charles-salvia

17 ms·

31.
by charles-salvia 9y ago
Yeah, in the 90s Microsoft was basically this unstoppable juggernaut that ruled the Desktop with an iron fist. The main cause of their decline was that a new market appeared which they failed to capture - namely, the mobile market (as well
32.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
I experienced pretty much the exact opposite of what you're saying. Most of the skills I have I learned by researching/studying by myself. College was mostly useless to me. And I'm much more productive when working remotel
33.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
Based on the developments in exo-planet research along with discoveries like this over the past couple of years, I would conjecture that life is ridiculously common. But by life, I mean microbial life. I would imagine that multi-cellula
34.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
For any meeting that doesn't involve in-depth technical discussion - the kind of discussion where you might need to break out a whiteboard and start drawing nodes - I find that video conferencing is a perfectly fine substitute for face
35.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
I usually just rely on drugs like... um, caffeine, rather than trying to religiously stick to a particular sleep schedule.
36.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
The point is apparently to return "type_t::num_types" if the key doesn't exist in the map. Using at() throws an exception if the key doesn't exist.
37.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
The legendary "Alcubierre drive" concept for faster than light travel relies on the existence of negative mass to work. Up until now, I have always read that it was generally assumed that negative mass could not exist, making the
38.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
Ads are definitely a huge problem, but it seems they are at least equally, perhaps even less of a contributor to bloat than the tons of off-the-shelf Javascript frameworks/libraries major websites throw in to perform analytics, or to
39.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
It doesn't seem to matter as much in the technology world. When I look at people's resumes I barely even glance over the Education section. I mean, I'll take note if it's something extreme like a 4.0 at Stanford, but f
40.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
What's funny is that some modern scripting languages like Python, with things like the "os" module, are almost passable as a general purpose shell scripting environment. I actually tend to write Python scripts instead of b
41.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
Presumably, the idea is to count sufficiently similar images as the same image when doing the deduplication, so traditional hashing doesn't help here.
42.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
GWB had the choice of (1) start war in Iraq for vague reasons, (2) don't start war in Iraq. He chose (1).
43.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
There is ... a crude spell checker could be implemented by dumping a dictionary of words into a metric tree and using levenshtein distance (or damerau-levenshtein distance) as the distance function. The spell check would then consist of do
44.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
There are many metric-based data structures, such as M-tree, Vantage Point Tree, etc. They all suffer from the same major problem: they all rely on triangle inequality to speed up search by pruning impossible paths. But this doesn't
45.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
To me this sounds like you just develop dependency-laden bloatware, i.e. you'll throw in some 5 gigabyte Javascript library just to do one thing.
46.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
Still, the thing is, I really don't buy into any arguments in favor of starting a new project, in C, today . The problem is that C suffers from some really serious disadvantages as a systems programming language, and it has no signif
47.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
This is kind of silly... this is really a problem with the human obsession with creating taxonomies and classifications of natural phenomena, when natural phenomena are basically collections of atoms that have very fuzzy boundaries. Cluste
48.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
Your bullshit detector is hopelessly broken. At a certain point, these "mathematical simulations" (i.e. effects observed in a laboratory) end up having real world applications. Anti-matter has already crossed the threshold of be
49.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
CERN claims to have created anti-hydrogen atoms in 1995 [1], and Fermilab confirmed the claim shortly after by doing the same thing. You're perfectly free to doubt these claims (for whatever strange reason), but doing so would be prett
50.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
No power on Earth is that competent. And the Tea Party was very clearly a reaction to Obama getting elected, and egged on by the Republican establishment.
51.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
It runs 24 hours and extensively covers 4 of the 5 boroughs. Yes, it's dirty, but the coverage + availability is what makes it a great system - it's certainly unparalleled in the Western hemisphere. Everytime I go to San Francis
52.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
I agree. A lot of the complaints about "fake news" and everything aren't so much directed at actual false information being reported - but rather the selection or emphasis of certain facts over others. An obvious example w
53.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
Yeah, terms like "machine learning" and "AI" have basically become buzz words which, to most laymen, probably encourage the idea that we're on the cusp of creating Data from Star Trek. Unfortunately, the reality is
54.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
What do you want us to do? These guys keep throwing spears and shooting arrows at anyone that approaches their island. Should we... should we ask the Indian government to send in an armed infantry unit to force the Sentinelese to sit do
55.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
And in the latter case, most human programmers will be unemployed, and thus unconcerned with hash collisions.
56.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
You're venting at the wrong leaf node
57.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
I really sympathize with this, honestly. At a certain point, as I'm working really hard to debug a segmentation fault late at night, and then catching the subway early in the morning, the idea of having to sympathize with a bunch of w
58.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
What the hell are you talking about?
59.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
I can understand your sentiment - but unfortunately we can't just ignore rural America. The problem is basically that, on average, rural areas tend to be less educated and far more religious. They vote against social programs that wou
60.
by charles-salvia 10y ago
I'm not a baby boomer, so I have no interest in defending them, but there's something inherently tautological about this whole line of reasoning. The argument is basically "everything sucks right now, so blame the largest vo

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