It is sexism, and it's unfortunate. I'm a woman, and I pretend to be a man online so my comments and understandings of computer science, code, programming, and mathematics are treated with the same respect, and given the same kind of responses and feedback.
I've tried numerous times to out myself as female and it's clear that there is consistently a difference in the way I'm spoken to as a woman and as a man.
I will probably move onto another alias as I typically do, but I think it is necessary to point out that both genders suffer due to any kind of discrimination. I feel like people hold me back by judging my abilities by my gender. I get angry thinking about how much more I might have been able to learn if I was a man, and I resolve that with studying independently, and fighting in whatever way I can to make sure I can gain the same knowledge base as anyone else should be able to.
One of the few things I am proud of is that I have managed to cultivate an online personality image that is often mistaken for an older man. I don't know when I will stop believing that I am inferior at the things I've spent my entire life studying, but I hope I will soon, because it is extremely depressing. I don't know what my experiences are the definition of, because I know they are biased by an extremely limited set of data.
The point is, I guess - keep your eyes on what really matters to you, and always keep that goal in sight. It's very easy to turn a superficial cultural assumption that actually doesn't happen that often, into a self defeatist attitude, and all that attitude does is get in your way of achieving.
Forgive me, but I don't think you'd have gained much more understanding of systems.
this industry, if you're not born in the right geographical ___location is a complete impossibility unless you are an autodidact.
Personally growing up where I was there was 0 incentive to work in computers- no courses, even anything bearing on technical was cut due to lack of interest. So I taught myself. I find that this is probably the best way to learn.
You might have been held back due to gender- I can't possibly know. But I wouldn't consider it a bad thing, probably the extra fight taught you to appreciate what you were learning in the first place.
on the flip side, I resonate with the top commenter- had I been born a woman I do feel I'd have more chances of getting a job in some hard to access companies (whether that's true or not is completely debatable of course). Even though I'm sure there are people who condescend [you] outside of [your] career.. at least online you can mask [your] gender (sad that you'd have to but bigots be bigots), but I cannot become a woman for a job interview.
You don't have to become a woman unless you want to become a woman. I don't have to work for idiots, and neither do you.
I think any form of prejudice hinders your ability to think regardless. They can't see existence the same because they've already molded a language, a way of reasoning, and a way of thinking around an axiom of absolute certainty (that they pretend doesn't exist, because it's a bias they do not consciously act on, but it exists as an invariant in the mind regardless). It is ridiculous, counter intuitive, cognitively dissonant logic.
> in this industry, if you're not born in the right geographical ___location is a complete impossibility unless you are an autodidact.
Most of what is fundamentally mentally shaping and necessarily important for your ability to think as a human being is not dependent on education, but on everything, and I don't know whether I have control over it or not, but I don't begin with the premise assuming that I already know everything I am going to know.
You wouldn't consider gender discrimination against women a bad thing?
Why don't you apply the same logic to the parent's comment, and consider it a good thing that he has to work harder to get the job he wants? Probably the extra fight will teach him to appreciate the job even more. Or something.
excuse me.. from what did I say that made it sound like I said gender discrimination is "not a bad thing".
that's quite inflammatory and it's quite upsetting.
What I actually said was; "it's good that you educated yourself because self education is much better than formal education in this industry"
I received the same amount of encouragement as the Parent. Zero, none, my mother thought it was stupid- no father, and no education system for 25 miles that would educate me on this.
And from what I've learned in nearly 10 years in industry; Self education beats formal education when formal education doesn't work hard to learn.
k? now, please, in future read the comment properly, parse what is actually being said instead of throwing accusations and insults at people.
You might not have intended or meant to say that, but I parse
"You might have been held back due to gender- I can't possibly know. But I wouldn't consider it a bad thing, probably the extra fight taught you to appreciate what you were learning in the first place."
the same way as your parent comment. Just a heads-up.
The web is a poor reflection of how you well you will be treated by people in general, the relative anonymity has a profoundly negative effect on peoples behaviour.
