I interviewed at Palantir last month, and the process is still very similar to what you've described. However, regarding the last point, after the product demo they did directly address the potential for misuse of the product.
They described a culture that encourages asking hard questions, and doing the right thing in ethically complex situations, even if that meant turning down a business opportunity. It came across as frank and sincere, and I didn't get any sense they were grooming for a cult, more that they were looking for people who were smart and passionate.
I'd say it's an excellent way to get a feel for what it takes to build a home. There are a TON of details, especially if you don't want it to rot.
If you intend to heat it in the winter, be sure to consider the effects of condensation. I made the mistake of building my first shed without proper ventilation, and it was like indoor rain when I turned on a space heater. For my second, more permanent shed I've followed building codes for real homes to avoid making any more big mistakes like that.
Thanks for the link. The author is an editor of the Princeton Companion to Applied Mathematics, which also contains very high quality writing and a book I recommend to anyone interested in mathematics and engineering.
I agree that this is a flawed article: the ads are irritating, the grammar is flawed, and calling boolean algebra an algorithm is inaccurate.
But looking past the flaws, I wouldn't describe it as vapid. I see it as more of a very high level survey of some truly important algorithms targeted at general population and students. This kind of writing can be an incredibly important source of inspiration for young people.
I agree with splitting up CF stacks this way. It reduces the the blast radius, that saved me on a number of occasions when stack updates went sideways.
The problem introduced by that approach is how to manage a large number of CF stacks. First I used a homegrown Python library to manage them, then switched to having Terraform manage CF.
At first Terraform on CF was just intended to be an expedient measure to facilitate migrating everything to Terraform, and eventually we did migrate to pure Terraform. But then we started hitting all the rough edges in Terraform. In hindsight, the hybrid approach had actually been more stable and manageable than using either tool in isolation.
That's not how I'd interpret this sentence: "We have skin and other barriers that protect the cells." It sounds to me like the author claims that humans have skin, which is true, and that skin forms a barrier that protects internal cells, which is extremely plausible.
That's a literal interpretation. A contextual interpretation implies that Roundup cannot cause harm through the observed means because it cannot clear the skin, the latter of which is patently false.
No. The contextual interpretation says that the above-mentioned study doesn't prove Roundup is harmful because the same results would be observed with any detergent, to which we are regularly exposed without suffering any harm.
Therefore, Roundup might or might not be harmful, but the study doesn't tell us much about it.
> to which we are regularly exposed without suffering any harm.
Right, because we're instructed not to consume detergents. Following this instruction keeps the detergents outside the body.
We are instructed to consume food grown with herbicides such as Roundup, and Roundup is often (if not always) delivered in a sprayed manner with significant aerosolization.
I always liked how Feynman dealt with complex numbers in 'QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter'.
He focuses on the intuitive concept of a particle having a spinny arrow attached, the arrow rotates as the particle flies through space. He only casually mentions that this is in fact a complex number, whereas the bulk of the text focuses on developing intuition around arrows.
I read that book in high school, and it certainly influenced the direction I took in university. It helped to understand that the physical universe often appears to behave in extremely non-intuitive ways, but using mathematics we can develop a model that transforms the phenomenon into something that actually does make intuitive sense.
I think some of the harder concepts in math are difficult because they act like stepping stones into aspects of our world that just don't make sense based on day-to-day experiences. But modern technology depends on this! Pedagogy is improving, but it still lags advances in technology.
Many people have recognized the need for improvement in mathematics education, and I think it really is evolving in positive directions. I worked at DreamBox Learning for a few years, they produce an adaptive math learning program for elementary schools (and gradually reaching higher levels) which as been very popular with children.
The kind of math that was traditionally taught in schools is still relevant and important, but I think we can leverage modern visual and interactive media to help children develop a broader class of mathematical reasoning skills, which includes much, much more than a bunch of rules, symbols, and rote procedures.
But you propose to simply relabel as function, which doesn't work in general because random variable corresponds to a specific type of function. You could compromise by calling it a probability function, but then you start to collide with other uses of that word.
I agree random variable is awkward, though. I always avoided stats courses because it's full of so much jargon that collides with nomenclature used by mathematicians.
Yes, it's not just a function - there are strings attached but we deserve a better name - probability function is x100 better. "random variable" is exceptionally bad in that it leads the mind in irrelevant directions.
To follow one of the more common patterns for identifying a class of functions, it could have been named after one of the early pioneers in the field. But yeah, it would be hard to do worse than random variable, which is illogical and misleading.
The result of the determinant might be negative, which doesn't make sense for a volume, so you need to take the absolute value to interpret it that way.
They described a culture that encourages asking hard questions, and doing the right thing in ethically complex situations, even if that meant turning down a business opportunity. It came across as frank and sincere, and I didn't get any sense they were grooming for a cult, more that they were looking for people who were smart and passionate.