< A lot of industrial Haskell sadly still uses string interpolation for SQL synthesis, or fall back on libraries that use TemplateHaskell to unsafely lock a specific build to a snapshot of a database at compile-time.

This sounds kinda off-putting, but I'm not totally sure what it means. Are the SQL libraries for haskell comparable to e.g knex, or psycopg, or sqlalchemy? The bit about string interpolation makes me think that prepared statements aren't used?

Do you have a reference for this? While Greece was strongly influenced by the cultures of the Near East and Egypt, it entirely misstates the situation to say that "most of their culture was handed to them." Edit - Walter Burkert has an excellent, short book on this - The Orientalizing Revolution

At least in the specific case of Herodotus, in his Histories, he has several theories about Greek customs borrowed from other cultures. He also has a relatively open mind about different cultures having customs that are better. For example, he talks at one point how he thinks the Persians (who were often enemies with different city states) have a good custom of raising young children (males) separate from the parents until a certain age so if they should die it is less of a hardship.

Herodotus was fantastic because he was the first historian, but he is seriously lacking as a historian if you judge him by modern standards. That doesn't detract from him as a great man and an intellectual pioneer, but it does mean we should be skeptical of his theories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus#Egypt

For sure, everything he says should be taken with a grain of salt. I was just giving an example of a specific Greek who had some of the ideas the OP was requesting.

I noticed that, but haven't any idea what the purpose is?

It's a speed optimization. Local lookups are faster than global lookups in Python.

Perhaps the elegance would be better illustrated if the planets were shown to move in elliptical rather than circular orbits - this of course was the primary historical difficulty in understanding planetary motion

Most of them are not that elliptical. When put to scale, they difference is almost negligible. For example Mercury has a 23.8Gm difference (51.7%) which sounds like a lot but that's 4 times less than Neptune's 80Gm difference (1.79%) and only 0.5% of Neptune's distance.

* Mercury max 69.8 Gm :: 46.0 Gm :: 51.7%

* Venus max 108.9 Gm :: min 107.5 Gm :: 1.30%

* Earth max 152.1 Gm :: min 147.1 Gm :: 3.40%

* Mars max 249.2 Gm :: min 206.7 Gm :: 20.6%

* Jupiter max 816.0 Gm :: min 740.6 Gm :: 10.2%

* Saturn max 1,509 Gm :: min 1,350 Gm :: 11.8%

* Uranus max 3,008 Gm :: min 2,742 Gm :: 9.70%

* Neptune max 4,540 Gm :: min 4,460 Gm :: 1.79%

I agree with the main point of the article, but I'm somewhat disturbed by the statistical errors and misconceptions.

>Few websites actually get enough traffic for their >audiences to even out into a nice pretty bell curve. If >you get less than a million visitors a month your >audience won’t be identically distributed and, even >then, it can be unlikely.

What is the author trying to say here? Has he thought hard about what it means for "an audience" to be identically distributed?

>Likewise, the things that matter to you on your website, >like order values, are not normally distributed Why do they need to be?

>Statistical power is simply the likelihood that the >difference you’ve detected during your experiment >actually reflects a difference in the real world. Simply googling the term would reveal this is incorrect.

How is that a 'devil's bargain'? Just seems like an everyday deal to me.

Perhaps your assessment says more about you than it does the actual facts of the case

That's why I said 'from my perspective', or is there something specific that it says about me?

That is precisely what happened with PDT, correct? It was spin out from MS

Nonsense. Tao is using perfectly idiomatic language here - "The sample space will be a probability space (once we have endowed it with some additional structure)".

That's not good: We don't want to have to use words such as endowed and structure that are not precisely defined in the context and, thus, are conceptually fuzzy.

Some intuitive overviews, clearly labeled as such, are fine and can be helpful, but "idiomatic language" just is not. Won't find such in the writings of W. Rudin, P. Halmos, J. Neveu, or any of a long list of authors of some of the best math books. In a good math or computer science journal, a reviewer or the editor would likely reject "idiomatic language".

The definitions I gave are the accepted ones.

Regarding d) - how much do you think the researcher, much of whose work was presumably funded by taxpayer dollars, should get?

I believe University of Waterloo is one of the few that does full ownership of work by Prof (I could be wrong) .. and year after year, they beat the biggest Universities in Canada for being ranked as the #1 in entrepreneurship, tech commercialization and innovation. I think its the subsequent economic impact that counts, rather than sequestering innovation for the sake of a few bucks in 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 ownership model.

https://uwaterloo.ca/research/waterloo-commercialization-off...

Many of the big giants of tech world have set up offices all around uWaterloo and enjoy a symbiotic relationship w/ the research faculty.

Agreed; I'm a researcher at an institution where the researchers get 1/3rd (split among all the patent authors). That fraction is okay with me. We get a huge boost from having access to the university community and the department's resources.

The only annoyance is that the 1/3rd comes from the University's profits, not revenue. The costs of the patent application, including the tech-transfer office salaries, are subtracted first.

I think the point goes towards the idea that the rewards should be related to the risk.

Commercializing IP - which is not a product yet - is non-trivial, could take years to productize, and then longer to penetrate (or create) a market. In short, it's a long, painful, and often expensive process that often fails anyway. If there was a way to provide a license agreement that was more favorable to product/market validation, that could change the economics.

Unfortunately, I've only participated in licensing once, so I don't have an alternative model to suggest.

Since the income generated is taxed anyway, Some of the proceeds go back to where they came from. An investment of sorts. The university and commercialization office should probably get cuts more commensurate with their contributions, whatever that may be.