elliptic

9 ms·

31.
by elliptic 12y ago
Richard Hamming's thoughts (from You and Your Research) deserve to be quoted in full (below). Probably they are less applicable the less research or speculative work you do. Now for the matter of drive. You observe that most great sci
32.
by elliptic 12y ago
Just to be clear, it's not my version. I've always wished I could read Classical Greek.
33.
by elliptic 12y ago
A more sober translation seems to be: And the gray-eyed goddess herself bestowed on them every art, so that they surpassed all mortal men as the best workers with their hands; and the roads bore works of art like living, moving creatures, a
34.
by elliptic 12y ago
I'm not saying that Oracle hardware or software is the solution, but "scaling-out" is incredibly difficult in transaction processing. I worked at a mid-size tech company with what I imagine was a fairly typical workload, and
35.
by elliptic 12y ago
I wonder how many of these sorts of algorithms are out there? We might be hearing about the guy that received 10 consecutive accurate stock tips.
36.
by elliptic 12y ago
Are there compression techniques that are only "mostly" lossless? I was thinking something along the lines of: for delta, N > 0 the probability that the compression & decompression of a random stream of N bytes will resul
37.
by elliptic 12y ago
In what sense is this list "curated?" I'm seriously asking. Have you used all/most of these, and can recommend them?
38.
by elliptic 12y ago
Do you know he was kidnapped illegally? Or is that alleged?
39.
by elliptic 12y ago
What did they do that you know was illegal?
40.
by elliptic 12y ago
So, basically, you think that there are exactly 0 CS professors who are horrible programmers?
41.
by elliptic 12y ago
Anyone know of good papers relating to deep learning that are not from image classification or speech/text recognition?
42.
by elliptic 12y ago
Seems like a somewhat artificial distinction. I'm responsible for coming up with my own models and implementing them in production.
43.
by elliptic 13y ago
What's this weird idea that "B-players hire C-players to make themselves look good?" Are we convinced that all the B-players (let's face it, that's most of us) are so terribly weak and insecure? Is it relative? W
44.
by elliptic 13y ago
<< Lots of people on the other side of the hills (Concord, Moraga, Walnut Creek) have this idea that Oakland is a really scary place. I think it's partly racial (because of the higher percentage of African Americans here) and par
45.
by elliptic 13y ago
I don't think it has much to do with his salary. My view of him is largely positive as well, but from what I've read (Masters of Doom, a lot of his writing) he is not a man to whom empathy comes easily (which is not to say he isn
46.
by elliptic 13y ago
I'm not sure I'm more productive on 8 than 6 hours' sleep - is there any way to verify this? I'd even pay good money to find out the optimal amount of sleep for me.
47.
by elliptic 13y ago
This raises the question - are there fields in tech or software engineering that are mostly empirical or mostly conceptual?
48.
by elliptic 13y ago
The "{area/field/business} is broken" template is broken (well, I don't know if ever worked). Algorithm development is not broken - it's specialized work and it's largely done by people with specialized b
49.
by elliptic 13y ago
> An ecosystem is a four-sided network — you need entrepreneurs, VC firms, schools, and journalists That sentence tells you all you need to know about the author and his perspective, I think.
50.
by elliptic 13y ago
I believe that when people complain about "lack of stack allocation" in Java they sometimes mean "lack of value/non-reference types," which in other languages (at least C#) are frequently but not always stored on th
51.
by elliptic 13y ago
Serious question - how realistic is that? How many people make significant changes to the planner/executor besides Tom Lane?
52.
by elliptic 13y ago
An odd rant. The judge in question appears to be an alcoholic, and came to the court drunk. Surely this is professional misconduct (and to my mind warrants firing), but it really doesn't justify the author's charges of system-ri
53.
by elliptic 13y ago
I don't understand - when you made this decision, did you expect that you were going to be good enough so that these features of chess (draws and deep, well-studied opening theory) were going to be relevant to you?
54.
by elliptic 13y ago
Ehhh. Those companies and others like them (Aramco, etc) represent the heart of the modern industrial economy, for better or for worse. Are consumer companies like Apple even imaginable in their absence?
55.
by elliptic 13y ago
Ought "just lost their mother or grandmother" really be a single category? I don't know if I'm acting correctly, but I tend to approach those two conversations rather differently.
56.
by elliptic 13y ago
Probably like all books that are meant to be strange and mysterious, it's actually quite boring. The strangest books to me are those the authors meant to be understood. One example (for me) is Valis, by PK Dick.
57.
by elliptic 13y ago
I don't think those 3 are any less well-known than other physicists and mathematicians of similar accomplishments. Ramanujan, in particular, because of his romantic story, is far more well known than his influence might suggest. His
58.
by elliptic 13y ago
So I know a little about neural networks and ML in the (simpler?) context of image classification etc. Anyone have a good reference/introduction to using it for this sort of work?
59.
by elliptic 13y ago
I thought that one of the comments - to the effect that this article tells us relatively little about Borges and perhaps more about the author - was very perceptive. I am going to try to remember not to fall into that trap.
60.
by elliptic 13y ago
It is difficult to imagine what sort of evidence will convince you. All sorts of behavior is possible under all sorts of unrealistic models. I'd also like to note the irony of your snarky comment about wishing that those who disagree

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