tikhonj

77 ms·

901.
by tikhonj 9y ago
Hah, I just read an article from the SEP related to that: "The Repugnant Conclusion"[1]. I think it was actually on the front page of HN a few days ago. In essence, it's a tricky ethical question: is having more people with a
902.
by tikhonj 9y ago
CS is one of the few fields where you can get even the best jobs without a degree. You will have to clearly demonstrate your skills somehow but if you manage that not having a formal degree is no barrier. This is a massive step up from mo
903.
by tikhonj 9y ago
Macros are absolutely not a way to get around the type system. The things macros let us do are mostly orthogonal to types and there is no contradiction to having macros in a typed language. In fact, that's exactly what Template Haske
904.
by tikhonj 9y ago
The Elm architecture is explicitly not FRP. With FRP, you could include a component that changes pretty easily; for example, with GHCJS and reflex, there is a function called dyn that takes a Dynamic widget (ie a signal of widgets) and turn
905.
by tikhonj 10y ago
The point is that it's not inherently inscrutable—it's different. And being different is a virtue: at the very least, you'll learn something from Haskell, and it's going to let you do things other languages won'
906.
by tikhonj 10y ago
The data here is only for large companies. I happen to know what a couple of medium-sized quantitative trading firms (Jane Street and DE Shaw) pay interns, and it's meaningfully higher (10–12k/month), although it might even out if
907.
by tikhonj 10y ago
Nautilus had a great article a while back on how things get popular[1]: it's more a function of social networks than of the things themselves. The research detailed in the article looked at music specifically, but I think the idea gene
908.
by tikhonj 10y ago
Isn't most research funded out of external industry and government grants that also pay into the university (ie grant overhead)? Given that even most top research universities get by on a fraction of Harvard's endowment—while
909.
by tikhonj 10y ago
Currently we're a small team mostly based in Sunnyvale, but we're also partly distributed and have some people in Minneapolis. This has been a bit awkward for the class specifically because teaching people over Hangouts turns out
910.
by tikhonj 10y ago
I work at Target and we have a weekly class on algebra, category theory and Haskell because people are interested. It's a mix of programmers learning some of the math and mathematicians learning some of the programming :). It's ac
911.
by tikhonj 10y ago
There is, but it's pretty low because language extensions are designed with Core in mind and the desugaring tends to be relatively straightforward. In most cases, the semantics of the "sugar" is defined in terms of a simple
912.
by tikhonj 10y ago
Think of this as closer to an optimizing backend for GHC than a completely brand-new compiler. It uses GHC to parse, typecheck and desugar Haskell to an intermediate form called Core and uses that to do its own optimization and code generat
913.
by tikhonj 10y ago
Hah, I think you're right—my first impression of "maker" is that it's just a bit too "wholesome". "Hacker" also has deep historic ties and, as used in "Hacker News", it's a bit of a pro
914.
by tikhonj 10y ago
I'm not familiar with Git internals. Does the performance of the hashing algorithm contribute significantly to how Git deals with large files or with operations over a large number of small files? I've run into performance problem
915.
by tikhonj 10y ago
I've thought the same for a while, and now I'm looking to Nix[1] as a solution. Upside: strong fundamental design, extreme reproducibility, great Haskell support. Downside: small community, middling OS X support, essentially non-e
916.
by tikhonj 10y ago
I find this very revealing: it's easier to argue against an objective claim—even if all the evidence points against you—than it is to argue against a normative claim. So it's easier to deny "global warming exists" than i
917.
by tikhonj 10y ago
I work in supply chain optimization, and reinforcement learning has been an important technique in the field for decades . Supply chain problems are naturally modeled as Markov decision problems (MDPs). As the state space of your MDPs gets
918.
by tikhonj 10y ago
I don't think that's fair, any more than it would be fair to say mathematics is the hypothesis phase either. Mathematics might be used to build scientific theories, but mathematics itself is self-contained and doesn't need
919.
by tikhonj 10y ago
I'm working on one on-and-off (more off than on lately) that compares parse trees to group related changes together and tries to do some high-level analysis (like finding moves). I finally got my core algorithm working reasonably well
920.
by tikhonj 10y ago
I work on supply chain optimization at Target, and we write lots of internal documents in TeX. Admittedly the team has a relatively academic background—many PhDs in math, CS and OR—but it's still industry use :). Some Word/Power
921.
by tikhonj 10y ago
It's the original wiki. The article was written by a variety of people, probably in a conversational style. I believe the wiki was recently rearchitected, which would explain why it doesn't scale any more :P.
922.
by tikhonj 10y ago
Because a bad Wiki people use is better than a good Wiki people don't.
923.
by tikhonj 10y ago
Tax laws are hard to change. Prop 13 sure had unintended consequences...
924.
by tikhonj 10y ago
The cheaper European brands like Skoda and SEAT also likely have significant volume. Skoda, for example, sold over a million vehicles—a non-trivial 10% of VW group's total. Audi sold something like 1.8M, probably with better margins th
925.
by tikhonj 10y ago
Ah, that's a fair point. Most math textbooks are not that great pedagogically—perhaps I was just projecting how I think mathematical ideas should be introduced :). I'm definitely trying to do this myself: whenever I teach an abs
926.
by tikhonj 10y ago
That's not a charitable interpretation ("twisting history to support their world view"), and your comment seems to be conflating the language-logic view itself with the history presented here. The relationship between pro
927.
by tikhonj 10y ago
One critical assumption behind discussions like that is that popularity is strongly correlated to quality. But that just doesn't seem true in practice—popularity is the result of complex social dynamics and isn't strongly correlat
928.
by tikhonj 10y ago
I sort of agree, but this approach has a real problem: you're strongly selecting for people who are at least okay with the language. If you expect all criticism of Go to come from people who have years of Go experience, all you'll
929.
by tikhonj 10y ago
Unless you read segfaults and core dumps as insults, of course :).
930.
by tikhonj 10y ago
The point is that they're both formal systems of reasoning, not that they have exactly the same properties. The techniques and abstractions from both PL and formal logic often generalize well to both.

More ›