EliAndrewC

9 ms·

31.
by EliAndrewC 14y ago
I went to a a magnet school (Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology) which does NOT discriminate against Asians in the way that so many colleges do. Last year more than 50% of students were Asian-American. This is what th
32.
by EliAndrewC 14y ago
I'm always conflicted about interesting comments which link to something I read and learn from, but which are needlessly insulting. The grandparent linked to FightingAging.com and I read the article and clicked on some of the links and fou
33.
by EliAndrewC 14y ago
That signal seems a poor proxy for something we can measure more directly. If what we care about is "do illegal immigrant break laws more often than legal immigrants and/or more often than the general population" then we have decades of im
34.
by EliAndrewC 14y ago
Completely agree - even when the salesmen behave exactly as you'd want them to, it's still a stressful experience because of the price opacity. When my wife and I bought our current car, we researched the average price for that year/model a
35.
by EliAndrewC 14y ago
Can someone explain TCP Preconnect? My Google-fu has failed me - I understand that DNS prefetching is when Chrome notices that there are links to other domains so it resolves the IP addresses of those domains ahead of time so that their pa
36.
by EliAndrewC 14y ago
Paul Graham explores this question at great length in his essay, "Why Nerds Are Unpopular": http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
37.
by EliAndrewC 14y ago
I believe that this is the origin of that joke: http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20030427
38.
by EliAndrewC 15y ago
The more I think about it, the more I like this metaphor. Because you CAN make SOME estimates based on what's in the closet. If it's a huge closet, you could guess that the house was fairly large. If there are a lot of coats of different
39.
by EliAndrewC 15y ago
That's interesting, because I always think of the Lawrence Journal World (the creator of the Django web framework) and Adrian Holovaty's excellent writeup of how they thrive by excelling at local news: http://www.holovaty.com/writing/funda
40.
by EliAndrewC 15y ago
I think that the spelling corrector was cited to support the grandparent's assertion that Norvig can "communicate them so well that you feel it was so obvious that you should have found it immediately".
41.
by EliAndrewC 15y ago
My guess is that the downvotes are from people objecting to the use of the word "steal" to describe piracy.
42.
by EliAndrewC 15y ago
I remember an anecdote about a record store with a similar tactic for selling CDs. They'd put out 5 copies of a CD; 4 copies would be marked at $13 and 1 copy would be marked at $11. People browsing would notice the cheaper copy and immed
43.
by EliAndrewC 15y ago
The grannie in my family will sign up for whichever social network has the pictures of her grandson. So I think that even (especially?) non-technical users will choose whether to sign up based primarily on who else they know is using it.
44.
by EliAndrewC 15y ago
Netflix also uses Amazon S3 and is probably an even larger customer, but I agree with your assessment that custom rates are very likely (for both of them).
45.
by EliAndrewC 15y ago
The technical term for this is a "long s", which Wikipedia describes at great length: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s
46.
by EliAndrewC 15y ago
The example in the OP (fuck) was so common until the early 1800s because of the typographic convention to substitute an f for an s. In other words, the word "suck" was being written as "fuck", which is why the word appeared so often until
47.
by EliAndrewC 16y ago
They do this on the SomethingAwful forums, it's referred to as hellbanning, though I'm not sure if the term originated there: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hellban
48.
by EliAndrewC 16y ago
If it makes you feel any better, StackOverflow caps your rep gains to 300 per day, so assuming that most of those upvotes occurred in bursts when the question was first answered and then at subsequent times when it was linked to from elsewh
49.
by EliAndrewC 16y ago
I wonder whether most donors actually understand this, with non-donors being the primary complainers. Randy Milholland, the webcomic artist behind Something Positive, quit his job and funded himself for a year with donations to spend more t
50.
by EliAndrewC 16y ago
It says "Payment Processing"
51.
by EliAndrewC 16y ago
They've also recently created a Gold "Electorate" badge, which is defined as "Voted on 600 questions and 25% or more of total votes are on questions." This should encourage people to vote up good questions as well as good answers.
52.
by EliAndrewC 16y ago
I'd say that this is especially relevant to hackers in corporate environments because of this passage: "Hansen heard a flood of complaints early on: The urinals stank. They were dirty. Where was the flush handle? In one building, the compla
53.
by EliAndrewC 16y ago
In grad school, a friend told me he wanted to go into videogame programming, so I described this post to him. His response was immediate and unwavering: "I don't care, I want to do game programming so much that I'll do whatever it takes."
54.
by EliAndrewC 16y ago
Here's one where PG was actually downvoted into oblivion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=190451
55.
by EliAndrewC 16y ago
Also, much like Reader's Digest, the user-submitted anecdotes are typically re-written by the same person to give them all the same, easy-to-digest flow.
56.
by EliAndrewC 16y ago
Last year, Slate published an in-depth series of articles summarizing the various theories about why we haven't seen more terrorist attacks, e.g. the "Terrorists are Dumb" theory, the "Near Enemy" theory, the "Bush kept us safe" theory, etc
57.
by EliAndrewC 16y ago
> Also, don't quote me on this but I think the very first cartoon that triggered all of this was done by a guy specifically to rub it in and cause hurt--and not as an innocent comedic act. If you're referring to the bomb-in-the-turban c
58.
by EliAndrewC 17y ago
Anecdotally this fits with my experiences on death march projects. I've often seen people learn a new programming language and/or set of libraries while on a tight deadline and getting yelled at for being behind schedule. Their knowledge
59.
by EliAndrewC 17y ago
Michael Phelps was also suspended from competition for several months and lost some of his endorsement deals as a result of the pipe photograph. Plus while people in your life (and mine) may have just shrugged and moved on, this was a big
60.
by EliAndrewC 17y ago
Some of this speaks to PG's "Writing to Discover" ( http://paulgraham.com/discover.html ) observations. When he says, "The paintings made between 1430 and 1500 are still unsurpassed" then my impression is that he's just stating his opinion

More ›