apl

9 ms·

31.
by apl 11y ago
MPL's documentation is a catastrophe, and the API design is indeed abysmal. The plots, however, are only as ugly as you like them to be. Here's a great auxiliary package with much more sensible defaults: https://github.
32.
by apl 12y ago
Do you have any decent sources on that one?
33.
by apl 12y ago
> The most striking characteristic of a randomly designed > system is that you cannot restart it. Once you shut it off > it dies permanently. I don't see how that is a consequence of the underlying design principl
34.
by apl 12y ago
You could, of course, just download a Julia distribution, fire up the interpreter and see for yourself. But I'm sure unfounded snark is much, much better.
35.
by apl 12y ago
That's not quite correct. a) 24FPS are easily detected as flickering; our true flicker fusion frequency is found around 60-80Hz. b) Perceptual time discretisation heavily depends on the modality and even the task in question. For motio
36.
by apl 12y ago
There's a lot of good science on this exact issue, dating back to the 50s/60s (good entry point: the Nobel Prize-awarded work of Hubel & Wiesel). The brain does indeed perform many, many passes of feature extraction and reduct
37.
by apl 12y ago
Ugh, yet another entry in the emerging genre of "We combined well-established techniques in order to generate a vaguely sci-fi-sounding scenario." Other noteworthy examples: 1) Brain-to-brain control: http://www.plosone
38.
by apl 12y ago
Please note that while interesting in the context of a 14-year old executing it (under heavy supervision, I suspect based on the trajectory model), the translation from fly or bee to robot has been done for almost thirty years on a much lar
39.
by apl 12y ago
While it's true that a biological eye doesn't really have a defined "framerate" like video sensors do, the examples you're providing don't really show that. Sensitivity to very short stimuli doesn't prove
40.
by apl 12y ago
Minor detail I love : the example on the homepage is drawing the PlotDevice logo in PlotDevice. Simple, but effective. Excellent presentation in general.
41.
by apl 12y ago
For fans of the Python numeric stack (NumPy, SciPy, pandas, etc.): if you ever want to give Julia a go, there's an excellent Julia-to-Python bridge called PyCall. https://github.com/stevengj/PyCall.jl It allowed m
42.
by apl 12y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_(video_game)
43.
by apl 12y ago
It's neither weird nor pointless. They're going for something that is as comfortable to work with as modern dynamic languages, for something that eschews the cruft of ObjC. Python is simply a very popular representative for this t
44.
by apl 12y ago
Is it possible that LT got leapfrogged by Apple a couple of minutes ago?
45.
by apl 12y ago
> I would call it duck typing Ha, that's a fairly apt comparison. > It's not clear that we need a theory of consciousness at > all, how is something as ill-defined as consciousness even > viable in a ma
46.
by apl 12y ago
That's not the notion of consciousness we're dealing with when talking about the "hard" problem of consciousness. You're describing its psycho-functional interpretation: the ability to see yourself as a "self&q
47.
by apl 12y ago
I appreciate the notion of a "pretty-hard" problem of consciousness; it nicely captures what people in the field, philosophers and scientists alike, are actually looking for. His counterarguments appear sound, especially the tec
48.
by apl 13y ago
A Python list is not a matrix, so I don't see how this change would entail your statement. Of course, for very specific use cases, a list looks like a numerical vector; the semantics are very different, though.
49.
by apl 13y ago
No, we should deprecate numpy.matrix which is the culprit here. If there's only numpy.ndarray, the semantics are absolutely clear: * for element-wise multiplication and @ for "proper" multiplication of two matrices.
50.
by apl 13y ago
> You arrive at the problem of then not having an element- > wise version of the multiplication but it's not as if this > solves that problem anyway. Please reread the text. It's exactly what it does, and an e
51.
by apl 13y ago
> is JetBrain's PyCharm significantly better than the PyDev plugin for Eclipse? Yes. As it happens -- in almost all ways, and it's under rapid and sustained development. I can wholeheartedly recommend it as a general p
52.
by apl 13y ago
> Why are HTC and Samsung doing so well in the phone market? Because they > offer what clearly millions of people want: a 5" screen. Not sure that's supported by the data. Do you have a specific reason for assuming
53.
by apl 13y ago
Worthy choice, especially Suedhof. His work is a seminal contribution to our understanding of one of the most basic principles governing information processing in virtually all nervous systems: the chemical transmission of a signal from one
54.
by apl 13y ago
That applies to some of the hard sciences (more precisely: engineering, as well as some branches of physics and chemistry), but not in general. PhD students in biology earn around 1400 after taxes; a philosopher or what have you is lucky to
55.
by apl 13y ago
Keep in mind that "All breakthroughs are derived from basic research" (if true) doesn't entail "All basic research leads to breakthroughs". We still need to judge the merit of basic research; in this case I'm s
56.
by apl 13y ago
> I've never understood the weird fascination with "many-worlds". In addition to the parsimony/redundancy argument already brought up, our weird fascination with "many worlds" should be utterly obvi
57.
by apl 13y ago
You're pretty spot on here -- up to approximately 1500Hz, the auditory brain can make use of so-called inter-aural time differences which allow estimation of a given source's azimuth. After that, phase differences become ambiguous
58.
by apl 13y ago
It genuinely might. Some very basic notions of various logics (e.g., the difference between sufficiency and necessity, a careful analysis of conditionals, validity versus soundness) are absolutely worthwhile subjects of sustained formal stu
59.
by apl 13y ago
> I have June and July to write, edit, market, and launch > the book. It may be slightly ambitious, but I plan to > have a lot of time on my hands. That'd be an absurdly demanding schedule for an experienced author
60.
by apl 13y ago
Well, it was published in the NEJM today: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc1206319 Academia moves slowly. You want to make sure that your innovation actually had a net positive effect (does the patient actually survive?), you nee

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