lliiffee

On a related note, I had a very early account (probably one of the first 1000 on the site). Years later reddit said they lost some laptop with account info, and so they reset all the passwords. My account was from before there was email. My attempts to get the account back all were met with responses that said "use email reset" and seemed to imply I'd done something wrong. My thanks for being a loyal user for over a decade.

I was surprised to learn recently that there is a cheap and easy to take action that will reduce your exposure to air pollution while driving: Replace your passenger-compartment air filter with a HEPA filter! Most cars made in the last 15 years or so have an air filter right before the AC. You can, for slightly more money, replace this with a HEPA filter. I haven't tested, but this will probably be very effective, since the car is such a small space and there is so much pollution outside.

Replacing the filter is an incredibly easy job on most cars. You don't need any tools or even to open the hood. You just pull out your glove box, and then the filter slides in and out.

I honestly think that in terms of health, this might be the action that has the highest ROI. (Amount of health improvement per amount of time / money invested.)

I was a little apprehensive, but decided to try this. I called my representative as well as both senators. In all cases (3:30pm on a thursday) I just got a voicemail. I left a short message in each case. Nothing could be easier.

Would you mind elaborating? I'd love to hear more.

Honest question: what if those self-driving cars have multiple people in them? With 4 people you quadruple the throughput, and this seems technically achievable with technology. Minivans and the like go further. I certainly haven't run the numbers vs rail but in most regions it seems like 4x ing the highways would meet current needs comfortably.

Some feedback -- this looks great! I'd love to have some kind of (la)tex support.

I sympathize, but do keep in mind that it would be very difficult to teach all the math at the same time. Imagine trying to run a course in French on analytic philosophy. If your students didn't know much French coming in, you'd be in a tough spot.

Just a reminder, I'm still eagerly awaiting this-- I check your site everyday! :)

Any way you could make this available outside the Mac App store? Apple seems to have decided I did something horrible and unforgivable by moving to a different country after creating an account, thus making it impossible for me to use the store.

To be a little optimistic, it does seem to me that the ESTA system (where an electronic check is done for visitors looking to use the visa waiver program before they travel) has greatly reduced these types of situations. However, ESTA is only used for visitors arriving by air/sea and not for people driving or walking over the border.

In any case, I myself (an american citizen) have been treated with extreme disrespect and a total lack of professionalism when crossing the border at this same checkpoint by car from the Canadian side to the American side. The particularly ridiculous part of this was that after I waited an hour for them to tear everything apart in my car looking for contraband -- at which point it's been verified that I was doing nothing wrong -- they continued to be completely antagonistic.

Edit: I filed a complaint about this, which did lead to a supervisor calling me back and talking to me on the phone for probably 30 minutes. The supervisor was reasonably pleasant, but unapologetic. (Is it reasonable that someone be forced out of their car in the middle of winter and not allowed to get their coat?) He claimed that he put a "warning" on the officer's record, though this didn't seem credible. He again and again seemed to imply that I might have been smuggling, after which I had to remind him that my car was extensively searched and cleared.

To build on fny's answer, there is one school of statistics (Bayesian statistics) where there basically is a "right" way to do analysis for any problem, provided you make the necessary assumptions (likelihood and prior) correctly. However, the most common statistical concepts (e.g. p-values or confidence intervals) are not in the Bayesian school

I'm sure they would! But there's a pretty strong argument it's a step in the right direction. Actually, this link makes a more modest proposal that papers should report likelihoods rather than p-values. This avoids reported results results depending on priors (which perhaps we don't trust authors to choose well), though a reader can easily impose themselves if they want to.

https://arbital.com/p/likelihoods_not_pvalues/

You still have the option to muck with things by choosing your hypothesis class in a bad way-- nothing can really replace publishing data!

