sampo

979 ms·

1. 2881.▲
   by sampo 14y ago

   Yes, NLP systems are going to have many engineering uses, and Chomsky agrees. Are they going to help in the true scientific understanding of the systems? So, what we have is (1) the engineering / statistical modelling / machine learning a
2. 2882.▲
   by sampo 14y ago

   Andrew Ng's Machine Learning course at Coursera, week 1 contains about 1 hour Linear Algebra review: lectures on vectors, matrices, their multiplication, transpose and inverse. So do you think these lectures are not enough to bring one up t
3. 2883.▲
   by sampo 14y ago

   I think the main reason why scientists haven't moved away from FORTRAN is cultural. What should they move to? Fortran90 has vector and matrix notation build-in so it's just like typed, faster matlab. More safety, more speed, what's not to
4. 2884.▲
   by sampo 14y ago

   Happened to a Soviet lander on Venus in 1982: "The quartz camera windows were covered by lens caps which popped off after descent. Venera 14, however, ended up measuring the compressibility of the lens cap, which landed right where the prob
5. 2885.▲
   by sampo 14y ago

   If you have, for example class Rational(x: Int, y: Int) { def numer = x def denom = Y } and then homework is to implement def less(that: Rational) = ??? then you're gonna get 15 000 people answering with
6. 2886.▲
   by sampo 14y ago

   So far, majority of the functions in the Scala course homework have been one-liners. Mostly without any new variables that one could name. This kind of problems, a lot of people write the exactly same answer, down to every single character.
7. 2887.▲
   by sampo 14y ago

   That feature, where you have an overview of the whole textfile in the rightmost column of the left window, what is it called? And is it available for emacs?
8. 2888.▲
   by sampo 14y ago

   ''It might seem that we would need only to run a conventional ray tracer "backward" from the light sources to the eye to achieve these effects. This concept has been called backward ray tracing , to indicate that it runs in the reverse dir
9. 2889.▲
   by sampo 14y ago

   It's actually Computer Science that has most scattered and disorganized publishing culture, and could use a lot more collective hacker attitude to somehow fix things.
10. 2890.▲
    by sampo 14y ago

    "without being so engaging that you can't put it down" I find re-reading (good, entertaining, no too serious) novels that I have already read before, works best. Since you have already read the thing previously, it's easier to put it down
11. 2891.▲
    by sampo 14y ago

    I think Steve Jobs' "bicycle for our minds" metaphor for computers, was quite nice. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob_GX50Za6c#t=0m25s
12. 2892.▲
    by sampo 14y ago

    On another page [1] the writer says: "Childr­en in Fin­land go to school year round". Why would he say that? Did he just pick a random far-away country to say a strange (but untrue) thing about? Or does he really think that childr­en in Fin
13. 2893.▲
    by sampo 14y ago

    Here in Finland (population 5 million) the government is preparing to allocate ca. 1500 million euros to order a country-wide medical patient database from Accenture, who are the local representative for Epic Systems [1] and Epic's MUMPS-ba
14. 2894.▲
    by sampo 14y ago

    Just tell, how does going through transport security in China work for you?
15. 2895.▲
    by sampo 14y ago

    Yes, the constructed list contains a lot of duplicates (removing duplicates with the python set operations shortens it by 40% - would be a worthwhile optimization for the runtime, too), but my percentages are not based on that. But: I sampl
16. 2896.▲
    by sampo 14y ago

    Maybe there is a little mystery. Enumerate all the fractions with at most 3-digit denominator (0, 1, 1/2, 1/3, 2/3, 1/4, ..., 998/999) between 0 and 1. Now what is the probability that amongst them we find an approximation to a random real
17. 2897.▲
    by sampo 14y ago

    optimizing the average case is (in my experience) more common in optimization problems ... the author should say is that the number of floors required to break the egg follows a uniform distribution Then again, optimizing the worst case p
18. 2898.▲
    by sampo 14y ago

    How common are noun-case errors among people who have a high school education? I mean something like using the elative case when the ablative might be more appropriate? Nonexistent. I don't think even preschool children ever mix those. I
19. 2899.▲
    by sampo 14y ago

    As a non-native speaker of English, I have been wondering how much signal it would be appropriate for me to infer from the kind of sloppy grammar that is typical only for native speakers of English? [1] I learned English at school as a seco
20. 2900.▲
    by sampo 14y ago

    > Geography nitpick: The airport in Istanbul is actually east of the Bosporus, making it Asia. Nitpick of nitpick: The larger airport in İstanbul (Atatürk International Airport) is on the European side, the smaller (Sabiha Gökçen Intern
21. 2901.▲
    by sampo 14y ago

    The main point of the article is something else, but this is a pretty thoughtful sentence: "In a world where everything must go through the rules and regulations of an app store without any oversight we, the developers, will suddenly be in
22. 2902.▲
    by sampo 14y ago

    There is no reason to quarrel about the meaning of 'significance' in statistical testing vs. in natural language. Just look at figs. 4 and 5 in the paper, and see that mean times spent for the scanner task were: 5.17 hours (dynamical typing
23. 2903.▲
    by sampo 15y ago

    The text in your link claims: "it is illegal for a FORTRAN subroutine to call itself recursively, either directly or indirectly". That is not true anymore (for almost 20 years), since Fortran 90 has 'recursive' keyword with which you can de
24. 2904.▲
    by sampo 15y ago

    > This is because most of their intranet apps will only work in IE6 How did it ever happen that IE6 ended up in such a long lasting and dominating position? Was it (I am just guessing here) the coincidence of tho things: (1) IE6 just ha
25. 2905.▲
    by sampo 15y ago

    I don't think the writer was criticizing neural nets and genetic algorithms as an approach, just observing that what they have produced so far is "decidedly unintelligent".
26. 2906.▲
    by sampo 16y ago

    "As the drink cools more water melts into the drink, diluting the cocktail. Thus a shaken Martini is generally slightly stronger than a stirred one." When a drink is shaken, or stirred, with ice, the cooling happens as the heat from the dri
27. 2907.▲
    by sampo 16y ago

    So if we stard from C, and take steps of fifths, we get the notes in the order: C, G, D, A, E, B, F#, C#, G#, D#, A#, F (and then C again). It is true that if you take the first 5, you get a scale with pattern of intervals C-<2>-D-&
28. 2908.▲
    by sampo 17y ago

    A bit unrelated note, but if vertical screen estate is valuable also in normal laptops, why aren't more people putting the toolbars to the sides ot the screen? As most laptops are widescreen anyway these days.
29. 2909.▲
    by sampo 17y ago

    As far as I understand, the volcanic ash melts in the combustion chamber (where temperature is like 1000 C), and then later can solidify on surfaces, and may block cooling ducts and such.
30. 2910.▲
    by sampo 17y ago

    France, Belgium and Netherlands (at least) have been conducting test flights during the weekend: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63G1U920100417 Finnish Air Force had some fighter jets in air on Thursday 15th, when the ash first hit