deong · HackerTrans

deong

no profile record

comments

3 jaar geledendiscuss

Yep. And there are the formal optimality gaps like "this algorithm provably finds a solution in polynomial time no less than twice the optimum tour length", and there are also the informal "I have no proof of anything, but this algorithm usually finds optimal tours or tours within 1% of optimality on problems of up to 10 million cities" type of gaps. Both are useful to know and understand in practice.

If my job were to solve TSP instances, I'd not bother trying to tell someone why it's hard. I'd through Iterated Lin-Kernighan or something similar at it and go get some lunch.

6 jaar geledendiscuss

That's not the right analogy. It means you're not allowed to sue someone else for requiring an ID check in order to let you shop there.

I'm not a lawyer, but I'd be surprised if this defense was particularly robust anyway. It seems you'd just have to argue that there's some slight difference in the situations and that's why I'm doing something that guy shouldn't do. But either way, you're not taking away the correct message from his example.

8 jaar geledendiscuss

I'm not sure it should really count as a "Lisp book", but The Art of the Metaobject Protocol" is one of my favorite technical books ever.

It takes some knocks for not really containing anything about how to use CLOS. Instead, it's how CLOS is built. At a higher level, it's "how to build an object-oriented language/object system from scratch" using Lisp as a vehicle.

8 jaar geledendiscuss

Which 20 Republican senators do you imagine are going to stop him?

8 jaar geledendiscuss

Oddly enough, I assume the Google advancement structure values anything but stability. You launch products to get promoted. Maintaining them is for fools and losers.

Granted, I have no inside information. That just fits the externally observable information and the tiny amount of corporate politics that occasionally makes its way public.

8 jaar geledendiscuss

I think you're taking him a bit too literally. In these examples, you're not looking at simplifying anything. You're not getting rid of unneeded code. You're getting rid of debugged and stable code in favor of writing something new from scratch because fuck all knows why.

8 jaar geledendiscuss

They used to as part of their quarterly earnings reports, if I remember correctly. They stopped during the latter part of WoD when by all accounts the subscriber numbers were very low (by WoW standards).

8 jaar geledendiscuss

Even local optima are often pretty good in practice.

Also, it's a very good practice to iterate through the neighbors in a random order (if you're doing next descent, for steepest descent obviously it doesn't matter).

8 jaar geledendiscuss

There's another issue as well. His mapping of difficulty reaching a key isn't really the whole picture. On a conventional QWERTY layout, neither the E nor the C keys are especially hard to reach, but if you had to frequently type them successively, that would be terrible. What matters is not just where a key is in relation to your hands, but also where two keys are in relation to one other.

In grad school, I did a lot of work on the Quadratic Assignment Problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_assignment_problem). If you model that "key reachability" metric as two-key sequence difficulty instead, you actually get a QAP instance to solve. I built a little toy project that would look at the source text of my dissertation in LaTeX as well as the accompanying C++ source code for bigram frequencies, and I mapped out a flow matrix manually in a similar way to the author here, but including that successive keypress difficulty, and ran my multiobjective QAP solver to generate a range of keyboards optimized for my specific dissertation work.

I did this as a fun little gimmick as part of a sort of "ignobels" within my department, so the results weren't really a thing you could use. To generate a usable keyboard layout, you need to also include a ton of heuristics for things like "put all the number keys together" and the idea that you can treat "a" and "A" as the same letter, but "2" and "@" may make sense to separate, none of which I really properly handled. But I think with some work one could actually formalize the problem of finding a real layout for normal people to use.

8 jaar geledendiscuss

I have the previous xps 13 running linux now. I'd like to support them, but unfortunately, CostCo sold me the Windows version with mostly equivalent specs for like $400 cheaper than Dell had the Developer Edition at the time. I replaced the Broadcom WiFi chip for $30 and was good to go. I think I saw where the current model no longer has replaceable WiFi modules though.

8 jaar geledendiscuss

I don't think he's at all concerned about the license. He's just saying most people won't and shouldn't do "real work" on a machine that could break at any point with no possibility for support.

8 jaar geledendiscuss

I think if an x1 Carbon ran OS X, you'd see a massive number of people migrating from Macbooks over to it.

8 jaar geledendiscuss

Sure, but all of those are different than an admin at hacker news doing an

    UPDATE posts SET text="I hate brown people" WHERE post_id=17560983

to make you look like a racist (or whatever they wanted to alter your comment to look as though you had written it). That type of editing doesn't naturally occur and is more like the type of changed meaning we're talking about here.

8 jaar geledendiscuss

It's also important to remember just how far Git was ahead of most competitors in performance. I was using monotone quite a bit around this time, and while its UI was frankly not much better than git's, it at least worked acceptably quickly. Darcs was mostly defined in the public eye by the exponential merge issue. Hg was fine, for some definition of fine, but it was enough slower than git to be annoying -- maybe not deal-breaking, but noticeable on pretty much any task.

I remember installing cogito to act as a front-end for git because very early on it seemed obvious that (a) git was going to win, and (b) it was going to win in spite of its UI, which was saying something.

8 jaar geledendiscuss

I believe the recommendation is to use something like Signal or iMessage -- an end-to-end encrypted channel that isn't email.

8 jaar geledendiscuss

Almost every email client defaults to HTML. There are going to be people using both encryption and HTML.

8 jaar geledendiscuss

I haven't been on a search committee in years, but in the mid 2000s, I think 3-500 was about the norm for a mid-range state school. Not all those people were qualified, but I think you can assume you'll have somewhere on the order of 2-300 qualified applicants for most jobs.

8 jaar geledendiscuss

Tenure track positions are not at all hard to fill. There are 500 people applying for every one of them, and probably 350-400 of those people are completely qualified to do the job. But only ten of them are desirable, and a hundred other universities have those same ten people on the list.

Paying market rate won't help, because they're not leaving positions unfilled because they can't make an attractive offer. They're leaving positions unfilled because they're unwilling to live in a world where not every team gets Lebron James. It's better to do without than to not get your first choice, so that's what they do. If they were willing to pay $800k to fill a seat with whoever they picked as that "market rate" lecturer, they could have just hired the same guy for $120k -- he applied for the job and you rejected him.

8 jaar geledendiscuss

As has been pointed out before, statistics like these "for every five open faculty positions, only one is filled" are incredibly misleading. The reason only one in five is filled is not because there's a shortage of qualified teachers. It's because the thousand faculty searches going on at any one time are only interested in competing for the same hundred people.

Universities aren't trying to hire someone who can teach undergraduate CS courses. They're trying to hire someone who can build a lab capable of bringing in a steady stream of seven-figure grants. You need to have a PhD from a top-five (ish) school, with an excellent publication record, and an existing network of collaborators to be competitive for the vast majority of open positions.

8 jaar geledendiscuss

$125 an hour isn't crazy. I billed that doing some consulting for a company in Memphis maybe five years ago, and that was a no negotiation involved arrangement. I'd worked there before, so they knew me. I threw a number out there and they pretty much went, "alright, sounds reasonable enough".