man-and-laptop

16 ms·

31.
by man-and-laptop 8y ago
Maybe one usage could be in Thompson sampling. You're trying to guess the maximum of a function, so you sample a random function from the GP, find its maximum, test it out, get back a y value, and then update your GP. Maybe that's
32.
by man-and-laptop 8y ago
This looks like trolling. Blockchain was the first serious attempt at solving the problem of distributed concensus without centralisation. One application of this outside of cryptocurrency is to DNS (see Namecoin). Cryptocurrencies at the v
33.
by man-and-laptop 8y ago
Taleb's book The Black Swan has sections comparing heavy-tailed prob. distributions with thin-tailed prob. distributions. The thesis is that you can't tell whether a distribution has fat tails until a fat-tailed event happens (whi
34.
by man-and-laptop 8y ago
Taleb claims that most psychological studies suffer from methodological flaws like p-hacking. One should be very sceptical of these kinds of studies and how you interpret them (correlation vs causation). Psychology has recently experienced
35.
by man-and-laptop 8y ago
> I could work at someone's house for 6 months and watch them avoid me in town a couple of months later. Maybe those people were just introverted, or felt unsure about what you thought of them.
36.
by man-and-laptop 8y ago
Exactly. The value of Bitcoin comes from the fact that it's something scarce and un-counterfeit-able, just as money should be, while also being "de-centralised" and not tied to a government or corporation. The Proof of Work (
37.
by man-and-laptop 8y ago
Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding, but I disagree with you. A merkle tree is a recursive structure. If you trust a substructure of it, then you don't need to repeatedly re-evaluate that substructure. What that means in practical
38.
by man-and-laptop 8y ago
My point about floating point numbers having no advantages other than speed and memory usage was referring to the following: Some people think that you can decide equality of floating point numbers, while you can't decide equality of r
39.
by man-and-laptop 8y ago
Fish Shell has been having some problems implementing process substitution. Last I checked, they tried two approaches: * piping to FIFO files, but it throws an error if you pump too much data into them * waiting until one process finishes b
40.
by man-and-laptop 8y ago
I didn't mention memory use and dynamic allocation because I thought it was obvious. I filed it under "faster".
41.
by man-and-laptop 8y ago
You're claiming I said things I didn't say. Two things: 1. I did acknowledge that floating point numbers are faster. I expressly stated that they do have some advantages over real numbers. 2. I'm not talking about symbolic co
42.
by man-and-laptop 8y ago
> if two of these are equal then in general you can't determine that they are in finite time. This is arguably a problem with floating point as well. Two computations F and G which ought to produce the same result can end up differi
43.
by man-and-laptop 8y ago
I never said that they don't have applications. And you can do all those things with real numbers. What's your point?
44.
by man-and-laptop 8y ago
They effectively change the structure of your code. Every time you do an operation on a real number, it essentially launches a new process that runs indefinitely in the background. I would file that under speed problems. To control the spee
45.
by man-and-laptop 8y ago
It's interesting to point out that you can compute with exact real numbers. But this is of course going to be less efficient than using something crude and fast like floating point numbers. There's also an argument that imprecis
46.
by man-and-laptop 8y ago
It boils down to the fact that Pure Mathematics has a well-tested (if sometimes rigid) methodology. Metaphysics may lack an adequate methodology. The role of methodologies in general is to determine what's true and what's false, a
47.
by man-and-laptop 8y ago
It's a broad idea to construct a secure PoW, with all that's required to make it secure, but to try and make it applicable to areas like number theory. See PrimeCoin for a successful example. Also your concerns are unfounded: See
48.
by man-and-laptop 8y ago
No. The PoW problem should be derived according to the current state of the blockchain. That makes "solving a lot of primes" in secret inapplicable. You read my post far too literally. The idea is to combine the ideas behind Namec
49.
by man-and-laptop 8y ago
It would be nice if this were used as the PoW problem for a blockchain. Since the Mersenne Primes are rare, the PoW problem shouldn't be to find new Mersenne Primes directly, but something that could make indirect progress on that. Als
50.
by man-and-laptop 8y ago
The language (.*)\1 is not context-free. Also it's not clear if regexes with backreferences can parse XML, which is context-free.
51.
by man-and-laptop 8y ago
> rure is the Python binding Rust's regex library, which guarantees linear time searching using finite automata. This is the most feature-complete linear-time regex lib for Python as far as I can tell.
52.
Rure-Python: Python API for RUst's REgex Engine
5 points by man-and-laptop 8y ago|3 comments
53.
by man-and-laptop 8y ago
> The fact is successive governments have rightly identified that both skilled and cheap labour from immigration is keeping our economy afloat. Otherwise we’d see them at least tap the brakes. But they haven’t. OK, so a politician living
54.
by man-and-laptop 8y ago
A person from country C can immigrate into the UK by immigrating into one of 27 different other countries, and then using free movement to get into the UK. This makes border control harder.
55.
by man-and-laptop 8y ago
I'm talking about long term impact, not emergency measures. Everything you've mentioned is an emergency measure AFAICT. For comparison, the impact of banning the printing presses only materialised quite a lot later than it happene
56.
by man-and-laptop 8y ago
Really? Because "freedom of movement" seems to be the sticking point in the Brexit negotiations. The UK can't go the Norway route because it doesn't want "free movement" into its territory.
57.
by man-and-laptop 8y ago
I was commenting on something above. A short comment which I interpreted as a short "I don't like this." which I thought was a bit echo-chamber and lacking in substance. I take your point though. Not great style.
58.
by man-and-laptop 8y ago
It does prohibit them among the 28 member countries. They call it free movement. Each of those country's immigration policies is a loophole for the other 27. It's a loss of border sovereignty.
59.
by man-and-laptop 8y ago
Opinion on Brexit. Hopefully of interest: I'm torn on Brexit. If Britain stays in the European Union, then it won't have a lot of power to manage her borders. The "liberalness" of Britain's immigration policy ends u
60.
by man-and-laptop 8y ago
[edit] w/e

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