benrbray

26 ms·

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by benrbray 5y ago
I guess I disagree with your premise then? In my experience someone who is likely to think that anyone can learn CS is likely to also think that anyone can learn art, car repair, or chemistry. On the flip side there are plenty of people w
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by benrbray 5y ago
Sorry, by "can" I mean "has the mental capacity to". I agree with the statement "not everyone has the knowledge they need to understand chemistry right now ". I disagree with "not everyone has the menta
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by benrbray 5y ago
I don't disagree with a lot of what you said. Practically speaking, some students are simply "behind" where they should be, at it might be too much effort to catch up, so the pragmatic choice is to pursue something else. I
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by benrbray 5y ago
Why do you believe that "not everyone can understand chemistry"? Perhaps I should be a little more specific. When I say "everyone" below, I mean "the overwhelming majority of people in the average range of human in
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by benrbray 5y ago
The grandparent comment was about teaching, so I interpreted the parent comment to mean that "innate ability matters much more than good teaching", which my personal experience teaching people disagrees with. And sure, the stateme
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by benrbray 5y ago
> I don’t think everyone can understand computer science. This is a bold claim. None of us are special for working in tech. Our life has presented us the opportunity and passion to invest ourselves deeply in the field, often at great
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by benrbray 5y ago
As I understand it, immutability usually refers to mutable data structures hidden behind an interface that allows the programmer to reason about things as if they were immutable. The naive implementation is of course to duplicate all data
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by benrbray 5y ago
Is anyone here able to provide insight about how these visualizations are used today by humanities / social science researchers? As an undergrad I helped [1] a German Lit professor run topic models and produce visualizations like this
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by benrbray 5y ago
Yeah, I remember I used to get frustrated when I had to read code that used map() or even .forEach() extensively, thinking a simple, imperative for loop would suffice. I slowly came to realize that a for loop gives you too much power. It&
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by benrbray 5y ago
For completeness, would you mind posting a link to some of this evidence so we don't have to take your word for it?
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by benrbray 5y ago
It's quite a mess, since discrete optimization is quite an old topic used by many different fields (engineering, statistics, sciences, math) each with their own notation/terminology. One of the merits of the B&V book is the r
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by benrbray 5y ago
I'm not sure "Convex Optimization" by B&V is a good self-study book. I really struggled with it as student, and I struggled to teach with it as a TA. It's one of those "Step 2. Draw the Rest of the Owl!" b
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by benrbray 5y ago
A good intro real analysis book will have no prerequisites, really! I learned from Ross, "Elementary Analysis: The Theory of Calculus", which starts with sequences of natural numbers. (I'm of the opinion that the usual Calc1
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by benrbray 5y ago
Riehl's "Category Theory in Context" is great. It's one of those books where every page really takes a couple hours to fully absorb. It pairs well with Milewski's "Category Theory for Programmers" [1] se
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by benrbray 5y ago
I recently started working through the first volume of "Software Foundations" [1] by Pierce et al. If anyone wants to learn Coq with me this summer, feel free to email me at [hn username]@gmail.com :) [1] https://softw
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by benrbray 5y ago
How innovative, more P A D D I N G around everything! What's information density? I guess all the UI controls need to social distance? Big ScrollWheel™ did it again!
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by benrbray 5y ago
Interesting to that this method makes use of Equivariant Neural Networks. Taco Cohen recently published his PhD thesis [1], which combines a dozen or so papers he authored on the topic. [1]: https://pure.uva.nl/ws/file
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by benrbray 5y ago
Nice project! How was your experience using CRDTs? I often see the criticism thrown around that the history might become enormous even with regular usage. I'm curious what you have to say!
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by benrbray 5y ago
Strictly speaking, yes, you're right that some people are mentally deficient. But no one is disagreeing with the fact that people with mental disabilities exist. So I'm focusing instead on otherwise productive members of societ
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by benrbray 5y ago
I don't think it's really about computational power -- it's about practice and experience. It's about how hard those people choose to work and what things they choose to put effort into over their lifetime. All those c
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by benrbray 5y ago
In my own perhaps limited experience, I've never really encountered anyone who is simply incapable of deep thought / critical thinking. I've met plenty of people who have a learned helplessness when it comes to, say, math.
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by benrbray 5y ago
For me, I'm not quite ready to give up on the dream having a job that I actually enjoy. I'm still young, so effort I put into my career now will pay dividends for the rest of my life. Giving up the most productive hours of my da
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by benrbray 5y ago
One idea is to rank users more highly when their comment is closer to mine in the comment tree. Also to weight users more highly when we both comment on an article that has relatively few comments.
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by benrbray 5y ago
I'd be more interested to see a list of users who have commented the most on the same articles as me. Seems like a better way to measure interests, even if it's indirect. Of course, this wouldn't distinguish between doppelg
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by benrbray 5y ago
For anyone looking for an explanation, this StackOverflow question [1] is worth a read. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3870088/a-monad-is-just-...
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by benrbray 5y ago
The term "jaywalking" is intentional slander of pedestrians popularized by car manufacturing companies who were hell-bent on subjugating American cities to the automobile. [1] https://www.vox.com/2015/1/1
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by benrbray 5y ago
For a salaried position, it would be cool to have a system where you can "deposit" time by working extra one week when you're in the zone, then later "withdraw" some of that time when you need a break. Rather than
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by benrbray 5y ago
Related to #2, I'm still recovering from high school AP English. We had to meet quotas for a certain number of underlines / notes written in the margin per page. For the better part of a decade I haven't been able to pick u
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by benrbray 5y ago
No. Comments are like a parity check. If the comments don't match the code, then you know that either: 1) The comments are correct, but the code is wrong. This is a bug. 2) The comments are wrong, but the code is correct. This is e
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by benrbray 5y ago
Sometimes what is obvious to the code author won't be obvious to the person tasked with maintaining it. Sometimes, the "obvious" code has a bug, but its intended purpose is no longer obvious. Commends for "obvious"

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