Top all-time · #3387
Moritz Hardt
Personal blog · blog.mrtz.orgaidata
Moritz Hardt writes Moody Rd, a personal blog at blog.mrtz.org about ai and data. Since 2015, 23 different Hacker News readers have linked it 29 times, most often “Competing in a data science contest without reading the data”. The last post was in 2016, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (16) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Moritz Hardt's blog on machine learning and research culture. HN commenters cite its NIPS experiment on peer review agreement and its post on Wacky Boosting and leaderboard overfitting.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 16 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A blog about machine learning.
Most-linked posts?
- Competing in a data science contest without reading the data8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2015-03-09
- The NIPS experiment7 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2015-03-13
- The zen of gradient descent4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-05-11
- Is Differential Privacy practical? (2013)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-03-11
What Hacker News says?
Hey Sam, semi technical question here. NIPS, ran an experiments a few years ago where for 10% of the papers they had two completely independent teams of reviewers assess papers and score them - the agreement between the teams was very low: http://blog.mrtz.org/2014/12/15/the-nips-experiment.html (barely better than chance, actually). Would you consider doing something similar for YC? Obviously, you already have mult…
Comment linking /2014/12/15/the-nips-experiment.html
on “I Am Sam Altman, President of Y Combinator. AMA”Submitted Approaching fairness in machine learning as a story · 65 points
HN discussionThey might be talking about an interpretation of gradient descent that this article provides: http://blog.mrtz.org/2013/09/07/the-zen-of-gradient-descent....
Comment linking /2013/09/07/the-zen-of-gradient-descent.html
on “Alpha Go Zero: How and Why It Works”Submitted The zen of gradient descent as a story · 43 points
HN discussionMy experience is that for elite schools -- Stanford and MIT -- the remaining factor is how much one is willing to cheat. There is a random component, a merit-based component, but most (and I have large n here) successful affiliated faculty candidates did so by cheating in some way. That can be data baking, credit theft, or a whole slew of other techniques, but at least in my department, most new faculty at least at…
Comment linking /2014/12/15/the-nips-experiment.html
on “The culture of rejection in computer science publications”Submitted Competing in a data science contest without reading the data as a story · 37 points
HN discussionGreat post! The author touches on Chebychev polynomials, which are the basis for quite a few numerical analysis tricks, including conjugate gradient [1], accelerated gradient descent [2], and Chebychev semi-iterative methods (which find the best combination of past iterates to use during an optimization procedure; sadly I can't find a good reference). There are a number of facts/folklore about Chebychev polynomials…
Comment linking /2013/09/07/the-zen-of-gradient-descent.html
on “Implementing the Exponential Function”Submitted Is Differential Privacy practical? (2013) as a story · 29 points
HN discussionAs a grad student (ML) close to finishing I can say exactly what I want. I want to read math books, program, and publish slowly (papers + blogs) with meaningful and substantial work. I do not want to be chasing benchmarks or worrying about how to play the politics of paper publishing to get through the provably random[0][1][2] noise that is the review process. But no one is going to pay me for this, including academ…
Comment linking /2014/12/15/the-nips-experiment.html
on “Graduate students question career options”Submitted Towards practicing differential privacy as a story · 8 points
HN discussion> Also, why is NEURIPS or ICML papers is not a hiring guarantee? I thought they're highly sought after. They're sought after, but the conferences have also grown huge. NeurIPS 2018 accepted around 1,000 papers! Based on a query of the DBLP [1] dataset, there were 4,409 distinct authors who had a paper at either NeurIPS 2018 or ICML 2018 (or both). If you add in a few of the other big AI and ML conferences (AAAI, IJC…
Comment linking /2014/12/15/the-nips-experiment.html
on “A.I. researchers are making more than $1M, even at a nonprofit”Submitted Towards practicing differential privacy as a story · 7 points
HN discussionBackground: The technique is actually pretty fascinating. This is something that's been well understood by the cryptography community for decades, but is somehow just recently being fully appreciated by the ML community. See here: http://blog.mrtz.org/2015/03/09/competition.html https://www.kaggle.com/c/restaurant-revenue-prediction/forum... Summary - Submitting guesses to a system that gives you back scores for you…
Comment linking /2015/03/09/competition.html
on “Computer Scientists Are Astir After Baidu Team Is Barred from A.I. Competition”Submitted Is Differential Privacy Practical (2013) as a story · 6 points
