benkuykendall

15 ms·

31.
by benkuykendall 10y ago
Could you perhaps be a little more specific? Sure, we use OR, AND, and even XOR to deal with conditionals that map to T and F, but this seems like kind of a surface level use of booleans. When do we invoke the algebraic properties of the st
32.
by benkuykendall 10y ago
Presumably a "species" should be an equivalence class, right? So the relation "A and B are of the same species" should be transitive, symmetric, and reflexive. Symmetry is easy (an organism shares 100% of its genome with
33.
by benkuykendall 10y ago
With the whitening requirement already depending on an algorithm with cryptographic guarantees (they use SHA3), this hardware only seems useful for generating keys. They suggest the following algorithm to generate N bytes: > The Inifite
34.
by benkuykendall 10y ago
If you go on to read the later parts, the author explains how physics limits random access to N bits to O(sqrt(N)) even without a memory hierarchy. This has practical implications when comparing sequential access in an array to random acces
35.
by benkuykendall 10y ago
What are you quoting from? I can not find that text in the linked article (as of Wed Aug 17 15:44:38 EDT 2016).
36.
by benkuykendall 10y ago
If we just needed these quantities as the inputs to an equation, sure, we should express them as 1E12 meters or (whatever x 3.6E6) Joules. But it turns out units are not only used for computing, but for communication. I am familiar with the
37.
by benkuykendall 10y ago
I'm having trouble understanding this statement and its motivation. Under what definition of "interesting" can any "unreasonably" long theorem statement be of interest to humans, and what makes you this class of the
38.
by benkuykendall 10y ago
I fail to see what is unscientific about stating conditional probabilities. Astrology is unscientific because the orientation of the heavens is for the most part independent of the observables of a person's life. But the inputs to Berk
39.
by benkuykendall 10y ago
Ok, let's use that 1E-8 fatalities per vehicle miles driven. If you commute 50 miles a day 250 days a year for 50 years, we get a total of 1E-8 x 50 x 250 x 50 = 0.006 fatalities, or a 0.6% probability of death.
40.
by benkuykendall 10y ago
Where did you get the 80 million active drivers number?
41.
by benkuykendall 10y ago
Why is "number of unique species" an interesting metric? If island A had three species of deer and island B had one species of deer and one species of wolf, island A would win under this measure, though B might seem more diverse.
42.
by benkuykendall 10y ago
"Never abbreviate a variable" is a very strong statement, surely inspiring religious wars. And maybe there are edge cases: i as a loop counter, id for an integer primary key, whatever. But this example is something else entirely;
43.
by benkuykendall 10y ago
> To put that in perspective, 700 trillion pixels is 70 times more than there are estimated galaxies in the universe according to Google, or just seven Zimbabwean 100 trillion dollar notes. ... How about this instead: a 700-trillion pixe
44.
by benkuykendall 10y ago
Is "PostEverything" their op-ed section? I guess in that case it's not too egregious. But for a news article, it seems much too quick to accept the occult without giving any specific evidence. > As I see it, the evidence f
45.
by benkuykendall 10y ago
The full title (for me at least) reads "As a psychiatrist, I diagnose mental illness. Also, I help spot demonic possession." The HN title reads "As a psychiatrist, I diagnose mental illness. And sometimes, demonic possession.
46.
by benkuykendall 10y ago
I agree diagnosing demonic possession would be unscientific. However, the role and attitude of the author seems ultimately helpful to his patients. If he can screen the suffers of diagnosable and treatable mental illnesses from the hard to
47.
by benkuykendall 10y ago
Huh, the AST looks pretty human readable. Anyone have tips for writing WebAssembly without using asm.js? Even a pointer to decent documentation would be great.
48.
by benkuykendall 10y ago
>> if you uniformly randomly choose a real number There is no uniform probability distribution over all real numbers.
49.
by benkuykendall 10y ago
That's not an inherent problem with GNU/Linux. Shows up fine for me because I have "ttf-ancient-scripts" ( https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/ttf-ancient-fonts/ ) installed.
50.
by benkuykendall 10y ago
The installation instructions tell me to curl a script straight into bash. Isn't this rather dangerous?
51.
by benkuykendall 10y ago
I agree that a few misclassifications is not a huge problem, but it suggests a bigger methodological flaw. Looking at your source code, it seems your definition of engineer is grepl("engineer", tolower(job_title)) | grepl(&quo
52.
by benkuykendall 10y ago
There are plenty of engineering jobs in the "non-engineering" graph. ("Fullstack Javascript Ninja" 3% 50K) ("Avionic Software Lead" 6.25% 120k) ("Software [Developer]" 3.5% 32.5k) This seem
53.
by benkuykendall 10y ago
Looks good in eww! http://i.imgur.com/5mLJdXb.jpg
54.
by benkuykendall 10y ago
Not a whole lot of content in the article... we all know GPUs are good for many data processing or machine learning tasks. Clearly gaming was the impetus to develop high performance GPUs initially, but I wonder if it still holds true that g
55.
by benkuykendall 10y ago
> Tesla’s President of Global Sales and Service Jon McNeil noted that the automaker has been working through performance testing and that CEO Elon Musk has been personally testing Model X’s as they come off the assembly line. Isn't
56.
by benkuykendall 10y ago
A psuedorandom generator G(x) can expand n random bits to n+1 psuedorandom bits that still "look random" to any efficient program that sees them. The existence of such a G that is efficiently computable is hard to prove (at least
57.
by benkuykendall 11y ago
Yeah, we have some public key schemes that are conjectured to be resistant to quantum attacks. This one in particular is fun because of the connection to machine learning. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_with_er
58.
by benkuykendall 11y ago
Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10586661
59.
by benkuykendall 11y ago
That's really cool! Here's a similar study that showed pigeons could "learn" the solution to the Monty Hall problem http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/com/124/1/1 The whole point of t
60.
by benkuykendall 11y ago
This write-up doesn't explain how to program the device, but this page does http://docs.primotoys.com/docs/cubetto-manual.html#introduct... Basically, you program a sequence of commands FORWARD, LEFT, RIGHT. T

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