Viewing profile — Totient

Scott Aaronson argues that, based on what we know about quantum mechanics, Wolfram's "long-range thread" cannot reproduce special relativity and Bell inequality violations: www.sco…

I'm reminded of the classic Charles Baggage quote: On two occasions I have been asked, "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come ou…

This makes perfect sense. I know people who would be terrified of the thought that their organs could be harvested while they might yet recover, but also people who be horrified th…

I agree, and disagree with the author. > "Vision 1: CONNECT KNOWLEDGE, PEOPLE, AND CATS." > This is the correct vision. I would say this is a correct vision, which I happen to be i…

Satire, aside, I think a very short addition to the last line holds a lot of truth: "A hash is simple. A hash is fast. A hash is all you need to start with ". I can think of plenty…

(Theoretically, at least) The ability to exercise a line-item veto would help. The rider to build an new bridge to nowhere would get vetoed, and the rest of the bill would go throu…

I agree. It would be nice if everyone was exposed to programming, just to get a feel for what is possible/plausible - plus the benefits of learning how to think through a problem l…

Looks like a system to setup up assurance contracts for funding software. Glad to see more people trying to make this sort of thing work. What's interesting is that you can actuall…

There was a followup using actual shocks on a puppy. Similar results: http://www.holah.co.uk/files/sheridan_king_1972.pdf

Hmm... I kind of want to figure out a way to make CAPTCHA-coin work now. Cryptocurrency mining for the people! I just can't think of a good way to generate CAPTCHAs (or something s…

Speaking analogously, "If we gave everyone one in the world a device that randomly shot paint at the wall, I would be more surprised if no one ended up with an interesting pattern.…

I love this description of quantum. The paper Aaronson links to, "Quantum Theory from Five Reasonable Axioms" ( http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0101012 ), is also a great read. The "…

> Had Java been not so broken for numeric stuff I'm curious, what makes Java an especially poor choice for numerically intensive computing? Is the JIT penalty too high, or is it so…

You don't need a validation set. I'm pretty sure you still want a test set.

Instead of "rest" (which the author mentions is a core function), the Clojure convention for getting the remaining items appears to be "more"; e.g. [x y & more] I really like this …

I don't understand the difference between fn and fn* . After some brief experimenting in the REPL, they seem to behave exactly the same, the only difference being that fn* is what …

The problem is that pretty much the entire standard library isn't thread safe. It would take some serious work to get OCaml ready, unless you stick to message passing between disti…

The guy I work for really has no idea how easy certain tasks are once you automate them. I have done nothing to correct his misconceptions. (I'm a CS grad student, working under a …

Clojure feels like a 'compromise' Haskell, but I mean that in a good way. Haskell really wants to pretend that everything is a pure function. But I think this is a case where the c…

I wonder where things like classic rock / broadway musicals / opera / etc. fits on this spectrum. I really appreciate including Shakespeare and Moby Dick on the spectrum, but I'd s…

I really like this idea and it got me thinking about a lesser, but still bad, disaster: If all computers were to disappear tomorrow (let's say a super-EMP, or something) how could …

The Fourier transform .gif was gorgeous. Anyone know of a similar one for Laplace transforms? (I'm still having trouble building up intuition for the Laplace transform.)