I'm too lazy to look up the ref, but someone told me that the preference for average faces was actually an artifact of the averaging process. It turns out that averaging images of faces also makes the skin look a lot younger and smoother, and therefore more attractive.
One way to test it would be to see if the median face, by some choice of metric, was also more attractive. The problem with other averaging methods, like simple pixel averaging, is that you can produce a result that is not actually particularly similar to any face anyone has. For example, if you had a population where everyone's face was highly asymmetric, but 50% in one direction and 50% in the other direction, the average would be a symmetric face that is completely atypical for the population.
Any android phone will do the maps and GPS, and basic internet, so you're covered there. They all can do music and podcasts too with the provided "listen" app, although there are other players out there. (I use the (not free) Doggcatcher app, which I like very much.)
And of course, they all send and receive phone calls. This is where it gets a little dicey, since it's not totally the phone's "fault" (nor to its credit) for the quality, since although some is the phone, a lot is the carrier and its coverage where you are.
I don't know what country you're in, but in the US at least, the big carriers have varying converage in various areas. In some cities AT&T is king, others Verizon, etc. So a lot depends on where you are, what carrier you're with, and the coverage characteristics of the area.
Are you really sure about this? It sounds equally plausible to me that not knowing both the source and target languages would give one an advantage of not relying on ad-hoc, hard-to-model, human judgements. Being monolingual is more likely to enforce a discipline where one develops an algorithm which would work effectively on all natural languages.
IIRC the 'candide' group was (not intentionally) composed of scientists with no knowledge of both english and french.. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~aberger/mt.html
It does help to have sketchy knowledge about some language to see how you can figure out things when you cannot assume any knowledge of them.
Contrary to your point, early statistical machine translation only works well for relatively close language pairs, like English-French or English-Spanish. It totally fails for more distant languages such as Chinese, Arabic or even German, which is why you have so many Chinese-speaking people (including English-Chinese bilinguals) in machine translation these days.
Parallel corpora are full of ad-hoc, hard-to-model, human judgements (from people called "translators"). The advantage is that the translators don't come up to you to criticize your translation model; however doing error analysis for an MT system (i.e., the key to actually improving things and not producing garbage) requires at least minimal knowledge of the source language and relatively good knowledge of the target language.
Well the deactivation page did automatically say that the users "friends" would "miss" them. Did they actually check with these users to see if they would want their image and identity to be used in this way? If not, then it seems pretty disingenuous to me. How do they know that these users will actually miss them? Why is facebook assuming that my friends would not respect my decision to leave facebook if that was the case..
>>"Did they actually check with these users to see if they would want their image and identity to be used in this way? "
I think we're waay beyond the point where fb checks with its users on how, where and when it wants to display their content. Sure you can go through their convoluted privacy controls but they'll find a way to do what they want.
"my definition of a terrorist is somebody who uses stealth to deliberately target civilians in an effort to affect political change."
Shouldn't the definition of terrorism include the fact that they are violently targeting civilians? Economic or computer terrorism that doesn't actually hurt or kill anyone doesn't meet the definition in my view - and the publishing work or WL definitely doesn't either.
The point is that the use of stealth and fear to purposely sway voters is a deliberate circumvention of the act of an intelligent population making an educated choice by voting.
The actions which may induce this fear are not germane. Ruining commerce for a week, if it causes real harm to economic participants and sways voters, is good enough.
You can release too much information and also interfere, perhaps even scare and cause harm. Using the fact that "it's only the truth" is not enough. It's a red herring. So they are walking a very fine line here, but as far as I can tell they're on the correct side of it. At least as far as the terrorism definition goes.
I never thought I'd be having this discussion on HN, but by that definition Fox News (and to a lesser extent other networks and/or "commentators") would qualify as a terrorist organization.
As much as I dislike Fox News, actually extending the definition of terrorism far enough to include them, and Wikileaks, would dilute the definition to the point of uselessness (or, worse, to the point of including anyone you don't agree with who is trying to induce political change).
I should probably start staying out of the WL discussions here, this is starting to sound too much like /r/politics :(
All I'm saying is that a clear definition of terms is required if you would like to discuss this. Here or anywhere.
You are welcome to come up with your own terms -- perhaps you are correct in that the search for terms is political and contentious. Don't know.
I came up with my definition many years ago, because the word "terrorism" is way overloaded. I would encourage you to come up with your own. I do not care what that definition is, as long as it is consistent (And btw, once you get something, I'd love to hear it)
As technologist, I think part of our job in this entire WL issue is to be able to help the average layman understand the issues involved. So -- agreement or not -- we should all think through on our own what our analysis is. As anal as they are, semantics matter.
And no, voluntarily watching a TV news channel does not count as terrorism under my definition, unless it also includes dancing with the stars, which I think should be outlawed worldwide (wink)
I think we can separate advocacy from semantics. If not, then we're stuck in these arguments no matter what we do or try. The issue here is that technology, our bread and butter, is becoming intertwined with just about everything in the entire world. And most of the people and system is it now affecting are completely unprepared to deal with it.
I agree that definitions are important, but most people's definitions of terrorism involve something going boom. I'm not as interested in coming up with my own definition as I am in using the terms and definitions that are least likely to be misinterpreted by the largest number of people.
