argv_empty | 5 years ago | on: Bevy 0.5: data oriented game engine built in Rust
What does it mean for a game engine to be data oriented or data-driven?
argv_empty's comments
argv_empty | 5 years ago | on: The Facebook phone numbers are now searchable in Have I Been Pwned
argv_empty | 6 years ago | on: Lisp-Flavored Programming Languages
The syntactic structure of both "code" snippets seems equally clear (or maybe "uncertain in the same ways") to me, though my understanding might be a bit off if the author has biased the comparison by following generally accepted use of whitespace with one language and not the other.
This looks like another instance of slapping a pseudo-scientific veneer on top of conclusions driven more by untrained gut feeling in order to pretend one's subjective impressions are firmly grounded in objective reality. It's like the phrenology of programming languages.
argv_empty | 6 years ago | on: Lisp-Flavored Programming Languages
Perhaps you know more of kazinator's history than I do, but that HN account wasn't even created until 2014, so saying kazinator is the one who started this very old argument requires some extra evidence.
argv_empty | 6 years ago | on: Richard M. Stallman resigns
Is nobody else at the FSF capable of public advocacy? It seems to me that Stallman's unique ability was formulating the FSF's ideals in the first place, but once the platform is laid out, anyone who holds those ideals ought to be at least somewhat capable of promoting them. Even before this particular incident, it seems rms was not exactly well liked as a spokesman.
argv_empty | 6 years ago | on: Richard M. Stallman resigns
Don't want problems for having 1-1s with women
What sort of problems? I don't hear about many cases of women accusing other women of using their status as manager for sexual harassment.
argv_empty | 6 years ago | on: Why Google Poses a Serious Threat to Democracy, and How to End That Threat [pdf]
Epstein's argument seems to assume that any information which shifts an undecided person's view is biased. Basic chemistry lessons make the claims of homeopaths seem downright silly. Does that mean that teaching chemistry is biased against homeopathy, or is homeopathy just not all that great an idea?
Well, perhaps that definition of bias is specific to strictly political topics rather than questions about the observable effects of various actions. Even so, by the standard of shifting views a certain direction, does Google present as much of a threat to democracy as higher education does?
argv_empty | 6 years ago | on: Net worth of Americans aged 18 to 35 has dropped 34 percent since 1996: study
when the money gets spent either way*
The core of the "bad investment" argument is that the money doesn't necessarily all get spent either way.
renters see little reward or penalty for being poor neighbors
"We have chosen not to renew your lease."
argv_empty | 7 years ago | on: Airlines eye crueler ways of making passengers miserable
I'm fine with paying a bit extra for more comfort and better service on a flight, but anything short of double the cost of the cheapest coach-class ticket never seems to get me that.
argv_empty | 7 years ago | on: Composing Programs in Python, SICP Style
Makes "SICP Style" seem like overselling it a bit.
argv_empty | 7 years ago | on: Proceedings Start Against ‘Sokal Squared’ Hoax Professor
Seeing some people's apparent fixation on the dog park data fabrication as invalidating the whole effort, I have to wonder whether actually collecting the data for that paper would have made all their other hoax papers "legitimate."
argv_empty | 7 years ago | on: Proceedings Start Against ‘Sokal Squared’ Hoax Professor
Because reputation spreads. The linguistics department understands that the literature department's behavior does not reflect on the chemistry department, but the electorate seems not to grasp that so easily. Since STEM depends heavily on government to fund basic research, STEM's progress can definitely be impeded by widespread mistrust of academia as a whole.
argv_empty | 7 years ago | on: How Indian Americans Came to Run Half of All U.S. Motels
What valuation do you give his mother's influence over the board at IBM?
argv_empty | 7 years ago | on: Markets are efficient if and only if P = NP (2010)
The paper doesn't even manage to prove that finding a significantly profitable technical strategy is in NP.
argv_empty | 7 years ago | on: Markets are efficient if and only if P = NP (2010)
Yes. Mapping from 2^n bitstrings to 3 market positions.
argv_empty | 7 years ago | on: Markets are efficient if and only if P = NP (2010)
On top of that, the argument rests on the kind of error you expect to see freshmen making in a discrete math course:
> The basic argument is as follows. For simplicity but without loss of generality, assume there are n past price changes, each of which is either UP (1) or DOWN (0). How many possible trading strategies are there? Suppose we allow a strategy to either be long, short, or neutral to the market. Then the list of all possible strategies includes the strategy which would have been always neutral, the ones that would have been always neutral but for the last day when it would have been either long or short, and so on. In other words, there are three possibilities for each of the n past price changes; there are 3n possible strategies.
There are 2^n possible histories of length n. If a strategy maps each history to one of three positions, there are 3^(2^n) strategies that consider n bits of history.
argv_empty | 8 years ago | on: H&R Block and Intuit Lobbying Against Simpler Tax Filing (2017)
Most of that time is spent trying to figure out how and where to access the W-2 from my employer’s payroll provider.
As soon as my employer made it hard for me to download my W-2, I withdrew consent to only receive an electronic copy.
argv_empty | 8 years ago | on: E Pur Si Muove
It is quite ordinary for SV employees to be fired or "resign" after being caught participating in wrongthink. Eich is the most famous example
Eich was free to think whatever he wanted, and he spent many years doing exactly that. What he turned out not to be free to do was enforce certain ideals he held on others.
argv_empty | 8 years ago | on: Lisp at the Frontier of Computation [video]
That surprises me, because languages like Lisp, Smalltalk, Ruby and Haskell are all about powerful abstraction capabilities so you can express yourself exactly as you need instead of writing a lot of boilerplate.
There is a mindset that's popular among programmers which says, "I cannot understand what anything does except by knowing all about its internals." Languages like Go let the programmer keep that mantra instead of understanding the things they use based on a description of external behavior.
argv_empty | 8 years ago | on: Stanford CS007: Personal Finance For Engineers
Seriously, be open minded about subjective opinion. There is no right/wrong.
Risk tolerance is, but refusing to diversify outside of real estate and precious metals is objectively a risky strategy without a history of outperforming lower-risk ones.
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