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kd0amgon I've reproduced 130 research papers about “predicting the stock market”

It's not just hand-wavy. It's outright wrong. The size of the search space isn't just exponential in the amount of history -- that's the number of possible histories. The number of mappings from histories to positions is doubly exponential, so they can't even be uniquely described in less than exponential space.

kd0amgon Yoda conditions

Or use ML-style reference cells, so that assignment cannot work on two things of the same type.

kd0amgon Lisp is not based on the Lambda Calculus

"Receiving the source code" of an argument in lambda calculus is an accident of notation. The source code is not observable by the function it is passed to. Confluence implies that there is no way within lambda calculus to distinguish the result of reducing a term from the term itself.

kd0amgon FAA Bans Recalled Apple Laptops from Flights

That's a lot rarer than a 5% chance. If 5% of these laptops exploded every few hours, there wouldn't be many of them left by now.

kd0amgon Shepard Tone

No (nontrivial) additive combination of Cs is also an additive combination of Ds (or C#s or Bs or ...). You'd need something nonlinear like multiplicative combinations, effectively a C amplitude-modulated by another C, in order to get non-C results.

kd0amgon Social exclusion fuels extremism in young men

I can't help but feel like the Venn's diagram between people who suggest "move to a more rural area" and people who never lived in a rural area for a prolonged period of time is a full circle.

I've seen plenty of comments from people in rural areas along the lines of "Why are all the young folks moving to the big cities instead of here?"

kd0amgon Racket: Lisp for Learning

DrRacket seems to suffer a lot from re-implementing typical GUI components. Scrolling a text pane is slow (unless there's a very small amount of text in it), clicking buttons sometimes produces no visual acknowledgement, the "close window" hotkey does not work on some windows (e.g., Preferences), etc. The most entertaining example I've seen was a few years ago when some users with Retina MacBooks were confused as to why the close/minimize/resize buttons in DrRacket were blurry while no other applications they ran had that issue.

kd0amgon Racket: Lisp for Learning

Do kids that skip the racket course generally do better than those that don't?

This is likely to have some confounding factors, considering the usual mechanics of skipping a university course.

kd0amgon Why is modern web development so complicated?

I’d argue that the multiplicity of different programming languages and programming language paradigms suggests there likely isn't a teleological trajectory towards some single standard for programming.

We also have a multiplicity of building materials, tools, fabrication processes, etc. What's the standard way to make a steel object? Do you cast, forge, stamp, mill, sinter, roll, weld? I would expect engineering as a discipline to have more solid arguments for choosing which (combination) of those processes to use for a particular task than what is typically thrown around in discussions about choosing a programming language or paradigm.

kd0amgon FCC closes telemarketing loophole used by scammers

Does it spoof? If X calls Y and gets forwarded to Z, does caller ID at Z show X or Y? As a possibly naive user, showing X seems like the right thing to do, since that's the number Z will be connected to if someone answers.

kd0amgon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2019)

Location: Boston, MA

Remote: if necessary

Willing to relocate: yes

Technologies: Racket, OCaml, C, Java, J, APL, ACL2, LLVM, Haskell

Web: https://jrslepak.github.io

Email: jrslepak@ccs.neu.edu

I'm nearing the end of my PhD in programming language design, with a focus on high-level languages for data-parallel computing. My overall interest is in designing/building tools for data science, scientific programming, machine learning, and similar fields.

kd0amgon Why Generics?

Generics are more for developing reusable libraries than single applications.

kd0amgon Parents Give Up Custody of Their Kids to Get Need-Based College Financial Aid

Even weirder if it also doesn't expect legal guardians to contribute

kd0amgon Parents Give Up Custody of Their Kids to Get Need-Based College Financial Aid

Well... CLC didn't offer me much that I wanted but couldn't get at Stevenson anyway. I was dual enrolled for an introductory philosophy class, but within my eventual undergrad majors, Stevenson offered at least as much coursework depth.

kd0amgon Think in Math, Write in Code

Don't numeric solutions in math books also look very different from closed-form solutions?

kd0amgon Think in Math, Write in Code

Curry-Howard maps typical practical tasks on the programming side to completely useless make-work on the math side. Turning a customer's name and address into text to make a mailing label has to happen at some point, but you really don't need to go through all those steps to show that if customers exist, then strings exist.

kd0amgon YouTube bans content “showing users how to bypass secure computer systems”

Past thought about free speech seems to be based on the assumption that people can communicate without having some third party approve the sender/receiver/message. Now we mostly use a communication medium that involves a lot of third parties. How many private companies carried this comment to your screen? The bakery whose WiFi I'm using now, their ISP, some unknown backbone carrier, YCombinator, your ISP. Maybe a CDN provider and some others I can't think of.

