lliiffee

Another option is to just install Sage. It "just works" to install. Though it is less about numerical computation than symbolic computation. (Though both are targets, there isn't really equal focus, in my opinion.)

Actually, even if no one dies, we can still all have children without creating infinite population, as long as we have, on average, less than 2 per couple (1 per person).

For example, if we have 1 billion people who suddenly all become immortal, and each couple has, on average 1.8 children, we asymptote towards a world with 10 billion immortals. Everyone could have offspring, though the actual number of young people would be continuously decreasing...

If $p0$ is the starting population, and $a$ is the number of children per person (number per couple divided by two), we have

  p = p0 * sum_{i=0...inf} a^i = p0 / (1-a)

Candidly, you already know who wants to opt out: they have images blocked. If you really want to do the right thing, don't add more tricky tracking mechanisms than hidden images.

Out of interest, why do you prefer the second line to

    (1-p)**70

? Is there some kind of improved numerical stability?

Which is odd since, doesn't ALDI not accept credit cards?

That reminds me of another effect: I am thought of as a person that regards missing these things as a benefit!

As a facebook non-joiner myself, I find that I miss out on a lot of baby pictures, knowledge of other people's birthdays, and (a few) parties.

There is some truth in his point about big buttons. The idea of using a traditional keyboard+mouse interface with software designed for fingers is actually pretty appealing, just because of the ease of use constraints on the software.

That is a pretty common problem in machine learning. There are tons of solutions, but they are usually classifier specific. For example, if using a decision tree, one can take test data and determine for each leaf node in the tree what fraction of instances are classified correctly. For leaf nodes with accuracy below X, change the output of that node to "give up".

> Recognizing the food with few errors would be horribly hard.

I wonder if it would be possible to have some sort of a hybrid system, where automatic recognition is attempted, with a fall-back to manual input where this fails. (The manual input could be to select from several automatic "guesses") If the app stored all the data from all users, this could eventually lead to a really big database, and the automatic recognition might get better and better.

EDIT: Also, automatic vegetable/fruit recognition is actually in production in some supermarkets, for weighing/pricing. (I saw this in France.)

meetup.com serves this purpose to a large degree. Unofficially, of course, but I think that is part of what makes it effective.

Good point! Theoretically, you could have Montana come and run a prison in California. Of course, that would never be allowed, for the same reasons that it costs so much to house prisoners in California now...

I meant that I was joking about putting a dollar number on "justice". Although, I'm not sure how unreasonable that is.

If we are committed to the mercenary approach, we would have to define how bad a murder is "in dollars".

If you think we should be focused on justice instead of a cold cost-benefit analysis, may I suggest defining how valuable justice is, in dollars? (I'm joking, I think...)

I believe Schwarzenegger wants to do exactly that, but has been prevented by prison guard unions.

I wonder if the algorithm includes the taxes that people won't be paying due to sentences. That could get really complicated. For example, having a felony conviction on your record probably hugely reduces lifetime incomes. For certain people, the lost taxes might be much larger than the "direct" costs.

I don't know. A very high-quality small school will have a tendency to get bigger.

I couldn't quite understand how it works. Was the idea as simple as just creating the infographic, then putting it somewhere on the site you want to juice up? (There were details about links I couldn't really follow on Reddit...)

For better or for worse, it isn't that unusual.

https://support.sas.com/opal/external/dm

Incidentally, Time Warner just informed me that they were raising the price of my internet-only plan to $54.95, and pointed out that internet + cable plans start at $56.95.

Thanks for the recommendation! If anyone else isn't familiar, there is an exceptionally good Wikipedia entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyer%E2%80%93Moore_string_sear...

My understanding is that Google totally agrees that they are weeding out talented people. However, given the number of applications they get, they are wise to be more concerned about false-positives than false-negatives. Most companies don't get so many highly-qualified applicants and so would probably be foolish to copy the Google model.

I thought that Steve's previous analysis that having crazily long posts was part of why they had such a impact was spot on. I'm surprised and disapointed that he's considering consciously making posts shorter and more frequent.

Nothing in Rochester.

Please clarify: Why are random pivots not practical? And why do you say there are no truly random quicksorts? Because pseudorandom numbers aren't really random, or for some other reason?

Your second point may be valid, though not literally. I've implemented quicksort, and I used (pseudo) random pivots, damnit! :)

The article you point to doesn't seem to address the complexity of quicksort with random pivots. However, that is proven to be expected O(n log n) time for any data in Motwani's Randomized Algorithms book, and I don't think the correctness of that has ever been questioned.

Note that properly implemented quicksort has expected O(n log n) time independent of the data (dependent only on the random choices of pivots), whereas interpolation sort's performance is data dependent. That's a pretty important distinction.

I assume three are for position, and three are for angle.