alex-g

9 ms·

1.
by alex-g 11y ago
Why not? The point is to be able to distinguish the cases.
2.
The Lego prosthetic arm that children can create and hack themselves(theguardian.com)
1 points by alex-g 11y ago|0 comments
3.
by alex-g 11y ago
Just as a breadcrumb for readers who are curious about the generating function stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorial_species (see also https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~byorgey/pub/speci
4.
by alex-g 11y ago
Systemic biases complicate the assessment of merit.
5.
by alex-g 11y ago
Seamus Heaney began his translation of Beowulf with "So", rendering the Old English "Hwaet" in a more natural way than the usual archaic "Listen!", "Lo!", "Hark!" kind of thing. In the intro
6.
by alex-g 11y ago
Maybe part of the explanation for this specific attack is incompetence - miscommunication, comparatively junior people exceeding their authority, subordinates afraid to object, and everyone doubling down rather than admitting defeat. I coul
7.
by alex-g 12y ago
> BGP announcements, themselves unencrypted, aren't protected with DNSSEC. This is true, but only because BGP announcements don't involve DNS, and so all the DNS security in the world won't help. Agreed that there is a lo
8.
by alex-g 12y ago
Is your work at all based on Rydeheard and Burstall's "Computational Category Theory"? They also do category theory in ML.
9.
by alex-g 12y ago
I wonder if this even needs to be something in the home. Wouldn't it also make sense to install these things, in bulk, in a place where they could service several homes? Say, at the block level. If it is part of power distribution infr
10.
by alex-g 12y ago
Computer Modern http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Modern
11.
by alex-g 12y ago
This reminded me of Chiang's 2008 story "Exhalation" ( http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/exhalation/ ), which explores cognition and entropy through the idea of minds which are built as pneuma
12.
by alex-g 12y ago
Yes, the commentary on the nationality of each author is definitely in the category of "benchmarking the capabilities of the outside world".
13.
by alex-g 12y ago
Congratulations! This was the slipperiest of all slippery slope arguments on HN today. Report to the nearest male genocide facility to claim your prize.
14.
by alex-g 12y ago
The Mill certainly raises a lot of interesting code generation and optimization issues. I'm sure there's plenty of scope for figuring out good optimization strategies, as a lot seems to depend on the ability of the compiler to mak
15.
by alex-g 12y ago
It's interesting, but the problem I have with the presentation is that the modern manifestation of this idea has nothing to do with Buddhism. While we can maybe say that Buddhism came up with some similar-looking stuff, there's
16.
by alex-g 12y ago
Sperner's Lemma is probably my favorite mathematical result. It is easy to explain, and pretty easy to prove, but it has a higher than average number of "aha" moments along the way. The mathematics is not too intimidating - p
17.
by alex-g 12y ago
This was not a referendum, nor even a proper opinion poll - just a partisan petition. The figure of 89% is completely meaningless. Both the Daily Mail, and this article, prefer to make their own political point (we hate government and taxe
18.
Seasteading(tinyletter.com)
3 points by alex-g 12y ago|0 comments
19.
by alex-g 13y ago
I disagree that the slides have to be able to stand alone. Critical material shouldn't be completely ephemeral, but there's no reason that everything has to be on the slides. It can be in lecture notes, textbooks, and so on.
20.
by alex-g 13y ago
Yes, the interface idea is basically the right thing, but there are technical difficulties which aren't immediately obvious. For example, we'd like to be able to prove that two different implementations of the natural numbers are
21.
by alex-g 13y ago
Right, this is how mathematics really works. But formalizations of mathematics may suffer from leaky abstractions. If we prove facts about numbers by compiling them into sets, and then using set-theoretic axioms, we might accidentally make
22.
by alex-g 13y ago
This is a very good thought. Some current projects are trying to develop computable mathematical foundations in a more structured way. Homotopy type theory ( http://homotopytypetheory.org/ ) is one example that has a lot of b
23.
by alex-g 13y ago
There's a rather good Let's Play by Psychedelic Eyeball, here: http://lparchive.org/System-Shock-2-(by-Psychedelic-Eyeball)... As I recall, he does a good job of holding back on spoilers, but you might want to fin
24.
by alex-g 13y ago
I don't know a lot about biology, but I do know a lot about proofs, provenance, zero-knowledge, etc. I wonder if there is some way, in an experiment of this kind, to tell whether the embryonic stem cells obtained are "really"
25.
by alex-g 13y ago
Your comment reminded me of this story: "A certain well known mathematican, we'll call him Professor P.T. (these are not his initials...), upon his arrival at Harvard University, was scheduled to teach Math 1a (the first semester
26.
by alex-g 13y ago
Suppose you don't have absolute clocks (so you don't know when it's 1pm) but you do have the ability to count time steps. Then you can solve the problem by "pinging" down to the end of the line and back, counting al
27.
The future that everyone forgot – Some of the work we did at Danger(medium.com)
1 points by alex-g 13y ago|0 comments
28.
by alex-g 13y ago
There is no royal road; or if we want some mystical woo, we could say that the journey is the destination, or something. I think that if you're trying to understand P-vs-NP it's not a matter of proceeding definition by definition.
29.
by alex-g 13y ago
If you believe a slippery slope argument, you'll soon find yourself believing any old rubbish.
30.
by alex-g 13y ago
Which definition is being blurred, exactly? Definitions may be being changed, but that's in order to make our words more accurate and more practically useful. It's actually quite hard to determine who is the intended target of a

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