To some extent, you probably have heard of them, under the rubric 'direct transfers' or cash payments. Direct transfers of valuable assets (cows or cash) to the very poor have done very well when evaluated in randomized experiments, and I suspect you've seen at least one article on them in the past (albeit it might have been on GiveDirectly or one of the other programs rather than BRAC itself).
Evolutionary algorithms may work ok here, but I have not seen any high-performance ML tasks done with evolutionary training of neural networks in a long time. It's all backprop and, increasingly, reinforcement learning these days.
Have you ever looked at https://github.com/karpathy/reinforcejs ? Karpathy already has demos similar to yours which you could build on. The trained agents might be better.
Yeah reinforcement learning and policy gradients can possibly attack the same problem.
Although for a simple task like this demo, I stand by simple conventional neuroevolution as they would work best and are easy to train as the nets are quite small.
> Although for a simple task like this demo, I stand by simple conventional neuroevolution as they would work best and are easy to train as the nets are quite small.
They may be easy to train but I'm not sure about 'work best'. Watching your final trained agents, I see a lot of dumb obvious mistakes where the agent runs right into a line; and I see little higher-level strategic planning like trying to maximize free space around one or run away from a incoming line.
> Historians believe Suleiman’s heart and internal organs were buried in the tomb and his body taken back to Constantinople, as Istanbul was then known. His death at Szigetvar was kept secret for 48 days to prevent his troops from giving up the fight.
I was wondering how the tomb of the most famous sultan could have possibly gotten itself lost. The answer is it's only sort of his tomb.
That's too elaborate. They like more direct attacks. Think subpoenas exploiting the third party doctrine to the hilt, MLATs to image any server remotely suspicious outside the USA, and occasional direct hacks.
"Under the scheme, a company which turns over less than $20 million is eligible to apply for a cash rebate of 45 cents for every dollar spent on research and development activity.
According to a press release in May, 2015, DeMorgan Ltd succeeded in its application for the rebate.
That means DeMorgan were able to prove to AusIndustry that it had spent $120 million on R&D activities in the 2014/2015 financial year, all while turning over less than $20 million. A 45 cent rebate on $120 million works out to $54 million."
I'm a consultant in the R&D Tax space. The press release relates to an advanced finding, which is an advanced approval of R&D activities. It does not however guarantee approval for the amount of expenditure they would be claiming. A tax refund of that size would naturally attract the attention of the Australian Tax Office(ATO). The press release is also dated before they could submit their tax return to obtain a 14/15 refund. A key problem with the press release is that there is now a $100million cap on how much expenditure they can claim in a financial year, so theoretically their maximum benefit would be $45million.
$120million in software R&D is a very large spend in Australia for one year, Google Australia for example claims about $40-$50million in R&D spend each year. Atlassian and some of the larger banks would claim a similar amount. I have not heard much about DeMorgan before, however if it all checks out they would be one of the most significant powers in the Australian tech space.
Fellow Australian here (albeit currently living in Tokyo).
The "We create tax refunds" part of your homepage says that a company can get a tax refund even if there is no sales.
Does this mean that if I establish a company tomorrow, invest $100k of capital, and spent $100k of capital on R&D, then the ATO will give my company $45k?
The R&D Tax Incentive was designed to give a cash benefit for startups who have little tax to pay. So your example is correct for a pre revenue entity, assuming no outstanding tax liabilities. Its an entitlement scheme, so as long as your doing R&D, have a company and spending your money through the company, you will get the benefit of the scheme.
It is one area that Australia has a significant advantage over the US for startups.
I've been through the ATO R&D tax rebate process with a business that had Australian operations, you need audited financials and it takes months of due diligence. As an example, we applied to the ATO with preliminary totals for our 2014 R&D spending in January of 2015, updated our application in March with our audited numbers, answered questions from the ATO for 3 months, had our application approved in June, and the check wasn't cut until September or October.
The credit from the ATO comes in the form of a check, but it's a prepayment against future tax obligations (you lost the tax-loss carry-forward you'd otherwise be able to claim to offset future profits). It's very useful for a startup since it's non-dilutive funding which can be used to get a lot of work done.
Yep, there are all sorts of forms about material representations and liabilities for false statements. It seems like a well-run program, our contacts with the ATO were very sharp and knew which questions to ask. You could tell they've ferreted out fraudulent applications before.
If you're honest, it's a great source of money. Our company was doing actual research to the tune of $50M spent in Australia (which was all VC money) so we got back something like $20M in non-dilutive additional financing. That $20M was "free" to us (but we lost out on the ability to write off $50M of losses against our future profits). It encouraged us to spend much more on research which mostly came in the form of salaries for Austrian employees. As long as you're not in the habit of lying to tax authorities, I don't know why every startup wouldn't take advantage.
Both crazy not to try and do it in house for the cost. Those guys are charging 15% and say you won't get it if you do it yourself. Any confident business person should be able to. It is meant to be self administered. It is a huge profit center for the likes of KPMG.
The R&D Tax scheme is a mix of law, tax and accounting. Like representing yourself in a legal matter or doing your own tax return, if its simple and straightforward you might be ok to claim yourself.
However add a little complexity here or there and it helps to have someone who knows what they're doing to guide you through it. Its a self assessment scheme, like tax, anyone can lodge their own return and the ATO will pay out with only cursory checks.
