US Army applying new areas of math • Hacker News Board

Re: US Army applying new areas of math

#151

Post by hatchershoes » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 7:52 PM UTC

gdy wrote: post #142

cf498 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are however killing people. Lets not skip over that part as nice and cuddly as "just doing their job" sounds. I highly doubt the dead would care that their murderers were paid to do it.

It's nice to displace the guilt for democratically electing a government that orders your military to kill people by blaming the military instead of yourself.

You think that I am to blame for American drones murdering families in foreign countries? How about my parents for not teaching me to vote better?

Re: US Army applying new areas of math

#152

Post by mattigames » Fri, Mar 22, 2019, 10:12 PM UTC

RhysU wrote: post #105

mattigames wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, traditional sources suck, in America; universities should be way more tightly controlled, in a decent society taking 56% of grant money should put some people in jail. In the year 2019 working for the US military should feel embarrassing, after the Iraq fiasco, support to journalist-killer Saudi crown prince; support to genociders that use child soldiers such as Idriss Déby (Chad), plus many other mistakes make…

There is danger in inaction. Note that US soil isn't often annexed. This damned thread has triggered all my pent up jingoism. "America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn't standing still. " -- e.e. cummings If you take orders for a living, your job is to be on the move. Not to…

The problem is that "being 100% in the right" doesn't seem to be their goal, not even a secondary one.

Re: US Army applying new areas of math

#153

Post by Ericson2314 » Sat, Mar 23, 2019, 4:19 PM UTC

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #22

Ericson2314 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think "bad at specifying the domain and range of functions" was somebody trying to describe type safety in more pedestrian terms. I think the actually idea is while the theory of statistics (like all math) is well typed, professional statisticians tend to use shitty tools/programming languages without good type systems. People scoff that type errors are easy, but when most of the work is encoding the domain knowled…

No, it is not about static typing or the general use of typed data structures for describing statistical software. Statistical software has been among some of the best software around for a long time. In fact, I frequently revisit aspects of the C++ implementation of STAN and the interface design of pymc as inspiration for effective software design in other domains. The idea that statistics is a field with poor softw…

> Stan interfaces with the most popular data analysis languages (R, Python, shell, MATLAB, Julia, Stata) and runs on all major platforms (Linux, Mac, Windows).

None of those languages have good type systems.

And like I said, this is about modelling more generally than just statistics.

Re: US Army applying new areas of math

#154

Post by jjtheblunt » Sat, Mar 23, 2019, 11:36 PM UTC

amirhirsch wrote: post #21

romwell wrote: post #8

For anyone interested in applying traditionally pure fields, Applied Topology has been slowly gaining steam lately (as reflected in the article: "topological" is now a hot word). Robert Ghrist of UPenn has been at the forefront of bringing topology into applied fields; and has written a good text on the subject.

Hipster Topology: I studied Algebraic Topology before it became "Applied"

ditto