camccann

38 ms·

331.
by camccann 17y ago
Value, in the money sense, is what someone is prepared to pay. That's the kind of value I was referring to. Which is indeed one possible definition of the word, but not the most useful one in a world where rational economic agents don't
332.
by camccann 17y ago
Questions of that type often state that your only means of weighing the objects is a balance scale, i.e., you can put balls 1 and 2 on one side and balls 3 and 4 on the other to see which pair is heavier, and that's "one weighing". I'm gues
333.
by camccann 17y ago
An excellent demonstration of why it's a bad puzzle--there's an obvious naive solution that most people get stuck at (the 19 minute one), and a single critical insight that reveals the otherwise simple optimal solution. It's not testing log
334.
by camccann 17y ago
These little "here's how it would look" tools work well enough for sanity-checking images on a computer monitor, but don't necessarily tell you much about what someone will actually see. Color blindness makes a lot more sense if you have a
335.
by camccann 17y ago
As an aside, if "he was playing Monopoly" is indeed the expected answer I would be hard pressed to think of a worse type of question to ask at an interview. Using deliberately misleading phrasing to turn a trivial question into a riddle is
336.
by camccann 17y ago
Pretty sure 13 minutes isn't possible. The constraints are: no more than two people on the bridge at a time, they have to walk together to share the necessary flashlight, and if someone doesn't have the flashlight, they can't cross. i.e., i
337.
by camccann 17y ago
Good writers and actors don't usually work for free. Just because there are lots of expensive things that don't really improve quality doesn't mean quality isn't still expensive. Unless you're suggesting that television shows should all be
338.
by camccann 17y ago
Well, there's at least one perspective (accurate or not) from which your point doesn't hold. As a hypothetical, assume that perception of quality within a domain is actually a trained skill, improved by incremental refinement via new experi
339.
by camccann 17y ago
Maybe I'm being obtuse, but why not? The radius and tooth count appear to be the same on all four, and the directions of rotation match if each turns opposite the two it touches.
340.
by camccann 17y ago
Okay, here's the fun bit: Having a nearby grandmother consistently increased or decreased a child's chances of surviving vs. not having a grandmother around, in proportion to the expected number of shared X chromosomes. From the article:
341.
by camccann 17y ago
This sort of approach will leak information about what usernames exist in the system, which has security implications. Depending on the nature of the application you may or may not need to worry about this (e.g., obviously irrelevant if the
342.
by camccann 17y ago
Not to mention heavily fortified with nutritious mercury compounds!
343.
by camccann 17y ago
People blank with pressure. The first thing the interviewer should do is lay off the pressure not turn it on. Seniors and Out of Job People tend to freak. Even at Google, a job is not a vacation. Wanting to hire people who react well unde
344.
by camccann 17y ago
Summary of the results: If you are liberal, you eat overpriced, pretentious food. If you are conservative, you eat bland, unhealthy food. Hooray for reinforcing the expected stereotypes! I'm going with it probably saying more about whether
345.
by camccann 17y ago
The term "memory leak" is also sometimes applied, particularly in GC environments, to mean "memory that is still referenced, but will never be used again". Poorly-thought-out caching is an easy way to do that, especially if the cached value
346.
by camccann 17y ago
There's an external cost (or benefit) to everything . Fully calculating the impact of a given action on everyone else would be absurdly computationally intractable, particularly for extremely diffuse or probabilistic effects. So, the quest
347.
by camccann 17y ago
I find it hard to take people seriously when they mention their ridiculous biases right up front. Why is this? Most people, myself included, have at least a few "ridiculous biases" in their heads. I find it much easier to take an argument
348.
by camccann 17y ago
Except that the term native is overloaded; it can refer to an individual (as in "native speaker") as well as to a population, with different implications. I'm a native of my country, i.e., not an immigrant, but I'm not a member of the conti
349.
by camccann 17y ago
I have a hard time taking seriously any school of thought that's explicitly anti-empirical. This is the 21st century, have we learned nothing from the scientific revolution?
350.
by camccann 17y ago
Unfortunately, his point would be stronger if he had made it more in terms of a practical problem to be solved, not as an excuse to get in shots against The Evil Other Guys. Partisan feuding is for people who want political power, not solut
351.
by camccann 17y ago
A pity, because the article makes an interesting point otherwise, when not drifting into deranged partisan territory.
352.
by camccann 17y ago
For people without a job, give a guaranteed government job for $6 an hour. This sounds good but in practice would probably be a bad idea, for multiple reasons. The main problem is that government work programs would (by necessity) have to
353.
by camccann 17y ago
Just to highlight the part that I personally find most interesting: Terra preta, Woods guesses, covers at least 10 percent of Amazonia, an area the size of France. It has amazing properties, he says. Tropical rain doesn't leach nutrients f
354.
by camccann 17y ago
Whats a one liner to describe the Y-Combinator to someone new to FP? For someone mathematically comfortable with the idea of higher-order functions, it's "a function operating on higher-order functions, that returns a fixed point of its a
355.
by camccann 17y ago
A carbon atom is bigger than a water molecule? Interesting. Speaking of the carbon atom, there is no way that what seems to be its nucleus is even remotely to scale.
356.
by camccann 17y ago
If anything, the article could be taken to show that any large organization is inherently destructive to efficiency and should be cut down for the good of society.
357.
by camccann 17y ago
As an aside: it's not uncommon for groups of people to say they value one thing but, in their aggregate behavior, act as if they value other things instead. This is particularly blatant where moral obligations are involved. If instead you
358.
by camccann 17y ago
In practice "peak oil" is more a political catchphrase than anything else. Objectively, the concept is both true and obvious. Yes, finite resources are finite and if you keep using them they'll eventually run out. Not exactly rocket science
359.
by camccann 17y ago
Trivially true, but not necessarily helpful. No one is suggesting that dwindling oil supply means we'll be going back to pre-industrial technology levels (well, no one sane, at least). The concern is potential economic shocks due to large
360.
by camccann 17y ago
If you're talking about the dark blue part of the graph, that represents currently active oil fields only, so of course it's going to drop starting the day after the graph was made because it's defined to exclude new production capacity!

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