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I find his thoughts about the potential limits of humanity provocative and really clever. These three parts made great impression on me: > And in fact, you could argue that the rea…

I think the point is that when the AI takes over the control of the world it does not have to be through a technological singularity, with Roko's Basilisk and all the drama. It cou…

Yes, you are right, it is much simpler when you have just a single number to "optimize" across population. And the correlations are strong indeed. But if you want to explain more v…

I do not want one-pixel gifs, because the only use of such techniques is exploiting the HTTP "referer" field.

Not likely, given that you are allowed to edit comments.

I'm from east Europe, so the problem could not concern me as it has been written, as nobody here really flashes their money around like a clown. But I remember the feeling of being…

Well, seems that you are right. I stand corrected.

To be precise, Alice quits programming because modern languages lack proper concurrency specification, and thus lack actual "Math" in this area. I can sympathize with that.

This is so cool. But, here is a question: why? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVd-rYIqSy8 Because we can.

Fabrice Bellard also did some research on pi digits calculations. Because of that, in 2009 he held a record for the longest pi expansion ever calculated. http://bellard.org/pi/

Ebola is a very "clever" virus with its interferon-blocking properties. But still, out of the infections we still cannot vaccinate against, influenza has been the single most deadl…

Well, considering: the extreme working hours (that can in extreme cases result in death, or a psychiatric disease), high risk of exposure to drugs, the fact that the starting banki…

I started some basic calculations in Google to find out what do you mean. So I converted 6.5 TeV to about 1 microjoule, then typed '1.21 GW / 1 uJ' to find out the beam intensity i…

Well, I will argue with the examples you have provided. As to maintaining a blog, take a look at Joel on Software's "Advice for Computer Science College Students"[1], section "Lear…

Exactly. You do not need to understand what does NP-hardness mean to be an excellent developer. Understanding complexity, computability and modern logics is pretty satisfying, I'm …

Interviews are incomparably easier than good programming competitions.

I meant a distribution with "discrete" probability, i.e. a distribution where the probabilities of singletons are all equal and nonzero, so that a simple Bayesian argument could po…

It still does hold up, but becomes more complicated. In general, there is no uniform distribution over any infinite set. We might: a) think about a pipe spitting out objects that h…

That would be only delaying the issue, as QE is a program of buying bonds with imaginary money, not giving out the imaginary money for free. Bonds have maturity dates. http://www.f…

The title seems to be misleading. Nowhere in the article does the author explicitly state that salts should not be used, because well, they should be used. His point was that salts…

No, of course not by censorship. Through: fines for monopolist practices (happened to Microsoft), general smear campaign (happens to Amazon in Germany over working conditions), pok…

Similar argument can be applied to China. This is precisely why Zuckerberg is learning Mandarin and networking there.

I participated in a blind test between Google, Bing and Yahoo in my Information Retrieval class at a university, back in 2013. The results were: 1) Google, 2) Bing, 3) Yahoo - for …

It is not a bug in the JVM, it is an obscure bug in the JNI-ed code. As to why this happens - perhaps read the blog post?

This is a very sound approach. The main benefit is that all JVM languages can utilize optimizations if the optimizations are in the JVM, thus logic duplication is reduced. Also, pl…