hackerblues

What is your point?

Presumably the correct response to bullshit is to call it out as such rather than producing your own.

Is this like the time you threw the paralyzed kid into the ocean and then blamed her drowning on her parents for not teaching her better car dodging skills?

This is somewhat misleading. Yes, it's true if

    3 * 123456789

counts as one multiplication.

But if you're doing the 'old' version you implement it as 9 single digit multiplications:

    3*9, 3*8,....,3*1

all written down with appropriate carrying.

If you do it with the new method you again get 9 'single' digit multiplications:

    3*9, 3*80, ..., 3*100000000

which you then add up.

---

The old methods efficiency comes from writing the steps out in a compact notation, not from reducing the number of multiplications or additions.

As far as I know every child in England is currently being taught this method.

I'm not sure that I would leap to calling it retarded. I agree that it takes up more paper but paper isn't the most expensive thing in the world.

What it does do is make explicit why the old school method works. Look at the explanation given by the article for the old method:

'Answer = 720, Because: 2x36 = 72, with a 0 added in the ones place.'

No, the reason you get 720 isn't because you 'added' a 0 in the ones place (72+0 = 72). It's because you are multiplying by 20 and not by 2. The old method hides this fact and corrects for it by a mechanical process: first write down a zero and then shift the other entries to the left.

Your criticism is analogous to calling Assembly retarded because Haskell exists. They serve different purposes.

"But with frequentist methods it's not even clear what kind of assumptions you're making."

I don't understand what you mean by this.

For a simple, concrete example: take the problem of fitting a distribution to a sample of real random variables. It seems that a Frequentist would make the following assumptions:

1. The data comes iid from some unknown but fixed distribution.

2. This true distribution is included within some set of distributions: eg, the set of normal distributions with real mean and non-negative real variance.

They would then use some estimator to estimate the parameters. The choice of estimator is perhaps justified by some theoretical properties, eg, consistency etc. This gives another assumption.

3. The best estimator to use is the one which is optimal with regard to properties x,y,z.

If it is not clear what assumptions I am making and I have explicitly stated some, presumably there are others which I have left unstated. Could you explain why you think the above collection is insufficient?

I have a bilingual friend who claims after spending few weeks in Australia or Japan his dreams switch to the local vocabulary.

Do you have any reason to believe that this trend has not held throughout history?

If I go into debt that year does that mean the fine gives me money?

Original:

  def double(x):
      return x+3

BUG REPORT: double(4) returns 7 instead of 8.

Fixed:

  def double(x):
      if x == 4:
          return 8
      else:
          return x+3

An interesting perspective, I've copy-pasted this to my blog.

tldr version; right-wing skeptic triumphs over strawman climate change advocate.

CCA: Hi, I think global warming is going to destroy the planet.

RWS: Oh no! Why?

CCA: All the scientists say so.

RWS: What about all the scientists who disagree?

CCA: Oh, those don't count.

RWS: Why not?

CCA: Because they disagree with me.

etc

My take on the money sink comment:

If there are n people in the market moving money around in a closed system then the combined wealth of those n people is constant.

If another person joins in and is making a net profit then it must be the case that the combined wealth of the original n is decreasing.

Admittedly this relies on money not being created or destroyed, which may cause the model to be a poor approximation of reality.

If she's doing good work but is a net drain on everyone around her then yes, the possible solutions are to 'fix' her or isolate her.

The feminist script she describes is 1990's notion that a couple can obtain a satisfactory sex life through a process in which the woman overcomes the mans negative sexist conditioning by using a verbal contract to stipulate her limits. There some provisions made about people with no respect for women like date rapists and people with the "frat boy" mentality.

The example she gives is of a man who is by external measures an enlightened guy - wealthy, polite, and educated. We are given no reason to believe he is disrespectful of women generally speaking. But when it comes to sex he is unable to get it up unless he is explicitly pushing a woman beyond what she feels comfortable doing. For emphasis: this is a part of his sexual experience and not a part of his general attitude to women.

The fact that this single event occurred is sufficient to demonstrate that the 'How to have a mutually enjoyable sex life' script does not work universally and so requires revision for a full explanation of the world. It proves the unpleasant fact that dominance beyond enthusiastic consent can form an integral part of a mans sexual identity.

In this section she establishes that a breach in this perception of sex has occurred. In the rest of her article she uses online pornography to argue the size of the breach.

tldr; lolz bitches hate logic right bro?

Figure out a way to get real evidence of whether or not it will work before the decision is made purely on the basis of your internal beliefs.

Reframe your criticisms from "This is bad." to "This aspect needs improving because of the following problems: , , , ."

" I used to love drinking soda. Drank it by the gallons. I stopped due to weight gain. Now I don't crave it, I am mostly repulsed by it"

I've had a similar experience. A few months ago I moved overseas and as a result have drastically changed my diet, including large reductions in salt, sugar and caffeine. The results have been mixed:

- I get huge sugar cravings at times which I've never had before,

- I can't stand the quantities of salt I would have eaten before and it makes me physically sick,

- I have no desire to consume more or less caffeine but when I do have it I can't sleep at all.

