oddthink

9 ms·

61.
by oddthink 6y ago
Calling it "AI" is a stretch, it's more like using the TensorFlow infrastructure to do Bayesian inference. Here's a presentation on the process: http://hyperion.usc.edu/UQ-SummerSchool/pres/Lang
62.
by oddthink 6y ago
Thanks. My question really wasn't focused well, and it was easily read not as "please help me understand" but as "hurr durr Python is better". I think my reaction comes from the dissonance between people saying &quo
63.
by oddthink 6y ago
This may be inviting downvotes, but I still don't understand the use-case of Deno. Why would I use this over something like Python? In Python, I find I can do most things I want with the standard library plus a handful of well-known pa
64.
by oddthink 6y ago
That looks super fun! Are they still using this? I was at MS a few years before that, still dealing with a few legacy things in A+. There were hopes that we'd switch to something like F#, but we ended up just re-doing most of the mortg
65.
by oddthink 6y ago
Oh, yes. In the olden times, I could hop on the subway for 20 minutes and get to a magical place with free food, good coffee, an actual full-sized desk, a monitor bigger than a 12" portable, and no fights breaking out every 45 minutes
66.
by oddthink 7y ago
"Old and quirky" is an understatement. It's a god-awful mess, with semantics so murky that people end up just copying patterns and hoping that it'll do what they want it to do. And it can't be killed, because every
67.
by oddthink 7y ago
But one of the examples of adding maps would be for it to mean "upsert", rather than "use the monoid for the value types". I think that's still a perfectly good monoid over maps (it's not commutative, but that&
68.
by oddthink 7y ago
Yeah, I agree. I wrote some mortgage prepayment models in q for a while, but didn't dip into K itself. Q is fantastic as a database query language (assuming you have time-series databases and are mostly doing fairly simple operations.)
69.
by oddthink 7y ago
Ugh, this. I still fail to understand how a device from 2019, even a phone, could show any rendering delay when scrolling to page 200 of a 400 page static document. I thought PDF was less programmable than PostScript, but there's still
70.
by oddthink 7y ago
Yeah, I have a physics / GR background, so MTW is the lens through which I see all of this. That and Schutz's Geometrical Methods of Mathematical Physics. I agree that we don't need coordinates. Things are things. But what al
71.
by oddthink 7y ago
So, like many things, this is both true and false. The object isn't the coordinates, but you do need two kinds of things to make physics work. (Maybe you don't for geometry, though, not sure.) If you have a displacement vector, an
72.
by oddthink 7y ago
Thanks, this is basically what I had concluded. The exterior algebra exists on both the tangent and cotangent space, and that I was mostly used to seeing it in the cotangent world, due to its applications there.
73.
by oddthink 7y ago
Does anyone have a good summary of how this relates to the differential geometry world with its n-forms and n-vectors? For example, I'm used to thinking of the wedge product as operating over n-forms and requiring a metric (or volume e
74.
by oddthink 7y ago
Because caps lock is already control. :-)
75.
by oddthink 7y ago
Atoms don’t work in that kind of a field, let alone molecules. Nothing wants to go across field lines, just along them.
76.
by oddthink 7y ago
For radio pulsars, I didn't think it was that mysterious. (Not like accretion-powered things, where I don't know how that works.) You've got an intense magnetic field that beams emission. At the low level any moving matter is
77.
by oddthink 7y ago
I worked on pulsars in grad school, and I always groused that I had to deal with ultrarelativistic plasma physics and pair-production in curved spacetime. There's a reason it's hard to come up with solid answers for these things.
78.
by oddthink 7y ago
It's about nuclear density. Neutron stars are held up by neutron degeneracy pressure. Another fun fact is that the magnetic field energy density alone near the surface of a pulsar (1e12 gauss and up) is about that of lead. (~40 g/
79.
by oddthink 7y ago
Yes, thank you. I was thinking of Kent Pitman's critique that unwind-protect didn't have the right semantics when implemented with dynamic-wind, and that (in general) it seemed like fluid-let and unwind-protect wanted different so
80.
by oddthink 7y ago
Does anyone have a good link to the state of the modern thinking on continuations? I remember from back in the Scheme R5RS era there was a conflict between call/cc and dynamic-wind. If you have a dynamic extent (like for example a try
81.
by oddthink 7y ago
I like the phrase, too. I'm on the "sick of programming languages" side, and I like go, for the things I'm using it for: CLIs, simple debug web-servers, calling out to RPC services. (Read a CSV file, run everything throu
82.
by oddthink 7y ago
Not in my experience. I have both a CVS and a normal grocery store (a Morton Williams) across the street. CVS beats the grocery store on milk price (e.g. Horizon) by ~$0.50/gal and on breakfast cereal (e.g. Cheerios) by ~$1. Whole Food
83.
by oddthink 7y ago
I don't know if JVM is a problem; the issue that caught me in my few-weeks of experimenting with the language was the lazy semantics of sequences. I know the problem, and I've danced around this same issue in things like Haskell w
84.
by oddthink 8y ago
I don't know about overqualified, it's more that the job is hard in a different way. I'm not a CS grad, but it's not as if I'm actually using my numerical analysis or computational fluid dynamics coursework either.
85.
by oddthink 8y ago
Is that nested-define common racket style? I know it's been legal, at least since R4RS, but I've never seen it actually done.
86.
by oddthink 8y ago
Interestingly, the APL community (or at least the kdb/K community) and the Forth community (from what I hear) often push in the exact opposite direction. They seem to love to take advantage of any accidental regularity in the problem a
87.
by oddthink 8y ago
I always thought there was something almost magical about this one.
88.
by oddthink 8y ago
I think there are self-reinforcing pockets out there. I'm a manager also, and I know if I heard any of this I'd stamp it down immediately. Heck, if I didn't, I wouldn't be doing my job, and I'd (hopefully) eventuall
89.
by oddthink 8y ago
Despite my griping, I liked kdb+ and q. As a database query language, q is awesome, if you are doing a lot of time-series analysis (running sums, etc., nothing fancy). As a language, the table type in q is very nice, a bit like what pandas
90.
by oddthink 8y ago
About 10 years ago, A+ was just used as the communications protocol for fixed income. Nothing (that I knew of) used it, but C++ ceremoniously created A+ objects, sent them over the wire to another C++ process that decoded them. Around that

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