ArbitraryLimits

Well, this is really getting down to a philosophical level. You can't technically "own" any land at all in the United States, for example, the most you can get is unlimited use rights in perpetuity. Stop paying your property taxes for a few months and you'll find out who actually "owns" your land real quick.

I feel compelled to point out that what Steve Jobs said and what Steve Jobs did very rarely aligned all that much.

I think your parent post is saying that metrics are for control and not planning. Once you've identified what your business depends on, and have identified good metrics that (at best) are proxies for those things, a dashboard is a great idea. If on the other hand you don't actually understand your business model, your first goal is to start to understand it, and fixating on a particular set of metrics will only make that harder IMO.

Yes it is, but your parent post was asking how they knew how large the source code was. This quotation is reporting the size of the final binary.

Neither here nor there, but FYI in English "software" is typically partitive and not denumerable, i.e. you should say "some cryptography software", or else something like "a cryptography program" or "a cryptography application."

> Some of the best finishers I've ever met tend to be EE folks.

That's been my experience as well, but I think it's mostly because of the three types, EE's are the only ones used to making schedules and sticking to them.

Have you guys ever worked for a big company in the United States? Because I have some news for you...

Seriously though, it's interesting to hear these opinions about the sources of work inefficiency inside the EU. I'm American but lived in Italy for several years in the late 90s, and "Why is our economy so inefficient?" was a common topic of discussion at the time. Almost no one thought it was because of long meetings or too many managers; there seemed to be a consensus among the people I spoke with that the number one problem was the type of regulation mentioned above (e.g. not being able to sell books after 18h in a bookstore).

It's important to realize that lots of those regulations do actually have a purpose, which is to keep certain sectors of the economy dominated by small sole proprietorships instead of by big corporations. Again with the bookstore example, a Borders or Barnes and Noble or any other big box store chain would just give up on such a market. On the other hand, an owner/operator of a small bookstore would either find loopholes (like this owner's swap with the cafe owner across the street) or else they just grease the right palms and work around the rules. In either case, success depends on the kind of social capital big corporations will never have.

TL;DR The purpose of these "senseless" regulations is to keep shops in Europe small and charming. Inefficiency is the tradeoff.

> Getting money quickly from a merchant account is a privilege, not a right.

What is this, a forum for dads of teenagers? "Getting money quickly from a merchant account" is a feature that services like Square can either try to provide insofar as the law allows, or not. I really don't see the point of making this a moral issue.

The STL's templatization over allocators is over allocator class, not allocator instance which makes them effectively useless IMO.

> People who write insecure code, when the language makes it just as easy to write secure code, are to blame for insecure code

We're not discussing who's to blame, we're discussing whether there's anything to assign blame for.

> the notion that "America no longer makes things" is absolutely, empirically, unassailably false.

It depends whether you count robots and computers as part of America, doesn't it?

They can get away with it because C has an ABI, so cygwin + gcc -mno-cygwin can build binaries that interoperate with Visual Studio's libc. Lots of open source projects build their Windows distributions this way - GTK for example has been doing it for about 10 years now.

Microsoft has never seen Visual Studio as a profit center. It's just there because compilers are complements of applications that run on their system, which is a profit center. The only reason they even used to charge for it was to not kill Borland's compiler business. As long as there's a C compiler for applications on their operating system, they're happy. If someone else writes it, so much the better.

I apologize for replying without actually looking at your posted code first.

What I meant to say was, "If it's all in one C++ project, it's not symbolic differentiation" and I took the liberty of changing "not symbolic" to "numeric."

Having now read your posted code, I kind of feel like a 17th century naturalist trying to classify a platypus. Clearly this technique is not symbolic differentiation, since it can only produce numerical and not symbolic results (although I suppose the Jet template could handle an "expression" type as its first argument - have you actually tried this?), and it's not really numerical in the normal sense because there's no h parameter that changes the accuracy as it varies.

As an aside, "autodmatic ifferentiation" is a terrible name, in the sense that it doesn't convey any real information about the technique, except maybe that it's being done by a computer and I knew that already. It might still be a good marketing term (like how Richard Bellman named his technique "Dynamic Programming" because it's impossible to call something "dynamic" in a perjorative sense, although there really isn't anything intrinsically dynamic, and in fact you commonly end up solving "static dynamic programming" problems).

