crasshopper

browse in w3m. problem solved.

Persi Diaconis https://www.ams.org/notices/200511/what-is.pdf — you want to choose randomly from the eigenvalues of a matrix

read his post on octonions http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/octonions/

The 1, 2, 4, 8 phenomenon surprised 20th-century mathematicians, and derives from weird facts about how S7, S3, and S1 fiber. (fibration is lining one shape with other shapes)

Persi Diaconis https://www.ams.org/notices/200511/what-is.pdf

Niles Johnson on Hopf/Milnor fibrations https://nilesjohnson.net/hopf.html

For those who want to know more, this topic links nicely into A-D-E theory, Dynkin diagrams, and Coxeter groups.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-XzhVrXIVeSVcV9iRJ4S...

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-XzhVrXIVeQ298S6uCyo...

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week230.html

https://unapologetic.wordpress.com/category/geometry/root-sy...

http://www.math.harvard.edu/~lurie/papers/thesis.pdf

Beautiful world this author is peeking into. Enjoy.

Yeah, but is a vote-system going to be better?

Thanks for doing this! I hope more people add their stories.

Seems more like "electrophysiology" than "a neuroscience revolution". Would be really cool to have played around with those in school though.

I wonder why the graduate students went to Zeelenberg first, instead of straight to Eijlander.

I've heard that as well. I dunno, doubling seems to have worked so far...

Agreed, if you're doing the same kind of work (or similar enough) over time.

   Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect,
   even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

The best advice I ever got on project-time estimation (from a biology postdoc) was: make your best, most honest best effort, and then double it.

When I make projections with a spreadsheet, I have a cell that copies my grand total of all costs and call that copy "unforeseen costs". I always hate bidding that high at the start, but the estimate ends up being close to right surprisingly often.

This article says 30% overruns are common, which is within my former boss' +100% bounds.

The other nice thing about doubling your cost estimate is it prevents you from catching the winner's curse and landing an overly-stingy client. Plus if you really can keep costs within your spec for the project, then you win extra profits. You'll never win that "game" if you don't leave room for error.

If, as the article says, "Clients’ Focus on Low Price Is a Major Reason for Effort Overruns", then probably a simpler theoretical explanation can just be the winner's curse.

No need to talk about distributions, gaussian or otherwise.

And Seth Brown wrote a few useful small functions too.

http://www.drbunsen.org/explorations-in-unix/

(might have also made it to HN)

Here's a tiny tool I like: https://gist.github.com/isomorphisms/9537586

It just prints the first `head` line and then random few rows instead of the top few. For me this is nicer than looking at the top 5 lines every time. I'm peeping at different parts of the table and thus gradually getting acquainted with it.

Jeroen, I'm just reading your [1] for the first time now. Are you aware of Dirk Eddelbuettel's `littler`? I believe that might overlap with your Rio tool to some degree.

It seems like a way to lend scientificity to his opinion. There are other ways of saying smarts>experience. Invoking y=mx+b here seems deceptive.

Probably everyone knows the math; I just think they're exaggerating the relevance of this model to real life.

I'm with the commenter (here) who said that real life is more likely to be an initial-value-dependent or path-dependent PDE. Someone else said having a high-IV person on your team will raise the slopes of everyone else which seems also right: the issues are multidimensional, not affine 1-D.

Ousterhout is taking sides (smarter > more experienced) which is fine; he can make that argument. But using y=mx+b as x→∞ doesn't count as an argument; it's rhetorical flair, not rhetorical substance. The substance of his reasoning seems to be "That's my opinion based on my experience in my past jobs".

Let's race 10 miles. I run each mile in 5:59 and you run each mile in 6:00. You get a mile head start.

Whoops—this fable is only true "eventually", if the slopes remain the same as t→∞.

I just mean if you do limit the password length or character type, please remind me at the login screen, because there's no way I will remember across sites who wanted 6-8 characters from [aA9$_!#] and who wanted 12-16 from [a9-].

As a user I strongly agree that I want to know which of my username or password is wrong. While you're at it, please remind me which characters your website allows, and how many are expected.

User/pass guessing by crackers can be solved with passphrases. Don't let registrants get by with a crackable password. Then remind us at the login screen that your site wants a passphrase (you can even flash me something that reminds me of the registration prompt if I forget my passphrase).

Thanks Sogen

For graph colouring I think the right WP link is Ramsey theory.

Also not sure graphs are a "branch" of mathematics, that would be like saying polygons are a "branch" of mathematics. (Branches would be like CA, AT, DG, ... as in http://arxiv.org/list/math/recent.) I see graphs as just a common object that relates to a variety of mathematical areas.

Exterior calculus: http://arxiv.org/abs/0907.5356

Discrete diff geom: http://mesh.brown.edu/DGP/pdfs/sg06-course01.pdf

My three cents: Lee, Spivak v1, Stillwell.

I would call both of these "X for computer scientists".

Yes, you're right about that.

> Enough of you care about this to vote it to the front page?

Possibly only because of the author.

Ah, problems.