maxander

77 ms·

661.
by maxander 10y ago
So I suppose if we're going to be exceptionally paranoid, we would run everything on virtual machines. Unless I'm missing something, even if a process in a VM managed to trigger a physical nonideality on the physical machine gr
662.
by maxander 10y ago
I'm pretty sure this attack consists of a slight alteration to the design of the chip (namely, adding that extra logic gate), so it automatically scales to precisely the number of chips made with that design.
663.
by maxander 10y ago
I suspect that if N honest backers would expect a net gain from a decision even if they spend X/N voting for it, a single owner of N fake accounts would expect a net gain from the same decision even if he spent X voting for it. Anonymi
664.
by maxander 10y ago
I wonder if anyone implements the restriction that a password reset can only be ordered after a certain time (a week, say) since the last successful password entry, for long-established accounts. Most real password resets are likely eith
665.
by maxander 10y ago
No one cares if they build websites for the gov't (indeed it's exemplary citizenship), the concern is rather that their involvement will include influencing policy. They have many interests relating to existing or potential regul
666.
by maxander 10y ago
This was an unexpectedly interesting talk, considering that from the framing I expected it to consist of essentially "Penrose, everyone thinks the Godelian thing is stupid, please just stop." Instead we got a theory ( very theor
667.
by maxander 10y ago
If a transcendental number is imperfectly remembered, are its digits thereby less random?
668.
by maxander 10y ago
The use of "rewrite" is a bit misleading- what's being altered in this mechanism is an epigenetic tag that sits "on top" of one of the standard DNA bases; that an individual's epigenetics are altered as they go
669.
by maxander 10y ago
I suspect a Houyhnhnm would reply that the very concept of the requirements changing for a set thing like an "operating system" is a category error- the idea of an operating system is defined (by a perfectly rational Houyhnhnm)
670.
by maxander 10y ago
Since we're discussing the notional programming practices of a race of sentient equiinoids, I might advance a counterpoint; the reason we're served so well by transience is that humanity has spent its 50-odd years of serious compu
671.
by maxander 10y ago
I don't see how your first two points are relevant to the article- it never discusses face detection use as a password, only as a means of indexing into social networks. ("Only.") Regarding your third point, sadly, such a so
672.
by maxander 10y ago
I greatly appreciate this blog for breaking up the monotonous techno-optimism native to HN, but I don't know that the author has thought through this particular position very well. He's right that, strictly speaking, our odds of
673.
by maxander 10y ago
True enough that I shouldn't bandy about accusations of depression. But the author derides a billion-dollar cancer research effort as "pointless" in the title . He may recognize the progress, but he's bizarrely adaman
674.
by maxander 10y ago
Therapies that could reliably cure any cancer are often worthy of research, but I'd put the expected value of these approaches lower than that of "ugly morass" standard research. Reason 1; cancer therapies have to effectively
675.
by maxander 10y ago
I was about to post the same- the article has such a "nothing is worth doing" level of pessimism about medicine that halfway through I was wondering if the author was suffering from depression. He's right that an ever-older p
676.
by maxander 10y ago
Its a nice little bit of common wisdom that "free is always better," but its not actually true - if it were, Netflix and Spotify and their ilk would never have gotten off the ground, since there's not a thing they're se
677.
by maxander 10y ago
Other commenters have voiced objections to various bits of this argument which I won't repeat, but I want to highlight a point that is extremely important in cases like Snowden; we agree that his action was unlawful, but this says litt
678.
by maxander 10y ago
I think you'll find MIT's gatekeeping is extensively systematized. : ) Which is not to say that MIT admissions don't sometimes revolve around human elements, and moreso the process of landing RA positions, but the sheer nu
679.
by maxander 10y ago
Absolutely true- things are more competitive now in large part because a much larger segment of the population gets a shot at it. I'm not saying things are objectively worse on a social level, far from it... but they were more relaxed
680.
by maxander 10y ago
Man, the days when a kid without particular academic accomplishment could just be "guided" to MIT by a teacher impressed by his intelligence and passion. Or when a dropout could just wander into a physics lab and land a job as a
681.
by maxander 10y ago
I think you find these incompatible simply due to the Valley's own particular brand of "audacity." What #2 predicts the end of are build-fast-and-break-things concept-startups that throw tons of energy, developer-wages, and
682.
by maxander 10y ago
But that's not how "math," as taught to and perceived by middle schoolers, works; as far as they've likely ever seen , a math problem is a question for which there exists an answer in the form of a sequence of arithmeti
683.
by maxander 10y ago
> “Our ability to understand what to build is so far behind what we can build,’’ said Dr. Minshull, who was invited to the meeting at Harvard but did not attend. “I just don’t think that being able to make more and more and more and chea
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by maxander 10y ago
Money. Doing biology research is expensive . You'd have to find a country that cares about blue-sky health research and not bioethics, which sounds tricky. Despite the hype, this sort of technology wouldn't have any useful imme
685.
by maxander 10y ago
I was about to post the very same quotation. Its not naively clear where the line is drawn between "speedup that could be obtained through clever heuristic/nondeterministic/whatever classical algorithms" and "speedu
686.
by maxander 10y ago
If you want to die to assist the population-control efforts, be my guest. : ) More seriously, what would happen if the average number of children per family was 3.5, rather than 2.5 [1]? Probably nothing absolutely catastrophic, and that&#
687.
by maxander 10y ago
The old chestnut, but valid: Learn, and get comfortable in, a functional language. The typical case being Lisp (often in conjunction with a readthrough of SICP), but if you have the stomach for it, Haskell (or languages of its lineage- ML
688.
by maxander 10y ago
So Tesla has two problems, according to the article: - They can't ramp up production fast enough to keep up with the demand indicated by pre-orders. - Pre-orders are likely to be overstating demand substantially, since they are refunda
689.
by maxander 10y ago
> Elsevier can't fix the problem that scientists don't have a way to assess the quality of other scientists' work. You are aware, I hope, that Elsevier curates the content of its journals by literally sending the papers t
690.
by maxander 10y ago
> “Stress does funny things to the body,” said one former senior agency official who added that “there is zero evidence” Kelton was poisoned. > After recovering, he was named deputy director for counterintelligence, a job that put him

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