fdej

16 ms·

121.
by fdej 10y ago
Yes. Language acquisition follows a standard sequence with specific milestones universal to all languages. For example, the period around 6-12 months is critical for phonetic learning. Before 6 months, infants are able to discriminate betwe
122.
by fdej 10y ago
No deliberate puns required. As a computer algebraist, it bothers me that "Taylor shift" is un-Googleable.
123.
by fdej 10y ago
I think serial PL designer Wouter van Oortmerssen started creating languages in his teens...
124.
by fdej 10y ago
By the time we actually let people do that, we will have flying cars to commute with anyway.
125.
by fdej 10y ago
Yep. Penrose's argument goes something like this (oversimplified): 1) Turing machines can't solve the halting problem. 2) Humans can solve the halting problem. 3) Therefore, humans can't be Turing machines. There are two prob
126.
by fdej 10y ago
It's an interesting question, but many of the changes that occur with old age could simply be side effects of optimizing for performance before and during reproductive age and need not be evolutionarily advantageous per se.
127.
by fdej 10y ago
This is not an accurate summary of what the study actually found. The article proposes a high-level explanation for how one aspect of learning changes with age. The actual cause of this high-level change could be lower-level age-induced d
128.
by fdej 10y ago
The brain has dedicated subsystems for different aspects of spatial and visual understanding. Certain groups of cells (place cells, grid cells) are known to be involved specifically in the ability to track one's own location and moveme
129.
by fdej 10y ago
Yes, I was of course nitpicking. The only reason I did so is that others in this thread already seemed to be commenting based on that interpretation of your post, and in the followup comments you all seemed to be talking past each other. I
130.
by fdej 10y ago
Pre-agricultural societies certainly had a clear division of labor between the genders, but could still have had a high degree of equality in the sense that both women and men had roughly equal power in the communal decision-making.
131.
by fdej 10y ago
You claimed that "most ancient societies were blatantly misogynistic". I don't think the current evidence suggests this, unless by "ancient societies" you meant something like "ancient civilizations". I wo
132.
by fdej 10y ago
> However, the numerical value of K is notoriously difficult to calculate to high precision, so computation of more digits get increasingly slower. It can be calculated to n digits in O~(n^2) time, which isn't really that bad. Somet
133.
by fdej 10y ago
The submitted paper is well-written and appears to be correct, but it is far too short. No reference is made to previous attempts to study Euler's conjecture or similar conjectures (there are surely a dozen other papers that ought to b
134.
by fdej 10y ago
On the other hand, 1/3 is still not the (exact) solution to 3*x=1...
135.
by fdej 10y ago
I've been reading another textbook on the same topic recently, and find it endlessly fascinating. I can grok quantum mechanics intuitively on some level, because it's governed by simple mathematical laws, even if those laws are qu
136.
by fdej 10y ago
The core of what makes C elegant is that basically everything that looks atomic is atomic, in the sense of taking O(1) space and memory (at least until C99 introduced its abominable variable-length arrays, and perhaps some other features I&
137.
by fdej 10y ago
Quick: how would you implement for (i = n; i >= 0; i -= k) with unsigned integers? I just use a signed pointer-size type for all sizes and counters, and stay happy...
138.
by fdej 10y ago
I'd like to see a single-player bot that can do human-level speedruns and/or beat stuff like https://www.twitch.tv/blooditekrypto/v/30795033 Baby steps. Beating other bots in deathmatch is a good start.
139.
by fdej 10y ago
It would be useful if it had a tool to convert MIDI files to source code (ideally with some sane automatic structuring). I've sequenced some 15 megabytes of MIDI files, and would love to have them in a form suited for version control.
140.
by fdej 10y ago
Moreover, TeX has no serious competition (at least in the niche of typesetting mathematical documents). There are plenty of good text editors and IDEs to go around.
141.
by fdej 11y ago
MathJax works reasonably well, but I can almost read the TeX source out loud faster than the browser renders it (together with PDF.js, this has been my go-to counterexample whenever someone claims that JavaScript is performant). With formul
142.
by fdej 11y ago
Clearly the next goal for AI is a program that can teach Go better than human teachers.
143.
by fdej 11y ago
No need to speculate. Selective breeding for intelligence is how we got herding dogs (Border Collies, German Shepherds, etc.).
144.
by fdej 11y ago
Off-topic: we (the human species) have built an AI that can master the game of Go, but we don't yet have the intelligence to publish charts correctly on the web. That blur of a JPG is half a megabyte!
145.
by fdej 11y ago
I would take one study with a grain of salt too. Even if the conclusions are correct in the setting of the study (and since most research findings are false, they probably aren't), it doesn't mean that you can extrapolate to every
146.
by fdej 11y ago
The paper: https://dx.doi.org/10.1002/smj.2192 The PR version: http://today.tamu.edu/2015/10/15/ceo-effect-on-firm-performa...
147.
by fdej 11y ago
Well, there was some recently published research that claimed to find that most of the effect attributed to CEO performance actually can be explained by random fluctuations. Make of that what you will.
148.
by fdej 11y ago
In my opinion, the first course on ODEs shouldn't be concerned with the transmission of information. That is where the wave equation comes in, in the first course on PDEs.
149.
by fdej 11y ago
I think GitHub should starting doing something this for issues and pull requests. Instead of the nondescript - Issue #2654: misplaced comma on page 3 of documentation - Issue #2653: open() should accept relative file path it should be - Que
150.
by fdej 11y ago
There is so much variation in the methods that have already been used to derive "nothing up my sleeve" numbers that you could easily come up with 2^10 equally plausible methods. The 24 chosen bits for "BADA55" might be o

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