xaa

9 ms·

31.
by xaa 9y ago
I went to a completely unranked school, not even a CS major. But took Programming I anyway. It was for freshmen, and was in C++. IMO, for an intro language, you need either something close to the metal, so that students can work their way u
32.
by xaa 9y ago
Biologist here. Biologists don't try to predict whether a drug will have side effects before giving it to humans. They simply give it to mice. If we do have some strong reason to suspect it might be harmful to humans, we might do a pri
33.
by xaa 9y ago
Yeah, I've been out of the Windows game for some years now, but my wife has a few (desktop and laptop), occasionally comes to me and says "it's slow. fix it." And indeed it is slow, even on moderate browser use -- things
34.
by xaa 9y ago
The trouble is that it is not hard to point out flaws in any system, government programs included. Many Republicans have taken this to the logical extreme: they say government programs CANNOT work. In solidly red areas, they justify this by
35.
by xaa 9y ago
Very interesting paper. Two problems that jumped out at me are: 1) income is not COL-adjusted, and 2) more importantly, there is not a term in the regression for urbanization/population density. It is well-known that urban areas lean D
36.
by xaa 9y ago
Sure, fair enough. I was implicitly talking about 1980s to present (the period when the inequality began to spike), but obviously was not clear about that. However, in the present day, I don't think it is just the 1% who are against a
37.
by xaa 9y ago
Where's the evidence that this solidarity ever existed? On the coasts at least, the people in this $300K range may talk a good talk about marginalized groups, etc, but the solidarity clearly ends at their pocketbooks. Wealthier people
38.
by xaa 9y ago
Yes... the statistics in this article are annoying (par for the course for BMJ, NEJM, and other medical journals). They use mixed-effects models and a lot of potential covariates (good) but then bin the variable of interest (BAD). I've
39.
by xaa 9y ago
Sort of. My understanding is that it means "declaring your (virtuous) opposition to <bad thing X>, regardless of whether <current topic Y> is actually an instance of X or whether Y is actually harmful." On the right, i
40.
by xaa 9y ago
> In my view critical thinking without constructive thinking is as big a problem as no critical thinking. I disagree. I see critical thinking as a prerequisite for constructive thinking. Without the ability to identify problems, you can&
41.
by xaa 9y ago
I am aware the law changed, now; admittedly I didn't until reading other replies to my OP. And I am not familiar with the nuance. We certainly have defamation laws in the US as well, so there's that. I think criminalizing (or even
42.
by xaa 9y ago
Eh, the simplified version is: - Engineers (like electrical etc) use Matlab - Statisticians use R - Rich people sometimes use Mathematica - People with some CS background use Python/numpy/sklearn For "purer" math, like s
43.
by xaa 9y ago
If the laws were the same in the US, and I called Donald Trump an idiot, would I have to furnish an IQ test? If I wrote that Ballmer/Nadella was incompetent and Microsoft products are crap? I guess the problem is that the nature of spe
44.
by xaa 9y ago
I can understand this, but there are plenty of police chiefs, district attorneys, federal prosecutors, and intelligence folks who later go into politics and don't become authoritarian. George H.W. Bush was Director of the CIA before be
45.
by xaa 9y ago
I consider the occasional need of the government to tell the media "you can't publish this for national security reasons" to be in a different category. This has legitimate use-cases, and with proper oversight can be done c
46.
by xaa 9y ago
Believe me, I do. I didn't vote for Donald Trump or GWB. But I have to accept that their actions constitute a big part of what the US is, especially as seen from the outside. To simplify a little, in a democracy, if 51% of voters are &
47.
by xaa 9y ago
Yes, I see the connection, but I have difficulty seeing how politicians think that even with such measures, they can actually control discourse (apart from going full China on the matter). I have always found it interesting that the great d
48.
by xaa 9y ago
Fascinating and useful explanation. I think, then, the difference compared to the US must be that in the US, the majority of both parties have authoritarian tendencies, but there is a vocal minority of "libertarians" in both parti
49.
by xaa 9y ago
I assumed as much. The question was half-rhetorical, though: such regulations did not and could not prevent what happened. There seems to be a law of diminishing returns on regulation: sure, common-sense things like not allowing weapons to
50.
by xaa 9y ago
I just don't understand the UK on surveillance and free speech issues. In most ways, the UK seems more sane than the US, but they have these absurd libel laws and take any and every opportunity to cry "regulate the internet"
51.
by xaa 9y ago
I am glad to hear Clojure is slowly getting its act together WRT numerics. I reluctantly dropped the language several years ago because the ecosystem for any kind of math/ML was just nonexistent, unless you consider a "call the te
52.
by xaa 9y ago
But it's not as if China, India, etc haven't benefited from the West's carbon-fueled economic growth. It was that economic growth that led to all the various technologies that they've imported. The West has also borne, a
53.
by xaa 9y ago
Yes, I know they are different, but I was talking about C++. I heavily use the STL and greatly prefer it to C idioms. I also like namespaces. Templates can be very hairy but void pointers are not great either. In short, I simply think C++
54.
by xaa 9y ago
Honestly, I never seriously considered it. I thought it was more-or-less an "Apple thing". OFC it is supported on other platforms, but seemingly not widely used (I write scientific code that really only has to work on Linux). But
55.
by xaa 9y ago
Sure. I use it for some things and straight C++ for others. Cython is good for simple things, like small tight loops. One thing that is much more reliable in pure C++ is any kind of threading or OpenMP etc. Theoretically Cython has it, in p
56.
by xaa 9y ago
I, on the other hand, am a primarily Python programmer being slowly lured to the Dark Side. The thing I love about using C++ is that you get direct access to all these rock-solid libraries in C that everything is built on -- zlib, libcurl,
57.
by xaa 9y ago
Yep, Taleb's Medium account is a great place to go if you value any kind of expertise and want to raise your blood pressure. However, this is one of the very few pieces by Taleb I sort of like. He makes an important point: if you work
58.
by xaa 9y ago
The thing that distinguishes my situation from the type of "unicorn job" you are talking about is that I have some realism, and I compromise. Clearly it is ridiculous to expect I can do what I want 100% of the time without any of
59.
by xaa 9y ago
I'm at Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. My focus has been on human, mainly because that's where the impact is, and because of minor technical issues making it easier to do human data. But we do other species as well, the syst
60.
by xaa 9y ago
> they want to be left alone in a lab to answer their questions while someone else keeps the lights on. And well...yeah...you just described the perfect job. Well, that IS what I want, probably what everyone wants. I don't like writ

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