celoyd

25 ms·

181.
by celoyd 16y ago
In theory, GPS fix quality is roughly the same in all mid-latitudes[0]; any difference between Florida and Washington should be lost in other factors. Probably, either your sky is more covered in Seattle (by trees and hills, for example), o
182.
by celoyd 16y ago
I could be totally wrong, but my impression is that at the time of the EPA’s creation, the model of pollution that it was designed to prevent was based on more or less directly harmful contamination: litter, mercury, smog, that kind of thin
183.
by celoyd 16y ago
I also mostly agree with thaumaturgy, so I think we’re pretty much good.
184.
by celoyd 16y ago
You’re making really good points, but unfortunately I mainly agree with them. That is, you’re arguing against something I did not argue. i.e., whether it "would be" good medicine or not is completely irrelevant, because we're talking about
185.
by celoyd 16y ago
I think we mostly agree and are arguing mainly over interpretation. There's a large chasm between things that might potentially work, and things that couldn't even work in theory. Can you characterize this chasm? I think that there’s a fa
186.
by celoyd 16y ago
Heh. What is that difference? Philosophers of science would love to know. If homeopathy failed to conform to accepted theory but consistently beat placebos in a wide variety of good clinical trials, it would be good medicine; if it worked i
187.
by celoyd 16y ago
I basically agree with this, but I can’t help thinking it would be stronger if it were softer in places. For example, I couldn’t say that “for homeopathy to be effective, it would have to work in violation of the principles of biology, chem
188.
by celoyd 16y ago
I could be wrong – it’s been a while now – but isn’t that what forth’s “immediate” is?
189.
by celoyd 16y ago
This is tricky for me to think about because I’m not sure what to count as “functional”. For example, is a cozy sense of familiarity and well-being functional? I could argue either side of that. It seems obvious to me that these things are
190.
by celoyd 16y ago
Yes, but … some of these can be seen as removing the cognitive friction of relearning unimportant things every time their implementations evolve. Rigorous situational efficiency would be inefficient overall, because everyone would lose time
191.
by celoyd 16y ago
Horses and some sailing ships go faster than 20 mph, but yeah. Also, Voyager wasn’t designed for maximal speed out of the solar system. Even then, if we had wanted to get to Alpha Centauri as fast as possible, we could have done better. Not
192.
by celoyd 16y ago
For a comparable curiosity, see the VOC. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company – “It was the first multinational corporation in the world and the first company to issue stock. It was also arguably the world's first me
193.
by celoyd 16y ago
Sure. As this is designed now, HTTPS’s prevention of malicious JS insertion is the big weak point I see. But it’s implicitly asking what you could do if you found ways of getting around that, for example by using client-side caches of the c
194.
by celoyd 16y ago
Got a specific problem in mind? How would you attack this?
195.
by celoyd 16y ago
No. Assuming it’s correctly implemented, it’s more secure than an identical app that sends the password over SSL to the server. This is not an innovation in cryptographic theory, but it’s something you don’t usually see in a web app.
196.
by celoyd 16y ago
(Friend of the OP here.) That’s true, but it’s a problem with pretty much everything. Google (or an impostor) could , once in a million requests, send you JS that posts your Gmail password to Twitter. You probably don’t trust this site as
197.
by celoyd 16y ago
Many sites’ articles’ addresses are only unique in the query string. For example, HN’s own discussion pages would all be considered http://news.ycombinator.com/item .
198.
by celoyd 16y ago
There are several errors like this in the movie. IMDB’s “goofs” page is long. I assume they were mostly accidental, but I’d rather see them as part of the atmosphere of irrationality within rationality.
199.
by celoyd 16y ago
Kudos for actually checking, but of course this only proves it for lame with certain flags. There are several popular compressors and many many options. As someone mentioned, YouTube doesn’t say what it uses, but it may be possible to figur
200.
by celoyd 16y ago
re-encoding an mp3 doesn't do much Sure it does, typically. It’s no different from video in this way: ideally, all of the image features that would get thrown out were thrown out the first time, but the codec isn’t that smart. Most implem
201.
by celoyd 16y ago
Are you claustrophobic? From http://www.astronautix.com/craft/reseball.htm : “It was said that when they were in use, astronaut candidates would be asked to get in one. After fifteen minutes or so, the candidate was asked how long they th
202.
by celoyd 16y ago
More power to them. But notice they have defense funding. As the article hints, right now, if someone with Ebola got on a plane to Cairo or Johannesburg, billions of people would die. That’s not worth much in the $10 × 1,000,000,000 people
203.
by celoyd 16y ago
One function is as a sort of compression/mnemonic. Bingo. I think this is very important insight from CS to this kind of literature. You might enjoy Robert Bringhurst’s discussion of Haida myths, where he calls them fractal in a way t
204.
by celoyd 16y ago
Sure, but even internally. Like a lot of long oral literature in verse, it has a smallish set of colorful epithets for often-mentioned things. For example, where the rhythm requires it, Ulysses might be called πολύτροπος, resourceful; where
205.
by celoyd 16y ago
Furthermore, in many of the literary traditions Tolkien was building on, formulaic phrases are just the way it’s done. For a well-known example in epic literature, take Homer: the Iliad and the Odyssey are full of repeated wordings which, i
206.
by celoyd 16y ago
It’s hard to tell what they’re actually saying here other than that a newly popular, relatively open platform has some bad UIs. Why’s it gotta sound so grouchy?
207.
by celoyd 16y ago
No, it has a legal obligation to do what (the majority of) its shareholders say. If they tell it to dance a jig and give all its assets to the Flat Earth Society, it’s obliged. Maximizing shareholder value in the way that’s usually meant is
208.
by celoyd 16y ago
Oh, I’m not begrudging your posting it; for one thing, it’s got me thinking about Hilbert (and Z-order) curves again. It just seems like an odd application in an area where, I gather, more sophisticated correlation tools are the norm.
209.
by celoyd 16y ago
I like sticking stuff on Hilbert curves as much as the next person, but I don’t see how it makes this particular data easier to understand. It looks like you could do the same thing in as little total space with overlapping line graphs, for
210.
by celoyd 16y ago
I think Kay is a genius, but this is a bad example of what he’s trying to say. I can’t imagine a culture that’s producing moving music but isn’t fascinated with the epiphenomena of music. Kay comes off as a “get off my lawn” old guy, which

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