_dps

23 ms·

301.
by _dps 14y ago
The article, without being wrong exactly, is responding to a non-point while missing what I consider to be a deeper problem (disclosure: was very briefly a professor, now founding a startup, which is much more stressful for me ;-). CNBC: "B
302.
by _dps 14y ago
I'd add that for the bulk of people writing software to support science, programming practices are among the least of their concerns. A data analysis program supporting a particular research project is more akin to a mathematical formula th
303.
by _dps 14y ago
> Part of my problem with the statistics you link ... You raise an interesting question, to which I don't have a conclusive immediate response. I'll have to dig deeper to really know. The numbers on the US do seem out of line with well-
304.
by _dps 14y ago
> The Greek crisis, more than anything, is the result of massive tax evasion. [Greek/US dual citizen here] Having lived in Greece for upwards of a decade, during the particularly transitional time from ~1988-2004, this is not in line wi
305.
by _dps 14y ago
I think the notion of "effective annual interest" for such short-term and small-principal loans is a little stretched, and can easily yield crazy sounding numbers. The core problem is that any costs that are fixed-per-applicant but zero-pe
306.
by _dps 14y ago
I don't have an opinion on major lifts as I have fairly little experience with them, but as a younger man I would have (uninformedly) considered them "not right for me". What I did find right for me was intense rowing (on a machine), whic
307.
by _dps 14y ago
There are large budgets for geological data analysis, but in contrast to most businesses the oil and gas industry actually has physical constitutive models for the phenomena they track; so, instead of domain-agnostic data mining, they are m
308.
by _dps 14y ago
Following up on my other comment about the power of coordination to eliminate certain failure modes: If everyone guesses randomly they stand a (1/2)^100 chance. If they all guess the majority, with, say, blue as the tie-breaker just to have
309.
by _dps 14y ago
I'm not sure the conditional probability argument explains it. Specifically, given A=H, the probability of (H,H) is the same as the probability of (H,T) so that alone shouldn't inform your guess. I believe the core mechanism at play here is
310.
by _dps 14y ago
I think there might be some nuance in the composition of the leavers vs the comers. This is purely speculative, but one could imagine that in SF: - leavers are mainly people with established jobs, thinking of starting a family, who want mor
311.
by _dps 14y ago
> This money doesn't go into shareholder pockets, it goes back into the university to support further research activities, reducing the need for government subsidy. This is a reasonable intuitive expectation, but it's simply not the cas
312.
by _dps 14y ago
There are two ways to look at Lua. There's Lua-the-abstract-language which can certainly be used as a broad-spectrum scripting language. I certainly use it in that capacity. Then there's Lua-the-implementation(s) (PUC + LuaJIT), both of whi
313.
by _dps 14y ago
I don't know if you're likely to get many useful responses here, but I'll offer a few specific pieces of advice on tropes to avoid: 1) films often use the "aha, now I'm really serious" gimmick, wherein the "hacker" is now talking about so
314.
by _dps 14y ago
Your factual observation is correct, but I don't think the parent is suggesting that the absence of weapons guarantees genocide. I believe the claim is that weapons provide a deterrent to genocide. To relate to your example: Canada may have
315.
by _dps 14y ago
Respectfully, it's not a stupid fraction. It is a fundamental quantity arising from the linear algebraic interpretation of correlation. Correlation induces an inner product on the set of zero-mean random variables. The regression coefficien
316.
by _dps 14y ago
You raise some good points; I understand you're playing the devil's advocate but I thought a few would benefit from a friendly counter :) > ... everyone stumbles across is the "counting from 1" ... Fair enough :) I find this objection t
317.
by _dps 14y ago
> Lua was never designed to be used for really large code basis I'd certainly agree that "maintainable for large code bases" was probably never on Ierusalimschy & Co's language design requirements document, but you could say the sam
318.
by _dps 14y ago
> Either trust what the upvotes tell you, even when you disagree, or manually curate ... Why the harsh dichotomy? Surely one can believe upvotes to be a good filtering method on average while still accepting that occasionally they do a
319.
by _dps 14y ago
I think you're mixing two separate questions here that have easy answers when asked in isolation (bias disclosure: I founded a startup, and have worked at several startups). Q1) Why would anyone accept a below-market offer (financially) wit
320.
by _dps 14y ago
<pedantic clarification> For those who first encounter the word "typo" indirectly as TamDenholm did, it's worth noting that a typo is not just any spelling mistake; it is a mis-spelling rendered in a type-set text and arising not th
321.
by _dps 14y ago
I agree with one minor quibble: I don't think it's a conflation of education with economic utility, but rather a convergence . To put it another way, it's not so much a new perception of education but rather a new reality colliding with
322.
by _dps 14y ago
> "... you need to be able to absorb even your lit majors" I think this cuts both ways, and in fact "cuts more" in the opposite direction; even the non-marketable majors (in fact, especially the non-marketable majors) need a plan for ho
323.
by _dps 14y ago
You're probably aware of LuaJIT ( http://http://luajit.org/ ) already but I'll toss it in for other readers: as a former heavy user of ctypes, after discovering LuaJIT and its FFI I haven't touched ctypes again. For people who need to do th
324.
by _dps 14y ago
My guess is that he's asking for $50 because he doesn't want to attract people who won't extract significantly more than $50 worth of value. Regarding your comparison to FB: price is certainly not just about cost; it can also be about estab
325.
by _dps 14y ago
Seconded on the framing comment from lucianomt, and I'd also keep in mind that the people buying and selling 7 days ago were not the same people buying and selling now. At the IPO you had two special classes of participants. One the sell si
326.
by _dps 14y ago
I'm not sure what PG's intention was, but I bet that "under-the-table dilution" in the form of liquidation preferences, board seats, and veto rights on sales below Y% return is much more common in down rounds. These investor privileges ofte
327.
by _dps 14y ago
In case you're interested, the thing you're discussing is usually available at heritage tomato sellers (at least in California). I am currently growing 16 different "heritage" tomato plants that are precisely low-yield less-watery cultivars
328.
by _dps 14y ago
Mz, you don't know me but I've often read your comments here with interest and respect. I also know several people in the San Diego ecosystem (I was in LA for many years). I admire what you're doing with healthgazelle and if I can help let
329.
by _dps 15y ago
I ask this honestly because you seem like a sharp guy and I'm genuinely curious: what's stopping you from working a dev job for 6-12 months, saving 2-3k/month of a 8-10k/month paycheck, and then starting your own thing when you have 6-12 mo
330.
by _dps 15y ago
I'm a bit confused by lumping Yahoo in that group (unless your goal was to show a sampling of companies including one big win, in which case I apologize for misunderstanding). Yahoo was surely a resounding success for the VCs who backed the

More ›