currymesurprise

That is the expected result for a sub-population that has a shorter lifespan.

My sibling comment addresses deaths lagging over time. But even in the steady state of (say) 18% smokers, you expect more than 18% of deaths to be smokers because their life expectancy is shorter.

I believe the grandparent's comment was a bit misleading if not wrong. (http://xkcd.com/386/ ..)

In most dialects of English (notably British English), the short form of the subject is "maths". In North American English, it is "math". In all dialects, the full form is "mathematics". In all dialects, both the short and full forms are singular and accept singular verbs. For example, "mathematics IS the study of numbers and patterns".

If you like to tailor to your audience, you may consider using "maths" for a British audience and "math" for an American audience.

I believe you have misunderstood your parent comment. The question "Do you actually believe suicide can be caused by someone playing dress up?" asks whether suicide can be caused by Richard Branson playing dress up.

The question does not appear to confuse "transgender" and "transvestite", nor does it use "playing dress up" to refer to either.

I believe the suggestion is to use the "From:" field of the email, which for a significant fraction (perhaps even majority) of people includes their name. I think it's an interesting idea.

I think you misunderstood your parent's comment.

While the phrasing of the final sentence was awkward, the post was arguing for exactly the same thing as you.

As a correction to my sibling comment, orange _is_ counted as a color in English. The most widely-cited list of colors in English, as seen on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_... for example is that English has eleven basic colors: white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and gray. That page also provides criteria for being considered a basic color term.

People actively look to credit other people's success to anything but their work all of the time. Just this week, such a webpage was heavily discussed on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6546325

The submission attributes Bill Gates's success first and foremost to his grandparents and parents. This is part of a very common pattern of attributing success to everything but work.

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5204329

More or less, yes, that is my implication. Luckily, my sibling comment provides some extra information.

For the example of SHA-1 computation, you mention using FPGAs that finish in 400 clock cycles, which is at most an order of magnitude away from a naive CPU implementation of around 4000 clock cycles. I'm not as familiar with SHA-256.

gwern, if you're reading, this section is misleading if not wrong ...:

"But that doesn’t seem very true any more. Devices can differ dramatically now even in the same computers; to take the example of Bitcoin mining, my laptop’s CPU can search for hashes at 4k/sec, or its GPU can search at 54m/second."

This is an example of parallelism and parallelism only.

Hi, thank you for your insightful comment. Can you provide a source for the sentence "The Federal government does (more than 90%, in point of fact), through the FHA."? I am unable to find any similar statistics. Thanks.

To be fair to mathematics, in your example the proper notation is df = (del f/del x) dx + (del f/del y) dy, which does not suggest the possibility of cancelation.

The Valiant-Vazirani theorem says that both Unique and Unambiguous SAT are NP-hard under randomized reductions.

While this is not NP-hard under the usual definition, modern complexity theorists believe derandomization to be possible to a degree similar to their belief that P is not NP.

People generally agree that there was not a malfunction in the electronics.

But whatever happened with Woz's car? He claimed he could reproduce an uncontrolled acceleration bug in the electronics. (However, this is unrelated to the alleged malfunction affecting other people.) Last I heard, he turned over his car to Toyota, and that's it.

Anyone know more details?