I can understand how negativity or strong criticism whether warranted or not can have a measurable effect on ones well being away from the internet; I have felt it too with a very limited online presence.
I actually find myself more often than not shying away from interaction on the internet in at least partly because of that possible negativity, while some may disagree I believe it is better for me personally and professionally; I would hazard a guess that online discussions bring limited return in terms of career development.
I do believe in the power of networking, the door opened to my two most recent opportunities via associations, but none of those were cultivated online.
how much more I might have been able to learn if I was a
man, and I resolve that with studying independently
I find this such a strange statement because your solution ("studying independently") is exactly what every engineer (male or female) including myself does. I don't know a single accomplished engineer that is excellent at computer science, software engineering and programming for any reason than independent study.
Yes, there is occasional mentorship and asking questions, but those merely help with orientation corrections that help improve the efficacy of independent study. The journey to success in our field is essentially a solitary one. Hours of independent study relative greatly dwarves learning from others by several orders of magnitude.
I've had two mentors and mentored many others. The way I attracted mentorship had nothing to do with my gender and everything to do with my actions and how I asked questions. The first mentor I had came by way of noticing the book I was reading "The Little Schemer". The second mentor (and a current co-worker of mine) came from reading lots of his source code and submitting pull requests. Those I've mentored has been the result of their gumption. They just asked for help and advice and I gave it to them. My continued mentorship was dependent on two criteria: (1) the person needs to demonstrate that they will help themselves (including asking questions the smart way); and (2) be committed to independent self-study and practice.
fighting in whatever way I can to make sure I can gain the
same knowledge base as anyone else should be able to.
What knowledge base exists out there that is in anyway exclusive to one demographic? I started learning to program in the mid-90s. Back then an argument could be made that knowledge was locked away and privvy to only a few. Mostly it was a problem of discoverability. You didn't know what resources were good ones to learn from so if you were lucky you'd know one enlightened engineer who could recommend the resources they considered to be effective instead of whatever "Learn X in 24 hours" crap on the shelf at the local Barnes and Noble.
There days there is no shortage of suggested self study lists and reviews from Amazon, blogs and sites like HN. There's IRC. There's oodles and oodles of code on Github to read. There's koans. There's Project Euler. There are interactive language tutorials like the official one for Golang of 4clojure. There are interactive books like Marijn Haverbeke's Eloquent JavaScript. There's the whole series of "Learn X the Hard Way" started by Zed Shaw. There has never in history been such an abundance of accessible content to learn programming and there are no filters out there on any of this knowledge that prevents a self-directed learner from acquiring any knowledge they might desire. I'm actually jealous of the 10-12 year olds growing up today. Insofar as knowledge is concerned, any kid today with a computer and internet has a level of privilege relative to my 10-12 year self in the mid-90s that dwarves many times over any kind of privilege people complain about today.
Seriously, in 2015 and beyond the only thing that can keep anyone away from all this knowledge is not having internet access and a computer. That's a poverty issue that I would love to see solved because I think Internet access and access to computers should be a basic human right since it's essential for participation in much of the economy today.
> “It goes beyond image classification — the most popular task in computer vision — and tries to answer one of the most fundamental questions in computer vision: What is the right representation of visual scenes?
Can someone knowledgeable in graphics research explain the context that this question comes from?
If I am reading the question correctly, I infer that the question suggests that there exists a right way to reproduce the visual experience of reality. To me, this sounds like a question that is equally valid to have no answer (or many answers) in aesthetics, art, and philosophy, etc.
Think about Dreaming. "seeing" during a dream state works by experiencing pure data representation of the real world. People fluent in lucid dreaming can tell you something funny happens when you try to thorough examine objects while sleeping. Constructed worlds tend to be skin deep, and fall apart when poked. Everything is build with ideas drawn from your experience.
Its Plato's Allegory of the Cave all the way down.
Imagine "watching" a movie compressed using your very own prior knowledge. Every scene could be described in couple of hundred lines of plaintext. Today we do this by reading a book :) What if we could build an algorithm able to render movies from books?
