NathanRice

17 ms·

31.
by NathanRice 15y ago
Sorry, I'm a math person, I use math terms out of habit :) Your initial statement was that if you take a single threaded program and run multiple instances of it in a single process (composition of sequential software), concurrency issues a
32.
by NathanRice 15y ago
If you're talking about single process cgi/wsgi/node-style-eventloops, the composition of sequential software is still effectively sequential if the data is disjoint. If you have non-disjoint data and a single process environment, then you
33.
by NathanRice 15y ago
I hesitate to admit photons into the macro realm, considering they are elementary particles and essentially massless. Given the de Broglie hypothesis, I must of course admit macroscopic objects do have wavelengths, and thus macroscopic unce
34.
by NathanRice 15y ago
My experience in user interface coding (though not really my favorite area) has been that event handling is pretty much code and ignore, until you want to do some big nasty thing, at which point you have to implement a callable/runnable int
35.
by NathanRice 15y ago
I am a big fan of synchronous dataflow as a way to organize programs. It meshes well with the idea of modelling knowledge rather than "programming".
36.
by NathanRice 15y ago
I was thinking more along the lines of working around data-locality issues. For instance, imagine that you have code that requires very high latency fetches, or you are working with a data set that doesn't fit in memory. Typically, you ha
37.
by NathanRice 15y ago
One significant issue is that most programming languages are inherently temporally inexpressive, having either full order (imperative/impure functional) or no order (purely functional). Ideally the language would make it easy to organize s
38.
by NathanRice 15y ago
In my opinion, there isn't really a palpable benefit to be gained from totally re-engineering GUI event handling. Processes that are so CPU intensive they cause the GUI to lag are uncommon (and easily dealt with when they do occur). Even
39.
by NathanRice 15y ago
The reality is stateful on a macro-scale. I find the idea that the universe is actually stateful, and we do not completely understand behavior at quantum level far more parsimonious than the converse.
40.
by NathanRice 15y ago
While I agree with some things the author says, his conclusions are bullshit. Very few processes want to be parallel. People who primarily do parallel programming think everything needs to be parallel, so they assume everyone must be going
41.
by NathanRice 15y ago
In my experience Indian workers are a bad bet. The average quality of work I've gotten from Filipinos is higher, for slightly less money. Filipinos on average make more of an effort to understand requirements and seem to take more pride i
42.
by NathanRice 15y ago
I have my face in a Burger Machine record book. I don't remember my exact time now, but it was like 1:05ish. I'm sure someone has beaten me by now but the staff sure was impressed when I did it :)
43.
by NathanRice 15y ago
Filipinos are great for business process outsourcing. They tend to have fairly good written and spoken English and have a decent work ethic. I'm not as big a fan of them for software work. For coders, eastern Europe is your best bet, with
44.
by NathanRice 15y ago
In the binary case the usual treatment in statistics is to use the logistic function (and logit) to work with real numbers, then transform back into probability space as the last step. This is a little flakey for ordinal numbers, and the us
45.
by NathanRice 15y ago
By far my favorite book on the subject is conveniently available for free on the internet! "Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms" by David MacKay is wonderfully written, well paced and comprehensive. If you like the book,
46.
by NathanRice 15y ago
You are absolutely correct that they are not mathematically identical. I struggled to word it in a way that would not mislead people, the distinction is important to emphasize.
47.
by NathanRice 15y ago
Yes, the explanation of "imaginary votes" is by far the simplest way of thinking about the situation. Having mathematical formalism and a rigorously studied methods makes me feel OK about doing it though, otherwise I would be very uncomfor
48.
by NathanRice 15y ago
Operations research and hard systems modeling are neat. The only gripe I have is that often times the models make simplifying assumptions which hold tenuously at best. One example of this is the Gaussian copula used in VAR. In actuality,
49.
by NathanRice 15y ago
Absolutely! I just wrote a reply where I alluded to that, unfortunately I didn't refresh and see this post or I would have just plugged you instead. The benefit of the Bayesian treatment here that I want to drill down on is how natural it
50.
by NathanRice 15y ago
I don't think you have to resort to any overly complex machinery to achieve similar behavior. The simplest approach is to just use a non uniform prior. His pessimistic bound could be emulated by having an initial alpha that places more we
51.
by NathanRice 15y ago
I appreciate people who take the time to apply math to things in the real world, and share it with non academic crowds. Thanks for that. 5 star rating systems are obnoxious. From a mathematical perspective, if you treat them in an ordinal
52.
by NathanRice 15y ago
Well, I try not to be dogmatic :)
53.
by NathanRice 15y ago
While I agree with the spirit of the article, this is one of those cases where a Bayesian treatment is conceptually much clearer. Assume that ratings are being generated by a stable stochastic process where the underlying distribution is mu
54.
by NathanRice 15y ago
This is actually an active area of research in the theory of computation, and computational semantics. Researchers have been hard at work trying to formulate an algebra of ubiquitous computation that can encapsulate the spatial and tempora
55.
by NathanRice 15y ago
"Learn you a Haskell for great good" is probably the most approachable book on the subject you can read it online for free. People who are confused should definitely check it out.
56.
So you want to hire good programmers?(machinegestalt.posterous.com)
2 points by NathanRice 15y ago|0 comments
57.
by NathanRice 15y ago
Actually, if you read between the lines a little bit, what the article suggests is somewhat analogous to a viewmodel/presenter. Creating an entire DOM in the way suggested would be bad form, but creating an abstracted viewmodel then transf
58.
by NathanRice 15y ago
A lot of people will make snide remarks when someone says they are creating their own framework, but obviously if someone has evaluated the existing frameworks and still decides to do it, there is an unscratched itch. A lot of people who a
59.
If programming languages were vehicles, what would they look like?(machinegestalt.posterous.com)
20 points by NathanRice 15y ago|3 comments