1,675 karma · joined March 31, 2015
Unfortunately, this disregards another aspect of a pragmatic picture, which is that to start off with, probably none of the teachers at a random school would even be able to open a terminal on some linux setup... Which leads us to... YouTube! Hmm. I think we are stuck again.
As far as I know, this story is not as well known in South Africa as one would perhaps expect.
On a different topic, how would this influence Raspberry Pis going forward?
If you gave mathematicians some general exam and have all universities participate, I would also not expect top universities to score the most. However, if you asked instead what the money value is of their research, then MIT, Oxford, et al. would score highly.
I don't want to extrapolate on the economist.com article, and whether it's true or not, but rather just illustrate that this happens in other contexts.
Another example is salaries. Are the best programmers in the areas that pay the most? I think no, but the ones whose work make the most money for their employers probably are. A case in point is the alpine Emacs coder that featured in a comment a few days ago, Thierry.
The main issue is that if you focus on the money part, then you focus on ideas that have settled. Many small places or small universities are still at the distillation step and the distillate tends to move to where the money is. I use this argument as one of the main arguments for fundamental research, and also for why it has cognitive dissonance with earning potential.
One question I would have on your comment is: What kind of proof or counterexample for P ?= NP would in fact influence our study of hash functions? This is a subjective question of course, but essentially I am wondering what approach to P ?= NP might introduce new mathematics that indeed would have something to say about hash functions.
In a company, you have a board and you have shareholders. If you don't want the mould of a public company, you create or keep it as a private company. In a private company, you can do any of these employee stock options or buybacks or long term things, much as you can do with a public company, if you wanted to. The board and the shareholders have a similar sort of dynamic in both, but I would say the board of a private company invites less scrutiny, or at least less fully public scrutiny.
So what is the difference between a public company and a private company---in the context of this discussion? The main difference is that in a private company, especially if you didn't set up your shareholders agreement in a friendly way, you can have deadlocks where shareholders can't sell their stock.
This I think is what JPMorgan is targeting, and based on my experience, it's a pretty clever segment of the market to try something, since, as the article and I mention, private companies have inherent difficulties to trade stock (especially if the shareholders are not fond of each other). The stock value of private companies can be undervalued too, and this would mean that JPMorgan would create additional cash out of thin air. Or rather, by analogy magically unlock lost Bitcoin wallets.
Some examples of private companies: Carlsberg, Lidl, Aldi, Deloitte, PWC, IKEA, Koch Industries.
What I find interesting is that this article about private companies was posted after the, ehm, funny LTSE one (seriously, the London Stock Exchange is LSE...) and it would arguably be the closest existing structure where you are not bound by public company expectation, and in theory you could build a rather charitable setup from a private company, much like the LTSE article's prose likes to promise.
It would be better to focus on individual actions that may have been nefarious, on Bill Gates's part, than the overall fact that everyone started to use MS Windows. I think this is the only way to have some sort of audit of opinions. It is not clear to me that humans are able to en masse adopt actions that are always mutually beneficial.
You could also say that humans have universally adopted a stance that gold is valuable. The question of whether gold should be valuable or not is rather difficult to answer, and indeed this is what cypherpunks were thinking about in 2007.
I have a somewhat unpopular opinion that leather is more nature friendly than synthetics---since many hides, globally, are often discarded due to the cost of tanning---and if I were to make leather products more popular, on average, then it may become difficult to say whether it should be popular or not. And at that point one would need some sort of critical appraisal of individual actions and the individual intention and results of actions.
After all, the issue is that mathematics is simple. Humans don't like simple things. And when humans think they have found simple things they start wars or some novel iteration of discrimination against others.
I thought perhaps three of the Millennium problems had been solved, and the apocalypse were here.
BTW, for those interested in P=NP and not so much in the direct mathematical research, one interesting way to approach is via hash functions. If we had P=NP, then hash functions would be more easily invertible (eh, left or right invertible). I think in polynomial time. Sorry for the "I think", this isn't my field and I try to find ways to reinterpret it.
