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Two Kohler Novita wash toilets (bidets), with heated seats, auto-open covers, instant unlimited hot water, and more.

Other examples of sociological storytelling y'all might recommend—other than Game of Thrones and The Wire—and not necessarily from TV but in any medium?

Is this trading bot you’re writing available online?

Xamuel, where did your old blog go? The one where you talked about Esperanto as a gateway language to get people over their fear of learning a new language? I try to cite it regularly but it’s offline and Wayback Machine is giving me lip. (Sorry to barge in on this thread, I hope it’s the most reliable way to get to you.)

Firefox specific. about:config -> javascript.enable -> "false". Refresh. Reset to "true".

Like all good philosophy, this idea has a long history. I encountered it in Taleb's Black Swan as Pyrrhonian skepticism, which flourished in Greece as the Aristotelian Academy. Very down to earth and actionable advice on living and doing. Many Pyrrhonians were doctors and that colored their philosophical views—at a time when philosophy was taken very seriously and meant more than it does today (see it as a precursor of today's science).

Just to make sure, is the demo supposed to forward me to https://postgres.demo.envelope.xyz/v1/app/all/index.html? I feel sheepish for asking for this but a TodoMVC would be really helpful, since I'm not sure what I'm seeing in this demo . The idea sounds very attractive though.

Professors teaching such courses at the graduate level primarily intend them to benefit students doing active research in the field. There's an extraordinary emphasis on mathematical derivations to show how one idea leads to another. This is intended to both (1) provide insight into why methods work—though less rigorous and more intuitive approaches frequently exist and are discovered by the less robotic students, and (2) give students practice in the mathematical gymnastics needed to publish in the field. The benefit to a practitioner, let alone an interested outsider, will likely be small.

An analogy might be to consider whether a course on type inference and Hindley-Milner offered by a computer science department would benefit someone interested in learning Haskell.

FYI: FFTS [1] in many (most?) cases outperforms FFTW, without runtime calibration. It gets there by using a smarter algorithm algorithm. It doesn't have the bells and whistles of more complete libraries—e.g., restricted to power-of-two transforms for now—but hopefully this will change.

[1] http://anthonix.com/ffts/

I'm in.

In a Previous Age, there were “rumors that there would be interest in opening up the language if there would be enough community response around it”—wonder if they amounted to anything [1]. Interest in k is only growing it appears.

[1] http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/11/14/22741/791

Your experience with Q is really a satisfying read! Should I abandon my tepid attempts to get into J and throw myself on Q, despite its hefty pricetag for 64-bit version? Would you be able to do as much with Kona instead of Q?

I too am amused by his opinion of JavaScript. A professor was moved enough to translate most of SICP to JavaScript and writes in its first chapter, "Above beyond these considerations, programming in JavaScript is great fun" [1]. I agree, and I'm enjoying going through this SICP/JS moreso than the original, as I can write solutions to the exercises in any old browser JavaScript console and paste them into a gist for safekeeping.

[1] http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~cs1101s/sicp/

I'm working through the admittedly beautiful and very thorough documentation [1].

It's a very simple idea, really: you write your document and sprinkle racket s-expressions wherever you want. You can put your definitions at the top of your document, or in another file. You describe your templates in Racket also, because like Butterick says in his RacketCon video [2], "S-expressions and XML are the same thing". You can use tags that you haven't defined, they just get placed in the resulting HTML.

You still have to roll your own CSS and any JavaScript. As far as I can tell it doesn't help you out with things like keeping track of footnotes numbering or citations and such: you roll your own for things like this, Pollen is no LaTeX. This is partly why I say it's a really simple system. It makes a certain set of web authoring things simple, but it doesn't try to be a one-stop shop, which is excellent because this makes it a supremely flexible tool.

It also has some backend fancy sauce where you can save your file and refresh the page [3]. Also I admit I'm not really a big fan of DrRacket: I've just been using it for the tutorials because I have no idea what to expect from Racket, but I'm slowly moving to Emacs, and Racket seems to work fine there.

Definitely worth checking out Pollen if only to get a light introduction to the thoroughness of Racket documentation (they definitely do things differently in Racket-land!), but stay for the tools you need to roll your own ultimate static blog generator.

(Also, completely unrelated: cool video and cool title at another RacketCon 2013 talk: "Racket on the Playstation 3? It's Not What you Think!" [4].)

