sfpotter

23 ms·

271.
by sfpotter 2y ago
Everyone: "O(n^2) algorithms are bad." Also everyone: "Just do the stupidest thing in the shortest amount of time possible. We'll fix it later."
272.
by sfpotter 2y ago
How much of a speedup did you get switching over to Rob Pike style includes?
273.
by sfpotter 3y ago
Lucky for you to have the privilege to protest quit from moral outrage. Not everyone is so lucky (in fact, most people aren’t).
274.
by sfpotter 3y ago
There are actually companies to work for where you can get involved and develop ownership over things, and where how well you do relates to the success of the business. If you have a good relationship with your coworkers, you may even want
275.
by sfpotter 3y ago
The barista isn’t an axe murderer.
276.
by sfpotter 3y ago
What are you even talking about?
277.
by sfpotter 3y ago
A road trip by random walk is a valuable experience, the kind most people on HN lack.
278.
by sfpotter 3y ago
There’s another reason AI won’t eliminate jobs. People like to hire people who are like them (also who like them, and who they like). The only people who AIs are like are AI engineers (more broadly, engineers, scientists, etc). For an AI en
279.
by sfpotter 3y ago
Thanks, very helpful. I’ve used ARPACK extensively and have had no complaints with it, but I haven’t tried this particularly pathological case.
280.
by sfpotter 3y ago
Why should it be more stable?
281.
by sfpotter 3y ago
I'm not saying we should defund math. I'm saying that it's perfectly fair and reasonable to think through how much sense it makes to allocate research funds for pure math. More specifically, I'm pushing because on the id
282.
by sfpotter 3y ago
I don't agree. You're basically sticking your head in the sand saying that because there have been unanticipated benefits sometimes hundreds of years later, we can't even attempt to decide what research is valuable. If the
283.
by sfpotter 3y ago
I never said we should defund pure math. How many pure mathematicians have gotten tenure in math departments and were subsequently forced to work on "applications"? Do you have any actual examples? How many superstar researchers h
284.
by sfpotter 3y ago
'If you want to work on "applicability", go get a job in industry.'
285.
by sfpotter 3y ago
Most people don't have the luxury of tenure. Frankly, most people don't have the luxury of a single career that's well paying throughout their professional life. If funding dried up tomorrow and every number theory professor
286.
by sfpotter 3y ago
This is simply wrong. There is loads of academic research born out of industrial collaborations which is absolutely focused on how useful it is. Applied research exists in academia. On the flip side, if you think the only place you can do s
287.
by sfpotter 3y ago
It's different. Painters, sculptors, musicians, etc. are all doing something which is ultimately in service of making others happy and fulfilled. A mathematician or scientist working on something terribly narrow and abstruse is arguabl
288.
by sfpotter 3y ago
Totally wrong. Transit != rail. There are amazing trailheads that are easily accessible from downtown Seoul by a reasonably short busride (e.g. Bukhansan national park). The fact that buses run to these trailheads does absolutely nothing to
289.
by sfpotter 3y ago
I recently signed up for Qobuz, which costs the same or roughly the same as Spotify. They have a significant amount of recommendations, writing, etc written by actual people. It is of vastly higher quality than anything automatically genera
290.
by sfpotter 3y ago
All of the math departments I’ve been involved with have had department-wide lecture series. Actually, all of them even had regular lectures meant to apply to the entire college.
291.
by sfpotter 3y ago
It sounds like you are already set up for I-5 getting obliterated. If you only go to the south end for Ikea, Southcenter, and Seatac, how often do you really need to do those things? It's not like it becomes impossible to drive there,
292.
by sfpotter 3y ago
There are no major highways through Manhattan. The city is better for it. Drive around the lake if you need to get past the city.
293.
by sfpotter 3y ago
Creating I-5 was really contentious at the time. It destroyed neighborhoods. My family has lived in the area for several generations and my parents can attest to this. Lidding it would be great, but removing it would be better. There are lo
294.
by sfpotter 3y ago
OK, got it... I suppose that's reasonable, but depending on what you're working on, I'm not sure seriously reducing the debuggability of your project is acceptable. For the kind of work I do, I need a debugger. I would also
295.
by sfpotter 3y ago
Way, way past the point of being overdone! And I'm sure most of the people who keep overdoing it are referencing the Murakami book, rather than the great Carver short story.
296.
by sfpotter 3y ago
I appreciate the sentiment of what you're saying, but I guess I'm not totally sure what you mean by "abstraction". Maybe "abstraction" is the wrong wording for my original post... For example, in boring code yo
297.
by sfpotter 3y ago
"Functional" C++ with deeply nested loops implemented using stuff from <algorithm> and <functional> and lambda.
298.
by sfpotter 3y ago
There are so many reasons. I'm sure others will provide their own favorites. One that I find particularly annoying lately: if you work on a project that makes heavy use of the STL (or, really, any heavily templated library written in a
299.
by sfpotter 3y ago
SD lacks humanity. Jeff’s art looks “bad” but bad looks human. His games are immediately recognizable, and that familiarity is friendly, comforting, and inviting. All tile art SD games are going to look the same and have a slight uncanny va
300.
by sfpotter 3y ago
Anything involving pivoting for stability isn’t trivial to parallelize. Plain old Gaussian elimination on huge sparse matrices doesn’t scale in parallel very well. At the other end of the spectrum, getting a matrix-matrix multiply to run fa

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