tmoertel

60 ms·

661.
by tmoertel 14y ago
Are we talking about IN clauses that contain a correlated subquery or something the optimizer would have a hard time determining was independent of outer context?
662.
by tmoertel 14y ago
What’s being glossed over here, and explains a lot of the confusion around which is the best method of “solving” the multi-arm-bandit problem, is the classical bias-variance tradeoff. All of the methods presume some model of the problem, an
663.
by tmoertel 14y ago
Let’s be clear about what we’re discussing here. The author of the original article suggested that efficiency was a problem because it threatened employment. I believe this claim to be false because, as I’ve written in earlier comments, whe
664.
by tmoertel 14y ago
I believe it because the alternative – that humans cannot find new ways to create value for themselves – is harder to believe. Assume that there is a point in time in which humans run out of ways to create value for themselves. If you were
665.
by tmoertel 14y ago
It's not infinite; it's practically unbounded , meaning it can be increased for a long as humans have an interest in increasing it.
666.
by tmoertel 14y ago
In human society, there are a practically unbounded number of things that humans can do that other humans would be willing to pay for. The same cannot be said for horses, which have zero ability in human society to find new ways to cre
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by tmoertel 14y ago
The fallacy here is that machines “replace” humans. They don’t. They can displace humans from jobs, but the humans don’t disappear. The humans still exist and can still do all the things humans can do, including find ways to create value
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by tmoertel 14y ago
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4031451
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by tmoertel 14y ago
If you actually want to understand the "math behind it all," do yourself a favor and read the first three chapters of _Probability Theory: The Logic of Science_ by E. T. Jaynes. Jaynes builds, from the ground up, probability theory as an e
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by tmoertel 14y ago
A scatterplot will be superior whenever you want to see all your data (and not smooth some of it away).
671.
by tmoertel 15y ago
I've been streamlining my commit histories this way for several years now, and it's worth the effort. I do it pretty much the same way the author does (only I use Emacs and Magit mostly). The reason I do it is because my work has to make se
672.
by tmoertel 15y ago
And now, for your entertainment, an implementation in a language I'm pretty confident has a user base of just me: gimli> pascal <- local { gimli+ loop <- function(n, xs) { gimli+ if n > 0 then do giml
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by tmoertel 15y ago
Actually (unwords . words) is the identity only for lists of strings containing no whitespace. For example: Prelude> let xs = [" a"] in xs == (words . unwords) xs False
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by tmoertel 15y ago
The claim is true: QuickCheck is surprisingly more effective at finding problems (and documenting expected behavior) than unit tests. When I first tried it, not long after the QuickCheck paper came out at ICFP 2000, it found problems tha
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by tmoertel 15y ago
While I can understand why probability textbooks present Bayes' Theorem as P(A|B) = [ P(B|A) * P(A) ] / P(B), I've always thought the following rewrite makes more sense when the probabilities represent degrees of belief: P(A|B) = P(A) * [ P
676.
by tmoertel 15y ago
You wrote that reasonably smart people couldn't figure out the old system, even with a couple of days' investigation. How is this a good system? If people can't figure it out, how are they supposed to use it? Then you wrote that, when the
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by tmoertel 15y ago
Fortunately, Pearl has distilled the highlights of his book _Causality_ into a 50-page paper that makes a great introduction to the modern theory of causation: http://ftp.cs.ucla.edu/pub/stat_ser/r350.pdf Through this paper, and others li
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by tmoertel 16y ago
> But that means that you have not created an actual search program. You are just using googles data. No, if your learning system is working properly you should be using Google's data only to the extent it is legitimately observable and
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by tmoertel 16y ago
Here's the problem I have with Google's claims about Bing: Google suggests that Bing is cheating but hasn't demonstrated that Bing's behavior somehow deviates from what is optimal in a machine-learning sense. Thus, the real question is whet
680.
by tmoertel 16y ago
> That is entirely a matter of opinion. It isn't entirely a matter of opinion, is it? When you use map to do your mapping, aren't you are stating your intent in the language of the profession? The name of the function, after all, is "
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by tmoertel 16y ago
But the first of your examples is cleaner not because of any inherent advantage of list-comprehension syntax but because in Python the syntactic cost of turning an expression into an anonymous function is so high. In other words, you're com
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by tmoertel 16y ago
> Usually list comprehensions are a much cleaner way to write a map. But the first makes my intent clearer than the second: map(f, xs) [f(x) for x in xs] In Python, where creating anonymous functions is syntactically expen
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by tmoertel 16y ago
An alternative to a kettle with temperature control is to use a little math to find dilution ratios. It's quick, easy, and works with any kettle to give water of any temperature. See: http://blog.moertel.com/articles/2005/07/11/math-makes-
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by tmoertel 16y ago
The success of the Khan Academy is by orthodox educational standards surprising . That it is surprising ought to tell us something: that the orthodox understanding of how education should be "delivered" is at least partly wrong . We sho
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by tmoertel 17y ago
> There is no real financial incentive to prevent cancer etc, but lots of money and glory for curing people who have got cancer. Prevention is much harder to sell than cures because the effect of prevention is hard for people to see. I
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by tmoertel 17y ago
Hey, if works for Keith Richards, it's got to be effective: Richards has stated that the "Satisfaction" riff came to him in his sleep; he woke up just long enough to record it on a cassette player by his bed. Source: http://en.wikipedia.
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by tmoertel 17y ago
I was thinking the same thing. I also wonder why more Linux distros do not include qmail. Other than having a few anachronisms, which can quickly be brought up to modern times, it's a fast, secure, time-tested, and completely respectable
688.
by tmoertel 17y ago
> Functional style in languages such as Scheme, Lisp and the like tend to nest functions. Which makes readability a bit hard, ... Hard for whom? People unskilled in functional programming? People skilled only in the English language fi
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by tmoertel 17y ago
> I guess they believe functional programming does not help with code readability. What does that statement say more about, the Python community or the readability of functional programming?
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by tmoertel 17y ago
> Instead Opera, Mozilla, Apple and Google are on a dysfunctional goosechase with VIDEO. I'm sure you hope they're chasing wild geese, but from where I'm sitting, almost all Flash usage on the web, weighted by user volume, falls into tw

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