ewjordan

66 ms·

451.
by ewjordan 17y ago
I think the parent was really hoping for a link to the source data, along with a rigorous explanation of how it was acquired. Too many of these graphs result from massaged/corrected/otherwise altered data rather than direct results, and qu
452.
by ewjordan 17y ago
Regardless of whether it's necessary or not, it's kind of expected knowledge to have as a programmer. Around here you'll find a lot more anti-Java sentiment than in most places (and most of it is probably justified), but I still doubt you
453.
by ewjordan 17y ago
Plus, can any non PhD even get access to a scientific journal? Can you or me even access most of them without a paid subscription? Yes - go to any local university library, walk to the section labeled "scientific journals" and go nuts. Y
454.
by ewjordan 17y ago
Let's repeat yet again: unintelligent, mean, illiterate, crackpots with horrible political views can get science right. And wonderfully credentialed, polite, intelligent, well-renown scientists can screw up science horribly. Science is not
455.
by ewjordan 17y ago
There's more on this at http://www.climatescience.org.nz/images/PDFs/global_warming_... [PDF], including some more detailed graphs at the end. Full disclosure: I'm coming at this from the initial point of view that the global warming folk
456.
by ewjordan 17y ago
You're overlooking the scaling factors at work here, though, which make the "our world has too many good people" worries lose a lot of their force. As long as the need for labor scales roughly in line with the population and the supply of c
457.
by ewjordan 17y ago
From what I remember, it usually means "Scored in the top N% on a standardized test", where N is some small-ish number, roughly proportional to the amount of noise that local parents make when their children don't get labeled as "gifted."
458.
by ewjordan 17y ago
When gifted adolescents are compared to general high school students according to their preference for intuition, they are more likely to enjoy solving new problems and dislike doing the same thing repeatedly. My take: they've become bore
459.
by ewjordan 17y ago
It's main points are is games like WoW teach the wrong lessons, like "investing a lot of time in something is worth more than actual skill". For the vast majority of our fellow humans, this is exactly the lesson they should learn to pre
460.
by ewjordan 17y ago
Parent is just quoting buzzwords, but I can't say that he's altogether wrong: the reason this is a story has nothing to do with science, or any desire to find the truth. It's a clash where each side has already decided that it's Right ba
461.
by ewjordan 17y ago
The only money I've ever made off of music is doing live gigs. Give your music away for almost nothing (or dirt cheap) and then play your own shows. This is The Problem for the record industry - there's an almost infinite supply of very
462.
by ewjordan 17y ago
Re: "(to be fair she said that all users will click on 1/4 of the ads presented to them, not '1/4 of users will click on an ad')" That's even worse: she assumed that 4 ads would be presented per e-mail , so the CTR would be 100% per e-mail
463.
by ewjordan 17y ago
If you're respected in your field, have you considered shifting into consulting? You're really in an ideal position for it: you should have no trouble finding work, and will probably find that if you book the same number of hours, you'll m
464.
by ewjordan 17y ago
...yet the guy from Google explaining the reasoning claimed higher memory usage as one reason Python was discouraged. I don't know myself, as I've never written a full non-trivial, scalable business application side-by-side in Java and Pyth
465.
by ewjordan 17y ago
The cost starts out too high to justify releasing something that's not optimized when you're operating at Google's scale, especially since the development costs are largely up front whereas the ongoing compute costs keep going for at leas
466.
by ewjordan 17y ago
"Quickly grok" to "test things out" - it just isn't going to happen like that, even if you know the math behind it (FWIW, for that paper you're going to need a lot about statistics and Markov chains, but you may be able to get pretty far ju
467.
by ewjordan 17y ago
If you got in low, it's been really hard to not make money. Absolutely true. But there have been plenty of down days, and what's suspicious is that Goldman made money on all of these except one (though see my final statement in this post
468.
by ewjordan 17y ago
Had he chosen football instead of art he might be looking back thankfully that the decision lead him down the path to becoming an NFL star, or sports announcer, or whatever. The likelihood of football leading directly to a career path (ra
469.
by ewjordan 17y ago
Too imprecise. The claim was that a segmentation by birth year would not be expected to correlate with bravery, smarts, or hard work, not that there's no segmentation that correlates with any of those qualities. Your proposed version is qu
470.
by ewjordan 17y ago
Don't forget the next statement: Now the FCC is proposing taking a free market that works, and adding another layer of innovation-stifling regulations on top of that? Of course, the problem is that we don't really know whether a free mark
471.
by ewjordan 17y ago
That doesn't mean it's a completely useless concept. ...except that according to the article, it is a useless concept, with that conclusion backed up by data. So you're really saying that you think the research that the article is based
472.
by ewjordan 17y ago
I don't even know for sure if you are experiencing qualia. I'll go you one further and admit that I don't know for sure if I am experiencing qualia. My brain certainly tells itself that I am, but how do I know it's not just wrong? Perha
473.
by ewjordan 17y ago
The "weirdness" (or whatever you want to call the enormous explanatory gap between our mental lives and inanimate matter) deserves an answer. It's not something to sweep under the rug as "subjective" or "unscientific" or "poorly defined".
474.
by ewjordan 17y ago
You are assuming that there is no innate quality of human organic compounds and processes that differentiates us from electrical components. It may very well be the case that this is either true or false. We simply don't have enough eviden
475.
by ewjordan 17y ago
If you're digging into Hofstadter (and if you aren't, you should be, whether or not you agree with him, almost every word he's ever written is worth reading, including the seemingly irrelevant stuff about translations), I Am A Strange Loop
476.
by ewjordan 17y ago
Searle is an atheistic (I think - at least he's nonreligious) philosopher who agrees with you. He argued against "functionalism" - which is pretty much the stance that most here are taking - that consciousness is a complex adaptive process
477.
by ewjordan 17y ago
Big crashes will always occur, but I would not blame the recent crash on the gaussian models. I'd rather say that (almost) everyone underappreciated the risks connected to the real estate prices. Part of the reason they underestimated tho
478.
by ewjordan 17y ago
Why is Taleb getting all this mainstream attention? He's telling people that "common knowledge" in a particularly despised sector of our economy is not only wrong, but downright idiotic. And he's presenting it in a way such that Joe the P
479.
by ewjordan 17y ago
Right with you there. However, I do suffer from the people around me bitching about my sleep problems because they see me up at 7 AM after a long night of coding. If one more "helpful" printout with an "FYI" scribble on it mysteriously
480.
by ewjordan 17y ago
Exactly. Frankly, the dude couldn't have been very smart if he didn't realize that you could replace the word "God" with any word you want in that "proof" and thus establish that it exists. This type of spot checking is important, and any

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