Recent submissions

Comment · 10 years ago
< A lot of industrial Haskell sadly still uses string interpolation for SQL synthesis, or fall back on libraries that use TemplateHaskell to unsafely lock a specific build to a snapshot of a database at compile-time.

This sounds kinda off-putting, but I'm not totally sure what it means. Are the SQL libraries for haskell comparable to e.g knex, or psycopg, or sqlalchemy? The bit about string interpolation makes me think that prepared statements aren't used?

Comment · 10 years ago
Do you have a reference for this? While Greece was strongly influenced by the cultures of the Near East and Egypt, it entirely misstates the situation to say that "most of their culture was handed to them." Edit - Walter Burkert has an excellent, short book on this - The Orientalizing Revolution
Comment · 10 years ago
I noticed that, but haven't any idea what the purpose is?
Comment · 10 years ago
Perhaps the elegance would be better illustrated if the planets were shown to move in elliptical rather than circular orbits - this of course was the primary historical difficulty in understanding planetary motion
Comment · 10 years ago
I agree with the main point of the article, but I'm somewhat disturbed by the statistical errors and misconceptions.

>Few websites actually get enough traffic for their >audiences to even out into a nice pretty bell curve. If >you get less than a million visitors a month your >audience won’t be identically distributed and, even >then, it can be unlikely.

What is the author trying to say here? Has he thought hard about what it means for "an audience" to be identically distributed?

>Likewise, the things that matter to you on your website, >like order values, are not normally distributed Why do they need to be?

>Statistical power is simply the likelihood that the >difference you’ve detected during your experiment >actually reflects a difference in the real world. Simply googling the term would reveal this is incorrect.

Comment · 11 years ago
How is that a 'devil's bargain'? Just seems like an everyday deal to me.
Comment · 11 years ago
Perhaps your assessment says more about you than it does the actual facts of the case
Comment · 11 years ago
That is precisely what happened with PDT, correct? It was spin out from MS
Comment · 11 years ago
Nonsense. Tao is using perfectly idiomatic language here - "The sample space will be a probability space (once we have endowed it with some additional structure)".
Comment · 11 years ago
Regarding d) - how much do you think the researcher, much of whose work was presumably funded by taxpayer dollars, should get?
Comment · 11 years ago
Can someone explain the following comments, for someone with some knowledge of ML but none of NLP? "First, it's really much better to use Averaged Perceptron, or some other method which can be trained in an error-driven way. You don't want to do batch learning. Batch learning makes it difficult to train from negative examples effectively, and this makes a very big difference to accuracy" I thought that it was typical for suitably regularized batch methods to modestly outperform or at least match (in terms of accuracy) online methods, whose main advantage is their speed.
Comment · 11 years ago
Is this claim correct? "You do four of these sequential scans, and in each you write sequentially to one of 256 locations. Four passes, no random access. This is great. I don't even see a log n there, do you?"

You're writing to one of 256 (presumably far apart) memory locations - why isn't this considered random access?

Comment · 11 years ago
Out of curiosity, how much better, typically, is the 'optimal' blending rule than blending with some random or 'reasonable' weights? Never really thought to ask myself that question...
Comment · 11 years ago
4-5x extremely minuscule is still minuscule.
Comment · 11 years ago
Can someone summarize or translate (for non-Britons) the paragraph dealing with the educational background of Classics students?

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