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481.
by ced 15y ago
Honest question: how are phones for the poor such a huge win?
482.
by ced 15y ago
In as much as you're trying to predict which startup will succeed, the data from the genome project is perfectly acceptable. The problem comes when you decide "I will do X because that's what successful startups do." If you don't understand
483.
by ced 15y ago
I don't mean to be too harsh on a well-intended project, but the startup genome reminds me of Feynman's Cargo Cult Science : In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials,
484.
by ced 15y ago
Ah, I did not know that the systems of Tycho and Copernic were the same. I think that when most scientists (and bravura above) invoke Occam's razor, it's to pick one of two non-equivalent theories. For instance, the Ptolemaic system made
485.
by ced 15y ago
I agree with the thrust of your post, but not with: Occams Razor is not a statement about the world. It is a tool for thinking. In a world where everything is best fitted by a fifth-order polynomial, scientists who encounter a seemingly l
486.
by ced 15y ago
What's the algorithm? Edit: I'm puzzled by the downvotes to my honest question. "machine learning" is not an algorithm, it's a field!
487.
by ced 15y ago
The last block that will generate coins will be block #6,929,999. This should be generated around year 2140. Isn't that entirely dependent on the rate of technical progress? Furthermore, what happens when the crypto algorithms are broken?
488.
by ced 16y ago
Hey, I was curious about your claims, so I ran both versions on my computer, and SBCL came out 10X faster. For one million calls (count=1000000) and n fixed to 100000, SBCL took 0.6 seconds versus 8.6 seconds. One thing I did, though, was t
489.
by ced 16y ago
That would be awesome. Right now, with Scipy arrays, you get pretty good performance if you use matrix operations and built-in functions. That can be unnatural, besides it would be more efficient to do a plain for loop in an ideal world. Is
490.
by ced 16y ago
(no automagic memory management, no garbage collection, no functional programming). That's a big drawback. Common Lisp (SBCL) is very fast already, and one can avoid the GC overhead in a number of interesting situations (though not all).
491.
by ced 16y ago
I also do scientific computing, with scipy. The weave module allows me to write C code inline directly, it's great for optimizing away the bottlenecks. On the minus side, documentation is scarce, the error messages are worthy of template C+
492.
by ced 16y ago
The post above is deleted because I wasn't satisfied with it (the book sounds pretty great and I didn't feel like my comment had that much relevance). I'll bring it back since it got a reply: The title is misleading; the book seems to be
493.
by ced 16y ago
"diff" between graphics files is neither readable nor meaningful, and where automatic merges are impossible anyway. Both problems seem "hard but solvable" to me. Isn't there software doing that already?
494.
by ced 16y ago
You clearly know more than I do about these things, but: 0 < sqrt(2)^a <= a for all a in 0..2) is not true. It fails for a=1. If you can make it right, could you explain the reasoning that gets you there? I never know how to tackl
495.
by ced 16y ago
Can you sit against a wall? How long should one persevere before giving up if nothing interesting happens?
496.
by ced 16y ago
No problem! In fairness, this "pick a random chemical component" idea was at least moderately retarded, and most worthy of criticism.
497.
by ced 16y ago
You make a good point, though I wish you hadn't called mine retarded. we have had better ways of judging danger since the dark ages. That's true. And if you trust scientists and the FDA to do their jobs, you're all set. But what if you do
498.
by ced 16y ago
The other part is the assumption that "natural" molcules are inherently better. I wouldn't say "inherently better", but... Through evolution, we've adapted to molecules present in the environment, and because other organisms have similar
499.
by ced 16y ago
Actually, it is very much a chemical. All food is chemicals. That's literally true, but not the intended meaning. Chemical has become a synonym for "man-made". It's a useful distinction. If you were forced to choose between eating 100g of
500.
by ced 16y ago
Here's the official page for Canada, with the exact conditions and job requirements. http://www.consular.canada.usembassy.gov/nafta.asp It's obtained at the port of entry, so if you're denied, you'll miss your flight. But it seems unprobl
501.
by ced 16y ago
I think one of the key parts of parenting for our generation will be to equipt our children with [...] the willpower to handle and enjoy games like WoW properly. How do you do that?
502.
by ced 16y ago
(Also I can rant about how the word "immutable" gets misinterpreted and cargo-culted but that would be a lengthier post.) Please do.
503.
by ced 16y ago
Like jerf said, just give them a name and be done with it. Why would you want anonymous, mutually recursive functions? These things are sometimes useful in writing compilers though, but then the transformations are more elaborate.
504.
by ced 16y ago
How does that make a difference for boot time and non-compiz desktop use? Isn't the screen image rendered by the CPU, and blitted to the video memory?
505.
by ced 16y ago
I'm a fan of Proebsting's Law: Proebsting's Law: Compiler Advances Double Computing Power Every 18 Years I claim the following simple experiment supports this depressing claim. Run your favorite set of benchmarks with your favorite state-o
506.
by ced 16y ago
the extra time taken to draw a 9 vs a 7 was worth it Is it??? Adding one more exponent is huge, while 7->9 feels much smaller. It's all intuition, though. Does anyone know how to tackle such a question? Limited empirical results say:
507.
by ced 16y ago
Wow, that's quite amazing: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25VGdNU3nrU I don't know to what extent some of the stuff is preprogrammed (presumably the loop lengths are), but it really seems like all the sounds were made during this one reco
508.
by ced 16y ago
It's only second among the (up-and-coming) languages he chose. Scheme takes only 0.05% of the overall job market. Witness: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=java%2C+C%2C+Python%2C+sch...
509.
by ced 16y ago
Oh, that's a clever solution. Thanks.
510.
by ced 16y ago
But isn't that true if the list has one element? Then A->A, thus prev==next, but the list still isn't empty. And if the head lives outside of the list proper, then you would need special-case code to handle deletion of the first element

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