Infinity is not a number it is a concept[1] My math teacher used to say think of infinity like a impossibly large number. An impossibly large number divided by two is still an impossibly large number
I'm not talking about math. I'm talking about computer numbers, specifically IEEE-754.
NaN is represented by a maximal (all ones) exponent, and at least one non-zero in the mantissa. Infinity has the same exponent but an all-zero mantissa. So with a naive comparison, NaN compares greater than infinity.
If you only believe output from programming languages, javascript claims that the type of infinity is "number".
I know you were talking about floating point. That is why I said what I said using python code. It seems to be a concrete representation of IEEE-754 math. Also from my reading and understanding numpy is written by scientists that understand IEEE-754 perhaps a little more than some others.
I was fully away of that stuff you say about how NaN is represented and was also aware of how Inf is represented. My statement and link to the concept of Infinity on mathforum was an effort to support the idea of why most math done with code involving Inf will also result in an answer of Inf.
The article that this whole discussion is about seems to think it is OK (ie not a bug) to convert a float like Inf to a integer do some math and convert back to a float and get 1.5 and that is OK. It seems like a bug to me.
While you’re correct, you’re being downvoted probably because you’re taking this seriously. I’m sure most everyone here knows infinity isn’t a number, but a concept, but you never know.
I think any conversation that says there is halfway between inf and 0 is treating inf like it is a fixed point and therefore a number and not a concept
This is why participating on Hacker News conversations are problematic. I think you are talking about downvoting because a persons misunderstands me. Even in your statement you imply by saying "but you never know" that it is possible people aren't being aware of the point I was making
> tan(π/8) would be halfway between 0 and 1 ie .5?
It implies that tan(π/8) would be "halfway" between 0 and 1 in this sense of what "halfway" means. In this sense, 0.5 is not halfway between 0 and 1, 0.414 is.
It's easier to visualize it. You're standing on the roof of a 1-meter-tall building on a flat earth with a perfectly clear atmosphere. If you look straight out
(90°) you can see to infinity (tan 90°). If you look down (0°) you can see where you are (tan 0°). If you look halfway between those (45°), you can see 1 (tan 45°) meter straight in front of you. But if you look halfway down again, you won't see exactly 0.5 meters, will you?
This does not imply that tan(pi/8) is 0.5. There’s some overloaded language here that I’d like to unpack:
The original issue at hand is to talk sensibly about “half way” between 0 and infinity. But in the standard way we think about distance between numbers, there’s obviously no way to do that — you can’t add and subtract real numbers to infinity!
So, implicitly what’s happening here is that by talking about a map between a finite interval and (0,inf), we are equipping (0,inf) with a new, special definition of distance between numbers. This is called a metric.
Usually, when we talk about the distance between x and y, we mean `d(x,y) = |x-y|` — this is called the Euclidean metric (in 1 dimension).
Here, we’ve introduced a new metric on (0,inf): `d2(x,y) = |tan^-1(x) - tan^-1(y)|/(pi/8)`
The half way point between 0 and 1 under the Euclidean metric is 0.5. The half way point between 0 and 1 under our fancy new metric d2 is ~0.414.
TL;DR: You can generalize the notion of “distance between two numbers”, using distance functions called metrics. Under the typical metric, the half way point between 0 and 1 is 0.5. Under our cool new infinite-tan metric, the half way point between 0 and 1 is ~0.414.
> tan(π/8) would be halfway between 0 and 1 ie .5?
tan(π/8) = √2 - 1, not 1/2, but the value is indeed halfway between 0 and 1 if you take the distance function to be
d(a, b) = |b - a| / (√(1 + a²)√(1 + b²)) or
d(a, b) = |b - a| / |1 + ab|
(These are chordal distance or stereographic distance, respectively, when the real number line is used to represent points on a circle under stereographic projection.)
The halfway point is 0.5 when you use the distance function d(a, b) = |b - a|.
