BeeBoBub

Thanks. HN removes characters after the hash when I submit links. Maybe my reputation is too low.

This is an interesting idea for waste heat. Is the waste heat a nuclear power plant produces significant? My understanding is you want all your heat working to spin your turbine.

That’s not really the argument monkeybutton is making, the point is lobsters’ neural complexity is similar to ants, and orcas are comparable to humans.

It is true that photonic systems can multiply/add very efficiently. The limiting factor for optical neural networks are activation functions. Non-linear relationships are hard for photonics. State-of-the-art nonlinear features require optical elements that are difficult to manufacture or op-amps which slow the computational potential of the optical neural network by orders of magnitude.

I concur with many other commenters here, this is a fantastic read. Though, I find the value in this book is not the discrete proposals Jaynes makes - his conclusions on schizophrenia are dubious at best. Jayne’s achievement is in his explaining of the mindset and thought patterns (what Jaynes calls consciousness) of the ancients.

So often ancient man felt alien to me. Not until reading this book have I felt I understand what it was like to have lived millennia ago.

But where does it end? Is all reason not based on a set of axioms? You can comment on your presuppositions, if you throw them all out then there is no (classical) logic.

Philosophy is a conversation, and valid argumentation is that starting point of any treatise. The work of contending philosophers is to challenge one another, so there should be no hesitation in using less-than-certain (that is to say, all) presuppositions.

Moreover, Feser does comment on his presuppositions in this very article.

> I would qualify this by saying that metaphysics is prior to logic if “logic” is understood in sense (b) described above, though not if understood in sense (a). Naturally, we have to presuppose certain canons of reasoning when reasoning about anything, including metaphysics. But it doesn’t follow that we have to presuppose the codification enshrined in some particular formal system – such as, for example, modern propositional and predicate logic rather than traditional Aristotelian logic, or rather than some system that tries to capture the best of both worlds (such as that of Fred Sommers).

I understand caution when stating opinions - it is a good instinct, but I'm not sure what you're arguing.

> I think that sometimes being overly opinionated and incapable of changing your mind is potentially harmful to others, yes… Is it not potentially dangerous to advocate for various political realities based solely on unexamined/individual opinion-based constructs?

How can I disagree with this? Yes there is hazard in advocating for anything. Moreover, there is hazard in doing anything. But I see what you're getting at. There is some line we draw in our own minds between philosophy, that is the pursuit of truth, and political - the realm of opinions.

Where is the line? Most would say that it is when the philosopher argues in good or bad faith. Thus, we are in the realm of the unknowable, the motivations of all around us. Also, not to comment on the notions of whether it's possible for an individual's to be "good" or "bad", but I don't want to digress.

To return, I think you're saying that making statements result in harm to individuals is bad. I agree, but this is a political question, not a philosophical one. Thus providing a philosophical justification or contradiction for your statement is moot.

Is it wrong to be opinionated? Feser quickly remarks on a problem of math: some mathematical constructs reflect the system of math more than reality. If your philosophy never touches the political, the reality, aren’t you merely creating a system of reasoning for its own sake?

Moreover, does he need to challenge his own presuppositions? We can do that!

You’re suggesting that a head of state (more, a sovereign) should have the right to rule subjects by decree in private. I think that most would agree that the citizens should have the right to know how the laws they live under came to be. You are unfair to conflate Greenwald's advocacy for everyday individual privacy with the Queen’s right to rule arbitrarily.

baybal doesn’t contradict you. Deng radically westernized parts of the Chinese economy, but he also enforced the one child policy. The economic effects of a small young generation supporting a large aging population is witnessed in Japan: a slow in growth if nothing else

Whale fall described in chapter 81 of Moby Dick:

Now, this occasional inevitable sinking of the recently killed Sperm Whale is a very curious thing; nor has any fisherman yet adequately accounted for it. Usually the dead Sperm Whale floats with great buoyancy, with its side or belly considerably elevated above the surface. If the only whales that thus sank were old, meagre, and broken-hearted creatures, their pads of lard diminished and all their bones heavy and rheumatic; then you might with some reason assert that this sinking is caused by an uncommon specific gravity in the fish so sinking, consequent upon this absence of buoyant matter in him. But it is not so. For young whales, in the highest health, and swelling with noble aspirations, prematurely cut off in the warm flush and May of life, with all their panting lard about them; even these brawny, buoyant heroes do sometimes sink.

This is a fun blog post, but I thought it was a little hard to follow. A few observations:

  When we added the features a new problem emerged: their 
  ranges are very different from X1 meaning that a small 
  change in θ2, θ3, θ4 have much bigger imopacts than 
  changing θ1. This causes problems when we are fitting the 
  values θ later on.

This was a little confusing because you reference θ2, θ3, θ4 without explicitly showing them in h(x).

  Because we will be using the hypothesis function many 
  times in the future it should be very fast. Right now h 
  can only compute one the prediction for one training 
  example at a time. We can change that by vectorizing it

What does it mean for _h_ to compute something? Why is vectorizing better? Context about the computation is needed to determine if vectoring will speed computation.

Why do you use gradient descent when you can use a closed-form solution to solve the regression? It would be nice to discuss both gradient descent and the closed-form solution.

You cover a lot of topics in this blog post which have a lot of nuance and depth (e.g. random initial weights) that merit whole posts on their own.

I am working on a product which makes use of this technology. I generate vocal pitch visualizations for karaoke

http://pitchperfected.io

HN aggregates, it has no illusions of creating original works. Occasional high-quality reposts are a virtue of HN, and I don't think HN suffers from the same regurgitation issues as film sites. The film websites often come with analysis or reviews of films where the regurgitation lies, whereas Hacker News provides no editorialized comment on the articles, only discussion.

"Echo Chambers" etc... could be merely a distributed version regurgitated content, however I think the HN community tends to self-police groupthink

For non-accelerating masses, or more precisely within an inertial reference frame

I’d say the same, but it’s been more eye-closing for me