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391.
by ced 14y ago
you don't have to wonder which threads ran when How does that work? Does it really record every single assignment to every variable in every thread? Wouldn't that potentially slow everything down sufficiently that some classes of multithr
392.
by ced 14y ago
Bayes' theorem and Bayes' rule are essentially the same equation. Most people will use the two interchangeably. Bayesianism is a perspective on how to do modelling under uncertainty. It doesn't reduce to "use Bayes' theorem", even though al
393.
by ced 14y ago
The Goal of Bayesian Inference: Quantify and manipulate your degrees of beliefs. In other words, Bayesian inference is the Analysis of Beliefs. Bayesian inference is no more about beliefs than logic is (or any scientific inference, really
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by ced 14y ago
Raymond Chen from Microsoft on maintaining backward compatibility from Windows 95 to Windows XP: Look at the scenario from the customer's standpoint. You bought programs X, Y and Z. You then upgraded to Windows XP. Your computer now crashe
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by ced 14y ago
Are there any situations where you want to use a frequentist procedure? I've concluded that given a perfect, infinite-power MCMC simulator, I would always do a Gelman-style Bayesian analysis (with model falsification and improvement), but i
396.
by ced 14y ago
Cool, I didn't know that could be done. Can it work for global and local variables as well?
397.
by ced 14y ago
Macros extend the power of the language way beyond its core primitives. For instance, I wrote a macro, TEMPORARY-ASSIGN. I use it like this: (TEMPORARY-ASSIGN ((traversing obj) true) ... do stuff ...) In Python, the equivalent c
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by ced 14y ago
Good point. Evolution is a complex balance.
399.
by ced 14y ago
Evolution is often all-or-nothing --- no one produces "half a child". This is especially true of men, if you believe the 40-80 figure [1]: 40% of men have descendants vs 80% for women. We are the descendants of A) successful people [2] and
400.
by ced 14y ago
I was curious about that figure - here's the breakdown: Percent of adults with hearing trouble: 16.2% Percent of adults with vision trouble: 9.4% Percent of adults unable (or very difficult) to walk a quarter mile: 7.3% Pe
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by ced 14y ago
Terry Tao has a great set of lecture notes available online, too. http://www.math.ucla.edu/~tao/resource/general/115a.3.02f/
402.
by ced 14y ago
I'm confused by your restatement, because it does not restate what I said. Indeed! I hadn't quite made out what you were trying to say in that post - my statement was not relevant.
403.
by ced 14y ago
I agree with your post, though I am curious to know if there is any use for "this function is likely to terminate" inside static analysis. How this guarantee is possible, despite the halting problem, is because he designs an abstract repre
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by ced 14y ago
Yeah, these problems are hard (and fun!) to think about. But I still don't understand how you can go from: There has to be an infinite number of functions we cannot write programs for! which is, of course, true, to So we have managed to
405.
by ced 14y ago
Nice post. the number of programs we can write is countable; the number of functions we can write over interesting domains (like natural numbers or integers) is not countable You should edit and rewrite "the number of functions we can wri
406.
by ced 14y ago
Whereto? I appreciate your contributions to HN.
407.
by ced 14y ago
What kind of company do you work for? Which "broker" do you recommend, if any?
408.
by ced 14y ago
What kind of maths/statistics are you using?
409.
by ced 14y ago
Wikipedia has an implementation of Fibonacci with DP, and another with memoization. It's a clearer explanation than the blog provides. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_programming#Fibonacci_...
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by ced 14y ago
The answer to "Why time appears to speed up with age" is to be found in the messy details of neurology, genetics and evolution, not in an aesthetically pleasing mathematical formula.
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by ced 14y ago
It's inspiring to note that Bill Press is 64 years old, and Freeman Dyson is 88! Here's a more technical explanation, gleaned from http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.2666 . Each prisoner dilemma round has four possible outcomes: CC, CD, DC and DD (
412.
by ced 14y ago
There is a lot of physics that suffers from "bad metaphysics" precisely because of its practitioners reinventing metaphysics, in the guise of "interpretations" of physics, when they are unaware of obvious problems that arise, which even a
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by ced 14y ago
How would they get caught stealing trade secrets through Skype? Whistleblowers? Have there been any instance of a transnational tort claim in tech? I really wonder how much espionage is going on. Does MS have a mole at Google, and vice vers
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by ced 14y ago
Where do you get an OR job? What would be the top OR employer?
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by ced 14y ago
The Haskell approach sounds pretty neat. How well does it work in practice? I thought that C++ introduced exceptions to get away from having to check every single return value, and to be able to handle the condition at the appropriate calle
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by ced 14y ago
Thank you, that cleared things up. Does Haskell allow you to assert that a function (like, say, the Sieves of Eratosthenes algorithm) does terminate, so that it may use that info to make additional simplifications?
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by ced 14y ago
Interesting. I am not that familiar with ML languages, but isn't the situation equivalent to division by 0 in arithmetic? Division by 0 is undefined, because assigning it to any natural number would yield a contradiction. Alternatively, one
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by ced 14y ago
It looks like a linear combination of shifted step functions/logistics. That's a complete set - it can represent any function to arbitrary accuracy. I agree that in practice you won't necessarily get better results, though.
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by ced 14y ago
Thanks for the detailed explanation. I was subconsciously thinking "Matrix multiplication is this weird operation, which happens to be isomorphic to function composition in the space of linear transformations." rather than "Function composi
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by ced 14y ago
Don't you have to basically prove associativity to show that matrix multiplication is a function composition?

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