Strilanc

87 ms·

841.
Counterintuitive Counterfactual Strategies(strilanc.com)
1 points by Strilanc 12y ago|0 comments
842.
by Strilanc 12y ago
Whether or not you drift there or instantaneously teleport there, there are still causality issues. You can make it into your own past by jumping once, changing your speed to tilt the frame of reference you're moving "instantaneou
843.
by Strilanc 12y ago
Even if that's the problem they intended to solve, they're using an inefficient solution. (Could you point to where they say they intend to count the unique reachable forests? Their javascript code [1] does enumerate stable fore
844.
Eating Lions, Wolves, and Goats Faster(strilanc.com)
42 points by Strilanc 12y ago|8 comments
845.
by Strilanc 12y ago
I think of English courses as teaching you about being convincing to humans . Correctness is important, but secondary . This is probably best exemplified by anecdotes being arguably the most evocative form of explanation, and yet the weak
846.
by Strilanc 12y ago
I bet the average Wikipedia article gets vandalized more often than the average Britannica article did. Probably orders of magnitude more often, even counting only the instances that weren't caught. I'd take Wikipedia over Britann
847.
by Strilanc 12y ago
The control is a bit frustrating. Kept turning in directions I didn't intend. Took 6x as long as it would with my hands.
848.
by Strilanc 12y ago
Really glad to see reactive catching on. It really is a significant improvement over raw events, even in trivial cases.
849.
by Strilanc 12y ago
They dabble in scaling 2-dimensional objects by radius instead of the area, but not quite by radius. A ~40% (cumulative) increase in dollars is shown as a ~70% increase in pixel area (which is a ~30% increase in radius, not ~40%).
850.
by Strilanc 12y ago
Also, on top of being cumulative and using different periods, the chart just directly visually lies. The pixel height difference between the 78.2 and 148.8 bars is ~110px for 70.6B$. But between 148.8 and 210 it's 198px for 61.2B. So
851.
by Strilanc 12y ago
(Author here) Do you have a link? I don't know much about the engineering details, other than "It's hard. Every part of it is hard.". Is it the controlled not that's tricky?
852.
Storing Bandwidth with Quantum Teleportation(strilanc.com)
17 points by Strilanc 12y ago|4 comments
853.
by Strilanc 12y ago
The function is continuous. The cumulative effect of the sum after the nth item are bounded by a [-2^-n, 2^-n] offset, and varies very slowly as x is changed (the argument to cos is divided by increasingly huge factors). I haven't done
854.
by Strilanc 12y ago
They don't collapse into two-valued logics, but they can be encoded into two-valued logics in the same way that numbers can be encoded into sets. The simplest way to see this is to think of a computer. Its operation can be describe
855.
by Strilanc 12y ago
I subjectively don't find those philosophies interesting, and have a distaste for assigning single ideas to heterogeneous groups like "the west". Your mileage may vary. For example, I would consider myself western but I don&#
856.
by Strilanc 12y ago
I would have enjoyed this article if it dropped the Buddhism and kept the math. Alternate logics are interesting, but you tend to be able to reduce them into each other in the same way that universal turing machines can simulate each other.
857.
by Strilanc 12y ago
I mentioned that I was playing fast and loose when swapping them. But nevermind that exact process, let's be a bit more direct. 1. Can you give me any function whose derivative is the function I specified? (i.e. I give you permission
858.
by Strilanc 12y ago
Note: I also think the public's LHC worries were unfounded. One way that the LHC collisions differ from cosmic ray impacts is that the center of mass velocity is much lower. If high energy collisions created small black holes, cosmic r
859.
by Strilanc 12y ago
Consider this function: f(x) = sum[n = 0 to infinity]((1/2)^n sin((1/20)^n pi x)) It converges because each successive term is bounded by [-1/2, +1/2]. But if you integrate it you get: f(x) = sum[n = 0 to
860.
by Strilanc 12y ago
You can modify it slightly and get a function that has no integral, though it still has a well defined area under its curve (do the limit after the subtraction of the two otherwise-would-diverge sums).
861.
by Strilanc 12y ago
Relevant, though not yet practical: quantum error correction [1]. There's a threshold we have to get over, then it gets a lot easier. edit and a reddit commenter mentioned this link saying that the current record for storing a qubit
862.
Storing Bandwidth with Superdense Coding(strilanc.com)
57 points by Strilanc 12y ago|4 comments
863.
by Strilanc 12y ago
The article didn't answer any of the questions I had. It reads a bit like someone was asked to expand the title into two thousand words. Half-thought explanations, some anecdotes, but almost no data. So both prices and lifetimes have d
864.
by Strilanc 12y ago
My father is/was a fisher and I come from a community that has a high proportion of people who fish generally. You'd be surprised how many fishers can't swim, despite spending their working lives out on the water. The justifi
865.
by Strilanc 12y ago
On the other hand, shower thinking is alive and well. Probably far more common than it was 100 years ago, too. Wastes more water though..
866.
by Strilanc 12y ago
1. Agreed. (Assume it doesn't.) 2. Why am I making my library's utility methods public? It's a frob library, not a generic utility method library. I don't want clients depending on my utility methods. I don't want t
867.
by Strilanc 12y ago
I disagree. For example, a method to generate all the permutations of a sequence is easy to get wrong and should be tested whether or not the library using it exposes it. Testing an internal method by itself, instead of indirectly through t
868.
by Strilanc 12y ago
I agree that the style of the typical errors differs, although there are definitely cases decided by some stupid mistake made when collecting evidence. But even when I try and test I don't hit 1 bug per 2000 lines of code. For exam
869.
by Strilanc 12y ago
That is not what I took away from the article at all. What I took away is: if you think parapsychology is wrong, then you should be really worried about the rest of science because their studies are not better designed. It's most clear
870.
by Strilanc 12y ago
> Rarely, at least according to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. In a 2006 opinion he cited an approximate error rate of 0.027 percent, based on [...] I laughed out loud. 1 mistake per 3700 cases. The software industry averag

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