I've written Python for years and have never used any special editor. The one problem I've had is when commenting out several lines of Python code -- you need to add a # character to the beginning of each line. It's a minor inconvenience. But Python could use a good multiline comment mechanism. I had the same problem in Perl, which uses curly braces, so it isn't really an indentation issue at all.
Even at the speed of light we can expand our territory at most proportional to the cube of the amount of time we have to spread. If the birth rate exceeds the death rate, the population growth will be exponential. No matter what technology we have, we won't be able to accommodate a geometrically growing population within a volume that grows no faster than a cubic formula. Here come the death panels. Thanks, Obama!
The US swamped (whatever that means) with infections in two weeks and "the majority of humanity being wiped out... taking out huge chunks of our population" are two entirely different events!
If you include the fact that you never bought it, that's more information that affects the probabilities. It's just like in the Monty Hall problem where revealing a goat behind one door changes the probabilities of what's behind the other doors.
Given the fact that cannabis was recently made legal where you live, you may be 5% less like to pass a class. Given the additional fact that you chose not to use cannabis, you may be 5% more likely to pass a class due to the curve being lowered by those who do smoke.
We'll need human drivers in the loop for quite some time. Here's a radio interview with a robotics researcher who actually works on autonomous vehicles to tell you the same: http://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on...
When most AI people are talking about artificial intelligence, they are talking about narrow "intelligence". This is why in Russell & Norvig's book they quickly move away from the term "intelligence" and instead speak of "agents" working in a particular "task environment", and whether the agents behave rationally or not. For example, a chess program may be able to win chess games against a grandmaster chess player, so we say this agent is performing rationally within this specific task environment. The chess program is not "intelligent" in the sense that you and I are -- it's an incredibly dumb automaton, as is nearly every computer program. You can see this when it fails miserably when put in any different task environment.
The intelligence that will bring about the singularity is artificial general intelligence, which is the same intelligence that you and I have, that is, the capability of performing well in a very wide variety of environments. This type of agent would be able to reason about how to improve itself and bring about that improvement. Very little AI research these days involves artificial general intelligence, and the progress in this area is slow.
I think this is exactly why Andrew Ng started his machine learning Coursera course, because so many programmers in Silicon Valley were applying machine learning techniques without knowing what they're doing. His idea seems to be, "If I can teach the fundamentals of machine learning to thousands of programmers, then these so-called machine learning 'experts' will be seen for who they are." I hope that managers that think they can be armchair data scientists will also be seen for who they are.
Exactly! The multiple return statements make the code easier to understand. Some programmers are so militant about having a single return statement in every function that they can't tolerate that code, though.
The goto statement isn't the issue. The issue is non-structured programming, which includes the use of goto, break, continue, multiple returns from a procedure, exceptions, longjmp, and anything else that interrupts the normal control flow of a program. The idea is that to understand a program, you need to understand all the ways the flow of control can occur. Each time you conditionally break the flow of control, you're potentially doubling the number of ways control could flow through the program, making it potentially exponentially harder to understand and test.
Once a co-worker proudly showed me how he wrote the following construct:
do { //some code
if (condition) break; //more code
if (another condition) break; //yet more code
} while (0);
to avoid goto statements. My reaction is that goto statements would more clearly express the jumps in the control flow. A do-while indicates a loop, but it isn't a loop; it's gotos in disguise.
Some programmers take this idea to an extreme and even write code such as:
int abs(int x) {
int retval;
if (x >= 0) retval = x;
else retval = -x;
return retval;
}
In this case, multiple return statements would make the code simpler, not harder to understand. Similarly, using exceptions wisely can make code easier to understand, not harder.
The bottom line is that as a general rule it's best not to break the flow of control. But a good programmer will know when it makes sense to do so, and if a goto statement makes sense, it can be the clearest way to express such a break.
She missed the "reasoned hypothesis" step. We know that burning fossil fuels produces carbon dioxide, and we know that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. So of course burning fossil fuels will cause warming! And because we've observed the warming, we've confirmed this prediction beyond all reasonable doubt.
That's ice surface area, which tells you only how spread out the ice is, not how much there is. You need to look at the ice mass, which is declining at an accelerating rate.
Slashdot Mirror
Not for me. I just finished downloading GCC 5.1 and Visual Studio 2014!
But New Horizons was trying to avoid collisions, not create them!
They did name Charon, Doofus.
So once she tried to break a satellite and she fixed it by mistake? Oops!
I've written Python for years and have never used any special editor. The one problem I've had is when commenting out several lines of Python code -- you need to add a # character to the beginning of each line. It's a minor inconvenience. But Python could use a good multiline comment mechanism. I had the same problem in Perl, which uses curly braces, so it isn't really an indentation issue at all.
