dougabug

25 ms·

211.
by dougabug 12y ago
I've had friends whose careers have followed more or less that trajectory. It seems to me that there's an arbitrage possibility here, tremendously undervalued intellectual capital.
212.
by dougabug 12y ago
This is an incredulous claim. Even scientists such as Freeman Dyson and Hendrik Tennekes had their reputations smeared for daring to express skepticism over the most dire claims of catastrophic AGW proponents. Dyson didn't even claim t
213.
by dougabug 12y ago
Fractals have no inherent dependency on microprocessors. Microprocessors can be used to generate fractals simply because they can execute the generation rules of a fractal, but you could could likewise generate them with anything which can
214.
by dougabug 12y ago
When the CEO of the company you work for tells the world he can't wait to replace you and your fellow workers, it seems reasonable to worry a little bit. At a minimum, it's a bit disconcerting to be equated in value to a (not so d
215.
by dougabug 12y ago
I think these companies want to avoid making the drivers look any more like employees than they already do. Frankly, it seems to me that they are in fact employees, over which Uber exerts enormous control, to the point of spying on them, mo
216.
by dougabug 12y ago
She dropped out after had enough experience and data to do the math. It seems like there are a number of people not realistically adding up their true costs.
217.
by dougabug 12y ago
There are other costs besides gas, there's wear and tear on your car, maintenance, interest (if you financed your vehicle, say through one of Uber's subprime lenders), insurance (does your insurance company know that you are using
218.
by dougabug 12y ago
Companies devote so much time, money, and energy to recruiting good engineers; but then dump them on projects which slowly suck their will to live. Ideally, a company should have as a mantra, "We will not bore you." If you have a
219.
by dougabug 12y ago
"Coursera and edX, the two main MOOC providers, are essentially acting as gatekeepers for American higher education online, replicating in their virtual world the pecking order in the physical world as determined by U.S. News & Wor
220.
by dougabug 12y ago
College dropouts (Gates, Jobs, Ellison, Zuckerberg, etc) can make it to the top in the tech world. OTOH, top tech companies like Google and Facebook routinely screen out candidates with Bachelors, Masters, and PhD degrees from top schools b
221.
by dougabug 12y ago
Whether intentional or not, Rubin's earlier initiative vacuuming up many of the interesting robot companies into Google, would seem to create great new opportunities for new robotics startups.
222.
by dougabug 12y ago
After a lost decade of misplaced vitriol directed at relational models and SQL, I'm personally heartened to see a trend back to human readable query languages over rpc as an interface, sensible representation of information in relation
223.
by dougabug 12y ago
"The feeling of experience" is likely the result of a mechanical process, in much the same way that the expression of DNA into RNA to construct proteins and regulate life is a mechanical process. If a robot can see its environment
224.
by dougabug 12y ago
When someone asks "Is blue blue?" they implicitly mean "What is blue?" or equivalently "Does blue mean what we think it does?" Blue has both an objective and subjective meaning, which today we see has different
225.
by dougabug 12y ago
It seems reasonable that when you decompose the representation of the target function you are trying to learn into more layers, each of the layers can be "more gently" modulated to emulate the target function as observed through t
226.
by dougabug 12y ago
Zip cars had no operator overhead and had convenient downtown and other high demand locations where parking is expensive, but in the end they wound up not really impacting overall personal car ownership, and the company was absorbed by Avis
227.
by dougabug 12y ago
There are some interesting points in this other article you reference, such as calling out a few of the strengths and weaknesses of the CWA. I'm a bit puzzled by the assertion that SQL has no recursion, since recursive CTE's are p
228.
by dougabug 12y ago
SQL does not specify join order. Determining efficient join order based on constraints and statistical distributions of the data is one of the main tasks which a Cost Based Optimizer performs.
229.
by dougabug 12y ago
This seems like just background subtraction. I used this on soccer videos eight years ago using some robust optical flow code from Michael Black to estimate the background motion and suppress it, leaving the foreground (i.e. the player).
230.
by dougabug 12y ago
Axler's book is much more of a pure math book, in the spirit of an abstract algebra or analysis book. Strang's book is more applied, applications oriented, more mechanical in nature. Both approaches have their place, Strang is mor
231.
by dougabug 12y ago
Sounds something akin to "security through obscurity." The perceived advantages of proprietary secret security measures are often dwarfed by the benefits of opening up a system to careful scrutiny.
232.
by dougabug 12y ago
The expression "X is eating the world" is eating the world.
233.
by dougabug 12y ago
The "sky high heels" might invite more attention, but the patronizing comments part make me wonder whether it was the right kind of attention. "99dresses was squarely focused on trading cheaper fast fashion (fast fashion is r
234.
by dougabug 12y ago
You certainly can steal, threaten the staff, or set the place on fire. To the extent that shop and its people are recognized and protected by laws and government agencies such as the police, you'll likely face serious repercussions. Bu
235.
by dougabug 12y ago
> You are exactly describing the world today, as provided by our big government. Of course I am. Orwell would be astounded. I perceive a false dichotomy of big government vs big corporations. While it may be possible to have one without
236.
by dougabug 12y ago
Corporations are legal fictions. They exist through the power and authority of the State, their contracts are enacted and enforced through agents of the Courts. Corporations are manifestly not free to organize as they will. Is it economic
237.
by dougabug 12y ago
Drive reliability is far more important to me than minor differences in performance. Unfortunately, reliable information about reliability is typically absent from most sad reviews, making them not terribly useful for purchasing decisions
238.
by dougabug 12y ago
I actually do keep score on advertisers whose uninvited popups or navigational hijack tricks waste my time. Their brands accrue negative associations. I can't fathom why so many advertisers are so eager to demolish their brand equity b
239.
by dougabug 12y ago
Early Google didn't sell search result placement, they focused on superior organic results. It was later that they copied the idea from Overture, a company with much smaller search volume, but which had figured out a successful monetiz
240.
by dougabug 13y ago
Feynman describes being rejected by Bell Labs several years in a row for an internship, and each year coming back and cheerfully taking the tour. He finally got the job, but the war intervened. His attitude towards rejection seemed pretty c

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