No. I'm not a fan of the format either, but if that's the way that someone chooses to disseminate informative content then style concerns are insufficient reason to forego it. The bikeshed doesn't have to be blue.
See a lot of criticism here. For a math new grad who wants to break in software development, what similar guide would HN recommend? I'm specially interested in backed.
I prefer the guide to be extensive like this one because it give me a sense of what I know and don't know.
In short, in any kind of programming, you have to learn the basics first. For web frontend, these I think will be: HTML, latest CSS spec, Javascript ES6. After that you can pick up a small library like jQuery. After that, you will know by yourself if you need to learn a particular JS framework.
For backend: A bit of HTML/CSS/JS, a language usable on server side (C#, PHP, Python, maybe Java, maybe JS), SQL and one RDBMS (Postgres, MySQL, SQL Server etc.). After that you can learn about REST, CORS and more advanced stuff. If you reach this point, you will know by yourself what you need to learn next.
Thank you Lex. I think your podcast are the most interesting in the internet. But...
Readings books is awesome because you are getting the condensed knowledge that someone have spend maybe decades of their lives to compile. When I listen to a podcast the same applies to a lesser extend. The problem is Lex does not ask interesting questions. He dwells into philosophical and common questions i.e "What is the meaning of life", "is math invented or discovered". This questions are interesting but are not in the guest field of expertise which in turn causes them to give a generic response. This devalues the quality of the podcast.
I disagree with this. One of the reasons I like this podcast so much is that the philosophical questions often lead to guests revealing profound insights into their outlook on life (or at least you get to see more of the interviewee's personality!).
The other thing I like is how Lex is willing to disagree with the interviewee. It leads to much more interesting discussions when someone has to explain their reasoning rather than just stating it outright. I think it helps that Lex seems to always ask the same questions I was thinking of!
I agree with this. I’ve been in the AI field(s) for over 25 years and I really wanted to like this podcast. The people Lex gets on are amazing, but I haven’t been able to get through any of the episodes as they get too philosophical.
I understand it would be difficult to get ones head around the matter produced by each of these giants to ask more specific questions. Would it be worth asking others in the field about the key ideas that require explaining and which topics are controversial?
While I definitely understand where you are coming from, I think Lex's style can grow on you.
My advice would be to ask shorter questions, sometimes Lex you try to explain what you mean. I would just drop the question and let the other person start talking instead of you trying to fill the silence.
Also I do really enjoy the questions about meaning of life (maybe more discussions on free will would be great too).
In any case, hats off to you Lex for interviewing some of the most interesting people in the field (and those who are not exactly in the field too).
Lex here. The amount of positive and thoughtful comments here is humbling. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.
Here are things I didn't realize is the role of the interviewer (my role) but I now know they are:
1. Push towards depth, because not all people go there naturally themselves.
2. Ask for clarifications if I don't understand something. This can make me sound stupid, but it's a worthy sacrifice. I will always sacrifice ego for the chance to understand something basic or hopefully fundamental. In fact, I play dumb sometimes just to force explanation of basics on which the technically deep ideas are built.
3. Disagree respectfully (at times playing devil's advocate) to give a chance to the interviewee to argue their point.
4. Speak whatever question or point I have clearly, concisely, quickly, and then shut up and listen. My role is to give the other person a break and to throw up ideas that spark their passion. I really struggle with this (especially the concise, clear part).
Thank you again for the kind words. I'll keep improving!
Another AI person here (Stanford PhD student). I concur the philosophical stuff is mostly annoying for me -- for me it comes off as random self-satisfied pseudo-intellectual self-indulgence that makes for nice clickbaity-youtube clips but does not make for actually good conversations. The list of guests is great, but i'd prefer the conversations to me more humble and less wannabe insightful.
Interesting philosophical thoughts are not limited to philosophers. A philosophical question asked to a top-achieving person in any field often yields a thought-provoking answer. I have heard some of those in Lex’s podcast. A diversity of perspectives is helpful for such questions.