Uh... they're the same thing.
Even at the speed of light we can expand our territory at most proportional to the cube of the amount of time we have to spread. If the birth rate exceeds the death rate, the population growth will be exponential. No matter what technology we have, we won't be able to accommodate a geometrically growing population within a volume that grows no faster than a cubic formula. Here come the death panels. Thanks, Obama!
The US swamped (whatever that means) with infections in two weeks and "the majority of humanity being wiped out... taking out huge chunks of our population" are two entirely different events!
Huh. I don't remember seeing those. Maybe those comments were modded down, as they should have been.
You're seriously underestimating the connectedness and security of cars. They're already networked and hackable remotely.
No, we're far from having cars that drive as well as humans. It's such a large open research problem that we just got a 32-acre fake city to help develop driverless cars.
If you include the fact that you never bought it, that's more information that affects the probabilities. It's just like in the Monty Hall problem where revealing a goat behind one door changes the probabilities of what's behind the other doors.
Given the fact that cannabis was recently made legal where you live, you may be 5% less like to pass a class. Given the additional fact that you chose not to use cannabis, you may be 5% more likely to pass a class due to the curve being lowered by those who do smoke.
I thought the characters drove their cars to school in that movie.
Oh, go blow it out your ass!
We'll need human drivers in the loop for quite some time. Here's a radio interview with a robotics researcher who actually works on autonomous vehicles to tell you the same: http://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on...
From that perspective there is absolutely nothing to be gained from getting out of bed either. That's why it's not a useful perspective.
When most AI people are talking about artificial intelligence, they are talking about narrow "intelligence". This is why in Russell & Norvig's book they quickly move away from the term "intelligence" and instead speak of "agents" working in a particular "task environment", and whether the agents behave rationally or not. For example, a chess program may be able to win chess games against a grandmaster chess player, so we say this agent is performing rationally within this specific task environment. The chess program is not "intelligent" in the sense that you and I are -- it's an incredibly dumb automaton, as is nearly every computer program. You can see this when it fails miserably when put in any different task environment.
The intelligence that will bring about the singularity is artificial general intelligence, which is the same intelligence that you and I have, that is, the capability of performing well in a very wide variety of environments. This type of agent would be able to reason about how to improve itself and bring about that improvement. Very little AI research these days involves artificial general intelligence, and the progress in this area is slow.
I think this is exactly why Andrew Ng started his machine learning Coursera course, because so many programmers in Silicon Valley were applying machine learning techniques without knowing what they're doing. His idea seems to be, "If I can teach the fundamentals of machine learning to thousands of programmers, then these so-called machine learning 'experts' will be seen for who they are." I hope that managers that think they can be armchair data scientists will also be seen for who they are.
Exactly! The multiple return statements make the code easier to understand. Some programmers are so militant about having a single return statement in every function that they can't tolerate that code, though.
The goto statement isn't the issue. The issue is non-structured programming, which includes the use of goto, break, continue, multiple returns from a procedure, exceptions, longjmp, and anything else that interrupts the normal control flow of a program. The idea is that to understand a program, you need to understand all the ways the flow of control can occur. Each time you conditionally break the flow of control, you're potentially doubling the number of ways control could flow through the program, making it potentially exponentially harder to understand and test.
Once a co-worker proudly showed me how he wrote the following construct:
//some code
//more code
//yet more code
do {
if (condition) break;
if (another condition) break;
} while (0);
to avoid goto statements. My reaction is that goto statements would more clearly express the jumps in the control flow. A do-while indicates a loop, but it isn't a loop; it's gotos in disguise.
Some programmers take this idea to an extreme and even write code such as:
int abs(int x) {
int retval;
if (x >= 0) retval = x;
else retval = -x;
return retval;
}
In this case, multiple return statements would make the code simpler, not harder to understand. Similarly, using exceptions wisely can make code easier to understand, not harder.
The bottom line is that as a general rule it's best not to break the flow of control. But a good programmer will know when it makes sense to do so, and if a goto statement makes sense, it can be the clearest way to express such a break.
W****h!
A very large marine mammal.
Most people who go to prison don't particularly care about obeying laws. That attitude doesn't seem to result in much leniency from the courts.
She missed the "reasoned hypothesis" step. We know that burning fossil fuels produces carbon dioxide, and we know that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. So of course burning fossil fuels will cause warming! And because we've observed the warming, we've confirmed this prediction beyond all reasonable doubt.
That's ice surface area, which tells you only how spread out the ice is, not how much there is. You need to look at the ice mass, which is declining at an accelerating rate.