HN discussionI was up too late and grumpy, but the peer review process (while necessary) does prevent good papers from being published in a reasonable time frame. And acceptance is closer to random than you might expect. Here's a review of the NIPs acceptance process. http://blog.mrtz.org/2014/12/15/the-nips-experiment.html Stuff like arXiv is in theory very good for the actual process of science, but so is having free, accessib…
Comment linking /2014/12/15/the-nips-experiment.html
on “337 whales dead in Chile in one of history's biggest beachings”Submitted Competing in a data science contest without reading the data as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI think this is largely a case of 'moloch' as described by Scott Alexander: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ In that long (but excellent essay) Scott points out that self organizing systems like human society can sometimes arrange themselves in horrible local minimas which can be very difficult to escape. I think the way modern science is organized is decidedly suboptimal. Note that I'm ta…
Comment linking /2014/12/15/the-nips-experiment.html
on “Scientific Regress”Submitted Competing in a data science contest without reading the data as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIf you enjoyed this, don't miss Moritz Hardt's entertaining blog post on Wacky Boosting (linked from the forum thread): http://blog.mrtz.org/2015/03/09/competition.html
Comment linking /2015/03/09/competition.html
on “Our perfect submission”Submitted The Zen of Gradient Descent as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThe bots are used to scrape data from the leaderboard and make adjustments to improve their score by overfitting the public leaderboard data. Essentially this: http://blog.mrtz.org/2015/03/09/competition.html You might say: but that won't change who actually wins on the private board. However when you use techniques like that you can get identify data in the test set and use it for training. It does help a some, but…
Comment linking /2015/03/09/competition.html
on “AI and Bitcoin are driving the next big hedge fund wave”Submitted How to break a machine learning competition as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> paper reviewers are usually not supposed to look at the actual source code of the papers Wait what? I haven't reviewed for ACL but most conferences don't say "don't look at the source code." They will say that reviewers are not required to look at it (as well as the appendix). But generally it just isn't uploaded. I do always look at the main method when it is there but talking to my peers and advisor, this is ver…
Comment linking /2014/12/15/the-nips-experiment.html
on “Bad numbers in the “gzip beats BERT” paper?”Submitted Competing in a data science contest without reading the data (2015) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion> It's very difficult to pass lackluster work through these places Not really that hard. It's difficult to pass outright bad work through a top-tier conference, but above a quality threshold, it's basically a crapshoot; the reviewing process doesn't reliably separate middling from great papers. The very low acceptance rates (~10-15%) and very high inter-reviewer variance [1] combine to make it pretty random whether…
Comment linking /2014/12/15/the-nips-experiment.html
on “Ranking of CS departments based on theory papers”Submitted The NIPS experiment as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe PSU Grievance Studies Affair [1] had the same objective as the 1996 Sokal Affair: to test peer review by submitting obviously bad papers that should be rejected, and seeing how many of them are accepted. The motivation behind this is entirely reasonable. Bad "true negative" as well as known-good "true positive" articles ought to be regularly submitted to every peer review process as a test of accuracy. A great e…
Comment linking /2014/12/15/the-nips-experiment.html
on “PSU punishes prof who duped academic journal with hoax 'dog rape' article (2019)”"objective" if your goal is to rank people by publication in those conferences. (1) the difference between the best and worst papers in a venue is wild. (2) http://blog.mrtz.org/2014/12/15/the-nips-experiment.html (3) different fields vary dramatically in how many papers they publish Plus I love how brain dead the word "objective" is. Every thing is objective. What objective function did you choose and does it optim…
Comment linking /2014/12/15/the-nips-experiment.html
on “Objective CS Rankings Through Papers Published at Top Conferences”So there's a few things to consider: First, this peer review via conferences/journals/etc is relatively new in the scientific process. Really only the last 50 years has this paradigm been the main way for publishing. Prior to that scientists have just published in the open and and peer review happened by peers reading and responding. Not too different from what we see with arxiv, twitter, and blogging. Second, we ne…
Comment linking /2014/12/15/the-nips-experiment.html
on “The Most Cited AI Papers in 2022”
