justinpombrio

72 ms·

871.
by justinpombrio 13y ago
Yeah, those academics, especially the tenured ones, just hate to say anything out of line. You emphasize _theory_ as if there was some alternative it could graduate to once it were "accepted". Scientific explanations of the world,
872.
by justinpombrio 13y ago
Why then did the Creator seem to largely "start over" after large extinction events? Surely he didn't forget what he knew simply because an asteroid hit the Earth. Now that you have put forward a theory, the proper thing to d
873.
by justinpombrio 13y ago
No, but we have found millions of fossils in the ground from different time periods, and it looks an awful lot like different species slowly changed over time (and occasionally branched off or went extinct). If this weren't the case, s
874.
by justinpombrio 13y ago
Reading that article and the follow up[1], it looks like Google made use of a quirk in Safari to give third-party cookies that would otherwise be blocked. No other major browser blocked third party cookies in this way, so the workaround jus
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by justinpombrio 13y ago
Which other way would you suggest? Also, I was under the impression that very little money and effort was put into attempting to enforce the GPL through lawsuits (and these slides don't seem to suggest otherwise, naming just a few peop
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by justinpombrio 13y ago
There's two related arguments you (may) be making. One is philosophical, and to that I say: can you give an algorithm to compute a0, a1, ...? If you can't (and I suspect you can't), I'd be hesitant to say that such a seq
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by justinpombrio 13y ago
That is precisely what I was looking for (and from Norvig, no less). Thanks!
878.
by justinpombrio 13y ago
So, I occasionally hear someone espouse the utility of design patterns. As a Haskellite, I tend not to see the point, and wonder sometimes whether they're all just kludges to, e.g., work around not having first class functions. I'
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by justinpombrio 13y ago
On the contrary, we do have a choice! We could use computable numbers instead of reals. A computable number is any number which is output by some Turing machine, or, equivalently, any number which can be found by some algorithm. e and pi
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by justinpombrio 13y ago
If you want to be formal, 0.999... is by definition the limit as n goes to infinity of the sum from x=1..n of (9/10^x). This limit converges to 1. More intuitively, what is the difference (as in subtraction) between 0.999... and 1? I t