lmkg

99 ms·

901.
by lmkg 11y ago
As always, the fastest way to perform a calculation is to as much work as possible when the clock isn't running. In this case, pre-compute every possible solution months ahead of time, and have a cabinet full of look-up tables. Another
902.
by lmkg 12y ago
> What visualization were you taught, if not this one? Oftentimes, no visualization or other motiviation is taught at all. Students are simply instructed the steps to follow to produce a correct result.
903.
by lmkg 12y ago
> Sure enough, we see that the gamma function has no limit at > the nonpositive integers, always approaching positive > infinity from one side and negative infinity from the other side. On the complex plane, there is more than on
904.
by lmkg 12y ago
Yep, it sure does. The magnitude of Gamma(x) grows without bound as x approaches any negative real integer. The negative integers (and the point at infinity) are also the only points where Gamma(x) has a singularity.
905.
by lmkg 12y ago
For me, this article was thought-provoking throughout, but there was a very deeply-buried lede as well: in the linked interview with Maria Klawe[1], all the way at the bottom, where she mentions separating the 101-level CS class by previous
906.
by lmkg 12y ago
I received an aborted call (hang up after half a ring) from a non-anonymous number. When I searched for that number online, the only results that came up were forum discussions of wondering whether it was really Chase's fraud-detection
907.
by lmkg 12y ago
We know what Earth-like life looks like, and some of the indirect evidence it leaves, so we know how to detect it. This means that we can actually build an instrument that looks for it. We have no way of detecting non-Earth-like life becaus
908.
by lmkg 12y ago
On the other hand, the reason that Firefox got a reputation for being slow, bloated, and leaky was because 90% of the features were written by third-party developers with varying levels of competency, no quality controls, and little incenti
909.
by lmkg 12y ago
As a strategy, it's better than being profitable: it's predictable. The forecasts for the upcoming financial quarters are much more likely to be accurate when you only work with known IP. The CEO is more beholden to analysts and s
910.
by lmkg 12y ago
Twin Studies are often more feasible (and sometimes more ethical) than a random control study. A Twin Studies can have results that qualify as "interesting" even with just a dozen or two groups of twins; a random control study on
911.
by lmkg 12y ago
There's merit to this position. You can think of this as the process/organization equivalent to technical debt. Every problem that you introduce a hacky work-around, that root problem sticks around and keeps generating more and mo
912.
by lmkg 12y ago
Three big reasons. 1. If you use a CDN or other sort of caching service, a significant fraction of traffic never hits your server, and your logs are incomplete. 2. Logfile parsing does not measure on-page events that do not involve a server
913.
by lmkg 12y ago
Yeah, it's not like Microsoft could write a privacy policy that lets them not follow the law, and expect that to matter to law enforcement. Until the law changes, there's not much that individual companies can choose to do about t
914.
by lmkg 12y ago
I guess more generally, it's about effects . The same rant could apply to any particular effect, because they share the property of being infectious: async, unsafe (in C#, not Rust), throws (checked exceptions), IO, etc. My question i
915.
by lmkg 12y ago
There's a difference between a value-add, and a gatekeeper. And a gatekeeper can get away with skimming an asymptotically high percentage of the profit. A value-add like Steam is nice, but it's not essential the way that BnM dis
916.
by lmkg 12y ago
I'll voice a dissenting opinion. Doing HTML and JavaScript are commodities. Given the existence of standards, there's not a lot of room for innovative behavior. Any developments (faster, new HTML standards, etc) won't impact
917.
by lmkg 12y ago
I work as a digital marketing analyst (think Google Analytics). While reading this piece, I find myself nodding and agreeing with 90% of it. As it turns out, the way that decision-makers incorporate data and expert opinion doesn't chan
918.
by lmkg 12y ago
I strongly encourage people to read the book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. He makes some rather solid and defensible statements about consciousness (included falsifiable predictions t
919.
by lmkg 12y ago
When you're dealing with a totally new field, there's a lot of low-level, seemingly-obvious junk to sort out. And immature fields haven't developed common tools or proof techniques, so everything looks harder than it should b
920.
by lmkg 12y ago
The fear is not that proprietary code will become better than FOSS code. The fear is that proprietary code will become better than previously-existing proprietary code. RMS considers closed-source code to be so immoral, that open-sourcing c
921.
by lmkg 12y ago
Professional Web Analyst here. My day job is working with metrics on web sites. I'll try and weigh in. First, we can argue and pontificate and philosophize all we want, but ultimately there is no proof of the pudding except the tasting
922.
by lmkg 12y ago
Writing literal [] + []? No. Writing x + y where x and y are both arguments to a function, and some call site was passed an (empty?) array of integers instead of an integer? Believable.
923.
by lmkg 12y ago
Eh... somewhat. I do think that it's meaningful to describe a program as being imperative or declarative or object-oriented or functional or strongly-typed or whatever, and that determination can be separate from the language that th
924.
by lmkg 12y ago
Just because Clojure has the DO form (or that Common Lisp has the PROG form) doesn't mean that the language is imperative. It means that it allows imperative programming. This is like saying that a language with casts doesn't
925.
by lmkg 12y ago
Cracking would be considered a failure. You can still step on it, but it looks bad, so you don't want that to happen. This can happen from prolonged stress, sudden impact, or expansion/contraction from thermal cycling. The surface
926.
by lmkg 12y ago
Part of this is a tooling issue: A/B testing products allow you to use the tool in a way that gives erroneous answers. They don't tell you what's wrong about doing this, and I would go as far as to say that it's intentio
927.
by lmkg 12y ago
This is the primary downside of reading without a bookmark. Any book I've read on public transportation, I would guess on average each page gets read about twice (with some chapter intros reaching double-digits). It's hard to figu
928.
by lmkg 12y ago
I've wondered about this before, and had to explained to me. Basically, RMS only considers software "eligible" to be free if it could, in theory, be moved to other hardware of the customer's choice. It is the ability to
929.
by lmkg 12y ago
I think the development of programming literacy will mirror the development of literacy. Literacy itself used to be a niche skill, learned by a select few who made an earning from it (scribes, criers), while the majority of craftsman got al
930.
by lmkg 12y ago
There's an important implication in Thomas' reply that I want to make very very explicit: The process of getting someone to sign a check is one of those things that has a tendency to drag on forever . Even if you can get an inves

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