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d9fb698e010974b | 10 years ago | on: ARMing a Breadboard – Everyone Should Program an ARM

This is really cool. One cautionary thing though. I think that because of breadboard capacitance if you try any sort of high frequency stuff on the breadboard (like >= 10MHz) you'll get all sorts of weird effects. (This is just a breadboard problem that occurs at high frequencies, not an ARM problem).

I'm just an amateur in this area, so if someone who is more knowledgeable could confirm or deny with I wrote above that would be great.

d9fb698e010974b | 10 years ago | on: Foundations of probability theory

Well you can just read the reviews to see that the Durrett text isn't well regarded while others like Chung's are. And the criticism about a probability space not being a sample space is correct, but I think it's clear what Tao meant there, namely that the sample space would be a part of a probability space.

d9fb698e010974b | 10 years ago | on: Foundations of probability theory

The sample space is not the probability space. The probability space has a sample space though, which is what the Wikipedia definition says, but not what Tao literally said. I think it is pretty clear what Tao meant though.

d9fb698e010974b | 10 years ago | on: My gamedever wishlist for Rust

Is rust as complicated as it seems to me? I know ML derived languages well so I'm not a stranger to functional programming. And I'm a pretty competent C programmer, but it seems like Rust is about as complicated as C++, which I find offputting.

d9fb698e010974b | 10 years ago | on: Why are working class kids less likely to get elite jobs? They study too hard

Everyone who wasn't born into the small elite is affected by the system, including me. It's not a competition to see who suffers the most.

Edit: also, the elite themselves are punished by the way things work. The number of truly elite jobs is small and the competition is very strong. For every kid whose parents bought his/her way through the system there were a number of others whose parents tried, but failed, to do the same thing.

d9fb698e010974b | 10 years ago | on: Why are working class kids less likely to get elite jobs? They study too hard

I think your conclusion is right for most people, but you're a bit too cynical. The system isn't rigged purposefully. It is just that the people who decide who gets the elite jobs all act a certain way and had similar backgrounds. Naturally they like people like themselves and so the jobs go to those people. Even then, there are lots of qualified people from those backgrounds who don't get those jobs. Everyone is competing for a purely positional advantage (i.e. in order to move up, someone else must move down) and the 1% is already large enough to replenish its own ranks.

d9fb698e010974b | 10 years ago | on: Why are working class kids less likely to get elite jobs? They study too hard

I came here to say pretty much the same thing, but you beat me to it :)

The fact is that these elite jobs, while demanding, don't require particularly unusual talents. Many people can perform them. The supply is far greater than demand, which you can see, for example, in the number of people who apply for entry level positions at large financial firms, where many of the elite jobs are. It's similar at the elite universities, which could all easily fill their classes with valedictorians if that's what they wanted.

But yeah, it's pretty much what you said above. People like those who are like themselves and there are only so many spots available, so naturally they're going to pick people from similar backgrounds unless the candidate is lucky, charismatic, or significantly better than everyone else (which is unlikely when you're already choosing from an elite population).

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