erydo

12 ms·

61.
by erydo 14y ago
Errors cancel out when they're errors of magnitude, which is what I believe he was referring to, and is often the most important property of Fermi estimates. If one estimate is off by 2x and another is off by ½x, those cancel out because th
62.
by erydo 14y ago
Most contracts include a severability clause, which basically says that if any part is found to be invalid, the rest of the contract continues to apply anyway. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severability
63.
by erydo 14y ago
I can only speak for myself, but I think the cause is often practical: good things are often baselines that don't need to be changed and can usually be ignored more than the bad things which actually do need to be addressed. This tends to
64.
by erydo 14y ago
These days when I see a project with the word "Kickstarter", it gives me an immediate understanding of the basic funding model and the mechanics of it. I'd be less likely to donate if it were just a "donate with paypal" link on some blogpos
65.
by erydo 14y ago
When you bring up Clojure, I think it's fair to point out that, beyond even the default-unsafe reader thing brought up a couple weeks ago, the JVM itself has had several fatal security issues recently. No platform is completely without bugs
66.
by erydo 14y ago
I'm not sure I buy the "this isn't as much about perception as expectation" explanation. I wonder whether the brightness of films--images projected from a powerful lamp onto a white screen; or through a bright LCD screen, etc.--causes our e
67.
by erydo 14y ago
This is something I was thinking about last night, prompted by the recent resurgence in awareness of government wiretapping and some of the responses of "use SSL everywhere so it's not a problem." Does anything prevent a government from pri
68.
by erydo 14y ago
> I'd take Einstein in his 40s over a thousand other randomly-chosen physicists in their 20s (I don't think I've seen a more clear example of a false dichotomy.) I agree that age is rarely the determining factor for someone's general co
69.
by erydo 14y ago
You're right, and I didn't doubt that. I meant it's self-inconsistent with how days and years are handled, not necessarily inconsistent with other calendar APIs within Java and Android. Sorry I wasn't clear.
70.
by erydo 14y ago
According to this comment: https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=39692#c17 It's caused by the convention of the Android datepicker to store month values as 0-11 instead of 1-12. Dates are given in 1-31 as expected; and years
71.
by erydo 14y ago
Even putting it into a separate compilation unit isn't a long-term solution: compilers that do whole program optimization may still be able to optimize it out. I believe just declaring the operand to be volatile would prevent it from being
72.
by erydo 14y ago
First: I'm not recommending anything—I'm asking a question. This isn't my practice but it's important to play devil's advocate sometimes. Second, the question was not whether piping to shell is a good way of doing installations. The questio
73.
by erydo 14y ago
Ignoring the SSL bit, from a security standpoint is piping to the shell really any different than saying "run this installer application"? Either way you're allowing the source to run arbitrary commands on your computer.
74.
by erydo 14y ago
No, Jabbles is correct: look at listing 11. It's reassigned five lines down.
75.
by erydo 15y ago
You're right that Hilton in particular is very centrally controlled. Other large franchises have more flexibility. (Starwood is a bit more flexible, for example). One of the reasons we've been reluctant to go straight for the top is that, a
76.
by erydo 15y ago
Thanks for the advice! You're absolutely right. We did a lot of research before jumping into this: interviewed with a lot of hotels, did our codevelopment, etc. But in ramping up to "let's get something solid that we can sell", we psycholog
77.
by erydo 15y ago
This is actually the approach we started off with, and still pursue to a limited extent. (See earlier comment—we're moving away as much as possible from individual hotels and trying to pursue hotel groups). The issue we've run into is that
78.
by erydo 15y ago
The business model is to license the software to hotels. More specifically, whoever has the final say within the hotels varies wildly between properties. In some places, it's the Front Desk Manager; others, marketing; some places defer al
79.
by erydo 15y ago
We've also posted this to Reddit [0]. Any input is really appreciated. We've worked hard to get where we are, and are very proud of the product. We'd love to make it a successful one. Thanks! [0] http://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/commen
80.
by erydo 15y ago
What? C has those const rules. The type "int const* const*" is valid C. The differences are primarily that in C you can't use a const symbol in a place where a constant expression is expected (e.g. initializing another const, or a staticall
81.
by erydo 15y ago
Blender comes to mind. It was opensourced (ransomware) around 2001 IIRC, and it's still a quite healthy project. I'm sure there are other good examples. You might also count open source games relying on id's engines.
82.
by erydo 15y ago
There's a difference between seeing that something can be generalized, optimized, or improved and spending the time to do it. Knowing that difference and applying judgement is a major differentiator between inexperienced programmers and exp
83.
by erydo 15y ago
I have the keyboard version (i.e. Kindle 3). The keyboard is hardly ever used. If I were to buy a new Kindle, I'd probably get the one with the 5-way controller. I don't think multitouch would really be that useful for reading books; your m
84.
by erydo 15y ago
Some extensions haven't been updated to support newer versions of Firefox. Some people just don't want to sink time into upgrading their software, or risk that something that once worked now doesn't. If you're a web developer, you have to k
85.
by erydo 15y ago
Definitely a bug, but don't you have to log in to the administrative interface to access those forms in the first place? On D-Link routers I've played with, that interface was password protected and was the mechanism for uploading new firmw
86.
by erydo 15y ago
I hope that's not a genuine field manual. It's poorly written and quite superstitious: > However, it is important not to stare at the enemy > because he may sense the stalker's presence > through a sixth sense.
87.
by erydo 15y ago
I'm using the same setup (OS X Lion, same build of Chrome), and it works for me.
88.
by erydo 15y ago
That still doesn't quite answer the question: If the money is paid, there is no crime to begin with. The transfer isn't selling the right to go to the authorities, it's resolving the crime of non-payment in the first place.
89.
by erydo 15y ago
> If you threaten to expose a crime unless you are paid money, you have committed blackmail. That might make sense if the crime in question weren't the non-payment of that money. Saying, "If you don't pay what you owe, I'll report you"
90.
by erydo 15y ago
They'd sell for a high price not necessarily due to price gouging, but because it costs a lot to sell to the military. The overhead of quality control, support, and all of the bureaucracy involved in dealing with a military customer would d

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