alextp

60 ms·

211.
by alextp 16y ago
This is the best characterization I've ever read of the Green movement. I've joked for years about how nature has replaced god for some people, but it was always too vague without the connection to atonement and suffering.
212.
by alextp 16y ago
This paper http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0502072 explores what it means for physical reality. It's really interesting. There are many possible scenarios, however. This blog post http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2009/07/03/is-pnp-an-ill-pose
213.
by alextp 16y ago
This is actually not a bad idea, and some scientific groups are pressuring to move to this model. See Yann LeCun's proposal ( http://www.lecun.com/ex/pamphlets/publishing-models.html ) for an example. ICML almost does this. The review is
214.
by alextp 16y ago
Maybe, but I think internet time wasting is a lot less toxic than TV time wasting. For me the main differences are: tv channel-surfing is a variable-rewards skinner box (more so than internet) tv has an essentially higher cost to stop watch
215.
by alextp 16y ago
This is, as far as I know, code directly related to a learning to rank work by some googlers, not at all a generic library blessed by google.
216.
by alextp 16y ago
It is arguable that some people develop addictive relationships with their religious and/or political views, seeking reinforcement like an addict seeks a drug. But, yeah, the other examples qualify as phases without being as toxic as drugs.
217.
by alextp 16y ago
From 15 hours ago, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1549363
218.
by alextp 16y ago
Just another day it dawned on me that an important part of the overwhelming success of television (specially cable television) is that it's another unpredictable-rewards skinner box. There are the good shows you know and expect (and their f
219.
by alextp 16y ago
I mean my parents, my girlfriend's parents, my friends' parents, and almost every middle-class to upper-class person my age's parents as well. Not our grandparents, mind you.
220.
by alextp 16y ago
You have a point, but I don't think it's that simple. With things like hard liquor, heroin, cocaine, and other generally accepted to be addictive things, a lot more people go through "phases" of the stuff than actually waste their entire li
221.
by alextp 16y ago
But some of the things you mention only look bad when compared to even crappier alternatives. > Large quantities of mass-produced food instead of meager quantities of undependable crops that you spend 90% of your working life growing; A
222.
by alextp 16y ago
I'm not sure I agree. In most NLP papers I've read the real meat of the paper is not in the code, but in a couple of equations that, with a lot of mostly-mechanical wrapping around, implementing, debugging, and plugging into well-understood
223.
by alextp 16y ago
This is also very true. And I think a part of the reason why this is worse with research code is that the meaty part of the code tends to be (at least in ML/NLP) a few equations from the paper, in a hacky and convoluted way, and unless you'
224.
by alextp 16y ago
That is a huge part of my problem, as well. Sometimes when showing the code to an advisor/colleague I have to bring up an interpreter and type over 10 differend commands before something starts to work (and don't even get me started on the
225.
by alextp 16y ago
I agree with the feeling, but a lot of the time, scientific software is just not ready for real usage. My software at least is completely useless most of the time (you have to open it in the interpreter and type the right incantations, and
226.
by alextp 16y ago
I think, however, that the Chinese government itself pays for americans to teach english in China.
227.
Brazillian government threatening to sue google out of the country(translate.google.com)
1 points by alextp 16y ago|1 comments
228.
by alextp 16y ago
What you describe is the h-index ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index ). It is one of the fairest ways of measuring merit, but for most social sites it has the problem of being too fair. If you're maintaining a site like stackoverflow o
229.
by alextp 16y ago
detex is easy to use and strips the latex out of latex files. You can also extract the text from a dvi using catdvi, and from a pdf using pdftotext, so I think you could probably afford to support latex :-)
230.
by alextp 16y ago
Exactly. Assistentialism is easy to defend, hard to attack ("you mean you should NOT help them?"), and spreads very easily, but totally fails to help, most of the time. A government shouldn't build hospitals for the poor, or schools for the
231.
by alextp 16y ago
> But you do know that blacks commit a lot more crime (~ 10x) everywhere I don't understand why this rules out cultural reasons. In most of the places where black people live today outside africa their immigration was mainly based on sl
232.
by alextp 16y ago
The correct response to this feeling is flagging the link. That's how moderation happens in HN.
233.
by alextp 16y ago
It goes further than that, and most modern machine learning methods are fundamentally defined in a "minimizing ugliness" framework.
234.
by alextp 16y ago
Another problem is that lilypond is slow, and any WYSIWYG interface to it would either bypass the compiler to show a "preview" of the score or would have a horrible lag whenever the user edited something. This might not be obvious, but addi
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by alextp 16y ago
That's a very good book to read, even as a man from a completely different time and circumstance than Virginia Woolf's when she wrote it.
236.
by alextp 16y ago
To be pedantic, most people usually mean "median" (or a robust estimation of the mean without considering outliers) by average, and in samples from a continuous distribution it is necessarily true that ~50% are above/below the median.
237.
by alextp 16y ago
Yes, abstractly, of course. On the other hand, this sort of distribution is usually gaussian (a whole bunch of average drivers, and a few specially good and bad ones), and it is true that 80% of the people can't be above average if they are
238.
by alextp 16y ago
http://www.springer.com/computer/swe/journal/10664 http://esem2010.case.unibz.it/ http://portal.acm.org/browse_dl.cfm?coll=ACM&dl=ACM&... http://lens-ese.cos.ufrj.br/ese/ These are the links I know of in the area.
239.
by alextp 16y ago
(a machine learning phd student here) 10 hours a week reading seems about right for me, although often is a lot more or less than that. Usually most of my reading come from: google scholar searches on a topic of interest, following the refe
240.
by alextp 16y ago
Yes, the area51 process seems very broken. I'm not sure why they ask for so much focus and bureaucracy for the new projects, given that stackoverflow is so broad, open-ended and easy to use. Until they fix it I guess the solution is to use

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