upquark

10 ms·

61.
by upquark 13y ago
> You are not taking the entire hash, you are only taking the first 33 bits Right, my bad, didn't pay attention to the problem we are trying to solve :)
62.
by upquark 13y ago
> Clearly you'll have tons of collisions with that solution Why? If we assume the hash code assignment to one of the 2^32 people is uniformly random from a set of 2^160 codes, the odds of finding a collision are astronomically small
63.
by upquark 13y ago
Math is essential for this field, anyone who tells you otherwise doesn't know what they are talking about. You can hack together something quick and dirty without understanding the underlying math, and you certainly can use existing li
64.
by upquark 13y ago
Agreed. Plus, the current notation is a result of multiple iterations by some brilliant people. If you look at older attempts at formal mathematical notation, some of it is laughably bad in comparison. We are standing on the shoulder of gia
65.
by upquark 13y ago
No, I'm disagreeing with the statement that you don't need calculus as a statistician. You absolutely do. The expected value is an integral, and is the very first concept in stats / data analysis / whatever you want to c
66.
by upquark 13y ago
If you think a statistician need not know calculus, I sure as hell hope you're not a statistician :) This is a central concept in stats: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_likelihood_estimation
67.
by upquark 13y ago
Well people have varying abilities towards algorithmic thinking, abstraction/generalization, spatial reasoning, creativity, focus and attention to detail, etc.
68.
by upquark 13y ago
Relational just means tabular in the context of relational databases. For storing large-scale social networks I would think of specialized graph databases before anything else.
69.
by upquark 13y ago
Yes, Harvard MBAs suddenly become "brilliant engineers" when they take the Google offer vs the Goldman one :)
70.
by upquark 13y ago
AdTech is a broken industry with most participants providing zero to negative value to the world. They are basically just nodes in a messy, unregulated, scam-ridden chain of players moving an ad from technically illiterate buy side to an eq
71.
by upquark 13y ago
Where exactly did they make you say "Sir! Yes Sir!"? I have worked in NYC finance and fin tech for years and have never seen anything close to the caricature you're describing. Also, what is Marathon?
72.
by upquark 13y ago
What makes it right is purely pragmatic and a function of our abilities and limitations, scientific and computational resources, time constraints, etc. We could in theory run quantum simulations for everything, given the resources, but we d
73.
by upquark 13y ago
Possibly poor wording, my intent was to say that you cannot dismiss or underestimate statistics in modeling the mind because the damn thing is a sophisticated statistical information retrieval system (with some higher-level structure on top
74.
by upquark 13y ago
No I'm not arguing for a statistics-only scheme, just that you can't ignore it / abstract it away, and that its role is crucial in cognition. I think we agree with each other.
75.
by upquark 13y ago
Not sure what AI mysticism is, nor how you arrived at the conclusion that statistical learning models will come up with thunder gods.
76.
by upquark 13y ago
The issue being discussed is the choice of right level of abstraction and the right tools for modeling a given real-world phenomenon. My comment says that statistics is essential in modeling this particular phenomenon, based on my experienc
77.
by upquark 13y ago
You need to use the right level of abstraction for the problem at hand. For modeling intelligence, abstracting away the probabilistic/statistical aspects of cognition greatly limits your options. Continuing the web development analogy,
78.
by upquark 13y ago
100% agreed. GEB is a great book, but Hofstadter hasn't been relevant in this field for a while now (AFAIK). Good old fashioned AI approaches show what a giant blind spot our minds are for our species, how little introspection goes on
79.
by upquark 13y ago
You cannot not reduce it to statistics, vast majority of your cognitive activity is statistical in nature, in the more general sense of the word. The actual high-level structured thoughts are a very thin layer on top of a huge statistical i
80.
by upquark 13y ago
Nah, data science is AI-complete, like natural language understanding. Think of current state of data science as just the next iteration / rebranding of statistics, powered by newest developments in CS, machine learning and software in
81.
by upquark 13y ago
Cool, thanks for the link.
82.
by upquark 13y ago
Wouldn't it be in the best interest of memes to never let us figure them out though? To never obtain this view of the world where memes are exposed for the parasites that they are? Maybe "theory of memetics" is a next-generat
83.
by upquark 13y ago
Awesome post. About the "fantastic two-gene change": can't there ever be a force pushing for a species to obtain two independent mutations more or less simultaneously? What I mean by that is pressure on a species to maintain
84.
by upquark 13y ago
There are two issues here, I think. One, as a layman in math you end up reading about / paying attention to the discoveries you can parse and understand, thus introducing a bias by ignoring the results that require years of math traini
85.
by upquark 13y ago
Thank you for the links, very interesting. There is also this: http://genderdreaming.com/family-balancing/natural-gender-sw... I have noticed that in some small immigrant population pockets in the US the majority of of
86.
by upquark 13y ago
I wouldn't say 1.4k is a reasonable rent in DC, not in my experience at least. Not even if you move out to the nearby suburbs.
87.
by upquark 13y ago
Still, I think that specific issue is on the radar all the time and addressed by presidents and politicians precisely because of its divisive nature (can be easily used to divide people into warring factions, for historical/religious&#
88.
by upquark 13y ago
Those are minor issues blown out of proportion to engage the population, divide it along imaginary lines and have them go through victories and defeats and enjoy the show. It's the circus part of "bread and circuses". Real is
89.
by upquark 13y ago
You notice the corruption of mass media when they cover a subject you are closely familiar with, but the general population can be easily misled on (say, political situation in an obscure corner of the world). They don't try too hard t
90.
by upquark 13y ago
You can start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory

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