Viewing profile — ck113

Seth Roberts has made his entire reputation on self-experimentation. (Partly on the strange things he claims to have learned by doing it, and also partly on his defense of it as a …

All due respect, I don't think you're getting what Robin Hanson is about. (Which is understandable if this is the only post of his you've ever read.) The point of this post isn't t…

I think it's interesting. Not so much the ultimate question of whether they can find him, but rather the things we learn along the way about exactly how much a reader base with no …

Ok, I know it's violently tangential and pretty silly, but I noticed this in the article too. I thought it was interesting because (I'm guessing) it's not a case of the author not …

It's mostly just a technicality of the definition. NP (and P for that matter) can only contain "decision problems," i.e., problems for which the answer must be Yes or No. So the NP…

Sure, of course. I'm not out to convince anyone that P != NP here, especially not using Proof By Obviousness. I just meant to underline one of the intuitions that makes so many peo…

Ooh! Ooh! I just remembered another cool thing about the "polynomial-time verifier" formulation of NP. It makes it possible to phrase the P vs. NP question much more starkly. The s…

From the article: "Another interesting feature of NP problems is that a solution can be checked in polynomial time by a deterministic Turing machine. So, checking a solution of a N…

I thought this was the most telling line of the article: "Ultimately the first factor of performance is the maturity of the implementation." That supports a common conviction held …

To make it even more abstruse, it's not usually results that we describe as "relativizing", but proofs and proof techniques. For example, the proof technique we call "diagonalizati…

I don't have an opinion about the Scheme -> Python switch, but I didn't find this a very compelling objection. The author seems to assume that a CS degree is meant to teach you to …

If you're interested in wild speculation (I have no idea how Twitter's database works), here's how I interpreted Biz's explanation: With the new system, say user Foo writes "@Bar l…