abraxasz

12 ms·

61.
by abraxasz 14y ago
"Skepticism, contrarianism, criticism, etc. are incredibly valuable tools and are fundamental to HN and to discourse in general. One should not have the merits of their ideas judged solely on the "tone" articulated by them, and HN should ce
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by abraxasz 14y ago
What I find interesting (not judging here) is that people's attitude toward the immutability of the constitution seems to be inconsistent. The same people who invoke the 2 amendment to block any discussion on gun control are willing to "rei
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by abraxasz 14y ago
I don't think we need another vehicle for the "spread of ideas". We have the internet for that. Everyone and their dogs have a blog on which they can detail the minutiae of their crackpottery. The reason I used to like TED is that they cura
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by abraxasz 14y ago
Had a somewhat similar story. Took a class whose instructor had written the reference book in the field. We used his textbook, but instead of having us buy it, he gave out free photocopies of the preprint for the yet-to-be released newest e
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by abraxasz 14y ago
The best class I've ever taken was an intro class in statistics, in which the professor recommended... no book. He had an entire set of notes, practice problems (with extraordinarily detailed answers), and problem sets. Every year, he creat
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by abraxasz 14y ago
There are some ad hominem attacks, which the author acknowledges by the way. Doesn't mean it's right, but at least he recognizes his possible bias. Putting that aside, he does provide arguments against the article, which you chose to totall
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by abraxasz 14y ago
Yeah, I tried to play work out the solution before looking at the article, but realized that the problem was not even well posed. You could ask for the number of uniforms needed so that the probability of their convolution being greater tha
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by abraxasz 14y ago
No, I think it actually makes sense. How are lawmakers supposed to know every single one of their voter's issues? Plus this particular issue (unlocking phones) might be a particularly important one for you, but secondary for a vast majority
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by abraxasz 14y ago
Seems like a french retailer [1] guesstimated the release date as being October 6th 2013. Note that I have no idea how reliable this information is, and I'm taking it with a wagon of salt myself.. [1] http://www.cinemablend.com/games/Bungi
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by abraxasz 14y ago
I'm from a minority, and I'm currently enrolled in a phd program (well, about to enroll in september) in a top university. I've been working really, really, really hard to get there. Like, really hard. So it does piss me off when people jus
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by abraxasz 14y ago
Can you elaborate on that? I mean, how exactly does it bias people's response? The "privacy" of a service can affect people's answer if it is that, private. But Quora is not a super exclusive club: anyone who's willing to spend some time si
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by abraxasz 14y ago
I think the main problem is this pervasive habit (not talking only about disqus here) of making controversial modifications (because hey, they must know that a significant part of their users won't like it) and making them the default. I do
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by abraxasz 14y ago
This is something that has bugged me for a long time: how do people consider a "language reference" as a good documentation? Maybe it's because I'm not a programmer, so I'm not used to reading language references, but when I'm picking up a
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by abraxasz 14y ago
"I have begun to think now that the most important thing when writing software is to write the usable minimum. If then the tool becomes popular and other people begin to use it, then I should I work on the documentation and interface." That
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by abraxasz 14y ago
I read it cover to cover (so to speak) about two weeks ago, and although still a work in progress, it is indeed the best written guide to R that I've read to date. It appealed to me because it insisted on the functional programming side of
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by abraxasz 14y ago
I've had to learn R during my master (in statistics), and found the process very unpleasant. There are different ways in which a language can be difficult to learn. Haskell has a steep learning curve because it has a lot of unusual concepts
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by abraxasz 14y ago
The article fails to provide important details. Imagine the following two situations: - In every country, there are as many boys and girls taking the science exam, and the girls get a better average. But the top n students are all boys. - I
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by abraxasz 14y ago
I'm not against your general point. But take this website: http://dapaticalglobal.com/ This is a case of a design company that basically ripped off the design of another design company. They used almost exactly the same sub-title on the f
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by abraxasz 14y ago
Maybe it is because I'm not a Haskell Guru, but although I love Haskell's terseness, it tends to make it very hard for me to read code I've written a while ago. I tend to get excited about cool Haskell features like Arrows, using them whene
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by abraxasz 14y ago
Duh? Why would google have to participate? If the journals don't want people reading online, why do they put content up in the first place? Then they can always ask google to no longer link to their content if that's the problem.. No, the r
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by abraxasz 14y ago
"there isn't new profound number theory in this" I find this claim very surprising.Saying that "there is no new profound number theory" implies a deep understanding of the totality of Mochizuki's work, which as far as I know is so complex a
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by abraxasz 14y ago
Agreed, I was very please to see a mainstream journal take the time to describe a potentially groundbreaking mathematical discovery
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by abraxasz 14y ago
This has to be the most thoughtful comment I've read on the subject of affirmative action. It's definitively gonna be food for thoughts. Thanks!
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by abraxasz 14y ago
I disagree. It is true that a male is hardly qualified to talk about how a female perceives things. But sexism in IT is an issue that concerns females AND males. A male should be allowed to say that, as a male, he thinks that he is annoyed
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by abraxasz 14y ago
>Anyone smart enough to have an interesting opinion on this topic is probably also smart enough to see that there's absolutely no upside to expressing that opinion. That's my exact conclusion for pretty much every interesting/controvers
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by abraxasz 14y ago
And what even smaller percentage of people go through the trouble of reporting an error event if they do see the curl? It feels weird to pay for a service, and then have to actively work to make it better.. (by paying, I mean buying an ios
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by abraxasz 14y ago
I believe that what is meant by "criminalizing contact between Wikileaks and active servicemembers" is not that Wikileaks should be considered an enemy of the US, but rather that "leaking secrets to Wikileaks" should be criminalized. The sa
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by abraxasz 14y ago
> We’ve seen that consumers are not scared of changing their behavior, as that’s what we do; we adapt. Vendors need to start delivering better software and hardware! Uhm. This is a rather bold claim that certainly needs some kind of ref
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by abraxasz 14y ago
I had the same gripe with image placement when I used Open Office on my Linux box a few years ago. I thought that MS office or Apple Pages would be better but ... well ... I don't seem to get much more done with them. Granted I did not try
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by abraxasz 14y ago
I am not a native speaker either. This is why I read things carefully before commenting :) Didn't mean no harm by the way, just replicated the tone of the commenter..

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