jfarmer

58 ms·

451.
by jfarmer 13y ago
He's just speaking colloquially and I don't know anything about the system of logic he's describing. He means something like "weak relative to all the other ones we'd consider on a day-to-day basis" or "s
452.
by jfarmer 13y ago
I'd say it's more like "venture anarchy" or "venture lololololol". There's no central organization and each chapter is self-organizing. I was a trustee of the SF chapter for about two years. :)
453.
by jfarmer 13y ago
"Strong" and "weak" have well-understood meanings in mathematical logic and model theory. For example, imagine there's a true and "important" statement S about Turing machines for which we could prove &quo
454.
by jfarmer 13y ago
It's also not obvious what "average case" means. For example, if we're talking about the asymptotic behavior of the function A(n) = avg { RunningTime(Algo, x) : x is valid input to Algo and len(x) = n } are we as
455.
by jfarmer 13y ago
More importantly, although "O" is a function, one doesn't usually think about it that way. If one were, I think it's important to be precise. Here's the best crack I can take at it, though. Let ℜ be the set of all
456.
by jfarmer 13y ago
Right, yes, that's the main thing to understand and it's also the thing that most explanations obscure. I tried to be clear about that, but wasn't clear enough. See my follow-up comment.
457.
by jfarmer 13y ago
I'd summarize my other comment this way. Asymptotic analysis only makes sense in the context of functions whose inputs are real numbers (possibly integers) and whose outputs are real numbers. When we want to do asymptotic analysis of
458.
by jfarmer 13y ago
Let's be precise. I'm being more precise here in my comment than I was on Quora. Big-O and related notations are ways of categorizing functions. O(n^2) for example is actually a set of functions, which is why I wrote f ∈ O(n^2)
459.
by jfarmer 13y ago
Eh. I haven't read the study and it's behind a pay wall, but from your description and the abstract this sounds like it's measuring subject preference. Whether subjects prefer "chart junk" is orthogonal to the ques
460.
by jfarmer 13y ago
Here's an answer of mine on Quora you might find useful: https://www.quora.com/Algorithms/How-can-I-determine-whether... There are two things going on. First, when we talk about Big-O we're not talking about
461.
by jfarmer 13y ago
The y-axis is unit-less. They normalized the run times by the "Normal C" run time, so that, e.g., 2.0 means "took twice as long as Normal C."
462.
by jfarmer 13y ago
Yes, I think he's just being clever. If you look at the source you can see the font choice is explicitly set inline, for this page only: <div style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:105%"> ... <
463.
by jfarmer 13y ago
I was responding to the original commenter's claim that Richard was a sociopath by painting a plausible alternative. I was not trying to muster a case for that alternative, except to point out one would just as justified in jumping to
464.
by jfarmer 13y ago
Yeah, on second thought, you're right. The author is probably just a dick. Screw him.
465.
by jfarmer 13y ago
I see no evidence to the contrary, either. As long as we're drawing conclusions about the author's personality and intentions, why not be charitable? Otherwise, we should just keep our commentary to the argument as written rather
466.
by jfarmer 13y ago
Have you met Richard? What you're saying is so far off the mark it's not even offensive, it's just funny. :D I think he's just making an effective argument. If Richard's position is "you should always pay sev
467.
by jfarmer 13y ago
First, the author is talking about startups, not companies which might have reason to lay off thousands of workers or whole teams. Second, in a startup, it's probably worth getting an employee to sign a separation agreement even if the
468.
by jfarmer 13y ago
It's more than that. A contract isn't binding unless both parties offer consideration. In the case of a separation agreement the employer's consideration is the severance pay.
469.
by jfarmer 13y ago
I don't get it. The value prop: "Easily Deploy your Code to Any Server." I don't want to deploy my code/application to "any" server. In fact, I want to deploy it to the smallest number of servers possibl
470.
by jfarmer 13y ago
Yes, I was specifically talking about the feeling of adjointness. Moments lik those made me think something categorical was happening somewhere.
471.
by jfarmer 13y ago
Oh, and also, the moment this became clear to me was when I read the original monad paper. How frustrating -- all this ink spilled on explaining monads and I just needed to read the original paper to see the real motivation.
472.
by jfarmer 13y ago
Yes, this is more correct, and I was also imagining the category being something like "space-delimited strings." I realize that'd require redefining things like string concatenation to be "space-delimited concatenation&
473.
by jfarmer 13y ago
Yeah, some of the syntax was confusing for me, too, but I trusted that it was equivalent to the mathematical statements. Here's the original paper on monads, which I highly recommend: http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadle
474.
by jfarmer 13y ago
Nice! Yeah. I had two avenues of understanding available to me when it came to monads. The first was my knowledge as a mathematically-inclined software engineer. The second was my knowledge as someone fluent in high-level mathematics. I
475.
by jfarmer 13y ago
@jchrisa: Sometimes the HN comment timeout doesn't make sense. Hah! This is my reply. "When you have traction, you'll know it. Traction is what allows you to learn. Then you might wanna try not failing, or at least, let fea
476.
by jfarmer 13y ago
The idea behind the "fail fast" mantra is that folks over-emphasize getting every decision correct. This is a problem because you don't really learn until your idea meets reality, including what's important to focus on
477.
by jfarmer 13y ago
It's great for two classes of people: those who understand monads from a Haskell/software engineering perspective and want to learn the mathematical perspective, and those like me who understand them from the mathematical perspect
478.
by jfarmer 13y ago
Hrm, not sure about that. I know of no college CS course that requires category theory, let alone having the expectation that a decent CS degree will give you exposure to it. As an example, the University of Chicago, my alma mater, doesn
479.
by jfarmer 13y ago
As a counterpoint, I'm fluent in mathematics but know virtually no Haskell. Your write up presumes the exact opposite and is therefore totally unsuitable for someone like me. :) I mean that quite literally: I can make neither heads no
480.
by jfarmer 13y ago
Yes. Thank you. Yes yay yes. I studied mathematics. I've been programming for 15 years, 10-or-so professionally. I've always wanted a "real math" explanation of monads. They now make sense to me. Seeing why mu need

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