mbq

Um, are you sure we are there yet? For me it seems that the only atoms it has learned are the long-lasting static scenes, rather than eyes or mouths. Maybe it is just a matter of scoring and can be improved, but still...

If it runs, it has to be decrypted (at a current level of cryptography); at most it is obfuscated and the access is blocked by some hardware tricks which may be costly to circumvent, but there is nothing fundamental stopping you.

Binaries can be converted back to assembly and quite often even back to equivalent C; bugs are most often found by fuzzing (intentional or not) which does not require source code. The difference between open and closed source is that open is more often analysed by white hats who rather publish vulnerabilities and help fixing them, while closed by black hats who rather sell or exploit them in secret.

C is not a problem -- you can make a bug in every language. Even with memory safety and a perfect compiler, bug may direct the flow in bad direction (bypassing auth for instance) or leak information via side-channel.

This is only for certain, verbal questions like antonym of, synonym of, X is to Y as Z to what; for each of them a separate, specific model was built (not that the AI read the question and printed relevant answer).

To sum up, the paper should be titled "Dictionary is better than MechTurk users on look-in-dictionary tasks."

Link to the original paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1505.07909v1.pdf

About hard as setting up any UNIX daemon on a few computers. Reliability is a complex topic, depends on what you need -- for an anecdotal evidence I maintain a microscopic (10-20TB/4-6 desktop hosts) Moose deployment for a distributed home dir use-case over 5 years without any data loss despite two full computer losses, one disk malfunction and numerous network and power outages (it never detected a bit-rot event though). There are many serious success and horror stories one Google query away.

There are also distributed file systems (MooseFS, Gluster, Ceph) which can duplicate data across physical locations, protect it with checksums, scrub in a distributed manner and auto-heal, all of that transparently.

We do know what goes on in them. They are just trying (more-less, but it is only a matter of speed) random solutions till good enough, where the human operator decides what is "good". Which is fundamental, because when you have a function f you know nothing about, the _only_ thing you can do optimise it is to sample randomly, keep current best solution and hope it is good enough. Anything smarter would require some knowledge or assumptions, so is impossible to apply.

In the even more meta direction, the question is though whether human intelligence is some mystical emergent magic, or just try-till-good-enough massive optimisation of physiological needs plus some bonus for social behaviour sponsored by evolution plus some random noise, hidden behind a self-illusion of being a real thing, similar to consciousness. This idea is obviously somewhat disturbing; it shows that success is only a matter of luck, resourcefulness depends on environment, motives are never really noble, apes are only less successful than us because they can't (yet?) efficiently store and share information and art is a matter of an accidental conflux of random biases. On the other hand it suggests that singularity is nonsense, even more, that AGIs will become self-crippled with similar flaws that we observe within ourselves.

This can be solved by containers.

And Akamai's is inspired by http://http2.golang.org/gophertiles (which they acknowledge).

I don't know the details, but this is rather due to fact how docker operates -- there is a daemon that runs with root privs (which are esential to create a container) controlled by a client with a protocol that has no concept of fine-graind access lists. Consequently, user A can do anything with user B's containers because docker doesn't even have such thing as container ownership. Also docker protocol involves something which is basically opening shell as root, thus users with docker access have also a passwordless sudo. All those choices are basically ok for docker because it is designed for single-user systems like developer laptops or application servers.

Currently, for multi-user systems the only safe option for containers is sadly virtualisation or emulation; nice implementation of rootless chroot is proot, http://proot.me/

Why, docker-initiated chroot would prevent FF from acessing any not-FF+libs files, including which this malware steals; on Qubes it would have access to everything user-readable in the AppVM, which may include some secrets as Qubes workflow involves user-supervised copying files across VMs.

Obviously docker, as opposed to Qubes, won't stop more complex malware that exploits the kernel.