That in itself is a loaded topic... trying to redefine a term is usually either a losing battle (because people won't listen), or an underhanded strategy (because people won't notice). We don't always have the luxury of attaching a glossary to a conversation ;)
This has actually turned into a great technology discussion.
The first thing you have to do, if you're programming inside a business, is come to agreement on terms. The initial thing most people try is some sort of dictionary approach, but after a while you end up realizing that a critical part of a project team's work is to create working definitions of common concepts. This is called the problem domain language (insert long talk which includes Ludwig Wittgenstein here) Words mean something because of the semantic web they are presented in. They have no meaning on their own.
So "Customer" or "Account", while sounding like clear terms, are actually the same problem as "terrorism" Unless you come up with (and own) a definition, analysis will be impossible because of contradictions.
Sorry. Slipped into teacher mode.
This is just stuff I do all the time, so I don't have a problem with creating working definitions, no matter what the topic is. I'd much rather be considered an oddball with my own definitions than circling my tail trying to pin down what things like "war" or "terrorism" is. Because if I'm creating my definitions, I can ensure consistency. Can't do that when you turn that job over to somebody else. Language is extremely slippery.
I thought it was common to invent new terms or repurpose neutral ones rather than subvert common, loaded terms for your own purposes?
I would not call it "oddball", I would call it either "intentionally misleading" or - granting benefit of doubt - a "misjudgment causing more harm than good".
How about "cyberterrorism", a reasonably established term?
The word itself doesn't matter. That's the whole point.
Call it "foo". The point is that I create a symbol that has these attributes. We can then reason about this symbol.
You cannot do this by picking up an already-loaded term and working with it. It doesn't work. So by redefining "foo" or "terrorism" or "cyber-terrorism" or whatnot, you then have to go back to where the old word was used in context and see if it works. In some cases it works. In some cases it does not. You find out all sorts of interesting things by slightly formalizing your language in this manner.
Is a certain amount of real harm that could credibly take place a requirement? Or could, say, Saw IV be terrorism if it had a political message?
For contrast, the DoD's definition of terrorism:
The calculated use of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological.
Or could, say, Saw IV be terrorism if it had a political message?
How could a movie sneak up on a population and play itself to them?
But -- playing a terrorist beheading to a bunch of captives at a local theater could, as long as it caused harm and was purposed to interfere with the democratic process.
Terrorism and WL, although they are not the same (remember I am saying they are not the same), are both "meta" attacks. They don't attack the people, per se, they seek to destroy or change the system of governance the people use to make decisions. This is why the argument that only 2K people were killed while more people die in roadway accidents on 9-11 makes no sense. You don't count up the bodies from one attack or the other. It doesn't work like that. It's not a kinetic fight, or even a fight for land. It's a systemic fight.
Yes but isn't the possibility that your communications will be disclosed to the public by an anonymous insider already a part of this game? I don't see the naivety or idealism here - It just looks like standard journalism to me. WL has done a lot to make the "game" more interesting by making the possibility of insider leaks more credible than before. There are many reasons why an insider with the story to tell would rather talk to WL than a newsmedia reporter.
why not take the simpler explanation that the reason families have broken up is that they actually weren't that happy?
Also why doesn't having multiple people in a family earning an income lead to an increase in security? i.e. the impact of a (e.g. job loss, illness) can be buffered by the other partner's income.
Only if they weren't already spending up to the limit (and past) of both incomes together. If one is working and loses his job, the other can get a job; if both are working and don't have any cushion, they are more likely to have a problem.
This confuses me. If it is impossible to time the market, then why does he think it is "pretty clear that the market is getting overheated"? [edit: in the comments he explains that he's looking at "revenues and cash flow and discounted cash
flow to get values", but if these are only weak predictors that don't enable one to time the market, why worry?]
Other people are willing to pay more than he is for the same opportunities. When the other guy on the block is willing to spend more money than you think reasonable, it's very possible that the market is overheated.
I happen to think this is total crap: VCs will completely turn the screws on you when the economy tanks and behave in an adversarial and predatory fashion. When things are going better than expected, prices rise - and he doesn't like that he has to pay more. If you have revenues and cash flow, the fact of the matter is that you probably don't need VC and can walk away from stupid offers.
This is the usual nonsense about "smart investors" - he basically says outright that people should go with his firm despite other people offering a better concrete deal because of his intangible connections and expertise.
But the fact of the matter is that you CAN value those. If the choice is between getting $7M and $15M for the same chunk of your firm, you're basically paying a $8M premium for his potential assistance in selling the firm, lukewarm commitment towards raising future capital, and whatever value his rolodex has in your space divided by the amount of time he's actually going to spend on your startup. But that is absolutely crazy. You're getting maybe 15% of the VC's time and paying $8M for doing so. Seriously, that's nuts.
Instead, hire a decent investment banker and be prepared to pay several hundred thousand to do so, hire a couple great business development people who are actually in your space as opposed to in the venture capital space, and go to town. If your VC tells you that their halo effect is worth more than a million bucks, (or alternately if you're talking rather large numbers, if the delta between one money source and another is more than say 20%) you need some pretty concrete reasons as to why.
TLDR: Shop around for capital. Fred probably is worth a premium - but not a 2x premium. Cash flow wins and VC puffery doesn't.
