power has cemented the position of renewables as an indispensable part of the global energy mix; by 2035, renewables account for almost one-third of total electricity output."_ , [1], page 6

Also, from their FAQ[2]:

> How much of the world's energy comes from renewable sources?

 _"In 2009, the world relied on renewable sources for around 13.1% of its primary energy supply, according to IEA statistics. Renewables accounted for 19.5% of global electricity generation and 3% of global energy consumption for road transport in the same year."_

So it looks like the Slate article is grossly misleading.

[1] [http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication...](http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/English.pdf)

[2] <http://www.iea.org/aboutus/faqs/renewableenergy/>

<comment><USER4> Lomborg is right here. This graph (2.7, page 2) shows IEA projecting 3-4% of 2035 primary energy to be "other renewables" (including wind, solar, and geothermal, by their definition). Biomass (wood burning in the 3rd world) is much larger.

[http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/media/weowebsite/2011/key_...](http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/media/weowebsite/2011/key_graphs.pdf)

There's no discrepancy. _Renewable electricity_ may be 1/3rd of the 2035 _electricity_ supply, in that forecast; but wind and solar are only a fraction of renewable electricity, and electricity is only a fraction of energy. Dams are also renewable electricity. And non-electric energy (oil fuels) are even larger than electricity.

(I'm still looking for the actual numbers (a lot of the IEA publications are paid-access); I'll update this comment when I find them).

(edit: tables are here starting on page 544: <http://www.scribd.com/doc/72512781/World-Energy-Outlook-2011>)

<comment><USER5> The focus of the article is almost entirely on electricity. It's fairly misleading to quote those statistics in terms of total energy consumption when the rest of the article only discusses electricity production.

<comment><USER2> The focus of the article was actually Earth Hour, and how useless it really is. The whole damn article lurches from one disaster to another.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The same argument goes for Mother's day. Why be nice for one day? Does it really make a difference? :-)

The value is symbolic. Participation is a reminder and a statement.

<comment><USER7> But how valuable is that sort of symbolic gesture? If it actually makes people in the 1st world congratulate themselves that they've made a difference by flicking a switch, and then continue as normal as if everything is fine, then it might even have negative value. I don't agree with much of the article, it's quite wooly, but this point was the most valid/interesting part and I think you might have missed it.

<comment><USER8> Absolutely nobody (for all reasonable definitions of nobody) believes that turning the lights off for one hour has any quantitative impact on energy usage. What it does is _remind_ us that for the other 364 days of the years, we need to be thinking about energy policy. Efficiency, conservation, and low carbon/low polluting energy sources are important as we grow to 10 Billion on this planet, AND the third world starts to consume energy closer to the levels of the developed nations on a per capita basis.

<comment><USER7> I wasn't suggesting that most people think they're making a quantitative impact by flicking a switch, give me some credit for goodness sake. Did you not notice how I defined the subject of my comment _symbolic gesture_? I'll make my point again, since you missed it the first time. I was suggesting that by flicking the switch, and participating in the grand _symbolic gesture_ of Earth Hour, people feel like they've achieved something, and go right back to their incredibly wasteful 1st world life style feeling like they've scratched their eco-itch for another few days/weeks/months/whatever. As a tactic I think its shallow and weak. Lifestyle changes need to be baked into the fabric of society and dictated to us if we're to see any meaningful change, frankly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Other articles by the author: <http://www.slate.com/authors.bjrn_lomborg.html>

Now, where did I put my salt.

<comment><USER10> He's pretty infamous as the "Global Warming won't be that bad" guy.

It reminds me of a favorite scene from the animated show 'King of the Hill':

Dale(conservitive redneck friend): Global warming? Who cares? We'll grow oranges in Alaska.

Hank Hill : Goddammit Dale. We live in Texas. It's 110 degrees in April. If it gets 1 degree hotter, I'm gonna kick your ass.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> While I do think Germany's energy policy is colossally stupid it does bug me that this article cites a not-so-reputable institute:

[http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Institute_for_Ene...](http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Institute_for_Energy_Research)

<comment><USER2> He's a climate change "skeptic". Did you expect anything less?

<comment><USER12> I wish pseudo-scientists didn't use that word. It makes all of us that identify as skeptics look bad.

<comment><USER2> The best sort of skeptic is the one who is skeptical of skeptics. This causes a few self-referential problems, but nobody said life was meant to be easy. Least of all for skeptics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A better read on the subject:

[http://enochthered.wordpress.com/2008/03/31/earth-hour- candl...](http://enochthered.wordpress.com/2008/03/31/earth-hour-candles-and- carbon/)

</comment><comment><USER14> I agree with the author that turning lights off for an hour, once a year, has negligible (if any) impact on the environment or global warming, but I see Earth Hour as a symbolic action that raises awareness of an important issue and is a very nice international gesture of solidarity.

</comment><comment><USER15> Earth hour is just a way to draw attention to the subject.

