Monday, November 28, 2016

Udacity talk 6, Sebastian

Jobs guarantee for the nano degree?
I believe 10,000 people well trained, can find job in 3-4 months.
self-driving car useful in narrow, curvy road in India?
these cars are very precise.
from scratch or integrate with current technology?
integrate
people will lose jobs due to technology?
Human is traditionally defined by our physical strength and agility. It wasn’t our mind. We aren’t trained to be thinkers, were trained to be doers physically. … We have so many intereting jobs and lives.
I learn an important lesson: if you don’ t aim high, you don’t achieve high. You got to try these things. Almost every expert says it can’t be done is wrong in every field.
what do you envision the impact by self-driving car?
save a lot of life. save a lot of parking space. reduce insurance cost…

Udacity talk 3, Jess Lee

Advice for woman to start a career in tech?
foucus on doing amazing work. surround yourself with the best people and learn from them.
more tenacious or aggressive ?
You have to find your own style. (Be yourself.) You have to lean to your own strength. I think as I was figuring out my own leadership style. look at different role models. I found some male leader whose style wasn’t quite right to me… It was ok to sought my personality out or not fit that classic alpha male mode.
advice for younger yourself?
I think I was a little bit discouraged at first and feel like I couldn’t be a leader because I’m a little bit on introverted side, a little bit quirky, weird. I feel I didn’t fit that classic mode and then I figured out I could do it my own way.
be more confident. I wish I’d learned that lesson earlier.
secret sauce for success?
  1. delight your user
  2. do a few things well. focus.
  3. make an impact. At the end of the day, you want to be surround with the people, not only smart and can do the job. but you really love being around. Find a group of people, empower them,that makes the journey much better.
suggest young people to get master or doctoral degree?
From my personal experience, I am really glad I go to industries right after bachelor degree. I think it depends what you want to do. In certain fields or areas…
For the first few years I learn so much. teamwork, clean code, etc. It is always good to accelerate these process.
how do you come out the idea of Polypove?
The early founders were trying to build a house. They have to choose piles, all kinds element matched each other. Then we move to fashion …
The problem is huge, how can a young programmer do?
Some of best programmers, they don’t just think purely about the technical side, they want to actually understand why are we building this? What’s the user want out of it? What’s the business goal?
How to do a side project in a busy life?
If someone could tell me the answer… I can’t do it.
Maybe if you are really excited about it, quit your job and do it full time.
suggest for preparing an interview?
Sometimes if you really want a job, you’re really excited, you go that extra mile, you know the product, research interviews beforehand.

Saturday, November 26, 2016

invisible iceberg and Hamingway

iceberg
meaning
knowledge
Let’s begin with Archimede’s principle on buoyant force:
F_b=\rho_{water}gV_{immersed}
where Fb is the buoyancy, rho is the density of water, V is the volume of ice immersed in the water. To keep balance, this force should be equal to the gravity, which is:
F_g=\rho_{ice}gV_{ice}
If we substitute the density of ice by 0.92 g/cm^3 and water by 1 g/cm^3, we get V_{immersed}=0.92V_{ice}. In other words, the visible ice floating on the water is only 8% of its total volume.
Interestingly, the Iceberg Theory, or the theory of omission, was coined by American writer Hemingway in 1923. His iceberg theory highlights the symbolic implications of art. He wrote in “the art of the short story”:
You could omit anything if you knew that you omitted, and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.
If you leave out important things or events that you know about, the story is strengthened. If you leave or skip something because you do not know it, the story will be worthless.
It is totally opposite to my previous understanding, which thought the invisible part is unintentional. Nevertheless, Hemingway has such a deep insight that how human perceive the world and construct his story in the same way. It’s something so deep in mind that people tend to believe his own conclusion.

