btilly

49 ms·

721.
by btilly 2y ago
Roman numerals were designed for a world where calculations were done on an abacus, and numerical systems merely recorded inputs and outputs. In that world they are better than Arabic numerals, for the simple reason that your brain doesn&#x
722.
by btilly 2y ago
This is highly relevant to the recent discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42285128 . Google claims that their use of pretraining is a key requirement for being able to deliver a (slightly) better chip design.
723.
by btilly 2y ago
Look, either the follow-up article did pretraining or not. Jeff Dean is claiming that the importance of pretraining was mentioned 37 times and the follow-up didn't do it. That sounds easy to verify. Likewise the importance of spending
724.
by btilly 2y ago
And do you believe that that is what's happening in this case? If you have personal experience with Jeff Dean et al that you're willing to share, I'd be interested in hearing about it. From where I'm sitting it looks lik
725.
by btilly 2y ago
The reason that they do not look the same is that the order statistics are there presented for an exponential function, which has an unbounded upper range. When you do it on a uniform distribution with n variables, you get an n'th powe
726.
by btilly 2y ago
Playing around with a somewhat similar mechanic lead to me proposing https://projecteuler.net/problem=240 .
727.
by btilly 2y ago
Your second point is questionable at best. Making money hard to trace most directly hurts countries like the USA that are used to using the financial system to enforce their will. For example virtually every crime worth doing turns into mon
728.
by btilly 2y ago
So just run it inside of a Docker instance.
729.
by btilly 2y ago
Elon Musk was just appointed by Donald Trump as being in charge of firing half of the government. He won't likely do that. But any regulator who gets in his way? Yeah, not many will volunteer for "the firing line."
730.
by btilly 2y ago
As an ex-academic, I have to heartily endorse this perspective. And it was the recognition of the echo chamber + necessary sucking up to "famous" people that caused me to leave academia. However I have to say that Sabine Hossenfel
731.
by btilly 2y ago
I think that this is a general trend. Various fields tend to get into groupthink, and it is hard for people who buck the trend to pursue the usual academic path to research. But usually the herd has gone down a wrong turn, and it is up to a
732.
by btilly 2y ago
Back in 2011 I was working on a project that involved Riak. The difficulty and slowness for doing stuff corresponding to basic SQL operations was certainly a giant strike against it, and helped sink that project before it was released.
733.
by btilly 2y ago
Yes, there are some deviations. But minor adjustments to the Standard Model handles those. And don't really point in the direction of a better theory. More relevantly to the previous question, I'm not aware of any of those which a
734.
by btilly 2y ago
Yes. The Standard Model has completely explained all experiments involving them for around 50 years now. In fact the outstanding success of the Standard Model has posed its own problems - the lack of deviations from it makes it hard for exp
735.
by btilly 2y ago
What investments do you think were better? He's had far more income from other investments. But he turned $25 into $2000 in 3 years. That's around 331% profit per year, compounding annually. Given that he likes to invest in relati
736.
by btilly 2y ago
Ah. Passive income. It can indeed work out for you, but it is the fact that it can work out that makes it so tempting for scammers. Warren Buffett claims that the best business that he was ever in was installing pinball machines in barber s
737.
by btilly 2y ago
I must have missed that article. Can you find it? Unless you can come up with a specific reference, it seems unlikely that this would explain the large memory efficiency difference. By contrast it is simple and straightforward to understand
738.
by btilly 2y ago
Unless you can be concrete and specific about some of those reasons, you're just replacing handwaving with more vigorous handwaving. What is it specifically about JavaScript's implementation of data isolation that, in your mind, h
739.
by btilly 2y ago
Your claim makes zero sense to me. Particularly when I've personally seen similar behavior out of other languages, like Java. As I said in another comment, the most likely cause is that temporary garbage is not collected immediately in
740.
by btilly 2y ago
That's because you're churning temporary memory. JS can't free it until garbage collection runs. Rust is able to do a lifetime analysis, and knows it can free it immediately. The same will happen on any function where you&#x2
741.
by btilly 2y ago
https://youtu.be/W1ZZ-Yni8Fg?si=493ozTdkEsXJnPpB does a good job of explaining it.
742.
by btilly 2y ago
Exactly the point. We can compile any piece of software that we want into hardware, but after that it is easier to change in software. Given the variety of unexpected ways in which hardware is used, in practice we went up moving some of wha
743.
by btilly 2y ago
Exactly. And the relationship seems to be that if your income goes up 1%, your available wealth at a point in crisis goes up 2.8%. However your willingness to spend at the moment of crisis is dictated by your problem and available wealth. A
744.
by btilly 2y ago
This strategy minimizes the impact by making one core less necessary. But it does not eliminate it.
745.
by btilly 2y ago
You need CPU time to evaluate the priority of the event. This can't happen until after you've interrupted whatever process is currently on the CPU. And so the highest possible priority an event can happen is limited by how short a
746.
by btilly 2y ago
I'm skeptical of claims that this waste doesn't translate into the higher level metrics. The claim is that the size of the pot of money to be split is determined by the willingness of consumers to pay. Which is determined by the
747.
by btilly 2y ago
How would you measure results? Go to a doctor, get a prognosis, get a treatment then a new prognosis? The incentive to inflate results is obvious. How else would you measure it? Survival rates? Doctors now have a strong incentive to avoid t
748.
by btilly 2y ago
That isn't just recent automotive seats. I've been having that problem for decades. Particularly bad offenders are Budget rental trucks and airline seats. But it is getting worse. The more ergonomic they try to make the seat, the
749.
by btilly 2y ago
I've never seen a nurse not insist on the right position. However I've always wondered how much of a difference my long torso makes when my blood pressure is measured. I'm 6'3", and it's mostly torso. The resul
750.
by btilly 2y ago
Thank you for providing a reference. Sight unseen, I'm inclined to think that SpaceX is more likely right here. In particular part of the higher figure is a lower launch cadence. But SpaceX is building their technology around very rapi

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