aphyr

81 ms·

781.
by aphyr 17y ago
I thought Steve was impressive because he was uncommon. By definition, every high school with a track team has a captain of the track team; you're likely to see hundreds of Davids in a given college admissions department. It's much less lik
782.
by aphyr 17y ago
Yeah, I'm a little surprised that Digg has moved away for performance reasons. Maybe their data model is fundamentally more complex than StackOverflow? Or maybe SO has a better caching layer in front of the service?
783.
by aphyr 17y ago
I think in some cases this kind of appeal to authority can be valid. Facebook has absolutely insane sparse matrices to handle. They handle enourmous volumes of traffic querying very specific (read: not cachable between users) datasets. Mo
784.
by aphyr 17y ago
Really? I came from RCS, CVS, and SVN. Git's toolkit took about ten minutes to get used to, but then I suddenly realized that it made far more sense than SVN. git add, git status, git commit -a. All repos are equal. Everything is small, a
785.
by aphyr 17y ago
Three things suggest to me that gender differences are not as intrinsic as we might assume, given the current disparity: 1. Social groups tend to select for like individuals. Many women (and other under-represented people) find it surprisin
786.
by aphyr 17y ago
You have to give the guy credit. Arrested, he escapes into the ceiling tiles, steals a uniform, and walks out the front door. Arrested by a frackin SWAT team, he steals the squad car he's placed in and makes a run for it? Hats off, ladies
787.
by aphyr 17y ago
Speak for yourself. I'm cognitively useless until at least two--four hours into my day. Best work happens right around 5pm.
788.
by aphyr 17y ago
This is absolutely amazing. The PS guys are really pushing the envelope of image editing. I think it's really cool that the editing process is more structural, more high-level, than working with the basic tools. The lens flare removal, espe
789.
by aphyr 17y ago
Did anyone else try the pzizz example tracks after reading this? I was suprised at how quickly I started sinking into wooziness! $40 is kind of a lot for napping software, but I may have to check out some of the free binaural beat apps.
790.
by aphyr 17y ago
Yes suffering is bad. But say you have a child who has been found torturing a small animal. Statistically that child has a 90% chance of turning into someone who does great harm to human beings. Given that would a society be morally jus
791.
Internal Youtube emails and conversations, presented by Viacom (businessinsider.com)
1 points by aphyr 17y ago|0 comments
792.
by aphyr 17y ago
You're right; nobody likes living next to a factory or power plant. But that doesn't mean you have to live twenty miles away. I lived in Madison, WI for two years; being on an isthmus, they've had to cram city government, utilities, shoppin
793.
by aphyr 17y ago
It may not be possible to stop people from doing what they want, but what they want can certainly be influenced by city planning. Fly over Portland, OR and compare to Minneapolis; the difference in layout is staggering. Even when you includ
794.
by aphyr 17y ago
"Do you expect to change homes as much as you change jobs? If not, the fact that your home is walking distance from your old job just doesn't seem like a bonus." Good point, but I don't think it invalidates my argument. Most people relocate
795.
by aphyr 17y ago
I'm not that excited about it. Intelligent Transportation (the Google vans with wifi) is a great way to make the commute more productive for people--but to the extent that this technology encourages urban sprawl, I'm against it. Commuting
796.
by aphyr 17y ago
You can't trust the last person who used it to wash their hands. Besides, it's probably a different layout/size than yours, and keystroke loggers would be a problem. I think it's a non-issue; people will just use their laptops.
797.
by aphyr 17y ago
Yeah, most discussions I've read on this boil down to "it's what I learned first." Seems to be a familiarity thing. What bugged me about PS is that it's really hard to manage all the panels and subwindows. They end up covering what I'm tryi
798.
by aphyr 17y ago
I can't speak for OO, but I definitely prefer Gimp's interface to Photoshop. On the other hand, I use weird window managers.
799.
by aphyr 17y ago
I think that last line is even more telling. "I consider this prediction to have been proven correct." Credibility: zero.
800.
by aphyr 17y ago
The thing that fascinates me about psychopathy, along with ASPD, autistic-spectrum, etc, is that many of these "disorders" or "syndromes" are just different ways that minds can work. Humans come in so many flavors! In some ways, it's the cl
801.
by aphyr 17y ago
I agree that behaviors are caused by physical states. However, stating that people who behave in a fundamentally different way aren't physically different is misguided. Every person is physically different. The difficulty is that unless the
802.
by aphyr 17y ago
Seconded. As I recall, the PCL-R matches far fewer people than DSM-IV's ASPD criteria.
803.
by aphyr 17y ago
Curious. My psychopathology course always emphasized a diathesis-stress model. Their position was that "mental disorders" are functionally defined behaviors involving biological, emotional, and social factors in varying degrees.
804.
by aphyr 17y ago
I believe the APA's official stance is that psychopathy and sociopathy are obsolete synonyms for antisocial personality disorder. That being said, the ASPD criteria are somewhat different from the PCL-R; PCL-R tends to select a much smaller
805.
by aphyr 17y ago
No. It's a euphemism for a quantum electrodynamics process, commonly known as pair production. ;)
806.
by aphyr 17y ago
I'm surprised he knew what brands of running shoes or tomato sauce he wanted. Confronted with a selection of functionally identical boxes at the supermarket or shoe store, I frequently stand stymied for several minutes. Eventually I realize
807.
by aphyr 17y ago
I don't believe it's primarily about advertising. Chrome startup on my Ubuntu and Windows boxes is an order of magnitude faster than Firefox, and significantly faster than IE. I can open a Chrome window and navigate through two pages befo
808.
by aphyr 17y ago
Coral Cache was invented for just that. http://www.coralcdn.org/
809.
by aphyr 17y ago
That's an interesting idea. In this case, though, I don't think it does. In fact, many radial forces don't scale with the square law--the weak and strong nuclear forces, for example. The fourth-power scaling in the parallel plates example i
810.
by aphyr 17y ago
Sure. You could mechanically couple one of the plates to a generator of any type. Keep in mind though that the Casimir energy is conservative--meaning that you can't extract more energy out of it than you put in. You'd get one extremely sma

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