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Interval Tree Clocks
Notes on Interval Tree Clocks
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Entropy in the Universe
If you click on this picture, you’ll see a zoomable image of the Milky Way with 84 million stars: But stars contribute only a tiny fraction of the total entropy in the observable Universe. If…
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A Sober Look at Bayesian Neural Networks
by Carles Gelada and Jacob Buckman WARNING: This is an old version of this blogpost, and if you are a Bayesian, it might make you angry. Click here for an updated post with the same content. Context: About a month ago Carles asserted on Twitter that Bayesian Neural Networks make...
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The Map Is Not the Territory (2015)
The map is not the territory reminds us that our mental models of the world are not the same as the world itself. It cautions against confusing our abstractions and representations with the complex, ever-shifting reality they aim to describe.
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Decision Table Patterns
Decision tables are easy, simple, and powerful. You can teach them in five minutes and write one in half that time. You can look at a table and understand what it’s saying, see if it matches your problem, and check for design flaws. So it’s kinda weird that there’s basically nothing about them online. I wrote an…
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Two Workers Are Quadratically Better Than One
For latency, anyway. A common architecture pattern is the “task queue”: tasks enter an ordered queue, workers pop tasks and process them. This pattern is used everywhere from distributed systems to thread pools. It applies just as well to human systems, like waiting in line at a supermarket or a bank. Task queues are…
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How to Think about Correlation?
I am an economist at the Federal Trade Commission with a very basic statistics question, one that I have put to several fairly high-powered econometricians, and to which no one has had a satisfying answer.
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Climbing the cosmic distance ladder: Terence Tao book announcement
Several years ago, I developed a public lecture on the cosmic distance ladder in astronomy from a historical perspective (and emphasising the role of mathematics in building the ladder). I previous…
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Holes in Bayesian Statistics
Every philosophy has holes, and it is the responsibility of proponents of a philosophy to point out these problems. Here are a few holes in Bayesian data analysis: (1) the usual rules of conditional probability fail in the quantum realm, (2) flat or weak priors lead to terrible inferences about things we care about…
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A round-up of topology-based papers at ICML 2020
With this year’s International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) being over, it is time to have another instalment of this series. Similar to last year’s post , I shall cover several papers that caught my attention because of their use of topological concepts—however, unlike last year, I shall not restrict the…
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How many pieces can a puzzle have?
Patrick Honner tweeted a few days ago: My 7 yo pointed out that our 300 piece puzzle actually contains 18 x 18 = 324 pieces and I just don’t know what to believe anymore. — Patrick Honner (@M…
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A circuit-like notation for lambda calculus (2015)
Lately, I’ve been playing around with inventing a visual writing system for lambda calculus.
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Ryanair, Hamiltonian Cycles, and using graph theory to find cheap flights (2018)
Using graph theory and Ryanair route data to find cheap multi-city flight loops through Europe.
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PigPaxos: Removing the Scalability Bottlenecks in Paxos
This is our most recent work, started and led by Aleksey Charapko . (This is a joint post with him.) You can get the paper at arxiv.org . Th...
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Pathfinding Demystified (2014)
Pathfinding is one of these topics that usualy baffles game developers. The A* algorithm in particular is poorly understood, and the general belief seems to be that it’s arcane magic.
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Using neural networks to solve advanced mathematics equations
Facebook AI has developed the first neural network that uses symbolic reasoning to solve advanced mathematics problems.
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Quines: self-replicating programs (2005)
A “ quine ” (or “ selfrep ”) is a computer program which prints its own listing. This may sound either impossible, or trivial, or completely uninteresting, depending on your temper and your knowledge of computer science. Actually, it is possible, and there are some interesting ideas involved (in particular, writing a…