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Arrrlex

34 karma · joined November 21, 2019

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Arrrlex··on Misalignment Museum
https://simonwillison.net/
Arrrlex··on The ingenious design of the aluminum beverage can (2015) [video]
I'm not an expert, but apparently transport accounts for only 11% of carbon emissions for food [1], and I suppose it's likely similar for beer. To me this suggests factors affecting production are far more important.

[1] https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2012/09/04/how-green-is-lo...

Arrrlex··on A spelled-out intro to neural networks and backpropagation [video]
I believe GP is talking about part 2 of the fast.ai course: https://course19.fast.ai/videos/?lesson=8
Arrrlex··on Functional programming jargon in plain English
Currying support is orthogonal to how function arguments work. Some languages (e.g. OCaml according to this question[1]) combine named parameters with currying, allowing partial application with any of the function's arguments.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3015019/is-there-a-progr...

Arrrlex··on The Lazy Monad
I think this is the mistake a lot of people make: they form an intuition of monads after seeing lots of examples of them, and then they try to communicate that intuition without just saying "here are lots of examples of monads".
Arrrlex··on Deep learning is hitting a wall?
Worth mentioning: there were three research groups trying to emulate C. elegans, and they all seem to have stalled [1].

[1]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mHqQxwKuzZS69CXX5/whole-brai...

Arrrlex··on A Python Guide for the Ages
I think this snippet would raise a KeyError whenever the index you're searching for is greater than 0.
Arrrlex··on Intermediate Algebra
Just to clarify: there are lots of numbers that aren't real numbers (for example, imaginary numbers). Intuitively the real numbers are all the points along the number line, including rationals and irrationals (such as root 2, pi, or e). There are lots of other comments in this thread that give a good explanation of how that works formally.

If the students haven't yet encountered complex numbers, infinitesimals, infinities etc. then it's perfectly reasonable to say that all numbers are assumed to be real (as follows strictly from the definition in the book).

Arrrlex··on Sphere Eversion
In the real world you usually can't pass a material through itself.
Arrrlex··on European mortality monitoring shows increase in excess mortality
Could someone help me understand the all ages excess mortality graph? Naively it looks like

a) there were way more deaths in 2018 and 2019 than were expected, and

b) despite Covid-19, the excess mortality still hasn't caught up with 2018 levels

What am I missing here?

Arrrlex··on Code is Engineering; Types are Science
This isn't a reply to your substantive point (of course I agree that fortran/numpy programmers do science), but certainly when I'm coding with numpy I have a mental model of the shapes of the arrays, very akin to the mental model I have of the types of objects in e.g. Haskell or Python. Sure, the shapes are runtime properties and they're not enforced anywhere, but that doesn't matter to my mental model of what's going on.
Arrrlex··on Draft of the Fast.ai Book
This is a draft. I expect that, when the first finished version is ready, the authors will promote it effectively (IMO they are very good at promoting their courses at fast.ai).
Arrrlex··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2020)
Location: Berlin

Remote: ok

Willing to relocate: no

Technologies: Python (web development + NLP), server-side Swift, Scala, AWS, Gitlab/Jenkins CI

CV: alexmck.com/files/cv.pdf

Email: hello@alexmck.com

Mathematics graduate with 4 years' experience as a software developer, looking for a part-time Software / Data / ML Engineer role while I finish my masters in CS.

Immediately productive in Python, I'm also demonstrably fast at learning new tech stacks (e.g. Swift and Scala in my current role). I care deeply about good software design, test-driven development, and having a product-first mindset. Excellent communication skills.

Arrrlex··on How to Exit Vim
I'd have thought it's because the French keyboard layout is arranged with the "Z" in place of the "W" on a qwerty layout