<comment><USER2> I'm pretty sure that most of us are aware of the subject by now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Symbolic gestures are all very well, but real gestures, however small, are a lot better. Here's a few ideas off the top of my head for things you could do on Saturday instead of turning off the lights for an hour:

\- If you still use incandescent bulbs, buy some fluorescent or LED bulbs to replace them.

\- If you heat your house in winter, and it's not well insulated, look up options for getting better insulation put in.

\- If you're in the habit of driving when you could have walked or used public transport, try one of those alternatives.

\- If you eat meat, try a vegetarian dinner on Saturday.

Any other ideas?

<comment><USER17> If you usually avoid the first unheated water coming out of the pipes before your morning shower, collect it in a bucket. You can then use it for flushing the toilet, or whatever.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Solar and wind energy are doing very well in Spain: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Spain>. There is a lot of FUD about the need of subsidizing, but it seems that the technology is already mature enough, and subsidies are not necessary any more: [http://electricidadsostenible.blogspot.com.es/2012/12/espana...](http://electricidadsostenible.blogspot.com.es/2012/12/espana- la-energia-solar-fotovoltaica-es.html) (link in Spanish, sorry).

</comment><comment><USER19> Does anybody actually think that turning off the lights for an hour makes any kind of difference? Seems like this author is attacking a straw man.

<comment><USER14> There's probably one or two people who may believe that, but I think most of us see it as a symbolic gesture. Yeah, he is attacking a straw man.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> After soundly drubbing the effectiveness of this symbolic event, the author finally suggests an alternative activity:

"Focusing on green R&D might not feel as good as participating in a global gabfest with flashlights and good intentions, but it is a much brighter idea."

... with no information about how the average consumer is supposed to "focus."

</comment><comment><USER21> Slate just syndicated this article: [http://www.project- syndicate.org/print/earth-hour-s-counterp...](http://www.project- syndicate.org/print/earth-hour-s-counterproductive-symbolism-by-bj-rn-lomborg)

</comment><comment><USER22> I'd say this article teaches all the wrong "lessens", personally.

</comment><comment><USER23> I wonder what formula he's using for kWh -> "servant" conversions?

<comment><USER4> The naive one that measures the average heat output of a human (about 100 watts, or 2,000 kilocalories/day). This an upper bound on mechanical work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The author is encouraged to leave all his lights on at home, and activate all appliances 24/7, regardless of whether he's home or not, as a celebration of all the wonders that electricity does for us. I doubt he will have a problem, given that efficiency is not a concern for him (perhaps mute the TV when sleeping, and perhaps turn off the food processor to keep things a little quieter for naptime).

<comment><USER4> That's "Human Achievement Hour":

<http://cei.org/hah>

 _I doubt he will have a problem, given that efficiency is not a concern for him_

Except one hour of this costs essentially nothing, just like one hour of "earth hour" saves a negligible amount of money (if any). They're both _purely symbolic_ gestures. :)

<comment><USER24> The author isn't just about the one hour of Earth Hour, he's against everything it represents - which for the most part, is efficient use of energy. I'm just saying he should put his money where his mouth is.</comment></comment></comment>


China is working with Canonical on an Ubuntu customised for Chinese users - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21895723

<comment><USER2> Correct me if I'm wrong, but this sounds like a distro of linux not a home- grown operating system. That said, I like the idea of it, especially if the code base can contribute back to the open source community.

<comment><USER3> You're not wrong; headline of article is rubbish. Actually, the "slant" of it is kind of odd.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is anyone else concerned this is just going to be used to make the Great Firewall of China easier to enforce? Call me skeptical but I'd be concerned there would be some bad stuff hidden in there to allow the gov easier access to it's citizens data.

<comment><USER5> _Don't trust us? Erm, we have root. You do trust us with your data already._ \-- <http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1182>

<comment><USER6> That seems like an unnecessarily flippant response. I can just imagine the reaction if Google or Facebook responded similarly to privacy concerns.

The fact that I already do trust a service with my data isn't itself a reason to not periodically question that trust.

<comment><USER4> Also I think it depends on who's hands the data is in, maybe it's a false sense to comfort but I would rather Google or Facebook have access to my data and a Government agency who seem to be motivated by suppressing exposure to information they deem 'unfit' for their citizens. But i completely agree that questioning that trust is important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I guess Red Flag Linux didn't work out.

