Perceval

43 ms·

481.
by Perceval 17y ago
Mozilla has active projects working on almost all of the complaints mentioned here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Projects They are working on startup speed, UI responsiveness, reducing I/O, a new uncluttered theme, redesign of the add
482.
by Perceval 17y ago
I agree. I think it's reasonable to consider him a domestic terrorist. His actions and rantings are not materially different from those of Timothy McVeigh (OKC Bombing) or Ted Kaczynski (The Unabomber). Both of them were rightly consider
483.
by Perceval 17y ago
Nassim Nicholas Taleb's books ( Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan ) make the point that power laws are better at describing how uncertain the world we live in is, rather than making uncertainty and risk tractable in the way that the
484.
by Perceval 17y ago
I found this article when searching for information on statistical methods based on power laws. I've been trying to find information on non-Gaussian statistics, but having a difficult time making my way by myself. I even bought a book of
485.
The social meaning of the power law(thememorybank.co.uk)
3 points by Perceval 17y ago|4 comments
486.
by Perceval 17y ago
I rarely upvote articles, even if they're generally interesting to me (front page or /newest). Because upvoting also functions as a saving mechanism on your userpage, I only upvote things I want to save (mostly on a certain topic). If the
487.
by Perceval 17y ago
To clarify, while BHL finds himself on the right in some public debates, he isn't of the right. His most frequent criticisms are of the left—he's somewhat like the Christopher Hitchens of France: a disaffected man of the left, criticizi
488.
by Perceval 17y ago
Yes, somewhere between that and an unselfconscious Dadaism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada
489.
by Perceval 17y ago
/b/ also functions as a honeypot. The other boards are more strictly moderated to stay on topic, free from trolling and racism, and worksafe. The ability of those boards to stay sane is in part a function of having a board like /b/ where
490.
by Perceval 17y ago
Excellent Mencken quote. Another relevant one: "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth." --Oscar Wilde
491.
by Perceval 17y ago
Some credit may be due to Shii, who was the admin on 4chan who implemented FORCED_ANON on /b/. See: http://shii.org/knows/Shii Some of his thoughts and findings on anonymity can be found here: http://shii.org/knows/Anonymous http://bl
492.
by Perceval 17y ago
Some folks have put together a comment filter that flags any comments that are 'formally' stupid in the same way that #14 is: http://stupidfilter.org/main/
493.
by Perceval 17y ago
This is sadly not unique to the Obama administration. Every president since at least Kennedy has altered the statistical measures of key economic indicators in order to hide weakness in the economy. Here's a fantastic article on the subje
494.
by Perceval 17y ago
Take a look at goldbasis.org. It's a very simple way of taking advantage of overall economic growth, while alternatively protecting yourself against inflation and instability. Nothing fancy.
495.
by Perceval 17y ago
Problems with x-height is the first thing that popped into my mind when reading this article. Some fonts, even if they're both old roman fonts, will have dramatically different sizes: higher x-height, wider, thicker, etc. Just putting tog
496.
by Perceval 17y ago
If I am on a platform where Arial looks OK, it should already be my default sans-serif font, right? Well, the thing about designers is that they don't trust the end user. In their minds, if the end user were put in charge, 90% of the web
497.
by Perceval 17y ago
This article is pretty embarrassing in its use of numbers/statistics. The second number is how many jobs the state Economic Development Department claims to have created in Santa Fe last year. As if the state's economic development depart
498.
by Perceval 17y ago
We have a rough approximation of that in the United States with the Earned Income Tax Credit. If you have a job but make less than a certain amount, the government sends you a tax return to supplement your income up to that level. http://
499.
by Perceval 17y ago
>Intergenerational mobility in the United States is lower than in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark. As far as I can tell, that study measured mobility by quintile. If the United States has a wider variance i
500.
by Perceval 17y ago
As I recall from past discussions, pg has indicated that his algorithm discounts outliers. So someone who has one 40+ comment and a string of comments rated 1 or 0 will not see the benefit of the outlier. A solution to piling on, if it per
501.
by Perceval 17y ago
The approximate budget for the intelligence community (the collection of sixteen agencies dealing with intelligence as part of the federal budget) is something in the neighborhood of $75 billion. Signals intelligence gets over 90% of that
502.
by Perceval 17y ago
Corporations have been in existence in Western culture since at least the high middle ages. Corporations existed in the Americas since before the American Revolution was even an idea. The Hudson's Bay Corporation is the oldest commercial
503.
by Perceval 17y ago
Kind of like "Montgomery of the El Alamein," which means Montgomery of the the the Amein.
504.
by Perceval 17y ago
> will there be a purpose formed corporation whose sole goal is the election of an individual? I believe this already exists and is called a campaign. There are already rules governing fair play for campaigns, along with political act
505.
by Perceval 17y ago
Free speech protections for individuals don't protect us against prosecution for making fraudulent claims or certain types of lies (e.g. libel, slander, yelling fire in a crowded theater, perjury, and so on). Why would a right to free spee
506.
by Perceval 17y ago
The xkcd IRC channel instituted the Robot 9000, which mute-bans anyone making an unoriginal comment. Obviously this does not prevent trolling, but it does reduce some of the more low-hanging fruit of retardation: http://blag.xkcd.com/2008
507.
by Perceval 17y ago
There's very little practical difference between a space rocket program and an ICBM program. Fore example, during the Cold War, the Japanese Space Agency's most advanced rocket was basically a direct copy of the United States' MX missile.
508.
by Perceval 17y ago
I wrote a long article on the subject of online community and the problems of scale: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/12/33338/3000
509.
by Perceval 17y ago
This makes intuitive sense. A great deal of operations on computers today are not CPU bound. In fact, the CPU (plus GPU) are sitting mostly un-utilized. Processors are fast, memory is cheap--both expand following Moore's law. But hard dr
510.
by Perceval 17y ago
I would bet that Wikipedia is more database bound than CPU bound. HipHop would probably help, but not tremendously.

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