Viewing profile — njohnson41

Even with the birthday problem, sqrt(52!) is still about 10^34, which is still huge. It's unlikely that any two (sufficiently random) shuffles in history have been the same.

Or maybe it's just a good excuse to carry fewer cups and pitchers around?

You're right (and nitpicking nitpicks seems appropriate to me :P). But, I'm pretty sure the assumptions of logistic regression are even stronger than just that. The inputs are assu…

Still, in any consistent way of assigning probabilities to events, if A implies B, then P(A) Neural network outputs are not probabilities. I think that's the main lesson here.

I personally liked "Godel's Proof" by Ernest Nagel. It's pretty old, but it's to-the-point and inexpensive.

Fair enough; I'll be a little more precise. I think the correct way to state it is: "all true statements are either tautologies, or can be determined empirically (with arbitrarily …

Especially if you assume that the scientific method is always valid--that all true statements can be determined empirically--you can't make statements like "Ultimate Meaning doesn'…

> ... all possible combinations of 8-16 characters with 100 character possibilities ... Yes, but this doesn't even come close to describing the typical users' password, which is mo…

This should be marked (2004), not (2014).

There could also be a simpler causal link: books and lucrative jobs could both caused by higher family socio-economic status.

Kolmogorov complexity is definitely meaningful, but it's not (Shannon) entropy, just conceptually similar. Many people think of something like Kolmogorov-complex sequences when the…

Right, the amount of entropy per bit of sequence is always between 0 (deterministic) and 1 (every bit is independent and 50/50) (... or between 0 and log2(k) in general if the elem…

That's because this result is not about combining weak deterministic PRNGs, it's about combining entropy sources (like two hardware random number generators). This has always been …

Interestingly, that may be the new ordering if the disks are SSDs, but the typical seek latency on a spinning disk (~5 ms) is definitely higher than the latency to read data from a…

Sounds a lot like python's "pickle" module (which is super-useful for prototyping), but with the same achilles' heel: all of your serialized objects can now run arbitrary code when…

Of course, knowing that extremists are usually engineers only helps you if you have a known extremist and want to guess his profession. Extremists are a pretty small group, and eng…

I think one of the common terms for this is a "motte and bailey doctrine", where people define their terms one way during an argument to make their statements super-defensible, but…

Good article. I'm only a bit disappointed that the author seems not to realize that Bayes' theorem is just a simple consequence of probability theory, and should be attractive not …

There are already multiple known molecular mechanisms for long-term memories though. One of the simplest is spike-timing-dependent plasticity [1], which is caused by the behavior o…

Not if we genetically engineer them to like it first!

I suspect that's an important part of why confident ignorance is seen as the "stupidest" trait. Being confident has social advantages, so without a significant risk of looking stup…

You can convey some of that information to the compiler by using __builtin_unreachable(), e.g.: #define ASSUME(x) if(!(x))__builtin_unreachable() This is compiler-specific, of cour…

"If, after all, Nagel is proven wrong—that is, if subjectivity is in fact reducible to an identifiable network of neural synapses—what is the point of investigating the human condi…

Cryptographic constructions using block ciphers generally rely on the block cipher never having the same input twice with the same key in order to satisfy security models. If you'r…

A "right answer between competing answers" just sounds like a high-entropy belief state over the correct action to take. This doesn't mean you're overanalyzing, it means you don't …