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BigJeffeRonaldo

35 karma · joined September 15, 2016

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BigJeffeRonaldo··on The Tragedy of Newcomb Mott, Who Thought He Could Walk into Soviet Russia
These people hate white American men. Since white women voted majority Trump, they're beginning to receive hate as well. Whether or not reality fits their narrative isn't really relevant. Leftists seem very intent on pushing the race war narrative as much as they are able to lately.
BigJeffeRonaldo··on If Susan Can Learn Physics, So Can You (2013)
I felt the same way until I got to undergrad and relearned math from the basis of naive set theory and spent time working through the basics (proper definitions, proofs, Dedekind cuts etc.).
BigJeffeRonaldo··on The Wall Street Journal to Close Google Loophole Entirely
Nobody pays for Netflix; they just use their cousin's/sister's/girlfriend's/etc.'s account.
BigJeffeRonaldo··on The Wall Street Journal to Close Google Loophole Entirely
Recent events have convinced me not to follow such a course of action. Most of the media seems more intent on printing fake news that fits their agenda than honest investigation, leading to the more sarcastic among us to refer to WaPo as Jeff Bezos' blog, etc. The media has a lot to do to recover their standing in my eyes before I'll read their work, much less pay them for it.
BigJeffeRonaldo··on Don’t Pursue Programming if You Aren’t Passionate About It
Passion is not really interesting. I'd rather hire someone who is skilled, easy to work with, and will get stuff done. I don't really need him to get hyped up on caffeine and write medium articles about how passionate he is; I'm paying him to do a job.

I also am not sure what to make of the Op's mention of starting to program at 10. I read my dad's copy of K&R and installed some Linux distribution at that age too, but I didn't make any real progress until I realized that it's just a job and started acting more like a professional.

BigJeffeRonaldo··on “My Code is Self-Documenting”
I can tell you're upset, Vince, so I'll be the one to end this discussion.
BigJeffeRonaldo··on “My Code is Self-Documenting”
This generally won't work for straight forward game theoretic reasons. Boss thinks you're slow->boss brings on h1b consultant willing to pump out spaghetti code and toady up to him->you looking for a new job. Organizations get what they ask for
BigJeffeRonaldo··on “My Code is Self-Documenting”
But it does. It depends on the organization, but there are groups where chugging coffee, talking a lot, and pumping out dozens of half-working features by coding like a drunk cowboy will get you promoted and recognized as a team player, while pushing back to take time and do things right will have you reprimanded. Many such cases out there.
BigJeffeRonaldo··on “My Code is Self-Documenting”
It's a matter of incentives. Business folks don't care about comments unless they have a dev background. Your options are then to focus on the incentives present in the situation, or materially harm your own life and well-being by working extra hours to make up for your management's inability to manage.
BigJeffeRonaldo··on Should gifted students go to a separate school?
If that is the case, public education does not exist to educate children (or at least this is not its primary goal), but rather exists as some sort of bizarre redistribution program. High IQ parents are then expected to feed their children into the hopper for the gain of others.
BigJeffeRonaldo··on Should gifted students go to a separate school?
You're asking parents to sacrifice the mental health (via bullying and social issues) (and thus physical issues likely stemming from mental health problems), intellectual development, future earning power, etc. of their gifted children to benefit others. Personally, I am not comfortable with the idea of sacrificing my children to a utopian project. These children also often develop social issues, as different IQ buckets have very different social norms (imagine how a 100iq normal person forced to socialize only with <65iq disabled folks would be affected).
BigJeffeRonaldo··on Should gifted students go to a separate school?
I think resentment of this kind of social engineering is a major key in recent US political shifts. Let's talk about the basics. If a kid can learn more difficult material and the kid wants to, most reasonable people would agree that the kid should go where that is an option. This basic sense of the world is blocked by social engineers obsessed with n-th order effects who ignore the fundamental issue. Let's do the basics, folks.
BigJeffeRonaldo··on The Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz
Well, the model at least does not maximize likelihood
BigJeffeRonaldo··on Some Colleges Have More Students From the Top 1 Percent Than the Bottom 60
I find it very interesting that many so-called "Ivy Misser" schools such as WUSTL and Tufts have more 1%ers and fewer 60%ers than extremely elite schools such as Princeton and Harvard. Even Yale has a lower ranking on the list. Perhaps the elite of the elite are more concerned with giving their progeny a broad exposure to different classes of people, while more middling members of the upper class concern themselves with status signalling.
BigJeffeRonaldo··on I Didn't Get Hired to Google
This is exactly what I thought when I heard about this guy. He's undervaluing himself bigly. If you obsess over one company, or girl, or whatever else, you take all of your own power away and hand it over to chance. An interview or conversation could fall through for any reason at all. Meanwhile if you're intense enough to study algorithms for 8 months you can probably get a pretty good job at any number of places without wrecking your self-worth if you get rid of the tunnel vision.
BigJeffeRonaldo··on Nissan says self driving cars are impossible today
I don't care about self-driving cars until car company CEOs have their kids riding in them. Until then, I am not interested in taking the risk of testing their engineering.
BigJeffeRonaldo··on Why do traders in investment banks feel their jobs are immune from AI, etc?
Because investment banking is a sales job.
BigJeffeRonaldo··on Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews
Great post. If you have a worse background, you have to fight your way up, whereas those with more family resources just have to not screw up badly and they'll probably end up alright.
BigJeffeRonaldo··on Learning Machine Learning: A beginner's journey
Well, most states won't let me practice as an engineer, even if I get really good at Solidworks from watching YouTube videos, because I have no background in the field.
BigJeffeRonaldo··on The Disadvantages of an Elite Education (2008)
And this is why Trump's win was so confusing for many citizens if the US--too stuck in their bubble to understand the rest of the world and its happenings. See also Nassim Taleb's essay on the Intellectual Yet Idiot class: https://medium.com/@nntaleb/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211...
BigJeffeRonaldo··on The Disadvantages of an Elite Education (2008)
Exponentiation isn't a middle school operation. Most probably don't know what real exponentiation is until they do the famous problem in chapter 1 of baby Rudin defining it (or equivalent problem in another book), and bright students are unlikely to study this before mid high school. Normal students sometime in college probably.
BigJeffeRonaldo··on Ask HN: What's the state of the job market in data science and machine learning?
It was past the peak last year, i.e. machine learning somehow went backwards up thr hype cycle over the past year according to Gartner. Maybe due to deep learning news stories over the past year+.

