seanstickle

This is my difficulty with J as well.

APL has a better mental "feeling" for me, more like mathematical symbols. Oftentimes, these are pretty direct.

Want to drop the first element of a vector?

APL: 1 ↓ 1 2 3 4 5

J: 1 }. 1 2 3 4 5

The APL version looks like a drop to me. The J version looks like two characters that I have to remember the meaning of.

I'm sure if I was deeply proficient at J, the two-characters would stand out by their meaning, but it's hard for me to get that far when APL is so much cleaner for me to read.

Not to be too pedantic, but the profession is "physician assistant", not "physician's assistant." They typically have master's degrees (and all will be required to have master's degrees by 2020), can practice medicine in most specialities (including surgery, pediatrics, etc.), and can prescribe medicine in all 50 states.

Note: I work for the Physician Assistant Education Association.

This game is very similar to my first year of college mathematics -- studying Euclid's Elements and working through the proofs. I look forward to the game version of my sophomore year -- Apollonius' conic sections and Ptolemy's astronomy.

Deontic logic! "Prove that killing Mr. A is incompatible with the categorical imperative. Also supports undo and redo."

I don't limit characters, but I do limit my emails to 3 sentences per http://three.sentenc.es/

It's proven quite useful in my work, so I can see this product as a useful extension of the idea.

That said, the constraint is self-imposed, and I wouldn't dream of obligating other people to do the same just to send me an email.

Our college textbook for calculus was Newton's Principia, which I suppose is also somewhat dated. However, I was able to obtain a sound working knowledge of calculus from that. Granted, I updated it a bit with Robinson's 1970s text on nonstandard analysis.

The fundamentals prove to be quite timeless.

I would say that there are advantages and disadvantages to learning from an older text, depending on what you're aiming to learn.

Not to be too pedantic, but...

Felienne Hermans actually implemented a Turing machine in Excel, without using scripting: http://www.felienne.com/archives/2974

There was an HN post about this in September 2013: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6416631

Felienne Hermans has done some very interesting work examining how to refactor spreadsheets. (http://www.felienne.com/publications)

Her PhD dissertation on the subject "Analyzing and Visualizing Spreadsheets" (http://www.felienne.com/archives/2534) is particularly detailed.

Much though some people might think that spreadsheets are not for serious work, they're being used for that right now, and that is unlikely to change. Better to figure out how to improve the tooling, rather than undertake the quixotic quest to get business people to abandon their perfectly viable programming tool.

There is an excellent video with her on InfoQ, explaining her spreadsheet formula refactoring tool Bumblebee (and the F# code behind it): http://www.infoq.com/presentations/spreadsheet-refactoring

As a fan of accounting, I hasten to point out that this is only one of a couple of different triple-entry accounting schemes, which include:

* [Momentum accounting](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Momentum_accounting_and_triple-...)

* [Cryptographically-sealed triple entry accounting](http://bitcoinmagazine.com/9969/triple-entry-bookkeeping-bit...)

Point of clarification: physician assistants are qualified to diagnose, treat, and recommend courses of action related to health care.

Per the American Academy of Physician Assistants: "PAs perform physical examinations, diagnose and treat illnesses, order and interpret lab tests, perform procedures, assist in surgery, provide patient education and counseling and make rounds in hospitals and nursing homes. All 50 states and the District of Columbia allow PAs to practice medicine and prescribe medications."

http://www.aapa.org/the_pa_profession/what_is_a_pa.aspx

Disclaimer: I work for the Physician Assistant Education Association.

K: APL (and J) is too verbose.

APL: Errors increase in proportion to the amount of code typed; therefore, decrease amount of code typed while keeping expressiveness and power unchanged.

Alternatively:

APL: Programming should be more like math.

These are nice examples of scribal abbreviations in Latin. Q.v. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribal_abbreviation

And echoing one of the items from W. Edwards Deming's list of deadly diseases (from "Out of the Crisis", 1982): "Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force."

Create better systems, don't decorate the walls with nonsense "motivating" junk.

M => a thousand, as in Roman numerals.

MM => a thousand thousands, i.e. a million.

Commonly used in accounting and finance.

"The Man Who Loved Only Numbers": http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Loved-Only-Numbers/dp/07868840...

A poignant examination of the mathematician Paul Erdős, and his notion of The Book, "an imaginary book in which God had written down the best and most elegant proofs for mathematical theorems."

