Machine learning and artificial intelligence are not the "same thing". To say so does not "oversimplify things just a little bit": It is grossly inaccurate. Expert systems, pattern recognition, robotics and fuzzy logic- all part of A.I.- do not, per se, involve learning (though they may).

This planet has reached 'peak intelligence', and is not on the downward slope.

Maybe so, but could you please not post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

So, this is just an advertisement?

By far the most common is supervised learning (in which there is a target variable). Less common is unsupervised learning (in which there is no target variable, but solution quality still might be measurable). Occasionally, one comes across reinforcement learning (long-term performance is measurable, but little or no short-term feedback is available), and a variety of more special-purpose techniques like association rule discovery / link analysis, anomaly detection, sequential patterns mining, frequent pattern mining and probably several others I've forgotten.

I have to wonder what the legal ramifications of using one of these things to defend oneself would be.

Excel's pseudorandom number generator is weak: Agreed. The claim that someone, presumably a well-situated person in the Canadian government, might be able to put their finger on the scale for this applicant versus the others seems reasonable. Otherwise, the notion that a bad PRNG, even the one in Excel, will "favor" one group over another, or one person over others, seems a stretch.

Personally, I'm much more concerned with the day-to-day work situation than perks, but remote work (near 100%, preferably) is something I look for.

I agree with this, however it's not clear to me what concessions one can win in comp negotiations that'd affect day-to-day work. Any ideas there?

Sorry, you're right: TO me, either there's a fit or there isn't. I guess my point was that no perks will compensate for a bad fit.

I think that's an interesting question: It seems that many people assume that taxation and regulation should be the norm.

One argument often made by governments in favor of the taxes they collect is the services they provide, especially, in the case of sales taxes, the legal protections they offer buyers. I wonder how well that justification holds up in the world of on-line retail?

Property taxes pay for schools, police, county/town government services, etc.

State income taxes (in most states) pay for the legal courts, the parks, roads, and plowing, and a state unemployment + welfare system.

Federal taxes mostly go towards the military and some other civil services like environment and highways. Social Security + Medicare are welfare payments made to old people who have worked and aged to around the age of 65.

So, I'm not really sure what I'm benefiting from here. I guess maybe another foreign country would invade the US and potentially kill me if we didn't have a military. But I'm not feeling like any of these services personally help me at all.

Sales tax goes into a slush fund at the state level that is just spent on anything random. I don't think it's mandated to be used for something specific to online consumer protections?

It's worth noting that the actual title of that essay is, "Why do deep convolutional networks generalize so poorly to small image transformations?"

Thanks! We've un-generalized the submission title from “Why do neural networks generalize so poorly?”.

In viewing the page titled 'The Criminal is Disproportionately Likely to be a Foreigner', I am reminded of the "New Yorker's View of the World": http://i.imgur.com/A3JwoFr.jpg