cdavid

64 ms·

601.
by cdavid 16y ago
I think discussion about IQ, genetics and co are mostly meaningless for various reasons: the issue is extremely loaded politically, which means it is difficult to discuss about it with people who has a different opinion, and the science aro
602.
by cdavid 16y ago
That reductio ad absurdum, and most likely not what the OP meant. The idea that a fair society is one where inequalities are rather low is not exclusive to extreme left ideologies. How you articulate inequality and justice is one of the mos
603.
by cdavid 16y ago
There has been many studies for a long time (several decades) which show that as far as environment matters, what matters is not so much money, but what is called in sociology "cultural capital" (not sure it is the right expression in Engli
604.
by cdavid 16y ago
I would suspect they could easily gain ground once they get some people working in Japan to get all the cultural "quirks". I don't use facebook myself, but everyone around me seems to use it quite a bit, Japanese as much as foreigner, but t
605.
by cdavid 16y ago
I think the OP was refering to neural network as used with their analogy to their biological counterpart, which has indeed fallen out of fashion several decades ago. I rarely see "neural network" used in recent machine learning/AI literatur
606.
by cdavid 16y ago
It was figured out much earlier than 1996 - CAML first appeared around mid 80ies, and the theory behind type inference is more than 30 years old. I strongly suspect someone of Richard Gabriel caliber to be aware of this in 1996. Maybe the r
607.
by cdavid 16y ago
What's the point of map reduce if data can be held in memory ?
608.
by cdavid 16y ago
That's pretty rare situation nowadays, and relatively specific to maths and few other fields where you can work by yourself. Even Nobel-prize level research is rarely done this way anymore.
609.
by cdavid 16y ago
Exactly: it is very wrong to think PhD are useless because you won't use what you did during your PhD. This is stupid on two accounts: even if you do an academic career, what you did during your PhD is rarely what you will do later, and PhD
610.
by cdavid 16y ago
The problem of spam is that you do not want many false rejections (much better getting some spam through than losing some valid emails). In your example, you say it is easy to see from sender/subject/first line it is a spam, but only becaus
611.
by cdavid 16y ago
agreed. I had to use twisted this year, and I find the whole approach really wrong from an API POV. You have to force everything to use twisted-way, and this impacts a lot the design of the whole app. inlineCallbacks has its issues as well
612.
by cdavid 16y ago
OTOH, measuring this kind of things is quite hard - it is only a couple of cycles assuming the optimistic case, so smaller than most measurement methods overhead. People often wrongly assume that you can just execute many times the thing in
613.
by cdavid 16y ago
I think the most significant thing to learn at the OP's stage is dealing with bigger codebases. Anyone can program something in 1000 LOC. 10000 is already harder, but I think there is a guenuine difference when it goes to the next level, be
614.
by cdavid 16y ago
I think you are not looking at it the right way: sure, a lot of stuff on github is crap, but if you have something good on it where you are a significant contributor, then it surely is a good sign.
615.
by cdavid 16y ago
I did not call anything inferior - I don't know anything about nuclear technologies, so I could not make any judgement of that nature. My argument was that fast breeder is nothing new in principle, and the claims as stated in the article ar
616.
by cdavid 16y ago
You say that as if that's a bad point: what's the point of being always on the bleeding edge for the end user ? What do you think is the work of a linux distribution (or any packager, really). I am quite proeficient in python (which has b
617.
by cdavid 16y ago
This kind of claims has been heard in France as far as I can remember it. I don't know how technologies differ between French technology (super-phenix) and chinese ones, but I would be warry about the claims before seeing concrete results:
618.
by cdavid 16y ago
Email spam has no monetary value for google, whereas web spam may (I don't know whether they benefit from ads revenue from link farm and co, but that seems at least plausible). I wonder if the search quality issue is not also linked to a va
619.
by cdavid 16y ago
I don't understand "explanatory is a subset of relevant". If it does not (partially or not) explain the observed result, how can you decide whether it is relevant ? As for the other links, I don't see numbers related to PPP, but maybe I mis
620.
by cdavid 16y ago
While you're right that memory is the bottleneck in many CPU intensive programs, the idea that you need low level access to circumvent it is far from obvious. For example, several well known people have argued that C makes it more difficult
621.
by cdavid 16y ago
Because it is normally harder to scale write than read. At least, that's the most obvious thing coming to my mind, I don't know reddit usage.
622.
by cdavid 16y ago
Note that it is a very limited metric, I would not try to deduce too much from it. Also, MS research recrutes a lot of people top in their fields (up to fields medal/nobel prize kind of level), which helps tremendously when you only look on
623.
by cdavid 16y ago
That is significantly alter the outcome does not make it relevant - it only suggests it may be relevant. The typical example is explaining education success in terms of tv hours views/days during primary education. The variable has a stro
624.
by cdavid 16y ago
That it is googleable does not make it relevant. I don't understand how excluding students is not relevant when discussing about money spent per student: the point is indeed to keep enough to be statistically significant, but w.r.t. what is
625.
by cdavid 16y ago
Controlling for exogenous variables is not creepy, but I find the focus on "ethnicity descent" a bit weird when it is the sole parameter being checked. For example, how does this study make sure that there is no other explanatory variable h
626.
by cdavid 16y ago
Oh, sorry about the confusion. I realized afterwards that you may have actually described how it should instead of the how it is . Maybe my English is faulty, but I think it was important to stress this for people outside of academia, it
627.
by cdavid 16y ago
I may be wrong, but it does not seem like you have much experience in academics. I don't know any university where papers (and more especially their impact, as measure by h index and co) do not matter a lot when getting tenure (or any kind
628.
by cdavid 16y ago
In all fairness, hg serve is much easier to use than git daemon. It works on windows, for once, and you don't have to be aware of all kind of border cases w.r.t. aliases, etc... Still recently, I got issues accessing a git repo in which I d
629.
by cdavid 16y ago
In theory, you can use git's branching model, but in practice, it is preetty horrible in my experience (I have only one year experience with hg, though). The tip thing mentioned by Armin is a big UI wart when using "intree" branches, by whi
630.
by cdavid 16y ago
While geting tenure at harvard is indeed no small feat, I doubt teaching has much to do with it. Teaching sadly plays little role in getting tenure, especially for prestigious institutions. Grants and papers are the most significant points.

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