The wiggle word here is "right", I suppose. It's easy to ascribe meanings to that word which are very difficult to use---my limited understanding of Philosophy makes me think that this is the realm of ideas like "qualia" and the like.
For a long time statisticians wrangled over this word in a reduced context. The "art" of statistics is to build a model of the world which is sufficiently detailed to capture interesting data but not so detailed to make it difficult to interpret as a human decision-maker. Statisticians usually solve this problem by building a lot of models, getting lucky, presenting things to people and seeing what sticks.
For a long time this lack of a notion of "rightness" was so powerful that it precluded advancement of the field in certain ways.
With the advent of computers we discovered a new, even more precise form of "right" however and this formed the bedrock of Machine Learning. The "right" ML is concerned with is predictive power. A model is "right" when it leads to a training and prediction algorithm which is "probably, approximately correct", e.g. you can feed real data in and end up with something useful (with a high degree of probability).
So with respect to computer vision we know that it is very difficult to build "efficient" algorithms, ones which work well while using a reasonable amount of training data. CV moved forward when it realized that there were representations of the visual field which led to better predictive power---these were originally generated by studying the visual center of human and animal brains, but more recently have been generated "naively" by computers.
So, there's a reasonably well-defined way that we can find the "right" representation of visual scenes: if we find one which ultimately is best-in-class of all representations for any choice of ML task then it's "right".
I like this definition, it's almost equivalent to the one given below by me: if you have a good predictor you can compress the information well, but not optimally. But to compress optimally, you need more than an optimal (single outcome) predictor, you need a predictor that will output probabilities of various events close to the true probability.
So in some sense optimal compression gives the best you could hope, up to limitations of the probabilistic models, which is why I like this explanation.
The question is fundamental to all kinds of recognition: recognizing the invariants of the scene, the data that distinguishes it from other scenes, which is very close to the definition of Shannon information.
For example, if you can extract a 'Mesh' from a 2D picture, you can generate many other view points, and that mesh can be considered a good representation. If you are more sophisticated however (and perhaps have a larger "dictionary"), you can instead extract 'There are two wooden chairs 1m from each other, ...'.
That's the sense in which the representation is fundamental to computer vision -- it distills what the system knows (or what it wants to know) about scenes. The more concise the representation without loss of information the smarter your system is (and past a point becomes a general AI problem).
You can figure out statistical structure of natural images (or just faces) and derive efficient representations with similar properties as to those observed in the visual system of the brain.
I used to beg my parents to order me various forms of an encyclopaedia, I used to devour bookshelves. I remember reading every breakfast food box and piece of junkmail, just because it was something new.
I remember my mom telling me how shocked she was when I was like 6 or something - she didn't believe me that I read one of these young adult books in a day, and so I then rambled the entire story out, and she was proud of that for a while. I told my mom recently that I was watching an anime, and she was surprised and happy that "I watch TV again", because I've pretty much stopped watching TV for the past 10 years or so. The contrast of these worlds is stark.
I remember this stuff and I feel like I've become dumber, because I feel like I can't hold as much information. What is really happening, is I can't hold as much information as a computer can. But then there's some kind of process that seems to run on top of the memorization, that feels more like it's something I'd call a sense of self. Sometimes it is tiny iterations of a swift selection mechanic operating on information that has already been indexed, sorted, qualified, quantified, translated and weighted countless times, other times, it is a way of being intelligent that I don't ever think I could ever program. It is the kind of thing that makes the comparison of AI to actual intelligence laughable and ridiculous to even begin to pose the question.
To me, it's more about being able to find a real signal in a world that is constantly producing enough noise to consume us all.
Also, people do use this stuff to think about their computer systems, so I'm a little confused at the author's point of instinct and intuition. Most engineers are trained in analysis of the infinite (calculus), which also includes rigorous analysis of 0 and 1.
1. When you are poor, school feels like you are trading pleasing an adult for the slim chance of getting out of poverty. It feels less like you are working in a real system with an honest chance and more like you are playing in someone's half psychotic maze. The adult world seems like a careless game where no one cares about anyone besides themselves once they've made it.
