alextp

28 ms·

271.
by alextp 16y ago
My past self empathizes with you. I'm not sure if it helps, but life can change, and even though everyday repetitive things will always be dull, being already happy can make it a lot more bearable, interesting even. Sometimes really silly t
272.
How to save the news, by Google(theatlantic.com)
1 points by alextp 16y ago|0 comments
273.
by alextp 16y ago
Sadly, it is strongly to blame for my not buying mathematica---most of what I would want to do there I can do (with some contortions) on wolfram alpha. I even have a firefox keyword for it (wa).
274.
by alextp 16y ago
Color, when used by a good director, adds a lot of subtle semantic content to a movie. See some old Almodovar movies, or maybe Kieslowksy's Three Colors trilogy, or even The Matrix. Color adds information that wasn't already there in black-
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by alextp 16y ago
I agree. Numeric methods have taught me far more than learning simple programmable analytic tricks. Specially solving reccurrences and summations, which mathematica can do very well, and I will almost always make a silly mistake when trying
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by alextp 16y ago
The problem with this is how to decide which students fail and which pass a course. If you just use a cutoff on the z-score you will be consistently failing a certain proportion of the students, which might sound reasonable but completely i
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by alextp 17y ago
Actually, the worst problem with submodules in modern DVCSs is handling dependencies. If project A depends on project B and project B and the API exposed by project B varies over time it is pretty easy to keep both in sync and working. Exce
278.
by alextp 17y ago
I think the main reason people mind so much that dirty tricks work on women (and forget that even simpler tricks work on men as well) is this idealization we culturally have of women as far-away difficult perfect prize-worthy things. If you
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by alextp 17y ago
> On a theoretical level, I think consciousness has already been explained and is not a hard problem unless you are using a hard definition. A state of consciousness is whatever neurons happen to be ON or ACTIVE in an arbitrarily small
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by alextp 17y ago
Just like tex the quality has potential to the very good, but when you stray from the defaults it suddenly takes a lot of tweaking to produce a nice-looking score.
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by alextp 17y ago
In the humanities it is a bit harder than medicine because you can't even do controlled experiments in most situations, and observational statistics is complicated.
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by alextp 17y ago
> Productive depression is a dignified depression¸ where the person realizes that the object of the angst is a little elusive I think their theory is that this state (realizing what is the object and why it is elusive) is the healthy ou
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by alextp 17y ago
> It only become deeply unsatisfying and misleading for people who do not understand how to translate this information to the real world. Not really. The OP is arguing that translating this statement to the real world adds nothing we di
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by alextp 17y ago
I was responding to the $/minute equivalent to song licensing earlier in the thread.
285.
by alextp 17y ago
They wouldn't go broke, they'd just stop charging the fees.
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by alextp 17y ago
This is a very interesting idea, but I think it would be virtually unlegislateable with patents because, among other reasons, you can (and people do) patent things that do not have a consistent unit you charge for (and that don't even go in
287.
by alextp 17y ago
I'm not sure. Every large enough system ends up needing a lot of boilerplate to tune it to work correctly. I think if such a law existed most decisions would go through the (non-elected) supreme court or some independent autarchys than thro
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by alextp 17y ago
> Let's imagine, company which will not depend on any other company. And, pray tell, where would they get the cash?
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by alextp 17y ago
I'm not so sure---I mean, I've sure read some papers that I'd love never to have been published, even if that means tweaking peer review a bit. EDIT: in a sense that the results are obviously false and come from either some ideological stan
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by alextp 17y ago
> The only alternative to 'sham' governments imposed from outside are 'strong men' Please be careful with that. In my country (brazil) we had a US-sponsored military dictatorship in the sixties-eighties that was both "strong men" and a
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by alextp 17y ago
I'd say just to save time and face. If he was found with a bullet through his head or something like that it is not unreasonable that all airports and roads would be closed for a while, but if it looked just like a heart attack the murderer
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by alextp 17y ago
I think it's more like Yahoo!Answers
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by alextp 17y ago
I'm outside the US (São Paulo, Brazil) and could skip the paywall by clicking via the google search link (although by now the article is way down in the list).
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by alextp 17y ago
function isNaN(x) { return x != x; };
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by alextp 17y ago
Friedman is one of the worst sources of opinion I've ever read. The World Is Flat (which is, admitedly, his only substantial work I've read cover to cover) is filled with unwarranted conclusions and groundless generalizations and altogether
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by alextp 17y ago
If you're in linux you can just type that into a shell and it will work. What it does (and you can emulate in other OSs) is concatenate the bytes of the jpeg file with the bytes of the zip file and save them as one huge blob, which will be
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by alextp 17y ago
This is very hard to do; you'd probably have to write a bot to feed reasonable but false data into random forms, and then coordinate it. You'd also be wasting a lot of bandwidth; in this sense it is as useless as those "let's DDOS them back
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by alextp 17y ago
Only the pypy interpreter is written in RPython, code running in pypy is written in normal python. See http://codespeak.net/pypy/dist/pypy/doc/coding-guide.html for more info
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by alextp 17y ago
Erm, ls .mozilla/plugins I think
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by alextp 17y ago
This ignores the fact that even if you explain quicksort to a random person and give them a list of a few thousand numbers they can only look at one at a time you will invariably find out that most of the people will get it wrong most of th

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