miloshh · HackerTrans

16 lat temudiscuss

Is there some serious reason you need to upgrade? If so, then I think you can just unzip a fresh install and copy over the plugins you want (as .jar files) into the new directory structure. Apparently there are more ways to do this, though I didn't try: http://www.venukb.com/2006/08/20/install-eclipse-plugins-the...

miloshh

16 lat temudiscuss

Those are pretty strange. I am using it on a Mac right now, with no serious problems.

I'm not sure about the bundle creator, I never used that, but not being able to create a new file seems like some random little issue that's most likely fixable.

miloshh

16 lat temudiscuss

> Then there is the beast called Eclipse. It certainly seems like it should be able to do everything in the world... Yet it is buggy, its plugin architecture is a conflicting mess, and its performance is so abysmal...

I have used Eclipse for many years with multiple languages, and none of this is quite true. There is a bit of a learning curve, where you have to learn not to do some things that break it. :) But that just takes a few hours, and a bit of patience - after that you have many months of happy coding, where it just works...

miloshh

16 lat temudiscuss

Indeed, Eclipse for Java is just unbeatable. I just recently started using it for C++ and it also works surprisingly well. I find myself much more productive than in a text editor, especially in a large code base I didn't know before.

miloshh

16 lat temudiscuss

That is a cool story...

Though, may I add that Python (or any other modern programming language) can manipulate its own code as data - only not as gracefully as Lisp. In other words, a Lisp program is its own AST - but in other languages the AST is only a "parse" away (and Python specifically makes computing it very easy).

miloshh

16 lat temudiscuss

Agreed; unfortunately, the people that will immediately imagine hordes of terrorists entering the country pretending to be entrepreneurs form a significant portion of the electorate.

miloshh

16 lat temudiscuss

These kids are first generation Americans - they went to school in the US.

miloshh

16 lat temudiscuss

I meant intensity resolution (or color depth, as you say). Dynamic range is something else - it is the interval [darkest, brightest], or their ratio if you prefer.

miloshh

16 lat temudiscuss

That would just increase the resolution. The real problem is that the device is way too dark to display the levels of radiance you see on a bright day. Tone-mapping has to be used to bring those levels down, and there is no "correct" way to do that - one has to play with settings.

miloshh

16 lat temudiscuss

A much simpler explanation would be - people that are wealthy enough to choose where they would like to live are predominantly not African-American.

miloshh

16 lat temudiscuss

Doctors are actually very careful not to be overzealous in diagnosis. To meet the criteria for a real diagnosis, the symptoms must be "excessive, long-term, and pervasive".

Similarly, not everyone with "blues" is clinically depressed, and not everyone with unexplained weight loss has cancer... the folk estimates of the prevalence of these conditions are way overblown.

miloshh

16 lat temudiscuss

Actually, it might be that doctors are quite accurate with diagnosing ADHD. The problem is that the sample of kids that they even get to examine is already biased - they may be the younger ones, in which parents or teachers just observed immaturity (which is probably uncorrelated to ADHD). Just a guess - maybe the paper addresses this issue.

miloshh

16 lat temudiscuss

Note that I defined n as the input size...

miloshh

16 lat temudiscuss

You just painstakingly carried out the absolute analysis, which I know works.

Let X be the value in the envelope you have, and Y in the other one (X and Y are both random variables with well-known distributions). Then E[Y/X] = 1.25. That's what I wanted you to explain. You just keep saying that E[X] = E[Y], which I know.

Note that this paradox would not arise if X and Y were independent, since then E[Y/X] = E[Y] / E[X] = 1.

miloshh

16 lat temudiscuss

I agree the blog is excellent, and provides a great answer to the original question of this thread. Check it out!

miloshh

16 lat temudiscuss

That's not a very good example - square matrix multiplication is O(n^1.5) (where n is the input size) and extremely fast in practice.

(Though, as you say, there could still be an O(n) algorithm - this is not known).

What I said is true even for linear programming (a P-complete problem) - it has polynomial and efficient algorithms - though the latter are actually not polynomial in the worst case. :)

miloshh

16 lat temudiscuss

Very good summary.

Though I was just reading the synopsis, and the statistical physics part seems to be proven: "The 1RSB ansatz of statistical mechanics says that the space of solutions of random k-SAT shatters into exponentially many clusters of solutions when the clause density is sufficiently high. This phase is called 1dRSB (1- Step Dynamic Replica Symmetry Breaking) and was conjectured by physicists as part of the 1RSB ansatz. It has since been rigorously proved for high values of k. It demonstrates the properties of high correlation between large sets of variables that we will need."

I did not dig into the references yet, though.

miloshh

16 lat temudiscuss

Yeah, the common complaint against "P=NP would break cryptography" is "but what if the polynomial algorithm for (say) SAT is n^10000?". That is not very likely, in my opinion. Even though "polynomial" is not equivalent to "efficient", in practice all problems that have a polynomial algorithm also have an efficient algorithm.

miloshh

16 lat temudiscuss

I do not necessarily agree. There is a large number of open problems in computer science (especially in theory of complexity), and a correct proof of P != NP is very likely to use techniques that will help in resolving the other open problems. The techniques are also likely to change what we're learning in CS courses.

miloshh

16 lat temudiscuss

Ad 1 - Not sure what you're trying to say, all I said is that you don't know the distribution of A - if you knew it, you could make an informed decision on whether to switch.

Ad 2 - If you carry out the analysis you're trying to teach me, you'll find that the expected relative gain from switching is 1.25. Now explain that. (You'll also find that the expected absolute gain is 0 - that's not a paradox.)

comments