xamuel

35 ms·

331.
by xamuel 7y ago
I despise this recent (yes, it is recent) assumption that an author is obligated to include everything related in any way in their bibliography. A bibliography should be a list of papers that informed the paper in question; not every paper
332.
by xamuel 7y ago
>Papers from people with no grounding in the subject matter don't get the big journals No! Papers should be judged by their merits, not by their authors. This is why in many fields, it's customary to send a blinded version of t
333.
by xamuel 7y ago
Not sure how representative I am, but I can say that when I'm trying to solve an abstract problem, there is definitely a sort of dialog process that goes on in my head. I mean that literally, as in, subvocalized English words saying th
334.
by xamuel 7y ago
I wonder how it would fare on Pink Floyd's "Sheep", where vocals seamlessly transform into instrumentals and it's impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-
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by xamuel 7y ago
And even better, karaoke that doesn't suck--most karaoke tracks are covers by cheap bands and you can clearly tell the inferior quality if you're familiar with the song.
336.
by xamuel 7y ago
>Most use of mathematics we rely on, up to the present, is performed by non-mathematicians That's like saying: Most of the physical products we buy are assembled by non-inventors. ;)
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by xamuel 7y ago
To me, the primary value propositions are: issues, merge requests, comments on issues and merge requests, related stuff like tags/milestones/etc., and the ability to expose this stuff in a friendly way to project managers who don&
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by xamuel 7y ago
It's really astonishing to see all the recent drama around GitHub/GitLab. Hard to believe those are multibillion dollar companies when their entire existence can be summed up as "Filling in some gaps in git". Like, if Li
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by xamuel 7y ago
There is a lot of commonality between some of the sayings of Christ and some of the sayings of Buddha. But the shared eastern elements are more obvious in Buddha, more subtle in Jesus. For example, when Jesus says, "All who draw the sw
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by xamuel 7y ago
>a "full self driving suitable zone", with standarized road paint, signs, beacons, traffic lights... We've done this already. It's called "railroad tracks" and the self-driving cars on it are called "tr
341.
by xamuel 7y ago
I'll nominate this pseudocode from a paper of mine currently under review. Treat it like a koan to be meditated upon to gain enlightenment about AGI. The paper introduces an ordinal notation system in which ordinals are notated by comp
342.
by xamuel 7y ago
Thanks for the context! I guess if you kick enough crutches out from under enough old men, maybe one of them will be inspired to become a doctor. I'll take the bearable world, thanks very much! "The kingdom of heaven is near.&quot
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by xamuel 7y ago
Hah, I like that. If you need some foundation for it, you could always quote Paul: "You are to imitate me, just as I imitate Christ." (1st Corinthians 11:1)
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by xamuel 7y ago
People misunderstand that old saying, 'Religion is the opium of the masses'. They think it means religion is meant to pacify and control. And maybe that's what Marx intended it to mean, I don't know. But it has a truer a
345.
by xamuel 7y ago
It's a pity so few people realize that beside all the usual stuff (love or hate it) that society associates with the Bible, the Gospels contain discourses of Jesus which are genuinely brilliant purely in their own right as philosophica
346.
by xamuel 7y ago
Something subtle that's easy to miss is the fact that the original text did not contain quotation marks, and neither does the KJV. There are places where by introducing quotation marks, the translator necessarily must make decisions wh
347.
by xamuel 7y ago
>it is fine to be as vague as necessary, too And it should be no less vague than necessary. A decade or so ago, XML was all the rage, can you imagine if a bunch of laws had been stamped in stone mandating XML everywhere? Yuck!
348.
by xamuel 7y ago
>You can also do crazier things, but there is no need for that in most software. For dev teams of sufficiently large size, a general principle is: whatever crazy things the language allows, someone is going to do and commit into the code
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by xamuel 7y ago
>I suspect I'm just not smart enough Nah, I have a PhD in math and I agree with you completely. Imperative is way better. And most mathematicians agree with me. You can see this by cracking open any actual math or logic journal an
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by xamuel 7y ago
Does this apply to the leader of Taiwan, for example? (Depending on who you ask, you'll get different answers about whether Taiwan is an independent country or a region of the People's Republic of China.)
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by xamuel 7y ago
Yes, that's my point. And it doesn't really simplify the function itself, it just rearranges it, in the same way you can break up a complex painting into jigsaw pieces and say, "Look, each piece is simple!"
352.
by xamuel 7y ago
I laughed out loud at "200 erotic romance novels" :) Of course you're right about that. But the conclusion should not be "continue rotting away on social networks", the conclusion should be "read 200 good boo
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by xamuel 7y ago
I don't understand why anyone would want singledispatch. Instead of having the function defined in one place where you can look it up, now the function is potentially scattered all over the place. (I'm not talking hypothetically.
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by xamuel 7y ago
Things absolutely can violate the laws of physics, in which case the laws of physics have to be rewritten. In fact, that's the holy grail in physics, is to find an experiment which reliably breaks the currently existing laws of physics
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by xamuel 7y ago
To "soar like the birds" would mean to be able to fly at will and land at will, wherever and whenever you desire, as effortlessly as walking. You're absolutely right, mankind will never be able to soar like the birds. Even if
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by xamuel 7y ago
Our Tower of Babel _will_ eventually reach heaven.
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by xamuel 7y ago
Don't forget, the spreadsheet jockey not only shoots himself in the foot, he can also saddle his whole team with a dependency on his undocumented, un-version-controlled spaghetti macros, which will become a maintenance nightmare for ye
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by xamuel 7y ago
There's a subtle insidious effect of professors being childless. Like it or not, for practical intents and purposes, academia serves as arbiter of truth for our society. If most of the professors are childless, they will be subconsciou
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by xamuel 7y ago
I'm a math PhD, left academia because I have kids and I wanted to give them a better life than you can give kids with a postdoc salary ;) I can't perceive any differences as an outsider vs. insider. Probably some reviewers subcons
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by xamuel 7y ago
Perhaps. Or maybe they're both symptoms of the same root problem: a glut of "scientists" who care less about truth and more about money/academic career. BUT, we shouldn't view these scientists like Disney villains.

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