One can tell that Lex does his research and also asks specific questions pertaining to the interviewee’s expertise. I think he strikes a good balance in many/most episodes.
I believe A* should always give the minimum path as long the heuristic is optimistic. It will become a greedy search if the heuristic is pessimistic. If the heuristic is "perfect" i.e heuristic(x to y) = min_cost(x to y) the the search will be optimal (i.e no nodes that do not belong with the path will be explored)
Yep after playing around with it for a bit it didn't give a minimum path. I believe something is wrong with the heuristic you are using.
I believe the push and pull is between optimal path and time to find the path. The heuristic dictates whether the algorithm will lean towards Dijkstra or Greedy or somewhere in between.
Whether a greedy heuristic is faster or not is dependent on the structure of the graph. For the example in the article about mountains and grassland, it makes sense that such a heuristic would speed up the search, since the algorithm can't get stuck in dead-ends.
But in a problem where the algorithm can get stuck in dead-ends, it's possible to construct examples where the greedy heuristic is (much) slower than plain Manhattan distance. Here's an example:
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The other day I brought a large furniture and no other option but to transported with the trunk of my car open. The car has "protective" beep system whenever the car drives with the trunk open or with seabelt off. So my car was beeping the trip...it almost drived me insane.
It is so sad that I can no longer control what my own car does. This is only about to get worse as tech improves.
Heck our phones and computers are probably sending thousand of telemetric information right now and we don't know or control. It just a matter of time until cars do that to, and we cant not longer control who to utilize our own cars.
From the game theorist point of view I think its better if one company is the underdog. Think about it, if one company is the underdog, one company has a lot to gain by competing, while the other has a lot to lose if they don't compete. Therefore we get competition.
Now, the more equal the market share of the companies the grater the risk and less the reward for competition... A better strategy would be not to undercut your competitor and instead divide the market share. Which leads to stagnation.
Do people here think it sound reasonable?
Edit: Mathematically the argument would be as follows:
Consider two company A and B. A has market share 'a' and B has b. n is the total market. Then a + b = n.
A's reward for competing will be n - a = b.
A's risk for competing will be a, (it's remaining market share).
A's will compete as long as the reward is greater than risk.
Take it for what you will, but an Intel engineer relayed to me (many years ago, in the aftermath of the Microsoft antitrust trial), that they attempt to ensure that AMD maintains a certain level of competitiveness as a hedge against antitrust. Sometimes that involves actually helping AMD via partnerships or technology sharing, if they are struggling too much - other times it means giving them a swift kick to the crotch if they are gaining to much ground. It may have been BS, it may not have - and much has certainly changed over the years... but...
AMD has always been nipping at Intel's heels, for 20+ years now, never really losing or gaining too much to pose a real threat. Yet we've seen how ruthlessly Intel will snuff out potential contenders (such as Transmeta, RIP), it does kind of make you think there's something to it.
This was the reason for me to still buy AMD shares when they were deep underwater. I considered them basically immortal, because if the company ever was in existential danger, Intel would have a huge incentive to stage some kind of indirect rescue operation (not outright buying, that would kill the goose, but something else that surely would prop up AMD share value), because the monetary value of AMD as an antitrust insurance was easily much higher than AMDs market cap.
Sold those shares way too early in hindsight, but still got a good return out of that thinking, and if AMD ever gets into trouble again, I won't hesitate to apply the same logic.
There's a simpler explanation for why Intel used AMD GPUs for a while: Intel's new integrated GPU design couldn't ship until they sorted out their 10nm issues, and their older design wasn't competitive. When Intel went shopping for GPUs on the open market, they could get them cheaper from AMD than Nvidia (though the HBM2 requirement was a clear downside). They actually paired AMD GPUs with both 14nm Kaby Lake and their failed 10nm Cannon Lake processors that had broken integrated GPUs. The short-lived Intel/AMD GPU partnership came to an end because Nvidia's lead over AMD got too big, but it was doomed to be cancelled as soon as Intel gets 10nm working.