http://m.imgur.com/gallery/noBKI

BigJeffeRonaldo··on Why Don't Computer Scientists Learn Math?
I studied math and computer science at university. My personal experience was that if you wrote a long string with quantifiers in your vector spaces or analysis homework or whatever, the professor would ask you why you were acting like you were still in your 'Intro to Proofs and Logic' course and to please rewrite your homework in English. It was assumed that you could translate between quantifier predicate stuff and English, and that you should just therefore stick to English so your professor can actually read it. The CS faculty members were much more fond of writing stuff out in such formal terms like that (especially in the CS-oriented math classes like a general discrete math course, or an automata course) possibly because they thought the CS kids needed more practice with the notation.

My math profs emphasized juggling multiple layers of logical abstraction and omitting all unneeded explanations, while the CS guys wanted everything in excruciating detail and extremely formal language.

BigJeffeRonaldo··on Ask HN: What is your favorite internet rabbit hole?
Leave it to STEMlords to reinvent Christianity
BigJeffeRonaldo··on The McMansion Scale, Explained
Kids didn't know that Chicago existed? I don't know how to respond
BigJeffeRonaldo··on Do the math: too much calculus? (2012)
https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~wtg10/decimals.html

You can construct a complete ordered field from infinite decimals

BigJeffeRonaldo··on Do the math: too much calculus? (2012)
Solving equations is NOT easy.
BigJeffeRonaldo··on Is Silicon Valley Discriminating Against Men and Asians?
Great, I'll tell my Peul friend that he's a genetic bottleneck for wanting to marry a Peul girl
BigJeffeRonaldo··on The Stack Overflow Developer Story: A New Technical Resume
I'd be surprised if there weren't somewhere out there who didn't understand additivity of variance (and linear combination with the covariance terms, or that it is a more natural parameter for the normal distrovution, or some other reason) but had founded and sold a machine learning company. Further, this seems a bit like asking someone with several years of development experience if he knows what a compiler is.
BigJeffeRonaldo··on Women rise through the ranks of IT more rapidly than men
My wife was offended the first time her manager told her that she should think about management as a career path :)
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