1958 interview by Paris review

The journalist George Plimpton, tried to ask every details of what is in Hamingway’s mind when he is writing. However, he finds it difficult to talk about writing, he feels so strongly that such ideas should remain unexpressed, not be spooked by such questions.
He prefers not to talk about them (some superstitions things cheer him up), feeling that whatever value they may have can be talked away.
that though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing.
Writing is a private, lonely occupation with no need for witnesses until the final work is done.
some habits are worth noting:
  • he stands when he writes
  • he keeps track of his daily progress, so as not to kid himself
  • write every morning as soon after first light as possible. No one disturb you at that time. You can start from 6 to noon until you feel empty mind.
  • discipline is acquired
  • I have worked well everywhere…The telephone and visitors are the work destroyers.
  • Once writing become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.
  • Financial security can keep you from worrying, which destroy the ability to write.
When do you decide to become a writer?
I always wanted to be writer
The fun of talk is to explore. All that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it.
Some writers can hold teaching positions. I could not do it… Trying to write something of permanent value is a full-time job even though only a few hours a day are spent on the actual writing.
A writer can be compared to a well…It’s better to take a regular amount out than to pump the well dry and wait for it to refill.
(I see I am away from the question, but the question was not very interesting). when you ask someone old,tired questions, you are apt to receive old tired answers.
The further you go in writing the more alone you are.
A close knowledge of works on the list help fill your “well”?
They are part of learning. **Nobody knows what it is made of, least of all yourslef.
the symbols in your novels?
If you don’t mind, I dislike talking about them and being questioned about them. If there are good explainers, why should I deprive their job?… Read for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading
I still belive it’s very bad for a writer to talk about how he writes.
How am I going to write it if you don’t leave me alone?
Do you work out the whole plan before you start?
I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote
Do you think a writer ‘s power diminishes as he grows older?
I don’t know about that. People who know what theyare doing should last as long as their heads last.
Do the titles come to you while you’re in the process of doing the story?
The title comes afterwards
I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg… so that the reader read something it will become a part of his experience and seem actually to have happened
How soon do can you write about it in fictional terms from an experience (air crashes)?
There is no rule about how soon one should write about it.
Everyone has his own conscience, and there should be no rules about how a conscience should function.
would you sy your work reflects one or two ideas?
The man who said it possibly had only one or two ideas.
What do you think is the function of your art?
why be puzzled by that?
From everything that happened, you know and unknown, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality.

Friday, November 25, 2016

WestWorld

This sci-fi TV show has taken a bold step. The future human robots have emotional intelligent and began to have self-consciousness. Furthermore, this show has included many interesting cognitive psychology terms, such as Bicameral mind, Dissonance theory.

1 the original

What do you think about of world?
Some people choose to see the ugliness in this world, the disarray; I choose to see the beauty
To believe there is an order to our days, a purpose…
At some points, we were all new to this world…. a place with unlimited possibilities.
  • No offense. I rather win a woman’s affection than pay for it.
  • You always pay for it. The difference is our costs are fixed and posted right there on the door.
Do you feel inconsistencies in your world? or repetitions?
All lives have routine. Mine’s no different. Still, I never cease to wonder at the thought, that any day the course of my whole life could change with just one chance encounter.
Just trying to look chivalrous.
What if you and everyone you know were built to gratify the desires of the people who pay to visit your world.
Did you see the cracks after a while. That’s why I like the basic emotions. you know what that mean? It means, when you’re suffering, that’s when you are most real.

2 chestnut

The violent delights have violent ends.
roll them back. Don’t play god if you couldn’t handle with the devils.
Dr. Ford: what’s the point of it? Get a couple of cheap thrills? some surprises? But it’s not enough. It’s not about giving the guests what you think they want. No, that’s simple. The titillation, horror, elation. They are parlor tricks. The guests don’t return for the obvious things we do, the garish things. They come back because of the subtleties, the details. They come back because they discover something they had never noticed before, something they’ve fallen in love with. They are not looking for stories that tells them who they are. They already know who they are. They are here because they want a glimpse of who they could be.

3 stray

I guess people want to read what they want most and experiences the least.
Why do you ask about my son?
Personal questions are an ingratiating scheme.
Let’s not go someday, Teddy. Let’s go now.
Bicameral mind: theory of conscience. voice is from god.
Is there something wrong with these thoughts I’m having?
No. Evolution only uses one tool: mistake
Do you want me to change back?
No. Let’s see what the path leads.

4 Dissonance theory

you think the grief will make you smaller inside, like your heart will collapse itself. It doesn’t. I fell spaces opening up inside of me, like a building never explored.
I think I want to be free.
you don’t want to go back to the old life.
No choices you have ever made was your own. You have always been a prisoner. What if I told you I’m here to set you free?

6 Adversary

Great artist hide themselves in the work.
Never start something you’re not willing to finish. And you will get fucked either way.

7 Trompe L’Oeil

William: I’ve been pretending my whole life. Pretending I don’t mind, pretending I belong. My life build on it. And it’s a good life. It’s a life I’ve always wanted.But then I came here, and I get a glimpse for a second of a life in which I don’t have to pretend. **A life in which I can be truly alive. How can I go back and pretend when I know what this feels like?
You unlock something on me.
Ford: people tend to ignore things that are harmful to them
I have come to think of so much of consciousness as a burden, a weight, and we have spared them that. Anxiety, self-loathing, guilt. The hosts are the ones who are free. free here under my control.

