feral

48 ms·

361.
by feral 15y ago
>Social proofs are bad. You should be reading the comments and then deciding what is interesting and noteworthy [...] Respectfully, I disagree. Its a core idea of this site, that the community does a good job of surfacing interesting in
362.
by feral 15y ago
Past polls show that a substantial portion of readers (me included) think the points are very useful. They draw our attention to the best comments. Clearly, you think this reduced usefulness is worth it to reduce fights; fair enough. So, is
363.
by feral 15y ago
>Sometimes I still forget what inverse means in math. I think your interpretation is actually the more correct one, here. Squaring and square-rooting are the inverse of each other. They are really talking about calculating the reciproc
364.
by feral 15y ago
If people continued to write independent programs, purely to replicate and verify claimed results, then certainly it'd be beneficial for them to have the source, in order to track down where the discrepancy arises. This is often how it wor
365.
by feral 15y ago
In one way, I really agree with this initiative. I'd like to raise a counter argument, about replication, though. In a nutshell, if someone has to reimplement the code, from the details in the paper they've read, its a great check that the
366.
by feral 15y ago
In the spirit of your comment, perhaps it would be better to say 'spent', rather than 'wasted'? As you are saying, this is an important distinction.
367.
by feral 15y ago
But what is 'actual business value'? Lets say we are considering an oil company, which makes a profit from drilling oil. If oil rises in price, the company makes more profit. Surely, in a very real sense, the 'actual business value' of thi
368.
by feral 15y ago
First off, business value can change quickly. Sudden events happen. You can think of dramatic events such as terrorist attacks or death of an important executive; but there's other information, such as the public announcement of a new produ
369.
by feral 15y ago
>you can throw anything at her The word 'her' surprised me - 'it', surely? But I guess this just goes to show, once again, how easily anthropomorphisation comes to people; if the experience is good enough that customers start thinking a
370.
by feral 15y ago
>Not Singapore, NZ, Australia, Hong Kong, India or any number of prior British colonies that use British English and spellings instead of American? Not to mention Ireland.
371.
by feral 15y ago
This appears to be a denial by the person in question: http://www.scss.tcd.ie/~clearm/bitcoin.html I did the same undergrad as the guy. I have to say, I'd be really impressed if he put together Bitcoin just as he was finishing college. I
372.
by feral 15y ago
Obviously, if there is a single move that wins you the game every time - being able to consult the oracle, in your example - then this pure strategy is dominant, and no mixed strategy is called for. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_strate
373.
by feral 15y ago
I think the best solution in this space would be to implement this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamirs_Secret_Sharing Then you could nominate some family members, friends, significant other, such that some minimum number of them were r
374.
by feral 15y ago
"But it's had a much worse track record with communications. There are no cell phones (or cell-phone-like devices) in Neuromancer." There is the matrix though, which isn't a bad vision of the Internet; its global, all the big databanks are
375.
by feral 15y ago
Is 93% really an acceptable amount of the 'giant asteroids that could smash into Earth' to track? Clearly, its a better number than, for example, 50%; and its great that NASA is doing any tracking; but this is an species level existential t
376.
by feral 15y ago
Gold is not the same as USD. It is a different asset to USD, and carries different risks. The Greek Bonds you mention, you also consider 'money'. Well, not all 'money' is the same. That's why you get paid more if you buy Greek bonds than i
377.
by feral 15y ago
I'm afraid you don't understand the point of arbitrage, at all. As others have said, by definition, an arbitrage is risk free (or, in practice, nearly risk free). Buying extremely risky Greek Bonds, with borrowed USD, is just making a lever
378.
by feral 15y ago
Yeah, but that's not arbitrage, either, right? Like, you took on a risk, and you got compensated for the risk. You essentially issued insurance. Perhaps you were lucky that you didn't have to pay out. But that doesn't mean you found an ar
379.
by feral 15y ago
I don't think what you are talking about is arbitrage, either. You are talking about using interest free loans from credit cards in order to make a leveraged bet on the price of gold; that is not arbitrage. If gold decreases in price - and
380.
by feral 15y ago
I was replying to this: "I'm not talking about using your own software, I'm talking about eating actual dogfood."
381.
by feral 15y ago
I don't know how to say this - but, are you for real? Its very important to eat well. Yeah, eat cheap food thats fast to cook, but also make sure its healthy. Vegetables and noodles, pasta, are cheap and quick. The safety standards and qu
382.
by feral 15y ago
Ok - it looks like they reached that conclusion by multiplying the number of Bitcoins transacted, by the dollar value of a Bitcoin. Fair enough, but its a measure vulnerable to the problem that days-destroyed is trying to solve - it'd be ea
383.
by feral 15y ago
If you were to monitor velocity of money http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money naively, by calculating total bitcoins transferred, then it would be trivial for any party to increase the velocity arbitrarily high, by just sending
384.
by feral 15y ago
>But to imagine that that self-aware technology will be anything but symbiotic with us is truly crazy. Have you any argument to back up such a strong position? >Of course the world will become dominated by self-aware technology; it
385.
by feral 15y ago
>You need to state very clearly that it's co-op and the goal is to stay alive for as many blocks as possible. I'm pretty sure its non-cooperative. If you look at 1:00, you see an instance where one player is told 'you lose' and the othe
386.
by feral 15y ago
Its not really fair to ask the C code to include OpenGL calls -- a pretty verbose API -- to compare it against the Clojure code which has default access to the Java Swing library, and GUI widgets. Looking at the game logic in both examples,
387.
by feral 15y ago
The Microsoft Surface is 107cm x 56cm. I haven't done it, but I'd say the experience of looking at at atlas on it, with multitouch zooming, and the ability to turn on and off layers, compares favorably to using a library atlas, like in the
388.
by feral 15y ago
I'm not fully sure what the author is trying to say here. Is it that a small screen isn't as good for looking at geographic information? If so, then I completely agree. But large tablet screens, touch surfaces, pico-projectors, etc will a
389.
by feral 15y ago
Yes, sure, fair point. I was talking about strategy games as such - but you are right that there's large elements of execution skill in many games, even in an RTS like starcraft, which is also fun to compete on.
390.
by feral 15y ago
It'd definitely help people wanting to write articles analyzing starcraft. There's definitely things the author doesn't get, that'd seem obvious if he'd read this stuff. Anyway, I think most people study pure game theory, not because its d

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