drblast

60 ms·

421.
by drblast 15y ago
I've been playing Skyrim lately and I can only describe it as endlessly entertaining. I had the very same thought that the article talks about. Skyrim is almost completely realistic-looking. At some point in the near future, the games we
422.
by drblast 15y ago
Cars will be designed so as not to run over children. Children will stand in front of cars as a prank to cause massive traffic jams and make the evening news. People will use cars as advertising. You will receive free cars as "samples" and
423.
by drblast 15y ago
"At run time" is the key. Consider Java. If Dog and Cat are subclasses of Animal (or implement an Animal interface), for example, I might want to use a "breed" method to attempt to breed a hybrid animal with the loyalty of a cat and the st
424.
by drblast 15y ago
One of the easiest ways to take a multiple choice math test is to work backward from the given answers. You hardly even have to know what you're doing; just plug the answers into the question. I don't think any of my classmates or teachers
425.
by drblast 15y ago
The fact that someone is comfortable saying "all of my friends haven't used math in their successful careers, therefore math isn't useful and shouldn't be stressed and tested" is the exact reason that math should be stressed and tested. Thi
426.
by drblast 15y ago
Probability is much less meaningful when you're not talking about large groups of repeated trials. In the context of the article, imagine that you didn't do this just one time, but that you asked 100 fathers about the compostion of their ch
427.
by drblast 15y ago
The crux of the issue is much better illustrated by the simplified problem where if a man tells you one of his kids is a boy, the other child is a boy in 1/3 cases. That's intuitive looking at the possibilities: BG GB BB Where this analysi
428.
by drblast 15y ago
There have been various times in my programming career that I've wanted an emacs macro with arguments, so that it would do things like concatenate a number in each line. Things like this in C: #define a 0 #define b 1 ... #define
429.
by drblast 15y ago
"If a fairly good hacker is worth $80,000 a year at a big company, then a smart hacker working very hard without any corporate bullshit to slow him down should be able to do work worth about $3 million a year." Wow, in hindsight this seems
430.
by drblast 15y ago
Maybe I'm getting old, but I don't understand the compulsion to post potentially embarassing information about yourself on the Internet. I can't believe people are arguing about the right way to do this. Twenty years ago, it was rare for so
431.
by drblast 15y ago
About ten years ago, a similar checklist was the default response to proposed solutions to spam problems. And then someone wrote a proposal that checked many of the boxes on that list, but had the odd feature of actually working quite well.
432.
by drblast 15y ago
Does anyone else find it odd that the barcode doesn't entirely consist of a primary key referencing a passenger database? I do somewhat understand the desire to encode additional information for cases when, for example, network connectivity
433.
by drblast 15y ago
There's a security problem with that: $ chpasswd maybeUniqueString Error: maybeUniqueString already in use. $ su maybeUniqueString LOGIN OK, PROCEED TO EXPLOIT ME So username and login are not totally redundant.
434.
by drblast 15y ago
The exception proves the rule. This is a fantastic example. The implicit message here is that anywhere that this sign does not exist, photography is not allowed. That's a bad precedent to set. Imagine walking around and seeing "Free Speec
435.
by drblast 15y ago
It seemed odd to me too that a single API call could cause that much work. Granted, I have no idea how the actual app works. But one way to do this is to have clients belong to groups, then record if a group got a message (few writes). Th
436.
by drblast 15y ago
I still use Ubuntu because all the hardware works on my laptop. Changing UI's is easy, changing OS's is less so. I heartily recommend XFCE with Nautilus. Simple and works like a charm for quickly loading and switching applications, which
437.
by drblast 15y ago
>These are the kind of people (I kid you not) that think HTML tables are a great way to get your page layout just right. Is there are good replacement for HTML tables yet that works well in all browsers? I'm talking about for things tha
438.
by drblast 15y ago
Ahh, the weighted average approach to decision making. If you want to make a decision but don't want to trust your own intuition and judgment, and don't want to get embroiled in hard arguments where someone can get blamed later when things
439.
by drblast 15y ago
Even though I have great fun tinkering with Java, I think it's is a dead-end. Like C++, it exists in sort of a weird limbo between dynamic high level languages and C/Assembly. The advantages of the performance of imperative code that exist
440.
by drblast 15y ago
And the granddaddy of them all: http://www.peterluger.com/ Peter Luger eats all other steakhouses for breakfast, and I say that as someone who drools uncontrollably when I think about going to either Mortons or Ruth's Chris.
441.
by drblast 15y ago
My point exactly. It's easy to consider who's paying what taxes and thinking about if that's fair, but the right question to ask is, "Is this a worthwhile investment?" Who pays what in taxes is really a diversion.
442.
by drblast 15y ago
Voluntary gifts of money can be sent to the U.S. Treasury at this address: http://www.fms.treas.gov/faq/moretopics_gifts.html One has to ask, if any super rich person really considered the U.S. Government a worthwhile investment, why are
443.
by drblast 15y ago
Randall's math is spot on in this comic. Assuming the attacker knows the the password creation method (and the math assumes the attacker does in the first case), then the attacker knows the word list and the passphrase algorithm. 11 bits pe
444.
by drblast 15y ago
This looks like a cool geek thing but sounds like it has the potential to be a user-interface nightmare. "You have no application configured for removing red-eye. Please select a photo editor for removing red eye from these 1000 choices." F
445.
by drblast 15y ago
I looked at the tinywm code and it's extremely informative. A lot of times I'd like to quickly wrap my head around things like how an X Window Manager is written, for example, and one that implements the most minimal functionality possible
446.
by drblast 15y ago
I read an interview with a record executive a long time ago and he answered the question, "How do you find the next big thing?" "That's pretty easy," he said, "I just look for something that parents will hate." That this is a successful str
447.
by drblast 15y ago
Thank you so much for doing this. I've been hoping someone would write a decent online REPL for a long time; hooking it into Google Docs sweetens the deal.
448.
by drblast 15y ago
Last week I was reading an article about producing random text that was disturbingly close to human-produced by analyzing word frequency of massive amounts of data. It seems that it would be cheaper to produce articles this way instead of h
449.
by drblast 15y ago
Taking full advantage of many of the specialized instructions (SSE) in an Intel chip requires assembly language. One of my recent hobby projects rearranges the bits in a large set of data using the SSE instructions, and it's an order of mag
450.
by drblast 15y ago
The assumption that there's something wrong with not interacting with other people eagerly and often strikes me as oddly egotistical. Other people aren't alive solely for the enjoyment of extraverts. The "problem," if there is one, is that

More ›