alimw

23 ms·

241.
by alimw 8y ago
More to maths than numbers of course... it's been a while but I'm thinking Alice in Wonderland. or Flatland maybe
242.
by alimw 8y ago
Presumably the target audience then is people who got there by accident. > If your brain hurts (trust me, mine does too), ... This brings to mind something Ben Goldacre said (sorry can't quote) about the average science journalist b
243.
by alimw 8y ago
There must be someone in your company doing some form of business analysis? Probably in spreadsheets. Talk to them, especially about aspects of their work that involve probability. Don't expect to find a problem that looks exactly like
244.
by alimw 8y ago
> I remember it took me a while to realise I could do "x = x + 1" in my code and what that meant That's the sort of thing I called bit-twiddling in my own comment. Some of these ideas get so ingrained in older programmers
245.
by alimw 8y ago
I would use Elm. The language itself is very high level, but designed to be as simple as possible. I think that's ideal for a child still far from the job market, who might never need to learn how to do all that bit-twiddling that prog
246.
by alimw 8y ago
You write beautifully.
247.
by alimw 8y ago
The GP's comment > the stellerator design, in a deep and fundamental way, simply isn't possible without massive computational power, whereas we've been building tokamaks since before massive cheap computational power. does
248.
by alimw 8y ago
I understand the situation might be different in the US, but in the UK and in other countries a PhD with a hands-off supervisor can be as lonely as your heart desires.
249.
by alimw 8y ago
Previous discussion :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17641789
250.
by alimw 8y ago
I think your definition depends on being able to decide for every real x whether n ∈ [x-1, x), for which you need that n < x. According to the slides that is not generally possible in constructive mathematics.
251.
by alimw 8y ago
A more enlightening derivation here (ex. 12.11): http://pages.physics.cornell.edu/~sethna/StatMech/EntropyOrd...
252.
by alimw 8y ago
The idea that much (all?) of human thought, need, fear etc. is associated with (identifiable with?) sensation having definite location in the body, is one that should be familiar to anyone who has practised meditation as taught to Vipassana
253.
by alimw 8y ago
It's amazing that to replace Patrick Moore they found a black female version of Patrick Moore :)
254.
by alimw 8y ago
£47000 will put you in the eightieth percentile of London earners.
255.
by alimw 8y ago
Yes. If you don't know how to do the grunt work then noone's going to be able to make you do it. In one job I ended up spending most of my time programming for my junior's project simply because she couldn't (or wouldn&#
256.
by alimw 8y ago
I think you are exaggerating the difficulty of theorem statement compared to proof. Here is one (admittedly extreme) example in Lean, from the formal abstracts website. theorem Wiles_Taylor : ∀ (x y z n : nat), x > 0 → y > 0 → n >
257.
by alimw 8y ago
You're right (and the GP isn't). A proof of your topological theorem in any one of Coq/Isabelle/Lean is a pretty good indication that it's correct, in spite of their various foundations.
258.
by alimw 8y ago
Your second paragraph makes some startling claims. While it's not entirely clear to me what you mean by them, they do seem in conflict with my own understanding of emergence, and also with TFA, which says: > More generally, I claim
259.
by alimw 8y ago
I guess I'll admit I wasn't up to the intellectual challenge in that, all else being equal, being smarter might have got me through.
260.
by alimw 8y ago
I guess you mean that they're not too specific about concrete situations to which their analysis might apply. But in some sense the network model was already fairly specific, since the analysis would become yet more general in e.g. Per
261.
by alimw 8y ago
The article completely ignores the hugely damaging effect this aggressive approach can have (and, I can attest, does have) on the other party.
262.
by alimw 8y ago
I agree. Surely these sentences are outright wrong: "While a computer might find some pattern in a string, it cannot find the best pattern. We might find some short program that outputs a certain pattern, but there could exist an even
263.
by alimw 8y ago
Hardly a beginner at programming, but I also struggled with this when I picked up Python recently. The documentation doesn't make it obvious when functions have this sort of side effect, so like your students I play with the REPL to es
264.
by alimw 8y ago
Not all research is designed for commercial exploitation! For example some ideas that are both practical and useful can only be implemented by regulators or government agencies. In this arena good research may fail to find adoption for any
265.
by alimw 8y ago
How on earth did you interpret my comment as about "writing style"?
266.
by alimw 8y ago
> If people want to trade stocks every hundredth of a nanosecond, why not let them? > but if that meaningless-seeming competition between high-frequency trading firms helps subsidize basic research to improve our understanding of time
267.
by alimw 8y ago
View Source
268.
by alimw 8y ago
Do you maybe want a database integrated with a good logic programming language? Datomic/Datalog springs to mind.
269.
by alimw 8y ago
> If the real world has been disappointing to you for whatever reason, why wouldn't you seek out a more "perfect" world in a simulation? You could call this a lazy decision.
270.
by alimw 8y ago
The Black-Scholes model may not be a good example; it is successfully applied by financiers on a day-to-day basis.

More ›