astazangasta

133 ms·

1201.
by astazangasta 12y ago
Do you are think people who run polling organizations don't have political views? How about Pew? Yahoo? Even the AP? They all do. Why not speak from them? If it doesn't compromise their survey methodology, what's the problem?
1202.
by astazangasta 12y ago
Your disadvantage 1 is the result of a failure of imagination. The vast majority of life on Earth is built from nothing but carbon, oxygen,nitrogen, hydrogen, etc., and human life requires not much else. We could easily subsist on just thes
1203.
by astazangasta 12y ago
This comment is bonkers. This isn't the real world, where you can look things up on Google, or ask your economist friend, or email Brad Delong for help. This is a university exam. The whole fucking point of it is to test your understan
1204.
by astazangasta 12y ago
Why is this sneering garbage on HN? Look, none of this is new. Universities have always been contentious places, students have always been belligerent and uninterested in hearing the views of their opponents. This is what it is to be young:
1205.
by astazangasta 12y ago
People, please don't show a continuous variable with a rainbow gradient. Two colors will do - red/green, green/black, red/blue. Too many colors and you lose reference. You see green and have to think about what part of
1206.
by astazangasta 12y ago
Isn't this what cyanoacrylate (crazy glue) was invented for? Battlefield wound stitching?
1207.
by astazangasta 12y ago
Care to elaborate, or are we just going to trade claims of logical fallacies all day (please kill me first)? Pinker is the prime exponent of a field (evolutionary psychology) widely regarded by other scientists as a pseudo-science. When I h
1208.
by astazangasta 12y ago
Unfortunately Pinker is as guilty of just-so stories and easy essentialism as those he criticizes. What fraction of modern Americans are dying in wars again? Be wary of 'human nature'. http://www.newyorker.com/maga
1209.
by astazangasta 12y ago
Also, before we get to driverless cars, how about smarter traffic lights, that can say "ok, these guys are waiting for no reason. Instant green!" Smaller, easier problem, super helpful.
1210.
by astazangasta 12y ago
Jake Applebaum was detained routinely during border crossings in the early wikileaks days. They (FBI?) demanded he decrypt his hard drive for them. He refused. As far as I know they never managed to get inside. This works, at least some of
1211.
by astazangasta 12y ago
Hey, just read bytecode, then. As small and fast as you can get.
1212.
by astazangasta 12y ago
Don't speak for everyone. Personally I think the idea that we need wealth concentration at all is bogus. Investment is already performed by teams of skilled experts on behalf of the wealthy. We don't need individuals who simply pe
1213.
by astazangasta 12y ago
Hmm, when I worked with light microscopes as an undergrad we used to find at least one pixel blown out completely in every image from a cosmic ray intersecting the CCD array. Looks like these guys are detecting tracks from particle decay af
1214.
by astazangasta 12y ago
It certainly wouldn't produce a runaway fusion reaction, if that's what you mean. A hot plasma would dissipate pretty quickly once confinement fails, so the only energy would be that in the plasma itself. Might be bad for whoever
1215.
by astazangasta 12y ago
Can you clarify? Both of them took a principled stand and leaked a large amount of sensitive information to journalists they trusted at great personal risk. Both of them had a huge influence on public debate. They are at least comparable.
1216.
by astazangasta 12y ago
I'm not sure selection is a good way to think this particular problem, or management in general. Selection operates by replicating or destroying an immutable unit (a genetic variant). People cannot be replicated, only fired. Furthermor
1217.
by astazangasta 12y ago
What resources? There's not much useful water out there, let alone breathable air, carbon, organic matter, living things, ecosystems. All of those crucial resources are here. Besides, if we don't get things straight on this planet
1218.
by astazangasta 12y ago
Yes you would. Growth is a result of the differential between the birth rate and the death rate. If the fertility rate stays the same, but lifespan increases, there would be a period where the death rate would decrease, at least, until the
1219.
by astazangasta 12y ago
From an academic perspective, maybe. In terms of practical use of machine methods, not much. Machine learning is largely hype. I pity the army of PhDs they must have building training sets.
1220.
by astazangasta 12y ago
>About a year later, Google had reduced Android’s voice recognition error rate by an astounding 25 percent. lol. This is the grand payoff?
1221.
by astazangasta 12y ago
Yeah, I'll take a fairly predictable rate of inflation over an inherently deflationary currency with absolutely no controls on its motion. I guess we're supposed to be excited about currency being able to flit around like a panick
1222.
by astazangasta 12y ago
They forgot the other, key attribute of a dollar that makes it useful for 'distributing wealth': it has a relatively stable value. Economies rise and fall because of the struggle to control the price of their currencies. The notio
1223.
by astazangasta 12y ago
Why are we still doing this? We've known how to do secure authentication without the remote end holding your secret for years via public keys. Everyone here likely does this every day with ssh. There is even a browser mechanism for gen
1224.
by astazangasta 12y ago
Ugh, Stossel. Taxi deregulation has been done many times before. Try this: http://toomanytaxis.com/2009/01/taxi-deregulation-brings-onl...
1225.
by astazangasta 14y ago
As another visitor from Reddit, I apologize for this comment. While I agree with the original commenter that this case is overblown and shouldn't be called out as sexism, it flows from error and a reaction to a real problem. To suggest that