[1] http://pkg-build.racket-lang.org/doc/pollen/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20GGVNBykaw

[3] I've made a request for no-refresh updates: https://github.com/mbutterick/pollen/issues/35

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSmqbnhHp1c

It's a matter of ongoing surprise to see many scientist-engineers in my niche, in the USAF-sphere, who are jumping from Matlab to Julia, leapfrogging Python. Kudos to them.

Also reminds me of Pollen, for the inestimable Racket environment, which was created by M. Butterick to typeset "Practical Typography".

http://pollenpub.com/

Looks fabulous.

I don't understand the dichotomy between speed and efficiency. What's speed is the author talking about, and whose efficiency?

Bought this book, “The Three-Body Problem”!

Years ago, your post [1] about a fractious, joyous workplace shaped me as I entered the workforce. How's Blue River compared to that? Any fistfights?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=141967

I like this a lot! If I allow myself explanation, I'd say your findings make a lot of sense, but I will instead heed the title of Duncan Watts' latest, "Everything is Obvious*: Until You Know the Answer" :)

I wonder how much engagement you'd get if you made a browser plugin or even an alternative website that showed users a random selection from the top three pages of reddit/HN, then intercepted and logged their upvotes, to get a direct measure of intrinsic quality, rather than estimating this statistically. I for one would use such an interface.

On a sidenote. Have you seen this work in predicting the growth of ongoing cascades from Facebook [1]? I'm fixing to see if their findings apply to the MusicLab data.

[1] https://research.facebook.com/publications/680551081983090/c...

This seems like a dramatic illustration of cumulative advantage, as studied in the famous MusicLab experiment [1, 2]. The argument is that in cultural and social markets, random effects govern which products or artifacts get the initial few "upvotes" (or their analogs), at which point the rich-get-richer dynamic takes over. Very, very awesome.

[1] Salganik, Dodds, Watts, "Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market", 2006: https://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full....

[2] A popular article by one of the authors, the inestimable Duncan Watts: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15wwlnidealab.t.h...

Have you done one on compressive sensing and the functional analysis roots of that field?

This is especially tragic because matrix factorization algorithms are so deep and interesting, theory and programming-wise! LU, Cholesky, QR, eigendecomposition, SVD, mmmm. Round-off error tolerance, convergence criteria, stability, yum.

Characteristic qualities and root finding: bleh.

I watched Gilbert Strang's video lectures on linear algebra (the MIT freshman course) for preparation for my PhD qualifier exam, and as a third year grad student, I could appreciate the relevance of almost every single topic in the class. That is, seven years after freshman linear algebra and with countless applications programmed, papers read and implemented, and theoretical/applied classes taken, it "all made sense" (don't ask me what a freshman is supposed to make of that material, other than to acquire it at a very abstract superficial level).

The early classes are the prerequisites for every and anything you might wind up doing with math. Including becoming a math prof, or a web dev, or dropping out. Nobody tells you, for every section of every textbook you have to read, what its myriad applications might be, and you can't get a customized build of just the topics you want.

But we're all startup people here right? Can this shortcoming be fixed? Can we make a detailed dependency graph of topics in applied mathematics, which could potentially be used to generate custom learning builds?

Well, if I remember my university's beginner linear algebra course, there were many topics on the syllabus only due to historic accident, ancestor worship, and theoretical necessities: I remember parallelepipeds, Cramer's rule, solving eigensystems by solving for a polynomial's zeros... Let me tell you how many times I've used parallelepipeds, Cramer's rule, or found eigenvalues via the quadratic formula in the 12 years since linear algebra (and a career in statistical signal processing and machine learning): zero, zero, and zero. Most things in college are important only to the extent that they're gatekeepers for what's really important. What hiddencost says is true, but very little of what you're learning in class is relevant to those important and interesting things. Sorry: college sucks.

Can this logic be applied to another environment that has had a ton of money poured into it? Specifically, .NET. Can you replace Ruby/Python in the question with C# and if so, why doesn't the latter benefit from money and experienced developers?

Right. The part of the page that says "download (then $chmod +x k)" and linking to http://kparc.com/download/k is password-protected. I just want to follow along some of this tutorial material. I'll try to do this with Kona.

1) Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab 2) MIT Lincoln Lab (If you have/will have an advanced degree in signal processing, or applied math in general)

Many Kindle books, especially technical ones, are in the so-called Topaz format with embedded fonts which nobody has been able to reverse-engineer or break DRM for. I don't know if this breakthrough changes that---doesn't seem like it.

I look forward to seeing how this develops, and to see it (help see it) in Clojure.