asdf_snar

8 ms·

31.
by asdf_snar 5y ago
Thank you for this reply. My experience aligns with yours, and I find your conclusion (the question is not interesting) insightful. You're probably right. I am an ex-academic that wrote useless algorithms. The implementations were math
32.
by asdf_snar 5y ago
This is cool, but I've always wanted to know the reverse: how many arXiv papers that have an "algorithm" in them have made it into the codebase at a for-profit company? I estimate it at less than 0.1%. Of course, no company w
33.
by asdf_snar 5y ago
I just wanted to give an A+ for Hugo's quickstart. This HN post was coincidentally exactly what I had been wondering about. From the wealth of replies, I narrowed down my choices to Jekyll and Hugo. Both require a little bit of work to
34.
by asdf_snar 5y ago
I once attended a summer school in Saint-Flour, France, where Sourav Chatterjee gave a masterful exposition of results on large deviations for random graphs. All chalk talk, clear presentation. My impression is he's a deep thinker. On
35.
by asdf_snar 5y ago
I took the post as just being part of any other day, it just coincidentally happened that it's Christmas, and out of the blue after my partner of four years with whom I had planned to move across the ocean, buy a house and have kids wi
36.
by asdf_snar 5y ago
I also didn't get the impression at all that they're kids; quite the opposite. They have golden handcuffs, just like a lot of people in tech. The difference seems to be (and this is what I felt the article conveyed, at least to me
37.
by asdf_snar 5y ago
First, let me recognize the openness with which you're approaching the problem, and that you've acknowledged there is a problem. My academic background is also applied math, and I believe there is a missing viewpoint that I'v
38.
by asdf_snar 5y ago
It might come down to difference of experiences. As soon as software bites you once, I think most people feel differently towards it. I think the reason VLC gets (and in my opinion, deserves) a lot of praise is that a large part of the user
39.
by asdf_snar 5y ago
I've been using the Arxiv for 10+ years. I always thought it was just a "cool" way of spelling it, like "ArXiV" or "eXtReme". Mind blown, thanks.
40.
by asdf_snar 5y ago
Seconding these thoughts, but also I don't think they're harsh. After a minute on the site I still have no idea what makes this different from writing Markdown in Notepad. If I really need the "horizontal time" aspect I
41.
by asdf_snar 5y ago
I have a question about the statement "you can't truly measure randomness", if it's alright (since you seem knowledgeable about this). > For example a "random number generator" that just has a large hardcode
42.
by asdf_snar 5y ago
The quality of not only the product, but the accompanying explanations is outstanding. I think it's a work of art, because not only is it visually impactful (especially at 1Hz, as in the demu), it also uses the medium to convey an idea
43.
by asdf_snar 5y ago
I find it hard to appreciate the need for this website. First, after scrolling down to the bottom of the page, I still couldn't see where I could "start". I clicked the only prominent button featured on the page, "Produc
44.
by asdf_snar 5y ago
I'll repeat what others have said above, but perhaps with more emphasis on the layperson's perspective. I think I started using homebrew some 4+ years ago. I have no idea what a cask, tap, pour, or whatever is. At first things &qu
45.
by asdf_snar 5y ago
While I agree that some amount of mathematical maturity is useful, I think it is a far reach to claim one has to know the Peano axioms in particular, at least in their set-theoretic form. I assume you don't mean knowing and using them
46.
by asdf_snar 5y ago
> Indeed, "estimations" might not be the best word as you're still, in some way, estimating with the Monte Carlo approach. Not in some way -- literally. The samples are averaged, and as the number of samples goes to infini
47.
by asdf_snar 5y ago
I really dislike posts in this vein, because they use statements like "This post will teach you how to replace estimations and guesses with a Monte Carlo simulation." as though the output of a Monte Carlo simulation were not an es
48.
by asdf_snar 5y ago
I believe that he is very bright. Do you think it is possible that he has also gotten so wrapped up in his own thoughts that he can no longer distinguish "good" theory from "bad" theory? It happens to a lot of mathematic
49.
by asdf_snar 5y ago
Fair enough. Are there any notable improvements over Eigen? I couldn't see whether Blaze supports dynamic rank tensor operations (Eigen doesn't). Thanks.
50.
by asdf_snar 5y ago
Respectfully, it seems like you didn't take the following comment to heart. > You sound pretentious, hence why you don't inspire VPs enough to follow your projects. For that purpose, being skilled in SWE is barely important com
51.
by asdf_snar 5y ago
Writing math in Word has the following disadvantages: - referencing is a nightmare (this is probably the worst aspect). \label and \ref or \eqref? No, remember the equation number, click the References tab, Cross-Reference, select "equ
52.
by asdf_snar 5y ago
https://www.mathcha.io/editor is indeed much closer to TeXmacs than https://latex.codecogs.com/eqneditor/editor.php . No matter how instant the rendering is, the latter is still split-screen. It may no
53.
by asdf_snar 5y ago
Years ago I looked into both LyX and TeXmacs. I could already quickly write math in LaTeX but I wanted to work out calculations on a single screen without the code/renderer split screen setup (having the math directly visible is a game
54.
by asdf_snar 5y ago
I think I misled myself into thinking your selling point was the technology (Monte Carlo), whereas as you say there is little about that on the website. And your comments below are right: building the tool around MC affords you a lot of fle
55.
by asdf_snar 5y ago
It is true that there is no closed form expressions for the sum of two independent log normal distributions. However, like I said, good approximations exist. Moreover, if you were to ask me to compute some expectation E[f(X)] where X is the
56.
by asdf_snar 5y ago
As a package this seems perfectly reasonable, but I'm skeptical of the use of Monte Carlo being a technical buzzword rather than a choice made because it was the appropriate tool for the task. I wasn't able to find any technical d
57.
by asdf_snar 6y ago
I don't disagree with you on any points. I have some academic friends who mostly do "a ton of munging and then some basic stat functions", as you say (but with less sensitive data). The problem is that their workflow is prone
58.
by asdf_snar 6y ago
This article seems to cover research software that even can be built. I claim the majority of _code_ written to support research articles is a collection of scripts written to produce figures to put in the paper. Even when the article is ab
59.
by asdf_snar 6y ago
Of course, you are right. I recall Geyer at some point writing some people thought there was a difference between having a burn-in period that happened to have X_b = x_b, and simply starting with X_0 = x_b. I can't find that on this pa
60.
by asdf_snar 6y ago
I think Geyer's point is that if you generate samples X_0, ..., X_b where b>0 is a burn-in time, and start collecting estimates at time t>b, then that's not somehow better than starting at X_b and not burning in (the two are

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