I think of high-dimensional spaces in terms of projection. Projecting a 3-dimensional space onto a 2-dimensional space loses information and the results depend on perspective. Same with an 11-dimensional space being projected onto a 10-dimensional space.
I find that this metaphor works pretty well for visualizing how a vector-space search engine represents how two documents can be "similar" in N-dimensional term-space: look at them from the right angle and they appear close together.
Time to share my favorite quote from Symbols, Signals and Noise by John R. Pierce, where he discusses how Shannon achieved a breakthrough in Information Theory:
> This chapter has had another aspect. In it we have illustrated the use of a novel viewpoint and the application of a powerful field of mathematics in attacking a problem of communication theory. Equation 9.3 was arrived at by the by-no-means-obvious expedient of representing long electrical signals and the noises added to them by points in a multidimensional space. The square of the distance of a point from the origin was interpreted as the energy of the signal represented by a point.
> Thus a problem in communication theory was made to correspond to a problem in geometry, and the desired result was arrived at by geometrical arguments.
I would be willing to read a few chapters just on spec. There is real value in understanding how people used to think about a problem, and where the source ideas came from.
Humans crave certainty. Doctors, politicians, executives, salespeople, and so on are rewarded for conveying certainty even — especially — when reality is uncertain. It’s not that doctors don’t care to ferret out the truth, but that the market rewards them for claiming that they have the truth regardless of whether they actually have it in their grasp.
We need freedom, not paternalism. And yet, somehow, despite this nanny state utopia, my data gets leaked approximately once every 17 minutes. Security my entire ass.
> Bare excepts are syntactic sugar for `except BaseException`.
I'm guessing that a `3to4` script would be provided which replaces bare `except:` with `except BaseException:`. We have the experience of `2to3` to draw on with regards to how that might play out.
EDIT: Haha, I now see that this PEP proposes a change without advancing the major version. That surprises me.
If you have rodents inside your walls or attic, you have a major issue unrelated to the PEX. Also, to my knowledge, the colored PEX is the main culprit. Clear variants aren’t nearly as “tasty”.
Either way, if you have rodents inside… that’s its own issue.
Do you argue against layered security in your day job? I'm making a case for reducing blast radius in the event of a breach.
Of course rodent issues are related to PEX: now if a rodent ever does get in, the damage is multiplied when they eat your delicious PEX water pipes and you get a flood in addition to all the other horrors. Not so with metal piping.
It would be nice if all homes on earth could be completely 100% rodent proof forever. And it would be nice if attackers never breached computer systems. But some of us have to live in a world where such things happen.
You’re over prioritizing an edge case while ignoring benefits, I’d say.
If you want to talk about blast radius: PEX is substantially more resistant to freeze bursting. What about houses that are poorly insulated, so they are prone to pipe freezes? Copper pipes would be ill advised in that situation. I assume the same houses that are prone to rodent infestations are also poorly insulated. Which is more likely to happen I suppose depends on your climate.
Maybe I'll run it by my homeowner friend who suffered through the rat-chewed-PEX flooding that a PEX booster I came across considers her experience an "edge case". If I want to see her cry tears of blood, that is.
For good measure, I might also remind her that notwithstanding the flooding, the rats were a "major issue". Just in case she was confused about that!
Here in Europe, PEX is perfectly normal. The key difference is that we build our homes out of brick and mortar or outright solid concrete instead of wood, cardboard and glasswool, so pests have it much, much more difficult to cause damage.
Doesn’t Paris have an annual rat culling since their population of rats is like 10mil? And London is almost as bad as New York (which is also mostly stonework). The material hardly matters for rodents, as stone will make its own holes over time for them to get into, and the sewers in Europe are even older and in parts less maintained than the US.
Nah, according to what I've read, we really ran out of forest (wood) and had to start replanting them about 500 years ago, give or take a factor of two.
I quit a gig that was great in a lot of ways — great product, great peers, great potential — primarily because of of an "overachieving founder mode startup" individual. This person was exquisitely talented and inspiring but ultimately the only way to participate in the company was to overdrive yourself to the point of misery.
I stayed longer than perhaps I might have because that person was young enough to learn and change. And they definitely learned and changed over time, but not the lessons I thought they should learn. This doesn't make the direction they took objectively wrong, but eventually I and all the engineering peers I valued bailed out.
It was frustrating because I remain convinced it didn't have to turn out the way that it did. But leaving was absolutely the right thing to do and I'm much happier now.
Obviously not, as a trip to my profile page would have shown. And since you are not new either, you must have known that.
So I infer that you were displeased that I posted a story that has been discussed before when posted from other sources. I didn’t do it on purpose as I had not seen the others.
Of the 156 stories I’ve posted in the last 10 years, there have been 7 that either were marked as [dupe] or were [flagged] because they were dupes. I had not heretofore seen this ratio as problematic. FWIW I already strip off URL detritus to give HN’s URL dupe detection algorithm maximum advantage.
I will contemplate whether in the future I ought to perform an exhaustive search of HN before I post a story. Do others routinely do this? The tools aren’t great.
A conversation between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson from A Study in Scarlet, by Arthur Conan Doyle:
> That any civilized human being in this nineteenth century should not be aware that the earth travelled round the sun appeared to be to me such an extraordinary fact that I could hardly realize it.
> "You appear to be astonished," he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. "Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it."
> "To forget it!"
> "You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose..."
> "But the Solar System!" I protested.
> "What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently; "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."
This is a very inapropos quote, because A Study In Scarlet was the first Holmes story, and Conan Doyle later retconned this because it turns out to be very important for a detective of Holmes' sort to be able to draw on seemingly-useless knowledge in order to make serendipitous leaps of logic.
I maintain that it's relevant because it illustrates how unreliably people assess just what knowledge is likely to be useful. If anything, the fact that it was retconned reinforces that such assessments can be wrong.
For example, there's a notion in this thread relying on GPS makes you soft and that unless you learn how to navigate the way your forebears did you'll be unprepared or something. I find this proposition just as dubious as the notion that actively forgetting that the earth goes around the sun helps you solve murder mysteries.
It seems to me as though such assessments are often driven by self-interest and the desire to maximize the social utility of one's own knowledge and experience. Of course, those who believe that that "GPS makes you soft" is unquestionably true may find fault with my perspective.
I also just find that passage hilarious. It's simultaneously so misguided and yet so compellingly crafted, which is what makes for great satire whether intentional or not. My Dad read Sherlock Holmes stories aloud to me when I was a kid and that passage has always stuck with me. But perhaps this wasn't the right audience to share it with.
I find that this metaphor works pretty well for visualizing how a vector-space search engine represents how two documents can be "similar" in N-dimensional term-space: look at them from the right angle and they appear close together.
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