Four short links: 17 January 2017
Autonomous RDBMS, Rules of Machine Learning, Open Source LTE, and Limits of Evidence-Based Policy
- Peloton — a relational database management system that is designed for autonomous operation. The system’s integrated planning component not only optimizes the system for the current workload, but also predicts future workload trends before they occur so that the system can prepare itself accordingly.
- Google’s Rules of Machine Learning (PDF) — so good. Hard-won lessons, good advice for avoiding mistakes, and rules of thumb. The number of feature weights you can learn in a linear model is roughly proportional to the amount of data you have.
- srsUE — Open source software radio 3GPP LTE UE.
- I’m a Data Nerd But… (Keith Ng) — Governance is about making decisions with imperfect knowledge. They have to be best guesses because inaction can be as catastrophic as incorrect action, and because sometimes solid knowledge is hard to come by. When we use the language of science for governance, we’re setting up a hair-trigger (“but there’s no evidence for that”) that favours doing nothing. The best case scenario is that it’s a sincerely inquisitive process that could be abused by bad actors to keep us locked into inaction. The worst case scenario is that this is inaction by design, that it is ideologically driven conservatism trying to hide behind the language of scientific conservatism.