The first EU university enters in the 40s or 50s of the list and Australian universities seem perhaps overrepresented.
Closer to the ground, or, let's say, being more grounded in mundaneness, I think it's also because a lot of excellent papers are never translated to English. Asia "gets" this and pushes their English papers.
FWIW, Galois's memoirs have still not been translated, as far as I know.
Oh yes, and ETH Zurich is at least in the top 10 of the QS list.
I'm not a personal trainer, or motivational speaker, but brighten up.
As a mathematician, everything since the 1960s has to me been this cycle, and I think the key way to approach this is from the perspective of knowledge.
Don't look at software or data, but look at fundamental science, and you'll have less of this sort of burn out.
I read papers from 1950, and I pretend that I could have a coffee with the author later that day, and savour the fact that you can't take people's discoveries away from them, even if history or humanity has.
I'm sorry, but this doesn't seem to be clear at all to me.
Take the subset of investors that don't trade daily, or monthly, or, even yearly. There you have your long-term thinkers. And it's a large subset, make no mistake.
Also, LTSE? That's suspiciously close to LSE. I'm not being a detractor here, just asking the obvious.
> So, we needed a radically new thing. A new greenfield and new proofs of concept.
> Introducing cubism.
I think impressionism had the same "radical" property—the colours are not realistic, but they are emotional. Green smoke; pink haystacks. But perhaps there is still a stronger link to reality than for cubism. van Gogh's swirls I would guess are inspired by real things such as vortices in wind or water. In any case, for me the progression to cubism was linear from impressionism, and not radical. But I think the author means that you need abrupt changes to reap social capital, and that I do agree with—but I would maintain it holds for classicism to impressionism too.
> Shoenberg's twelve tonic technique comes with no musical tonality. All 12 pitches of the chromatic scale are sounded as often as one another in a piece of music without emphasis on any specific note. In other words, all 12 notes are thus given more or less equal importance, and the music avoids being in a key. Consequentially, there can't home base.
> It was a radically new game.
I don't know if I agree with this. The innovation was equal temperament and the creation of the piano. The key was that you have approximate harmonic intervals based on the 12th square root of 2: sqrt(2,12)^7 = 1.498 ~= 1.5 = 3/2.
Using chromatic notes is a logical consequence for later composers. In terms of composition, I would say that modes (think Wicked Game) are rather the innovation that reaped social capital in more modern times; as well as the idea of direct repetition (all pop music) rather than themes with developments on themes.
In any case, I would agree with the author. There is a clear proof of work aspect to social media. Hours spent that would lead to some Instagram picture; hours spent on some HN post...
I use Ubuntu 20.04 just as I have used 18.04 and 16.04, and the presence or absence of snap doesn't alter the experience for me. GNU/Linux based operating systems will always have a sort of idiosyncrasy inherent to it that stems from the fact that it's really isn't built on fads, and fads are always what would detract from it. Hence, Snap should be used by those who like it, and history will tell us whether it were a fad or not.
I think Ubuntu in general tries to appeal to more of the masses and would try to use things to draw people to it. Nothing wrong with that; you could always use Arch.
But please don't regard a feature that really isn't forced on you by GNU/Linux in general as a reason to, eh, be snapped off it. I use Xubuntu 20.04 and have used Snap here and there and for the most part I couldn't be bothered by whether it works well or not. I do think the topic of whether Snap makes sense, whether it's too slow, etc., is a valid topic to discuss, but I don't see how it should be an argument for or against Ubuntu.
In any case, being for or against something, when really it's only your own business whether you use it or not, does always have a sort of political tinge reminiscent of the aforementioned proprietary operating systems.
To me, Bullfrog equaled Syndicate Wars, and even just that is reason enough to praise them. I never played the other games, and I'm sure they were great too.
The closer I could get category theory in the workplace, the happier I would be. Or have been. My 2 cents on the matter is that when you work with data, rather than with sets that are placeholders for containing data, the more your questions or answers would be concrete and eventually have very straightforward solutions, or at least straightforward deliverables. In terms of the programming view I would say that this means that any abstract solution would have a counterpart concrete version or versions. The reason for abstraction should be to decrease the time involved with solving something.
