maxov

8 ms·

31.
by maxov 6y ago
I agree, the scientific consensus appears to be that absolute pitch cannot be developed after a certain age, and that this age is related to the 'prime' language acquisition ages. Tonal language speakers (e.g. Mandarin) have absol
32.
by maxov 6y ago
This answer is probably biased by what I’ve needed to use recently, but I think spectral methods are the most generally useful. E.g. spectra of symmetric matrices, SVD, Courant-Fischer theorem. You may not need this in all of, or even most
33.
by maxov 6y ago
See if there is a FIRST robotics team nearby at a high school. I did not participate in FIRST at that age (my interests were elsewhere), but my friends who did say it was a pivotal experience for them. You learn lots of hands on skills, get
34.
by maxov 6y ago
That link is really great, thanks! I was actually looking for a clear comparison between consistency definitions. I did not realize that consistency and atomicity also are overloaded between databases and distributed systems. That certainly
35.
by maxov 6y ago
That seems really unfair to Kleppmann. I know of all three, and all three are, at the very least, accomplished distributed systems researchers with several peer-reviewed publications. (They still have different levels of expertise/publ
36.
by maxov 6y ago
The posted article briefly discusses PACELC and Kleppmann says he doesn't find it any more enlightening than CAP. PACELC is an improvement over CAP in some sense because it is a finer-grained characterization of distributed systems, bu
37.
by maxov 6y ago
This is very similar to how I look at it. Expressive editing features do not have a direct impact on my productivity when coding. However, for those 1-2 hour focused coding sessions, it is easer for me to enter and stay in flow when I feel
38.
by maxov 6y ago
The clojure community has robust tooling around types and similar mechanisms. There is core.typed, but I honestly don’t know of many who use it in production. More recently, clojure.spec was released ( https://clojure.org/abo
39.
by maxov 6y ago
For the sake of clarity, and because it's your primary point, I do think it's worth to point out even in the article you cite nuclear is the cleanest, but safety depends on how you perform the estimate. I found the comparisons in
40.
by maxov 6y ago
Good point, I was not being fully general there!
41.
by maxov 6y ago
Dense math can often be complex to decipher. Sometimes it feels like reading an esoteric codebase to me! 1) Yes in this case 0 is not included in N. I’ve seen N defined both ways depending on the context, so it can be confusing when it’s no
42.
by maxov 6y ago
That's a cool anecdote :-) I wouldn't say it uses concentration of measure exactly, but I see how it is related. The anecdote is about asymptotic properties of random sequences, and concentration of measure is about the same too.
43.
by maxov 6y ago
Loved this article. There are so many applications of entropy and statistical physics in computer science, and I find it fascinating that the same general properties are useful in such different contexts. For example, there's a well-kn
44.
by maxov 6y ago
I think your point applies, especially to math. These days research math is a very collaborative and social endeavor. Terry Tao would probably disagree very strongly with you: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice&#
45.
by maxov 6y ago
It looks to be a custom function for parsing JSON arrays: https://github.com/haifengl/smile/blob/5bf4075b2978af68b31c7... The benefit is that the type will be known to be JSArray without need for runtime cast
46.
by maxov 6y ago
> I was just giving the recommendations in the context of 'Do you know any good books or resources to read up more on random algorithms?'. Not with any regard to practicality. Fair enough! I still think it's a good recomme
47.
by maxov 6y ago
I'm surprised and delighted to see someone recommend The Discrepancy Method by Chazelle. I love this book, but even beyond it requiring a lot of mathematical prerequisites, I'm not sure of the use to most software engineers. I thi
48.
by maxov 6y ago
P vs NP is more about verifying correctness of a solution compared to the hardness of finding a good one. I don’t think interpolation/extrapolation fits very well. However, what fits better is understanding existing ideas and verifying
49.
by maxov 6y ago
Had . Unfortunately Professor MacKay passed away from cancer in 2016. We lost a great soul. I concur that his textbook and sense of humor were fantastic. It was very enjoyable for me to learn the material from his lectures. They are a grea
50.
by maxov 6y ago
Yeah, I agree that these statements are not awfully scientific. I wish I had studies or references to back them up, but I’m not aware of something like that. However, as others have pointed out, this was originally observed by pg and has be
51.
by maxov 6y ago
Nah, I think you're asking a good question! I think your interpretation is correct - a good sign for a platform is if it has a small base of passionate users who love the product. For some more context, the How to Start a Startup cours
52.
by maxov 6y ago
I think your assessment of the shallowness of 1st page Google search results nowadays is spot-on. Anecdotally, I’ve noticed this situation get worse over the past ~5 years, to the point where I have to skip a few pages of search results and