Both the article and the interview say that employers "think" that it's cheaper to leave the position unfilled, typically because of lousy cost accounting systems that do not give an accurate picture of the reduced system throughput (and thus the foregone revenue). Most companies optimize locally, which results in de-optimizing the whole system -- a department saves some money by not hiring a new systems administrator until the next fiscal year, and the whole company suffers decreased effectiveness.

Some positions advertised may be, in fact, better eliminated. But that's not the point that the article and interview are making.

More appropriately titled: The Dangerous Effects of Reading Crap. Should be paired with a companion piece: The Dangerous Effects of Eating Dung.

Quick work. Thanks.

Am I to understand that people who live in Washington DC do not, in fact, matter? The state drop down has no provision for DC.

Does Stripe allow delayed payments? That is, people put in their credit card details, Stripe authorizes the card but doesn't capture the amount charged, then we can approve/decline the transaction, and then Stripe can capture or void the transaction?

We have a situation where we need, for legal reasons, to verify that people giving us money are allowed to do so, and we really don't want to have to reverse the charge after the fact if we find out they're not eligible to pay us.

Otherwise, the system looks great, and I want to use it right now.

In the context of COBOL, the natural assumption would be mainframe Assembler of the S/390 variety. Which is a distinct language, not the class of assembly programming.

I think the canonical response to this comes from Harry Frankfurt:

""" Both lies and bullshit can either be true or false but bullshitters aim primarily to impress and persuade their audiences, and in general are unconcerned with the truth or falsehood of their statements (it is because of this that Frankfurt concedes that "the bullshitter is faking things", but that "this does not necessarily mean he gets them wrong"). While liars need to know the truth to better conceal it, bullshitters, interested solely in advancing their own agendas, have no use for the truth. Thus, Frankfurt claims, "...bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are" (Frankfurt 61). """

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit

Just because you can see something is wrong doesn't mean you have a solution, and not having a solution doesn't mean you shouldn't say that something is wrong.

I would agree that "here is what you are doing is wrong, and here is why" is always appropriate. But pointing out problems doesn't come with an obligation to figure out how to fix it.

Criticism is a valuable role, whether or not you can fix the thing you find broken.

I wholeheartedly agree with the idea of primary sources, and of studying mathematics historically in general.

The Elements of Euclid is a model of clear, concise, beautiful mathematics which is easily accessible. Archimedes as well. Follow that up with Apollonius, Ptolemy, some Descartes, and then Newton, and you have a junior high and high school curriculum in mathematics that would give students a real advantage over the rote "here is what Disembodied Authority says you should know" learning.

Note -- I am not advocating the study of mathematical history in junior and high school, but rather the study of mathematics historically. It gives access to mathematics as a branch of the humanities, less focused on the answers, and much more focus on the questions and how some really smart people have addressed those questions in the past, which gives a good guide on how to address new problems that will come up in the future.

When it comes to history specifically, as the OP asked, I would still agree with going with some of the great works of history. Historiography can be left for college, but give the kids access to the letters and diaries and personal accounts of people who were at the scene of history, as well as the great works of history that have been written (Thucydides, Herodotus, all the way to Toynbee, Gibbon, and, hell, even Spengler). Drop the mundane and milquetoast textbooks.

If you have a formal systems bent, as I do, you might enjoy "Algebraic Models for Accounting Systems" (http://www.amazon.com/Algebraic-Accounting-Systems-Salvador-...).

"This book describes the construction of algebraic models which represent the operations of the double entry accounting system. It gives a novel, comprehensive, proof based treatment of the topic, using such concepts from abstract algebra as automata, digraphs, monoids and quotient structures."

Think of it as a primer for building yourself an exceedingly awesome and utterly-unnecessary Haskell-based QuickBooks.

There is a very clear checkbox that says "Post to Facebook", which you can uncheck.

Doesn't address your other issues about communication needs, but broadcasting to all your friends is a problem with a check-the-checkbox fix.

I found "A Logical Approach to Discrete Math" by Gries and Schneider to be delightful. It teaches discrete math using formal logic as the basis of the whole system.

http://www.amazon.com/Logical-Approach-Discrete-Monographs-C...

Feels like an auto-generated aphorism.

Behold:

"The weak regrets his silence more than his words; the strong regrets his words more than his silence; the magnificent regrets nothing."

If you'd read that one first, it would be just as meaningful. Which is to say, not at all.

Slower in a computer, slower yet in people.

And the throughput in AAABBBCCC is 1 project in 3 days, where ABCABCACB has a throughput of 0 projects in 3 days. In a business where cashflow is important, that 3 day throughput is more important than the overall 9-day throughput.