feral

57 ms·

421.
by feral 16y ago
Thought experiment: If there was a human that suffered an injury that left them unable to feel pleasure, or pain - some form of nerve damage, perhaps - I wouldn't think any less of that human's mental function. I wouldn't think they had
422.
by feral 16y ago
>Have you looked at how we write code? It is directly related to the hardware architecture. Operators over here, memory over here. This argument really doesn't make sense. My desktop PC has a haskell interpreter, a prolog environment, a
423.
by feral 16y ago
Why is that clear? Just because the lowest level of computation occurs in a 'mix of hardware and software' does not mean that all the important abstractions don't run at a higher level. And indeed, some evolutionary arguments about complex
424.
by feral 16y ago
Their ability to correct for the missing kids, is presumably because they can assume that the kids missing are missing at random (proportional to their attendance rate.) This is very different, because while there is some data missing, it i
425.
by feral 16y ago
Obviously if there has been a 'meta' process of refinement, such that the test set has been used in model development, then its not a clean test set any more, and shouldn't be regarded as such. That's something for any researchers to watch
426.
by feral 16y ago
I'm not so sure about that. Its pretty hard to predict the past too. Anyone doing serious research into this, will first partition the past data into training and test sets. (And sometimes other validation sets). So the idea would be to f
427.
by feral 16y ago
If you take a population of humans, put them on an island, and only allow those that grow tall to breed, after 20 generations you will notice a huge difference in the average height of your population. You might already be aware of this, bu
428.
by feral 16y ago
I passed. Because I clicked open a lot of stories from the main HN page in background tabs, and by the time I got to that one, it had told me I had passed.
429.
by feral 16y ago
The article is just about the qualification round. The first post-qualification round was even worse (I was a competitor). I won't go through all the details, but problems included mis-specified questions. The second question - a 2 variab
430.
by feral 16y ago
This paragraph from near the end, is extremely interesting in today's context: "As McKenna sees it, the rift between Jobs and Sculley ultimately stems from the sudden, dramatic change in the marketplace in the last two years. No longer can
431.
by feral 16y ago
Link bait title, and the video was uploaded to youtube in 2006 - seen it years ago. Prototypes aren't hard - useful mass production is hard.
432.
by feral 16y ago
"So - go for it - tell me, right now, which of his many predictions are "obviously going to happen." and which are "Totally foolish". " I'm not claiming to be able to make long term predictions. I'm also not egomaniacal enough to think that
433.
by feral 16y ago
That right there is exactly the sort of reasoning I object to. A poorly defined prediction is made: "Teleportation will be possible". Now, everyone who reads this probably imagines 'beam me up, scotty'. Subsequently, teleportation is define
434.
by feral 16y ago
"you've got to give the guy credit for his translating telephones..." Was it really so hard to predict in 1990 we'd eventually have automatic translation? First off, Kurtzweil had a company doing (primitive) speech recognition since the 8
435.
by feral 16y ago
I don't buy that Kurzweil prediction accuracy stuff. There's just so much wiggle room when you start allowing categorisations like 'mostly correct', and the sort of equivocation that seems to be going on. I thought his recent evaluation of
436.
by feral 16y ago
While we're looking through previous 'could have been facebook' social networks, I remember receiving invites to sixdegrees.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SixDegrees.com This old article from 1998 is worth a look: http://www.dougbedell
437.
by feral 16y ago
Pleasing aesthetically, as well as functionally. Good aesthetics always count for something, even with such a cut and dried task. Anyone printed these out nicely and put them on a wall? I think they'd make good posters.
438.
by feral 16y ago
Retreating from the cloud, and writing down appointments in the book, is the wrong solution, globally. The convenience of being able to access the data everywhere is too huge to sacrifice; this is only going to become more important as peop
439.
by feral 16y ago
I'll defend the PhD for different reasons. It educates you further. You acquire knowledge you don't get elsewhere. You get a range of skills and learning opportunities you don't get elsewhere - some of which are very useful when trying to d
440.
by feral 16y ago
Game theory analysis of situations like this usually concludes that you won't get $4999. Because another passenger will undercut you at $4998, and take the profit ($4998 - utility of flying) instead. But, of course, you'll anticipate that,
441.
by feral 16y ago
Strong AI is 15 years away? I'm not saying its impossible, but that's pretty ludicrous to state as fact. Even many enthusiastic Strong AI proponents would hesitate to give such an aggressive bound.
442.
by feral 16y ago
"Among those 34 OECD nations, only the United States spent centuries aggressively trying to stamp out literacy among a major part of its population." I'm Irish, and I'd question the accuracy of that statement - whether the US was unique in
443.
by feral 16y ago
Your response would have been a lot stronger if you had answered his main question - do you have an interest? This is a question it is reasonable to ask any blogger endorsing a product. It is also a question any blogger should clearly and
444.
by feral 16y ago
You should launch right now. You are front page on HN and delicious is all over the news. If you have an architecture that will scale any way well at all, get out of public beta, and try surf this wave.
445.
by feral 16y ago
I do a lot of work with very large graphs (100s of millions of nodes), running similar sorts of algorithms, and also have found there's a lot of benefits to going with a single machine with lots of memory. I'm happy to read that article, be
446.
by feral 16y ago
I disagree where you say 'an octree is definitely part of coding an MMO.' An Octree is just one technique to reduce the size of the Potentially Visible Set of geometry that is sent to the rendering pipeline. While its a quite a natural fit
447.
by feral 16y ago
No - I'm just saying that the submission to hackernews shouldn't be called 'Lets code... an MMO', because that makes it sound like its about coding an MMO, when its about coding an Octree. If I see an article about coding an MMO I expect to
448.
by feral 16y ago
The article is called "Let's Code... an MMO" - but it is just a simple Octree tutorial. I don't mean to be negative, like the guys friends that laughed at the project - but coding an MMO is several orders of magnitude more complex than putt
449.
by feral 16y ago
Completely agree. There's a whole science to the study of networks, looking at things like Centrality, local topological features, and even ranking schemes like PageRank. Of course twitter are going to generate scores for their users as th
450.
by feral 16y ago
The title is a little misleading. The authors consider the implications of another model of diffusion; they don't validate that this model is more applicable to Reddit or Digg. These models in themselves are interesting; they have surprisin

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