2. Many of those kids in poor schools are smarter than you think, and have a more realistic understanding of the real world than their wealthy counterparts. It's just the side no one likes talking about, because honestly, it's something society in general is ashamed of. We can build all this great stuff but we can't scale equality.
Look at the lives the parents have. Who do you think the kid is going to listen to and learn from the most? What someone says, or how reality is?
> Many of those kids in poor schools are smarter than you think,
When you say something like this it comes off as pretty antagonistic, unless you're about to explain out where specifically someone has said or implied anything about a students intelligence.
This is the most ironically stupid thing about hacker culture. It's just as 'follow the leader' as directly following the leader, and it makes the culture and the people in it definably predictable.
Actually reasoning about stuff when stuff can be reasoned about, and considering most opinions to be superfluous nonsense is the right direction. Opinions follow abstract models. You can pretty much find a computational or mathematical model, throw some nouns and verbs on it, and bam, you've got an opinion that has nothing to do with reality.
"You can pretty much find a computational model..."
I humbly request some illustrative examples. Note I agree with you. Examples can be powerful (and, unfortunately, polarizing). Whatever you can share would be appreciated.
Epistomology, psychology, and information theory tend to reflect them in an almost mirror way.
Then again, is it just me who sees the patterns in the words, or are the patterns actually there? I think it probably depends on how you mind constructs analogies and relations between it's map of cultural topics and dialogue, etc. It just bother me when I see flashes of pictures that I normally equate with programming and math, that model the relational structure of what I'm reading. The two have nothing to do with one another, and yet they persist in flashing across the visual processing part of my mind without me doing anything. I am occasionally fascinated by determining whether they mean anything, or where they come from.
People use terms though - black and white thinking, etc. Lots of analogies and metaphors have very simple abstract forms. It's memes, deeply validated patterns. They don't have to be true in reality as long as people keep talking about them and agreeing they exist.
I feel as though I have become a scientist scientist. Thanks for the kind words, but I'm just trying to get through a rough mental space. I prefer maintaining a zen beginner mind, because it is fairly easy to silence doubt.
But how do I know that I want my mind to be the way X wants my mind to be, without shaping it like that and biasing my assessment afterwards? How do I know whether I wanted my mind to be this way? How did my mind get this way?
I know it's paranoia but sometimes I think ideas are more like viruses in more than the colloquial internet memetic sense. Like the brain literally has difficulty letting go of ideas because of the ways various ideas may alter brain structure and consequently influence perception.
OK, I did not mean it like that. A good manager is not going to manipulate you in ways that are not for your own good (really).
Example: Say I have trouble finishing tasks assigned to me. A bad manager fires me. A different bad manager tries to manipulate me. A good manager works with me to help me learn how to get better at finishing stuff. Does that change me? Yeah, maybe it does. But unless I regard "the way I am right now" as the perfect standard for who and what I'm supposed to be, change isn't this thing to be regarded with paranoia. It's not something that you should desperately seek to undo, except that you can't quite figure out how to do so because you're different now. It's a good thing. (At least, it can be, done well by good bosses.)
Another example: My boss sees that I'm not good at Android. He sends me to some Android training. That changes my skill set, but not who I am in any fundamental sense. But my boss is still, essentially, programming people.
Well, your perspective isn't necessarily wrong. There are people who will try to mess with your mind, manipulate you, even gaslight you. Some paranoia is warranted.
With that said, though, still don't lose your ability to trust...
I'm disgusted by your disgust. I wanted a PhD more than anything, but I didn't understand my disorder at the time, and I didn't have the care nor coping skills I needed to get through life on top of achieving what I wanted to in the PhD program. That was three years ago and I still cry almost every other night or so over it, but I am living a much healthier and more understood life, instead of every day being almost constant confusion and stress (on top of difficult school work, being a teaching assistant and a research assistant).
It helps when the work environment understands explicitly. I experience heightened stress and chaotic thought patterns in overtly social situations that ripple across months when the situations only last days or hours, and I need to learn to engage in them very slowly at my own pace and be comfortable.