Abstractions are meant to reason about things that you want to be broad enough to include suppositions. The whole of mathematics is studying which statements follow from which axiom statements. Once you settle on the data, it becomes less of a mathematics exercise and instead is a coding exercise to find the peculiarities of the concrete example, and then the need for abstraction becomes less.
Abstraction gives me a lot of joy; but, you could instead do mathematics by enumerating all combinations of symbols and checking whether some are valid proofs of theorems. Programming will always have some context, often the context means peculiar data and hence you can solve the problem without any abstractions at all. However, the larger the data, the more difficult, and eventually concrete approaches become unfeasible. Again, one can think about this as enumerating solutions. If you had all the time in the world, you could just enumerate all programs, especially more concrete ones, and just pick the one with the right output for the input domain.
If you build a wooden table, you can get by with a small, ordinary toolbox. If you want to build a skyscraper, I think you could get by with a small toolbox, but it may take you an interminable amount of time. And moreover, without the abstraction of a large crane-like device of sorts, the design of building a skyscraper with a ordinary workman's toolbox becomes much more difficult, if not impossible. The design of a crane to me is an example of the right depth of abstraction.
I am not sure whether my analogy is clear, but my point is simply that abstraction is increasing the plausible data space and concretisation is selecting from possibilities. Another way to think about it: {{car, bike, plane},{spoon, knife, fork}, ...} abstract to, but specialise from {{vehicles}, {cutlery}, ...}.
You want some kind of balance in this thought process that fits the code base you are building or maintaining, or the problems or questions that you are solving.
If those plants are effective against malaria, it is inevitable that it should be applied in a practical way, which often turns out to be in the form of pills.
1. Using malaria medication is advisable if you don't have access to good doctors and good hospitals. If you permanently live in a malaria area, it's not practical.
2. If you have quick access to a good doctors and good hospitals, it's often better to treat yourself once you are sick. ---> NO this is not travel advice <---. The malaria medications have a lot of side effects to use permanently; the expensive ones have less side effects and I believe pilots generally use such ones since risking getting sick has the potential side effect of a plane crashing.
3. The key is detection and treatment. You can easily die in an top EU or US or Singapore hospital if the doctor doesn't ever see malaria and you happen to have it. You have to test until you get a positive---even if it is a false positive, and then you test again. I personally know people who's parent died of malaria in a good hospital in South Africa, but in an area that is far from the malaria areas, and hence has doctors who don't test for it. I am not a doctor so I am not sure how one is treated once tested positive, but I do know many people who recovered very quickly due to the doctors being acutely aware of how to treat malaria.
4. Taking into account said things above, malaria is not a major threat. If you read stories about game rangers in the KNP of South Africa, many of them died from malaria in their later life because they were somewhere deep in the bush/lowveld and far from hospitals and couldn't be bothered with having malaria, yet again, and stopping their fun bush activities to go to the hospital 200km away.
5. My grandmother had malaria 6 or 7 times and died rather healthy in her mid 90s. My family actually actively avoided the malaria areas in the summer back in the late 1800s and early to mid 1900s by living on the higher escarpment. You could also read about Dr. Annecke and the efforts back then to combat malaria.
6. The countries to the north of South Africa don't have the facilities to treat malaria, generally, and with proper treatment and selective DTT application, you should be able to limit the ranges of the parasite. Yes, DTT is a bad chemical.
7. On that topic, malaria is caused by a parasite, so in terms of vaccines it's not clear what the mechanism behind it should be.
8. If you think about the Panama worm exclusion line that featured a while ago on HN, something like that would have made sense if Africa were a more developed continent. But in any case, the point is that the poor state of many things in Africa is part of the malaria problem.
9. Many other things about Africa is way cooler than the other continents. We still have lion and rhino, for one. There were many large predators on the other continents. So, "development" is something of a complicated word.
10. South Africa generally manages malaria well, so it is possible to contain it through holistic management. And no, holism is a word that belongs to Jan Smuts and you cannot steal it for your magic peanut oil business.
