Viewing profile — apw

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 info…

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 speculativ…

The IBM Blue Gene/Q cannot in any reasonable way be described as "racks of PCs running Linux with souped up network cards".

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 pro…

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 compr…

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 phe…

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

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…

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 asid…

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"…

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

The codebook of a lossless predictive coding system is exactly "say[ing] the same things in different words".

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…

I checked the FAQ, but didn't see an answer -- how do you prevent malicious actors from returning bogus data?

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?

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-stat…

Could you please elaborate on "and surprisingly it needs to be intrinsically worthless"?

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 execu…

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.

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.…

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 sus…

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 …

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 pro…