ef4

12 ms·

91.
by ef4 10y ago
I have seen some of the most excruciating fake-agile organizations you can imagine. I am 100% on board with efforts to criticize that. But even the critics seem to get blinded by methodology. Methodology is only a second-order effect. The r
92.
by ef4 10y ago
It's much more universal than that. Variations on this proverb occur in many, many cultures and languages: there’s nobbut three generations atween a clog and clog dalle stalle alle stelle alle stalle quien no lo tiene, lo hance; y quie
93.
by ef4 10y ago
> twiddling bits This kind of phrasing implies that you aren't hearing what I'm saying. You're still picturing physical bits that can be twiddled. I'm not making an analogy to any physical bits at all, I'm not ev
94.
by ef4 10y ago
You're just describing a different way to physically distribute the bits. From a mathematical standpoint it's still very clear that information-theoretic bits are going in and coming back out again. Or to put it another way, if yo
95.
by ef4 10y ago
It's definitely not arbitrary. We have solid mathematical definitions of computing that are not tied to any particular implementation. Saying "the brain is not a computer" is a shorthand for "the brain is not Turing eq
96.
by ef4 10y ago
Which is a distinction without a difference. "Information" has a precise meaning. It is easy to design an experiment that proves information is being stored within yourself somewhere . What form it takes hardly matters at all, if
97.
by ef4 10y ago
The first third of Seveneves is a real gut punch. The only other world-ending story that comes close in terms of emotional impact for me was Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End". Stephenson manages to show humanity in al
98.
by ef4 10y ago
They did bring tons of comet with them. Which could theoretically be a source of carbon. It's a stretch, of course. But I think the story was that they kept the population in the Cleft down to a few hundred for many generations, only g
99.
by ef4 10y ago
You are correct. I suspect most native speakers miss this mistake if they're reading quickly. I did. Our brains fill in the missing word and pretend it was present.
100.
by ef4 10y ago
You're conflating different audiences. Sure, cutesy stuff is counter-productive for a 12 year old, and probably even most 9 year olds. But at 4 years old my kid was already applying loops and subroutines in LightBot (and later Robot Tu
101.
by ef4 10y ago
If somebody suggested a new preventative drug for a rare disease, and offered zero studies to back it up, and suggested everyone should be required to receive it, they would get laughed out of the room. Yet we still make public safety decis
102.
by ef4 10y ago
Yup. "With no credentials I was able to work hard on my own for a year and then landed an entry level position with very good future prospects." What other lucrative professional industry is this easy to break into?
103.
by ef4 10y ago
http://www.medpagetoday.com/upload/2013/7/24/FA-5548.pdf "Safety in Numbers: Are Major Cities the Safest Places in the United States?" by Myers et al, Annals of Emergency Medicine
104.
by ef4 10y ago
I should have qualified with "#2 cause of accidental death." And as your link shows, "accidental death" is the #1 overall cause of death for children. So it's the #2 category of the #1 category of risk.
105.
by ef4 10y ago
> Suburbia exists because people want a quiet, relatively safe place for their kids to grow up. Yes, but people are making their decision based on out-of-date facts. Because in the United States in 2016, mortality risk goes down as popul
106.
by ef4 10y ago
> I doubt the suburbs are actually safer. You are correct. The average American city dweller now experiences a lower crime rate than in suburbia. (That is an average, obviously some cities are dangerous and some suburbs are very safe.) &
107.
by ef4 10y ago
No need to reimplement. The original QBasic runs in your browser: https://archive.org/details/msdos_qbasic_megapack
108.
by ef4 10y ago
> At the very least, you cannot muck with kernel memory You most certainly can. Anyone who has written a device driver has done it. > this is called System Integrity Protection That can be disabled during boot.
109.
by ef4 10y ago
> you start to wish for some way of organizing the code Yes, this is a critical and valuable step in learning. You can't easily learn the solution until you've encountered the problem.
110.
by ef4 10y ago
No, there's a fundamental difference. I'm not talking about running closed source software. Windows will happily execute any general purpose program you care to throw at it. And how could it not, given the principal of Turing equi
111.
by ef4 10y ago
That streaming DRM only works if you give up control of the hardware you own.
112.
by ef4 10y ago
> In an ideal world with enough resources, every lab would have technical staff to help with this process, but most researchers unfortunately don't have bandwidth to spend on this problem. And they shoot themselves in the foot const
113.
by ef4 10y ago
> reproduce the code -- ideally, from scratch, so that his results are (hopefully) unaffected by authors' bugs This rests on a common false assumption that programmers make: they think it's easier to write bug-free code when st
114.
by ef4 10y ago
"You pay more taxes because somebody else pays less" is fundamentally misleading. If the government had to balance its income and expenses, then yes, one person paying less taxes would imply somebody else had to pay more taxes. Bu
115.
by ef4 10y ago
> That's not "pricing for the enterprise" you're describing, it's pricing for customizations. This is not a very meaningful distinction. Big enterprise software deals inevitably involve customizations and integra
116.
by ef4 10y ago
I bet the human driver doesn't even need to be physically in the truck. We already fly military aircraft remotely, I don't see why a truck that's packed with cameras and sensors can't be driven safely by a human in an of
117.
by ef4 10y ago
If that's the goal, they're doing it badly since the non-GAAP measures show higher profits.
118.
by ef4 10y ago
These stories about the triumph of Mises and Hayek fly in the face of evidence. Exhibit A is total government spending as a percentage of GDP: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_1900_2020... If Mises and Hay
119.
by ef4 11y ago
I used SICP too. And I'm very dubious that Scheme reduces the gap. People still had radically different experiences in the course depending on their prior exposure to programming. The biggest gap I observed was in motivating _why_ we w
120.
by ef4 11y ago
Even within CS education programs, this has a profound impact. You can't design a useful introductory computer science course that works well for everybody. A subset of your class has been dabbling with code since childhood, while anot

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