8 Trace Decay

Ford: You are now in a unique position. A programmer who whos intimately how the machine work and a machine works its own true nature.
Every host needs a backstory. It’s a story we tell ourself. And every story needs a beginning. Your imagined suffering makes you lifelike.
Pain only exists in the mind. It’s always imagined.
We can’t define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. Human fancy that there is something special about the way we percieve the world, and yet we live in loops, as tight and as closed as the hosts do.
  • seldom questioning our choices,
  • content, for the most part, to be told what to do next

Bicameral mind

Arnold: Memory, improvisation, each step harder to reach than the last and you never got there. …One day, I realized, consciousness isn’t a journey upward, but a journey inward. Not a pyramid, but a maze. **Every choice could bring you closer to the center, or send you spiraling to the edge, to madness.
I can’t roll you back. Once you’ve found it, you’ll find your way back. This place will be a living cell for you. It’s unconcisouable.
Another option: break the loop before it begins.
I want you to remove them (the sad memory)
Benard: I can’t. Not without destroying you. Your memories are the first step to consciousness.How can you learn from your mistakes if you can’t remember them?
The divine gift is not from higher power, is from our mind.
Did you find what you were looking for?
In order to escape this world, you will need to suffer more.

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

What mad pursuit, Crick, 1988

What mad pursuit— A personal veiw of scientific discovery
Francis Crick, 1988
Oscar Wilde
Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
Acknowledgement

My other major debt is to my family not only did they encourage me to become a scientist but they helped me financially . my parents made considerable sacrifices to enable me to go away to boarding school , especially during the depression . my uncle Arthur crick and his wife not only assisted me financially while i was a graduate student at university college but also gave me the money to buy our first house . my aunt Ethel , in addition to teaching me to read helped financially when i first went to Cambridge after the war , as did my mother . they both helped also with the education of my son Michael . while i had very little money when i was young , was secure in the knowledge that , thanks to my relatives , i would have enough to live on.
the main perpose of the book: the discovery of DNA double helix in 1953-1966.
the most important theme of the book is natural selection.
Francois Jacob
Evolution is a tinkerer
The basic laws of physics can usually be expressed in exact mathematical form. The “laws” of biology are often only broad generalizations.
Elegance and deep simplicity are useful guides in physics, but may be very misleading in biology, which receive much more guidance from the experimental evidence.
My first degree was in physics. I took some time to adjust to the rather different way of thinking necessary in biology. It was almost as if one had to be born again.. It is well worth the effort.
1947, at age 31, I went to Cambridge after WWII.
I am concerned more with ideas than with people.

1 Prologue: My Early years

I have no doubt that this loss of faith (12 years old) in Christian religion and my growing attachment to science have played a dominant part in my scientific career. I realized early on that it is detailed scientific knowledge which makes certain religious untenable. such as true age of the earth and the fossil record.

2 The Gossip Test

During war I worked on the design of mines. After the war I was at a loss as to what to do. Although I was offered a permanent job, I was reasonably sure that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life designing weapons. But what did I want to do? I took stock of my qualifications. … I was sure in my mind that I wanted to do fundamental research rather than going into applied research, even though my Admiralty experience would have fit me for developmental work.
I ask my close friend, Georg Kreisel, who said,
I’ve known a lot of people more stupid than you who’ve made a success of it.
Thus encouraged, my next problem was to decide what subject to choose. Since I essentially knew nothing, I had an almost completely free choice. I brooded over this problem for several months. …
I have several friends who were interested in science but knew less than me. One day I noticed that I was telling them, with some enthusiasm, about recent advances in antibiotics–penicillin and such. Only that evening did it occur to me that I myself really knew almost nothing about these topics, apart from what I had read in some periodicals. It came to me that I was not really telling them about science. I was gossiping about it.
This insight was a revelation to me. I had discovered the gossip test– what you are really interested in is what you gossip about. Without hesitation, I applied it to my recent conversations. Quickly I narrowed down my interests to two main areas: the borderline between the living and nonliving, and the workings of the brain.
It should not be imagined that I knew nothing at all of either of my subjects. After the war I had spent a lot of my spare time in background reading. The Admiralty had generously allowed me to go once or twice a week to seminars and courses at University College during my working hours.
In spite of these reading, I must emphasize that I had only a very superficial knowledge of my chose subjects. I certainly had no deep insight into them…
At this point a crisis suddenly arose. I was offered a job. Not a mere studentship, but an actual job on neurobiology.
The decision was a hard one. Finally I told myself that my preference for the living-nonliving borderline had been soundly based, that I would have only one chance to embark on a new career, and that I should not be deflected by the accident of someone offering me a job…. attractive though it was, I must refuse this offer.
My next task was to find some way of entering my new subject. I went around to see Massey, under who I worked during war, to explain my position and to ask for his help… He looked surprised when I told him of my interest in biology, but he was very helpful and gave me two valuable introductions.
I visited 5 different lab and finally chose Strangeways laboratory, where they did tissue culture….
After a year I want to mellanby to report progress. .. I had spent much of my time in trying to educate myself…. now that I had a background in biology, I would like to work on protein structure.

