Readit NewsI think the principal critique of Nowak et al.'s work is based on how it gets the biology wrong, not the math. Chicago evolutionary biologist (and prolific public intellectual) Jerry Coyne, reviews a recent paper that challenges Nowak et al.'s paper [1]. The answer to Taleb's weird post is within Coyne's review of Liao et al.:
> As I (Coyne) noted at the time (of Nowak et al.'s publication), their (Nowak et al.'s) dismissal of relatedness and kin selection from their model seemed bizarre, since they didn’t vary relatedness in their model. If you don’t do that, how can you say it’s unimportant in evolving eusociality?
"Math checks out" is a questionable approach to understanding science.
On a possibly related note, Taleb has recently been on a strange anti-Dawkins spree on Twitter and elsewhere [2]. Taleb has also done some weird anti-GMO bashing in the past [3].
[1] https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2015/03/27/new-pape...
[2] twitter.com/nntaleb
[3] http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-11-18/news...
//"Math checks out" is a questionable approach to understanding science.
Very much agree. By this standard, one could put "1+1=2" as an appendix to every article you ever write and then defend them as having valid math, regardless of the content of the rest of the paper.
I find this most surprising coming from Taleb, because I thought that one of his principal arguments in the world of finance was that rigourous mathematical models are of limited use in understanding complicated real world systems. Maybe I've misunderstood him, but he seems to have changed his tune.
> > So, is that before or after having been gc'd?
> GCing only removes garbage. Since you're creating branches to keep track of your topics, this shouldn't ever be a problem. If you had no references to a commit, it must not have been important!
Coming from Mercurial to Git, this has been the single hardest thing to wrap my head around (so far). Why should I have to tell my version control system twice not to throw away my work? Committing a change should be sufficient to let the VCS know that I want to save it. That's what that word means.
Actually, I thought of an analogy that helps me reason about this.
If we think of the VCS like a text editor, then a branch is like a file that you can write changes to. However, if you're working on an unnamed file, then the editor (or its designers) has to make a choice about what to do with that unnamed document when you're done.
Git treats an unnamed branch like the scratch buffer in Emacs. You can make all the changes you want, but once you close it, it's gone (in this case, eligible for GC). This seems reasonable, because if you cared about it, you would have given it a name.
Mercurial's designers work off a different assumption: all the work that you do is important (and it provides other mechanisms to allow rough work). So if you start working in an unnamed branch, that's no problem. You can have as many unnamed branches as you like, but it's up to you to remember your way around. Going back to the filesystem analogy, it becomes like navigating between your unnamed text files by their address on the disk, rather than a nice human readable name.
Does this analogy make sense to anybody else?
> But how do I merge your "foo" and my "woot"?
`git checkout woot; git merge his/foo`?
> Um ... why should I even have to care?
Because it helps encourage separating work logically, and gives you quick way to reset your working tree to a known state should merging upstream changes go awry?
> Why aren't we just working on the same branch by default?
You are, you just create topic branches off the development one to focus a series of commits on some goal. When you're ready to share it, just merge it into the development branch and push it. If you and your colleague are working on a topic together, you do the same, just push to some common remote branch for that topic.
> What happens when I type "git push"?
In Git 2.0, it pushes the current branch iff it tracks a remote upstream one; otherwise it prints an error explaining how to set the upstream branch for the current branch.
> So, is that before or after having been gc'd?
GCing only removes garbage. Since you're creating branches to keep track of your topics, this shouldn't ever be a problem. If you had no references to a commit, it must not have been important!
> Which branches did you get? etc.
As far as I know, cloning gets every branch from a remote; not all branches will automatically have tracking branches, but making those is easy enough.
> Worst, they are ways that you can corrupt your repository or blow your code away.
Do you mean making incompatible commits via rebasing by "corruption," or are you referring to actual repository data loss due to bugs? I'm unaware of the latter. If you consistently make temporary private branches, it should be impossible to lose work.
Is graph theory really that complicated? I always thought it was one of the more intuitive compsci topics, since it's very visual. Maybe that's my bias, though.
I try Mercurial every once in a while, so I'm not basing my opinion only on old versions (in fact, I just played around with it again today.) I always feel constrained--like it's trying to prevent me from doing what I want to do. A lot of it is familiarity, I'm sure, and differences in nomenclature (though, I'll say, "checkout" makes a lot more sense than "update" to me--I would assume that "update" would be analogous to "fetch").
> > So, is that before or after having been gc'd?
> GCing only removes garbage. Since you're creating branches to keep track of your topics, this shouldn't ever be a problem. If you had no references to a commit, it must not have been important!
