johndcook

I'm the author. I browse independent bookstores whenever I can. I agree that you can find interesting things there that you'll never find in large chains. But I don't recall seeing much by Le Guin in any bookstore, new or used, small or large.

I don't know how many times I've tried to find something slightly off the beaten path in a local bookstore or library only to come home and order it online.

On the other hand, local bookstores were more interesting before Amazon came along. Amazon doesn't just sell bestsellers, far from it, but they've caused local stores to rely more on bestsellers. All my favorite bookstores have shriveled their selection to the point that they're hardly worth visiting anymore.

Almost, but not quite. You could say "n! is the product of the natural numbers <= n." By this definition 0! is an empty product because there are no natural numbers <= 0.

However, this same reasoning would say (-1)! = 1, (-2)! = 1, etc. And while you could define negative factorials that way, it's better in practice to leave negative factorials undefined.

That is the usual explanation, but I don't think that helps much since counting the number of ways to arrange nothing is confusing!

Agreed. Academics put up with a lot of crap because they're extremely risk adverse.

The only thing controversial about this article should be whether it applies to quantum phenomena. The author touches on Bell's theorem etc., but that might distract from the main part of the argument: chance doesn't cause anything, at least on an ordinary human scale. Chance is the catch-all word we use for causes we don't understand.

Probability doesn't describe reality but rather our understanding of reality. If you flip a coin and look at it without showing me, its state is certain for you and random for me because you know something I don't know. If I assign it a 50-50 chance of being heads, I'm making a statement about my uncertainty regarding the coin, not the coin.

I've seen leaders who don't delegate but abdicate. They hand over a project completely, refusing to make decisions that only they are authorized to make. It's as if they're saying "Guess! And if it turns out poorly, I can say I never told you to do whichever course you take."

Meaningful function names are a good start. But they can only answer "what" and not "why."

I like ISO format because then alphabetical order corresponds to chronological order.

Y-M-D and D-M-Y both have their advantages. Unfortunately my compatriots have standardized on M-D-Y, a convention that has no advantages that I can think of.

In my opinion, Python is good enough at a lot of different tasks. I don't think is the best possible language for everything, but it's close enough that it's better than having to keep more languages in your head.

I do a mix of math programming and general programming and I'd like to stay in one language if feasible. I would far rather use a well-designed, general-purpose language with math libraries than try to use a mathematical language for general-purpose programming.

I only started using it a few minutes ago, but it seems to have kept some of the best features of Google Reader. It was easy to start using.

There are about 2000 work hours in a week. Useful when converting hourly rate to annual salary, e.g. $50/hour = $100K/year.

Sure, it takes work. But we expect children to be able to do it and they do.

I don't think that human nature changes over history, but culture does. I agree that attention spans have become shorter, but I don't see how that relates to whether programming languages will expand their palette of symbols.

He said it was a few weeks ago. Maybe he finished his work before posting this to HN.

Maybe it's better to let people do explicit side projects as a creative outlet so that they don't shoehorn them into production projects.

For hacking financial debt, see http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/11/02/snowball-strategy/.

I agree. I was just about to write a similar comment.

Droid Sans not as common as the other fonts on the list. I threw it into the mix for a couple reasons. For one, the feedback from twitter suggested that Android might support fewer characters than other platforms. For another, I expected a lot of commonality between the other fonts, but Droid fonts were an independent effort so I thought there might not be as much overlap.

I don't know what about LaTeX makes it slower than TeX to compile. I always use LaTeX rather than TeX so I'm used to the former's speed.

So recently when I compiled a huge TeX document, I assumed the compile had failed because it returned so quickly -- it seemed to return immediately -- but it completed successfully.

I've updated the post to include more readers people have suggested.

Goto statements are a good example. It's easier to recite "goto is harmful" than to say "In most situations, other control structures are more expressive and easier to maintain than goto statements. However, there may be rare occasions, particularly in low-level system programming, where goto statements could be preferable."

"Don't parse HTML with regex" is good general advice, but no more an absolute than avoiding goto statements.

I agree as far as parsing most HTML. I use regular expressions all the time when I'm working with HTML I've written by hand because I know what's there.

I just find it interesting that the efficacy of regular expressions can be framed as a computer science question, a practical question, and a statistical question.

I imagine that any feasible scientific experiment would measure only a crude approximation to reality. How can you randomize someone to a job and a way of working? Most people are not capable of concentrating for four hours a day, or have jobs that don't permit it.

At best you might recruit some undergraduates -- nearly all psychology subjects are college students -- and have them do some artificial task one way or another for a couple weeks. I find anecdotes from successful musicians, scientists, and authors more persuasive than data from an contrived scientific study.

Please see this follow-up post: Approximation relating lg, ln, and log10

http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2012/11/24/approximation-relat...

No. Peter Norvig found a particular instance where a formula motivated by Bayes' theorem worked even better when the formula was changed. The altered formula doesn't have a theoretical basis, but it seems to work.

The original link is down.

New link: http://research.google.com/pubs/pub38331.html

I could see theoretical CS merging back into math, and software engineering being part of engineering. The latter is more likely than the former.

Some writing courses have been absorbed by other departments. Engineering departments, for example, may teach their own technical writing courses rather than going through the English department. When I was in college, I had a writing course offered through the physics department.

There's a follow-up post addressing some of the arguments given in the comments to the first post: http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2012/07/23/80-20-software-ii/

Good point. I believe that explains why a lot of software is so bloated. It got that way for good reasons, at least what were good reasons at the time.