gjm11

107 ms·

931.
by gjm11 7y ago
Why do you say that hyperman1 "want[s] to make it taboo"? I don't see that at all. I think he[1] is just saying: the article says Feynman was sexist, but I haven't seen evidence of that and find it hard to believe. For w
932.
by gjm11 7y ago
The usage of the term "mental model" here seems really weird to me. Once upon a time, a "mental model" was, in particular, a model : some sort of mental representation of a thing, usually simpler and clearer than the
933.
by gjm11 7y ago
OK, let's stick with modern examples. We already had Warren Buffett. Some very rich tech people: Bill Gates, 3 children; Larry Ellison, 2 children; Jeff Bezos, 4 children; Mark Zuckerberg, 2 children. (I just picked some rich tech peop
934.
by gjm11 7y ago
Nope. (Sorry. I take it you would like them to be complete garbage.) There are two main ways in which a model can give bad results. 1. It can be a fundamentally bad model. E.g., Kelvin had a perfectly reasonable model of the long-term evo
935.
by gjm11 7y ago
People in any category "almost never achieve outlier levels of success"; that's what "outlier" means. If you mean that people with children achieve outlier levels of success much less often than people without chi
936.
by gjm11 7y ago
Yup. The hweird logical-fallacy use of "begging the question" is a mistranslation. It goes back to Aristotle, who talked about "τὸ ἐξ ἀρχῆς", meaning "asking for the first thing". That is: you're debating
937.
by gjm11 7y ago
There is a thing called "Quantum Bayesianism": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Bayesianism
938.
by gjm11 7y ago
Your meaning is presumably the opposite of what you say: that since the 1918 influenza was and is commonly called "the Spanish flu", it's unreasonable to complain at certain politicians calling the current pandemic something
939.
by gjm11 7y ago
It could! Given enough international cooperation, we could all adopt a lightly modified version of English that's more regular and easier to teach and learn. And then, over the coming years, it would absorb words from other languages w
940.
by gjm11 7y ago
Seems like a needlessly editorialized title. (The actual title at the far end of the link is "Comprehensive Python Cheatsheet".)
941.
by gjm11 7y ago
I don't know the answer to your question, but in addition to the mechanisms you mention there's at least one more: there's some evidence that fear in general, and fear of death in particular, tends to make people more support
942.
by gjm11 7y ago
Yup, but the computer isn't _learning_ it, it's already enforced by the fact that what the computer is learning is a time-independent Lagrangian. (I suppose it's learning a symmetry in the following sense: just _what_ is cons
943.
by gjm11 7y ago
Just as a datapoint: I have never written any code in APL, J, K, Q, etc., and I think & = min is perfectly defensible. If I had to switch regularly between K and (say) C or Python where & is bitwise (also perfectly defensible, of co
944.
by gjm11 7y ago
I can confirm that I also see this, both in my regular Firefox instance where I do everything and in an incognito Chrome window. Specifically, I get, in order from top to bottom, with only trivial differences between those two cases: A box
945.
by gjm11 7y ago
This seems ... not very accurate? My understanding of the history: Intel hired William Kahan (a professor at Stanford, already quite eminent, and familiar with FP on existing mainframes) to help get the FP design right, precisely because th
946.
by gjm11 7y ago
I don't know about this particular case, but I have some (weak, anecdotal) evidence that at least sometimes the high-level structure is harder to remember robustly than the details. I saw an amateur pianist sit down to play (a solo pia
947.
by gjm11 7y ago
Huh, so I did. Many apologies. (The OED's etymology for "car", quoted above, seems to disprove that too, but much less drastically: the two are closely related.)
948.
by gjm11 7y ago
In case anyone's wondering: no, of course the word "car" is not derived from the word "carnage". Here's what the OED says, for instance: Etymology: < Anglo-Norman and Old French (northern) carr, carre, Middl
949.
by gjm11 7y ago
It's not really "only a speedup thing" because the training process is different: as a CNN learns to (say) recognize dog-noses in the top left portion of the image, it's simultaneously learning to recognize dog-noses e
950.
by gjm11 7y ago
I don't think that means anything like "for people who have physically visited the Smithsonian" or "for people who pay us some sort of subscription"; if you use their website then you're a patron in the relevan
951.
by gjm11 7y ago
To make matters worse, it turns out that there are actually two different concepts commonly labelled by the word "prime", and in some highbrow contexts they are different -- so mathematicians actually define "prime" in a
952.
by gjm11 7y ago
The word "algebra" means a number of different things. It's the name of a whole field in mathematics, which covers objects like groups, rings, fields, and so forth. The sort of things defined, very handwavily, in terms of ope
953.
by gjm11 7y ago
The title doesn't seem to match the actual article content: it's clear that Betty Shannon was very smart and an important collaborator with Claude, but "mathematical genius" is very strong language and I'm not seein
954.
by gjm11 7y ago
Yup. 'Underlying our approach to this subject is our conviction that “computer science” is not a science and that its significance has little to do with computers.' -- from the preface to SICP. There's a similar quotation oft
955.
by gjm11 7y ago
If HN guidelines are considered to allow it, I suggest tweaking the title here to say "Internet Draft" rather than just "ID", which is unambiguous in the original context (i.e., a thing that actually is an Internet Dra
956.
by gjm11 7y ago
That term (or at least "jay driver") seems to have been in use before "jaywalker" or "jaywalking"!
957.
by gjm11 7y ago
The link here goes to a page that provides just the very beginning of the essay and a bit of context, along with a link to http://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2016/02/oxford-uehiro-p... where you can find the res
958.
by gjm11 7y ago
There's a little note saying that the list may not be complete. If you click that, they pop up an explanation, one of the bullet points in which says this: > We receive more details and activity than what appears here. For technical
959.
by gjm11 7y ago
I don't know what that "in economics" condition is there for. I expect there are plenty of economics professors doing very nicely in the stock market, but it tends to be mathematicians and physicists who found hedge funds. S
960.
by gjm11 7y ago
Not only may but do ; I like Common Lisp a lot, and while some people complain that LOOP isn't lispy enough I personally do like it. But it doesn't have the elegance of just specifying the inequalities you want your loop variab

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