Four short links: 5 July 2016
Natural Language, Human Augmentation, Programming Mistakes, and Facebook Management
- Natural Language Understanding (Almost) From Scratch (Paper a Day) — Collobert et al., describe four standard NLP tasks, each of which has well established benchmarks in the community. As of 2011, the state-of-the-art in these tasks used researcher-discovered task-specific intermediate representations (features) based on a large body of linguistic knowledge. The authors set out to build a system that could excel across multiple benchmarks, without needing task-specific representations or engineering.
- Human Augmentation Fiction — creator of a new Amazon series interviewed. “We’ll have old tech mixed in with new tech in one big mish-mash,” Zlotescu said, “Holograms doing the same functions as AR. Bionic eyes performing similar functions to Google Glass. Organic bionics and modifications being grown while metal arms are being built. There will be a lot to choose from, so get ready.” (via Mia Bennett)
- Investigating Novice Programming Mistakes (PDF) — the time to fix an error is not noticeably related to how often a student will encounter it.
- How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics (HBR) — At Facebook, moving into management is not a promotion. It’s a lateral move, a parallel track. Can’t emphasise enough the value of a strong individual-contributor career path; so many great coders are wasted being meh managers.
