The 1, 2, 4, 8 phenomenon surprised 20th-century mathematicians, and derives from weird facts about how S7, S3, and S1 fiber. (fibration is lining one shape with other shapes)
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect,
even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
The best advice I ever got on project-time estimation (from a biology postdoc) was: make your best, most honest best effort, and then double it.
When I make projections with a spreadsheet, I have a cell that copies my grand total of all costs and call that copy "unforeseen costs". I always hate bidding that high at the start, but the estimate ends up being close to right surprisingly often.
This article says 30% overruns are common, which is within my former boss' +100% bounds.
The other nice thing about doubling your cost estimate is it prevents you from catching the winner's curse and landing an overly-stingy client. Plus if you really can keep costs within your spec for the project, then you win extra profits. You'll never win that "game" if you don't leave room for error.
If, as the article says, "Clients’ Focus on Low Price Is a Major Reason for Effort Overruns", then probably a simpler theoretical explanation can just be the winner's curse.
No need to talk about distributions, gaussian or otherwise.
It just prints the first `head` line and then random few rows instead of the top few. For me this is nicer than looking at the top 5 lines every time. I'm peeping at different parts of the table and thus gradually getting acquainted with it.
Jeroen, I'm just reading your [1] for the first time now. Are you aware of Dirk Eddelbuettel's `littler`? I believe that might overlap with your Rio tool to some degree.
Probably everyone knows the math; I just think they're exaggerating the relevance of this model to real life.
I'm with the commenter (here) who said that real life is more likely to be an initial-value-dependent or path-dependent PDE. Someone else said having a high-IV person on your team will raise the slopes of everyone else which seems also right: the issues are multidimensional, not affine 1-D.
Ousterhout is taking sides (smarter > more experienced) which is fine; he can make that argument. But using y=mx+b as x→∞ doesn't count as an argument; it's rhetorical flair, not rhetorical substance. The substance of his reasoning seems to be "That's my opinion based on my experience in my past jobs".
I just mean if you do limit the password length or character type, please remind me at the login screen, because there's no way I will remember across sites who wanted 6-8 characters from [aA9$_!#] and who wanted 12-16 from [a9-].