Wouldnt spending money on infrastructure create need for people to be in the same physical location to do at least the manual work part of building infrastructure? Recent maintenance of electricity infrastructure in this street created a congregation of at least 8 people.
Also building infrastructure seems like a win win but after the infrastructure is built there is also a commitment to maintain the infrastructure. Isnt this like signing up for a recurring expense? Too often I think politicians and others think of it like a one off purchase to garner votes.
>> Don’t ever respond to a solicitation or a proposal on the phone. The urgency is a disguise.
> A disguise for what?
I think:
Something not quite right or something worse.
It's easier to get away with things when they aren't face to face. People often know when they are trying to get away with something and leak the truth or information about the truth in body language.
Also it is quicker to communicate over the phone. If they are desperate they can deliver a proposal( ask for stuff?) over the phone within a quicker time frame.
I get an error about the browser not supporting cookies. In the browser console I get this:
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attribute. It has been blocked, as Chrome now only delivers cookies with cross-site requests if they are
set with `SameSite=None` and `Secure`. You can review cookies in developer tools under
Application>Storage>Cookies and see more details at https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5088147346030592
and https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5633521622188032.
Chrome Version 80.0.3987.163 (Official Build) (64-bit) on a Apple MacOS
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I dont think you understand what it is like in some job markets. Once you are in an industry you might be able to sustain a career without certifications but how is someone supposed to break into an area when people only hire candidates with "experience" or certifications? Certifications were proof that you got off your ass and learnt and passed an exam. People that hire do not trust resumes anymore because candidates can put anything in a resume to make them sound good. You could construct a lab at home and write about your learning activities but in my experience no one trust such "evidence" since people can just copy and paste other peoples work.
Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat and hold several certifications, so I have a clear conflict of interest here
I agree with your analysis there regarding outdated and passable via brain-dumps, which is why I both respect and pursue Red Hat certs (before I went to work there). They are damn hard and there's no way to pass them unless you have practiced your ass off. The cert transcripts also specify exactly which version of the tech you took your exam on (e.g. RHEL 7 or Ansible v2.7), so an employer can see if your skills are outdated. IME they are well respected in the industry.
No test or cert if perfect of course, but they're not all equal IMHO.
Some certs like A+ are a game to get the candidate to memorize useless, obscure trivia that is found in someone's test prep materials.
The exploitative training/testing racket is all about creating a subscription-like dependency with planned obsolescence to get steady, easy money for more testing and more exams.
Thank the various gods for, back in the day: TestKing.
Good certifications which can be used in certain safety-critical tech jobs include the US state-by-state Professional Engineer license with a brutal and comprehensive exam process plus required work experience.
In general, better exams are free-form responses and/or a panel interview (if they still do that) like CCIE.
My boss had an MCSE but could only operate a Windows desktop as a power user and install Windows (server). He got this cert because of the "bootcamp" where they only taught to the tests and then they took the tests until they passed them.
Meanwhile, I was deploying GPOs and scripting remote cleanups of Blaster using PsExec... zero certs and no degree.
A+ is the mark of the beast and the coming of the second-stringer.
Get an A+ certification and see how far you get. :)
I could be wrong, but you come across to me on the negative-side, like cognitive distortions or inexperience. "Some job markets" being what specifically? Game dev, for example, the most sure path to that is more general experience before and willingness to work as an unpaid intern/code janitor prior to getting a paid position.
"How": That's your responsibility to use your imagination to figure out. No one else can or should think for you or do what you need to do because then you won't internalize independence or gain self-confidence to be more capable.
I've been a hiring manager on occasion. Resumes are an advertisement that must be proven fact-checking the candidate that the can demonstrate further knowledge and calling references. Resumes are often moot in rapid-pace technology fields where demonstration of specific, current knowledge is more important.. they are only good if they can be used as advertisements to get the attention of a company and/or get attention of different decision-makers within that company.
A home lab is useful for gaining knowledge that may be tested in an interview... like how to construct an HA MySQL or Postgres cluster that can failover itself, move the vIP and prevent split-brain. Or machine learning.
