drblast

51 ms·

451.
by drblast 15y ago
It talks about the history of banking and the fractional reserve system, the difference between commercial and central bank money. What most people don't realize is that banks don't have to actually have the money they lend out. That's the
452.
by drblast 15y ago
What you described is not how banks or money work. Below is an entertaining, albeit slightly alarmist, educational video on how the money system works today. This should be required viewing for anyone considering using money: http://www.y
453.
by drblast 15y ago
"Still, I think it's great to attract students with a fun, application-oriented course that gets them excited about the field, and hit them later with the more abstract ideas that might seem less relevant at the outset." Where is the fun an
454.
by drblast 15y ago
I have an oven that's about four feet wide that I hardly ever use for anything larger than a 12 inch cake. And I have more than one bathroom even though it's really rare that more than one person has to use the bathroom at the same time. I
455.
by drblast 15y ago
It might be better now than since I last looked, but the one language I haven't found a good tutorial for is Haskell. All the ones I've seen either dumb things down way too much with cartoons and such until they're difficult to slog through
456.
by drblast 15y ago
I always loved The Perl Cookbook. It's got some in-depth discussion in there about language features, but most of the time what I want from a language book is a bunch of (complete) examples to help me learn the syntax, and probably to show
457.
by drblast 15y ago
I guess everyone is used to language standards written in a very academic style so they ignore them, but if you really want to know how Javascript works, the ECMAScript specification is clearly written in semi-layman terms and includes a ve
458.
by drblast 15y ago
I've witnessed this. Counterintuitively, I think it's a side-effect of not understanding math. To those without a good understanding of statistics, numbers and graphs are a mystical, magical way to easily improve just about anything.
459.
by drblast 15y ago
The article is very funny, but I do find the definition of stupidity as the tendency to perform actions that benefit nobody as particularly insightful.
460.
by drblast 15y ago
I think these concepts became clear to me when I learned about the complex plane, Euler's formula, and demodulation of an FM signal. Particularly enlightening was the demodulation of a frequency modulated sine wave when the tuner was imperf
461.
by drblast 15y ago
On what do you base the assumption that it is possible for us, or anyone, to run a competent democracy? There's no historical precedent for it; in fact quite the opposite. Theoretically, it's possible, but in theory communism would work if
462.
by drblast 15y ago
We bought the camera in 2005. The quality of entry-level digital cameras was horrendous at that time. The primary concern was that it would take pictures without lag, so you're exactly right.
463.
by drblast 15y ago
Can anyone explain why the "ISO" setting exists on digital SLR cameras? It seems like this is an unnecessary holdover from film cameras. I ask this as an owner of a Canon Digital Rebel that knows very little about photography. What does c
464.
by drblast 15y ago
I wouldn't call that a waste; you no longer have to look up to know if it's sunny.
465.
by drblast 15y ago
It won't be a country; it will be a large network of individuals. I can't help but think that the future of education looks like the current home schooling community. The results with my own children are remarkable. The resources available
466.
by drblast 15y ago
The difference is one person tried to do something, and the other didn't try at all. The one who tried succeeded. Which makes the whole point irrelevant and illogical. If you want to prove that a "winning attitude" is the key to success,
467.
by drblast 15y ago
I was the sole user of LaTeX in my class of M.S.E.E. students in grad school. It was like a well-kept secret; someone years ago had written the thesis template for an older version of LaTeX. Because my thesis included a number of mathemati
468.
by drblast 15y ago
If you're writing a programming language, Lisp's terse syntax makes writing the boring parts like the parser very simple. That's why many of these cool projects use it. But for the more everyday tasks, other languages work just fine. Lisp
469.
by drblast 15y ago
This is very cool; I wasn't aware of the existence of some of these implementations. The Wasp Lisp is an interesting idea and looks like it has many of the same benefits as Erlang. If I had to guess at what programming languages would look
470.
by drblast 16y ago
And if you have a family you might get by owning a single car instead of two. I used to live within walking distance of work and we had one car for two years. That's a huge savings.
471.
by drblast 16y ago
The Socratic method can be frustrating with one child, because when she doesn't get it, she really doesn't get it, and it takes a lot of questioning to lead her down the right path again. Sometimes you just want to bang your head against t
472.
by drblast 16y ago
"On the same side" in the sense that I'd be opposed to file-sharing as it cheapens the value of the thing I own, not in the sense that I'm golfing with Warner Bros. executives every Tuesday.
473.
by drblast 16y ago
This is wonderful. My wife homeschools, and the math curriculum she uses uses a very similar method from the beginning. My daughter knows "12" as "One-ten two" and "33" as "three-ten three" and says it that way. She also knows those mean t
474.
by drblast 16y ago
Probably won't work. The only way to make this work is remove the incentive. If I could sell "used" mp3's back to iTunes, for example, I'd be less inclined to share them with the world for free. So a filesharing system that tracks what use
475.
by drblast 16y ago
Amen. You need a minimum of four hands to solder easily. "Then blow air over the hot area." I'm no expert, but I've always heard this is a bad idea. (A "cold solder joint")
476.
by drblast 16y ago
Edit: Whoops, I thought this was an "Ask HN." The below post still stands for anyone who finds it useful. The U.S. Census has an extremely well-documented large data set: http://www2.census.gov/census_2000/datasets/ And the documentation
477.
by drblast 16y ago
Yeah, Arduino does have that same spirit. The nearly direct access to the hardware was what made the C64 so cool. This new C64 has none of that, unfortunately.
478.
by drblast 16y ago
This is the most simultaneously brilliant and awful idea I've seen in a long time. You are going to attract many, many obsessive compulsive types who will be thinking, "Well, Sally's great, but I'd like to see her in a freckly redhead." I h
479.
by drblast 16y ago
The article said that the project was "dominated" by people who are "male," among other things. The logical error here is the point, not the specific characteristic of whatever group the author is concerned about. The point would be the sa
480.
by drblast 16y ago
It's a logical error to look at the outcome of a process and draw conclusions about it with no other supporting data. This error would be innocuous if it wasn't the underlying cause of every inhuman prejudice we've spent the last few centu

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