tgb

102 ms·

931.
by tgb 9y ago
But you can just measure whether animal eaters (tend to) have a B12 deficiency or not - you don't need to know any of this. Is your doctor recommending this based off a long chain of reasoning or based off of a study just directly meas
932.
by tgb 9y ago
Given that both Arabic and English are official languages of the UN (and in which all UN documents are written), wouldn't those documents form (a large part) of the data for training? Not that that would have much in the way of "G
933.
by tgb 9y ago
That's exactly what jimmaswell suggested he didn't like, though.
934.
by tgb 9y ago
I see now, thanks.
935.
by tgb 9y ago
I'm familiar with the concept of broadcasting in Numpy, but I don't understand what it means in this context. Can someone explain?
936.
by tgb 9y ago
Good point!
937.
by tgb 9y ago
Users can't really tell that an email is styled or plain before opening it, so if the opened numbers were too different, I'd be concerned that something was up.
938.
by tgb 9y ago
I used to think that running was boring and that I'd do more of it if it were less boring. At the time I was running on a treadmill while watching a TV show. But every time I hit the end of my run and went into the 5 minute cooldown, I
939.
by tgb 9y ago
Okay, sorry I read the article linked and not the article linked by the linked article that was hidden in the title of the first article. It was completely unclear to me that there even was a second article; it looked like just a few para
940.
by tgb 9y ago
I just manually fixed my mouse's scroll wheel middle click functionality from doing this 'double click' problem. You can take apart the switch and bend the spring a bit manually to get it back to shape. I don't know how
941.
by tgb 9y ago
When I first started programming (this was in C++), I decided that the obvious optimisation was to declare all these redundant local indices i,j,k as globals. Then the program won't need to make all this redundant crap! Of course that
942.
by tgb 9y ago
Wow, I was sure you were wrong when I read this but it looks like you're right. Though the reasoning here is a little different from how I interpreted your comment. It's not that the heaters concentrate minerals by, say, evaporati
943.
by tgb 9y ago
If you assume that most "stupid" people could avoid these situations if they tried harder and that social pressure to not "be stupid" causes people to act harder to not appear stupid, then it makes sense. (Both of those
944.
by tgb 9y ago
Sorry, I was not saying that the article applied Chebyshev's inequality. It's not related at all. But it's an example of a result where you do not have to assume that your distribution is a member of a particular family of di
945.
by tgb 9y ago
If all the visitors to that building applied this logic, then 50% of them would correctly believe that they were among the middle 50% of visitors to the building. In that sense it is correct reasoning without making any assumptions.
946.
by tgb 9y ago
No, it makes no assumptions about any distribution whatsoever. This is like Chebyshev's inequality: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chebyshev%27s_inequality Edit: it does make one assumption, namely that there wil
947.
by tgb 9y ago
The argument here is basically the "Doomsday argument" seen elsewhere except applied to to time instead of population. If you do this argument but say that we're likely in the middle 95% of the total human population, then yo
948.
by tgb 9y ago
On the contrary, the article never mentioned bell curve, gaussian, or normal distribution. You're projecting your own assumptions onto it. The reasoning may be suspect, but it makes no assumptions about distributions and you've mi
949.
by tgb 9y ago
Of course, you're right that what mathematical structures are the equivalent of the everyday terms we're talking about here depends on exactly what we're trying to accomplish. (Though note that the definition of trapezoid ver
950.
by tgb 9y ago
You're right that if you take a trapezoid and identify the sides, you get something that is topologically a torus. However, we were trying to measure distances on the torus and hence need it to be geometrically a torus - i.e. we need
951.
by tgb 9y ago
Yes, that works. But it loses the geometry of the plane when you do that. Or in terms of topology it's not a covering space of the sphere. When you represent the torus as the plane cut up into squares, any small piece of the torus look
952.
by tgb 9y ago
I think you're mistaken. Torii come from non-rectangular regions, too, though they'll always be parallelograms. Spheres cannot arise like this from any shape. Mathematically, you'd say that a sphere is simply connected and he
953.
by tgb 9y ago
I really dislike this argument. About 1% of US adults have had schizophrenia in the past year. And 2.6% of the adult population has bipolar. Yet at some point in their life they didn't know they were going to have schizophrenia or bipo
954.
by tgb 9y ago
Adding: I looked it up and Feynman quotes 10^8 times as much energy dissipated per step as the Van Neumann-Landauer limit when using the transistors of his era (1984-86 is when he taught the course).
955.
by tgb 9y ago
Wow have we improved that much in efficiency? I learned about this from the Feynman lectures on computing which are perhaps a little out of date.
956.
by tgb 9y ago
Oh it's worth noting that quantum computing research is reversible computing research. Quantum operations are unitary operators which necessarily have inverses. Famous quantum computing results like the "no cloning" theorem
957.
by tgb 9y ago
Reversible computation is inherently slow computation and the main advantage is it lets you get below this limit but current computers are still many (dozens?) of orders of magnitude off from reaching that limit. Until then, you'd be b
958.
by tgb 9y ago
The theme for the competition was "lost" - programmers are perhaps not the most creative at naming things.
959.
by tgb 9y ago
Is it American lobbying? As an American, I could never live in Europe since the cigarette smoke everywhere disgusts me. Too bad because they have a lot of other things figured out but will still be smoking the cigarettes outdoors in a crowd
960.
by tgb 9y ago
This isn't what it looks like! Because when you take the whole S&P500 you get stocks that go up and stocks that go down. If you pick just stocks that go up, you can get numbers well over 100%. Or negative numbers - imagine if the S

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