ewjordan

70 ms·

511.
by ewjordan 17y ago
You can unless you've signed something that prohibits you from doing so. There's no default assumption of non-disclosure or non-competition when you're taking on a project for a company as a consultant, even if you are required to transf
512.
by ewjordan 17y ago
It's also generally impossible to make a non-trivial game both zero sum in dollars and zero sum in utility, when using a non-trivial dollar->utility conversion.
513.
by ewjordan 17y ago
Just to take on [1], the difference between computer science papers and the postmodern papers that involve physics is that while both may seem unintelligible to someone unskilled in the field, real computer science papers actually mean som
514.
by ewjordan 18y ago
What caused this bubble is what causes almost every bubble that has ever happened: people see some item that they can buy and sell going up in price over a reasonably long period, they leverage the ever loving crap out of it because it's fa
515.
by ewjordan 18y ago
I think what Allocator2008 is getting at is that creating artificial life would show that there is nothing mystical or non-physical about consciousness. This would partly poke a hole in the argument for existence of God that the creation o
516.
by ewjordan 18y ago
You are aware that scientists still can't fully explain the most common mental process that takes up 30% of our lifetime? The human brain will never be perfectly replicated in this lifetime or any lifetime, in the same way that a group o
517.
by ewjordan 18y ago
It turns out that the vast majority of all IE sessions contain three or fewer tabs. That's only because tab management sucks when you put the tabs along the top of the screen, and the lack of organization means people feel obligated to cl
518.
by ewjordan 18y ago
So I'll assume, since you think that "I can google this" is a cop-out, that you never hit up Google in real life to look up some obscure technical point about a function that you need to call once every couple months in your coding? You
519.
by ewjordan 18y ago
I find it curious that the tech-savvy world of Hacker News, which should be comfortable with the idea of specialization in modern capitalist economies, seems to pine for a return to a "cottage" music industry, where the musician is to perf
520.
by ewjordan 18y ago
Talking about Twitter in the same breath as YouTube just doesn't make sense - YouTube's troubles stem from the fact that its costs are through the roof, being a streaming video site and all. In order to come out of the red, they have to ma
521.
by ewjordan 18y ago
A lot to respond to there, but I'll keep it to this for now: "Those who are of the Austrian prediction have successfully predicted the recession for quite some time now." ...and radical Muslims have been predicting the downfall of American
522.
by ewjordan 18y ago
Err...the following bothers me: "The ratio of converting invites to new users is your viral coefficient, k. If this is greater than one you will see self-sustaining, viral growth.2 If the coefficient is less than one each user will bring in
523.
by ewjordan 18y ago
+1 - I discovered the Tree Style Tab addon a few months back, and I absolutely cannot imagine living without it. If you don't already use it, give it a try now , you will never go back. This type of tab handling should be pulled in to ev
524.
by ewjordan 18y ago
Neither your mood nor those particular papers were at fault - sociology is a rancid cesspool, filled to the brim with Humanities-Style-Thinking at its worst, masquerading as a science because the questions it deals with are more concrete. I
525.
by ewjordan 18y ago
Ha, great article. Makes me think back to the terribad philosophy classes (at least the softer, less mathy ones - the pure logic ones were fine) I had to sit through in college. My trick back then: whenever I read a paper/essay/book on any
526.
by ewjordan 18y ago
First, a link direct to the REPL: http://lotrepls.appspot.com/ The lack of state between evaluations for the non-Lisps is unfortunate, but this is still really neat, I hope it continues to improve. What I'd really like to see is a set of
527.
by ewjordan 18y ago
Okay, but what's the point? Yes, it's possible to write down the Hamiltonian and Lagrangian formulations in a form that high school kids can understand. To what end? The reason these formulations are preferred is that certain classes of
528.
by ewjordan 18y ago
One could easily have said the same thing of Google's search business itself, which gives away tons of functionality and bandwidth. The real question is whether online advertising will ever bring CPMs in line with TV or print advertising.
529.
by ewjordan 18y ago
I suspect you have generally felt uncomfortable because you're hitting your head against the fundamental paradox of education: the most compelling, important, and unifying aspects of any field as measured by an expert in that field are almo
530.
by ewjordan 18y ago
Difficulty must be weighed against importance - far more people care deeply about universal health coverage than legalization of marijuana, so the same amount of effort provides a far greater return in the former case.
531.
by ewjordan 18y ago
"2.) Menace: who or what are they menacing? If you feel threatened, don't use their products." Well, apparently they are "menacing" content producers on YouTube by [!shock!] deciding that rather than renegotiate higher payments per view the
532.
by ewjordan 18y ago
The crucial difference being, of course, that the intended use of a car is not to kill people in a drunk driving accident, whereas the primary purpose of a gun _is_ to kill people by shooting them. Not saying it's necessarily right to sue t
533.
by ewjordan 18y ago
You're dead wrong. If the code you write in Ruby tends to be shittier than the code you write in Scala, then you're a damn fool if you continue to write your code in Ruby. "Reliable, high performance, correct and maintainable" has _tons_ t
534.
by ewjordan 18y ago
Laptop or desktop? If it's a desktop, I won't comment, that's entirely up to you (maybe others have advice) - I haven't used a desktop regularly in at least a year. If it's a laptop, though, unless you work in a totally Windows-centric env
535.
by ewjordan 18y ago
I agree with you, but I think the gp has a point: look at Java as an example. Here we are, at a point where Java code runs extremely fast, but because of the "Java is slow" meme that took off at the turn of the century, any time Java comes
536.
by ewjordan 18y ago
As an ex-SAT tutor (horrid job, but while in school it seemed like a good idea...), my take on the matter: high SAT scores don't mean a damn thing, I've seen absolute fools hit high 700s across the board, but low scores can be telling, espe
537.
by ewjordan 18y ago
How does JRuby's implementation compare to Scala's, though? I've been pleased overall with Scala, but I've not had much JRuby experience, so I'm curious.
538.
by ewjordan 18y ago
Careful here: are you _really_ suggesting that Twitter would do a full rewrite without making sure that it would increase throughput first? I don't get the sense that they are that inexperienced. If they think a switch to Scala will handle
539.
by ewjordan 18y ago
Maybe the article ignores that trade off, but Twitter is not really a "startup" anymore, so they are correctly leaving the startup mindset behind and beginning to analyze where they are wasting resources and what they can do about it. If th
540.
by ewjordan 18y ago
"If they were indeed obfuscating purpusefully, then there is a fraud case in here." Unfortunately, not quite. Our laws regarding these things are very primitive, which often means that you can be in perfect legal compliance, yet still comm

More ›