Viewing profile — arghbleargh

Sounds intriguing, but after reading through the website for 5 minutes, I still have no idea how this is supposed to work. From the pictures, it looks like they've set up some kind…

I find a lot to agree with in this article, and it explains it pretty well, but the part about the Federal Reserve is a bit too simplistic. The value of money is determined by a co…

Looks very interesting! I don't completely understand how to use it (and I guess not everything works yet?), but the UI looks nice, and it looks like it has some really cool featur…

Crucial question whose answer I didn't catch while reading the articles: how do you determine who is considered a "scientist"?

Not to say that the thing about men vs. women isn't problematic, but that quote is taken out of context. The suffrage part is a completely separate bullet point and isn't saying th…

This seems like a tricky case because if the users and drivers are being completely rational, it's not clear that Uber's deception should have affected their behavior. Sure, the dr…

50,000 miles/year * 20 years = 1,000,000 miles does not seem reasonable...

Isn't it simple enough to make three bounds checks to essentially do the same thing you did with the zero padding? You can even make it a function is_in_bounds(x, y, z)

It makes sense to control pedestrian traffic in some intersections, but it just seems like they're not even trying to optimize pedestrian throughput. What makes the lack of feedbac…

Wait, so will Sage still be open source?

Yes, I think this has to be a major reason why people distrust science, and frankly I am sympathetic to it. Too many studies amount to a 2% statistical difference (with an analysis…

I think this highly depends on what you mean by self-taught. Probably a majority of good mathematicians are "self-taught" in the sense that they learned most of the things they kno…

There is a linear programming formulation of the shortest path problem: see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortest_path_problem#Linear... . Indeed the vertices of the simplex met…

As someone who has done a fair bit of both math and programming, I will agree that having some math knowledge has definitely helped at various times when programming, but I don't t…

While you are correct in pointing out that these contests only test a relatively narrow subset of the skills needed for good programming, I don't think it would be correct to say i…

The notation is indeed a bit non-standard (we would generally use intersections nowadays), but it's not completely ad hoc. If you think of P_n as the indicator function of the poly…

It should be noted that from the original paper, the asymptotic formula that Oliver and Soundararajan conjecture still says that each possibility for the last digits of consecutive…

Providing opportunities for kids to learn coding is great, but it's possible to go overboard with it (teaching pre-readers?). For example, I don't think it should be considered one…

Does anyone have any insight into how Skyscanner differentiates from the many other flight booking websites (Kayak, Expedia, Travelocity, etc.)?

It definitely seems true, in my experience, that one-on-one tutoring achieves educational outcomes far superior to traditional classroom learning. However, I am wary about the abil…

When this kind of device is being used outside, does it actually have a noticeable impact on the air quality? Purifying enough air to fill Madison Square Garden sounds impressive, …

> "He just wants to invent good things for mankind,” said Ahmed’s father, Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed, who immigrated from Sudan and occasionally returns there to run for president. W…

Interesting that engagement seems to be waning from a lot of Evernote users (based on this anecdatum and the article). Is it because the product has gotten actively worse, or do yo…