OscarCunningham

73 ms·

871.
by OscarCunningham 7y ago
My understanding is that the bailouts were completely separate from the quantitative easing. The money for the bailout was raised by selling government debt, and in exchange for it the government got shares in those banks (the government ac
872.
by OscarCunningham 7y ago
They do (in some sense) give it to the government, but not to the banks. The banks get it in exchange for bonds and shares which they sell to the Federal Reserve. So the banks aren't getting money for nothing, they're exchanging m
873.
by OscarCunningham 7y ago
Does that mean that when you're flying an X15 you lose 6.2/22 = 28% of your bodyweight to the Coriolis force? That's pretty neat.
874.
by OscarCunningham 7y ago
I had an error which I believe I have now fixed. The intended algorithm is "starting at the end of the list, swap each element with a random predecessor or possibly with itself ".
875.
by OscarCunningham 7y ago
No structure can check membership in O(1) time if n is big enough.
876.
by OscarCunningham 7y ago
Is there an easy way to adapt the algorithm to get the cards drawn in a random order? The article says "it’s easy to randomize the order after the fact" but if we can't store them in memory then that's a no-go.
877.
by OscarCunningham 7y ago
I see. In particular the log(k) doesn't come from repeat attempts, it comes from the time needed to search through your list of drawn elements to see if you've seen the chosen element before.
878.
by OscarCunningham 7y ago
An easy way to randomise a list is the following: import random list = [0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9] length = len(list) for i in range(1,length): j = length - i k = random.randrange(j+1) list[j],
879.
by OscarCunningham 7y ago
They specifically say that a nice thing about Vitter's algorithm is that it produces its results in sorted order, and that it's easy to shuffle them after they've been drawn. > The reason it’s nice for an algorithm to prod
880.
by OscarCunningham 7y ago
>The misleading part in using the language of cards is that you don’t often consider a deck of size 2^64. What’s nice about the card formulation though is that it conveys how simple the problem statement really is. This is a fundamental
881.
by OscarCunningham 7y ago
I don't think that's a restriction that's usually enforced in this case. It seems nicer to allow the cubes to be zero since then the conjecture that the achievable sums are everything not 4 or 5 mod 9 can be stated without sp
882.
by OscarCunningham 7y ago
Yeah, e^n grows much faster than sqrt(2 pi n), so sqrt(2 pi n)/e^n will tend to 0.
883.
by OscarCunningham 7y ago
Stirling's approximation says that n! ~ sqrt(2 pi n) (n/e)^n. So n!/n^n ~ sqrt(2 pi n)e^-n.
884.
by OscarCunningham 7y ago
You're using "recession" and "stock market crash" as though they're synonymous. That's a dangerous assumption to make. It's possible for either to happen without the other.
885.
by OscarCunningham 7y ago
The difference between them is that physical evolution takes one state to another state, whereas addition takes two numbers to another number.
886.
by OscarCunningham 7y ago
Has the soil under the rainforest been slowly getting deeper?
887.
NASA said to be investigating first allegation of a crime in space(bbc.co.uk)
218 points by OscarCunningham 7y ago|117 comments
888.
by OscarCunningham 7y ago
You can't define definability, because otherwise you could talk about the "least natural number not definable in fewer than n symbols" which is a contradiction for sufficiently large n.
889.
by OscarCunningham 7y ago
Can a function have that property at every point?
890.
by OscarCunningham 7y ago
Surely there need to be weightings? If any amount of profit is better than any amount of other benefits, how is the situation different to now?
891.
by OscarCunningham 7y ago
In a circumstance where bosses are forced to tradeoff between these goals, how should they choose?
892.
by OscarCunningham 7y ago
The orignal quote is quite poetic: > "You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes." - J.B.S. Hal
893.
by OscarCunningham 7y ago
Only various C pitches, and only the fundamental. I believe that this is also how most Shepard tones are made, except that when you play a different Shepard tone you vary the note (i.e. A, B, C, etc.) but keep the average pitch the same, wh
894.
by OscarCunningham 7y ago
What I'd like to see is the opposite effect: A keyboard where every note is generated using only combinations of Cs, but with the weightings chosen so that its average pitch is the one that that key usually has. This would have the str
895.
by OscarCunningham 7y ago
You can sometimes use it by breaking the number down into smaller Fibonacci numbers. For example 29km = 21km + 8km = 13 miles + 5 miles = 18 miles. (Correct result is 18.02 miles.)
896.
by OscarCunningham 7y ago
By the way, "recession" doesn't mean the same thing as "stock market crash". The definition of a recession requires GDP to go down for two consecutive quarters. Although there is some correlation it's still com
897.
by OscarCunningham 7y ago
Does the same reasoning also imply that the government should get all physical property 100 years after its creation? If not, what makes that case different?
898.
by OscarCunningham 7y ago
Country size is a heavy tailed distribution. Every country aside from China, India and maybe the US is small.
899.
by OscarCunningham 7y ago
H. G. Wells: > New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled the humiliating question arises "Why then are you not taking part in them?"
900.
by OscarCunningham 7y ago
If you read the reports from the camps you see that there is a very high death rate. For example this woman ( https://www.apnews.com/61cdf7f5dfc34575aa643523b3c6b3fe ) claims that 9 of the 60 women in her cell died over the c

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