I am looking for feedback on a side project some friends and I have been working on.
First, do you see any value in being able to create, collaborate with access control, version, and diff data designs, and then output them to different formats? I have done some work in healthcare, energy, manufacturing, and e-commerce and in every one have seen json/xml schemas (or free text data specs) being passed around through emails, word docs, excel spreadsheets, hosted s3 files, power points, custom built websites, etc. I’ve also seen bugs when versions get confused between data partners or comments/changes get lost in email threads. It’s also not fun to read and maintain a 300-3,000 line data schema file.
Second, do you seen any value in being able to compose data designs? I personally think the idea of reusing data structures and composing data designs with a few clicks is interesting, but I’m curious to the practicality of it?
Also the json-ld graph output feels like it could be wrong? I am trying to avoid constraining properties using rdfs:domain as is common in RDF (since properties can be shared between designs and it creates a coupled export), however lib:children seems a little off?
The largest float in the output layer (while the graph is yellow) is the activation. The largest activation in the final layer is the network's "guess". The guess is the index of the last layer, which corresponds to a particular digit.
Awesome, I just flipped that switch at the top and can see how it calculates the individual handwritten inputs. Great demo!
So I guess during training you're telling it that correct answers should be 1 and the incorrect answers should be 0.
Do the encoding choices that you make regarding the input / output of a neural network influence its performance at all? Maybe for MNIST the way you have it is the most common approach?
Usually the number of nodes in the input and output layers don't affect things all that much. They are relatively set based on the problem. The number of nodes in the hidden layers, the number of hidden layers, and various other parameters such as cost and activation functions, are mostly what you use to tune performance.
In my experience spinners work great for async calls, but not so great for blocking synchronous computations. There is probably something that could be done though with a little bit of creativity though...
That's a good point. I tried some light optimizations using ShouldComponentUpdate in React, but I believe the bottleneck is a synchronous blocking call in the D3 rendering process. Larger networks write up 25,000 SVG elements, and I was not sure how to significantly improve rendering speed. Someone suggested Canvas with D3 could speed rendering up?
If possible, send it off to a web worker? That free's up the UI thread
Edit: So it's the rendering that's hard on the CPU. Canvas would probably improve performance. Also, the graphic is so simple and there doesn't seem to be any event listeners on the edges themselves, that converting should be trivial :)
For the most part you're not doing live animations, statically drawing on a 3 canvases would give you what you want (without huge overhead of DOM nodes and simplicity of 2D canvas painting). Web workers aren't going to do much since most of your lag is coming from way too much DOM (causing layout, repaints to take forever).
You are talking about the startup like it is a commodity. Is it a brilliant game changing idea that could fundamentally revolutionize a space? Is it a To-Do list knock off? You should not do a start-up to do a start-up, you should do a startup because somewhere inside of you there is an outrageous, nearly undefinable force driving you to do it because you know the idea in some form or another must exist for the world to be as it should
Thanks for the tip with the typos, I wrote it with jade and need to use a spell checker. Very unprofessional.
andbrand is about letting people share how they feel about products in an extremely natural way. If you produce a quality product that people genuinely like, then andbrand should make you look extremely good. Other people will see your product through an organic search process, allowing you to market for free.
Ok that's fair, one question though because this was what I got out of the book. Do you believe the main big picture purpose of Ayn Rand's philosophy was to create the best possible society? I definitely may have over simplified her idea of selfishness, however the article was more about popular culture's interpretation of it, and maybe making a caricature of it is quite common.
> Do you believe the main big picture purpose of Ayn Rand's philosophy was to create the best possible society?
No, that was just a consequence of her primary goal. She actually said she had no deep interest in politics other than to define a rational base for capitalism so she (and those like her) could be left alone to create. That was the basis for the title of her novel that free individuals are the fountainhead of all the values we enjoy. Her primary stated goal was to present the ideal man in her novels. In order to do that she discovered that she had to define her own philosophy of Objectivism. A complete philosophy doesn't start with politics or society but more basic questions such as the nature of existence, consciousness, knowledge, reason and ethics which all have to be defined to intelligently discuss politics (the highest level).
In reading your article and replies to others I see that the goal in your article wasn't to explain or discuss Objectivism so much but to explain the cultural phenomenon of Ayn Rand's popularity. My recommendation would be to read some of her non-fiction works like the one I recommended on selfishness. BTW, she qualified her advocacy of selfishness as acting on ones rational self interest, not emotional indulgence as you implied. (This is a common misrepresentation of her view). Also, she thought that emotions were important and essential to the human experience but they are not primaries nor means to knowledge. If you are interested in what Rand was all about you should also read her books Philosophy Who Needs It and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.
Ok well it makes sense that she chose to start at the highest level and work her way down. And yes I was speaking about culture.
She was absolutely brilliant, probably somewhere up there in the top thinkers in history. But building a functional society is obviously exceptionally difficult, and the highest level arguments seem to me more of a thought game for academics then a practical solution to a pressing and absolutely real societal problem. I guess the reason I wrote the article is because at times misenterpretation of complex ideas can be dangerous. Maybe similar to how Germany's propaganda misinterpreted the teachings of Nietzsche.
"Stealing is ok" was just an example of how a rational truth can be flawed, it had nothing to do with Ayn Rand's teachings. My impression from Ayn Rand's teachings was that the best possible society was created when people acted in self interest, this is what I mean by the "greater good". In the novel the politicians always spoke about the greater good, but her argument was they were not doing it right, and actually destroying society. The purpose of the essay was about some people's interpretation of her ideas more then the ideas themselves, which is why I believe they have received such a cult following.
How is the reader supposed understand all this unless you actually say it in your essay. Instead you present a distorted caracature of ideas you clearly don't understand.
Let me ask you this: if people don't act in their own self-interst, how should they act? And more importantly how should they express their many desires if not through their actions?
The point is I am not making an argument one way or the other. I am simply expressing how I have seen her views interpreted. Some people use her teachings as a foundation for how they make decisions, they have rationalized it is proper to act purely in self interest, and some of those times it is damn cold. And many extremely intelligent scholars have argued for many years about her teachings, writing is a way for me to traverse my mind to come to deeper understandings.
