tmoertel

56 ms·

631.
by tmoertel 14y ago
I came, I saw, I conquered. Those words are powerful, but not because they form a comma splice. That is, their power does not derive from failing the model's rules. Rather, the model's rules fail to capture that those words are powerful
632.
by tmoertel 14y ago
One point that most grammar discussions seem to miss is that grammar is a model of how people communicate, not the real thing. When a construction is labeled "ungrammatical," then, it could be, as the prescriptivists would have us believ
633.
by tmoertel 14y ago
Hindsight is not merely 20-20 but prevents us from seeing the past as it truly appeared. Because we cannot unknow what we now know, the mind's eye is an unreliable witness.
634.
by tmoertel 14y ago
My point is that, in this case, it is not possible to understand what it means to "publish" something without understanding the implications of its publish_at time. That is, it's not an "implementation detail" but an essential part of th
635.
by tmoertel 14y ago
But it's not "test-specific functionally", is it? The underlying object has a published_at attribute. Don't you think it means something? The reality, then, is that we don't publish things, but publish things as of certain times . Only b
636.
by tmoertel 14y ago
The chubbiness, itself, isn’t so much the problem. It’s that your models end up becoming arbitrary bags of logic whose contents lack rhyme or reason. Let me unpack that claim. In the models-and-controllers view of the world, there’s no obvi
637.
by tmoertel 14y ago
I came here to make exactly the same recommendation about Udi Manber's book. When designing an algorithm, you ought to make sure that it actually works. At some point, then, you're going to have to prove it. Which for most people is hard,
638.
by tmoertel 14y ago
If we attempt to apply Tao’s three stages -- pre-rigorous, rigorous, and post-rigorous -- to programming, something interesting happens: we find that the programming world is mostly stuck at the pre-rigorous stage because there is no widely
639.
by tmoertel 14y ago
I hope that the rise of Nate Silver portends a day when journalism will not be practiced almost exclusively by people who are functionally illiterate when it comes to all things quantitative. When so much of our world is governed by relatio
640.
by tmoertel 14y ago
Another problem with math education is that many of the people in leadership positions in public school systems are, when it come to math and related skills, functionally illiterate. Those people see themselves as successful and are respect
641.
by tmoertel 14y ago
I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Colin for offering his four-part CS "final exam" and then offering to grade our submissions. It must have been a ton of work, and it is appreciated.
642.
by tmoertel 14y ago
Even though you asked everybody to submit answers, you should expect people who expect themselves to do poorly to opt out. So your sample, I suspect, is strongly biased toward the answers from people who expected not to do poorly. And th
643.
by tmoertel 14y ago
That's interesting. I would expect you not to get many submissions from people who would expect themselves to do poorly on your exam. But, if it turns out that a sizable portion of people who expect to do well do not, that's indeed intere
644.
by tmoertel 14y ago
Sorry, I wasn't clear. I meant that when I see a p-value of 10^-6 in papers, I expect that there's at least a 1% chance that the humans screwed up the models somewhere, so I don't see it as more persuasive than 10^-2. That is, p-values lose
645.
by tmoertel 14y ago
Yeah, it always worries me that so many people see a small p-value like 10^-6 and say, "Wow, that one's definitely true." But p=10^-6 doesn't mean, as commonly believed, that there's only a one-in-a-million chance that the proposed hypoth
646.
by tmoertel 14y ago
I interpreted the author's claim to be that, assuming that all tested hypotheses were false, 5% would by chance alone be publishable anyway. So one must not take too strongly as evidence of truth the fact that a hypotheis was published. (I
647.
by tmoertel 14y ago
What makes you believe that the author of the parent post mentioned the "offshore" characteristic unnecessarily? When interpreting the story, isn't it important that readers understand that the programmer who added the call to sleep was far
648.
by tmoertel 14y ago
For a "real" benchmark, I'd like to see the query repeated until the response-time distribution stabilizes. Then take the response time at the 90th, 95th, and 99th percentiles, and also the mean. Actually, I'd like to see the CDF plot for t
649.
by tmoertel 14y ago
My hunch is that, in the original environment, PostgreSQL with the right indexes would be as fast as the bloom filter. I emailed the OP about adding an index on movie_person(person_id), and he (besides being very cool and gracious about ev
650.
by tmoertel 14y ago
Yes, in effect, gambling. The point I was trying to make is that the payoffs for X, for many real-world situations, are dwarfed by payoffs for "beyond X." So, in those situations, it's not a mind trick but rational to bet on the rare but h
651.
by tmoertel 14y ago
Thanks for pointing that out. I totally misread the bottom line. Once I had it in my head that those were seconds, no amount of looking at that little "ms" behind the numbers was going to show me anything different.
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by tmoertel 14y ago
EDITED ONE LAST TIME – I PROMISE, I REALLY DO, THIS IS THE LAST TIME – TO ADD: I think the reason that OP's join-based queries are slow is that there are no indexes over his junction table's foreign keys: CREATE TABLE movies_people (
653.
by tmoertel 14y ago
I have doubts about the offered explanation. From the abstract of the study behind the article [1]: When people seek to impress others, they often do so by highlighting individual achievements. Despite the intuitive appeal of
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by tmoertel 14y ago
That's because those empty books aren't truly empty. They're filled with imagined potential. Most purchasers estimate the value of that potential as high and are therefore willing to invest in something expensive to protect it and signal it
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by tmoertel 14y ago
Is there any way I can buy your book without being forced to register for a PayPal account?
656.
by tmoertel 14y ago
Software effort estimation causes three problems. First, most estimation processes model the uncertainty about the effort required for tasks but fail to model the uncertainty about the tasks themselves, leading to unreliable estimates. Seco
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by tmoertel 14y ago
Does anyone know how this letter first came to be published? Update: Google Books answered the question for me: > Dr. Stuhlinger responded to the sister in a letter that was published by NASA/George C. Marshall Space Center in 1970 titl
658.
by tmoertel 14y ago
Khan’s definition is fine. Karim Kai Ani is being foolish by insisting that “slope is a rate that describes how two variables change in relation to one another.” No, that’s a rate of change . A “slope” is a commonly used rate-of-change in
659.
by tmoertel 14y ago
We use shower boards at the startup where I work, and we not only mount them on walls but also cut them into smaller whiteboards that we can carry around in "decks." We might take a blank deck into a conference room, work out a design on s
660.
by tmoertel 14y ago
The typography in your presentation is great, but there's one thing you could do to make it better: don't use a left single quotation mark (U+2018) when what's needed is an apostrophe. For that need, the preferred character is a right singl

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