olooney

29 ms·

241.
by olooney 7y ago
I'm fairly certain that Hilbert would disagree with you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formalism_(philosophy_of_mathe... In particular, most modern mathematics can be formalized within first-order logic with the Z
242.
by olooney 7y ago
> [...] was that known at the time? Could engineers working on a canal project have anticipated socioeconomic trends like this? Mexico City has grown from 4 million in 1951 (the time of flood mentioned in the first paragraph) to over 20
243.
by olooney 7y ago
I'm not sure "we scraped ELI5"[1] is really such a substantive advancement of the state-of-the-art that it deserves such a large write up. The Stanford Question & Answer Dataset is much more carefully curated.[2] ROGUE[3]
244.
by olooney 7y ago
Elsewhere on this thread I argue that they are already not a site where everyone can get their questions answered, in practice or by design, and give examples of how the question-asking experience could be improved.
245.
by olooney 7y ago
Sometimes. I once asked how to find the "successor" of a floating point number. I had Googled this, in several different ways in fact, looking for phrases like "smallest floating point number strictly larger than", &qu
246.
by olooney 7y ago
Right. "Closed as Duplicate" could be renamed "Great Question! We have an answer for you over here!" without change in functionality and it would be an improvement. They could take it further and keep the duplicate as a
247.
by olooney 7y ago
Stack Overflow is basically under siege 24/7 by every yahoo with a keyboard. The smaller, more specialized stack exchange sites have less nonsense (maybe a 2:1 ratio of bad to good questions compared to Stack Overflow 10:1) to deal wit
248.
by olooney 7y ago
Every new question is, paradoxically, very low quality, unclear, AND off-topic, yet somehow at the same time an exact duplicate of an on-topic question with 653 upvotes. :)
249.
by olooney 7y ago
It's hilarious how self aware they are about the newbie experience[1] while at the same time having engineered an system that reinforces and enables all of those behaviors. Stack Overflow doesn't care about helping users get answe
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by olooney 7y ago
They made a movie about it staring Marlon Brando. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9sir%C3%A9e_(film)
251.
A Seriously Slow Fibonacci Function(oranlooney.com)
2 points by olooney 7y ago|0 comments
252.
by olooney 7y ago
There's a weird bug in human psychology where anything we can easily do ourselves is considered "easy" in an absolute sense, even if we've literally spend years or even decades acquiring the skills that make it so easy.
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by olooney 7y ago
The self-definition comment is a reference to the common LISP exercise of writing a "meta-circular evaluator"[1] - that is, writing a LISP interpreter in LISP. This is famously done[3] in "Structure and Interpretation of Comp
254.
by olooney 7y ago
Modern terminology is "dynamic" vs "lexical" scope[1][2]. Lexical scope makes it very easy to reason about closures[3]. Dynamic scoping is slightly easier for language authors to implement. Terrible languages like ColdFu
255.
by olooney 7y ago
Both R and numpy use BLAS, and if both are linked to the same library, say OpenBLAS or Intel MKL, then performance is in fact almost identical for expensive operations like matrix multiplication. (R also ships with its own internal BLAS imp
256.
The Worst Sorts(en.wikipedia.org)
2 points by olooney 7y ago|0 comments
257.
by olooney 7y ago
Individual trees are high variance. The random forest itself is an ensemble of many trees - a "forest" if we've being cute. Each tree in the forest is randomized training on a bootstrap sample. This is sometimes called &quo
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by olooney 7y ago
Random Forest doesn't use boosting. Tree models like XGBoost which do use boosting are indeed very prone to overfitting.
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by olooney 7y ago
Good point!
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by olooney 7y ago
> you would not be able to bring your own fuel I love that you point this out. People are so used to even "hard" science fiction hand-waving this away they often don't realize the magnitude of the problem. For example, if
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by olooney 7y ago
Because at an atomic level "cold" means "slow" and under the standard model you need to slam protons into each other fast if you want them to fuse. Here is a true "Explain it like I'm five:" Kid: I want
262.
by olooney 7y ago
These two projects look great, and are exactly the kind of projects where I can see Google making an impact. I think it is extremely likely that we will struggle to build working reactors until we have an "AutoCAD for magnetic containm
263.
by olooney 7y ago
Ah, yes, the good old Pascal's mugging[1]. I am aware that cold fusion experiments are both much cheaper, and if successful, considerably safer and cheaper than hot fusion. Yet, there is no plausible mechanism for fusion to occur at ro
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by olooney 7y ago
Google can do what they like, of course. Perhaps they'll even make some money off it and create some useful device. I doubt Google has any greater access to SMEs - which in this case would be academic physicists - than ITER or CERN. I
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by olooney 7y ago
Noted; I've edited the above comment to read, "have come close to being energy positive." Thank you.
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by olooney 7y ago
The skepticism is not about fusion power, it's about cold fusion specifically, as well role of proprietary IP and patents in scientific research. Tokamak[1] (and other magnetic confinement) reactors seem much more promising and have se
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by olooney 7y ago
Python's string format is also very similar to the "double mustache" convention widely used in web development. The following template string: "I have {{apples}} apples" To my certain knowledge this works i
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by olooney 7y ago
Right. Technical debt should not be understood on its own but as part of a larger "technical balance sheet" metaphor: technical depreciation, technical amortization, and so on.
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by olooney 7y ago
For an actual in-depth look at the origin and deep history of data science and statistics, check out the book the "The 7 Pillars of Statistical Wisdom"[1]. It recounts historical anecdotes such as the Trial of Pyx[2] at the London
270.
by olooney 7y ago
A timeless question. "Who shall mend the ship of state?" - Socrates, by way of Plato, paraphrased by Bertrand Russell > Plato's Socrates compares the population at large to a strong but nearsighted shipowner whose knowledg

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