bermanoid

45 ms·

331.
by bermanoid 15y ago
Given the high profile and sweeping consequences of their work, this attitude is giving science a black eye. First of all, "climate science" != "science as a whole". Second, if any scientific field ends up in the crosshairs of a well-fund
332.
by bermanoid 15y ago
That article doesn't debunk the claim very effectively, IMO: of Bazaar, Git, Mercurial, SVN, and CVS, Python-dominated Mercurial is the smallest by a healthy margin (~50k SLoC), whereas the more C heavy CVS, Git, and SVN weigh in at ~2x, 5x
333.
by bermanoid 15y ago
Take, for example, a traditional retailer such as Opening Ceremony. After shipping, merchant fees, packaging, and COGS, they produce an average gross margin around 40% (the industry standard) – after accounting for photography expenses (wh
334.
by bermanoid 15y ago
That Terry Tao article is excellent, as usual (well, at least for math dorks - what's unusual about this one is that you don't need a very high level of dorkery to grok it 100%) and the "executive summary" reason that Benford's law applies
335.
by bermanoid 15y ago
In science, a majority means very little. There have been many cases throughout history where one person was right and everyone else was wrong. That is a plain old crap argument. Yes, there have been such cases, but they are far and away
336.
by bermanoid 15y ago
However, when the position taken up by one side is "There is no room for skepticism about what my model predicts will happen in the future!" and the position taken up by the other side is "There is some room for skepticism about what that
337.
by bermanoid 15y ago
Compared to all the thousands of ways in which the government tends to find to waste taxpayer money with near-zero chance of it helping anybody, I just can't seem to be so offended by this one. If you hate the idea of taxation or stimulus,
338.
by bermanoid 15y ago
I think your concerns are absolutely spot on, and they match mine almost exactly - I've spent practically my whole working life modeling complex systems, and pathologies are the rule, not the exception, so it strikes me as unbelievably naiv
339.
by bermanoid 15y ago
It doesn't matter whether the market is right or not. What matters is that the market is. Politicians routinely forget that. Communism's core failure was ignoring the irrepressible nature of market forces. The same applies to our system of
340.
by bermanoid 15y ago
I don't automatically assume it's a problem, as so many people seem to. I don't assume that all economic inequality is the medieval type, where the rich are the winners of a zero sum game. The problem I see with growing income inequality
341.
by bermanoid 15y ago
Yes, to some extent there were debates about how the implementation would work, but also about how they would interact with all the various other features of Java, most of which were not constructed with lambdas in mind: generics, exception
342.
by bermanoid 15y ago
Because a huge proportion of the time there's nothing useful that you can actually do when you catch an exception, other than print the stack trace and exit. And because people are forced to catch the exception instead of letting it bubb
343.
by bermanoid 15y ago
Are you saying that if welfare benefits were reduced we'd have a lower unemployment rate? That a significant number of the currently unemployed have decided to remain unemployed because welfare is good enough? That's certainly an effect to
344.
by bermanoid 15y ago
This practice is extremely short sighted of Apple, Google and RIM. What practice? Responding to a properly filed DMCA complaint by taking down the content? You do realize that doing anything other than what they've done would be against
345.
by bermanoid 15y ago
Overage hours? Job-less risk? Career risk and opportunity cost? What? You seem to be including those numbers as his 'cost', are you assuming he's not getting benefits, or that he's going to work only 40 hours a week at this mythical 100k /
346.
by bermanoid 15y ago
Bad incentives: it's the incentives (see "Invisible Hand") that make things work properly! To the extent that the incentives are wrong, these are the regulations, the aberrations that make things deviate from the free market. It's fairly
347.
by bermanoid 15y ago
It's also worth checking out GWTBox2d, which is actually Java code run through GWT, and runs surprisingly well: http://gwtbox2d.appspot.com/ I'm really impressed with what JS can do these days...
348.
by bermanoid 15y ago
And this is why everybody else hates PHP. It tempts you to write bad code, and so most people working in the language end up doing so. I have to periodically stop myself when I'm writing PHP and make sure I'm not falling into bad habits.
349.
by bermanoid 15y ago
Not in cahoots at all, it really is a very interesting book. One of the most...different, I guess is the word, math/physics books I've read in quite a while. Be warned, it might not be the best book for beginners, and in all honesty it's m
350.
by bermanoid 15y ago
As confused as this article seems, it does at least reference one Actual Paper: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1101/1101.0931v2.pdf I haven't had a chance to look through it yet, but here's the abstract: We propose a deepening of th
351.
by bermanoid 15y ago
If you're up for a real wild ride and have some time to kill (no, seriously - the thing is over 1000 pages), Roger Penrose's The Road To Reality ( http://www.amazon.com/Road-Reality-Complete-Guide-Universe/d... ) actually covers this stuf
352.
by bermanoid 15y ago
And who will write the spec? And why will it be any easier to write the spec than the program? Sure, there will be people at the top of the command hierarchy dictating what needs are being met. That doesn't mean that spec-writing jobs wi
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by bermanoid 15y ago
The corollary here is quite interesting: if we imagine this extending quite a ways into the future, we might ask what sort of society we'd like to live in far in the future, where more and more jobs are lost because technology makes them po
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by bermanoid 15y ago
But should a 0.5% line item take precedent over three items which combined total to 70%? Is it any less of a waste of time to talk about those three items, each of which is considered a core concern of one of the two parties in control an
355.
by bermanoid 15y ago
How can one breathe the word "viral" and claim to debunk the concept without looking at data from one of the many Facebook apps that actually, you know, went viral ? [that's a rhetorical question, I fully realize that the answer is that th
356.
by bermanoid 15y ago
For super-optimal Reddit viewing speed, use the HoverZoom Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nonjdcjchghhkdooln... Then you don't even have to click the link to see cat pictures, you just hover and move on when it
357.
by bermanoid 15y ago
As it is, I have an unhealthy number of vim macros to deal with all the boilerplate that Java foists upon a developer. I hate to bring up the editor wars thang, but knowing a lot of very skilled people in the Java world, I will say this:
358.
by bermanoid 15y ago
Please don't write your own object pools, this isn't 1995. In my experience, object pooling (and poor-man's-object-pooling, using scratch objects and the like) can still make a major difference for certain applications. I worked on JBox2
359.
by bermanoid 15y ago
I'm really, really hoping that you're logging referrer data along with scores - if you're not already, you might consider starting. Even if this is not a source of proper scientific data, it would be highly interesting to see how, for in
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by bermanoid 15y ago
sleeping with people not your husband is a risk-seeking behavior that also increases genetic success for women. But the way you've phrased it is so loaded in "the way things are" that it's hard to see just how prevalent the cultural norms

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