alextp

10 ms·

61.
by alextp 15y ago
It's very relevant, as selective enforcement of laws is the bread-and-butter of corrupt and dictatorial governments everywhere. As the former de facto dictator (known anecdotally as "colonel" even though he was a civillian) of the place whe
62.
by alextp 15y ago
Part of my point is that even engagement might not be the best metric. For example, here in hn, I'm far happier if people don't post than if they post something trivial or uninteresting (your post and comments are interesting as I think thi
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by alextp 15y ago
I find this kind of thing funny, but misguided. Karma in websites is not necessarily about accuratly reflecting some ground truth upvote probability, mean chance of liking a comment, expected future vote ratio of the commenter, etc. It's an
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by alextp 15y ago
Also, hiring in third-world countries might be a problem. I'm brazillian, and unless you're in São Paulo you're likely to find that locals have a different sense of time, hurry, priorities, and civility. In certain parts of the country (Sal
65.
by alextp 15y ago
The cooperative multitasking model of F#'s async makes good progress in solving your first point. There are essentially two ways of assigning the result of code blocks to variables: doing "let a = foo bar" which runs the code without a yiel
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by alextp 15y ago
I think the argument is slightly more convoluted, so it survives your criticisms. Let's imagine a society where there is one thing which everybody wants (say, food) which is controlled by one big corporation (say, monsanto) with few owners.
67.
by alextp 15y ago
About the McLovin ID thing, I don't think it's Google's responsability to police which ids are fake and which are not. As far as I know faking an ID is a misdemeanor or a felony in most US states [1] and some other countries (like Brazil),
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by alextp 15y ago
The "high margin" part of the quoted sentence accounts for profit (after all margin is revenue - cost, roughly).
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by alextp 15y ago
Except with antibiotics history did not quite play out like this, in that there were far more fatal diseases before the invention of antibiotics, and some superbugs can be controlled with different variations on the same basic technology.
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by alextp 15y ago
I think google hires a lot of low-level systems programmers, as should anyone running thousands of datacenters. After all, the power and network savings you can get from bit-twiddling, when multiplied by the number of computers in these net
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by alextp 15y ago
It's really hard to understand all this crippling branding imposed by the manufacturers and the carriers in Android phones. Do you really want people to wince every time they see your brand?
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by alextp 15y ago
Thanks :-)
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by alextp 15y ago
Interesting. Do you have more information on both the texas/australia and the texas/germany comparisons?
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by alextp 15y ago
Agreed, but only up to a point. To program it is fundamental to have a strong intuition as to what should happen, why, and how to get there. Doing that without some amount of manual computation is temerary.
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by alextp 15y ago
In all honesty, reading this makes me want the writer to actually spend some time reading grocery store counter magazines or cosmopolitan, or even watching 5 straight hours of fox news or reality shows or whatever goes completely against hi
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by alextp 15y ago
Microsoft research feels a lot like this, only with a more academic bent.
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by alextp 15y ago
Personalization seems like an attractive solution, but it is not clear if personalization in this level is even achievable. Even assuming it is, there is an inherent bias problem: if you never get to see what the computer things you are not
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by alextp 15y ago
The method resolution order for instances of the same class is always the same for all methods. If the class doesn't implement that method, the interpreter just skips and goes to the next place in the call chain. All super does is call the
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by alextp 15y ago
I don't think it suffers much as the method resolution order (mro) is computed ahead-of-time when creating the class.
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by alextp 15y ago
This is a really valuable list, specially because by reading journals and going to conferences one would not think these are the major problems (as most of these are too hard to be tackled directly and yet need simple solutions that would n
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by alextp 15y ago
I think this is the most insightful reply to the original post. Indeed, thinking about "numbers of students teached" is a really crappy metric for the performance of a teacher; it's far better, for example, to use something like (average in
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by alextp 15y ago
> American idol - influence of music on society, what defines popular, changes in the music industry that make idol possible, etc. In my experience, if you bring up american idol most people will more likely say something like "god, did
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by alextp 15y ago
> One way in which you might participate is to explore what the other person finds so fascinating about the topic. You may think its idiotic but they clearly don't, so rather than try to convince them of your point of view, find out the
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by alextp 15y ago
The free version is important as a trial: I would never have bought instapaper if it were not for it. What I think, though, is that perhaps what most paid apps need is a way to do "shareware": allow the user to try for a day or a week, and
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by alextp 15y ago
This is a great strategy. It also trivially extends to show that there is no such thing as "too many customers, need to hire out", as you can always increase the price. The one problem is that this doesn't transfer easily to things that are
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by alextp 15y ago
Microsoft Research seem very evaluatable (they routinely sell their work to product tems, and things like the algorithms driving the ad network from bing came out of MSR) in terms of the bottom line, and Google's research is so integrated w
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by alextp 15y ago
> We already know the equations that we'd need to use do general intelligence, it's just that they're not computable with finite computer power, so we'd have to do some approximations, and at present it's not realistic because the appro
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by alextp 15y ago
This feels slightly untrustworthy. What if there are still external references to subfields of a struct? I think it's probably safer to just write explicit constructors (that allocate and initialize) and destructors (to free properly) for t
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by alextp 15y ago
A possible counterpoint to this is that in some big cities you do have forms of anonymous camaraderie. I live in the largest city in south america (são paulo), and once I moved here my biggest surprise was how intimate this place could be i
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by alextp 15y ago
How is your experience in the US? Is it mostly NYC, New England, and California (or big cities in other places)? From what I hear rural america (which controls a disproportionate share of the voting power) tends to be more xenophobic, speci

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