bob457

I thought this was going to be an interesting article. Then I read

>At first glance, this is sound—even admirable—advice for aspiring business leaders. But a closer look at Klarman’s remarks, as well as the origins and trajectory of his career, suggests a deeply flawed messenger.

And I realized this was just another article which refuses to engage ideas and falls back to ad hominem. I don’t care if the messenger is flawed, or what somebody thinks his or her motivation is for delivering a particular message. I want to hear a critique of the message itself.

I took two semester of graduate level applied analysis. The reals still don’t make sense to me. Those were definitely the hardest classes I’ve taken.

Everything has an impact.

The ultimate act of conservation is suicide. Few are that committed. We are all hypocrites.

The revulsion a lot folks express at one based indexing is always bizarre to me. I write code in c, python and matlab. Switching between these is really not that hard. The two indexing models just seem to be convenient/painful for different things.

And yes, perhaps one based indexing introduces a class of bugs when you need to call into c. But zero based indexing has the same problem if you need to call into fortran, and calling fortran is really common for numerical code.

The article may be old, but as if 6 months ago (the last time I tried Julia), the complaints about the jit were still valid. Typing something into the repl with a syntax error took tens of seconds to produce an error. Creating an array with 3 elements took over a second. Plotting took forever. It was a very frustrating experience.

I used to smoke a bowl almost every night. I quit because it had a number of affects on me I didn’t like: (1) it made me sleep poorly. (2) it made me paranoid/anxious, as in I would become hyper focused on all the ways my life could hypothetically fall apart (3) I couldn’t manage to do much besides sit on the couch and watch tv or game (4) I would basically become paralyzed by overanlysis, to the extent that I couldn’t really talk to people.

Friends of mine smoke regularly have basically the opposite experience. It really appears to me that weed affects people in really different ways, so it’s hard to make a general statement.

This xkcd provides a surprisingly effective metric:

https://xkcd.com/1301/

I think HN follows the aesthetic, to a good extent, of a sparse text based doc page. Those kinds of sites rank high in my personal trustworthiness rubric.

The more something has been “designed”, the more the sight falls into the untrustworthy category, barring substantial evidence to the contrary.

Also in EE, and I don’t know anybody using SNOPT for solving any kind of optimization (of which there are many).

My field is control systems. Every academic I know, and every paper I’ve read which mentions a software stack, uses matlab/simulink. Simulink appears to me to have no good alternative (maybe jmodelica or something?) There are some python/Julia alternatives to matlab, but the existing control libraries are really pretty limited in comparison.

I’m not sure exactly how dependent particle physics is on ROOT, so direct comparison is difficult.

It seems to me that one of the difficulties we have with making robots is trying to model them too closely after ourselves. We don’t have a humanoid maid, but we do have a roomba; similarly for lots of industrial automation. Home automation doesn’t look like c3po walking around your house flipping light switches.

It seems like maybe not the best reasoning to say “humans, do it this way, so that’s how my robot should do it.”

I agree. I print or buy the book for anything I want to read in depth. The ease of sticking a finger or scrap of paper between pages for easy reference is vastly underrated.

Also underrated is how easy it is find find something in paper book, based basically on how thick the two sides feel in your hand.

Two pieces of software I’ve had to work with for the last five years are matlab and labview. Say what you will about matlab, I think the documentation is the best I’ve seen anywhere. The labview documentation is some of the worst I’ve seen.

I’ll generally forgive an open source project for poor docs, because I can read the code(and it’s free, so how much can I really complain??) Closed source that costs thousands? You better have have your docs tight. That said, labview docs are worse than many open source projects. Most of it boils down to useless tautological statements like

“X: the input variable x”

Three things that make the matlab docs so much better:

1. A plethora of examples, in the same page as the function doc. Labview makes you open a special program (no, it’s not available via a web search) and search for an example. The search function sucks.

2. Web searches for matlab docs return the doc for the latest version. Almost always with labview, you get something from like 2012.

3. A real discussion of the algorithm being implemented, with real references. I can’t recall ever seeing a citation in a labview doc.

So there’s some impressions, from a users point of view:)

I always see people say how great gmail search is, as does the author in this article.

This befuddles me.

Gmail search often leaves out results I know are there, and sometimes comes up erroneously empty. I can verify this, because I store my emails offline. They are indexed by notmuch. I find notmuch to be not only faster than gmail search, but far more thorough: notmuch gives me hits that gmail skips.