For those who might not realize how amazing this is, take a look at how you can do these things manually:

https://tminka.github.io/papers/matrix/minka-matrix.pdf

Could you give more details about how you combined these? I'm aware of both of these tools, but wasn't sure how they could be used together. At the moment I heavily use mosh which is pretty much perfect aside from the fact that it kills my local scrollback history.

I believe that LLVM 6 has finally introduced this, e.g. see http://llvm.org/docs/Vectorizers.html#vectorization-of-funct...

Would you mind sharing which tablet you bought? I had the idea this still wasn't practical!

I think you're making the argument that with more guns, countries tend to have fewer gun deaths per gun. This makes sense, casually. However, I doubt that anyone cares about the number of gun murders per gun, but rather the total number of gun murders, which is (please correct me if wrong) still correlated with more guns.

Also, I see that you've focused the discussion on gun murders, which is fine, but we should note that decreased gun ownership does lead to far fewer gun deaths, mostly by reducing suicides.

The project cost £1.66m. With a total of 83 residents, that's about $25,000 per person. It would be interesting to compare this to the total investment needed for a typical non-renewable power infrastructure. This doesn't seem outrageously expensive, though (as the article mentions) this might be out of reach for communities in developing countries.

Can anyone explain the logic behind having lots of small batteries, rather than the power company buying a Big Battery and offering this as a service?

Two reasons occur to me:

1. Situations off the grid or with unreliable power (eg blackouts) 2. Transmission costs are high, so it's better to have the storage close to the source.

Even in the second case, it seems like the power company could distribute these. I wonder if they are just more regulated/slow moving/immune to marketing.

They prevent that by hosting it somewhere that no one can find it's associated with you. Not saying that's ethical, but it does prevent immediate harm to your brand, unless people somehow remembered on clicking the link when they see the actual article. (Which would still be a tiny fraction.)

Note that the machines have many tolerances that can be set to trade-off theft vs. annoyance of the customer. (E.g. the product weight when placed in the bagging area.) The machines can we way less annoying when they are set to be more trusting.

I also generally found them to work better in Australia than in the US, though the technology seems to be the same. I guess it's because of these tolerances being set differently, but that's just speculation.

It's a massive book, but it really is very entertaining as well. Give the first chapter a go, and if you're totally sucked in and laughing, you might be just glad that the book is as big as it is. If you aren't enjoying it on a page-by-page basis, it's probably almost impossible to power through. It's one of my favorite books, but it doesn't contain the meaning of life, or anything.

Would you mind sharing any more details about the attempted blackmail?

That's a good point, but it also seems strongly correlated with those that run ad/privacy blockers. (Even with such a blocker, perhaps the data collected is still valuable, though?) My instinct is that by selling an ad and tracking-free site, they would be indicating that the ads and tracking are a bad thing, as opposed to the party line that it's all "to deliver better services to you".

I definitely see your point! I guess there is a place for algorithms at any point on the easy/good trade-off.

You could periodically delete the wasted space. I think that if you, say, delete the wasted space when it is equal to the used space, you still still have O(1) amortized time.

Taxis are craaaazily expensive in Japan. (The quality of service is high though, which perhaps you were referring to.)

It seems unlikely-- in order to be true, computer science majors would need to actually have higher income with degrees from less competitive schools.

I think brk was just saying that everyone in priority will have room for their bags. Without priority boarding, they would have to fight with everyone else.

What I mean is that, if just doing regular Newton, I'm not sure I've ever seen an example using the interface you show. I think that the vast majority of Newton's method implementations pass H rather than H^-1, and get the search direction via "solve_H_g(H,g)" rather than "solve_iH_g(iH,g)". It takes cubic time to compute H^-1 from H (after which you can compute (H^-1)g) and it takes cubic time to solve for x such that H*x=g, but the rather is said to be more stable, and so preferred.

I know this is irrelevant to the main part of the post, which is to explain LBFGS, I'm just genuinely interested if there are applications where its better to pass the inverse of H rather than H itself for some reason.