<comment><USER8> I would like to understand why Red Flag didn't work out?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you deal with doubts and worries? - <AUTHOR>

Hello!
Quick question really, would be interested to hear the answers. Currently doubting my startup for a variety of reasons including competitors already in the market and worries about monetising.
My venture is HouseQuest (www.housequest.co.uk) which aim to make finding a student property easy. Scratches an itch of mine. <comment><USER2> There's always anxiety when launching something new. Is it what people are looking for? Are we doing this the right way? How can we make it better? Notice there are no questions in there about money? If that is your biggest concern it will take away from the focus of building the best solution you can. If you are really building something incredible the money will come. Be patient. The work is worth the reward.</comment>


Creating the Next Generation of US Employees. My Investment in Treehouse - <AUTHOR> http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/10/19/investing-in-treehouse/

<comment><USER2> I'm interested to see what influence Treehouse might have on the distance learning industry.</comment>


Database of all Marvel characters - <AUTHOR> http://marvelousdb.com/

<comment><USER2> Does this adhere to the Marvel API Terms of Service?[0]

Specifically, "Storage. You may not indefinitely cache Content and further agree to follow the content retention rules, as set forth here: [http://developer.marvel.com/documentation/attribution."](http://developer.marvel.com/documentation/attribution.")

This looks cool, but it seems to have just scraped the API, and I'd hate to see it taken down for violating their rules.

edit: You also seem to be distributing results of the API in the GitHub repo, which might violate this: "You may not...redistribute the Content or Tools except within your Apps."

[0] [http://developer.marvel.com/terms](http://developer.marvel.com/terms)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is the Blog about it --[https://orchestrate.io/blog/2014/04/08/explore- the-marvel-un...](https://orchestrate.io/blog/2014/04/08/explore-the-marvel- universe-with-orchestrate/) And here is the Source Code -- [https://github.com/asamiller/marvelousdb](https://github.com/asamiller/marvelousdb)

<comment><USER3> Very pertinent information. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Apparently they can't cope with two characters having the same name (not a rare thing in the Marvel universe):

[http://marvelousdb.com/character/1011256](http://marvelousdb.com/character/1011256)

<comment><USER5> Yeah, comics have enough duplicates of everything (including, in some cases, multiple identical clones of the same character) that the only sane way way to handle it is to assign an arbitrary unique ID to each character.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Here is the actual JSON for each comics and characters --[https://github.com/asamiller/marvelousdb/tree/master/data/](https://github.com/asamiller/marvelousdb/tree/master/data/)

</comment><comment><USER6> How are the results sorted? When I search "Spider-man", the first result is Boomerang, and none of the results on the first page are for the Peter Parker Spider-man (result #2 is Ben Reilly Spider-man).

<comment><USER7> Yeah, I searched for "Nimrod" and got nothing but a few other characters who reference encounters with him. He's in Marvel Universe, so clearly they're just picking and choosing who gets in here. This database is sorely lacking, and the search function is meh... Not a knock on the Node.js code, more of a knock on the Marvel API.

I know we're not supposed to be negative on here, but this is a cut and dry Comic Book Guy situation....

 _clears throat_

"Worst..... database..... ever...."

<comment><USER8> This was a little project I did when Marvel's API first came out. I scraped all the data and put it in a database that allowed better searching/browsing. I probably need to periodically scrape the API again to pull in changes and additions as they add them. Hopefully Marvel will update the data and make it more complete.

<comment><USER9> How in the world is this repo compatible with their TOS - [http://developer.marvel.com/terms](http://developer.marvel.com/terms) ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This looks cool and sexy, but I have to say, I still prefer the wikia database

[http://marvel.wikia.com/Main_Page](http://marvel.wikia.com/Main_Page)

It's much uglier, but much more useful for any actual, ahem ahem, "research".

</comment><comment><USER11> First tried searching for 'Quake', then 'Daisy Johnson' [0]. Nada :(

[0]: [http://marvel.wikia.com/Daisy_Johnson_%28Earth-616%29](http://marvel.wikia.com/Daisy_Johnson_%28Earth-616%29)

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm disappointed [http://marvelousdb.com/character/1017316](http://marvelousdb.com/character/1017316)

</comment><comment><USER13> I appreciate this being open source but why on earth would you store this information in JSON rather than a relational DB?

<comment><USER8> I had to pull the data out of Marvel's API which returns JSON. Then the data was stored in Orchestrate.io as the database. The JSON data is included in the repo so other people don't have to scrape Marvel's API.

<comment><USER14> Did you get special permission to do this? It is against the generic terms:

[http://developer.marvel.com/terms](http://developer.marvel.com/terms)

 _Use of our Content. You may not change or edit the Content (e.g., modify, augment). You agree to follow Marvel 's attribution and linking rules, as set forth here: [http://developer.marvel.com/documentation/attribution](http://developer.marvel.com/documentation/attribution). You also agree to delete any Content upon Marvel's request (or if Marvel disables the Marvel API (or upon termination, see below)). You agree to configure your Apps to request only Content that is needed by such App. You may not (except with Marvel's prior written approval): (i) use any Content, or the Marvel API or Tools for any commercial purpose; or (ii) redistribute the Content or Tools except within your Apps.

Storage. You may not indefinitely cache Content and further agree to follow the content retention rules, as set forth here: [http://developer.marvel.com/documentation/attribution.*](http://developer.marvel.com/documentation/attribution.*)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> There is one character so super he's in the database but you can't find him.

</comment><comment><USER16> I didn't realize so many of the Marvel characters had UK citizenship.</comment>