dspeyer

25 ms·

241.
by dspeyer 14y ago
Rainbows End (Vinge) has a very interesting and not exactly dystopic vision.
242.
by dspeyer 14y ago
Less political influence due in large part to shrinking numbers. Greater chance of terrorism due to increased fanaticism among those who remain. There wasn't anything like Oklahoma City in the 1950s, was there?
243.
by dspeyer 14y ago
"The market"? The market consists of buyers and sellers. Since a bed typically lasts over 10 years, a typical buyer buys fewer than 7 beds in a lifetime. That's not enough to get educated or even keep up with change. So in fact the market
244.
by dspeyer 14y ago
Calculating my vitamin D intake sounds difficult and unreliable. Is there any way to measure my vitamin D levels by examining my body?
245.
by dspeyer 14y ago
I always have water next to my bed when I sleep. Usually tap water, but in a bottle with a screw cap. I can open and close it without opening my eyes, and it won't spill.
246.
by dspeyer 14y ago
If people were indifferent (50% chance of wanting facebook) then the likelihood of at least 27 out of 37 randomly asked people saying "no facebook" is about 1 in 300. And that's counting the "Yes but I hate it"s as yesses. Count those as
247.
by dspeyer 14y ago
I think the destabilizing thing was how long Google _didn't_ play the MAD game. So Apple went on the warpath feeling safe. But Google militarized really fast.
248.
by dspeyer 14y ago
These how-to-apply-math skills are valuable, but they aren't math itself. Math is about building more general abstractions, keeping strict rigor, being careful with axioms, and developing techniques that are really, really broad as a resul
249.
by dspeyer 14y ago
> Remember, the contrast between white and black on computer monitors is greater than on the printed page, because computer-monitor white is brighter than a page usually. Only if the lights are off in the room. There may be such a thing
250.
by dspeyer 14y ago
I thought Oracle had agreed to $0 in damages for the rangeCheck copyright infringement ( http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9228298/Oracle_agrees... ) so they could get on with appealing the API copyrightability and the patents. Why
251.
by dspeyer 14y ago
Wouldn't an 850GHz signal be lost if an insect flew between sender and receiver? Isn't that going to make it pretty impractical? Honest questions. I could easily be missing something. High-res radar seems viable, though.
252.
by dspeyer 14y ago
Rather than await a moment of silence, perhaps now is the time to carefully see what can be preserved. Somewhere in possibility-space is a model in which great minds teach in only the ways that they are well-suited to. Giving the same mon
253.
by dspeyer 14y ago
Seems unlikely to me. The Motorola acquisition took forever to get through the EU, and that's a different industry. The legal burden of acquiring a major direct competitor like yahoo would be more than the company was worth.
254.
by dspeyer 14y ago
Google of the past was built on A/B. The new UIs are designed by a small, closed-eared team of graphic artists.
255.
by dspeyer 14y ago
Have you ever tried to read any Demeterized code? It's an idea that needs to die. If I see book.line(n) and I want to know how it counts footnotes, and Book::line is defined as this.sectionWithLine(n).line(n) and those are defined in terms
256.
by dspeyer 14y ago
I'm not saying they won't get a flood of resumes for every opening. But the best people, who know they can get a position at any major tech company, will be weighing Apple against the likes of Google, Facebook and Amazon. It's possible tha
257.
by dspeyer 14y ago
But might it be seen by the average potential Apple employee? It's structured as "don't buy from apple", but it also covers "don't work for apple", which they actually need to fear.
258.
by dspeyer 14y ago
Remember Amazon and one-click? There was sufficient backlash that they never tried anything like that again. Could work with Apple.
259.
by dspeyer 14y ago
Ah, I see. I'll admit I haven't seen a lot of explicit on-the-job training (besides that dealing with internal technologies), but I have seen a lot of people who's first job is less challenging than their later ones, who use it as a growing
260.
by dspeyer 14y ago
The tech field is like that. Work won't be any easier. In fact, expect major libraries and build tools that are internal to a large organization to be less elegant and documented. Learning stuff like that quickly is a skill you're going
261.
by dspeyer 14y ago
This article is playing word-games. When employers and economists talk about talent, they mean capability, regardless of whether it's natural or comes from hard work. Your dictionary may say "natural aptitude or skill", but that's irrelev
262.
by dspeyer 14y ago
Because there's a tremendous amount to be gained on the off chance that the appellate judge is smoking crack?
263.
by dspeyer 14y ago
For the cases I was easily able to count, this is one bug per thousand lines of code. I realize that's a handwavy metric, but it's enough to say we're not talking about a ton of bugs. On the other hand, successful conversion of these codeb
264.
by dspeyer 14y ago
If I were interviewing you and you said "I don't know" I would say "try to work it out". Jumping ahead and saying "I don't know but I think I can probably..." will earn you a few extra points. I recall one interview where I asked what sort
265.
by dspeyer 14y ago
The open source movement isn't. The "proprietary software is ok so long as not much is at stake and you weren't likely to tinker with it anyway" idea is.
266.
by dspeyer 14y ago
We do need RMS. Compromise is a dangerous game. Especially when the proprietary world doesn't compromise back (and it usually doesn't). How long could the free software movement have continued to mean anything if each year it had crept a
267.
by dspeyer 14y ago
It's hard to be sure without a full transcript, but there doesn't seem to have been any actual humor. Or plausible attempt at humor. Just serious sexism in a flippant tone. Why would people laugh at this? There are three possibilities: *
268.
by dspeyer 14y ago
> Shipper: Hmmm. I don't think that list is valid... > Google: Good. So your program will have to detect that. Your program might receive bad input, and it's your responsibility to output an error code if so.
269.
by dspeyer 15y ago
The implication seems to be that students with no experience can catch up with experienced students in one semester. Or perhaps that the experienced students have an advantage in perspective but not in actual knowledge, and the perspective
270.
by dspeyer 15y ago
That's the theory. Enforcement makes things harder. At least in the US, (and I strongly suspect in Canada as well) it's up to a jury to decide if the given rationale is genuine or an excuse to cover bigotry. Anyone who knows anything abou

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