The real danger lies when you get audited, it can be especially dangerous for startups who have been claiming a few years, ignorant that they have not been claiming properly and are faced with an Audit by the ATO for multiple years of tax refunds. Generally once you add penalties to the tax refunds they must now pay back, the amount will end most startups.
There are many reputable consultants in this space who are capable and cheaper than the big 4. I would suggest sticking to the big 4, Tier 2 Accounting firms and Boutique R&D Tax Firms. They should be registered tax agents and generally you would want to know if they have successfully navigated Ausindustry Reviews and ATO audits before. Avoid suburban accountants like the plague for these things.
Yep.. We were an American company, with Indian investors who bordered on the 40% ownership stake where we'd have to claim their revenue as ours, claiming R&D expenses for goods bought in the US and deployed in Australia with AU employees and backpacker visaholders.. Why in the world would we take the risk of filing our own application when you can easily negotiate a deal with one of the big 4 to 'handle it' for a few hundred k.
At this point, if he is Satoshi, he would probably be better off coming out of the closet. If you read through the McGrath-Nichols documents about the Hotwire bankruptcy and how the R&D tax credits dispute killed Hotwire, it's clear the ATO has it out for Wright.
I bet that whatever this raid is about, it's about something like R&D tax credits again (http://www.businessinsider.com.au/the-australian-who-may-hav... says $54 million in 2015 alone!) or some sort of VAT rebate, and it may kill another of Wright's companies. There's not much you can do against the ATO if they are determined to reach an adverse decision against you... But if he's Satoshi, he can take the moral high ground and wage a media campaign to shame the ATO into dropping the case and maybe finally correctly treating Bitcoin as money.
> But if he's Satoshi, he can take the moral high ground and wage a media campaign to shame the ATO into dropping the case and maybe finally correctly treating Bitcoin as money.
How does this help? If they treat it that way, wouldn't Wright have a huge income tax debt?
Yes, but presumably he can pay it out of his Bitcoin fortune. He has to deal with that at some point anyway, and by going public now, he gains additional leverage on his VAT or tax credit or whatever the ATO has decided to get him for this time.
> So let’s recap: in September 2015, Wright was annoyed that people didn’t know who the real Nakamoto was.
Is Kashmir unable to read? Wright never said that. He was clearly angry about the national stereotyping and the 'assumption' and how thinking is 'limited'. This is exactly like those cases where women authors publish books under names like 'J.K. Rowling' and readers assume they are men; of course they are going to be upset.
And Wright lives in London according to that Vegas video. Even more billionaires live there without much worries about kidnapping, and you'd think the Russians there would be a testcase.
That's mostly evidence for my theory: he's an egomaniac trying to sell a story. Almost all of this goes back to him or the leaker as a matter of faith. It all appears way after Bitcoin appears. Everything about how he presents himself comes off as playing to a mystique to draw people in.
I'd buy the leaks if the hacker posted a message as Satoshi using stolen credential and linked to this article. Meanwhile, the "hacker" is probably Wright with nothing to do with Satoshi other than make money on his name.
Journalists want the scoop of the century - outing the real Satoshi. By back filling history, they gave exactly what they wanted, and they took it hook, line and sinker.
Except is that really the scoop of the century? Do people really care that much? If the media would just leave the real guy alone we could have the added benefit of preventing false self-marketing too. How about we just ignore all these "the real satoshi!" articles?
It's already in Wired, has 212 points on Hacker News, and who knows what value to people assessing him in academia or business sectors. Altogether, enough people care for it to matter to a tech egomaniac. Not "scoop of the century" or anything, though.
Yeah, it would be the scoop of the century to Bitcoin fans but few other people. That said, as someone who isn't involved at all, I love a good detective story. I'll read this.
Yep. That seems plausible. Given means, motive, and opportunity (including a few months of time), could some of the folks here on HN have backfilled history this way? Register an email address one character off of Satoshi's? Edit some old blog posts to insert Bitcoin references? Generate backdated GPG keys? Perhaps enough to satisfy not-very-technical journalists who won't think to compare coding styles and are too worried about losing a scoop to ask folks for second and third opinions?
I'd expect the real Satoshi to have more of a math background, not "ecommerce law" and "digital forensics." I'd also expect him to be more similar in writing style and be more ideologically in sync with Bitcoin in his public actions. Plus I'm not a C# coder but this looks pretty basic: https://digital-forensics.sans.org/blog/2009/04/24/code-skil...
The evidence the journalists published is more convincing if you want it to be convincing. My guess is that they did.
I think Gizmodo's is a much less rigorous article than the Wired one. It mostly consists of accusations and circumstantial evidence. Every early player in Bitcoin development has these in spades. In a world where Craig Steven Wright is not Satoshi, we'd see the exact same tenuous evidence.
In contrast, the Wired article stays close to the facts (GPG keys, email addresses, IPs, etc) and hedges its bets. Wright might be Satoshi. He might be a hoaxer. We don't know. It's not as satisfying to read as the Gizmodo pablum, but it's much more accurate.
I have looked at the GPG keys, and based on the hash algorithm preference order, I believe they were created after [edit: July 2009], by a gnupg version following this[1] commit, on a computer with its clock set to 2008.
The change you link to has the same SHA-256 as the first option both before and after the change.
Did he use something else?
I'm curious to know your thoughts on the scenario whereby another hash would be chosen for him by the software, and whether or not he may have chosen a specific hash?
This is potentially a good line of enquiry with more info