3 The Baffling problem

For natural selection, the first point to grasp is that a complex creature or organ, such as the eye, did not arise in one evolutionary step. Rather it evolved through a series of small steps.
- random alteration in the gene
- selective pressure of the environment

14 Epilogue: My later years


In fact, some of scientist work so hard that there is no time left for serious thinking. they should heed the saying,
A busy life is a wasted life.
I decided that the move to Salk Institute was an ideal opportunity to become closely interested in the working of the brain….It took me several years to detach myself from my old interests, especially in molecular biology.
I found there was a new subject that called itself cognitive science. ( It’s joking that any subject that has science in its name is unlikely to be one). cognitive science was part of the rebellion against behaviorism. … may cognitive scientist tend to regard the brain as a black box, better left unopened. take no account of such things as nerve cells. … how do they hope to unscramble the way it operates by looking solely at its input and output, ignoring what goes on between? It is essential to study organisms at higher levels. The study of neurons by itself will never sole such problem.
Functionalist,
If you want to understand function, study structure.
My own prejudices are exactly the opposite. I think one should approach these problems at all levels. In nature hybrid species are often sterile, but in science the reverse it often true. Hybrid subjects are often astonishingly fertile.
In studying a complicated system, one can’t see what the problems are, unless one studies the higher levels of the system. but the proof of any theory about higher level usually needs detailed data from lower levels if it is to be established beyond reasonable double.

Sunday, November 13, 2016

Udacity talk2, Astro Teller

2016-6-6, Astro Teller, CEO of google X
Teller: The project that you’re working on it either has an Achilles heel, something that dooms it to failure or it doesn’t. Would you like to find out about that sooner or should we put off discovering later. Sooner. We should run our hardest part first.
So let’s celebrate the act of doing that independent of what the answer is. Great scientist celebrate the process of asking great questions and getting well-formed answers. they don’t celebrate success. That’s the wrong thing to celebrate. that doesn’t move science forward.
If you lost all the tools and software, but everything was in your heads. you only need 5~10% percent of time to rebuild from scratch…. So the entire process of innovation is the process of learning, and how to make that as efficient as possible.
Let’s celebrate the 95%. The 5% is easy. Any one can do that.
S: How do you pick engineers in X
T: People has to think differently, who come from different backgrounds and this isn’t some surface level excuse for having ethnic diversity or gender diversity. What really crave is this mental diversity.
There’s no question that someone who has that deep technical knowledge but fundamentally is a maker who has a deep excitement about trying to make hard interesting complex things. That’s the kind of person who’s going to fit X.
It’s not how well he can sell it. It’s how he can embrace the weirdness.
T: How do you pick ideas in the moonshot?
S: exclude ideas like: violates the physical law ; no business behind it (so not likely to scale, and unlikely help the world in a big way), did smart people try this before? (are we smarter than others)
The world has no obligation to include you, and no reason to exclude you.
train yourself up
If I were starting over from the beginning right now I would find the most exciting place I could find and I would offer to do anything there.
I’ll start however low I need to, so you can build confidence.
I encourage people to start a new career at least once a decade. because at some point you get a little stale in whatever career. Some of the innovation comes from you don’t know the rule.
I am worried about extending the life of body without extending the life of our minds
S: will AI control human?
T: If you are AI, why would you want to take over the world? Frankly, I think we should be more worried that AI will grow up to be smart enough, that it will notice that the things in this world who are really good are the dogs and the cats they get to lie around all day, do nothing and take care of us. If you are smart enough, would you really want to do all the work or do basically pawn it off on us.
why no one worry that? because it’s not fun to worry about that.
S: last piece of advice
T: live without fear. If you make choices based on all of the bad things that could happen and spend your time thinking about what you can lose, you won’t get most of what you want. If you embrace life with passion and without fear, he won’t always go perfectly, like you and me. But live without fear is a fairly magical choice to make

7 programming languages to say "Hello World"

