stiff

69 ms·

241.
by stiff 13y ago
I will listen with great interest if you then care to explain to me what is the great discovery Hofstadter made in the field of AI. I believe he is rooted in the GOFAI tradition, because he tries to understand intelligence by introspection,
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by stiff 13y ago
So Good Old Fashioned AI[1] is the new hot underdog AI thing now? I seriously don't understand the praise of Hostadter in the article and in the comments here, and the criticism of the mainstream AI research, especially it is very hard
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by stiff 13y ago
Hofstadter is about as much of a science researcher as Goethe was in his day.
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by stiff 13y ago
This is a bad article, especially for a technical audience. It romanticizes things a lot, as journalists have to, to keep up the readership rates, but it doesn't make for a very balanced judgement. This kind of debate is going on and o
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by stiff 13y ago
I will give you a really prosaic example: I was writing a JavaScript carousel, where from a collection of N elements, K were displayed at a time, and you could jump J elements to the left, or J elements to the right, additionally the whole
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by stiff 13y ago
It is a pity that people only think of "data structures" when they deal with large amounts of data and are forced to think of lists, trees, and all that. Even in simple business problems, choosing the appropriate set of variables
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by stiff 13y ago
I agree with your overall sentiment, but I have some objections with the specific things you are saying: - SICP the book and the original MIT course that is available online do not cover data structures or algorithms very well, it isn'
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by stiff 13y ago
I have written a more quickly paced Erlang tutorial some years ago, it is not even online anymore, but here is a copy from archive.org: http://web.archive.org/web/20080708140354/http://www.stifflo... I m
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by stiff 13y ago
The blog post might not be very clear on this, but I think the research mentioned basically shows that some chlidren are very strongly convinced that they "don't have a mathematical mind" or something along those lines, and b
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by stiff 13y ago
This has been debated to death, see something like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_versus_nurture , Pinkers "Blank slate" book, or what other people already mentioned. Look at extreme cases of people with
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by stiff 13y ago
There are two distinct things, both being true, as far as current research shows: - People who believe that mathematics is an ability that can be trained perform much better than the ones that believe it is an innate skills some people have
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by stiff 13y ago
Wow, people here are obviously much more attached to their lifestyles than this guy, considering the amount of hate he received in just a few minutes. I mean, he was relatively non-judgemental about the whole thing, and people here respond
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by stiff 13y ago
What it did turn out, though, is that we use too high doses of soaps and shampoos in general, and they are actually intended to be used in minuscule amounts Well, isn't this a confirmation of what I have said? Like producers of cosme
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by stiff 13y ago
Minimalism or not, I would like to expand on one of the points - most cosmetics in wide circulation today are really terrible. If you look up their ingredients and look at chemical properties of those, it's all about optimizing the tec
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by stiff 13y ago
I don't understand what this is about now. I understand in this fragment you are discussing why can't we make pain go completely away at will, and why didn't evolution invent such a thing. Among the causes you don't cons
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Misconceptions about evolution(evolution.berkeley.edu)
96 points by stiff 13y ago|167 comments
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by stiff 13y ago
I understand this research to say: if there exists a simple mutation that is hugely beneficial, it will spread fast. This does not mean every beneficial change to the DNA we as intelligent beings can come up with can be expected to have mos
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by stiff 13y ago
He nevertheless proceeds as if this is something that is generally true, with it only being false in exceptional situations. There is no reason to suppose that this is generally true, which makes the heuristic useless, and hence his reasoni
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by stiff 13y ago
If the proposed intervention would result in an enhancement, why have we not already evolved to be that way? This is completely misguided, because evolution does not necessarily "progress" in any sense. Here is a good explanatio
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by stiff 13y ago
6.00 from MIT and the Udacity courses about CS/programming might help bring you up to speed, and 6.00 is periodically offered at edx as a full online course. Wish you luck!
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by stiff 13y ago
This is such a shallow view of the topic. If you do good software engineering, all your programs also make great APIs for their problem domain, and there is only a few new things you need to learn about deploying them more widely if you fan
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by stiff 13y ago
Oops! http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Systems-Programmers-Perspecti...
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by stiff 13y ago
If you are serious about programming and have any possibility of doing this at all, by all means get a CS degree at the best university you can access. I have worked with or interviewed a few programmers without any university degree and ti
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by stiff 13y ago
Great article, case studies of skilled hackers solving real problems like this one are so rare, wish we had more of this. Only comparable thing I can think of at the moment are Peter Norvig essays: http://norvig.com/spell-co
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by stiff 13y ago
Can you give me an example of a rule that is true ("holds across a broad range of environments") and the truth of which does not depend on a "specific (and closed) set of assumptions"? How does one arrive at "rules&
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by stiff 13y ago
The thing with cranks is that there is really nothing to criticize, the words just don't make any sense - terminology is misused or invented and not explained, formalism is introduced without apparent reason, established best practices
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by stiff 13y ago
Crank science time! What I think he is doing, he is basically taking his philosophical musings, finds concepts from very high level mathematics that seem corresponding, buries it all under a mountain of formalism introduced for no particula
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by stiff 13y ago
For me, GMail reached an optimum in terms of user experience some three or four years ago. Then it was a mixture of changes that were nice but of minor significance (the look of the main interface is prettier now than those few years ago) a
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by stiff 13y ago
This is a great informal course in the intersection of mathematics and computer science. Other videos can be found here in section "A9 Lectures": http://www.stepanovpapers.com/
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Three Algorithmic Journeys(youtube.com)
3 points by stiff 13y ago|1 comments

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