waldrews

22 ms·

301.
by waldrews 17y ago
Subtle point: we already have an algorithm that would sovle NP-complete problems in P time if P=NP; it's just that we don't have a proof that it works that way. See for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_%3D_NP_problem#Polynomial-tim.
302.
by waldrews 17y ago
yeah, that train has sailed a while ago.
303.
by waldrews 17y ago
Sigh. Him again. Yes, he's unfortunately worth reading, for the drama and stimulation and calling attention to things that are known but not always fully appreciated. But I wish he wasn't worth reading. His hero Mandelbrot on the other ha
304.
by waldrews 17y ago
There are serious economists who look at these issues. The book Snipers, Shills, and Sharks, http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8435.html is a great summary of the research that includes this approach among a hundred others.
305.
by waldrews 17y ago
Just comparing percentages off different bases isn't quite what the paradox is getting at, but it's also a fine approach to representing data in misleading way. There's a great collection of such less technical tricks in the book _How to L
306.
by waldrews 17y ago
More importantly, it ought to have been part of the required reading regimen for the authors of said study.
307.
by waldrews 17y ago
The good news is that when you do A/B testing, you can create a properly randomized experiment, where variations of e.g. the number of men/women assigned to the A and B group are accounted for as part of the sampling error. Where this stuff
308.
Simpson's paradox: why mistrust seemingly simple statistics(en.wikipedia.org)
152 points by waldrews 17y ago|17 comments
309.
by waldrews 17y ago
Ok. Point well taken. Thank you. I'm being both over-optimistic and arrogant. And hey, apparently there's closures in PHP 5.3 anyway...
310.
by waldrews 17y ago
I appreciate the candor. The reason for PHP over my first choice of Django is that this project has a lot of junior people with PHP-only skills. I'm wondering about HaXe because I still want the people on the team who can appreciate it to
311.
Ask HN: Learning PHP, reluctantly, for a lisp hacker
2 points by waldrews 17y ago|6 comments
312.
by waldrews 17y ago
There's something to be said for language enforced limitations supporting encapsulation when creating an ecosystem of reusable components - something Java/C# has been great at. An analogy is enforced immutability. Unlike Ruby, Python has i
313.
by waldrews 17y ago
Please please don't do this. It hurts readability, and relies on a subtle grammar ambiguity. Without a highlighting editor (e.g. reading a diff in a code review) I'll be scratching my head trying to read this. And tools like editors that
314.
Rising health-care costs are pushing entrepreneurs to the limit.(online.wsj.com)
2 points by waldrews 17y ago|0 comments
315.
by waldrews 17y ago
Humble apologies, I didn't read the article properly and mistook the argument for a (much less sophisticated) one that's a pet peeve.
316.
by waldrews 17y ago
[EDIT - this 1st paragraph is wrong and retracted]<wrong> The post misses a large part of the point of LINQ to SQL, which is that it constructs optimized and type mapped queries against an external data source, rather than filtering
317.
by waldrews 17y ago
Feel free to dislike the language, but calling someone like Guy Steele a marketing droid is just unfair.
318.
Ask HN: Password managers
2 points by waldrews 18y ago|6 comments
319.
by waldrews 18y ago
Thank you. A noble and risky thing to do, giving the money to the charity of your own choice rather than give in to the witchhunters and blackmailers. I hope you're hired into a position of real influence in your next financial institutio
320.
by waldrews 18y ago
Agreed; selection bias - presumably the code base analyzed was made by experienced programmers with instincts tuned to creating smaller functions. When we do observe larger functions, there must have been a specific reason to do it, like a
321.
Ask HN: a bug in HN/Clickpass login?
1 points by waldrews 18y ago|0 comments
322.
by waldrews 18y ago
Ok, but Dijkstra would be the last person to use a go to statement in step 3.
323.
by waldrews 18y ago
perhaps he's a perfectionist about his writing?
324.
by waldrews 18y ago
Why did this get downvoted - people may disagree but a legitimate and informed opinion. Upvoting it back.
325.
by waldrews 18y ago
Don't know about mops, but apparently there are people who broom for fun: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curling Canada. I don't understand it either.
326.
by waldrews 18y ago
At least it's a functional language, and you can do things like manipulating code symbolically, showing its lisp heritage. The tooling, library integration, and debuggers aren't as good as, say, Python, though.
327.
by waldrews 18y ago
There are real current efforts to create such publications. This is quite relevant in pharmacology and other areas where biostatistics is applied, since there are often fewer incentives to publish the results of, say, a drug trial that fai
328.
by waldrews 18y ago
Well, it is Ruby we're talking about - who's surprised it doesn't scale?
329.
by waldrews 18y ago
Bah, just the week I'm out of town.
330.
by waldrews 18y ago
Sorry, what's HR?

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