murbard2

27 ms·

271.
by murbard2 11y ago
Forget the coal, make methanol from water and co2.
272.
by murbard2 11y ago
- You can make the Library of Babel better by removing books.[1] - You can make limbs more useful by removing degrees of freedom, simplifying the control task.[2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel
273.
by murbard2 11y ago
I think he's refuting weak-men argument. Not quite straw-men because I've heard them being made. Of course it's about modularity, but how do you get modularity? How do you safely abstract the internals of libraries? Types and
274.
by murbard2 11y ago
The value of functional programming is not in what it brings, it's in what it takes away. It is easier to reason about functional programs because they maintain certain properties. These could be types, an absence of side effect, etc.
275.
by murbard2 11y ago
It would imply no such thing. Voters do not have much incentive to make informed votes since the expected impact of their vote is very small. As a result, they tend to use their vote for signaling purposes, as a way to reflect the type of p
276.
by murbard2 11y ago
The blog post is much more hand wavy than the actual arxiv article. The notion of factorization of the wave function in particular is interesting. Scott Aaronson has fairly convincing arguments against IIT http://www.scottaaronso
277.
by murbard2 11y ago
Playing with the tails make all kind of mistakes possible, but that seems like a criticism that would apply to any attempt to identify a distribution based on sample.
278.
by murbard2 11y ago
> Actually all of them. I suspect you live in a bubble. Have you met many average voters?
279.
by murbard2 11y ago
That sounds more like a job for the KL-divergence.
280.
by murbard2 11y ago
Agree with you on all three, but specifically for 1., can you think of pathological pairs of distinct distribution that the test would often fail to reject?
281.
by murbard2 11y ago
Well, you said you disbelieve these things on the ground of them being too good to be true. I get that people are more likely to exaggerate the likelihood of success of some technology if it seems extremely promising, and thus one should be
282.
by murbard2 11y ago
>Honestly, I can't think of any important scientific discovery that was accompanied by "This is great! Think what it could do for civilization!" Radioactivity.
283.
by murbard2 11y ago
We know from biology that nanoscale factories are feasible, we know from human intelligence that AI is feasible, we know from Newtonian mechanics that space elevators are feasible, we know from stars that fusion is feasible.
284.
by murbard2 11y ago
Wouldn't it be great if we could produce fertilizer out of air? Wouldn't it be great if we could get energy by just digging in the ground? Wouldn't it be great if we could just prevent polio with a simple injection? Wouldn&#x
285.
by murbard2 11y ago
"The language is purely functional. There are no side-effects." This can be interpreted very efficiently by skipping evaluation.
286.
by murbard2 11y ago
There is a "winter truce" for evictions in France, but it runs from November 1st to March 31st.
287.
by murbard2 11y ago
> I had friends who learned how to read when they were toddlers and it had literally no effect on them later in life other than that they were bored in school until everyone else had the chance to learn who did not have their parents exp
288.
by murbard2 11y ago
I'm not a typical case but... I learned to read before primary school, I was bored out of my mind. The school offered to make me skip a class, my parents declined because they thought being too young would be detrimental to my school e
289.
by murbard2 11y ago
> PHP is a very, very fast way to program websites, even widely used ones Sure, and none of that has anything to do with its horrible design decisions and inconsistent naming. This ability to whip up web sites quickly is not something th
290.
by murbard2 11y ago
No, that's the weakest advantage, I've cited others. For instance, being able to rename the namespace is very important if you're using third party libraries which may have conflicting names.
291.
by murbard2 11y ago
(thanks, fixed)
292.
by murbard2 11y ago
And thus given the large amount of effective websites that are programmed in PHP, there's no reason to expect that there is much of a downside in using this particular design.
293.
by murbard2 11y ago
Not if you're in the company of people who like intractable game theory problems.
294.
by murbard2 11y ago
There's no reason to expect a language like English which evolved organically to have an elegant or efficient design.
295.
by murbard2 11y ago
Yes it is. Either all of your geography related function start with "Geo" followed by a capital. In that case you're basically using a namespace while reaping none of the benefits. You can't use the namespace to avoid re
296.
by murbard2 11y ago
The rules, as stated, make the game particularly uninteresting. I would suggest instead doing some type of Colonel Blotto game. For instance: Give each player 1000 points^. Points can be used to secretly bid on gifts and/or on players.
297.
by murbard2 11y ago
"The Wolfram Language has about 5000 built-in functions. All have names in which each word starts with a capital letter." Amazingly, I get the impression they say it as a point of pride, rather than as an embarrassing design decis
298.
by murbard2 11y ago
There's an important conceptual link between training RNNs and side channel attacks. I wrote a bit on the topic. Unfortunately, not my finest writing in terms of clarity, but I think it touches something important. https://m
299.
by murbard2 11y ago
In addition, SQL design is simply really good. It's of the few successful declarative language: you get what you describe. It's also a total, in that all programs terminate. These are really good characteristics to have.
300.
by murbard2 11y ago
By non-technical I think they largely mean "non-statistician" rather than "non-developers".

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