It means automatic numerical differentiation, not symbolic.

Thank you, that was enlightening.

> Of course anyone who runs the same program gets the same results, so ordinary replication is pointless

That would be true, if anyone actually distributed their actual code. Pick a journal article at random in any field that describes results from a computational model, and 99% of the paper will describe the results and not the model. The paper will never contain the complete code (which is fair enough, since it would be too long); 1 paper out of 100 will have excerpts of the code, and another 10/100 will have a URL that claims to have the code. If you actually follow that link, you'll find that 2-3 times out of 10 the code won't actually compile or run, and 9 times out of 10, the figures in the paper were generated by tweeking some parameters not defined in the paper whose particular values the author never recorded, and so even the author couldn't reproduce what he actually published, even if he wanted to.

Some people are trying to make institutional change here, see http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~wavelab/Wavelab_850/wavelab.pd...

But really it's a pretty sad state of affairs.

I thought the truncated Chebyshev series of an arbitrary function minimizes the L-inf error among all polynomials of the same degree, because Chebyshev polynomials have minimum L-inf norm among all monic polynomials of the same degree.

Let's try this: Tell me how you would construct a minimax approximation according to your definition?

How do you define "minimax" such that it's not a Chebyshev series?

To be fair, if they can't use CVS right they're not going to use anything else right, either.

Speaking as a Minnesota native, this is just all kinds of sad. Believe it or not, Best Buy used to be a more or less local chain that was known for their customer service and that inspired all kinds of customer loyalty. They were like the Fry's of the Midwest, except that it was usually possible to get useful technical information out of the employees.

Well, remember the same thing happened with all the movie studios in the late 1980s - someone sat down and calculated that the market price to buy a studio was less than what they could get by selling all the shooting lots in Century City to a real estate developer. This was also just a few years after the studios freaked out that the VCR was going to put them out of business. There were a ton of takeovers of the studios after that, but it's not like movies aren't still around and still profitable. Of course, their revenue model has changed significantly since then.

Of course, the same thing also happened to Silicon Graphics in the early 00s and they really are dead now. I'm not saying it's not a worrisome sign for print media, just that it doesn't necessarily mean they won't make it through, albeit with lots of changes.

I know? I'm not sure what you mean, I agree with the great-grandparent post and was trying to elaborate on it.

> Straight men are uncomfortable turning to other men for that kind of intimacy.

I personally don't really want that kind of intimacy from other men. The kind of association I want with other men is more of a "playing on the same team" sort of thing, like you'd get from playing sports together, maybe working on a side project together, or even just forming a group that always meets at the same bar on a certain night. The focus isn't on sitting around talking, it's half having a group identity and half working together towards a common goal.

Can someone help me out here with a TL;DR? This is my first exposure ever to any technical aspect of Go, and this discussion makes it sound from this discussion like it doesn't use any tag bits in its pointers, but has its garbage collector run heuristics on the data it examines to see whether it "looks like text" to decide whether to collect it? I know that can't possibly be correct.

> Also, in my personal experience, she is quite well known.

True in my experience, also. My very first college math professor took 15 minutes out of lecture, in Calculus I, to tell us about her. He culminated by naming his dog after her, which I guess was his highest form of praise.

Don't get me wrong. Deriving conservation of energy from time invariance, conservation of momentum from linear translation invariance, etc. is totally cool. But it's not really accurate to say that she's not well-known.

Am I the only one who was surprised that of all the pieces in that sentence, the author italicized "web browser" and "flash?" Those actually seem like the least hacky pieces to me, but I guess he highlighted those because they're at the end?

Apologies in advance for not actually commenting on body hacking, but did you serve in the military? I'm trying to decide whether the writing style where you omit subjects and occasionally verbs comes from the military only, or whether it's more pervasive.

A few years ago I looked up his earliest papers, and it's interesting that his work on Bayesian networks essentially seemed to start as an effort to detect causality among sets of random variables, i.e. given a Bayesian network, which random variables can be said to "cause" others? Of course, Bayesian networks start by assuming you know every random variable's distribution, so verifying independence is easy but finding it is hard. I've always thought an interesting research project would be to try the same approach with correlation functions instead of distributions, and see how far you can get.

> kidnapping and decapitating people

In case anyone else didn't pick up on this right away, Judea Pearl is the father of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and decapitated in Pakistan.