stiff

32 ms·

271.
by stiff 13y ago
And what is your solution to not getting hit by a truck over an infinite period of time?
272.
by stiff 13y ago
There is something very weird about people routinely speaking of immortality as something that is actually a thing. For all we know, stars die eventually, the sun will burn out eventually, the universe as we know most likely comes to an end
273.
by stiff 13y ago
I know "who he is". Do I have to agree with him because he is a professor? Every piece of his writing I saw used the most complicated language possible and the largest amount of digressions to in the end convey nothing concrete wh
274.
by stiff 13y ago
Nothing new in the philosophy departments: thousands of words and nothing to say at all that would be connected to reality. I heard he cites some experimental works sometimes, but his own work seems still to be in this good old tradition of
275.
by stiff 13y ago
Yeah, of what use can mathematics be, when you can just study "ideas and models"...
276.
by stiff 13y ago
Yes, judging from YT videos of drag soldering, this was what he did, except unlike people in those videos, he did it holding the circuit board vertically and hence it was one very quick move. Bear with me: this was almost ten years ago, I h
277.
by stiff 13y ago
Loosely related anecdote: in a technical electronics high school my teacher showed us, as a cool trick to impress us, how to actually solder this way - you make a nice little ball from tin with the soldering iron, put it over the first pin
278.
by stiff 13y ago
The best introductory book and also the most cohesive one is "Learning from Data" from Yaser Abu-Mostafa, accompanied by great video lectures: http://amlbook.com/ It differs from other books in that all the materi
279.
by stiff 13y ago
Doing a BS in CS would be the best, otherwise you will need a ton of self-discipline to learn even a half of what you would learn in a degree program. If you decide to self study, and have enough "mathematical maturity", you will
280.
by stiff 13y ago
This is a complicated issue, and I think you are confusing things a bit. Of course, for a gene to take an effect (produce a protein) it has to be activated via a certain chain of chemical reactions that is triggered by environmental conditi
281.
by stiff 13y ago
I am hardly a big fan of Khan Academy, but not only is there hardly any precise or logically sound criticism in this article, the video presented as exemplary is horrible, just unbelievingly dull, the level of enthusiasm is about that of a
282.
by stiff 13y ago
What is missing in the discussion of this and the previous article is some reflection on physiology and why could prolonged sitting possibly be bad for you in the first place. One must know that that there are many processes in the human bo
283.
by stiff 13y ago
Natural Language Processing.
284.
by stiff 13y ago
It's very, very naive to think that you can simply put all the recommended dosages of vitamins and macro-/micro- elements into a single shake and have it fulfil all the nutritional needs. You need enzymes to digest food, specific
285.
by stiff 13y ago
What helps immensely in learning new programming languages quickly, but also in spotting tricky bugs and increasing general software engineering skills is studying programming languages as a discipline of CS: learning how languages are impl
286.
by stiff 13y ago
The problem here is that we humans really want to believe certain things, and our emotional involvement blinds us to what we really managed to establish scientifically, e.g. people vehemently oppose any suggestions of determinism, attempts
287.
by stiff 13y ago
Wow. So you HN guys just accept statements like those on faith?
288.
by stiff 13y ago
I just don't understand how you can state bold claims like this as facts without substantiating them in any way by references or any sort of logical deduction: If a person learned to become exceptionally 'talented' in one ar
289.
by stiff 13y ago
Without references your comment is worthless.
290.
by stiff 13y ago
Seems like a tradition of the Perl folks: http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2012/05/ms... The Chuck Moore quote is especially ironic given what Perl represents in the programming language
291.
by stiff 13y ago
NumPy is a full MAT-LAB for Python, not a simple drop-in statistics library. It has to depend on LINPACK because writing a full linear algebra library that performs well is damn hard and takes several researcher-years. Most serious scientif
292.
by stiff 13y ago
The author is criticizing calculus courses. The level of formalism in calculus courses is relatively low, and none of it has anything to do with quantum mechanics or contradictions far down. It is only enough formalism to give a definition
293.
by stiff 13y ago
Almost any calculus course goes over accelaration being the derivative of speed and so forth. It doesn't make students suddenly understand calculus.
294.
by stiff 13y ago
it is true that rigour is eventually needed, but the principia, laplace's celestial mechanics and countless other works (heard of euler?) were all published before cauchy and weirstrass. all of the wonderful work in elliptic functions
295.
by stiff 13y ago
99.99% of the mathematics of motion consists of continuous functions with continuous derivatives of all orders. Infinitesimals are just fine for that. There were logical contradictions even in Newtons and Leibniz works, far before anyone
296.
by stiff 13y ago
Do you have any particular criticism to make?
297.
by stiff 13y ago
I find the logically sound version of the infinitesimals approach to be much more difficult to understand than the approach using limits. For example, you have to introduce hyperreals to make it work (most common approach): http:/&#x2
298.
by stiff 13y ago
Introductory calculus classes are hardly ever rigorous. The only formalism you see is functions and limits, and that's a very useful one, far from unnecessary, it might just not always be motivated appropriately by poor teachers who th
299.
by stiff 13y ago
Please read the article with a critical eye, some of it is complete non-sense, for example: CALCULUS: This course will explore the mathematics of motion, and the best ways to bury it under a mountain of unnecessary formalism. Despite being
300.
by stiff 13y ago
The real numbers have no relevance to calculus? Is there a way of doing calculus without real numbers that is simpler? What are you talking about?

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