buo

7 ms·

61.
by buo 13y ago
But I never said it was indistinguishable. What I'm saying is that the definition in the first sentence of the paper is wrong or, at least, incomplete.
62.
by buo 13y ago
I think you missed my point, which is this: the first sentence in the paper's abstract is wrong.
63.
by buo 13y ago
I don't think you're correct. A discrete distribution can be defined for any number of values. Linux, which is the subject of the paper, uses a discrete distribution too.
64.
by buo 13y ago
I know that, but that is what the first sentence in the paper's abstract is claiming. As I said, I think it's wrong.
65.
by buo 13y ago
From the abstract: "A pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) is a deterministic algorithm that produces numbers whose distribution is indistinguishable from uniform." I think this is incorrect, since it would imply that a program t
66.
by buo 13y ago
I didn't compare smartphone addiction to cocaine addiction, which wrecks and ends lives. I do think, however, that something can be incredibly useful and worthwhile and still have some negative effects. Everything in moderation and all
67.
by buo 13y ago
> what event could trigger a reversal to this behavior? People realising that addiction to stimulus results, over the years, in lower economic power and less overall happiness? I don't know if today's phone-addicted teens will
68.
by buo 13y ago
> eval(x) Sort of like the number omega, which contains in each digits proofs to every theorem, but is not computable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin's_constant
69.
by buo 13y ago
I know I'm in the minority here, but my offspring will only have smartphones when they are old enough to buy them and pay for their plans themselves.
70.
by buo 13y ago
Here, actually: http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/justpe... Search the document for "contraception".
71.
by buo 13y ago
You may be interested in a recent comment on this subject by a professional wildlife photographer: http://www.sansmirror.com/newsviews/on-safari-four-years-lat...
72.
by buo 13y ago
In Julia: julia> @time sum(1:1000000000) elapsed time: 1.4527e-5 seconds (88 bytes allocated) 500000000500000000 @time is a macro that prints the code's execution time and memory usage. This is inside a VM running L
73.
by buo 13y ago
Here's part of the saga of the blogger who got into a similar situation when he explained that 0.999... is equal to 1: http://polymathematics.typepad.com/polymath/2006/06/no_im_so...
74.
Hopfield Networks in Julia(johnmyleswhite.com)
5 points by buo 13y ago|0 comments
75.
by buo 13y ago
Sorry -- I didn't mean to be unclear about that. The point I wanted to make is that, while he violated a UN embargo, it was just a chess match, and nevertheless he was relentlessly persecuted and had to seek asylum.
76.
by buo 13y ago
An American that had to seek asylum from the US government was Bobby Fischer, one of the best chess players in history. His offense: playing a chess match against Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia (he also owed taxes). http://en.wikipe
77.
by buo 13y ago
I haven't seen mentioned here that Intel is one of the companies mentioned. I find this particularly worrying: if the hardware itself is compromised, it's game over.
78.
by buo 13y ago
I understand a frame of reference doesn't have to be physical. However, if you're in an apparently empty and dark universe, and you're interested in knowing whether you're accelerating or not, postulating a frame of reference is not going t
79.
by buo 13y ago
Yes, but when you drop something, you're creating a reference frame, aren't you?
80.
by buo 13y ago
Without a reference frame, what experiment can you perform that would tell you that you're accelerating?
81.
by buo 13y ago
About the cool literary feat: I'm wondering if there are languages other than English in which it'd be possible to write something like this. I speak Spanish and French and I'm sure it's impossible in both -- they just don't have enough sho
82.
The Catacombo Sound System(catacombosoundsystem.com)
2 points by buo 13y ago|0 comments
83.
Canada and science: NRC will now only do science that promotes “economic gain”(slate.com)
72 points by buo 13y ago|71 comments
84.
by buo 13y ago
I have to say, I'd rather have a 20-foot crocodile in my back yard, than a 1-foot spider.
85.
by buo 13y ago
At least we still have sane threading here at HN.
86.
by buo 13y ago
Indenting and maybe vertical lines to help the reader figure out the threading would be an improvement. However, I don't think this is good enough in a long email chain. The way traditional email readers solve this is, of course, is with tw
87.
by buo 13y ago
What bothers me most about gmail is the flat conversations, where you can't see that a message was a reply to an email in the middle of a thread. It seems I'm almost alone thinking this way, though -- it's not a complaint I often hear from
88.
The History of the Modern Graphics Processor(techspot.com)
5 points by buo 13y ago|0 comments
89.
by buo 14y ago
> The idea that they'll "still work" in non-optimized browsers doesn't seem too convincing The BananaBread demo ran very smoothly at fullscreen, 1920x1200, on Firefox 19. I was very impressed. I'm running on old hardware: a 3GHz Core2 D
90.
by buo 14y ago
You can also plot with Gaston, which is a frontend for gnuplot. https://github.com/mbaz/Gaston.jl Docs: https://bitbucket.org/mbaz/gaston/downloads/gastondoc-0.5.5....

More ›