machine

6 ms·

1.
by machine 19y ago
"I remember, I'd just had my twentieth birthday. I'd just gotten my Ph.D. And it looked like my plan to "be a physicist" was going just great." I had to stop reading there as I became ill. (23 year old that hasn't passed quals)
2.
by machine 19y ago
On a related note: http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/08/untwirling-photo-of.htm...
3.
by machine 19y ago
Even if the film turns out to suck, you can't help but admire this guy's dedication. I wish I had this sort of work ethic / commitment...
4.
by machine 19y ago
But would you trust math olympiad performance over good grades in graduate level math courses? What about publications in respected math journals? If by the time you graduate from college your math olympiad scores are the best things you
5.
by machine 19y ago
As other people have mentioned, doing well in college is more about learning a lot and doing research than getting good grades. With this in mind, I think doing well in college can be important for a couple of reasons: 1) You should try to
6.
by machine 19y ago
The 1-norm tends to also be less sensitive to outliers, and in machine learning, 1-norm regularization leads to sparse solutions. The real reason 2-norm is popular is that it is easy to minimize (differentiable).
7.
by machine 19y ago
I don't know a lot about ILP algorithms, but my understanding of them is that they basically search the space of logical rules for rules that "explain" the examples they are given. More formally, they look for rules from which you could th
8.
by machine 19y ago
And what's with the tiny hash symbols at the end of every paragraph. I also found the article unpleasant.
9.
by machine 19y ago
What you are talking about is more along the lines of inductive logic programming, where the goal is to induce general symbolic rules from specific examples. Even with ILP I'm not sure how exactly you could phrase things so that the machin
10.
by machine 19y ago
Metric trees (sometimes called ball trees) are a simple generalization of this to arbitrary metrics. They're also useful for points in a high dimensional euclidean space that have low intrinsic dimensionality.
11.
by machine 19y ago
I understand that it is in the best interests of an open source developer to give support for his software (assuming he wants people to use it), but he's in no way obligated to do so. Some people just develop software for fun and make it a
12.
by machine 19y ago
I have to say, I'm not that sympathetic. If you are using open source software, you can't expect free support, and you definitely can't expect immediate free support. Plus, it actually looks like you got each of your questions answered wi
13.
by machine 19y ago
A bit of semantics: what we are talking about here is the difference between statically typed and dynamically typed languages, not strongly and weakly typed. Python is strongly dynamically typed. Java is strongly statically typed. C is (
14.
by machine 19y ago
I don't see it on there, they must have taken it down. That said, Lisp isn't a really a pure functional language either if that is what you are implying (setf). I don't know enough about Erlang to say anything about that. It is odd that
15.
by machine 19y ago
I think these guys seem to be accumulating a lot of smart people with good track records though. It's an ambitious problem for sure but the potential reward justifies the risk. Actually I think the biggest risk is that Google probably has
16.
by machine 19y ago
I don't think it's the pointer dereference so much as the fact that you can't inline virtual methods.
17.
by machine 19y ago
I think the problem is still that there isn't really a clear definition of general intelligence or how it should be embodied on a computer. I agree that putting a bunch of different algorithms for different tasks in a box won't create some
18.
by machine 19y ago
I agree with tx. With C++ you can often avoid what would be virtual method calls in Java / if statements in C by using templates. This lets you effectively inline every function call. It'd be hard to do this in a clean way in C.
19.
by machine 19y ago
I disagree with you on a lot of points. First, I don't think AI has failed to deliver. There are a ton of things we can do now that we couldn't 30 years ago. Just to name a couple, how about simultaneous localization and mapping http://
20.
by machine 19y ago
For real. If only the world really worked this way. Even programming languages take a bit longer than a week to really learn. I find I go through at least two levels with a programming language: the first at which I know the syntax and c
21.
by machine 19y ago
Hmm, I don't think this was a bug. There was a pretty popular news story about legless chihuahuas that day (edit - a comment on techcrunch says cnn.com had it on their front page).
22.
by machine 19y ago
This is completely off topic, but I couldn't resist: http://www.marion.ohio-state.edu/fac/schul/drp/dr.html I've had the misfortune of trying Dr Becker and Dr Perky. Maybe, as in soda, when it comes to early-stage funding you can't beat
23.
by machine 19y ago
The problem with the colored balls example is that the person drawing the balls from the bag assumes the balls are i.i.d. (independently identically distributed). Put in real world terms, according to the example entrepreneurs believe thei
24.
by machine 19y ago
I hope this isn't true. I'm not sure about YC start ups but I know that I'm in this field because I love it. If you just want to get rich there are certainly easier ways to do that (e.g. real estate, investment banking).
25.
by machine 19y ago
I think they do have some modeling of underlying concepts. I think if I remember correctly they had a search where "politician" matched "mayor", so they at least have synonyms. I think they obviously would like to have understanding--it's
26.
by machine 19y ago
The answer to your first question is no. For example if you wanted to search for "What did Al Gore say?", a google wild card search for "Al Gore said wildcard" (the markup won't let me put an asterisk) would not match things like "blah, sa