ced

63 ms·

601.
by ced 16y ago
What is the most advanced compiler, across all high-level (not C/C++) languages? The GHC?
602.
by ced 16y ago
if I'm the best you can do, you clearly don't have good skills at identifying programmers. Aren't you underestimating yourself? Most businesses don't need Knuths. They need "smart & gets things done". By my reckoning, you're way ahead
603.
by ced 16y ago
Patrick, it sounds like you're performing "orthodox" statistics. That's likely to be good enough for this problem, but have you considered Bayesian statistics at all? Your conclusions could be very different.
604.
by ced 16y ago
I quit my Ph.D in astrophysics to spend a 3-year "sabbatical" in Asia (it's absurdly cheap to live there). I used that time to pursue research ideas in AI and compiler design. I just came back to Montreal, to look for contract work. I'm par
605.
by ced 16y ago
It's not fair to say that Lisp programs "modify their own instructions", certainly not in the sense that some assembly programs do. Lisp macros are better thought of as code generators , or as small compilers. They should never modify thei
606.
by ced 16y ago
I've got an American friend who once got the "American treatment" at a Chinese border. They told him it was specifically because of all the pains Chinese people have to go through when they go to the US.
607.
by ced 16y ago
Yeah, but where do permutations and combinations come in? I don't see it at all.
608.
by ced 16y ago
> Lisp has left the forefront of functional programming mostly to ML derived languages I'd be grateful if you could expand upon that statement. I'm a Lisper, and half the time I see one of these Haskell articles, I wonder if there reall
609.
by ced 16y ago
Well, of course, the richest people will all come from the high-risk high-reward pool. But the expected value of doing a startup could easily be lower than working in an investment bank. If one startup in five "succeeds" and the average r
610.
by ced 17y ago
I find that logical expressions are easier to parse. (OR (AND ...) (AND ...) ...) is cleaner (and shorter) than the corresponding one-liner in Python.
611.
by ced 17y ago
Isn't this incredibly simple to defeat? The phishing site can send your username to the real bank's website and retrieve the image.
612.
by ced 17y ago
Absolutely. I tried teaching Python to teenagers. It turns out that significant whitespace is a hurdle. I would use QBasic if I had to do it again.
613.
by ced 17y ago
If a pen is dropped on _a_ moon, will it Hey, the pen really could float away, no? The centrifugal force on a rotatating body is mv^2/2. If this is exactly equal to the gravitational force, the pen would "stay where it is". And if it rota
614.
by ced 17y ago
Hey, but couldn't the same argument be used to claim that tides shouldn't exist? The Earth orbits the Moon as well. That bothered me. So I checked Wikipedia: Thus, the tidal force depends not on the strength of the lunar gravitational fiel
615.
by ced 17y ago
The MIT seems like such a place to be for ambitious projects. Unfortunately I, like many others, attended a mediocre Canadian university because I didn't know any better. Questions for MIT alumni: 1. Is it still the mecca depicted in that k
616.
by ced 17y ago
Note that you'll also get blocked out if you type in: http://poorlytyped.blogspot.com/2010/01/haskell-ray-tracing-parallel.html from which one can conclude that the Chinese are being kept in the dark from Haskell's enlightenment. A
617.
by ced 17y ago
You should use probabilities, actually. And while step 4 is not a logical consequence, it may have substantial probability, per Bayes' theorem: P(C | A) = P(A | C) * P(C) / P(A)
618.
by ced 17y ago
Strings. Python allows you to manipulate an object's structure through the __dict__ field (as far as I can remember), and dir() also returns strings. They are ad hoc symbols.
619.
by ced 17y ago
A number of people are doing this already (technomads). I am, and yeah, loneliness is an issue. I always live with flatmates to alleviate it, but I still don't have anyone to speak with about science or technology. Thank god for the web...
620.
by ced 17y ago
Nah, that's not what's happening. The (time ...) special form is what prints the timing results, and it's squarely in the (big-test) function. All is right under the sun.
621.
by ced 17y ago
I've been reading Jaynes again this week, and he's just very, very convincing. And so I'm trying to read everything you wrote through these Bayesian glasses, but sadly, I'm not successful. Jaynes is rather critical of Fisher's hypothesis te
622.
by ced 17y ago
With this math, there is no use of 'prior probabilities' But the full hypothesis is "Given the data, are girls better than boys at this exam?" and clearly, the prior probability is relevant. Maybe in this case one might want to use a 50-5
623.
by ced 17y ago
First, thanks for the long answer. So, put all 20 + 18 scores in a pot, stir the pot, pull out 18 scores and average, average the remaining 20, take the difference in the averages, do this maybe 1 million times (thanking Moore's law) I ca
624.
by ced 17y ago
statistics is a rock solid part of mathematics, as solid as any part of pure mathematics The impression left by reading Jaynes (The Logic of Science) was that a huge part of conventional statistics was a hodge-podge of ad hoc methods. The
625.
by ced 17y ago
there has been a great deal of theoretical progress, particularly in areas such as probabilistic reasoning, machine learning Those are wide fields, are there any breakthroughs that really stand out in this decade?
626.
by ced 17y ago
There was a TED talk by an Indian neurologist who said that placebo works even if you don't believe in it .
627.
by ced 17y ago
Oy, he's writing an essay on some of the ideas in his book, NKS. Of course , he'll refer the interested reader to the relevant chapters. I thought it was well written; it delves deep on the "universe as a giant Turing Machine" perspective.
628.
by ced 17y ago
Right now, I'm in a Chinese net cafe, and 2 out of my 6 nearest neighbors are on Happy Farm. Net cafes in China get a lot of game playing compared to any other place I've been to (50-70% of computers in my quick sampling). and interesting
629.
by ced 17y ago
I've been living off my (grad school stipend!) savings for almost 2 years in Asia. I do AI research, independently. Here's the rent for one bedroom in a "decent student" shared flat: - Montreal: 300$; dorms 250$ - University town, Germany:
630.
by ced 17y ago
Kunming, China. One of the nicest places I've been to so far.

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