njohnson41

6 ms·

1.
by njohnson41 9y ago
Even with the birthday problem, sqrt(52!) is still about 10^34, which is still huge. It's unlikely that any two (sufficiently random) shuffles in history have been the same.
2.
by njohnson41 9y ago
Or maybe it's just a good excuse to carry fewer cups and pitchers around?
3.
by njohnson41 10y ago
You're right (and nitpicking nitpicks seems appropriate to me :P). But, I'm pretty sure the assumptions of logistic regression are even stronger than just that. The inputs are assumed to be independent given the output class, and
4.
by njohnson41 10y ago
Still, in any consistent way of assigning probabilities to events, if A implies B, then P(A) <= P(B). Neural network outputs are not probabilities. I think that's the main lesson here.
5.
by njohnson41 10y ago
I personally liked "Godel's Proof" by Ernest Nagel. It's pretty old, but it's to-the-point and inexpensive.
6.
by njohnson41 10y ago
Fair enough; I'll be a little more precise. I think the correct way to state it is: "all true statements are either tautologies, or can be determined empirically (with arbitrarily high but not necessarily measure-1 probability)&qu
7.
by njohnson41 10y ago
Especially if you assume that the scientific method is always valid--that all true statements can be determined empirically--you can't make statements like "Ultimate Meaning doesn't/does exist". If Ultimate Meaning
8.
by njohnson41 10y ago
> ... all possible combinations of 8-16 characters with 100 character possibilities ... Yes, but this doesn't even come close to describing the typical users' password, which is most likely a 6-letter English word with a capita
9.
by njohnson41 10y ago
This should be marked (2004), not (2014).
10.
by njohnson41 10y ago
There could also be a simpler causal link: books and lucrative jobs could both caused by higher family socio-economic status.
11.
by njohnson41 10y ago
Kolmogorov complexity is definitely meaningful, but it's not (Shannon) entropy, just conceptually similar. Many people think of something like Kolmogorov-complex sequences when they think of "random" sequences, which is (IMO)
12.
by njohnson41 10y ago
Right, the amount of entropy per bit of sequence is always between 0 (deterministic) and 1 (every bit is independent and 50/50) (... or between 0 and log2(k) in general if the element varies over a set of k things). These "weak&qu
13.
by njohnson41 10y ago
That's because this result is not about combining weak deterministic PRNGs, it's about combining entropy sources (like two hardware random number generators). This has always been possible, but it sounds like they've lowered
14.
by njohnson41 10y ago
Interestingly, that may be the new ordering if the disks are SSDs, but the typical seek latency on a spinning disk (~5 ms) is definitely higher than the latency to read data from another machine's memory across ethernet (a few hundred
15.
by njohnson41 11y ago
Sounds a lot like python's "pickle" module (which is super-useful for prototyping), but with the same achilles' heel: all of your serialized objects can now run arbitrary code when you deserialize them!
16.
by njohnson41 11y ago
Of course, knowing that extremists are usually engineers only helps you if you have a known extremist and want to guess his profession. Extremists are a pretty small group, and engineers a much larger one, so I'd have to assume that ex
17.
by njohnson41 11y ago
I think one of the common terms for this is a "motte and bailey doctrine", where people define their terms one way during an argument to make their statements super-defensible, but later redefine them to mean whatever crazy thing
18.
by njohnson41 11y ago
Good article. I'm only a bit disappointed that the author seems not to realize that Bayes' theorem is just a simple consequence of probability theory, and should be attractive not because "maybe the brain is Bayesian", b
19.
by njohnson41 11y ago
There are already multiple known molecular mechanisms for long-term memories though. One of the simplest is spike-timing-dependent plasticity [1], which is caused by the behavior of NMDA receptors shortly before and after depolarization. (T
20.
by njohnson41 11y ago
Not if we genetically engineer them to like it first!
21.
by njohnson41 11y ago
I suspect that's an important part of why confident ignorance is seen as the "stupidest" trait. Being confident has social advantages, so without a significant risk of looking stupid for overlooking something, everyone would
22.
by njohnson41 11y ago
You can convey some of that information to the compiler by using __builtin_unreachable(), e.g.: #define ASSUME(x) if(!(x))__builtin_unreachable() This is compiler-specific, of course, and introduces undefined behavior if the assumpti
23.
by njohnson41 11y ago
"If, after all, Nagel is proven wrong—that is, if subjectivity is in fact reducible to an identifiable network of neural synapses—what is the point of investigating the human condition through a humanistic lens? If what it is like to
24.
by njohnson41 11y ago
Cryptographic constructions using block ciphers generally rely on the block cipher never having the same input twice with the same key in order to satisfy security models. If you're feeding effectively random data into the block cipher
25.
by njohnson41 11y ago
A "right answer between competing answers" just sounds like a high-entropy belief state over the correct action to take. This doesn't mean you're overanalyzing, it means you don't have enough information to be sure
26.
by njohnson41 11y ago
If BPF can be used to modify packets, can a filter be used to send packets through loopback that then come back through the same filter? Sounds like a way to bootstrap a loop.
27.
by njohnson41 11y ago
Correlation, sure. But even as a non-vegetarian, I can understand the argument for not raising animals directly or indirectly for food, due to inefficiency. Vegans who believe that but don't really care about food being "natural&q
28.
by njohnson41 11y ago
I also like how the backpropagation section starts out by immediately talking about how it is really just chain rule application. The backwards-moving pattern of "backpropagation" is really just a side-effect of the derivative cha
29.
by njohnson41 12y ago
LEDs at 4 V DC are probably much easier to control with "microchips", which operate at a similar voltage, than neon at 2-15 KV AC. I agree he worded it badly, but the conclusion still makes sense for a loose reading of "essen
30.
by njohnson41 12y ago
From a physics standpoint, this is a pretty silly idea. Here's why. Whether we're talking about radiation caused by wireless communication (e.g. wifi at 2.4/5 GHz) or high-frequency oscillations in a microprocessor, it's

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