Nvidia and AMD both make discrete mobile GPUs, and those are the only two options for offering better GPU performance on an Intel laptop when Intel's own GPU is inadequate. Nvidia's GPUs have for years generally had a substantial power efficiency over AMD's.
If it turned out to be actually true... I wonder sometimes if it makes a better example of antitrust policy actually working to some degree... or failing.
Ease of entry into the market is much more important than the present market structure. An underdog can become the market leader in a year or two [0]. The issue with Intel/AMD is that there are only something like 4 legal entities out of >7 billion legal entities on earth who are licensed to produce x86 chips. 4 is better than 1, but it is still a low number.
It is nearly impossible to maintain an oligopoly in a market that is easy to enter and questions of underdog/overdog become irrelevant. All companies have to offer a reasonable (value/$) proposition to customers of they go broke.
Sure! For actual x86, they already have. You can make a perfectly good 32-bit chip with SSE2.
The patents on the core of x86_64 will expire in a couple years. Even if you can't have the more recent vector instructions, that's pretty good for a lot of use cases.
each of those 4 entities has whole teams devoted to building up the warchest of patents + colluding on standards to keep the balls in the air indefinitely.
Possibly some kind of tacit collusion is more likely with relatively similarly sized competitors. But to me a giant vs underdog situation is usually worse because in the real world I don’t think the underdog usually comes from behind and wins. In fact I’m amazed by the number of times AMD seems to have accomplished this with a fraction of Intel’s resources.
It feels backwards... the closer the companies are, the more there is to lose from not competing... but you do get commoditization. I wonder what a world with AMD being the leader and Intel being the underdog would look like.
I understand this is an armchair discussion about economics, but this is wildly oversimplified. What does it even mean to "compete" in this case? Obviously if either intel or AMD stopped researching entirely then they would quickly fall by the wayside, as long as either intel or AMD pose a credible threat to being able to innovate.
I would say that your a and b could be like, levels of investment into researching. They'll research at some level, or risk falling too far behind, but can't spend too much as then they'll have to divert funds from other things like marketing or production, or just run out of money. They'll both likely choose to invest at a pace where they think they'll be able to match the other's innovation, but not so much as to overspend.
Yes it oversimplified. Suppose that a = b, i.e both companies has the same market share. Also suppose that when both companies has equal market share their innovations rates are the same, same price etc.
The model has two equilibrium both companies compete in which their market share fluctuates around a = b. and we get a sort of predator-pray model[1].
Both companies do not compete their market share stays the same.
What does it means to compete? It could mean many things like not putting lower prices, delaying innovations until competitor has release their own etc.
The issue with this is the scenario where either company deviates from the status quo. For example, company A decides to make a tradeoff: invest more into R&D at the expense of sales and marketing. If Company B remains the same, company A may suffer a temporary dip in sales, but in exchange, their product becomes better over time and they are able to take more than the original 50% of the market due to having a superior product.
What you're talking about really only works if both companies agree to stay stagnant and collude to keep the status quo as-is. To be fair to your point, this has happened a few times historically, but it is usually considered price fixing and is very illegal[0].
I think a clearer is example would be with telecom companies. Say A and B, are telecom with equal market share. A, could "compete" in an attempt to gain market share and install a gigabit bandwidth, but this will only cause cause company B to retaliate and instant gigabit bandwidth as well. Therefore the market share and revenue will fluctuate back to equal. But both companies would have lose the money involved in installing the higher bandwidth. Therefore if the market share is equal the best strategy would be "tic for tac" i.e wait until you opponent does something. Which has two equilibrium either constant tic for tact. Or waiting for the opponent does a move.
In the case when one company's market share is smaller than the other it is always better to "invest" or compete.
There is always an advantage to being first; if there wasn't, nobody would ever invest in anything new. Even in your example, the first company to bring gigabit internet to an area can secure some contracts that will still be in place when their competitors respond, so they get a head start when that does happen, which can lead to a longer term market share advantage if they can keep the momentum going. Even if that advantage doesn't last forever, it certainly makes them a lot of money in the meantime.
