T-hawk

81 ms·

781.
by T-hawk 15y ago
Wow, it is beautiful. I'm trying to wrap my mind around the scheduling and the scale. It looks like it's calibrated to run an entire cycle in an hour, so if you see 6 arms (say) at the center, it's been running for 1/6 of an hour. I'm try
782.
by T-hawk 15y ago
> basically eliminating email altogether, where a small cabal of whitelisted services are only able to pass messages to each other. Arguably, that's exactly what Facebook is. Users whitelist each other and use that channel to communica
783.
by T-hawk 15y ago
Easier to figure using the radius rather than the diameter. Volume of the sphere is 4pi/3 * r^3, volume of the cube is (2r)^3. Factor out r^3 and you get (4pi/3)/8, or 52% of the cube's volume is within the sphere.
784.
by T-hawk 15y ago
pi/3 is 60°, and the sine of that is √3 / 2. But yes, that's not something one calculates by head, that's memorization. And working out √3 / 2 into decimals also takes a calculator, though I can approximate by knowing the first two signif
785.
by T-hawk 15y ago
I remember "luggable" as the adjective of choice for such machines through the late 80's and early 90's. The PC Magazine columnists (Dvorak and Seymour and others) were fond of it.
786.
by T-hawk 15y ago
> Don't ship a tablet computer yet. How quickly we forget the Apple Newton. Part of Jobs' legacy is also how well the company was able to bury and move on from missteps. For every company like Nintendo that recovers from a Virtual Boy,
787.
by T-hawk 15y ago
The argument for the oligopoly protection goes that, without that protection, the pharma companies would not have invented the drugs in the first place because their ROI would be insufficient without the government-protected price premium.
788.
by T-hawk 15y ago
They didn't create value, they figured out a way to purloin value out of the casinos. Every dollar they gained was a casino's loss. Much of programming is indeed like that, especially in the finance industry, where your gain is usually som
789.
by T-hawk 15y ago
Indeed. There was a post a month or two ago on HN that captured this fallacy beautifully and I wish I could find it again and/or credit its author: Q: "We pay salaries competitive with the market average, why can't we find good experienced
790.
by T-hawk 15y ago
> If you end up saying, "Well, that was just an estimate. It actually took 200 hours, so you owe me $30,000," they might pay, but they won't hire you again This bears repeating. Has anyone else noticed how the business world has redef
791.
by T-hawk 15y ago
Because the sites themselves don't work with a Chinese wall between sites. Yourfavoritesite.com is probably loading images from images.yourfavoritesite.com, or possibly akamai.net, and scripts from jquery.com. Making a browser able to dis
792.
by T-hawk 15y ago
> The reality is that some people can think in abstract terms, while others cannot. This is true, although there's also a gray area of spectrum in between. I've worked with a few programmers who could write imperative-style code just f
793.
by T-hawk 15y ago
I've known at least a few guys who did indeed like working long hours in the office, since that was less stressful than going home to a house full of cranky kids at bedtime. One co-worker even relished his 1.5 hour commute as the only rela
794.
by T-hawk 15y ago
Sure they do. A chain link connects two physical items, such as chain links or a chandelier or a bicycle lock. A hyperlink connects two web pages. The metaphor is sound and doesn't depend on English, albeit that the hyperlink is unidirec
795.
by T-hawk 15y ago
Also, Google is a bigger target than Bing for the content farmers. Bing has fewer gray hats gaming its algorithms, so Bing's results will include a greater proportion of naturally-occurring content and less of ad farms. It's like comparing
796.
by T-hawk 15y ago
How many postal mailboxes do you know that trigger automated out-of-office responses and all the other noise? Bounces do happen in postal mail, but 1) the PO usually has the option to discard marketing mail instead of bouncing it, and 2) th
797.
by T-hawk 15y ago
That last bit is important; don't confuse the correlation and causation. Sleeping more than nine hours a day won't kill you, it just correlates with other conditions related to death, like obesity or terminal illness or old age.
798.
by T-hawk 15y ago
Just don't confuse the correlation and causation. Those who stand do so because they like it. It doesn't automatically mean that everyone who tries standing likes it.
799.
by T-hawk 15y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking Fractional-reserve banking might be a good topic to review. It is entirely possible for more debt than currency to exist. Suppose you deposit $100 at a bank, which lends $80 of it
800.
by T-hawk 15y ago
The variable on which he's trying to discriminate for hiring is not, strictly speaking, gender. He wants to discriminate on the likelihood of an employee missing an extended amount of work time in the wake of a voluntary* personal choice.
801.
by T-hawk 15y ago
It's okay once you understand what it's doing. It's showing the asteroid's movement in relation to Earth - from a vantage point mostly fixed relative to Earth. The viewpoint sweeps above and below Earth's orbit to give you some idea of wh
802.
by T-hawk 15y ago
No, it was DEVICEHIGH= in config.sys to load .SYS drivers, and LOADHIGH (without an equals sign) in autoexec.bat to load an .EXE.
803.
by T-hawk 15y ago
This, a thousand times this. IE6 persists in corporations not so much from risk-aversion, but simply from inertia and the lack of a cost-benefit justification to upgrade. Windows XP is the real culprit. XP installers even through the lat
804.
by T-hawk 15y ago
Last line isn't quite accurate: If successful, Dawn’s double-destination mission will mark the first time a spacecraft has orbited two bodies in the solar system. Of course the Apollo manned missions orbited both the Earth and the Moon, s
805.
by T-hawk 15y ago
I know nothing about Ruby, but it's possible if a language implements an array as a linked list so the tail elements don't actually move. (At any rate, I hardly think we're worried about a modern computer workload of at most 25^2 string op
806.
by T-hawk 15y ago
Expanding NASA's budget by 2x or even 10x would not solve its problems. Parkinson's Law is as applicable to NASA as to any other organization. JWST and the other missions will overrun any amount of time and budget allocated to them.
807.
by T-hawk 15y ago
There's also accounts for people's cats, cars, bands, and loads of other silliness. So we can discount that claimed 750m some, but probably in the ballpark of not much more than 10%. And OTOH, perhaps Facebook knows this and already consi
808.
by T-hawk 15y ago
Wow, I got this too. Here's my followup question and answer. We know i is the square root of -1, but what is the square root of -i ? I've always thought that you'd need another dimension to describe that, and another dimension for the
809.
by T-hawk 15y ago
One of the best places to live in New York is actually New Jersey. Large areas of Jersey City and Hoboken and their surroundings are just as easy to commute via the PATH subway or a bus or even a ferry. Rent goes very roughly 20% cheaper
810.
by T-hawk 15y ago
The closest answer would be willful obliviousness. Like how voting for war funding means borrowing the money from sometime in the future. Politicians know these consequences on some level, but willfully just push them out of consideration

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