tmoertel

16 ms·

1. 211.▲
   by tmoertel 1y ago

   > > I dislike the “intuition doesn’t work, profile your code” mantra because it seemingly says profiling is a viable replacement for theoretical calculations, which it isn’t. > This seems like a nonsensical statement to me. How cou
2. 212.▲
   by tmoertel 1y ago

   > Hell, I’ve never even had bad ram. To what degree can you separate this claim from "I've never noticed RAM failures"?
3. 213.▲
   by tmoertel 1y ago

   Thanks! That's a nice 5x improvement. Pretty good for a query that offers only modest opportunity, given that the few columns it asks for are fairly small (`title` being the largest, which isn't that large).
4. 214.▲
   by tmoertel 1y ago

   Awesome! Thanks for checking :-)
5. 215.▲
   by tmoertel 1y ago

   This optimization should provide dramatic speed-ups when taking random samples from massive data sets, especially when the wanted columns can contain large values. That's because the basic SQL recipe relies on a LIMIT clause to deter
6. 216.▲
   by tmoertel 2y ago

   Note that you are making a casual claim (that junk food lowers intelligence in children) but the paper you cite provides no evidence of causation, only a statistical association between diet and intelligence scores. Further, this associatio
7. 217.▲
   by tmoertel 2y ago

   Ok. It's just that, as asked, the answer is obviously no because if F = `Set e`, F is not a type constructor, so F cannot be a functor.
8. 218.▲
   by tmoertel 2y ago

   Do you mean to ask whether `Set` (no `e`) is a functor?
9. 219.▲
   by tmoertel 2y ago

   You're inferring a lot that I didn't write or even imply. I'll be clear about my beliefs: 1. I just learned from the article about the fabricated Daisey episode and that TAL started using professional fact checkers only after
10. 220.▲
    by tmoertel 2y ago

    I made no extrapolation. I said that we haven't measured the reliability of the earlier stories. Instead of having a reliable measurement, we're going with our much-less-reliable assumptions (prior beliefs). The interesting thing,
11. 221.▲
    by tmoertel 2y ago

    It would be telling, however, to quantify the reliability of those “years of reliable journalism” by fact checking a random sample of the stories told over those years. According to the article we are discussing, TAL started using professio
12. 222.▲
    by tmoertel 2y ago

    Or get the best of both worlds: buy now and always pay off your full credit-card bill so you never pay interest and get, in effect, a free short-term loan.
13. 223.▲
    by tmoertel 2y ago

    But unions don't negotiate with their actual value; they negotiate by holding hostage the entire value chain in which their labor is a link. This results in the extraction of value from the public, who ultimately bear all such rents, a
14. 224.▲
    by tmoertel 2y ago

    The goal of an interview isn't to get the candidate to write code that will be used in production. The goal is to observe the candidate doing something that predicts whether they're a viable hire. If a candidate cannot write a f
15. 225.▲
    by tmoertel 2y ago

    Thanks for pointing this out! I had submitted the direct link to page 16, but it seems that Hacker News has edited the URL. Here's the direct link: https://archive.org/details/apple-iie-design-guidelines/page.
16. 226.▲
    by tmoertel 2y ago

    Thanks for sharing that link! Through it I was able to find that Apple had design guidelines going back to the Apple 2 era! There's even a fascinating anecdote about a surprisingly challenging UI problem for the Apple //e com
17. 227.▲
    by tmoertel 2y ago

    The problem is that the cheap books have already had their signatures cut into individual pages so that they can be perfect bound, basically running a strip of hot melt glue down the binding edge. At this point, you cannot rebind the pages
18. 228.▲
    by tmoertel 2y ago

    For context, this anecdote describes a particularly important and surprisingly difficult design challenge, and what happens when the designers’ solution to it meets real users. This is in regard to the 1982 computer program “Apple Presents
19. 229.▲
    A true anecdote of early Apple Human Interface design pains(archive.org)

    1 points by tmoertel 2y ago|3 comments
20. 230.▲
    by tmoertel 2y ago

    In one way, many newer editions of textbooks are worse than older ones: the printing. That's courtesy of modern print-on-demand systems, where instead of sharp offset printing you get glorified inkjet output that's noticably blurr
21. 231.▲
    by tmoertel 2y ago

    Okay. If I'm in a job market where what I want isn't possible, what does that reality suggest about my demands, the market, and the people who ultimately set the prices in that market (i.e., the public)?
22. 232.▲
    by tmoertel 2y ago

    > Forming a union does not mean you are asking for anything, it means you are giving yourself protection to ask for things in the future without being fired. The way I've always done it is that if I want something my employer won&#x
23. 233.▲
    by tmoertel 2y ago

    Oops. I had quite forgotten that I need to write about that. I said I would over a decade ago, so that's a long time for you to wait. Sorry about that. I mainly write for myself, so I need the time and the motivation. Until recently, m
24. 234.▲
    by tmoertel 2y ago

    For the particular case of the exponential distribution we can go further. By taking advantage of the theory of Poisson processes, we can take samples using a parallel algorithm. It even has a surprisingly succinct SQL translation: SE
25. 235.▲
    by tmoertel 2y ago

    Most textbooks on probability have some discussion of the relationships between the various distributions commonly in use. If you just want a quick overview, I found John D. Cook’s diagram to be handy: https://www.johndcook.com&#
26. 236.▲
    by tmoertel 2y ago

    Here's an logarithmic fact that I've made use of frequently: If X is a random variable having a uniform distribution between zero and one, then –ln( X )/ λ has an exponential distribution with rate λ . This relationship c
27. 237.▲
    by tmoertel 2y ago

    That sounds like it might have been Bill Budge’s Pinball Construction Set: https://archive.org/details/a2_asimov_pinball_construction_s... Bill kindly shared the source code on GitHub: https://github.com&#x2
28. 238.▲
    by tmoertel 2y ago

    Sublogic didn't just make a flight simulator, they also made a fun pinball simulator: https://archive.org/details/wozaday_Night_Mission_Pinball
29. 239.▲
    by tmoertel 2y ago

    Everybody starts looking, but it’s the top performers who get disproportionately more offers and leave.
30. 240.▲
    by tmoertel 2y ago

    The point is that both for- and not-for-profit systems can be exploitative and often are. And not-for-profits have extra avenues for exploitation. > Yes, that is corruption. However, it is being punished! In the example I shared, the evi