lindenr

I agree, if AI (or humans) have mistranslated a natural language statement to a formal statement, we should not rely on AI to correctly translate the formal statement back into natural language.

For many statements I expect it's not possible to retain the exact meaning of the formal-language sentence without the natural language becoming at least as complex, and if you don't retain meaning exactly then you're vulnerable to the kind of thing the article warns about.

Really interesting! It does need an explanation - took me a bit of clicking around to discover the rules (which I actually enjoyed because it turned out not to be too complicated! But some will give up early).

One aspect I liked about the larger puzzle sizes it that the topology becomes nontrivial: you can work out for sure that a cell has to be marked without knowing the exact path from the edge inwards, which you later narrow down.

Feature request: can interior cells be marked? Right now it's disallowed which helps rule discovery but requires the user to remember more.

Yeah, I think it's a typo and should have been "one in every 24 million babies" - this makes sense given the numbers, with 4 million born every year but only a new president every 6 years.

If I understand you right - you could visualize in 2d space: "king" at origin, X-axis is "king"-"man", Y-axis is "king"-"woman" (or gram-schmidt if you really want orthogonal).

In 3d you can go one further and have the Z-axis be "king"-"queen" (or gram-schmidt again). The orthogonalized versions have the advantage that they give a closer notion of distance to what the underlying model sees. In the 2d case you will get exact distances except that it won't show how far off "queen" you are when you compute "king"-"man"+"woman". In the 3d case it should give exact distances.

Edit to add: With the 2d version you can maybe do some more stuff. IIRC "queen" is chosen as it's the word with the closest embedding to X="king"-"man"+"woman". You can put the next few closest words on the 2d chart as well, each labeled with the orthogonal distance from the 2d plane. So then "queen" should be the word with the smallest (squared distance from X) + (squared orthogonal distance from plane), which you might be able to eyeball.

Would you be interested in working in quantitative finance in London? We're hiring (remotely for now, but you'd be expected to work in London probably later this year).

We have lots of PhDs (physics, maths, etc - not exclusively though, I only have a master's in maths) and aren't particularly looking for a finance background, so you're pretty much a classic interview candidate. (Finance knowledge or interest is obviously a plus.) Interviews would be on a combination of general maths, stats, finance, ML and programming - whatever subset you're strongest in.

To sell the role a bit - we work on algorithmic trading, but I probably can't say too much more than that. I'm really enjoying working here, the environment's a lot like hanging out at uni with my nerdy friends and the work is interesting and free of bullshit. Project turnaround time is quick.

Please let me know if you'd be interested in hearing more about this. You can reach me at my_email@wauchope.net, but instead of my_email it's dax.

Just spent some time playing around with that, really cool! Thank you :)

Off-topic but, was that supposed to be a haiku? I only count six syllables in the second line.

You said:

"Saying "selection pressure" implies intent, determination, a collective mission, if you will. Evolution has none of those drivers. It has no objectives. It sets no goals. And it certainly does not operate in some collective purpose driven form within a population."

danieltillett said:

"At the moment the speed of disease progression to death is so fast that it is slowing the spread of Ebola. If the Ebola took longer to kill it would infect more people."

This seems like a true statement and in line with your own opinion; I can't quite see what you are objecting to.

Ah, I see. Could you edit your post to reflect this? As it stands it is very easy to misinterpret.

Does this mean that a 10^13 reliability has 320% chance of failure?

EDIT: in any case the correct calculation should be http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%281-%2810^-14%29%29^%2... which gives a 30% chance of failure, versus http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%281-%2810^-15%29%29^%2... for a 3.5% chance.

The EPR paradox was resolved a while ago, strongly in favour of Einstein's "spooky action at a distance". The first experiments were done in the 70's. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell%27s_theorem

Also the last paragraph of the introduction at

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPR_paradox

I thought it meant two programs which compute the same thing but possibly using different algorithms. If they are indistinguishable then you can't infer from the improved algorithm anything you can't get from the old one.

And who told you there are "hundreds of thousands" of people who want to blow up Americans?

But actually, even (very generously) at 100,000 brand-new prisoners for the USG to deal with it would certainly cope just fine (an increase of 4% on the current prison population). And imagine all the money which would be saved from surveillance programs if all the terrorists were dealt with!

No. The escape velocity on Mars is 5 km/s, whereas on Earth it is 11 km/s. There is also a lot less of an atmosphere on Mars (though the atmosphere is smaller on Earth) and Martian gravity is significantly smaller than Earth's. It is far easier to leave Mars than it is to leave Earth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars

It does seem a bit more forceful than bold to me; maybe you could have a separate 'bold' font and a 'really really bold' font?

What? In the original it was written in all caps as well.

The point as I read it was that people who aspire to management aren't really engineers in the truest sense, but engineers "only by title".

That is, people working on actual engineering aren't really "engineers" if they have their eyes set on something else, like a higher position in acadaemia.

Relevant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number

Has the title changed since submission? It makes no mention of Windows 8 now (current title is "Malware Uses Google Docs as a Proxy Server").

It could also be that they're trying to filter out people who know "Windows support" sounds dodgy. This also fits with the fact that they still seem to all have Indian accents -- an immediate off-put to those who have heard about these scams. People who don't hang up when they hear the words "Windows support" coming from someone with an Indian accent would probably be very much more likely to fall for it.

Really? Wow, that's cool. Can I have a reference?

You didn't answer the question. No-one ever said pirating was okay (or "not stealing").

Also, I think you're wrong: pirating a movie/book/whatever will at most result in the price of one movie/book being lost from the creators (given that I may or may not have bought it legally otherwise). Copying an app, on the other hand, can result in a (theoretically) unlimited number of apps being purchased where the money doesn't go to the original creators. That is more like ripping a dvd and posting it to a torrent site.

I'm not saying pirating is defensible, but downloading something illegally is far less harmful than copying someone's app.

I doubt there is a conspiracy behind this; I just left the comment (too?) open to the possibility.

That's not the point. This whole case has been just testing the water for the FBI - seeing how far the public (and the NZ government) will let them go. Whether they have grand designs for after Dotcom nobody knows (conspiracy!), but this case is clearly about more than all that money copyright holders supposedly lost (I'm in agreement with you on that - I doubt they would have lost any less without MU).

For me, that is behind a login screen. I heard a little while ago about users who have a google account but aren't logged in being unable to access G+ pages; I'll edit after a cookie-clear and refresh (which may or may not help).

EDIT: De-cookieing helped, and I can now read the article without problems. Screw you, Google. Observers be warned.

EDIT 2: Is the downvote for any particular reason? My point was not unhelpful nor especially off topic; help, anyone?

Googling cache:<url> gave a cached version straight away.

I haven't heard of using incache:<url> before; what's the difference between that and cache:<url>?

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%... works for me.

Is it possible for the file extension to say one thing and the MIME type to say something else? So the file extension could be .jpg (reassuring the user that it is only an image) but the HTTP response says it is text/html?

I think a similar exploit was used recently with .svg images - they can contain javascript (being XML) which will be executed by the browser. Not sure about the details however.

PDF link: http://youcanmakevideogames.com/YouCanMakeVideoGames.pdf

If X is the number of different characters your password can contain then the total number of possible passwords exactly 8 characters long is X^8.

The number of passwords that are less than 8 characters long is X + X^2 + ... + X^7 which is significantly less than X^8 for large X.

So your point is even more valid.