ewjordan

62 ms·

181.
by ewjordan 10y ago
Come on now - thought experiments about the sex of children always ignore the real world complications that make them different from a coin flip (stopping conditions, genetic predisposition, environmental effects, etc.). And after making th
182.
by ewjordan 10y ago
"Assume you're a man and you have a sister." You just put your finger on the scale. All you can assume is that you're a man, not that you have a sister.
183.
by ewjordan 10y ago
Brilliant - this is perhaps one of the clearest explanations of the disagreement between each of these interpretations I've seen, and it makes crystal clear why we can't hope to observe any differences: the questions are all funda
184.
by ewjordan 10y ago
If memory serves, as far as classical quantum mechanics goes, Bohm's interpretation is 100% mathematically equivalent to the standard interpretation, making it observationally impossible to distinguish the two (much like many worlds vs
185.
by ewjordan 10y ago
That's not fair - plenty of people have defined "observer" in plenty of different ways (including defining it away, like decoherence supporters would prefer), it's just that there's no consensus because it's mo
186.
by ewjordan 10y ago
You're 100% correct - this is merely a direct presentation of the weirdness that results if you choose to interpret this experiment in the language of pilot wave theory. The physical results are the same as you would predict using norm
187.
by ewjordan 10y ago
"Read the docs" is not an excuse for incomprehensible source code. If links to documentation are not in the code, they might as well be nonexistent. In this case, I've never read the sources, so I have no idea if the complain
188.
by ewjordan 10y ago
It was prototype code, OP said that it was unmaintainable, and complained about, among other things, the "web-boys" adding unit tests - I'm not a 100% coverage zealot or anything, but adding some tests is not exactly hipster
189.
by ewjordan 10y ago
Money is the loudest voice, every time. And nobody has lost a single dollar because OS or database research is lacking. Even a major revolution in database tech would maybe reduce costs, downtime, or latency by 10% or so, max. Since that so
190.
by ewjordan 10y ago
An overaggressive pattern recognizer coupled with an overaggressive double-checker (something that pattern matches for incorrect results) is still a stronger system than the overaggressive pattern matcher alone. And depending on the shape o
191.
by ewjordan 11y ago
Even now, deep learning is basically 1980s-era backdrop with a few tweaks and better hardware - it turns out that despite decades of backlash against it, plain old backdrop pretty much is the shit, as long as you have a lot of compute pow
192.
Debunking Myths about Gender And Mathematics Performance(ams.org)
2 points by ewjordan 15y ago|0 comments
193.
by ewjordan 16y ago
IMO this is a ridiculous solution to the problem - rather than creating a market that's set up in a way so that high frequency traders can't get an edge (for instance, creating a market structured so that money/speed/location/regulatory sta
194.
by ewjordan 16y ago
What I find really interesting is that despite the fact that nothing in this story indicates that things have gotten in any way worse for people - to the contrary, it appears that at every step except the last, people are perfectly happy wi
195.
by ewjordan 16y ago
I've already made this comment elsewhere on this thread, but just for completeness sake... The problem with reading off a 30x variation (or even >10x) from Norvig's results is that it discounts the possibility that the same person might
196.
by ewjordan 16y ago
Article talks a lot about science, and then provides no actual studies that refute the original claim. That's not how science works. Devise a hypothesis. Develop a test to confirm or deny. Run test. To the contrary, a very important part
197.
by ewjordan 16y ago
Take any non-trivial debugging task (i.e. something that slipped through the net for several releases in a live system, not a simple bug in fresh code) and set me on it 100 times, and you'll almost definitely see at least 10x variation in h
198.
by ewjordan 16y ago
It's simply the way Bayesian statistics work: if the prior probability of something happening is very low, then for me to flip from thinking "didn't happen" to "did" it will take some new information that is very powerful. If you think that
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by ewjordan 16y ago
You're not bursting any bubble, you're just parading your cynicism and knowledge of a specialized field before a technical audience. In this case, I'd have to say that it's probably well deserved cynicism, though. An extremely effective
200.
by ewjordan 16y ago
You've summed up the technical bit of this perfectly, nothing to add there. Would be a very interesting bit of research, but the speculation really drives me mad, as it's so out there and without evidence to back it up that it's not even
201.
by ewjordan 16y ago
Imagine we can put a number on quality of life. If the poor person starts out at say 1 and is at 10 after 10 years (as has happened in many developing countries). Does it matter that the rich person also is 10 times better off or even 100
202.
by ewjordan 16y ago
The summary he gives at the beginning of this paper is actually pretty good, too, if you want a really condensed version: My core thesis, which I call the ―law of accelerating returns,‖ is that fundamental measures of information technolog
203.
by ewjordan 16y ago
One advantage of Python is that indentation etc. are required. This is such baloney. I've written hundreds of thousands of lines of code in Algol-esque languages, and just about every last line (by which I mean > 99.9%, with possibly
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by ewjordan 16y ago
I guess that begs the question, what should you put up when your business is stealth! You should be working on your product instead of futzing around with a placeholder web site that you don't actually intend anyone to see. If you actuall
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by ewjordan 16y ago
I think the way I'd put it would be that if I could be in any sort of legal trouble (or if there's any insinuation from an officer of the law that I could be in any sort of legal trouble) if I just got up and left, I'd damned well better
206.
by ewjordan 16y ago
Love Grant's demos, and anyone interested should check out some of his other ones, too: http://sites.google.com/site/kotsoft2/physicsdemos One request: if possible, please label links that go directly to Java applets. For a lot of us, op
207.
by ewjordan 16y ago
Interesting, good to know. How do UK speakers deal with non-named entities? For example: My family is/are going out to the movie. The class was/were getting restless. These are common gotchas on the SAT in the US; one of their favorite tric
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by ewjordan 16y ago
A good start is the LW Decision Theory sequence: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Decision_theory_%28sequence%2...
209.
by ewjordan 16y ago
Did they link to the wrong version? It certainly looks like it. Maybe if Eliezer sees this he can post a link to the actual finished copy? FWIW, though, whether finished or not there's a lot of really interesting stuff in there, definite
210.
by ewjordan 16y ago
He didn't wait terribly long: he filed in Dec 2009, and IIRC the ConnectU settlement was in early 2009. Between finding a lawyer, tracking down details and all that, I don't think that's a very long time between the action and a lawsuit re

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