Java

public class Hello
{
  public static void main(String args[])
  {
    String s = "Hello world!";
    System.out.println(s);
  }
}

C++

#include <string>
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
  string s("Hello world!");  // use library string
  char s1[]="Hello world!";  // use base library
  cout<<s<<endl;
  return 0;
}

Python

s = "Hello world!"
print s  # python 2.x
print(s) # python 3.x

HTML

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head>
        <meta charset="utf-8">
        <title></title>
    </head>
    <body>
        "Hello world!"
    </body>
</html>

PHP

<?php  
  $s= "Hello wolrd!"; 
  echo $s;
  ?>

JavaScript

var s=“Hello World!”;
console.log(s);

swift

var s="Hello world" // inferred typing
var s1: Character = "Hello world" //explicit typing
print(s)

Saturday, November 12, 2016

Udacity talk 1, Tony Fadell

2016-6-1. Tony Fadell is the father of ipod, founder of Nest.
Sebastian Thrun: Is it possible to find fulfillment working for a company or found your own company being CEO brings more?
Tony Fadell: Fulfillment is in the eye of beholder. You have to look for what you’re trying to learn. you need to set your own goals whether it’s as a startup as an independent or inside a big company.
The big thing that I asked when I interview people: what do you want to learn when you come here? Not what can you do for me. What do you want to learn? Because if you are always trying to learn then I know you’re trying to improve yourself and therefor you’re going to help the company improve as well.
Sebastian : How do you pick a candidate in the interview? How do you assess for the people really willing to learn
Tony: The other thing I ask is about their background so I go through their resume or any even if they don’t have experience. How did you pick your major? How did you discover what you wanted to do, what you really want to know? How did you know when you wanted to become an engineer or a doctor? I always want to see that insight. Do they understand what their gut is telling when they articulate that and then understand if they are really about pleasing you or trying to challenge themselves and get better. so you have to really listen closely.
S: you wanna be open to learning, open to failure.
T: Absolutely. We don’t learn to walk when we don’t walk out of the room. We have to learn everything in this failure on the way and you have to understand those moments of adversity and those moments of triumph, and how those people dealt with it. That’s the way I can assess.
We are adaptable creatures. we can learn all kinds of things if we want to learn.
Every single place you go there’s always something you can learn. You just have to be tuned into it and so yeah I learned a lot of great things in Apple. But at the end of the day, it boiled down to tenacity the people you know and things you need through your experiences. You can’t build a new company without understanding yourself but also knowing a network of people who can help you build. Most company is not just one person. It is a group of people. You need to have a network of people to help you and empower them to help you.
S: what is the rule for you to add a new feature?
T: First you have to segment out: are you a business to business product(service), or you’re business to consumer product. Very different things. company has very specific requirements and customer has very limited amount of requirement.
In General Magic we spent 4 years building something because we thought we needed every single feature. general magic lost a billion dollars and was one of the biggest failures in Silicon valley, because we put too many features in and it took 4 hours to explain what the product was. People have very limited time. You only have 3 or 4 amazing things to tell people.
Remote control is an example of Over design.
In the early days, we were trying to impress the person next to us. I am trying to say that I’m gonna make something so cool to impress them. You are doing something for someone who really understands and it gets really geeky. What your job as a great engineering designer is to not make things for the engineer next to you, but it’s to make for the common person who doesn’t understand the technology. Also, the product is empowering that person who buy the product a superpower. you make it so simple for them. They use it and feel like they have a new superpower they’ve never had.
S: how to say no if I want to add a new button.
T: there are data-driven decision, and opinion-based decision. the previous one is easier to look, and the later only takes 1 or 2 person to take care.
S: how do you learn from your failure?
… Your brain doesn’t come from the superficial success but from the learning success.
S: how do you convert from ipod to thermostat
T: frustration
T: I am chasing the passion, the thing that I really want to fix, that I thought was meaningful.
Don’t point to the market size. Point to the impact it could have as you do it right.
S: How do you do market research and something that doesn’t have a market yet?
T: You have to start with the idea what are you changing, and you have to take bold steps in terms of making something and trying it.
S: When I grow up in German, my professor never ever ask a question. They are supposed to know everything.
T: I went to 12 different schools in 15 years. Every time I was always learning because I was always in a new environment. I never was a master of in my environment because it was always changing. you should never think you’re a master of in your environment. This is about staying beginners to know what kind of product you’re going to make.
There are 2 things. One is always question. If you always question that means you’re curious, you have the potential to learn. The other one is just keep trying, keep listening ,keep learning, keep applying knowledge.