If my former school understood this instead of having my professors call me 'aspie', maybe I would have a PhD by now. The one thing I learned from this is that I should not be forced into any situation that makes me experience distress, and I do not care if you think it's ridiculous. I have spent far too much of my life in difficult mental places, and I do not want to live like that anymore, and I won't. I don't force people around me to do graduate level math simply so they can talk to me in a language I understand.
We are not always clever and eccentric, 100% of the time. It would help if people stopped looking at us like computers and started remembering we are human too.
I've had severe social anxiety for the bulk of my life. I've gone through periods of replacing it with a fundamentally dissociative awareness. The best I can describe it is being fully submerged in the belief that life is a dream, and nothing that happens actually matters.
It's tough, but what actually works for me now, is giving other people the respect and privacy they need, by not thinking about how they think. You'd be surprised how much extra thinking time you have for everything else just by cutting your thoughts off at that line.
Still, there are no rules yet for empathy, and my mind can still get panicky in crowds, and there is the belief that I will be perpetually socially naive and subject to social manipulation. But I think it's better than hiding in the corner of a room, staring at the floor, maybe.
I do not really like social media. I like interesting conversations that stimulate me intellectually.
On busy sidewalks with many people moving rapidly in both directions, how are collisions avoided? If two people each attempt to intuit the other's trajectory while maintaining eye contact, a game of infinitely recursing mirrors ensues, Inception-style.
What works is to pick a path, any path, and look in the direction of that path. That is a sufficient signal for all parties to self-organize and avoid collision, even at high speeds and density of people. In other words, leading lowers the cost of following.
Even if one could mind-read, one may not like what one perceives. But humans are adaptable and can often reciprocate. If one's actions assume/imply positive intent, one can motivate positive reciprocity and reduce/avoid the cost of perceiving intent.
I think your path selecting algorithm can wind up in a state of deadlock, but it is very clever in a socially passive assertive way. There has to be a way of handling paths crossing simultaneously, non-aggressively, and this can not be resolved without additional signaling semantics.
Thing I'm building | IDE,code,ssh | Documentation / Debugging
Email and messages will always interrupt me, whether I have one monitor or three.
Honestly, the internet is boring. Facebook is boring, here is boring, reddit is boring, it is all boring. It is so much more fun to make stuff. But it's a good place to go to when I want to start my day up, shut it down, and reboot my brain when I'm working on something difficult.
The concept of multitasking and single tasking is oversimplified. People define what tasks are and what organized is. If I see mathematical similarity through the 30 or so random topics I switch up and progress through, there is something that is single tasked in there because it unifies all the information selections, and it builds as I progress through each one.
> Honestly, the internet is boring. Facebook is boring, here is boring, reddit is boring, it is all boring. It is so much more fun to make stuff. But it's a good place to go to when I want to start my day up, shut it down, and reboot my brain when I'm working on something difficult.
You just put into words something I've been feeling very strongly lately. Well said. Thanks.
I've tried numerous times to out myself as female and it's clear that there is consistently a difference in the way I'm spoken to as a woman and as a man.
I will probably move onto another alias as I typically do, but I think it is necessary to point out that both genders suffer due to any kind of discrimination. I feel like people hold me back by judging my abilities by my gender. I get angry thinking about how much more I might have been able to learn if I was a man, and I resolve that with studying independently, and fighting in whatever way I can to make sure I can gain the same knowledge base as anyone else should be able to.
One of the few things I am proud of is that I have managed to cultivate an online personality image that is often mistaken for an older man. I don't know when I will stop believing that I am inferior at the things I've spent my entire life studying, but I hope I will soon, because it is extremely depressing. I don't know what my experiences are the definition of, because I know they are biased by an extremely limited set of data.
The point is, I guess - keep your eyes on what really matters to you, and always keep that goal in sight. It's very easy to turn a superficial cultural assumption that actually doesn't happen that often, into a self defeatist attitude, and all that attitude does is get in your way of achieving.