pjscott

72 ms·

721.
by pjscott 11y ago
Think Bayes is the best probability book I've seen for people who know how to program. Definitely worth a read!
722.
by pjscott 11y ago
You're arguing against the strong form of the efficient market hypothesis. The weak form merely claims that the market is hard to exploit -- that, for example, there are investors smart enough to notice when evil stocks are being lou
723.
by pjscott 11y ago
Blue Origin is a credible rocket company, in case anybody was wondering. They've got some impressive engineering, a realistic, incremental long-term plan, and pockets deep enough to pay for it.
724.
by pjscott 11y ago
This is a very under-appreciated point. If you profile a program on non-pathological input, the profiler won't tell you what's going to explode later on when your program hits a rare case that you hadn't expected. Theoretical
725.
by pjscott 11y ago
You've interpreted a statistical claim about population means as a universal claim about all members of a group. That is incorrect, uncharitable, and unhelpful if your goal is discussion rather than browbeating.
726.
by pjscott 11y ago
My god those are some great error messages. I hardly ever say that about error messages, but these are exactly what I want from a parser generator that aborts when it runs into ambiguity. It even has easy-to-understand diagrams!
727.
by pjscott 11y ago
S-expressions are a classic example of something that can't be matched with a DFA or NFA. In order to know how many parens are currently open (and therefore needing to be matched with closing parens) it would need an unbounded number
728.
by pjscott 11y ago
Sure, I used an easy case as an example, but it's not always so trivial to guess at the other person's intent.
729.
by pjscott 11y ago
What I've found works is to not directly answer maddeningly vague questions, but instead to either ask for nitpicky clarification or to give a very precisely-worded statement that answers the question they probably should have asked.
730.
by pjscott 11y ago
The "imagine 1000 women..." formulation definitely sounds easier to understand, but doctors do very poorly on it as well. Some numbers: http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/17/statistical-literacy-am...
731.
by pjscott 11y ago
That's roughly what I did, and it worked out about as well you predict. As soon as I understood what was going on with some kind of math, I'd use whatever tools I had to automate it: calculators at first, then computer algebra sys
732.
by pjscott 11y ago
The teen pregnancy numbers here seem to be from the CDC's hospital data rather than a self-report study.
733.
by pjscott 11y ago
I don't think this point gets mentioned enough: since physical degeneration due to aging is such a big risk factor for so many diseases, anything we can do to reverse that degeneration could end up being hugely effective at preventing
734.
by pjscott 11y ago
If I'm reading this right, their array resizing was linear rather than geometric -- definitely a radical difference from the usual implementations! That is, each time they called realloc, they added a constant amount of capacity instea
735.
by pjscott 11y ago
Imagine a gentle world in which the person you're responding to is merely commenting on the relative ease with which Minecraft could be optimized, and pointing out some of the reasons for this, without casting aspersions on anybody or
736.
by pjscott 11y ago
Because the former approach finds things that are obvious enough to have been noted by multiple cultures independently, while the latter approach finds things that seem unlikely enough to be novel -- right? A social scientist will not becom
737.
by pjscott 11y ago
That's an exceptionally clear, well-written book, and I recommend it without reservation. And it's free online, so anybody who's curious can just check it out.
738.
by pjscott 11y ago
Quick summary: subsidizing positional goods makes them more expensive (because there's always someone willing to pay more for a higher place on the totem pole), and it looks like this effect has driven up the cost of higher education,
739.
by pjscott 11y ago
They're a smaller-scale test platform for figuring out how to do propulsive landing and re-use, similar to SpaceX's grasshopper rockets. Blue Origin is also developing an orbital rocket, which will hopefully be more impressive.
740.
by pjscott 11y ago
It's a mathematical model that makes observable predictions. It's easily falsifiable: just show that its predictions are false. Now, you could argue that there's no test to distinguish it from other interpretations of quantum
741.
by pjscott 11y ago
A hopeful explosion, considering the circumstances! This particular failure would have happened even with a dry-land landing, and future flights will be using the upgraded landing leg design that landed successfully back in December rather
742.
by pjscott 11y ago
In general, it's a bad idea to form opinions of people from a news story about them -- sometimes accurate news doesn't make for a good story. The CFAR folks are... what's the opposite of cocksure? Epistemically cautious? Here
743.
by pjscott 11y ago
I was skeptical about the claims of competitive compression, but in a handful of experiments it looks like farbfeld+bzip2 got slightly better compression than png (after running through pngcrush). Decoding took an unfortunate number of mill
744.
by pjscott 11y ago
The file format is trivial, and can be read and written without any dependencies. The converter programs jpg2ff and ff2jpg depend on libjpeg-turbo to read and write JPEG files. The converter programs png2ff and ff2png depend on libpng to re
745.
by pjscott 11y ago
The clearest article I've seen on the subject is this one: https://colah.github.io/posts/2015-08-Backprop/
746.
by pjscott 11y ago
Do you have a counterexample?
747.
by pjscott 11y ago
For an allocation of that size, it's likely that your system's malloc is requesting the allocation directly from the OS's virtual memory system with mmap(2), and freeing it with munmap(2), without ever actually writing a mega
748.
by pjscott 11y ago
Algernon's law essentially says that biologically simple, major changes to human intelligence are very unlikely to have been strictly better in the ancestral environment, or else they would have happened already. Let's look at Wik
749.
by pjscott 11y ago
For the juicy stuff, here's the list of what's new in 9.5: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/What%27s_new_in_PostgreSQL_...
750.
by pjscott 11y ago
Are you actually shorting their stock, or just blustering? You sound very confident.

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