T-hawk

74 ms·

811.
by T-hawk 15y ago
Yup. Politicians and governments are, by and large, oblivious to the fact that laws induce behavioral changes. Like extending unemployment benefits to 99 weeks, then somehow being surprised when the rate increases of people staying on une
812.
by T-hawk 15y ago
Would moving out of California be an option? Or at least doing the minimum to establish residency somewhere with fairly lax requirements?
813.
by T-hawk 15y ago
More than 50 since many counties and cities impose their own sales taxes, on top of whatever the state levy is. There's also the complication of what items are taxable where. Clothing, for example, has seen a recent trend of exemption from
814.
by T-hawk 15y ago
Indeed. XP itself is a major reason IE6 hangs around so much. XP installation discs and images only ever came with IE6, never anything newer. And with the frequency that most corporate workstations get reassigned and recreated and reinst
815.
by T-hawk 15y ago
Everybody hates Ticketmaster's fees, but they are simply capitalism at work. The successful capitalist prices his goods and services not by his costs, but by what customers are willing to pay based on perceived value. (As any seller of
816.
by T-hawk 15y ago
you go to a hotel in which you once stayed, and tell them that you're going to dump every bit of possessions and furnishings in all the rooms outside on the street, rifle through them, set them on fire, then photograph all their guests in
817.
by T-hawk 15y ago
On the other hand, have you ever had the experience of nosing around a website and not being able to find something you're looking for? Wouldn't it be nice for someone to be walking along with you on bestbuy.com, see your struggles, and fi
818.
by T-hawk 15y ago
It's CYA policy for blame-shifting, a variant of security theater. When the next attack happens, the map purveyor needs to be able to say "he didn't do it with my maps". The map maker is not really interested in preventing attacks; just p
819.
by T-hawk 15y ago
I have a Strida and I love it. I've used it as my commuting vehicle for years - a mile to the subway, half mile from the subway to office. It's not any more work to pedal than a larger bike, other than having only the one fairly low gear.
820.
by T-hawk 15y ago
Not necessarily if you can parallelize computing the digits. Your average Pentium processor can compute a floating-point number with a mantissa of 16 decimal or 52 binary digits in one clock cycle, not 16 or 52. It does so by using enough
821.
by T-hawk 15y ago
This and many other posts are all good answers, but the point of the problem was simply to be able to think non-technologically and non-computer, not always an easy task for a class of computer science college students naturally disposed to
822.
by T-hawk 15y ago
The professor for my software engineering course in college posed a problem with a non-tech answer similarly. You have a cabin in the woods, with electricity and a freezer. You go hunting and bag a deer with much more meat than can be used
823.
by T-hawk 15y ago
No, 8000 miles sounds about right for the great-circle distance on the surface from Iowa to Egypt. First, the diameter of the Earth is not quite 8000 miles, but 7926. So if anything says more than 7926 (plus maybe the height of a mountain
824.
by T-hawk 15y ago
Also gray-to-black hat spam with links. Just like the content farms that plague Google's results, they'll push in any low-quality content in hopes of trolling some clicks to their ad- or malware-laden sites.
825.
by T-hawk 15y ago
Why is buying a movie "rofl never" ? That still sounds pretty low on the friction scale. The playback hardware is thoroughly cheap and commoditized, and there's no DRM. If you just don't like the price for buying or don't want to store t
826.
by T-hawk 15y ago
Of course, your ability to continue to own that land is also dependent on the continued existence of a government that remains able and willing to enforce the laws of property ownership and does not decide to raise property tax rates to con
827.
by T-hawk 15y ago
Bitcoin does share some aspects with a pyramid scheme. Bitcoin owners have incentive to recruit into the Bitcoin network. Bitcoins aren't really good for anything until merchants willing to accept Bitcoins also join the system. And the g
828.
by T-hawk 15y ago
What amount of computational power would it take to brute-force recover that private key? For $81,000 it would be worth throwing some considerable hardware resources at it.
829.
by T-hawk 15y ago
It might be worth mentioning how IE 6 is still there. IE 6 is the only version that ever came with Windows XP and 2003 install images, which many many corps still use. And remember that the average lifetime of a Windows installation on a
830.
by T-hawk 15y ago
He's saying there should have been a control group. We can't directly compare startups that YC funded with startups of equal quality that YC did not fund, because the latter does not exist (assuming YC is correctly selecting for quality.)
831.
by T-hawk 15y ago
I've got a slightly unusual pattern; for letters I use exclusively left shift, but will use right shift for the punctuation symbols on numbers 1-5, function keys on the left side, and the home/end/arrow navigation keys. So I answered both,
832.
by T-hawk 15y ago
Well, the entry barriers to programming were actually lower in the 1980s. Pretty much every home computer came with a flavor of BASIC built right in to ROM or at the worst bundled with it on a disk. Anybody with a TI-99/4A, C64, various A
833.
by T-hawk 15y ago
Yes, but there's a causal relationship that I think you're not quite expressing. We are where we are because here is where all the ingredients came together.
834.
by T-hawk 15y ago
> Why is the moon at the right distance to provide a gentle tide, and exert a stabilizing effect on earth's axis of rotation, thus protecting life here? A possible answer to this stems from the anthropic principle. We evolved in a plac
835.
by T-hawk 15y ago
Gray code was used as long ago as the Atari 2600 game system, designed in 1977. The system's clock for drawing out sprite graphics pixels counts in Gray code internally. Why? Because a binary adder could have too long a propagation delay
836.
by T-hawk 15y ago
You can write game logic in pretty much any language on modern hardware. The only things that need a highly performant language are the 3D graphics engine and geometry, and any deeply nested AI computational stuff. Your standard game logi
837.
by T-hawk 15y ago
It's certainly not hard to find lotteries where the expected payout is above 100%. This is true, but there's more to it. It's not so easy to find a lottery where the expected post-tax payout is above 100%, since you'll need the pre-tax
838.
by T-hawk 15y ago
Governments moved their currencies off the gold standard. Mostly for the self-interest reason of establishing greater control over their currency, often to inflate their way out of debt. Whether a gold (or Bitcoin) standard is good for t
839.
by T-hawk 15y ago
In this scenario, the server doesn't start out as rogue. It was an existing production machine, then superseded by an upgrade to a new set of production hardware. You have to understand that in companies the size of "Bank of Canada", ever
840.
by T-hawk 16y ago
The article misrepresents itself. "Said SETI Director Jill Tarter, 'that a time when we discover so many planets to look at, we don't have the operating funds to listen.'" It's a pretty naked sympathy appeal for money. "Honestly, if every

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