tjradcliffe

9 ms·

31.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
The one objective measure of success in art is mastery of technique, which is something the kind of dedication and practice he has done can produced. A mature artist of any kind should be able to deliberately set out to create a particular
32.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
The best thing about this piece is the rationality of his decision-making: didn't get a scholarship so take a year off to get better. School was getting too expensive so find a cheaper way to go. Need to pay off student loans so move b
33.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
> WW2 was caused in no small part by the Wall St Crash, which was a direct cause of hyperinflation in Germany Could you please clarify how the Crash of '29 caused hyperinflation in Germany in the early 1920's? Or do you mean th
34.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
Lecturing Germany on its own history is just about the most useless contribution to this debate possible. Germany and everyone else who foolishly loaned Greece money in 2010--and before--wants to get paid. There is nothing wrong with that.
35.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
And when have emotional appeals ever let anyone down? :-) Sounds like a valuable opportunity to practice Bayesian reasoning. One thing I like to do in situations like this is see if I can figure out any data that contradict my emotional res
36.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
Mathematicians use and think about math in a way that is almost completely orthogonal to the way physicists use and think about it. To physicists math is more like a natural language, and definitions are conveniences. This is why mathematic
37.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
I'm not encouraged by statements like this: "There is nothing inherently more scientific about using an ordinal rather than a cardinal quantity to describe an economic construct. Chemists' free energy, or the force required t
38.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
This is the traditional model of academic publishing that was driven by the limited communication and collaboration ability of the time. A study like the one you describe would be done by multiple co-authors (I don't think I've wr
39.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
They say C is a low level language. That is not the same as simple.
40.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
I see a lot of companies with websites that say they "value diversity" and yet have no one person in any team photo over the age of 40, which suggests their definition of "diversity" covers a singularly narrow range of c
41.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
> How many developers are going to be finding much work over 45-50 unless they are already well positioned as an independent consultant or have a name brand? Why exactly is this? And why would anyone go into a profession where they will
42.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
There's nothing magical about the required properties, so I'm not sure why anyone would describe them that way. They are no different than the properties imputed to neutrinos or the aether: http://www.tjradcliffe.com&#x
43.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
Dark matter is no more a kludge than phlogiston, or the lumineferous aether, or neutrinos. All of them were introduced as novel entities to explain experimental phenomena. The first two turn out not to exist, the latter does: http:/&#
44.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
If I claim, "An implementation of this algorithm (described in pseudocode) achieves O(N) peformance on that task" and no one can reproduce it based on the pseudocode, I've published a lie. This is a phenomenon I've seen
45.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
> I was gone within a few months, my other coworker soon after, and the most senior engineer on the team transferred within the company. Translation: Amazon suffered almost 100% knowledge loss on the systems your team were the exclusive
46.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
Excellent. Thank you for taking the time to pull some data out of the anecdotes. There are all kinds of tricky issues with this, as this is a small dataset, but by identifying categories you've created a template that could be used to
47.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
Marriage as a practical matter exists in all societies everywhere, in the absense of any institutions of organized religion or the political state. Read any ethnography of any stone-age people from the past several hundred years and you&#x2
48.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
> At lease in the case of traditional marriage, there's the creation of children to contend with. Huh? Sterile people have always been permitted to marry. Always. Everywhere. Under all circumstances. Ever. Sometimes inability to b
49.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
Probably because it is extremely implausible: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2516429/ And let's be clear about this: you have claimed lithium "will destroy the kidneys, eventually lead
50.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
This is not a problem with Bayes' Theorem. Any alternative method of updating beliefs will suffer from exactly the same problem of noisy inputs, and have the the additional problem that it cannot maintain consistency with all the evide
51.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
Bayes' Theorem tells us that the quest for certain knowledge, which drove a great deal of science and philosophy in the pre-Bayesian era (before about 1990, when Bayesian methods started to gain real traction in the scientific communit
52.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
Not the GP, but I focus on tradeoffs and roads not taken. Get them to talk about a project they've worked on, and then ask about alternative design decisions around some interesting feature and see what they say. Example: I developed a
53.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
As a matter of interest, does your company also ask managers to go through a management test as part of the hiring process? Let them run a team for twenty minutes or an hour and evaluate them on that basis? If not, why not? :-) I think &quo
54.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
> The problem is that you never find out because if someone bombs the coding part you simply chuckle and say "well that person is clearly a liar, or something!" and they don't go any further in the hiring process. This. I&
55.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
The list of hobbyists who didn't go on to form companies around their hobby is orders of magnitude longer than the list of those who did. So it really isn't that useful as a metric.
56.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
To first order options are worthless. I've worked for venture-funded startups, angel-funded startups and started my own company on debt and nerve, and the only one that worked out was my own thing. The rest... well, I have a lot of pre
57.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
Yes, it does. I am quite happy saying, "Climate change is a plausibly serious problem and the current best solution is to build nuclear (fission) power plants today to replace base load coal, to shift from income taxes to carbon taxe
58.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
Simple: this is exactly what you would expect on a high plateau. Think about it in terms of climbing a mountain with a fairly flat top. For a long time you're moving continuously up-slope, then when you get to the plateau you wander ar
59.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
The suggestion at the end of the article that very notion of the Enlightenment has outlived its usefulness is problematic. Clearly something happened in the 18th century that involved the backfooting of faith in favour of reason and empir
60.
by tjradcliffe 11y ago
Slightly better description of the underlying ideas here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgomery%27s_pair_correlatio... The key point is that the correlation function between pairs of zeros of the Reimann zeta functi

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