jwmerrill

17 ms·

91.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
Hacker News' charter (from the guidelines): "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
92.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
I think the gap between what a person would be willing to pay to play this game and what a casino would be willing to charge is the reason that no one plays it.
93.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
I'd like to call out the google analytics splash page as an example that makes me feel this way. Why is it there at all? Why is there a giant image of some irrelevant face on it?
94.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
So what technologies do you actually like for writing web servers? I think this comment is a good example of "contempt culture," which we've probably all been guilty of, and which we should do less. http://blog.aur
95.
Understanding the Pseudo-Truth as an Optimal Approximation(johnmyleswhite.com)
1 points by jwmerrill 11y ago|0 comments
96.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
I love Jupyter for working on research problems, but I think it's helpful to have something simpler for learning about the concept of functions. Of course, I would think that because I work on one: https://www.desmos.com
97.
95% of bank ATMs face end of security support(money.cnn.com)
1 points by jwmerrill 11y ago|0 comments
98.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
Fitting distributions is a little bit different than the usual model fitting scenario where least squares is appropriate. Sometimes people do things like construct a histogram and then do a least squares fit to the bin heights, but that pro
99.
Continued Fraction Arithmetic (1972)(perl.plover.com)
15 points by jwmerrill 11y ago|7 comments
100.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
The paper on "normalization of deviance" that this post links to is also really good. It's written from a medicine perspective, but its observations and conclusions are pretty generalizable. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih
101.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
I think "X is the year of Y" headlines are wrong about as often as the answer to "Is Z?" headlines is "no".
102.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
The rise of web apps and app stores show that distribution is everything. You can complain that this isn't what a browser is for, but it won't really matter until you can distribute your favorite kind of software in a way that req
103.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
A lot of the problematic behavior described here can be seen as examples of people optimizing for the most common/most likely scenario, and ignoring the potentially very large costs of unlikely but possible scenarios. Nassim Taleb has
104.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
Nice summary. I think it's worth noting that all of these criticisms generalize from the K-S test to any kind of Null Hypothesis Significance Test.
105.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
Diarrhea kills more than a million people each year. In 2012, it was the second most common cause of deaths in children younger than five (0.76 million or 11%). Be thankful that you live in a time and place that allow you to not take it ver
106.
On criticizing programming languages (without criticizing their users)(drmaciver.com)
1 points by jwmerrill 11y ago|0 comments
107.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
I don't work for the NSA—I just have a laptop, and a copy of Mathematica. The factorization took about 10 seconds. Mathematica is really a pretty remarkable piece of software. I doubt it's world class for factorization, but it giv
108.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
Sure thing! 651651626268416641641703*983764598769387649827639876407 = 641071800653367850802176606120792275422168080497001121
109.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
Here's an argument that runs completely parallel: jwmerrill's razor: points in the plane should be considered to be close to the origin unless there is evidence otherwise. Is this a reasonable law? As reasonable as Occam's ra
110.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
> The Bayesian approach is to assign a prior distribution to various theories of this nature. Because there are infinitely many possible priors, most exceedingly complicated (because the set of priors of complexity < C is finite or at
111.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
I think the best inspiration to take here is that the best way to write a compiler in 40 days is to first write one in 400 days. From the first entry: > Implementing these features is easy because this is the second time for me.
112.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
Beautiful description. Marijn Haverbeke has been writing some great material about his experiences creating ProseMirror [1]. I wonder how the two systems compare. [1] http://prosemirror.net/ [2] http://marijnhave
113.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
> There are all sorts of transient states that a parent's component shouldn't have to care about. The problem with this way of thinking is that there are invariably things that you initially believe will be of no concern to the
114.
Making Elm faster and friendlier in 0.16(elm-lang.org)
243 points by jwmerrill 11y ago|90 comments
115.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
Just a guess, but they're probably cheating the display. Try (a-b)*10^16
116.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
Multilinear maps. You can view contraction with a vector (a dot product) as mapping a vector into the scalars, contraction with a matrix as mapping two vectors into the scalars, and contraction with a tensor as mapping several vectors into
117.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
If your function isn't a mathematical function (i.e. its output is not completely determined by its arguments), then it's a little confusing to figure out what isolating a root would mean. But even in that case, bisect_root termin
118.
Bisecting Floating Point Numbers(squishythinking.com)
65 points by jwmerrill 11y ago|26 comments
119.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
I edited my response because I realized it was inflammatory. But to be clear, my viewpoint is that the client/server and viewer/publisher relationship is a negotiation. The publisher should make content available under terms they
120.
by jwmerrill 11y ago
Response 1: whether this question already has a technical answer that you find satisfying does not affect whether using an ad blocker is theft. Response 2: a few sites are already popping up messages asking you to turn off your ad blocker,

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