Viewing profile — ShannonAlther

On his original blog the author once said that he was considering making the title of his new blog an anagram, and that the closest options were Slate Star Codex and Astral Codex T…

Just realized I didn't know this: how are you supposed to comply with GDPR if your clients are partially anonymous?

This article leans too much on the current state of the art to extrapolate towards possible futures, and it shouldn't. AI is dangerous, sure, but the examples we're getting here ar…

I bet the cat soon learns that sitting in front of the door magically summons a human to let it out.

How many companies would this work at? Seems like more than a few might take exception to a potential employee trying to circumvent their normal hiring pipeline.

https://www.gwern.net Gwern is an independent researcher who studies... a lot of things. He's documented some of the history of the dark web, blogs about his nootropics experience …

Magic: the Gathering is also Turing complete. https://www.toothycat.net/~hologram/Turing/

Seconded.

You are right, but my point is that general relativity gives us enough of a causal model for gravity that throwing up our hands and saying "It's a mystery" is unacceptable.

Teixobactin, I assume? Their new method of parallel testing promising proto-antibiotics is really neat, but given the ratio of successes to failures, I wouldn't hold out much hope …

> The law of gravity is one example, since nobody knows where gravity actually comes from. Please stop this. While I agree with your overall point, we know what causes gravity (the…

Yes, it does. More or less every class of antibiotic was invented between 1940 and 1960. Discoveries since that period have been mostly incremental.

I'm also in the "everything is kind of okay in my workflow" boat. One of the major problems I hear about and encounter frequently is that biotech is a painful industry. Creating an…

Per the announcement on the linked page, NCEES will no longer be offering the Software Engineering exam after the final run in April 2019. It's been available for 5 years and looks…

Amongst other things, the original publication of the memo by Gizmodo stripped it of all the charts, citations and references Damore included.

Not so. First off, we're speaking specifically about Google, which might generalize to the extent of 'high performance' software jobs. Google hiring is selective enough that they c…

The luaJIT compiler[0] is stupendously good. Bob Nystrom, one of the developers for Dart, once said "Mike Pall [the developer] is a robot from the future"[1]. [0] http://luajit.org…

Python has the libraries you're looking for: numpy, scikit-learn, Keras, TensorFlow, etc. But because everyone else is going to tell you to use Python, I'll say that R and MATLAB/O…

That makes calculating the final price far too hard. If the customer has to use a smartphone app to shop anyways, why not just have the app display the personalized price?

Why would you allow users to change their display name? It's a forum, not social media.

Over what period did you have your investment in RealtyShares?

> Which makes it harder for households to hoard money. In other countries, we call this 'saving for retirement.'

Meaningless insofar as that goes, but being fairly clever is necessary to become a physician.

Just to be clear, when people say "Communism" and specify "the Soviet Union", that's adequate for rhetorical purposes. You can clarify that the Soviets were merely extremely social…

A lot of states have heavy restrictions on transport of alcohol, a sort of state-mandated middleman that is either parasitic or fulfills an important regulatory purpose depending o…