bencw

5 ms·

1.
by bencw 6y ago
> I am uncertain why this is such a travesty > If a school is willing to accept sub-par students then they will see their own stats decline I think you just answered your own question.
2.
by bencw 6y ago
You'd have to file taxes, but won't necessarily owe any.
3.
by bencw 6y ago
I think it's a play on "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".
4.
by bencw 6y ago
I see what you're getting at with the first point but what about the second? It seems to me the "quality of engineering culture" at a company doesn't need to correlate with company size.
5.
by bencw 6y ago
This is something I've wondered about (along with potential applications of autograd outside of deep learning). Do you have a recommended starting point for someone who wants to learn more about this?
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by bencw 6y ago
This comparison holds true for most major European nations vs the US.
7.
by bencw 6y ago
This is a general fact about Gibbs distributions!
8.
by bencw 6y ago
Why is this? Is there a brain drain going on?
9.
by bencw 6y ago
This book is great and very much complementary to Strang's approach in that it leans more towards "abstract" linear algebra.
10.
by bencw 6y ago
This is very well put. Knowledge has a hierarchical (or perhaps even cyclical!) structure and it's unrealistic to think that a body of knowledge can be taught or learned sequentially.
11.
by bencw 6y ago
Maybe I'm biased, but I really don't think so. Monads are quite a bit more abstract than the concepts in linear algebra. Linear algebra is both geometric and algorithmic and therefore very intuitive. Most of the difficulty people
12.
by bencw 6y ago
Honestly, I think working with computers (possibly some programming) should be more frequently integrated into math courses. A computer is a natural to really interact with the material, like labs in the natural sciences. We're lucky t
13.
by bencw 6y ago
A common type of example involves relatively small or uninformative datasets. Say you flip a coin a few times and only get heads. Your maximum likelihood (frequentist) estimate is that the coin will always land heads. In a Bayesian setting,
14.
by bencw 7y ago
I find this statement from Paul Graham's Revenge of the Nerds enlightening: > Lisp looks strange not so much because it has a strange syntax as because it has no syntax; you express programs directly in the parse trees that get b