andy_wrote

10 ms·

31.
by andy_wrote 9y ago
Although the immediate reason BRK/B ended up in the S&P 500 was because they acquired BNI (Burlington Northern, a railroad company) for stock in 2010. But fair enough that it wasn't in there beforehand and is still around now.
32.
by andy_wrote 9y ago
I definitely agree with your point, though I'd recast it slightly away from "twitchy"/"speedrun"/map memorization and towards the thrill of things being fast and disorienting. [1] Sonic involved lots of br
33.
by andy_wrote 9y ago
This. Technically the radii can't even have a normal distribution, because the support of the normal is (-Inf, Inf) but the radii are bounded below by 0. So you might say that the radii = r + e, where r is constant and e is normal arou
34.
by andy_wrote 9y ago
Interesting - just perusing those links, it sounds like a multi-armed bandit problem, in which you reason that if something has worked out before, you should tilt your bets more in that direction. In the context of the urn model, you'd
35.
by andy_wrote 9y ago
I've never played in real life with the deck, but I first came across this version on a software version of Catan I had (I think Xbox?). I really enjoyed it and my guess is that in real life it adds a substantial angle to negotiating p
36.
by andy_wrote 9y ago
There's a probability model called the Pólya urn where you imagine an urns containing numbered balls (colored balls in a typical example, but to draw the comparison with dice we can say they're numbered 1-6), and every time you dr
37.
by andy_wrote 9y ago
Fun story! But look at the date at the bottom...
38.
by andy_wrote 9y ago
I've never read Lessing, but Le Guin is one of my favorite authors. For me, _The Left Hand of Darkness_ is easily on a par with other canonical "great" 20th-century literature I've read. I've always felt that if she
39.
by andy_wrote 9y ago
Just saw it starting to happen to me a few minutes ago, at which point the status page still listed 100% app server availability, but it's since ticked down to 95%. Edit: just the web interface, I can still push code.
40.
by andy_wrote 10y ago
At Custora (YC W11), analyzing consumer behavior and presenting the insights through a web-based interface. We have an in-house system for modeling DAGs of statistics, perhaps like Airflow (I've only read about Airflow, never used it,
41.
by andy_wrote 10y ago
I'm in the middle of Death and Life right now. I'm enjoying it for sure, and I find myself nodding my head at a lot of what she says, particularly stuff about border vacuums and mixed-usage areas, both of which have figured into m
42.
by andy_wrote 10y ago
Thanks for writing it! It's one of my favorite math blog posts floating out there.
43.
by andy_wrote 10y ago
For readers who are OK with some math, I recommend John Myles White's eye-opening post about means, medians, and modes: http://www.johnmyleswhite.com/notebook/2013/03/22/modes-medi... He describes t
44.
by andy_wrote 10y ago
The only time I've actually seen a bat on the trading floor was as a branded piece of swag from the BATS exchange: https://www.batstrading.com/
45.
by andy_wrote 10y ago
From the article: "One hardheaded answer is to build more housing. An increasing supply of housing would theoretically put downward pressure on prices. The reality, unfortunately, is that almost all urban construction happens too late.
46.
by andy_wrote 10y ago
I've never played regular Werewolf, unless you are referring to what I know of as the informal party game Mafia (several nights, one killer, several townspeople, maybe one or two additional roles who get special abilities). In that cas
47.
by andy_wrote 10y ago
I'll second Hanabi. In addition to being inherently very fun, collaborative games are a great way to bring in people who aren't as into board games and are worried about getting stomped on by experienced players. An interesting an
48.
by andy_wrote 10y ago
I totally agree with your point about the comparatively low conflict in ONUW. In addition to the points you mentioned that drive this, I'd add uncertainty about your own team membership, and the fact that "good guys" may also
49.
by andy_wrote 10y ago
I can't believe that I'm the first to mention One Night Ultimate Werewolf, which has been the consensus favorite amongst my friends for a while now. It has relatively simple rules but very solid strategy (rewards logic and duplici
50.
by andy_wrote 10y ago
Towards the end of its life, my NES wouldn't work if I pushed the cartridge all the way in. I had to push it just the right depth in, such that the top of the cartridge (the part facing you when you inserted it) would lightly scrape th
51.
by andy_wrote 10y ago
In R there is a little syntactical nudge in this direction in that the matrix inversion function is actually called `solve`. `solve(A, B)` gives you the solution to AX = B, and B's default argument is the identity, so `solve(A)` just g
52.
by andy_wrote 11y ago
It sounds like the problem Fong faces is that the industry she wants to work in is very capital-intensive. In that case, does the startup/VC/equity model make sense? Wouldn't it make more sense to be attached to a large compa
53.
by andy_wrote 11y ago
If you live in NY, you can play this at a currently ongoing exhibit about the history of computing in New York at the NY Historical Society. (Review: I would say the exhibit was decent, though not great - might not be much new for people al
54.
by andy_wrote 11y ago
I think they don't have to be related. The article's example of tags and folders is a good illustration. "Tag" and "folder" models might have a clear enough implementation in the code; a programmer might wonder
55.
by andy_wrote 11y ago
The article, which I liked, is very end user-oriented, but I think that the ability of other programmers to interact with your conceptual models is just as important. Other people have to work with your code, and their ability to develop ne
56.
by andy_wrote 11y ago
I agree totally re your point of not understanding of the domain, it can be really hard to make good conceptual models until you've actually tried throwing some code at the walls. I guess I'd rephrase your point about "one to
57.
by andy_wrote 11y ago
I was going to say - I believe historians regard "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" as the definitive work on the subject, and Szilárd appears in the first sentence of that book. (I've only read the first chapter or two, been me
58.
by andy_wrote 12y ago
In light of this issue, dplyr's tbl_df structure (a light but helpful wrapper around data.frame) actually has different drop defaults, for example > x <- data.frame(foo=1:5, bar=1:5, baz=1:5) > dim(x[,'foo'])
59.
by andy_wrote 12y ago
Wickham et al's R packages are great, especially dplyr, and I think should be taught to new R users pretty much right off the bat. I find R's syntax to be a big hangup for new learners, especially on indexing and apply-to-each (sa
60.
by andy_wrote 12y ago
Are there people who have more experience with comparative workflow managers who can quickly see the pros and cons of Pinball vs. Luigi? Perhaps someone at Pinterest who tried out other systems, as was mentioned in the post? (Though maybe L

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