crntaylor

12 ms·

61.
The Bethe-Feynman formula for the yield of a fission bomb is still a secret(en.wikipedia.org)
1 points by crntaylor 13y ago|0 comments
62.
by crntaylor 13y ago
On your first point; I was matching the behaviour of the C++ program in the blog post, which allows any number of command line arguments but only uses the first two. On your second point, I actually thought about writing the whole thing as
63.
by crntaylor 13y ago
Haskell: import System.Environment import Data.List main = do infile:outfile:_ <- getArgs input <- readFile infile writeFile outfile . unlines . sort . lines $ input
64.
by crntaylor 13y ago
That's embarrassing - I thought that Shiller's "Real Price" had dividends already rolled into it!
65.
by crntaylor 13y ago
Believe me, I am more than aware of the perils of overfitting! The purpose of my comment isn't to say that using Shiller's P/E ratio is a good way to make money. In fact, I'm essentially saying the opposite - that while
66.
by crntaylor 13y ago
Nothing fancy - the data is available on Robert Shiller's website[0] and I implemented the rule in Excel. [0] http://www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/data.htm
67.
by crntaylor 13y ago
I believe that this is fundamentally good research. But beware if anyone thinks that you can use this to build a killer investment strategy. If one tests a simple rule, for example "buy when the shiller p/e ratio dips below 15 and
68.
by crntaylor 13y ago
This paper is really interesting - thanks. Some of my archaeologist friends have criticised Diamond's books for being too simplistic and using outdated techniques (even when they were written in the 80s and 90s) but I had never really
69.
by crntaylor 13y ago
My recollection is that Diamond's argument is slightly different. He argues that the east-west orientation of Eurasia meant that societies were more easily able to expand, because you experience relatively little climate variation movi
70.
by crntaylor 13y ago
One of his ideas is that the development of agriculture was "the worst mistake in the history of the human race"[0] contra the popular belief that agriculture improved food yields and freed people up to spend time developing scien
71.
by crntaylor 13y ago
I have heard the genre (which includes Malcolm Gladwell, Jonah Lehrer, the Freakonomics guys and Jared Diamond) described as "insight porn". The idea is to deliver small chunks of insight that is just counter-intuitive enough to b
72.
by crntaylor 13y ago
If you're using a logarithmic scale you shouldn't be using a bar chart, for the exact same reason as above - when you see bars, you naturally compare them on length. If the scale is logarithmic, then the form of the graph is in co
73.
by crntaylor 13y ago
I hope that you are either (a) a professional investor or (b) buying passive index funds.
74.
by crntaylor 13y ago
That isn't experimental evidence to the contrary at all, because the unpleasant jobs are done by people who don't have access to the government-mandated minimum income!
75.
by crntaylor 13y ago
Your first point isn't too far off the mark. If goods are really 60% more expensive in Switzerland than in the US, then you'd expect people/corporations/institutions in Switzerland to use their CHF to buy dollars, buy go
76.
by crntaylor 13y ago
The approach seems to be along the following lines: 1. Fit a model (in the case Zipf's law) to a semi-related field (the size of non-financial companies). 2. Find that the model doesn't fit reality in the field you're interes
77.
by crntaylor 13y ago
I have sent plenty of Facebook messages to dead friends and family. I know that no one reads them, but it makes me feel better.
78.
by crntaylor 13y ago
I'm self-taught and a relatively late starter. I've also never studied computer science in a formal setting (i.e. at a university). I started programming when I was studying for a PhD (in mathematics) around 2006-07. I was 23 at t
79.
by crntaylor 13y ago
I think what they mean is that the force we call gravity is an illusion that we experience because we perceive spacetime as flat. In a curved spacetime, you don't need to posit a force to explain motion due to a nearby mass - the mass
80.
by crntaylor 13y ago
I don't write C++, but if it has linked lists then at least the first one should be trivial. The second one would probably involve function pointers. Maybe his point was that you need to use a linked list rather than an array to get an
81.
by crntaylor 13y ago
Nice article. I don't really understand the final point, though. Here's a simple implementation of the collatz function that returns the entire list iterated through, using a simple data structure, and that is O(I) in the number o
82.
by crntaylor 13y ago
Chasing down the references in that paragraph reveals nothing about the FDA, AMA, DEA or NIDA's opinion on the Anabolic Steroid Control Act (1990). The only citation leads to the THOMAS page for the act[0] which only contains the text
83.
by crntaylor 13y ago
That article doesn't actually compare India to the US. In fact, it says that "It’s also likely the results aren’t India-specific." It would be interesting to see the results of a similar study carried out in the US or UK, for
84.
Erudify eLearning white paper: "Introducing Adaptive Learning for Enterprise"(blog.erudify.com)
2 points by crntaylor 13y ago|0 comments
85.
by crntaylor 13y ago
The problem with almost every language benchmarking blog post I see is that the author is generally an expert in at most one of the languages they are benchmarking, and so they write slow or non-idiomatic code in the other languages, leadin
86.
by crntaylor 13y ago
I also think it's a bit weird to flip direction of composition, but there are a couple of advantages -- 1. It keeps the "imperative" feel, so that you can write person.address.zipCode rather than zipCode.addres
87.
by crntaylor 13y ago
An example of Simpson's Paradox[0] (N.B. not really a paradox). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox
88.
by crntaylor 13y ago
Yes, it's intentional. That's part of the 'joke'.
89.
by crntaylor 13y ago
In fact, Elon Musk has said that the Hyperloop is not a vacuum tunnel[0]. [0] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/224406502188916739
90.
by crntaylor 13y ago
This looks really neat. I produce a lot of plots in my day to day work (mainly in MATLAB) so I'm excited to see if there's an opportunity to use Plotly. Can you point me to some examples of how you've brought Plotly into your

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