thanatropism

166 ms·

1501.
by thanatropism 11y ago
Can I maybe email you if this is (in your estimation) a conversation worth continuing? I have a feeling it gets fast lost in an aging HN thread. At any rate: probably the most important problem to be posed by such a "random input-outpu
1502.
by thanatropism 11y ago
> ideas flushed out. So there are too many ideas as it is?
1503.
by thanatropism 11y ago
This is nice. So, follow-up question. In economics, there's "input-output models" which amount to the summation of adjacency matrices for inter-sectoral demand linkages such that S = I + A + A^2 + A^3+... = (I-A)^(-1) We know
1504.
by thanatropism 11y ago
These are the prime numbers between 20 and 100: 23,29,31,37,41,43,47,53,59,61,67,71 73,79,83,89,97 Evens are out; so are small multiples. A multiple of three might end in 3, 9 or 7. A multiple of 7 may end in 1. So a "conservative ment
1505.
by thanatropism 11y ago
Did the parent poster say "reasonable"? He said "mainstream".
1506.
by thanatropism 11y ago
One thing missing here: Matlab syntax is actually very close to modern Fortran. At least twice I've written Fortran code (for Monte Carlo simulations; different contexts) by overwriting Matlab code adding types / general verbosity
1507.
by thanatropism 11y ago
I don't like this new title... There was plenty outcry when sizes 0 and 00 were introduced, and what attracted my attention to this article was not so much that dress sizes had changed upwards, but that such sizes are not "new&quo
1508.
A size 8 dress today is nearly the equivalent of a size 16 dress in 1958(washingtonpost.com)
72 points by thanatropism 11y ago|80 comments
1509.
by thanatropism 11y ago
Personally I wouldn't want to know. We have an actual agreement on this, me and my wife: try not to cheat, but if it happens, do everything to keep the other from knowing. What you don't know can't hurt you -- or at least tha
1510.
by thanatropism 11y ago
IIRC (but I can't seem to source it) it was Marshall McLuhan that said that there was nothing sweeter than the gaze of a tyrant. This is what Emerson seems to be preaching against, and how good a sermon it is.
1511.
by thanatropism 11y ago
But mathematics is about the only field where merit is clear-cut enough that there's no outsider mathematics, even if crank mathematics is clearly recognizable by professionals and even by college calculus-educated adults. If, as o
1512.
by thanatropism 11y ago
> when one imagines all objects are pictured on a > transparent screen in front of him and concentrates > attention only on the surface of the screen As they say it on the C2 wiki, IHaveThisAntiPattern. I'm more distractible
1513.
by thanatropism 11y ago
Since I was preempted for the comment "this is typical quality-control ad-hockery BS", I'll play devil's advocate and argue that the point of quality control is to identify two components of a mixture distribution[0]: a
1514.
by thanatropism 11y ago
When we have semi-complicated models we try to factor out the harder part to run outside Excel -- and thus have programming utilities available -- and write "front-end" logic (currency conversions, inflation adjustments, charts, e
1515.
by thanatropism 11y ago
This is a bit harder. An Excel spreadsheet has no self-evident order of evaluation -- the cell dependency graph can be arbitrarily complicated. Of course, Excel itself (and other spreadsheet programs) already do "decompiling", but
1516.
by thanatropism 11y ago
So I don't know the first thing about software patents, but most central banks (including the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, etc.) -- offer web interfaces for manipulating and retrieving economic time-series (say, taking l
1517.
by thanatropism 11y ago
What? Where? You're either talking about lower-lower middle class, or far outside the large metros, I presume? I'm amazed no one mentioned Bob's Burgers, at any rate. Are you in the same Brazil I'm in?
1518.
by thanatropism 11y ago
Very often these articles ask excellent questions -- but fully 80% of their value is in the prompt-question. On the one hand, this question explodes into the "general purpose AI" literature. Less Wrong actually originated from a s
1519.
by thanatropism 11y ago
Speculatively (pun intended): we see in saccades (rapid eye movements) rather than static analysis of scenery, so we're bound to understand the frequency of, say, edges over the fixed-period saccade rhythm better than we understand dis
1520.
by thanatropism 11y ago
I'm bothered by the dilution/misuse/pollution of the word "holistic". "Holism" is an important notion, held even by stodgy professores like WVO Quine. It stands in contrast to "reductionism", the
1521.
by thanatropism 11y ago
> “Guanabara Bay is a sacred place for us." No it isn't. I mean, everyone would like to see the mythical dolphins in our flag back. But it's not like we're nature-worshipping Na'vi aliens. We've actually blo
1522.
by thanatropism 11y ago
I never complete Coursera courses. That's probably more on me than them.
1523.
by thanatropism 11y ago
"X is the new Y" considered harmful.
1524.
by thanatropism 11y ago
Then, Safari has an amazing energy footprint. I will readily agree that the evolutionary path of OSX seems to have gone off the rails. But hey, why do I use Safari instead of Chrome?
1525.
by thanatropism 11y ago
That's more about organizing a talk in memorable points than overcoming shyness/vocal technique, etc. A lot of it is useful for essay-writing as well. (To be fair: I must have followed through with a third of it before priorities
1526.
by thanatropism 11y ago
The ideas in this article: 1. Contain a grain of truth 2. Might be better understood by reading Csikszentmihalyi (or Heidegger, for that matter) 3. Come in sets of three
1527.
by thanatropism 11y ago
OpenOffice is "good enough"; where Word isn't an option, it does the job. GIMP isn't even trying; it's not in the same market as Photoshop or casual image editing, which is well served by web apps these days. (One
1528.
by thanatropism 11y ago
Either that, or a rough estimation of the problems he expected to face moving forward -- this is a decades-old company, an amazing outlier in this industry -- made him think this would always be a relevant bottleneck. We're able to use
1529.
by thanatropism 11y ago
Mathematica is an interesting case study for a general-purpose software package that happens to be more feature-full and functional -- not just "more convenient" or "better UX" -- than any open-source counterparts. I ten
1530.
by thanatropism 11y ago
But isn't this the ultimate point of "science studies" (broadly put) since the days of Kuhn, Lakatos, Latour and so on? I mean, Wolfram's bizarre confirmation bias about discrete automata is (apparently) apparent to the

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