alisonkisk · HackerTrans

alisonkisk

no profile record

comments

5 maanden geledendiscuss

He was 7 years old, so it was impossible for him to give consent for anything. His parents gave consent on his behalf.

5 maanden geledendiscuss

I didn't see that in the document. What page is it on?

5 maanden geledendiscuss

There are probably hundreds of people on this site who had the same enthusiasm for math and time dedication as Terence Tao, but lacked his extreme outlier fluid intelligence, processing speed, perfect memory, and even handwriting talent(!). Terence Tao mastered calculus at an age when most future-mathemician geniuses weren't yet strong readers of chapter books.

5 maanden geledendiscuss

You are saying something interesting but too esoteric. Can you explain for beginners?

5 maanden geledendiscuss

Title: "California’s New Bill Requires DOJ-Approved 3D Printers That Report on Themselves"

Actual fact: California’s New Bill Requires that 3D Printers Get DOJ Approval as Firearm-Blocking"

(The "report on themselves" is fiction invented by Adafruit.)

5 maanden geledendiscuss

Hmm, how many bits has the space of all positive integers?

That's not what the (clumsily written) article is about. It's not about sampling the integers to choose an integer, it's about sampling the prime factors of an integer, as a measure of evenness of distribution of prime factors.

It's measuring the information in the prime factorization, the information in the number as a value.

5 maanden geledendiscuss

Here's an intuitive description of the entropy, [log(log(n)) -sum(log(p_i) log(log(p_i)))]:

The entropy of a random integer N is the volume of the gap between how much space N takes up and how much space its internal components take up.

This can be visualized as The City of N, in base 2. (OP used log_e, but that's too hard to draw.)

1. The Foundation (The Factors)

Take a random number N and break it into its prime factors. We write these prime factors in binary, side-by-side, along the bottom of a page.

The total width of this baseline is roughly log_2(N)(the number of bits in N).

2. The Cloud Ceiling (The Potential)

We write down the length of (N written down in base 2) in base 2. (If N = 46 = 101110 (base 2), its length is ~6 = 110 (base 2),

We write that number vertically (110) to set the Maximum Ceiling Height.

Finally, we look at the number N itself.

3. The Buildings (The Structure):

Above each prime factor, we construct a building.

* The Width: The width of the building is simply the length of that prime factor in bits.

* The Height: To determine how tall the building is, we look at its width and write that number down vertically in binary.

To normalize, we zoom our camera so the length (log) of N fills the view.

The Entropy (The Visible Sky):

The Sky: This is the empty space between the tops of the buildings and the top of the picture (cloud ceiling).

The Entropy of N is exactly the total area of the visible sky.

If N is prime, the building is as wide and tall as the whole city and touches the cloud ceiling. No Sky. Zero Entropy.

If N is a random integer, it usually has one wide building (the largest prime) that is almost as tall as the ceiling, and a few tiny huts (small primes) that leave a massive gap of blue sky above them.

Here is the visualization for N = 46. (Binary 101110, length ~6).

          (46)
      1 0 1 1 1 0  (length ~5.5)
     ---------------------------
         |1 1 1 1 1|
         |0 0 0 0 0|  
     |1 1|1 1 1 1 1|
     +---+---------+
     |1 0|1 0 1 1 1|
      (2)    (23)

(Visualization not exact due to rounding of logarithms, and because)

Interpretation:

Building 23 is tall. It reaches Level 3 (101 is length 5). It touches the ceiling (Level 3). There is zero sky above it.

Building 2 is short. It only reaches Level 2 (10 is length 2). There is one unit of sky visible above it.

Total Entropy: The total empty area above the buildings is small (just that gap above factor 2), which matches the math: 46 is "low entropy" because it is dominated by the large factor 23.

A number with High Entropy would look like a row of low, equal-height huts, leaving a massive amount of open sky above the entire city.

6 maanden geledendiscuss

This is a very unenlightening exposition that could discourage people from studying this beautiful problem.

A much better way to analyze it geometrically. The 6D problem has 2D trivial symmetries, and is parameterized by 4 polar coordinates: circumcenter distance from origin, circumradius, and 2 internal angles of the triangle. Then the solution is just [expected value of the area of a triangle on unit circle] times the radius integral in the OP article, divided by the π³ volume of the triangle space in rectangular coordinates.

7 maanden geledendiscuss

HN as a population skews heavily away from "real-world peer-scheduled activities"

7 maanden geledendiscuss

Submitted blog post is from Lichess user (rated ~2150 on Lichess), not Lichess organization itself.

7 maanden geledendiscuss

Typos could be automatically discovered and indexed one word at a time by watching users search the wrong word (wrong input method) and then search again with the correct input method.

8 maanden geledendiscuss

It's essentially impossible to deploy a non trivial NodeJS (including NextJS, Vercel, React, etc) project without critical vulnerabilities that npm will warn explicitly warn you about but be unable to avoid due to dependency hell of many packages depending unmaintained garbage that pins vulnerable versions of other packages.

10 maanden geledendiscuss

He appears to be a regretful atheist who yearns for a natural replacement for the power of the supernatural God some religious people believe in. See also the Singularity Rationalist / Roko's Basilisk people.

10 maanden geledendiscuss

Avi Loeb's career is focused on the idea that it's not 100% possible for contactable alien intelligence to exist, and he dedicates his career to finding it, and bends all news to that end. He does not exist in the world of pragmatic estimation, weighted probabilities and cost-benefit analysis.

This is totally disqualifying:

> Frankly, I would have used my body to stop the bullet on its path to kill a young father and husband like Charlie at age 31.

No one can jump in front of a single sniper bullet.

Thousands of young fathers die every day. Why isn't Loeb helping them instead of spending all this time promoting his search for aliens, and misleading journalists and the public about extraterrestrial intelligence?

11 maanden geledendiscuss

The person you were replying to is not a native speaker either, and also is not knowledgeable about the core ideas of logical systems (as other commenters have already explained).

11 maanden geledendiscuss

> Going fully circle I wonder what would happen if you got LLM's to define the ontology....

http://neal.fun/infinite-craft

vorig jaardiscuss

> > Thank you to the Phillips Exeter Academy Science Department for supporting this project.

This is what can happen when you live on a campus and don’t waste your life commuting.

2 jaar geledendiscuss

It's not wrong. It's just casually presented and not perfectly precise. the Chapter is about applting geometry in the real world, not idealized mathematical models.

It is standard in empirical science to focus on first order effects, and then to address 2nd-order effects, which the book does in the following pages.

Page 10 is a talking about how the angle of shadow is independent of subject position (human or pole), on the order of ~10m, and so we can treat all shadows at the same moment in time in the local area as similar. (Obviously shadows are not similar when comparing someone in Russia to someone in Mexico at the same time.) This is in contrast to a shadow from a streetlamp, where the angle changes from 45 degrees to 80 degrees over the span of a few meters of relative subject position.

This is true, and the 0.5-degree error due to the size of the sun is not important to the overall result, which is already appromixate to a similar level of precision, and is the same for all subjects.

2 jaar geledendiscuss

It's not a complaint, it's a safety warning.

2 jaar geledendiscuss

No, because the article is about sacrificing quality by using less energy. But the quality is already bad for non-toy purposes, so there is plenty of demand for higher-energy higher-quality systems.