I don't know what any of these particular changes mean but I've been surprised by the strength of my bodies reaction to the changed diet.

"I'm smart enough to discount my own bias"

I am genuinely interested, how did you establish that you have the ability to correctly compensate for your biases?

This is partially true but irrelevant. People don't join a club so they can experience body language. I assume they go so they can form a community and interact with people who share the same interest.

If visual contact was essential for forming significant relationships then the blind would be unable to make friends.

Out of interest, what would this mean if I don't have a Facebook account but my friend posts a picture of me?

I don't think logic means what you think it does.

Logic is about using deductions to reason about a thing. For example, in sudoku, "If I write a 5 in this cell then the column will contain two 5s. Therefore, this cell can't contain a 5."

Completing sequences of numbers like:

Q: What comes next? 2,3,5,7,11,...

A: 13, it's a list of primes

isn't about logical deduction at all. If anything it's about inference, but I'm probably classify it under pattern matching or something similar. In some sense these problems are meaningless. You could also answer the previous question with

A: -302, the list is the sequence {2,3,5,7,11,-302,5903,pi,....}

and no one can argue with your claim beyond "That's not what I/the author had in mind."

To get better at such things you just need to collect examples. Maybe look at http://oeis.org/Seis.html

I would agree that there is no benefit to a person who comes from HN to read just that specific article. However, if I was a regular visitor to the guys blog and came across the article that way:

- Him posting the full text rather than a hyperlink saves me an extra click. - Maybe it also makes it easier to talk about the article with the rest of that blogs community. - It provides another copy in case the original goes down. - If he also has other posts it provides a consistent visual aesthetic across the body of information.

It's somewhat like creating a miniature library and discussion group.

I don't find any of these arguments convincing, but they're possibilities.

Everyday I breath in tons of chemicals like nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, water vapor, etc. My height and, so I assume, lung capacity hasn't increased much over the last few years so I'd estimate that I've been taking in a constant amount of chemicals with each breath over this period.

For a different approach: from a scientific/logical perspective the result has no bearing on the truth of his claim. The only possibility which we can remove from consideration is the claim that "The coin will always land tails."

I am 23 years old and today I watched a youtube video to learn the proper way to cut up an onion. I cook a lot with onions, maybe two or three times a week, and before today I didn't know how to dice an onion except to slice it into rings and then hack at it a lot. Seriously.

Is this evidence that I am fundamentally unable to cut an onion? No. After I watched the video I went and did it. It's just that in the past I knew enough to get the job done and so learning anything more on the topic didn't have a huge priority.

If you want to live forever you will certainly need to solve the problems which normally come with aging. You will also need to deal with the problem of the sun burning out in X billion years and the heat death of the universe.

I hope you have a lot of money.

It appears that you think loving your neighbour means trying to generate an artificial emotion, as if the goal is to become so smitten you spend all day writing them poems and blowing kisses.

To see that this is ridiculous, try substituting other emotions in for love: Happy thy neighbour, Angry thy neighbour, Sad thy neighbour.

In the phrase love is a solid verb. It is about taking the time to help the person out when they require external assistance.

Crawling out of bed at 3am to change the sheets after your kid pisses the bed -> Picking up an extra coffee at lunch for Bob at the office when he has had a ton of work dumped on him and can't get away from his desk.

Taking your spouse out to dinner to celebrate their new promotion -> Congratulating Sue from down the hall when her daughter makes the news for winning a spelling bee.

Picking up your brother from the airport -> Inviting the new guy over for a beer.

I would claim that all of these are loving actions but none of them require you to have exactly one special emotional state. Certainly, being dragged out of bed doesn't inspire much poetry at the time.

Further, none of these requires a specific justification beyond reducing human suffering/making the world a better place so you needn't exhaust yourself looking for reasons. And I certainly hope that welcoming the new guy without even knowing his qualities to judge him by doesn't devalue the act.

I have been told that it might be a cultural thing by someone who has studied in the UK and the US. US = overplay amount of work done, UK = under play it.

Given grades are correlated with having understood the material, I assume the implication is that the material you might have learned but didn't hasn't been at all relevant.

I'm fairly introverted myself so I can relate to the notion of just spending time by myself and feeling quite happy about it. However, you miss out on so many opportunities.

I just moved overseas to a new university and I've been forcing myself to go to many, many talks and chat with the people there. Some huge proportion of time I walk away with some useful bit of information "You have to read the new paper by x! It covers exactly what you're looking for." or "Y just got a grant and is looking for PhD students in your area."

Every connection you make adds potential access to another life times experience and knowledge.

[I'm vaguely expecting you to weasle word "Ah, but not doing that is being an /extreme/ introvert."]

To be fair, a foreign student who is trying to rebuild a social group from scratch has more incentive to be be socially outgoing.