comicjk

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511.
by comicjk 13y ago
I think you're mistaken about what frequentist p-values mean. The definition you're using is the one we would like to have - the probability that X is president given the data. But what a p-value actually gives you is the chance o
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by comicjk 13y ago
The justification for affirmative action is not past discrimination itself, but its continued effects. Many groups have been discriminated against but recovered; there is no affirmative action for the Irish. For those that haven't, we
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by comicjk 13y ago
> Can we speed things to being better by being unfair the other way now? Absolutely not. Do you have any evidence for this? Because prima facie, reaching out to women does get some of them into tech fields, and we know that young women w
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by comicjk 13y ago
I think that's a very significant question. I would guess that 50%+ of Python users don't use Python 3, and thus would be counted as anti-Python-3, if not for that question which allows them to say "I don't think Python
515.
by comicjk 13y ago
Richard Feynman wrote about a very similar problem, that rat-maze experiments rarely controlled for the rats' ability to hear differences in the floor. He used it as an example of "Cargo Cult Science" ( http://neuro
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by comicjk 13y ago
Far easier just to shoot down the planes, assuming reinforced doors, air marshals, and passengers aren't enough. No, I don't think there's anything rational about it, beyond the rational calculation of shirt-term advantage by
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by comicjk 13y ago
If you have space for a pond but no reliable flowing stream, you can use the pond as the battery for your solar panels. Each kWh of storage in a 2m deep pond will take about 100 m^2 of area. A typical American house would use 6 kWh or so pe
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by comicjk 13y ago
Ironically, most of this pain was designed to prevent government waste.
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by comicjk 13y ago
I would, except I need it to pay my taxes. And so do 300 million other people.
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by comicjk 13y ago
My way of learning a programming language is always to write a chess program in it (this is probably why I haven't learned any languages which don't encourage state). A multiplayer chess site would be a fun and challenging project
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by comicjk 13y ago
Yes, all this is the reason I said "if it's no trouble to you." Certainly the desire for politeness can go too far, but avoiding a handful of loaded words is not very far. I don't think it's quite fair to compare a
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by comicjk 13y ago
How about respecting all people, if it's no trouble to you, in the way they want to be respected? And by the way, wordsmith, it's "the fashions are in whom you're supposed to respect."
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by comicjk 13y ago
His comment will never make him look like an asshole to anyone with historical perspective, because they will know that he was being polite in his time. Terms like oriental are offensive to many people this decade, so I won't use them
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by comicjk 13y ago
It is not all that wasteful; the water is recondensed from the steam so that when you boil it again it is already quite hot. This process is 1/2 to 2/3 as efficient as the theoretical maximum efficiency of any possible device, (ho
525.
by comicjk 13y ago
Huh? If he had said "everyone should learn Chinese because it is going to be the most important language," then your response would make sense; as it is, it just sounds like a canned reassurance. Where in his comment does he even
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by comicjk 13y ago
$100K is one developer-year... I would expect it to cost at least a hundred times that.
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by comicjk 13y ago
The knowledge of good and evil, if I recall correctly. That might apply to the peace prize but probably not to the prizes in physics or chemistry.
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by comicjk 13y ago
A redistribution of consumption does not increase prices overall, although in the short run you would expect apples to be more expensive and yachts to be cheaper. An overall increase in consumption, because poor people save a smaller fracti
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by comicjk 13y ago
A sensible national health system would be as simple as changing the Medicare minimum age to zero and abolishing Medicaid. Do you think this requires a constitutional ammendment? And do you think there's the slightest chance today&#x27
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by comicjk 13y ago
> possibly Except that's not possible, even for a Chernobyl-level release of radioactive material. You might as well suggest that Chernobyl made all food from Britain to Afghanistan inedible. We can detect material from Fukushima in
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by comicjk 13y ago
> people went to college for at least 100 years prior to that law. This is the fallacy of comparing the upper classes of one period with the masses of another. A far smaller fraction of people went to college in the century before 1976,
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by comicjk 13y ago
I don't have root on this system, and installing Firefox without root is such a pain I haven't gotten around to it.
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by comicjk 13y ago
Surely you're feigning ignorance. People find muscle sexually attractive and associate it with power in social situations. I'm not very muscular myself, but it would be pure sour grapes not to see the benefits.
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by comicjk 13y ago
Firefox 17 for Linux 64-bit: NS_ERROR_XPC_BAD_CONVERT_JS: Could not convert JavaScript argument arg 0 [nsIDOMCanvasRenderingContext2D.fillStyle] @ http://hellorun.helloenjoy.com/js/hellorun.min.js:4 Update: I pass all
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by comicjk 13y ago
I've checked it out on your recommendation. I like the syntax even better than Nimrod's, it has better support for scientific work, and the floating-point performance is virtually identical. The only problem is that global variabl
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by comicjk 13y ago
I'm in scientific computing so the floating-point performance is by far my biggest concern. In the tests I just ran, Nimrod and C are virtually identical in time (probably creating near-identical machine code). test.nim: var sum
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by comicjk 13y ago
It's far from just colloquial. Infrared and thermal motion at the same temperature contain the same amount of exergy, meaning that the thermodynamic limits on how much work they can do are the same.
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by comicjk 13y ago
I guarantee you that these rectennas will not work if their temperature is equal to that of the source radiation, and that they will generate waste heat which has to be removed. As for slaves to the Carnot cycle, no one has ever built a Car
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by comicjk 13y ago
> Tell me when was the time you decided to have democracy. People never had a choice. Actually, the fact of democracy is itself up for a vote. We could ammend the Constitution so as to abolish elections, if there were a consensus to do s
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by comicjk 13y ago
I agree that force is real and that legal equality is an ideal - this is the best argument I know of for a broad interpretation of the right to bear arms. But the fact that democracy is not a state of nature is hardly an argument against it

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