There’s also variation in the amount of children’s television watched by people in the test population. The protagonist mentions seeing “less children’s television than most children in our age cohort”, and it’s a safe bet that this was tracked as part of the data set.
sketerpot
Karma: 3,476
Not just genetic tendencies; it was also meant to look at shared environment, like the TV shows subtly but thoroughly pushing a certain worldview, and the words from teachers saying it explicitly. From the story: they wanted “to find out how well we were doing environment-wise and heredity-wise on people’s kindness and resistance to conformity-pushed cruelty”.
Ah. That web site throws out too many claims to investigate fully—who has the time? -- but if you google around for a sampling of them you’ll notice that they tend to crumble under scrutiny. The sections mentioning quantum mechanics are especially blatant: they’re gibberish, total incoherent misuse of terminology.
EDIT: There’s a sequence of articles called Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions which is relevant here. One that applies in particular is Fake Explanations, which could be summarized as “If you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge.” When people talk about “etheric worlds on different frequencies”, or “energy vortices swirling faster than the speed of light on the earth plane”, what does this predict? What, concretely, does it mean? If it can explain anything, then it predicts nothing.
Did you mean to post a link here? I’m not seeing one.
If you were to try and search the space of all possible inputs for MD5, you’d quickly(ish) find an input that collided with the Obama Werewolf input, but it’d be garbage.
Really? Last I checked, the best known preimage attack against MD5 was too slow to be practical. Finding collisions is drastically easier, though I don’t know any method for doing it with arbitrary plain-text English sentences.
Not just modern sexual attitudes, but specifically the sexual attitudes you see in the Harry Potter fanfiction community. And I’m sure it was meant to be jarring. Magical Britain’s culture is subtly but deeply different from that of the muggle country that shares its borders; it would be profoundly weird if there were no surprises, no culture shock.
He’s the Super Hufflepuff! He’s taking all the electives, which is physically impossible without a Time Turner! He was mentioned right before Harry started making thorough off-screen preparations, and then conspicuously forgotten for the rest of the chapter! Dramatic logic dictates that he’s got to show up at some point, probably in some way that involves time travel.
… Unless the whole thing was a throwaway joke about how useless Cedric was in Goblet of Fire, in which case yeah, I guess it was pretty funny.
An alternate interpretation is that Voldemort was strengthening a few of the spells that Sprout cast, as well as the spell that Tonks used to win the battle, and this use of his own magic was what caused Harry’s doom-sense to tingle. If that’s the case, then there would be none of his magic on the troll.
Other useful dummy values are $1, $42, $1,000,000, $9999999999999.95, and “’; DROP TABLE salary; --”. As someone who has written input validation code for web forms on a few occasions, I personally give you my blessing to subvert them.
I’m not entirely sure what your argument is yet, but here’s a simple example utility function that might be interesting as a baseline:
def utility(universe): return 42This function halts for all inputs, and assigns each input a desirability value that can be compared with others. What sort of utility function are you imagining?
It would definitely be a rationality quote if it went on to quote the part where Eric Flint decided to test his hypothesis by putting some of his books online, for free, and watching his sales numbers.
The Reddit guys really, really dislike doing schema updates at their scale. They were getting very slow, and their replication setup was not happy about being told to, say, index a new column while people are doing lots of reads and writes at the same time. So they eventually said “to hell with it; we’ll just make a document database, with no schema, and handle consistency problems by not handling them. Man, do not even ask us about joins.” This seems to have made them much happier than the ‘better’ database design they used to use, which is important when you’re a too-small team dealing with terrifying scaling issues, and you know that a lot of people are watching you because they are the ones causing the scaling issues.
This design sure does make writing SQL queries a pain, though, and it’s less than ideal for a site like Less Wrong, which doesn’t do much changing the code.
“Focus on the future productivity of the asset you are considering. [...] If you instead focus on the prospective price change of a contemplated purchase, you are speculating. There is nothing improper about that. I know, however, that I am unable to speculate successfully, and I am skeptical of those who claim sustained success at doing so. Half of all coin-flippers will win their first toss; none of those winners has an expectation of profit if he continues to play the game. And the fact that a given asset has appreciated in the recent past is never a reason to buy it.”
-- Warren Buffett, in some thoughts on investing.
If it makes you feel better, I studied computer science but frequently feel a sense of inadequacy because it feels less hard core than “real engineering”.
Your sense of inadequacy is probably unjustified. I studied electrical engineering and computer science. Within both fields there’s a wide range of hardcore-ness. In both fields you can find people who do incredibly difficult things, and a much larger group of people who do the bare minimum, and people everywhere in-between. I have seen some startlingly incompetent people with engineering degrees, so the lower bound here is pretty low.
So if coming from a top school makes SV employers think (correctly or incorrectly) that you’re a top programmer, this could go a way towards explaining the salary thing.
This also works if coming from a top school correlates with some factor that makes SV employers think you’re a top programmer. The most obvious example of such a factor is programming skill: you’d expect people at top schools to program better, on average, than people from obscure schools.
Have you heard a baby being born? A baby is all like “AAAAA! AAAAA! AAAAAAA!”, except less textual and more piercing in pitch. Show me a definition of “dignified” which encompasses such shrieking, and I’ll show you a definition of “dignified” which lacks mainstream recognition.
I’d say that the process of childbirth is a clear, up-front warning that it definitely won’t be.
Not only does exercise become its own reward, but skipping exercise becomes its own penalty—you feel physically crappy if you go too long without getting your fix. I see this as a good thing.
Exercising with someone is also an great way to socialize if you’re a quiet person, and ill-at-ease with small talk. Pauses in conversation are natural when people are breathing heavily, there’s always at least one shared topic you can talk about, and the exertion tends to make people more cheerful.
I looked into it and, yes, this looks basically correct with a caveat: it’s computationally very expensive to get those first stages to land on their own at a convenient, precisely chosen location. We’ve been doing propulsive landings for decades with e.g. the Apollo moon landers and the Viking Mars probes, the latter of which had to be fully autonomous because of speed-of-light delays. Landing a big long rocket is a bit harder because of its somewhat unwieldy shape, but inverted pendulum control problems are definitely not a new thing.
So where does it get computationally hard? There are two parts to it. The first part is computing a trajectory and a flight plan—when you should fire up the engines, which way you should be pointing them, what the aerodynamic control surfaces should be doing—which should get you to the desired landing location. This is a tricky optimization problem, with a bunch of annoyingly non-convex control constraints. The second hard part, and the reason you can’t just precompute the flight plan on a really big computer before launching the rocket, is that you need to adjust the plan in realtime. There will inevitably be unpredictable deviations from the original plan caused by things like wind or variation in atmospheric density. If you don’t compensate for them, those deviations will add up; the Curiosity Mars rover, for example, was a big improvement over its predecessors because its predicted landing zone was an ellipse that only measured 20 km by 7 km.
The algorithm (PDF) that I hear SpaceX is using does require some pretty serious processing power if you’re going to be recomputing your entire flight plan several times per second. A version suitable for realtime use wasn’t flight-tested until the early 2010s.