Viewing profile — brent

Look at the version in the comment posted by joshma: http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.042/spring12/mcsfull.pdf You must not have been the only person to notice this. The definition i…

I think your subset sum problem (the rock piles) is decent. However, for it to be useful I think you have to make it clear which class it is in (NP) and why (it is easy to check a …

Numerical Linear Algebra by Trefethen and Bao is well regarded.

This blog post seems to be copied from http://20bits.com/articles/graph-theory-part-iii-facebook/ without any attribution. It was also posted on yc only two weeks ago (see http://n…

I don't understand the interpretation of the principal eigenvalue either. Perhaps there is a more suitable interpretation in the directed case, but I'm not sure of that either. I t…

Under mild conditions of the undirected graph (basically that it is not bipartite and that it is connected) one can use the Perron-Frobenius theorem. So, to remove the ambiguity yo…

Pardon my naivety, but what do you mean by "thatched airplanes"?

This is why different communities accept p-values at certain levels (typically <0.05). You have to live with some amount of uncertainty when the data generating mechanism is random…

The claim is that the proof is unfixable. Proofs are either right or wrong. Good academics are supposed to checks proofs of their colleagues. There is no claim as to the merit of c…

If you find Sudoku boring you just need to add more constraints. For example, try solving one by considering some ordering on the entries (say, Left-to-Right then Top-to-Bottom) an…

Wait... hasn't this idea come and gone about 10 times in the last 10 years. I remember when I begged 37 signals to add this as a small feature about 4 years ago and they laughed it…

Sounds like an amazing idea... strikingly similar to the idea I pitched to YC in an interview in November, 2006 :-/. I guess they didn't like our team or progress. Bummer.

I can't believe no one has mentioned this, but it seems to me the most important thing is how well you can erase the marker. Assuming it works well you should demonstrate this. I s…

I can't claim to know who Clay Johnson is, but I am really interested in his low contribution to Wikipedia article length ratio.

I think it would be interesting to compare 2 hours of output from this guy vs. 100 hours of output at prices mentioned in various posts.

I'm not sure you've actually addressed his concern. I think the ability to use one (in an engineering sense) and get seemingly good results is separate from the issue of fully util…

I cannot let comments like this stand. I have seen little difference between students from the top few schools and the rest. If you are only doing an undergrad I see little reason …

Who do you think probably funded this? His advisor is funded by (at least) ONR, ARL, and DARPA.

My guess is he meant go and not go, the programming language, or go moku.

What? There exists a "top 5" for any ranked list with 5 or more entries. Anyways... I am sure he was referring to those 4 + either UIUC or Cornell.

It appears you likely have neighbors working nearby. How do they feel about the Grados?

Once again: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=928726

The 95% CI is going to be roughly 15-31%.

I'm not Danish, but on their behalf I'd like to note that these are called Tuborgs after the beer company. Apparently their delivery trucks had a profile that looked like the brace…

My advice is not to try to read through these books (like Elements or Bishop's book). If I were to learn the topic from scratch again * I would: 1. Learn basic terminology (basical…