wnewman

6 ms·

1.
by wnewman 7y ago
This hack is supposed to be for huge data: 10kb or more, thus comfortably more than a page. If the >10kb wall o' code was wrapped in a parse-as-JSON-at-runtime function call which was was preceded by a three-line comment describing
2.
by wnewman 7y ago
Both proof and explanation seem to be important. Two experiences with explanation made a particular impression on me. First I found it hard to get much out of a Real Analysis course when I was a grad student. Only partly because of lack of
3.
by wnewman 7y ago
"For no particular reason" may not be quite right. One candidate for a particular reason is the same grouchiness about orthodox[ ] technology that shows up in many double standards. E.g., chemicals that fail the Ames Test are alar
4.
by wnewman 10y ago
(responding not to what is in the article, but only to your comment on how difficult it is to study what is more nearly "advanced mathematics") I got 800 on the 1980s-era math SATs, came in third in the Portland OR area in a math
5.
by wnewman 10y ago
I have used all-uppercase to make a distinction like class vs. instance in variables (in case-sensitive languages in which the class might be an ordinary held-in-a-variable value, like Javascript), and I might do it again. But it's ver
6.
by wnewman 10y ago
Why would Carter know about QM? As far as I know, little in a nuclear reactor can be usefully analyzed at the quantum level even today. (And FWIW, even if some things in flight can be usefully analyzed in terms of simple limiting cases of t
7.
by wnewman 10y ago
"gov't taxes corporations' profits and individuals' revenues" Say what? As I understand it, a basic theme of income taxation for me as an individual in the USA, and indeed most (perhaps all?) western countries is th
8.
by wnewman 11y ago
At a guess, it includes things like the tricks in http://dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a456960.pdf ("DETECTION AND JAMMING LOW PROBABILITY OF INTERCEPT (LPI) RADARS") but (1) it's obviously
9.
by wnewman 11y ago
No, it was a thought experiment I made up, not an exercise I've ever seen performed: how abbreviated a description of quantum mechanics could I get away with and still convey the idea to on-the-eve-of-QM scientists? The QM equations ar
10.
by wnewman 11y ago
I think http://judithcurry.com/2013/10/30/implications-for-climate-m... is a reasonably representative informed article on this.
11.
by wnewman 11y ago
"The real trick is to see how well your model extrapolates from the data you have out into the future." That is the most common way to show the modeller is not shamelessly overfitting.:-| Another way, though, is less common but no
12.
by wnewman 11y ago
"It's weird that a person who can come off as a real grouch has managed to be such a supremely effective dictator." It's weird that a writer at the level of Bloomberg would be so weirdly dogmatic about this. To the best
13.
by wnewman 12y ago
"I'd also add that while everyone suggesting AI resources is helpful, the best thing to do is just jump in and start coding." I'd modify that slightly: skim (an hour per chapter? something like that) one or more comprehe
14.
by wnewman 12y ago
Also, the language syntax is (basically) designed to be parsed in a trivially obvious way into the internal "list" (really tree, with lists as a common special case) data structure. This lets the friction of writing macros which w
15.
by wnewman 12y ago
The old book _Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp_ contains a number of nontrivial programs (like an Othello player and a little symbolic math program). AFAIK, most people think the code is unusuall
16.
by wnewman 12y ago
(I've never worked at a bank, but I've talked with people who do.) It can also be work with too many grotty doesn't-teach-you-anything-technical challenges. For example, a bank that has acquired multiple companies with incomp
17.
by wnewman 12y ago
"You can easily diff text. Text works with version control systems." Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. It is very strange to me how hard it seems to be to convey this to almost anyone who has not experienced it in serious computer p
18.
by wnewman 12y ago
"If you look at a detailed diagram of a complex design, it is even worse than text." Not necessarily. (Or horses for courses, or YMMV, or however you want to put it.) For some kinds of things, diagrams seem to do awfully well. Not
19.
by wnewman 12y ago
I do not deny the importance of the KISS moral of this story. However, there is also an important meta-moral from putting this story in a larger context: what lessons about feasible complexity you draw from your insect-themed programming co
20.
by wnewman 12y ago
"Transporting goods inland was hard because..." I think it should be something like "was even harder than you would think because..." Sure it was harder before efficient harnesses, but even after efficient harnesses were
21.
by wnewman 13y ago
It is not necessarily true that just because they are called scientists, real people with real motives, funded by organizations of real people with real motives, operating in a political regime controlled by real people with real motives, w
22.
by wnewman 13y ago
I like the Pilot "Precise V5" rollerball pens, and I use them a lot, and they hardly ever leak --- except they do seem to leak with significant probability if I carry them on an airplane. Possibly that's the source of your di
23.
by wnewman 13y ago
"rather than bringing negativity" That seems like a false dichotomy. Someone who's a pollyanna even about horrendous abominations is a problem in one way, someone who's indiscriminately contemptuous of reasonably useful
24.
by wnewman 13y ago
That the South Korean school system would do this is discouraging, no question. But I am also discouraged by how, when reading academic scientists and academic journals (_Nature_ in this case), it seems considerably easier to find concern a
25.
by wnewman 13y ago
Well, even he probably has only an imprecise idea how many hundreds of hours he spent on it, but I'll speculate it's comparable to how many hours he'd spend getting a master's degree in CS (at night, while working full t
26.
by wnewman 13y ago
Like? I think it's more nearly that serious programmers tend to be very impressed with Linus's results, and his critics have tried to attack him in ways that don't properly acknowledge that. If a critic had said upfront &quot
27.
by wnewman 13y ago
There exist test suites which look for some typical problems. The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diehard_tests were well-known long ago when I last thought seriously about randomness, and a few minutes with wikipedia tol
28.
by wnewman 13y ago
Remember that it's not a good idea to equate "didn't have thousands of times the taxable income [in the 1950s]" with "didn't make thousands of times more" except for the purpose of misleading people. Compa
29.
by wnewman 13y ago
Not just his enemies. For me, a number of the most memorable flourishes of the book are how formidable it makes some of the other people, at least in some respects --- the defense professor especially, but at various points in the story he
30.
by wnewman 13y ago
Insignificant price controls don't make much difference, so it's basically a wash. Significant price controls tend to have predictable perverse effects. It seems to be impolite to report them: for some years, every time I read a s

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