daniel-levin

12 ms·

61.
by daniel-levin 10y ago
On the contrary - computers certainly can represent irrational numbers - but not with floating points.
62.
by daniel-levin 10y ago
If you are using floating point numbers, you are using rationals. You cannot represent an irrational number using a floating point variable. There is no getting around the fact that the real number system is an abstraction, and floating poi
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by daniel-levin 10y ago
That is interesting. I would imagine that this leads to extremely risk averse deploys? You can't know how much downtime a particular failure will incur so one small error could easily result in expending the failure budget for a signif
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by daniel-levin 10y ago
Also, when a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric, regardless of its original efficacy. This is widely known as Goodhart's law [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
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by daniel-levin 10y ago
ROI(tax lawyers) > taxes to pay without them.
66.
by daniel-levin 10y ago
The problem here is not the notation. Mathematical notation is not perfect, and can sometimes be confusing. Let me say this in a minimally offensive manner, without being obfuscatory: the author of this piece does not understand the mathe
67.
by daniel-levin 10y ago
Well, to some extent, they do. Their geofencing [0] service takes in coordinates and returns the geofences these coordinates fall into. They make this faster by pruning irrelevant geofences: >> Instead of indexing the geofences using
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Ask HN: What are some examples of successful companies rejected by YC?
115 points by daniel-levin 10y ago|58 comments
69.
by daniel-levin 10y ago
Do you have any experience with attempting to fix these bugs and then submitting patches / pull-requests? Yes, the core team should just fix these bugs. But if they're receptive to upstream changes you want made, then that makes t
70.
by daniel-levin 10y ago
This is also largely a consequence of the fact that most linear algebra courses are computational by nature. They'll ask you to compute lots of things as a means of assessment. Work out this determinant. Find the eigenvalues of that ma
71.
by daniel-levin 10y ago
>> The specific signature of this weekend’s utility power failure resulted in an unusually long voltage sag (rather than a complete outage) It is false to assume that the state of the electrical supply is either on or off. This may co
72.
by daniel-levin 10y ago
It's a special case of a more general (Israeli) bullshit detection technique. They'll ask something unexpected, but reasonable enough that an honest person would be able to say the answer immediately. The idea is that you bait a p
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by daniel-levin 10y ago
How did this "Connections in the news" feature use a person's name and surname to uniquely identify them? This is appallingly asinine, as this example indicates. My name is as generic as they come, and so this is a risk for m
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by daniel-levin 10y ago
"We Only Hire the Best" doesn't have to have any truth to it to be of use to companies. Their purpose in hiring is to extract value from candidates. Convincing people that they'd be amongst the best is all you have to do
75.
by daniel-levin 10y ago
That last sentence is the real piece of news here - the absolute core of the issue: Nigerians have been doing extremely well at Scrabble by applying non-greedy strategies. It seems obvious in retrospect that a game like Scrabble is not play
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by daniel-levin 11y ago
There is also a comprehensive mathematical library for JS called math.js [1]. It has no dependencies, supports powerful symbolic computation, as well as many mathematical functions. It implements a useful subset of what one expects a CAS to
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by daniel-levin 11y ago
Look under the 'Releases' tab. There you'll find different versions of the book, as pdfs
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by daniel-levin 11y ago
>> Last year, undercover TSA agents managed to smuggle concealed guns and bombs past security 96% of the time The system for gun/bomb detection is only as good as the agents responsible for it. For example, I saw my friend accid
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by daniel-levin 11y ago
Israel allegedly identifies homosexual Palestinians based on mass surveillance data and exploits them for it [1, 2] [1] http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.617280 [2] http://www.vice.com/en_uk&#x2
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by daniel-levin 11y ago
It also supplies the degree holder with a social signal which says: I can buy into the establishment . I say this with my newly minted BSc. in hand. In the process of obtaining it I realised that at a minimum, all you have to do to get a d
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by daniel-levin 11y ago
I disagree. A mathematical result doesn't have to have direct application to the real world for it to be useful. Drawing analogies between the real world and mathematical concepts is very powerful. I have a good example: Number theoris
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by daniel-levin 11y ago
This comment got me thinking: in some applications, Euclidean distance between feature vectors acts as a good proxy for adjacency/similarity. For such applications, an isometry from R^n to R^2 or R^3 should in principle preserve the me
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by daniel-levin 11y ago
>> it nails the database schema into your Rust code On the contrary, the purpose of an ORM is to let your code be a schema for your database. This is my personal use case for an ORM; I want persistence but am not overly concerned with
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by daniel-levin 11y ago
I had the opposite experience. I am on the free student plan for private repos. It has to be renewed annually. It wasn't clear to my how to do so. I asked, and Scott from Github support contacted me in under a minute and sorted it out.
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How I Sold My Bible App Company (2015)(medium.com)
4 points by daniel-levin 11y ago|0 comments
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by daniel-levin 11y ago
Or better, because it is possible that the current process selects adversely.
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by daniel-levin 11y ago
I think understanding that sentence reduces to parsing jargon. I'll provide an explanation I hope isn't in any way condescending. The main activity of research mathematicians is theorem proving. That is, turning conjectures into t
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by daniel-levin 11y ago
>> The CDC says Chipotle has been very cooperative in the E. coli investigation, but that the company is having trouble telling the agency which batches of ingredients went to which stores at which times. “The system they have is not
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by daniel-levin 11y ago
Hey Guys - I'm a big fan of your work, both with, and before Starfighter. Just a few initial comments: >> If your use of the system decreases Fun for other players, it is a violation of the Zeroth Rule. If it doesn't, we hav
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by daniel-levin 11y ago
The technology used by the police seems to be nothing more than support for their program of targeted intervention. The system does not only identify potential perpetrators, but also their victims. Using data to identify people most in need

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