gjm11

183 ms·

1621.
by gjm11 11y ago
"For humans" is surely intended to be the opposite of "for computers". It's meant to say "When we designed this thing, we made it a high priority for it to be easy to learn, easy to remember, and easy to use&qu
1622.
by gjm11 11y ago
We don't have automated cars yet. We don't have (e.g.) fusion power yet. Why should the possibility of improvements in the future stop us doing things that benefit us overall now ? And ... where does "taking civilization b
1623.
by gjm11 11y ago
The paper by Lyness and Moler is nice, but if it's really "about the idea in this post" then the fact is somewhat hidden. It's mostly about using the Cauchy integral formula to turn derivatives into integrals, using the
1624.
by gjm11 11y ago
I take it the proposal is that there should be a law requiring that such-and-such an algorithm be used. That would take away the politicians' power to gerrymander. (Of course it would also need to be voted for by the same politicians w
1625.
by gjm11 11y ago
> let women decide on fighting a war or not Cf. Aristophanes' play "Lysistrata" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysistrata ) in which the women of Athens persuade their menfolk to end their war against S
1626.
by gjm11 11y ago
(Apologies for the tardy reply.) Many European parties have things like "social democratic" in their name. They advocate social-democrat politics. Some European parties have "socialist" in their name. They mostly advocat
1627.
by gjm11 11y ago
I don't think I'm caught on the euphemism treadmill; I have no problem describing some systems and some people as socialist. (And, for the avoidance of doubt, I don't regard it as an insult to do so.) I just don't think
1628.
by gjm11 11y ago
It is only in the United States that "modern Scandinavian-style social democracy" is apparently indistinguishable from socialism. Socialism means large-scale state ownership -- or some other kind of collective ownership by The Peo
1629.
by gjm11 11y ago
Note that this bug originally seems to have been called something like "Implement LZMA compression", and the early comments are about that; it's some way in that someone says "oh, and Google have this new Brotli thing wh
1630.
by gjm11 11y ago
Presumably that Will met, and fell in love with, Ariel when he was 26 or thereabouts and she was a 15-year-old schoolgirl at the school where he taught. So saith Wikipedia, anyway.
1631.
by gjm11 11y ago
It can't be president unless it's 35 or older (and a citizen of the United States, which is also difficult for a cat) but I don't know of any age requirement for running .
1632.
by gjm11 11y ago
A word of warning about solutions to this problem. The "easy" version states it this way: the mapping you want takes (x,y) to ((ax+by+c)/(gx+hy+i),(dx+ey+f)/(gx+hy+i)) for some a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i -- a general "projec
1633.
by gjm11 11y ago
Wouldn't it be interesting if personal income taxes worked the same way? (Capital gains tax kinda does, at least in the jurisdictions I know about; you can offset losses against gains. But earned income seems just as much like business
1634.
by gjm11 11y ago
One of mine was 69 -- genuinely at random. (Well, semi-genuinely. I picked a randomish number, counted that many places through pi, and took two digits. I wasted some time memorizing lots of digits of pi when I was in high school; it would
1635.
by gjm11 11y ago
> already fought in the 2k10's Am I missing something? That sounds like it means the decade beginning in 2010 ... which we're still only half-way through. Do you mean something like "in 2011-2012"? [EDITED to add: Oh,
1636.
by gjm11 11y ago
I've seen video of a talk in which Yegge says, in so many words, that "NBL is Javascript". Google suggests it was a talk at OSCON 2007, which I can't easily check right now.
1637.
by gjm11 11y ago
You're missing one level of reference here. The usual joke has the person reply "Practice". The article is suggesting that talent is more important, relative to practice, than is commonly thought. So when you see the headline
1638.
by gjm11 11y ago
I don't think I believe your last paragraph. It's certainly true that when predicted interest rates go up, existing bonds (which have fixed yields built into them) become less attractive and their prices go down. So it's cert
1639.
by gjm11 11y ago
The article is talking about ongoing changes in what skills are most valuable. Bill Gates got super-rich by running Microsoft from 1975 to 2000. There's no inconsistency between "hard tech skills were most valuable 15-40 years a
1640.
by gjm11 11y ago
No, it doesn't mean that there are no socialists in the US. But if the people of the US, as a whole, have by whatever means come to hate and fear socialists and socialism, then someone who's willing to describe himself as a social
1641.
by gjm11 11y ago
Just out of curiosity, what do you think about "that point"? Do you think the Mexican government is pushing large numbers of drug dealers and rapists into the USA? Do you think this is an issue important enough that it should be
1642.
by gjm11 11y ago
What part of the constitution would it be contrary to?
1643.
by gjm11 11y ago
The slightly bigger picture: People become less liberal when they are aware of the existence of other people Not Like Them with whom they're sharing a country, but become more liberal when they actually interact with those people.
1644.
by gjm11 11y ago
> "If a businessman makes a mistake, he suffers the consequences. If a bureaucrat makes a mistake, you suffer the consequences." - Ayn Rand. There is some truth in this. It is the almost-exact flip side of this : If a business
1645.
by gjm11 11y ago
> the first maple-syrup WTF on Hacker News I actually checked and yes, if Google can be trusted then it is.
1646.
by gjm11 11y ago
"Normal" quantum computers are good at simulating quantum physics, or would be if we could build big enough ones. D-Wave's adiabatic allegedly-quantum computer is not, so far as anyone knows. The only thing (so far as I am aw
1647.
by gjm11 11y ago
kgwgk's explained why the answer is no, but let me offer a slightly different perspective. The situation is similar to the one we discussed earlier where you do the same experiment twice. Before you do the experiment , your estimate o
1648.
by gjm11 11y ago
Much narrower focus than dluan's proposal (climate science only); pretty much entirely one-sided (criticizes work supporting the consensus view only, kinda like if Batman only fought the cops). The guy who runs it isn't a scient
1649.
by gjm11 11y ago
> the chances are exactly 50% that the first result is more extreme than the second one The chance is 50% if you condition only on the information you have before doing either experiment. But once you've done the first experiment, t
1650.
by gjm11 11y ago
Yup! (For the avoidance of doubt, my comment that what you said applies to lots of things on SSC wasn't intended as any sort of criticism -- I wasn't saying "boo, you failed to describe the article in a way that distinguishes

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