Viewing profile — alex-g

Why not? The point is to be able to distinguish the cases.

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/~byorg…

Systemic biases complicate the assessment of merit.

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…

Maybe part of the explanation for this specific attack is incompetence - miscommunication, comparatively junior people exceeding their authority, subordinates afraid to object, and…

> 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 wo…

Is your work at all based on Rydeheard and Burstall's "Computational Category Theory"? They also do category theory in ML.

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 th…

Computer Modern http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Modern

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…

Yes, the commentary on the nationality of each author is definitely in the category of "benchmarking the capabilities of the outside world".

Congratulations! This was the slipperiest of all slippery slope arguments on HN today. Report to the nearest male genocide facility to claim your prize.

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 see…

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 c…

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…

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 …

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 ca…

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 dif…

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 …

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://homotopytypethe…

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 sp…

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 t…