11. Yes, a silver bullet would be nice.
You have some action act(x,y). The encoding in the bitstream can either differ for act(x,y) or act(y,x) or it is the same.
The original article states that the effect of act(x,y) and act(y,x) is the same. But the bitstream may differ. So it is commutative in the operations of the computer, but not in the bitstream instruction.
I think this is general work advice and in that sense I think it makes sense; it holds even more for {x, programming}.
From my perspective, specificity and personality is an important part of the creative process towards becoming an expert or otherwise accomplished in a field, or at least, a field that has some inventiveness to it. In other words, focusing on even fewer things than a field such as statistics.
To use the statistics example, I view statistics, or at least applied statistics, from the point of view of multivariate statistics. This makes me quite ignorant towards frequentist statistics (no, I am not about to promote Bayesian statistics, which in my opinion is the word that often refers simply to the Bayes Theorem in the context of frequentist statistics) but with very clear reasons:
1. Normality doesn't really come into play in multivariate stats unless we are sampling randomly and without context. In multivariate stats, we actually tend to either use an exhaustive dataset or we sample contextually, or maybe uniformly along a geographical feature such as a riverbed.
2. Dependence of variables is why we resort to multivariate statistics in the first place.
3. Sample size, similar to 1.), is often not applicable. It does apply in the sense that a small matrix gives few insights. However, replicates in an experiment in frequentist statistics are used as a measure of internal variation in relation to between group variation. In multivariate stats you can do the analysis in complete ignorance of whether there are groups at all, or, you can use the groups in a similar way and consider replicates. But there are not hard conventions like having at least three replicates in order to define what variation means in the first place. In multivariate stats variation is a measure of variation between variables, not groups, and the principal components order variation in terms of new, virtual variables via eigenvectors.
4. For a combination of these reasons, the general application of different types of statistics, specifically frequentist statistics as opposed to multivariate statistics tend to change the whole field you are working in to start off with.
Now, the reason for my elaborate story about differences in statistical approaches is that to be an expert in anything, I personally think is a journey towards discovering what makes your interests peculiar, or if you prefer another word, special. (Also, it depends on which experts you happen to be exposed to.) So, yes, of course it should be hard to be one of the best in anything, but I think a reasonable approach is to find the peculiarities of what you could become deeply committed to.
Frequentist statistics is contextually difficult for me to be focused on, and that makes it difficult. However, once the central limit theorem gets introduced, I instead would venture towards it and then once again forget whether I even can ever have enough time to properly study sampling. After all, I wasn't the one to happen to work for Guinness. Beer, now that would be a good reason to study sampling.
An example would be the South African originated company Compagnie Financière Richemont SA. Apart from economy of scale reasons, the reason why they moved to Switzerland is absolutely the stability of that country. South African citizens, many pensioners, now pay tax in Switzerland on dividends. (Yes, you have a DT treaty that allows you to go from 35% dividends tax to 15%, but still paid in Switzerland. And yes, probably they spend tax money much better than the SA government.)
LVMH by contrast doesn't have to move around, but in theory could have moved to Switzerland if it were the only stable country around.
So, to be Devil's advocate, is Switzerland a well performing country when considered critically or do they get a lot of money that in practical terms is or was historically generated in other geographic areas?
Conversely, if you don't have any stable countries at all, and you're left only with an option like South Africa, then there are countless examples of companies that simply could not survive. By the way, South Africa's taxes are getting quite high and there is absolutely no correlation between tax rates and service delivery. My personal opinion is somewhat more focused on practical terms. My first question about a country is not about taxes, but about the poverty line and buying power; and then about environmental issues. South African's don't have much hope for governments making any kind of sensible decisions.
This sounds like a funny inside joke, but I don't get it. We are talking about the French actor, right?
pandas.concat and similar functions for appending to a Pandas dataframe can be quite slow. Just mentioning this in case you ever encounter this issue; maybe you don't need to. In my case I changed to dictionaries for important parts and 2 mins changed to 5 seconds execution time.
However, in my case, I have to change logical row structure and not just read in rows as is.