ArbitraryLimits

I'm perfectly comfortable with concision, thank you.

Clearly one can interpret the Golden Rule two ways depending on whether you take into account the other person's different values or not.

For example, you're probably patting yourself on the back for being "concise" despite using more words to praise your original comment than it would have taken to clarify it, whereas I'm resenting you for the way you've ostentatiously foregone social niceties at my expense.

Is that really what you would have wanted in my place? Despite your ability to parse it, I don't think you understand the Golden Rule very well.

I don't think so - the whole point is that other don't want the same behavior from you as you would want from you, in their shoes.

SF is (or used to be until recently) the West Coast's banking center, and everyone in that industry has to be ready when markets open on the East Coast at 5am Pacific.

In Ruby, unit tests stand in place of static compiler checks. I haven't heard a strong argument against them nor a replacement for them.

How about static compiler checks? :)

In the US system ... everyone else is promoted and then assigned

It's worth pointing out that one of the reasons this system works in the US army is that non-commissioned officers are trusted with a great deal more responsibility than their Soviet counterparts were. The mechanical promotion of junior officers would be impossible without 15 year veteran NCOs taking care of a lot of the grunt work that Soviet officers got stuck with, simply because the system wouldn't trust NCOs with it.

Wouldn't this only apply to neural networks as used for classification? I mean the general paradigm of deforming curves until they're separated by a hyperplane seems pretty obvious now that I see it in front of me, but what about neural networks used to approximate continuous functions?

This is basically what VxWorks (real-time OS) started doing in their 6.x series - the MMU is active and all memory addresses are virtual, but no two processes get access to the same virtual address range. That way you can debug with virtual addresses turned on and see page faults instead of whatever hilarity ensues from overwriting the operating system itself, then turn the MMU off and stop taking the execution speed hit of translating addresses. It turns out that almost everyone just leaves memory protection on all the time anyway, since duh, it's the only sane thing to do.

Fun fact, the most reliable indicator that you have this kind of setup is whether the Unix emulation layer (if present) offers fork() - if only one process can access a given address then you obviously can't create a copy of a process that uses pointers.

That's true but I think the bigger reason is that a single address space makes system calls as cheap as regular function calls, since there is no kernel boundary any more.

Ironically, VxWorks's latest major rev was all about turning memory protection on since overwhelmingly people prefer the performance hit of kernel calls over the heisenbugs that come from stomping on the kernel's code and data structures.

I'm a little embarrassed that I never got the word play in "tarsnap" until just now...

Yes, but you have to admit it does need a call-to-action link that's actually a button.

That's a lot of buzzwords in one sentence. Reminds me of the early 90s when everything had to use neuro fuzzy wavelets.

I'm confused, are you saying there's a link between people's beliefs and actions or not?

No one's going to rag on the post's author for labeling himself "Christian" right at the top? He might have donated to Prop. 8 after all.

Edit: That's sarcasm, people.

Lagrange interpolations are only distantly related to Legendre/Hermite/etc polynomials

Actually ... take an nth degree polynomial from your favorite orthogonal set. For each of its n+1 zeros, construct by Lagrange interpolation the polynomial which is 1 at that zero and 0 at the others. Then that set of n+1 interpolating polynomials has the same relation to the orthogonal polynomials of degree 0 through n that (periodized) sincs have to sinusoids, i.e. you can decompose an n degree or lower polynomial in either basis, and the two representations are related by something like a Fourier transform.

Except that EEs like to explicitly restrict the word "signal" to mean only the known inputs, and call the rest "noise."

"Signal" has always bugged me because it has the connotation of a function of time, whereas historically the Fourier series were first used to represent functions of space.

Everyone says that, until they're put in charge of babysitting an old HPUX or AIX box and it's time to install something. Then no one complains about Autoconf again (though they can't bring themselves to praise it, either).

Automake, on the other hand...

Well, it helped that the Scuds had a 5% accuracy rate.

http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/rants/Latency.html

Years ago David Cheriton at Stanford taught me something that seemed very obvious at the time -- that if you have a network link with low bandwidth then it's an easy matter of putting several in parallel to make a combined link with higher bandwidth, but if you have a network link with bad latency then no amount of money can turn any number of them into a link with good latency.

You can tell it's dated from this little tidbit:

The Cable TV industry is hyping "cable modems" right now

Unlike the iPad, the iPhone, Dropbox, and "The Web," credit for this metaphor may fairly be given to David Gelertner. Although he applied it to naming files rather than servers.

From http://www.edge.org/conversation/the-second-coming-a-manifes... (1999)

If you have three pet dogs, give them names. If you have 10,000 head of cattle, don't bother. Nowadays the idea of giving a name to every file on your computer is ridiculous.