See: Uber vs Lyft, the iPhone (and, historically, many other Apple products), Coca-Cola, Netflix, etc.
I don't think that's the heart of the question. My question is is better for innovation if two companies have equal market share or if one has a smaller market share? I trying to argue that it is better if one company has a smaller market share.
Case 1: Netflix. Netflix caused innovation in the movie rental industry. But when Netflix first began it had much smaller market share compared to blockbuster. Would Netflix innovate again? Sure, but I doubt it would do anything revolutionary again. Most likely it would grow stagnant, once the new market stabilizes between hulu, HBO, disney, amazon etc.
Case 2: Apple. Apple was the underdog in early 2000s and that caused then to innovate, while Microsoft had grown stagnant. Today both Apple and Microsoft sort of have similar market shared and they don't really compete with each anymore. Microsoft shifted to cloud, and dropped windows phone. Apple keeps doing what they are doing with marginal upgrades to iphones, and mac. I don't really expected to come up with another "iphone" level innovation any time soon.
Case 3: Amazon. No big company is really trying to compete with amazon this days. I don't see Google or Facebook coming up with own online stores. It just not worth it to compete. While they are a lot of smaller online stores.
Case 4: Automobile industry. Sure they are new car models each year...but it is nothing revolutionary. Simple marginal upgrades over last year model. It was not until an underdog (tesla) tried to gain market share that we have seen any sort of innovation from them.
Most of the innovation today happens at smaller companies, and they eventually either succeed and become the next Apple and Google, fail and go out of business, or they get bough by the big companies.
> My question is is better for innovation if two companies have equal market share or if one has a smaller market share?
If that's your question, then the answer is obvious, isn't it? The higher the potential reward, the more motivation to innovate. If you only control 1% of the market, innovating might easily mean a 1000% growth of your company; but if you already own half, the best you can possibly do is double that. The upside just isn't there to justify big, risky plays.
That said, there is always a desire to grow, even if not by as much, so there is still incentive to not become stagnant and to continue making improvements to your products, even if marginal.
Yeah, when threadripper came out I believe it offered the same performance as intel I9 for about half the price. Why did AMD choose such aggressive pricing? Because they have the desire to grow. If Intel and AMD had the same market it would not make sense to put out a product for half the price as your competitor. So if Intel and AMD had the same share, we would probably still paying 1000+ dollars for intels I9.
I study at FIU... I just don't see the point this bridge. Why would you spend 10+ million dollars on a bridge to cross a street, when the same problem can be solved by a simple crosswalk? We already have one of these bridges... and the majority of people don't bother to use it and simple take the cross walk. It just such a waste of money.
To put it into perspective, 8th street is an 8 lane street at that intersection, with cars driving past 50 and 55 mph all the time. Not to mention that there are several on/off ramps for the Florida Turnpike right next to it. I would be scared of crossing the street there to be honest. If I remember correctly there had been several hit and runs of students too.
The bridge was connecting FIU with a large student residence. Negligence during construction notwithstanding, to say that a simple crosswalk was enough is disingenuous.
This is the meta story. The campus is my city is the same way, bordered by a six-lane arterial with poor pedestrian connectivity so cars can speed as fast as possible through the high-pedestrian area. As long as North American cities put the car first, people will die whether from bridge collapses or car crashes.
This is the same reason that only some Android devices support higher levels of Widevine; Samsung will add code to their OS that allows video/audio to be processed through inaccessible areas of the processor/GPU. If you try to take a screenshot it will just show up as a black screen (same on Windows with the Nextflix app IIRC). Cheapo Chinese Androids and even cheap Androids that you can buy in the US will not do this so they can't play high-res video on Netflix, even if they have a high-res screen.
On Linux this special path is not implemented; anything can see what's going on with the graphics or audio pipeline and record from it.
There's the fundamental limitation that the odds of any maintainer rewriting the entire graphics pipleine to secure the video path from the user for DRM on Linux is roughly zero.