In general, I had zero family, friends or legacy connections for the following to demonstrate :
At 15, I went to interesting talks and colloquia just for the heck of it, and asked questions. At one of them, I was offered a job as a dark matter physics research assistant at IBM Almaden but couldn't take it for legal reasons (15 ½ legal minimum). I was disappointed, but moved forward.
At 16, I got a pizza flipping/cashier job with zero experience because no one else was hiring (it was a recession and there lots of potential workers). Definitely a sh*t job but a job nonetheless. I had to break down every business door in the area and it was rejection almost every time, except when it wasn't.
At 17, I moved to a job in retail software sales with only one crap job on my resume by again banging-down every door to every business for 2 miles down a main road.
At 18, I started a sysadmin consultancy and built it up to 4 clients within a single building for convenience. I was doing sysadmin, netadmin and ported a Fortran nuclear reactor simulator from UNIX to Win32 and made it run 2.5x faster by disabling swap. Also, added a Cisco 1604 128 KiB ISDN router and discovered AIX was phoning home to IBM, keeping the router always demand-dialing... nothing a little /etc/hosts couldn't fix.
About 19, I took a crap-ton of (then cheap) community college classes, 5-7 at a time, and did a Transfer Admission Agreement to guaranty admission to a decent school while working almost full-time.
21, transferred to the uni and took 4 CS quarter-system classes at time. It's even more fun with a concrete math class where proofs are pages and pages. 3-4 all-nighters a week for months at a time.
At 25, I hit pause on uni and got a full-time Lead SysAdmin job at (top 5 university name) without a degree and zero certifications. They gave me all sorts of training/certs that were of mostly limited value and no importance but gave my boss an excuse to put us up in Hollywood, rent a Jag and personal-cost road-trip to Vegas on Friday. Remote-site VMware VCP training cost $10k back then, I bet it's $15-18k now... and the tests cost $3k+ now IIRC.
At 27, I moved to a biomedical informatics department doing High Performance Computing (HPC) and what would be considered now more like SRE.
A couple of years later, I bounced to finish the degree and go into enterprise consulting.
At 31, I did on-premises, generalist (SRE-like) integration and migrations at an AWS preferred partner for Fortune 200.
At 32, I delved in the startup scene, mostly earlier YC batch folks and did a smattering of consulting gigs, getting paid $10k/week. (It's best at that point to have an LLC.) In general, hang around the right coffee shops, and meeting potential clients is inevitable.
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Here are some preparatory elements to consider:
- Put useful things on Github and/or Youtube/Vimeo.
- Scrub social media clean or close them.
- LinkedIn is essential for legacy organizations.
- Have a resume in PDF & DOCX formats.
- Have a personal site that has limited details, links to professional social sites and a captcha'ed contact form.
- Carry personal cards with email (containing name), phone number with +country code and timezone, and a QR barcode that's the vCard.
- Cultivate a pleasant, no complaints, always on-time, always deliver, can-do/will-figure-it-out attitude.
- Make them tell you "no," because never asking is a definite "no."
It doesnt work the same. On Ubuntu I have found that you have to log in first on the machine so that the vnc server starts before you can use a vnc client to connect. It kind of sucks to have to go tot he machine to login each time it is restarted and leave the machine logged in.
I wonder how much difference physical stress Vs mental stress it makes. Stress is stress. Anxiety (mental stress) causes physical symptoms. The will to continue in physical endeavours is through changing the mind and being determined to continue. Mind over matter. This want to stop doing physical stuff comes from the mind. So improving the mental toughness comes from repetitively attempting to breach this barrier.
Goggins even says stuff in his interviews with Joe Rogan that indicate that he would agree. Most people stop physical activity not when the body is exhausted but when the brain thinks the body is done. When Jesse Itzler interviewed with Joe Rogan about Goggins, he said Goggins thought people only did 40% of what they were capable of until they changed their mind.
