justinmeiners

I think those are good points. I don't know much about comedy or entertainment but I get the same feeling that getting "chosen" matters more than your content.

On the other hand, great work doesn't happen by accident. Great businesses are a result of good management. Good products are results of good design. Those don't happen by accident, just like a great program doesn't write itself. You may not be a warren buffet, due to limited opportunities. But, you could leave someone like that penniless and nameless and i'm sure he could leverage his skills and knowledge to be "successful", even if not a mega-billionaire.

Marketing and sales is an important component which is left out (if you care about making money). That's also something you can deliberately work on and improve.

Do you think being good at something and successfully selling or marketing your work is like buying a lottery ticket?

Pg has a quote along the lines of "easier jobs that are hard to get fired from are worth more money." Of course not every public job is easy, rather often there are benefits involved other than cash

Absolutely. It's almost unheard of to work at a major academic institution without one. Becoming a professor is all preparation from 18-30, and then was an assistant you still have to grind and run errands to "earn your place".

I agree with you, but unfortunately our government is using them for that purpose.

The intent of that thread is to peer into his tweets to associate him with an untouchable "white supremacist", as opposed to any particular wrong doing. That's not even a description, it's just a reason to dehumanize someone.

so I unfollowed.

I completely encourage that.

I'm not asking for his political views to be platformed, just that we treat them separately. In other words, it's not in bad taste to respect Nick for a Bitcoin opinion, even if what else he has going on we believe or even know to be incorrect.

Just because somebody is good in one area that doesn't mean they have any authority in another

Precisely what I am saying. We can applaud Nick for contributions to cryptography without importing his views of other things. We don't have to weigh his political opinions at all.

just wanting that people are decent human beings.

This sounds to me like "having views I like, because only undecent people would think otherwise". Do you have an instance of Nick being nasty or indecent?

Is he mean? Or do associate those views with mean people.

I just don't understand why everyone needs to be a PR polished suit. These people work on computers, not administer public policy. We can appreciate their contributions and ignore their quirks or the fact they don't have all the popular opinions.

That is true, but it still provides tons of examples of functors such as fundamental group and homology.

These sorts of interesting functors are not common outside of graduate math.

hope he isn't

You wish he was more like you?

This is a good reason why he hid his identity. Any real person would be more disappointing then the legend constructed in imagination.

PG benefits from self-confidence as well (certainly to a less degree). Being extremely self aware and re-questioning ones positions constantly doesn't seem to be a winning trait in business and promotion. At the very least, if it's being done internally you want to continue to broadcast consistent and confident messages.

Category theory is mostly useful for modeling computation theoretically and thus designing languages.

It's also not that helpful to learn unless you already know a lot of deeper math, like introductory algebraic topology, etc.

Doesn't shunting yard solve this pretty simply? Once you have an expression in RPN, building expression trees is pretty easy.

I don't think so. I draw my 9s by drawing the circle, and then the line down. Looks like you go the other way. This is all about direction and gesture as opposed to OCR.

Looks like you draw your digits differently. It's "trained" to my style. Try making your own glyphs and see how it does.

How do you draw your 4? The one I used is the "one stroke" 4 where you draw it from left, top, and then down.

best match even when the match is poor.

Yeah, a real application could have a score threshold.

This animation might help:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_integral#/media/File:Line...

can't handle certain cases where a path is retraced in opposite directions

It does ok if there is only a small part that retraces, but you're exactly right.

It's "introductory" for MIT students who have a background in engineering, math, or physics, not average people off the street.

Recursion is hard for students to grasp when taught in math contexts as well, so I don't think this is a matter of prior CS teaching biasing them one way.

myself! https://github.com/justinmeiners/

See other comments. That may be the case, but it's wrong to frame it as "free" vs "paid".

I agree, that state is a mess. I happen to live in state with low taxes and affordable school.

Perhaps the european model is better overall, or perhaps there are other complications. Regardless, the debate is not "free" vs "pay private companies". Both models have costs and benefits.

I don't disagree. I am not making a judgement of which is better overall, just that neither alternative is free, or even close to that.

Europeans are absolutely, utterly, unable to imagine that things they pay a percentage of all income earned, over their entire life, are not free. It's incredible to watch from outside.

Python/C files didn't work in a vacuum

They do if you use the standard library (which for python is quite extensive), and copy any dependencies into your own source, as if they are your own. By "in a vaccum" we can mean if python o is installed, it will work.

Capture all necessary dependencies

Docker doesn't capture any dependencies. They still exist on the internet. It just captures a list of which ones to download when you build the image.

Do you think software we write now has more longevity than older software that uses make or a shell script?

It makes sense that having more information is better than less.

I would argue that they should use no dependencies to avoid this problem entirely, or download them and include them as source in the project, or at least include a note of which version of a major library they used in a README or comment. I think this is what is often done in practice currently.

Perhaps as you are saying, docker is just a stable way to document this stuff formally. But it is a large moving part that assumes a lot of stuff is still on the internet. What if the docker hub image is removed or dramatically changed? What if that OS package manager no longer exists? It just doesn't seem like our software is getting more longevity, but less. I don't know why we would bring that extra complexity to academic research if the goal is longevity.

Don't you think docker, dependencies, unit test frameworks, etc actually increase the need for ongoing maintenance as opposed to spitting out some C files or python scripts which last "forever"?

Unit testing, readability version control, documentation, etc are all engineering practices for the purpose of making ongoing development organized (especially for teams).

Why would a researcher need to do this, when in most cases all that they use is the output, and in CS/math it's only a minimal prototype demonstrating operation of their principle?

All of the other stuff would certainly be nice, but they don't need to adopt our whole profession to write code

it has no utility.

You can send money anywhere in the world in any amount for a flat fee. It provides an asset with a fixed supply to prevent against inflation. these provide plenty of utility

What you may mean is that it doesn't generate earnings/cash flow so it's not a productive investment.