We already have an answer about a government-operated communication medium: the government (including those acting on its behalf) must uphold our rights. That implies an obligation to keep storing/hosting/delivering things we say. It costs money, but society is more or less ok with the idea of a government having a legal obligation to spend resources on something. But what do we do with a private entity which spends a lot of money to operate and maintain a communication medium?

kd0amgon GNU APL 1.8

For coding in APL, I just switch to an alternate keymapping (Dyalog has one available for free).

kd0amgon How much are professors paid?

I think GP is using "role" to mean the collection of tasks/functions performed by a person rather than their job title. As far as I can tell, duties and incentives don't change as much when going from associate to full professor as when going from assistant to associate.

kd0amgon How much are professors paid?

A professor typically isn't working full-time on research either.

kd0amgon No Kings: How Do You Make Good Decisions Efficiently in a Flat Organization?

What's the hierarchical ordering of Congress, SCOTUS, and the White House?

kd0amgon Endless Sky: GPL Licensed Escape Velocity Successor

Captain Hector isn't the issue. You never got the 4th wall break?

kd0amgon Endless Sky: GPL Licensed Escape Velocity Successor

You won't be able to play through the full storyline though.

kd0amgon Colons in computer science paper titles (2018)

At least papers don't have subtitles (I think).

I've seen a few printed as having subtitles, including one with both a colon and a subtitle.

http://brrian.org/papers/ecoop2011-javascript-eval.pdf

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.03832.pdf

https://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/pmmwp...

kd0amgon Mathematics all-in-one cheat-sheet (2013) [pdf]

Searching for stuff I've used, this document is also quite light on combinatorics, complexity theory, and order theory (and of stuff I haven't used much, I don't see anything on category theory or topology). I don't think 330 pages is nearly enough to be truly all-in-one.

kd0amgon Ian Lance Taylor's Response to “Go Is Google's Language”

Go shot past similar languages because Google's backing got lots of instant attention from people who would never even hear of something like Nim or Clay.

kd0amgon Economics journal only publishes results that are no big deal

Citations actually already are a implicit voting system for quality work. ( in theory...)

I'm not sure this is even true in theory. The decision to cite something looks to me to be more about relevance than quality. Citing a paper says, "they investigated a related question," rather than "their investigation was especially rigorous/thorough."

Encouraging journals to publish more "boring" research, and if need be, dedicated journals, can have an actual impact.

Only if tenure committees and funding agencies consider the "boring" research sufficiently important.

kd0amgon The rise of the sober bar

I guess my question is, why can't you get the same experience at a regular bar?

Because relatively few bars have anything interesting to drink that's non-alcoholic.

kd0amgon Crimes in Concrete

There are definitely some confounding factors other than architecture to account for. At least in Boston, new construction isn't replicating the century-old triple decker (of course, truly doing that would take a century of wear and tear). So I have to wonder how much of that price premium comes from having brand new stainless steel appliances and on-site gyms instead of creaky floors and questionable wiring. And then it seems to me, just wandering around town, the "modern" new construction is priced well above market price (lots of units sit vacant for a long time, with many eventually adding deal-sweetening offers like a month or two of free rent).

kd0amgon Google Is Turning Off the Works-with-Nest API

First they came for Google Wave, and I did not speak out—Because I never really understood what Wave was to begin with.

Then they came for Google+, and I did not speak out—Because almost all the people I want life updates from are on Facebook.

Then they came for Google Reader, and I did not speak out—Because I never actually heard of Reader until years after it was eliminated. Maybe Reader was actually first?

Then they came for Works with Nest, and I smugly said, "I told you so"—Because I always thought it was a bad idea to expose my thermostat to the internet.

Finally, they game for GMail—and I couldn't contact anyone who might speak out for me.