alimw

I did not deny the fact that there is a greater variety of vowel sounds available in English. I merely doubt its explanatory power for the phenomenon you describe. But perhaps I am confused about exactly what that phenomenon is.

I think the issue here is that it's hard work for a native English speaker to keep track of the correctness of every single vowel sound because in English so many are elided or become "uh".

> Not sure where the 2500 number came from.

Athens probably? From what I remember of school, this was the world's first democracy. (I've heard that Americans are taught something else!)

You can already try this in Cursor. It doesn't work too well right now but perhaps that's just because noone has tuned the loop.

By "undirected structure" I assume you refer to the presence of cycles in the graph? I was taught to call such networks "recurrent" but it seems that that term has evolved to mean something slightly different. Anyway yeah, because of the cycles Gibbs sampling is key to the network's operation. One still employs gradient descent during training, but the procedure to calculate the gradient itself involves Gibbs sampling.

Edit: Actually was talking about the General Boltzmann Machine. For the Restricted Boltzmann Machine an approximation has been assumed which obviates the need for full Gibbs sampling during training. Then (quoting the article, emphasis mine) "after training, it can sample new data from the learned distribution using Gibbs sampling."

Calling yourself a poet does not excuse this meandering illogic

> They believe themselves to be good people.

As should be more widely known, this is a bad start to actually being good people.

Haha lucky you've decided those guys couldn't yet be called American

The BBC article has been rewritten since yesterday, but remains clear that it draws on more than one source.

That’s already enough to conclude that your attempt to “do your own research” fell at the first hurdle.

I am perfectly capable of making sense of the article. It's you that I struggle with.

At the time this exchange began, that was the only reference to CNN in the article. As I recall most of the rest was attributed to NBC.

What?

You must be talking about this one claim? Your comment reads as if you are dismissing the whole article.

> That included staff who are stationed at facilities where the weapons are built, according to CNN.

Excuse a small quibble on terminology-- Russia itself is a European country (large empty landmass in geographical Asia notwithstanding).

Well I'll only repeat what's said in the article: "Christian Wolmar told CNN Travel ... the route could have followed existing highway corridors.”

The article suggests that the flexibility of route afforded by slower speeds would have reduced cost significantly.

I wonder if you missed the three follow-up posts? It's really in those that his analysis takes shape. What you call the "upper net benefit bound" plays no part in it.

> By adding risk and reward to determine outcome value, Tao is claiming that outcome value is increased by riskiness.

Tao talks about minimising "value at risk" which he defines as risk MINUS reward. If you prefer to switch signs and talk about maximising "outcome value" then that would be reward MINUS risk.

> The claim of the proof is that I=F(0)+F(π) is simultaneously positive and arbitrarily small, which is not possible for a fixed number, but totally possible if you see I as a sequence indexed by n.

This is not possible because I_n must be an integer for every n.

Are you talking about this proof in particular? I see no connection.

> Staying on summer time for the whole year gives its inhabitants an additional hour of sunlight.

Now that's not really true is it :) It's robbing Peter to pay Paul.

> Farage repeatedly stressed that it would open the door to greater immigration

Farage is making it very clear in this election cycle that he stands for reduced immigration. Do you mean to say that he has changed his mind?

I conjecture that those of us who have taken exams entirely unprepared in the real world benefit from an immunity effect so that we never have to dream about it.

The words "cart" and "horse" spring to mind, in that order.

It should be blindingly obvious that a mask, any sort of mask, on a sick, coughing person acts to limit the quantity of infected sputum put into the air. Confusion arises on the right in particular because those guys simply cannot understand why they would wear a mask if the benefit is chiefly to other people.

I really wish it were first clarified in these discussions whether we are talking about benefit to the wearer or benefit to people around the wearer. The distinction appears to be completely absent both in the article and in the comments here on HN.

I think you are unjustified in squaring those numbers. A system that protects the borders protects the whole territory—so the relationship will surely be more linear than quadratic.

> Nothing wrong with that.

One thing wrong with it is that the myth leads us to blame ourselves for the failure to recover as well.

> NGO's come and claim resources on the land to mine what is rightfully Brazil's.

It's grimly amusing how the grabbier half of society literally cannot comprehend that not everyone is as selfishly motivated.

I think this 837 figure is the official rate but I don't understand what real-world significance it can have when pesos are actually being bought and sold at something north of 1100 to the dollar.

> The only exception might be one-off scripts.

Agreed, but if you're writing in J, Forth or Factor then it's hardly likely to make it into production anyway.