Viewing profile — llasram

Neat! I work on a system with some very similar math, but a slightly different model. I really like how in bayesect making the error rates asymmetric via independent Beta priors on…

Say you somehow have advance knowledge of the burning of the Library of Alexandria. Is it legal to steal as many books as you can from the Library prior? Of course not. Is this the…

I think the broad market trends are pretty suggestive -- consumers in general don't care about DRM or wouldn't see e.g. Amazon's success in the ebook business. For more specifics I…

I'm just a consumer, but Google Play Books are in fact available for DRM-free download when so-requested by the publisher. Or least that's the reason Google gives when directly pro…

I agree that innumeracy of various degrees is a widespread problem, but I do think the last example is because the term "false positive rate" sounds to many people like it should m…

That we're modeling the outcome of a coin toss as a sample space set containing at least two event elements, one of which we call "heads," and that we have a probability measure wh…

Worth it just for finding out about `stty -ixon`. I never would have guessed from the `stty` man page description that this option would give me back C-s and C-q to bind to somethi…

My take from the introduction is that the books is going to mostly be about probabilistic graphical models (PGMs). I look forward to reading this book when finished and hope they f…

If you want more detail on this story, I found Peter Nichol's book A Voyage for Madmen on the race as a whole quite engaging.

I've been enrolled in an MS Statistics program part-time while working full-time. I'm around half-way done, and by the end it will have taken me three years total taking two classe…

I had a pretty different reaction to "Story of Your Life." I can maybe see the description of "nihilist," but only in the sense of "positive nihilism" -- nothing outside of conscio…

That's a really good question. The best people I've seen so far have had a willingness to rigorously align their models with reality, plus the knowledge and/or experience to know w…

And in my experience the opposite applies as well. Having a PhD in a field providing the necessary background in theory doesn't necessarily imply the skills and experience required…

I think this is a good example of the problems with autodidactism. For all its flaws, structured education is what makes common knowledge common. When you study on your own, you do…

Which perhaps is evidence for their claim of personality-based self-selection?

I agree, both in the "mostly agree with" and disagreeing with the list regarding timbre. Adding yet another logging library to the mix doesn't fix the mess of Java logging librarie…

Wikipedia has a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_video_games...

Quad and squad. The joys of a character-set derived by the character overstriking your original development teletype could produce.

No. Even in toy examples with little internal structure, consider the length of the sequence generated. For both models we can include a synthetic "end of sequence" token which the…

Ok, bad example :-) Rust's mutable-iterator model of abstract collections supports this directly, but Clojure's functional-reduction model does not. I'll see if I can think of a be…

I could have been clearer. By the scare-quoted "collection" I meant a value which implements the relevant collection-like interface. In Clojure this is any object `reduce` works on…

Kind of. Rust iterator adapters are closer to the previous Clojure reducers namespace and the Java 8 streams API. All three take a "collection" and return a new "collection" which …

Unless the attacker controlled the domain TTL, maybe? But good point -- I was thinking of a similar attack using random domains.

I bet the observed "random" source addresses are open recursive DNS servers. For this kind of attack they provide essentially free traffic-washing for whatever actual traffic-gener…