Coming from Mercurial to Git, this has been the single hardest thing to wrap my head around (so far). Why should I have to tell my version control system twice not to throw away my work? Committing a change should be sufficient to let the VCS know that I want to save it. That's what that word means.
I get enough tech in my daily life, so I look to podcasts to enrich my life in other dimensions and teach me new things. Here are some of my favorites:
* Cooking, food, and molecular gastronomy; Cooking Issues: http://www.heritageradionetwork.org/programs/51-Cooking-Issu...
* Outdoor adventure; Dirtbag Diaries: http://dirtbagdiaries.com
* Music and poetic music breakdown (uniquely well-suited to audio as a medium); Song Exploder: http://songexploder.net
* History; the Memory Palace: http://thememorypalace.us
* Design; 99% Invisible: http://99percentinvisible.org
* Electic subjects: http://loveandradio.org
* RadioLab: http://www.radiolab.org
I'd love to find a good fiction podcast, with either short form stories or episodic long form arcs in the fashion of old-school radio shows.
Somebody already mentioned Welcome to Night Vale, which is a serial fiction podcast in the form of public radio news announcements from a town where all the weirdness of the world is true.
Also, there is The Thrilling Adventure Hour. This is a comedic take on old-school radio serials. There are multiple ongoing series within the show. This is a really funny show, with great production values, and some high profile guest stars.
tensorproduct commented on Please stop breaking the build danluu.com/broken-builds/... · Posted by u/luu
Am I missing something, or isn't this problem easily fixed by enforcing testing before push? As long as the appropriate tests are available, seems like this could be solved
I agree. I thought that this was the whole point of having a CI system.
I don't have a huge amount of experience in open source projects, so maybe they do it differently. Anywhere I've ever worked, not breaking the build and not causing regressions were a prerequisite to getting any pull request serviced. That's how you keep the master from breaking.
On the other hand, building a testing in a clean environment costs money. A company will pay for server time if they believe it's cheaper than developer time (it is). Maybe OS projects just don't have those resources.
tensorproduct commented on Know Your Tools – Terminal and Bash spacecowboyrocketcompany.... · Posted by u/zan
This is probably misunderstanding the demographic, but why does he suggest using nano over vim?
Maybe they just prefer nano?
More likely, if this is meant to be a gentle introduction to the command line, vim is a pretty scary place. Nano works much more like a "normal" text editor.
tensorproduct commented on Know Your Tools – Terminal and Bash spacecowboyrocketcompany.... · Posted by u/zan
The first thing I do on any bash terminal is `set -o vi`. This changes the default keybindings from emacs-like to vi-like. I find it to be a huge booster to my speed in navigating the command line.
edit: Actually, something cool I learned recently is that if you put the line "set editing-mode vi" in your ~/.inputrc then vi-like editing keys are available in any program that uses readline. This includes bash and the python repl. Presumably, a bunch of other repls and interactive command lines too.
tensorproduct commented on 'Nobody My Age Can Afford to Stay Here Forever' citylab.com/housing/2015/... · Posted by u/cindyceleste
How old are you? You mention that you have flatmates, but not everybody wants to live in a shared apartment far into their thirties, especially if you would like to find a place for you and your partner. The problem is that housing in London looks like a commodity that big sharks trade like many other long-term investment commodities. Problem is, that's the places where people would actually like to live that you're trading like it was crude oil barrels. How is that even barely sustainable for a city in the long term? Not limiting that by rules of law is a big mistake, but no politicians would be ever called into account for that.
I'm late-twenties/early-thirties. I'm probably just on the old side to still be perfectly happy to rent a room in a shared apartment. If I find myself in a long-term relationship then I imagine my priorities will change, but part of the reason I moved to London was because I thought it would be easier to meet romantic prospects.
I completely agree that property prices in London are insane, and that the political system is doing nothing to reign it in (quite the opposite, from my point of view).
But, from what I've experienced, if you don't want to buy your own property, then it's perfectly possible to live in London without earning crazy hedge fund money.
It has absolutely nothing to do with any "elite". It has to do with being economically visible.
If the government pays 300M citizens each $25k annually, that's $7.5T that has to come from somewhere.
If you play videogames all day, or turn your back yard into a decorative garden, or anything else you don't get paid for, then you are not contributing to that $7.5T.
Which can kinda be a problem if too many people do that and there's nowhere for it to come from.
A huge proportion of the welfare will is spent right away on consumption of necessities (food, rent) which goes right back into the economy. Specifically, it becomes revenue for business owners.