celoyd

12 ms·

61.
by celoyd 15y ago
Absolutely. But the idea of a collective action problem is that sometimes it isn’t in anyone’s interests to provide the service by themselves. This can interact badly with some of the (contingent) ways we’ve come to practice capitalism. Ide
62.
by celoyd 15y ago
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem . This is what governments are for .
63.
by celoyd 15y ago
As I said, empirically, those announcements are not important. Look at Perot, Nader, Paul – those votes might have been half an epsilon further from wasted than a vote for Obama or McCain, but they were still vastly less effective than any
64.
by celoyd 15y ago
Oh? What’s the fault in the thinking? I think it’s not a problem in the utility equation for an individual voter, it’s a problem in the system. By definition, a vote in a non-swing state is insignificant. Empirically, a good showing for a t
65.
by celoyd 15y ago
Argument #1: Presidential candidates are noise. Unless you live in Ohio or Florida, your vote is foregone. If you want to be a good citizen, your time is probably best spent on convincing your friends to vote in local races. Or doing not-
66.
by celoyd 15y ago
I don’t think of myself as the HN mainstream, but probably few do. I synthesize these positions on Gladwell. #1, he’s not a scientist and not a science journalist. He doesn’t apply any rigor to speak of: at best, he’s telling suggestive and
67.
by celoyd 15y ago
This reminds me of a semi-famous quote attributed to Bob Martin at AT&T: “Don’t include a sentence in documentation if its negation is obviously false”. I use this as a quick way of deciding whether I’m being informative. I imagine that
68.
by celoyd 15y ago
I took a semester or two of Ancient Greek, and it wasn’t a walk in the park, but it also wasn’t a headache. It’s the Indo-Europeanness: it’s full of cognate vocabulary and even idioms,[0] and while it has some new grammar, its basic structu
69.
by celoyd 15y ago
Off-topically, it’s a little odd to pick Swahili as a byword for a weird language for an English-speaker. It’s a popular second language (which tends to sand down a language’s most complex features), it’s written in the Latin alphabet, it h
70.
by celoyd 15y ago
It’s a lot like programming in that way. I’ve done enough of both that it bums me out when I see programmers looking at designers and saying “what’s the big deal, it’s just drawings” and designers looking at programmers and saying “what’s t
71.
by celoyd 15y ago
Ouch. Well, it looks like you get to be an early adopter of IZ!
72.
by celoyd 15y ago
PNG compressors generally try a couple different strategies, which can get very expensive. You might be able to ask the compression library to be a little more hands-off, if you don’t need great compression.
73.
by celoyd 15y ago
For any algorithm that’s heuristically searching a very large space (in this case, the space of model parameters to compress a given string), you can expect it to do better given more time. So it would actually be surprising if the best com
74.
by celoyd 15y ago
Are they that different? On the one hand, a single person’s ability to change government policy is pretty small. You can vote, call your member of Congress, or sign a petition. But it’s only true in a limited sense that the rules change i
75.
by celoyd 15y ago
The "It's took [ sic ] expensive to address the problem" argument It’s amazing how common this is. It was smart of Gore to use the phrase “an inconvenient truth”, because so many arguments boil down to “it isn’t happening, because if it w
76.
by celoyd 15y ago
Ornaments? Ha. A lot of them don’t have italics . Or reasonable kerning. Or text figures. Or even basic “special” characters like ñ . I’d give up dozens of attractive but incomplete fonts for a single complete one. One or two bugs or mino
77.
by celoyd 15y ago
This passage bewildered me. It’s hard to think of a time when the US military wasn’t comparably involved in politicized missions: see e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_milit... The wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and L
78.
by celoyd 15y ago
I know little about law, so this might not be what you’re asking, but I can easily find, e.g.: Price fixing, bid rigging, and other forms of collusion are illegal and are subject to criminal prosecution by the Antitrust Division of the Uni
79.
by celoyd 15y ago
I find it hard to believe that Haskell could not be friendlier. And I say that as a fan of Haskell.
80.
by celoyd 15y ago
We work in an environment where heresay [sic] and taste drive change instead of studies and models. We are stumbling in the dark. Another way to look at it is that we’re making progress, but with lots of false starts, like most progress.
81.
by celoyd 15y ago
Because you may have killed most of the bacteria but left a few with some resistance to that type of antibiotic. In classical evolutionary terms, you’ve thinned the herd to the strongest members. These surviving somewhat resistant bacteria,
82.
by celoyd 15y ago
We don’t really know how many 1,500 is, because we’re missing a lot of the variables we need to have even an order-of-magnitude estimate of how common intelligent life is. It could be practically inevitable on planets with liquid water; it
83.
by celoyd 15y ago
How can the messaging be improved? How can it be made more compelling to resonate more with laypeople? Explain SOPA as (1) censorship and (2) a heavy burden on legitimate business. These are honest ways of describing it in everyday terms,
84.
by celoyd 15y ago
Hey, that’s wonderful! I’ve linked back in the video description. Is there a place to ping you when I get the blog post up? Thumbnail sketch: people often want to generate sequences of distinct colors for data visualization, for example for
85.
by celoyd 15y ago
I love the golden ratio. It has many applications in design. In fact, right now I’m writing a blog post about using it to cheaply generate non-repeating sequences of distinct colors.[0] And I have some background in typography; I’m conversa
86.
by celoyd 15y ago
I think that’s the implication, but it goes even further than you say: because of the relativity of simultaneity (see Wikipedia), there is no absolute yardstick of the timeline. In other words, “it happened n years ago”, like “it’s happen
87.
by celoyd 15y ago
CRM is interesting stuff. It got popular in aviation after the crash of United 173,[0] where the crew was so involved in a serious landing gear problem that the only one who noticed that they were running out of fuel apparently didn’t want
88.
by celoyd 15y ago
Astronomers drove digital imaging sensitivity, so I reckon they’ve got it worked out. Skimming http://arxiv.org/pdf/0709.4281v1 , it looks like Ralph, the main visible-light camera, can distinguish between true blackness and a mere 3k pho
89.
by celoyd 15y ago
And only two of them are today considered humanities, which is what a lot of non-humanities people seem to be thinking when they say liberal arts . As someone who briefly attended a liberal arts college, when I hear liberal arts I unders
90.
by celoyd 15y ago
As you may already have discovered, it’s part of the Long Now, which is making the 10,000 Year Clock[0] (about which a friend of mine wrote a play[1], and which helped inspire Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi novel “Anathem”). It involves a bunch o

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