davmre

20 ms·

151.
by davmre 11y ago
Good catch. Probably what the article meant to say is that the lack of independence means the points are not conditionally uniform. That is, although X and Y follow uniform distributions individually, the dependence between them means tha
152.
by davmre 11y ago
As others have pointed out, the distinction between randn() and rand() is crucial here - the former gives you points from a (spherically symmetric) normal distribution, the latter gives you uniform points from the unit cube. One of the adva
153.
by davmre 11y ago
The easiest way to generate random points on a (hyper)sphere, at least with respect to most sampling APIs, is to sample from an isotropic normal distribution of the appropriate dimension (for a three-dimensional sphere, just call randn() th
154.
by davmre 12y ago
It only works specifically with the Nexus 6 (not other Google phones), apparently for technical reasons involving network-switching capabilities. Possibly that's BS, but assuming it's legit I'd imagine they'll try to get
155.
If the EU wins against Google, it could change the search engine forever(vox.com)
1 points by davmre 12y ago|1 comments
156.
by davmre 12y ago
Microsoft's Infer.NET is essentially an automated system for variational (/expectation-propagation) inference. It implements primitives for common operations and distributions, and then uses the local structure of mean-field infer
157.
by davmre 12y ago
I'd wager most people don't understand CDS's even now.
158.
by davmre 12y ago
Since this is the Internet, of course this has been done, several times: http://www.math.canterbury.ac.nz/~r.vale/got_290814.pdf http://allendowney.blogspot.com/2015/03/bayesian-survival-an.
159.
by davmre 12y ago
Most interests are pretty simple keywords so it'd certainly be possible to do algorithmic matching on the backend. But the article doesn't actually say they'll use profiles to choose drivers. More likely they'll continue
160.
by davmre 12y ago
Most things are cheaper when you're not paying first-world labor costs.
161.
by davmre 12y ago
The marginal cost of living in the Bay Area vs Ann Arbor is maybe 40k/year, most of which is housing. It's reasonable to compare $80k in Ann Arbor to $120k in SF, but $250k is ridiculous.
162.
by davmre 12y ago
As birdmanjeremy posted below, you have to discount for risk. This year he got $225k, next year he may get nothing. In any case I think you're underestimating the value of benefits provided by large tech companies. Free food, top-end h
163.
by davmre 12y ago
It's large when you present it as a single-day payout. If you imagine it might have taken a year of work to discover and exploit these vulnerabilities, with no guarantee of success, then the money is actually relatively low compared to
164.
by davmre 12y ago
Lots of people just don't think of financial modeling as a particularly interesting or beautiful area of math (this is of course a matter of taste). You could believe that finance is socially useful, and yet prefer for selfish reasons
165.
by davmre 12y ago
If your laptop is used to connecting to "home01284", it will send out a probe "hey home01284, are you out there?". Anyone nearby who gets this packet can respond, "yes, I'm home01284, connect to me!" They
166.
by davmre 12y ago
That's not the definition the mainstream AI community has taken, for what I think are largely good reasons, but you could define intelligence that way if you wanted. It's only a renaming of the debate though - instead of calling t
167.
by davmre 12y ago
I don't pretend that an argument from authority resolves this debate, but the fact that people like Stuart Russell take these arguments seriously implies that there's a bit more substance there than you're acknowledging. To a
168.
by davmre 12y ago
I don't know the numbers for MIT specifically, but most top-tier (Ivy-equivalent) private colleges have very generous financial aid, and consequentially very low levels of student debt. It's when you go down to the second tier and
169.
by davmre 12y ago
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "straw man" here. The usual meaning is that to attack a straw man means to argue against a position that no one actually holds, but which is easier to attack than your opponent'
170.
by davmre 12y ago
A lot of respected AI researchers and practitioners are writing these "AIs are really stupid" articles to rebut superintelligence fearmongering in the popular press. That's a valuable service, and everything this article says
171.
by davmre 12y ago
There are some obvious fixes here, like subsidizing the first N gallons/person/month (where N is some amount sufficient for basic human needs) and then charging market rate for water use above that level. You could even use a soft
172.
by davmre 12y ago
The marginal benefit of grad school is obviously a very personal thing. It depends on a) how excited you are about your current position/opportunities in industry, and b) how excited you are about the independent research you'd pu
173.
by davmre 12y ago
Grad students are compensated in other ways: training, prestige, independence, etc. Almost everyone in a respectable CS PhD program could have gotten a $100k/yr tech job instead. The fact that they turned this down in favor of a $30k g
174.
by davmre 12y ago
I understand that the contestant gets to specify a "decompressor"; my point is that this is not information-theoretically relevant. The real decompressor in this challenge is the Linux/C runtime environment. The "decom
175.
by davmre 12y ago
The "custom algorithm" thing is a red herring. You'll need to use some method to come up with your custom algorithm, once you see the input file, and whatever method you choose is itself a compression procedure, targeted at
176.
by davmre 12y ago
Unfortunately you're confusing bits and bytes (I did the same thing too at first). Fitting a decompressor in five bits is a lot harder. :-)
177.
by davmre 12y ago
Yes, but you don't get to see the file until after you've sent in the $100. So in order for this to be a good bet, you'd need a method that can compress a random file with at least 2% ($100/5000) probability. That's
178.
by davmre 12y ago
This is definitely an argument against certain cookie-cutter approaches to programming ("learn Rails in 15 days!" etc.). Even leaving AI out of the picture, a skillset that's limited to a particular language or framework is g
179.
by davmre 12y ago
Godel Escher Bach has a chapter riffing on the acoustics version of this idea: http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/jvt002/BrainMind/Readings/P... . Though the discussion there is about recovering sound waves th
180.
by davmre 12y ago
Programmers will be literally the last profession to be replaced by AI. If computers ever exceed human programming capability, we're essentially at the singularity (recursive self-improvement) and have bigger things to worry about. O

More ›