drostie

97 ms·

691.
by drostie 14y ago
Perhaps after this, his corporate backers will realize that the Internet is scrutinizing his actions too much for him to ram through their unpleasant legislation, and will find a new hero. Okay so it's not the justice you get in a Hollywood
692.
by drostie 14y ago
That's why I was putting more emphasis on the word "domination" than on "monopoly". I agree that WalterBright may have been making a very dense and mostly irrelevant point, to which the proper response may have been "so what?". I simply dis
693.
by drostie 14y ago
I really wish people would clarify what they mean by "free market" -- whether they mean unregulated (a politician's free market) or competitive (an economist's free market). If you are saying that there are no examples of monopolies in
694.
by drostie 14y ago
You may not come from the same culture that I came from, but the early significant milestones in my mathematical education were: 1. Reading the "aha!" books by Martin Gardner, as a child. 2. Reading Lockhart's "A Mathematician's L
695.
by drostie 14y ago
That's a starting point, sure, but it's not necessarily a great one. Books are books. They take time to find, money to purchase, time to be delivered, and then they take time to read and pursue. When I started learning Django, the key thing
696.
by drostie 14y ago
It is quite possible. Bacteria do all sorts of weird and wonderful things to have high genetic diffusion. One of the most interesting is that bacteria will sometimes link up to other bacteria to upload a copy of their genetic codes. (!) The
697.
by drostie 14y ago
In a world where our interactions are ever more inauthentic, the virtual can seem more Real than the real. Beside the grind, virtual worlds have managed to solve the deepest fears of human interaction, usually with the promise that you can
698.
by drostie 14y ago
Memory is seldom a constraint on the sorts of computers which run JS. The real WTF about that approach later on is just going to be that person.hasOwnProperty('Save') === true. As long as you can guarantee that you will never want to iterat
699.
by drostie 14y ago
Well, hold on a second. Even if we know the worm's neural network and how it's connected, that doesn't necessarily mean that a computer simulation of it will do exactly what the worm does. The problem is that we're not doing an atom-by-atom
700.
by drostie 14y ago
Look, (a) you screwed up the numbers. You should not be comparing, in this hypothetical scenario, 1.33 with 1, but rather 1/(1 - 0.33) with 1.33, which is instead 0.1625. That is, "these people who don't understand the numbers involved" in
701.
by drostie 14y ago
That would be great, if you were living sometime between the years 1960 and 2000. I don't know if you've heard, but we've had a rather spectacular economic downturn since then. 5-year CDs are less than 2% interest; 1-years are a little less
702.
by drostie 14y ago
I am not `its_so_on` but I would agree that it should be some sort of basic skill that people should probably take for granted. The first reason is because it's at the bottom of one of the most contentious issues facing modern man: the ques
703.
by drostie 14y ago
If you want to start doing security, I think it is more important to learn a fundamentally different perspective. It's sort of like learning magic, where the new perspective is 'What will my audience assume automatically? How can I get th
704.
by drostie 14y ago
I dunno. "Does it have any basis in reality" sounds somewhat bizarre. Think of points in the board game Settlers of Catan (or choose your favourite): do they have any "basis in reality"? In some ways yes, in most ways no; and in any case
705.
by drostie 14y ago
If LessWrong is our touchstone then indeed some forms of group-think are presumably unavoidable. I mean, I'm working on a new religion; given only that knowledge and no actual content, can you guess how I'd be received by Less Wrongers? Wha
706.
by drostie 14y ago
I am not sure that your proposal will work for anything with a concert-like structure -- much less, Burning Man. The problem is precisely the one that anyone faces: irrationality. You're asking people to state their price of indifference se
707.
by drostie 14y ago
Even the Guardian reporter has admitted that it goes over her head. Heck, I'm doing a Master's in condensed-matter physics and I don't understand much of the jargon. What I can tell you is, the parts which sound the most intimidating are
708.
by drostie 14y ago
I love how we're using Hacker News here -- this is definitely not what it was designed for. What we're really doing is something like a live chat room while watching a common talk, but unlike chat rooms it can be threaded and points can be
709.
by drostie 14y ago
They just announced 5.1 sigma, and on a normal distribution that would mean that it is 99.999966% certain, so that there is about a one-in-three-million chance that this is due to random chance, otherwise there is some sort of excess here d
710.
by drostie 14y ago
Yeah. The gamma-gamma and Z-Z together have been combined into a signal of 5 standard deviations from the no-Higgs Standard Model. Which is the common threshold for a discovery.
711.
by drostie 14y ago
Oh! I'm sorry, it occurs to me that my comment can indeed be read that way, and that's not what I intended. I mean it as "they attract these people", not "they are mostly these people:" the tiny percentage of society which is A is much more
712.
by drostie 14y ago
If your controller has too much logic you should really consider putting more of it in your model and view. Maybe I don't understand MVC, and you all can tell me How Wrong I Am, but here's how I understand MVC at present: Your Model is a pu
713.
by drostie 14y ago
As I recall, the same thing happened with a lawyer named Jack Thompson. I think it's just something about Law as a discipline that it attracts people who can be very literal-minded and who at least in their own mind are moral crusaders. (Di
714.
by drostie 14y ago
Of course, this isn't an article critical of PHP and I'm sure those defenders would just as readily state 'every time PHP appears on Hacker News the PHP-haters come out." While I tend to agree that I would not use PHP for new projects, I wo
715.
by drostie 14y ago
Agreed. What they inherit from koans appears to be merely the violence that the koans take for granted. My favorite example of this is the story of Gutei's Finger: It is said that Master Gutei would always raise a finger wisely when
716.
by drostie 14y ago
For me that was absolutely the crowning part of the story. "I will need tools to cut someone up, someone to tell me how the heart works and where the blood goes from the heart, and, uh... Oh! I'll need a coffin!"
717.
by drostie 14y ago
Just today I worked with Markdown, LaTeX, PDF, Postscript, SVG, Python, GIF, and HTML. Most of that was in some way or another related to the Master's thesis I'm working on, but it's honestly pretty typical. (The HTML was not -- I decided t
718.
by drostie 14y ago
Will you be able to return lambdas or just create them as function inputs? (I guess you can write a method which takes an object of interface X and returns it, but do you have to do this for every interface you want to use, or would the
719.
by drostie 14y ago
It always takes me a while when I'm watching Alan Kay deliver prepared remarks because his emphasis doesn't seem to match the emphasis of his speech. In this case it strikes me that he's trying to evoke the enormity of human history -- hu
720.
by drostie 14y ago
The point is not a concatenation of two symbols -- the point is that this one little point will kill the glider beside it, where by "kill" I mean it becomes the static sequence: . o o o . o . o . So if they are saying "deat

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