Honestly speaking, "colour" cameras we use every day are also false colour; they shoot 3 monochrome images in red, blue and green chunks of spectrum and mix the whole thing using plethora of parameters like white balance, or gamma. All this is heavily tuned towards human vision specifics to enable either monitor or print to induce a similar sensation in the viewer's brain that the photographed object would, despite the fact that the whole process retains only a negligible fraction of the information carried into the camera by the original photons. Quite a lot of animals perceive the hue of human-made photos and videos as totally odd, misexposed or desaturated, just because of having vision adapted to wavelengths or other properties of light which our processing mostly removes as redundant. Even more, one day humans may start to enrich their vision by technological or biological modifications, consequently beginning to perceive today photos as as dull as we see those old, monochrome ones.

Isn't it actually written to the EFI system partition on disk rather than flashed into the MB?

As with Java, the problem is not Flash per se but the browser plugin implementing SWF runtime. Flash can and probably will live long and prosper as the Flash "creator" app will switch to generating JavaScript+HTML5 istead of SWF.

Still, I would read something titled "China's Market Crash and the Man Who Earned >10M$ Having Precisely Predicted It".

It shouldn't be significant because GW is all about how bad Earth is in dissipating energy into space (in comparison to black body), rather than how much energy flows through. Nevertheless, let's count: according to Wiki, 2012 World energy consumption is 5.6*10^20J; this means we were producing at an average rate of this/seconds in year/area of Earth, which is 0.034W/m^2. Solar input (and thermal radiation output, since Earth is roughly in an equilibrium) is 340W/m^2, making our input 0.1%, about the same as variations due to solar cycles.

Also pulling anything from CDN basically means that CDN operator (or anyone that will manage to hack it) can spy on or alter communication between your users and your server.

Even with PZ DNA would have major and minor groove rather than being a symmetrical double helix beloved by virtually all illustrators, sadly also those of pop sci articles...

98% of computer-using population will use whatever comes with the machine; Linux is viable but the hardware vendors are not pushing it, also because of Microsoft lobbying. On the other hand Android could be easily built on top of QNX and get the same market share.

Nope; *ply are implemented as loops, you are only saving time on reallocating memory structures. Real speed-up is gained from using vectorised functions and operators (implemented in C or Fortran in R engine or a certain package) for whole vectors.

The execution could be better, but it is certainly not a stupid idea. GA code is esentially a concealed, unconditional transmit of the user data to a third party, and allowing this third party to intercept and modify your communication; pretty high price for a few colorful piecharts, and certainly something that deserves a disclaimer.

The fact that they want beacons suggests that the location information is not as accuracte or reliable as they would like to; quantitative changes also matter.

FB knows the list of visitors from their query logs and in principle may later sell it to the business either directly or as a more targeted ad.

Still this beacon network may be also alternatively mapped (or ripped from FB servers) by the community, released as an offline db and then used as a fully private navigation aid or something like this.

Turboprop business is an another airline, eurolot; it changes, but it is often a separate company.

I bet the author calls for making functions just right in size to leverage self-containment and complexity, instead of panicking after crossing some magical number of lines.

This is actually compatible with DRY, because overpartitioned functionality will require more state to be pulled from function to function, resulting in repeating, long argument lists.

Still, this also confirms the obvious fact that the selection of the winning team based on that hidden, private test also gives no guarentee that it is not accidently overfitted, especially with tons of submissions. The only reliable option to solve it is to ask participants for self-contained programs and run it inside a CV loop on the organisers' hardware, but this seems too cumbersome to be implemented in reality; I think only TunedIT tries it, but without luck :L

It is a common misconception and a huge source of disappointment with ML -- without proper validation of the whole model building procedure (method selection + parameter tuning + feature selection + fitting) no amount of data and magic tricks will make you sure that there is no overfitting. Even a single hold-out test is risky because gives you no idea about the expected accuracy variance.

It is sad that the post fails to acknowledge that hyperparameter tuning may also be a source of overfitting (and very often is) -- one should always treat is as a part of training and validate as such, for instance by using nested CV. And never ever report accuracy straight from tuning as a final result.

I like the idea to just show the globe (i.e. orthographic projection); it is familiar, interactive, distortions are not deceiving and naturally disappear with zoom.