Viewing profile — machine

"I remember, I'd just had my twentieth birthday. I'd just gotten my Ph.D. And it looked like my plan to "be a physicist" was going just great." I had to stop reading there as I bec…

On a related note: http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/08/untwirling-photo-of.htm...

Even if the film turns out to suck, you can't help but admire this guy's dedication. I wish I had this sort of work ethic / commitment...

But would you trust math olympiad performance over good grades in graduate level math courses? What about publications in respected math journals? If by the time you graduate from …

As other people have mentioned, doing well in college is more about learning a lot and doing research than getting good grades. With this in mind, I think doing well in college can…

The 1-norm tends to also be less sensitive to outliers, and in machine learning, 1-norm regularization leads to sparse solutions. The real reason 2-norm is popular is that it is ea…

I don't know a lot about ILP algorithms, but my understanding of them is that they basically search the space of logical rules for rules that "explain" the examples they are given.…

And what's with the tiny hash symbols at the end of every paragraph. I also found the article unpleasant.

What you are talking about is more along the lines of inductive logic programming, where the goal is to induce general symbolic rules from specific examples. Even with ILP I'm not …

Metric trees (sometimes called ball trees) are a simple generalization of this to arbitrary metrics. They're also useful for points in a high dimensional euclidean space that have …

I understand that it is in the best interests of an open source developer to give support for his software (assuming he wants people to use it), but he's in no way obligated to do …

I have to say, I'm not that sympathetic. If you are using open source software, you can't expect free support, and you definitely can't expect immediate free support. Plus, it actu…

A bit of semantics: what we are talking about here is the difference between statically typed and dynamically typed languages, not strongly and weakly typed. Python is strongly dyn…

I don't see it on there, they must have taken it down. That said, Lisp isn't a really a pure functional language either if that is what you are implying (setf). I don't know enough…

I think these guys seem to be accumulating a lot of smart people with good track records though. It's an ambitious problem for sure but the potential reward justifies the risk. Act…

I don't think it's the pointer dereference so much as the fact that you can't inline virtual methods.

I think the problem is still that there isn't really a clear definition of general intelligence or how it should be embodied on a computer. I agree that putting a bunch of differen…

I agree with tx. With C++ you can often avoid what would be virtual method calls in Java / if statements in C by using templates. This lets you effectively inline every function ca…

I disagree with you on a lot of points. First, I don't think AI has failed to deliver. There are a ton of things we can do now that we couldn't 30 years ago. Just to name a couple,…

For real. If only the world really worked this way. Even programming languages take a bit longer than a week to really learn. I find I go through at least two levels with a program…

Hmm, I don't think this was a bug. There was a pretty popular news story about legless chihuahuas that day (edit - a comment on techcrunch says cnn.com had it on their front page).…

This is completely off topic, but I couldn't resist: http://www.marion.ohio-state.edu/fac/schul/drp/dr.html I've had the misfortune of trying Dr Becker and Dr Perky. Maybe, as in s…

The problem with the colored balls example is that the person drawing the balls from the bag assumes the balls are i.i.d. (independently identically distributed). Put in real world…

I hope this isn't true. I'm not sure about YC start ups but I know that I'm in this field because I love it. If you just want to get rich there are certainly easier ways to do that…

I think they do have some modeling of underlying concepts. I think if I remember correctly they had a search where "politician" matched "mayor", so they at least have synonyms. I t…