iheartstartup

There's quite a bit of misinformation in this comment.

- Tensorflow has very little use for the mathematical concept of a "Tensor", apart from the fact that it is a multidimensional array as a way of organizing data.

- Again, most of what is covered in an Information theory class is coding theory, which is not directly applicable to ML. There are a few superficial connections, however, nothing enough to justify a whole class.

- A class on Harmonic analysis, again, though a beautiful subject, does not have any significant overlap with ML, apart from a few superficial similarities to do with convolution.

- Most ML Ph.d.s don't take these classes, and go on to have very successful careers.

This comment is very typical of a kind of snobbery in ML observers that goes along the lines of "you need to understand all these deep and hard concepts before you start to touch ML". Actually, you don;t. ML is, right now, still quite a young field as far as its branching off from statistics goes. We are still building the groundwork of this skyscraper.

We welcome everyone with any background, and hey, even those with none.

he misses many points, including the meaning of the phrase "long-term greedy". It is not about "everyone else in the market was short-term greedy and, as a result, we took all their money. Since traders like money, this was inspiring.", but a philosophy of enlightened self-interest, which I suspect would resonate with the class and professor more. Yet he subtly uses this as an anecdote about how MBAs are dumb and the classes "herd mentality". What aarogance!

if you've read the article, you'll the discussion at hand was concerning stereoscopic 3d, not the fancy light field tech which may be around the corner, nor not.

what matters in the end is being right. When opnions have to turn into action, knowing what is the right thing to do (knowing what technology to use, for example), and a careful balance of tradeoffs is always the sign of good leadership. This may include taking very strong stands on various things.

I've found people have tendencies to delude themselves in certain ways, however. Either being too positive or negative. The former is less harmful than the latter, but both are miscalibrations of judgement.

It'd be interesting to explore bounds on the entropy of these passwords. It'd be a shame if you could guess the rest of the password from the first 2-3 characters.

the social nut in VR is going to be the hardest one to crack. It will be big when the solution appears. But we're not close to one yet.

The approach we're taking now is the "avatars and voice" approach, where you interact with other people through VR puppets, essentially. These puppets can mimic your body language and facial expressions and are supposed to increase the depth of human communication through nonverbal cues. The truth is, after experimenting heavily with this, I've found most of it to be pretty gimmicky.

It seems the human mind naturally gravitates to such ideas (e.g. second life), but it never pans out. I'm not sure what the right answer is, or if theres even one.