apw

6 ms·

1.
by apw 12y ago
I found these slides very helpful: http://fodava.gatech.edu/files/uploaded/DLS/Vapnik.pdf In particular, I was unsure after reading the original article whether the additional information--for example, the po
2.
by apw 12y ago
One possibility is to use the neuromorphic chips as souped-up branch predictors -- instead of predicting one bit, as in a branch predictor, predict all bits relevant for speculative execution. This can effect large-scale automatic parallel
3.
RISC-V: An Open Standard for SoCs(eetimes.com)
52 points by apw 12y ago|26 comments
4.
by apw 12y ago
The IBM Blue Gene/Q cannot in any reasonable way be described as "racks of PCs running Linux with souped up network cards".
5.
by apw 12y ago
I thought the Owhadi et al. paper was about model mispecification; i.e., the true model is not in the hypothesis space. That's pretty fundamentally different--and far less of a problem--than gradient descent's "sensitivity t
6.
by apw 12y ago
It's not clear that a nicely formatted error message is preferable to a core dump. With a core dump one can explore the execution environment at the time of the crash. A nice compromise is a macro that prints an error message and then
7.
by apw 12y ago
I don't think that "it can be emulated by computers" follows from "intelligence is a purely physical phenomenon". Even fairly simple quantum systems (which are "purely physical phenomena") cannot be emulat
8.
by apw 12y ago
It's quite likely that he was using `perf': $ perf stat make ... 116,222 page-faults # 0.046 M/sec ... https://perf.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Tutorial
9.
by apw 12y ago
I'm surprised someone hasn't written a Markov Chain-based Yik Yak post generator. It would learn all the worst insults at a particular school, then apply them to the entire student body at random intervals. After a while, nobody
10.
by apw 12y ago
While the visualization is attractive, my fear is that it cannot convey the deeper reason why those sine and cosine waves magically sum to the desired function. Leaving rigour aside for the moment: think of functions f : R -> R as infi
11.
by apw 12y ago
If you can express your workflow as a set of dependencies (granted, not all workflows are easily expressed this way), make gives you parallel and incremental computation "for free". Imagine that you needed to download a tar archiv
12.
by apw 12y ago
For those looking for some details behind how Crazy Stone actually works, this set of slides may help: http://remi.coulom.free.fr/JFFoS/JFFoS.pdf
13.
by apw 13y ago
The codebook of a lossless predictive coding system is exactly "say[ing] the same things in different words".
14.
by apw 13y ago
The dead forests you mentioned may have became massive coal beds via the "charcoal route"; i.e. a global firestorm may have incinerated essentially the entire biosphere. The global debris layer created by the end-Cretaceous
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by apw 13y ago
I checked the FAQ, but didn't see an answer -- how do you prevent malicious actors from returning bogus data?
16.
Parsing: The Solved Problem That Isn't(tratt.net)
2 points by apw 13y ago|1 comments
17.
by apw 13y ago
What prevents some enterprising high school student from purchasing some Atrazine off Amazon.com, catching a few hundred tadpoles from their local pond, and doing their own study?
18.
by apw 13y ago
Its worth nothing that as this arms race proceeds, the historical record of Bitcoin transactions becomes harder to undo, and 51% attacks become too costly for even some nation-states.
19.
by apw 13y ago
Could you please elaborate on "and surprisingly it needs to be intrinsically worthless"?
20.
by apw 13y ago
Bitcoin is far more than "just" a solution to the Byzantine Generals problem. Inside every Bitcoin transaction is a small program that contains no loops. If that program when executed returns true, the transaction is valid. The s
21.
by apw 13y ago
It's possible that someone has found a way to speed up scrypt. We could solve for a lower bound on what that speedup must be.
22.
by apw 13y ago
Since most transactions are on the order of 1/1000 of a Bitcoin, it's useful to rephrase what you said as: around 150 million mBTC are being transacted (on the blockchain) per day.
23.
by apw 13y ago
This is only true if you use the simplest Bitcoin transaction. However, Bitcoin supports programmable m-of-n transactions, which enable highly nuanced levels of risk hedging. I suspect that it is only a matter of time before Silicon Valle
24.
by apw 13y ago
You make a good point. It's easy for me to criticize Bitcoin from the standpoint of assuming it is the official currency of some country, or the world's only currency. However, in so doing I am unintentionally ignoring the much m
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by apw 13y ago
Will you need to change that definition if I show you a machine learning algorithm capable of significantly outperforming the best human algorithms on the resume classification problem?
26.
by apw 13y ago
Thank you for your comment. Very interesting points. Isn't it wrong to say "compiled their C code at the lowest optimization level" though? As I read the paper, they compiled their C code at -O2. It's hard to work bac
27.
by apw 13y ago
It's not clear to me why this author, and many others, seem start with the assumption that Bitcoin has become the only currency in a country (or the world), then proceed to list all the bad things that would occur. It seems much more u
28.
by apw 13y ago
You might want to read about Dynamo: http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/1999/HPL-1999-78.pdf "Contrary to intuition, we demonstrate that it is possible to use a piece of software to improve the performance of
29.
by apw 13y ago
Good point, the minimum security of Bitcoin is that of gold; i.e. a safe guarded by people with weapons. But since Bitcoin is digital, its maximum security is far, far higher. Your private keys can be encrypted and safely stored with any
30.
by apw 13y ago
MPI has a reduce operator. On some supercomputers, the operator is implemented in an ASIC. It is quite easy to implement map/reduce style programs in MPI. It is quite difficult or impossible to implement the parallel algorithms that

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