For what it's worth he was also the first to use the metaphor of a cloud, although in his sense the cloud represented your personal data and it drifted to follow you, casting a shadow over pavestones representing computers, as opposed to the usual sense of the cloud being an amorphous body of computers.

It wasn't really funny until I saw the first figure, then I died laughing.

I found it funny how all the reasons they gave why TCP sucked were things their workarounds were equally bad at.

I have yet to see anything designed with UDP instead of TCP that didn't end up reimplementing TCP itself, poorly.

You're right, it was Newton's method.

Dijkstra's algorithm is close enough to the Bellman equation for programmers, I guess :)

Also I don't really think taking a Taylor series for the inverse square root should count as an "algorithm."

I've always been partial to Brad Efron's explanations, see http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.179....

IMO he nails the key distinction here: "One definition says that a frequentist is a Bayesian trying to do well, or at least not too badly, against any possible prior distribution."

And there's some nice humor also: "The 250-year debate between Bayesians and frequentists is unusual among philosophical arguments in actually having important practical consequences."

Everything you've said is strictly true, but I feel like it misses the point. The difference between water and diamonds is that water's marginal utility is almost zero, owing to its ubiquity, whereas the marginal "utility" of a diamond is huge since most people have none already.

one of the startup's I CTO for

Did I understand that correctly? You're the CTO of multiple startups? How's that working out?

Normalize to show percent of revenue and then we'll talk.

A time series of $$$ allocated to R&D is basically going to show when the company's growing and when it's shrinking, the same way a heat map of who clicks on furry porn is basically going to show population density.

I realize there's a chart of $$$ allocated to R&D as a percentage of sales but that's not quite right either.

As long as the costs of fraud are borne by the individual merchants I doubt it will be fixed. Fundamentally flawed system design / perverse incentives.

Sure, but be sure to empower consumers against the banks if you make the banks liable instead.

I've always found this case study from the classic "Why Cryptosystems Fail" fascinating:

In some countries (including the USA), the banks have to carry the risks associated with new technology. Following a legal precedent, in which a bank customer's word that she had not made a withdrawal was found to outweigh the banks' experts' word that she must have done [JC], the US Federal Reserve passed regulations which require banks to refund all disputed transactions unless they can prove fraud by the customer [E]. This has led to some minor abuse - misrepresentations by customers are estimated to cost the average US bank about $15,000 a year [W2] - but it has helped promote the development of security technologies such as cryptology and video.

In Britain, the regulators and courts have not yet been so demanding, and despite a parliamentary commission of enquiry which found that the PIN system was insecure [J1], bankers simply deny that their systems are ever at fault. Customers who complain about debits on their accounts for which they were not responsible - so-called `phantom withdrawals' - are told that they are lying, or mistaken, or that they must have been defrauded by their friends or relatives.

The most visible result in the UK has been a string of court cases, both civil and criminal. The pattern which emerges leads us to suspect that there may have been a number of miscarriages of justice over the years.

* A teenage girl in Ashton under Lyme was convicted in 1985 of stealing £40 from her father. She pleaded guilty on the advice of her lawyers that she had no defence, and then disappeared; it later turned out that there had been never been a theft, but merely a clerical error by the bank [MBW]

* A Sheffield police sergeant was charged with theft in November 1988 and suspended for almost a year after a phantom withdrawal took place on a card he had confiscated from a suspect. He was lucky in that his colleagues tracked down the lady who had made the transaction after the disputed one; her eyewitness testimony cleared him

* Charges of theft against an elderly lady in Plymouth were dropped after our enquiries showed that the bank's computer security systems were a shambles

* In East Anglia alone, we are currently advising lawyers in two cases where people are awaiting trial for alleged thefts, and where the circumstances give reason to believe that `phantom withdrawals' were actually to blame.

Finally, in 1992, a large class action got underway in the High Court in London [MB], in which hundreds of plaintiffs seek to recover damages from various banks and building societies. We were retained by the plaintiffs to provide expert advice, and accordingly conducted some research during 1992 into the actual and possible failure modes of automatic teller machine systems. This involved interviewing former bank employees and criminals, analysing statements from plaintiffs and other victims of ATM fraud, and searching the literature. We were also able to draw on experience gained during the mid-80's on designing cryptographic equipment for the financial sector, and advising clients overseas on its use.

I'm positive that I've seen configure scripts that try to check whether they, themselves, are out of date, and regenerate themselves if so. That's the only time I've seen an error about autoconf version skew.

To be fair, I've only actually seen this on scripts I was writing - never seen it happen to something that passed make dist.