

Patrick McKenzie (patio11) on Askolo - wglb
http://askolo.com/patio11

======
scottkrager
Lots of nuggets in that interview....

my favorite (as a competitive SEO)

"Social media: It's perfect for SEO companies which couldn't produce results
in SEO, because if you fail to produce results with social media it will be
utterly indistinguishable from actually producing results with social media,
but if you fail to produce results with SEO anybody looking at the gross
revenue graph will notice really quickly."

~~~
azazo
My favorite is the point that there are often better strategies (more
profitable) than going after the most popular terms.

------
ced
_my understanding from undergrad and talking with people is that there is a
heavy split between academic ML/AI and industrial ML/AI. One uses a lot of raw
brainpower, the other uses a lot of base cunning to reduce problems that look
like they require intelligence into large instances of boring math problems
which were mostly solved by the 1970s._

That's a surprise to me. Can anyone here expand on that? What are the books to
learn about "industrial ML/AI"?

~~~
Drbble
Parent is talking about Agent systems and just about everything that isn't
regular statistics. Basically, in the past 20 years, computers got 1000 times
smarter and people didn't, so old statistical models became tractable to apply
to terabytes of data, and the schools of "invent a thinking algorithm" stopped
being relevant.

/slightly bitter former "academic AI" student.

It's not really Academic vs Industry, though. It is Agents and Logic vs
Statistics.

The standard text is Elements of Statistical Learning. It is a grad-level and
mostly theory. For goofing around in Python, Programming Collective
Intelligence

~~~
ced
I agree that Rusell and Norvig AI doesn't have much penetration yet. As for
Elements of Statistical Learning... That's the canonical textbook for ML. If
industry relies on splines, boosting, and support vector machines, then it is
really not that far from modern academic ML research.

------
peripitea
Question for the askolo people: Is this Q&A finished, or will it ever be? It
isn't obvious from the UI whether there is a time window on how long Patrick
will be answering questions, or whether he may continue to answer questions
here indefinitely.

I ask because my normal consumption method for this sort of thing is to wait
until the interview is complete to read it, but in this case I can't tell if
it will actually end anytime soon.

~~~
shazad
Hey peripitea - the page is a permanent space to ask questions so you can keep
contributing whenever you'd like.

~~~
peripitea
Thanks. In that case, might I suggest something like RSS or email
notifications so you can be notified when Q&As you care about are updated?

~~~
shazad
Great idea - thanks for the feedback!

------
pbiggar
I'm astonished that someone would ask the question "marriage or YC". Surely
the number of people who have somebody they'd like to marry, who would choose
YC over marrying them, is negligible?

------
loboman
Not going to sign up on Facebook for that... so: Patio11, do you realize Patio
has a meaning in Spanish too?

~~~
caoxuwen
Hi loboman, you can signup without facebook too. We'll make that more obvious

~~~
tokenadult
_you can signup without facebook too. We'll make that more obvious_

I'm on board as one of the folks to receive questions, and yet every time I
visit the site, it asks me to log in again, unlike almost any site I have
signed up for as a regular participant. I probably do some kinds of script-
blocking that only a minority of users do, so this bug in persistence of sign-
in information may not have been experienced by anyone else, but I'll not for
the record that I don't even see a display of a way to log in with Facebook,
so that's probably a symptom of the same issue. Never assume anything about
the characteristics of the user's browser unless that is mission-critical for
your site. I can use other online sites (including Facebook) just fine.

AFTER EDIT: To answer your kind follow-up question, caoxuewen, I'm using
Chrome with all of the following extensions installed, mostly with default
settings:

Adblock Plus (Beta)1.2

Warning: This extension failed to modify a network request because the
modification conflicted with another extension.

Don't track me Google2.0

F.B. Purity - Cleans Up Facebook6.6.2

G+me for Google Plus™6.0.3

Ghostery3.0.0

Google Calendar (by Google)0.7

Google Tasks (by Google)1.0

Google Translate1.2.3.1

Google Voice (by Google)2.3.6.8

Highlight to Search1.0.36

Send from Gmail (by Google)1.12

Show Full Domain on Hacker News posts1.0

(I'll work on fixing the one conflict while you figure out what's going on
with Askolo. Thanks for your help.)

~~~
caoxuwen
Hi tokenadult, this is indeed a bug, we are are looking into it now - curious
what browser/version are you using?

------
Tichy
The religion bit sounds a bit like the Sherlock Holmes rationale that he chose
to not remember that the earth rotates around the sun because that knowledge
has no practical impact on his life. So basically religion doesn't impact you,
and therefore you chose to not think about it at all? But then why call
yourself religious?

Maybe that way your beliefs really do no harm, except that you are a role
model for others who might take it more seriously.

~~~
tptacek
His answer regarding religion is in no way similar to Sherlock Holmes'
rationale for not remembering the earth rotating around the sun.

This is not a good topic for a message board debate.

~~~
Tichy
I read only the bit where he said that his whole world is very rational and he
has only given the religion issue 3 minutes of thought. Maybe I missed
something, but it seemed like a plausible explanation for somebody rational
being religious. In fact to stop thinking about it after some point might be
the only way to explain the existence of religion.

Why would it not be a good topic? I have often pondered asking HN how to deal
with it, because I have a lot of religious friends and I am scared of losing
them if I bring up religion as a topic. I would be interested how other HN
users deal with that issue (assuming there are others who are not religious).

Also, religion might be the greatest hack ever.

~~~
tptacek
Yes, you missed the message he was trying to communicate. He was being
sarcastic.

Yes, you are likely to lose friends if you insist on debating their religious
beliefs as if they were favorite programming languages. You do not endear
yourself to them when you refer to religion as a "hack", in either common
definition of the term.

The best way not to "deal" with this problem is to avoid it. Hence: bad topic
for a message board debate.

If you feel any further urge to discuss this issue with me, and aren't just
trying to score message board points about religion, my contact info is in my
profile and you can feel free to ping me about this. I've invited you to talk
to me about religion; feel free to take me up on it. Know that your parent
comment is light grey because Patrick's response was intended to communicate
almost the opposite of that invitation.

------
edwinnathaniel
Makes me want to move to Japan... Now!

