xscott

41 ms·

481.
by xscott 5y ago
Yeah, spherical cows roll the direction you push them. Real cows have a bit more complexity to them.
482.
by xscott 5y ago
> So it's not chaotic like weather is chaotic. I politely disagree, but my non-expert arguments shouldn't carry much weight. Here's a quote from a 2018 IPCC document instead: "The climate system is a coupl
483.
by xscott 5y ago
I hope you'll forgive me for lumping you in with the other comments I read along these lines, but exaggeration on this topic is a pet peeve of mine. I've read more than a few parts of the IPCC reports over the years, and they are
484.
by xscott 5y ago
Mercury, pesticides, and plastics in the ocean are horrible in my opinion. However, I've seen more than one person who seems to think recycling is going to have an effect on atmospheric CO2 levels.
485.
by xscott 5y ago
I've heard similar arguments before, but the details really matter. The amount of heat and CO2 is going to rely on things like albedo on the ground and from cloud cover, as well as plant mass and more. I think it's a mistake to
486.
by xscott 5y ago
If the science is limited in that area, why do you believe tipping points (positive feedback) will be horrific? There's just as much reason to believe that negative feedback (the good kind) will keep things from going off the charts.
487.
by xscott 5y ago
Bugs and grad student software aside, ask anyone who thinks they can rely on a model to predict the future to implement a model of: a simple pendulum, a double pendulum, the three body problem, the stock market, and then finally the climat
488.
by xscott 5y ago
Why do people conflate climate change with plastic? Does creating reusable glass or metal containers use less energy or create less CO2 than making things from plastic? Plastic pollution (particularly in the oceans) is really disturbing, b
489.
by xscott 5y ago
I've seen this sentiment a lot, and it doesn't make any sense to me. How can you "trust the science" and peer review, but only when it's scary? If it's not scary enough, you hypothesize it being biased? How i
490.
by xscott 5y ago
Do you ever wonder why that comic only goes back 22,000 years? If it had gone back just a little more, say 25,000 years (a rounder number), it would be much more complicated to explain what happened. If it had gone back 400,000 years, whic
491.
by xscott 5y ago
> bizzare Arithmetic coding extention Frustrating to hear it called bizarre. Arithmetic encoding should've been the default if IBM hadn't sat on a patent for mathematics. A huge amount of bandwidth has been wasted sending ima
492.
by xscott 5y ago
No, because you wouldn't have to pay the virtual machine overhead (among others). Another possibility would be using Cython - write the prototype in pure Python, then Cythonize the parts which need to run more quickly.
493.
by xscott 5y ago
I wonder how your C++ would've gone if you had a C++ library of Python-like data types. Something like a 'variant' type that could hold arbitrary integers, strings, and dicts or lists of those (or anything else you commonly
494.
by xscott 5y ago
I'm curious to know if the various blemishes (acne scars, moles, etc...) are there in the true images. Also, the braids in one of the pictures don't look as simple/contiguous as I think real braids would be. Still, it's
495.
by xscott 5y ago
I think it's because most companies know that change is difficult and painful to most people. There's an "activation energy" that it takes for you to switch jobs, particularly if you'll need to move to a new locati
496.
by xscott 5y ago
1) I think I was wrong. 2) Thank you.
497.
by xscott 5y ago
Approval voting makes much more sense to me. Consider ranked-choice if it were applied to the presidency: Given that some states are slow to report their results, there are scenarios where you can't fall back to people's second
498.
by xscott 5y ago
There was a King Crimson link on HN the other day. I should mention Robert Fripp's "New Standard Tuning" is all fifths up the point where the highest string would be way too thin or way too tight (CGDAEG). Even as is, that
499.
by xscott 5y ago
I have an electric guitar with 5 strings tuned fifths (C G D A E), and a tenor guitar with 4 strings in fifths (currently D A E B). I've been mucking around with both for a few years. Conceptually, they're nice. You get a great
500.
by xscott 5y ago
If your application is I/O bound (web app), then you can get parallelism, even with the GIL. Each I/O call can (should) release the GIL before it waits on it's network packets.
501.
by xscott 5y ago
Depending on the nature of the interpreted Python part of the code, you could get a 60-100 times speedup by using PyPy (no rewriting needed). Removing the GIL in CPython would only beat that if you could get 60-100 times parallelism.
502.
by xscott 5y ago
The PyPy FAQ addresses this. To my eyes, it looks like this is partly to provide the same promises CPython does for C extensions, and partly because their transactional memory approach hasn't gotten the attention it would need to succ
503.
by xscott 5y ago
> [...] when reading many small packets from a network socket [...] Yeah, I should've said it more carefully. That's what I was hinting at with the mention of Amdahl's law. The separate bits of I/O are done in C ext
504.
by xscott 5y ago
> threading doesn't give me any benefit due to the GIL If your heavy lifting is done in C extensions, and those extensions release the GIL before doing that work, you can still get the benefit of parallelism within CPython.
505.
by xscott 5y ago
> I think the OP's point was that it forces you to do all the number crunching via those extensions [...] Almost. If you're using C extensions for performance, those extensions can release the GIL, and then you get paralleli
506.
by xscott 5y ago
> it sucks the oxygen away from alternatives that would be better in the longer term It's always frustrated me that the computing world isn't as it should be. Python as a language seems to have found a sweet spot for accessibi
507.
by xscott 5y ago
I don't understand why people care about the CPython GIL. For computationally intense stuff (numerics) running in the interpreter, the language is generally 60 times slower than PyPy and often 100 times slower than an equivalent C pro
508.
by xscott 5y ago
I appreciate the link, but I really don't understand the mechanics of using a bowl (tabo) without toilet paper or such. Get your hand wet in the tabo, make a first pass at cleaning. Then what? Your hand is dirty, and if you rinse it
509.
by xscott 5y ago
I suspect it's not about protecting the people (your college stadium example), and that it is about protecting the expensive airplanes. If I'm being charitable, it might also be about protecting the buildings that planes can crash
510.
by xscott 5y ago
Thank you for the corrections.

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