camccann

22 ms·

151.
by camccann 17y ago
On the other hand, as a resident of Michigan, there are no words, in any language on Earth, that could begin to capture the joy I feel at the idea of excising Detroit (though I fear it may have already metastasized).
152.
by camccann 17y ago
Lack of curly braces?
153.
by camccann 17y ago
Give me IF statements (preferably with nesting support) and variables, and there's nothing that cannot be done. I know you were exaggerating here, but simple conditional statements aren't actually sufficient. You need some construct that
154.
by camccann 17y ago
No amount of math can tease apart the indiscernibly complex. If there's any structure at all, you can find it with enough math and enough data; that's exactly the purpose of statistics. But without controls, and without repeatable experi
155.
by camccann 17y ago
Well, that's what we have statistics and the scientific method for. Of course, that means lots of math, and lots of research, and lots of hard work, and having to actually to change your mind if your predictions are wrong, and--worst of all
156.
by camccann 17y ago
Probably because there's not really much substance to address. Most commentary on "economics" is barely-disguised political advocacy, starting with a conclusion and then working backwards to come up with arguments, and this article is even
157.
by camccann 17y ago
Fun fact: Did you know that the word "man" was originally sex-neutral? The generic term was co-opted for the specifically male sense centuries ago and the original masculine term mostly disappeared. So, fight sexism by using "man" in the ge
158.
by camccann 17y ago
The article seems to be more interested in mocking other people's social/political ideas than talking about the actual problem, viz., ineffective schooling. Smugly telling someone that what they're doing is a bad idea doesn't really accom
159.
by camccann 17y ago
...but not the only one. For instance, #2 on the list there is Singapore, which is somewhat infamous as a semi-authoritarian society with, for instance, many restrictions on freedom of speech and laws criminalizing various types of undesire
160.
by camccann 17y ago
There's plenty of explanations out there, if you care to look. Of course, there's also plenty of explanations about how government policies have created new jobs. Measuring results and identifying causal relationships is incredibly difficul
161.
by camccann 17y ago
I didn't vote you down, and please don't read this as an attack, it's an honest question: Yes, he obviously has a strong opinion on the matter, because it's a direct and obvious consequence of his ethical worldview. Is this really a bad t
162.
by camccann 17y ago
That's actually a refreshingly well-thought-out treatment of the subject from someone who has (and says as much up front) a massive ideological bias against the whole concept. I wish more people with "fringe" political opinions were that se
163.
by camccann 17y ago
The concluding remarks from Dunning and Kruger's paper make me chuckle: In sum, we present this article as an exploration into why people tend to hold overly optimistic and miscalibrated views about themselves. We propose that those with l
164.
by camccann 17y ago
Well, I can tell you how Dunning and Kruger did it--they borrowed a bunch of jokes from various sources (famous comedians, joke books, &c.), then had some professional comedians rate the quality of the jokes. The assumption was that mak
165.
by camccann 17y ago
Counterpoint: If you want more information, in the USA (or at least parts of it) you can see your tax dollars at work with NOAA's weather graphs, like this: http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?textField1=42.9612&... Just in case yo
166.
by camccann 17y ago
How do they know they have the right person? What makes you think they necessarily care? If they're accurate enough most of the time, that's good enough for their purposes. Negative impacts on individuals isn't something they have any par
167.
by camccann 17y ago
That's not what credit scores are for though. Imagine that you're going to be lending money with interest. What does your ideal customer look like? Someone who just pays you back a month later? No, because you're not getting much interest
168.
by camccann 17y ago
I had not heard about this, but honestly I could not care less. If people just ignored this shit rather than pandering to the trolls, maybe there'd be no incentive for them to keep doing it. eBay has (or had?) a habit of spamming ads in G
169.
by camccann 17y ago
I find it deeply worrying that something can be censored based on the complaints of someone who would take Encyclopaedia Dramatica seriously.
170.
by camccann 17y ago
It sheds about as much light as asking whether an aircraft carrier can swim. (I am informed that aircraft carriers do indeed swim... in Russian.) "The question of whether machines can think... is about as relevant as the question of wheth
171.
by camccann 17y ago
The REASON why tabs are so bad is because it makes very very subtle errors when they get mixed. And the reason why spaces are bad is because it makes subtle errors when they get mixed in with tab-indented code. This is an argument for con
172.
by camccann 17y ago
If you use spaces instead of tabs, you're never relying on a particular editor or pager to have tab width set correctly. Tabs aren't just used at the beginning of lines. There might be a left-aligned, multi-line comment to the right of a
173.
by camccann 17y ago
"I think there's a connection. Certainly in the early days of Unix, pipes facilitated function composition on the command line. You could take an input, perform some transformation on it, and then pipe the output into another program. (...
174.
by camccann 17y ago
Function composition and currying seem like a more natural translation to me. Or you can think of it like this: netstat_n >>= grep "tcp" >>= flip awk 5 >>= sort >>= uniq_c >>= sort_n See also: http:/
175.
by camccann 17y ago
You seem to be making the assumption that the private sector isn't perfectly capable of manufacturing its own shitty incentives without the government's help. People aren't rational and decision makers don't automatically have incentives th
176.
by camccann 17y ago
Sounds about right, but it'd be nice if you elaborated on that reaction.
177.
by camccann 17y ago
It always surprises me the way politicians back then were so ballsy compared to the modern crowd. Not that that's relevant to anything, I suppose.
178.
by camccann 17y ago
Don't underestimate how much of social status really is nothing but behavior, by which I loosely mean everything that can be "faked". In other words, pretend long enough and you'll become the role you're playing. How much status you can g
179.
by camccann 17y ago
All the more reason why the industry ought to wise up before unionization starts to look like the better option anyway. Abusive management and powerful unions are a lose-lose situation for everyone. It's basically the double-defect equilibr
180.
by camccann 17y ago
Just be careful, if you're considering doing something like this: Make sure the tattoo artist is sufficiently lazy, as Y diverges under strict evaluation. Nontermination is typically undesirable in a tattoo (except in some subcultures).

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