hugh

28 ms·

271.
by hugh 18y ago
Or even better, "Why I prefer candidate A to candidate B, phrased in FAQ form with occasional attempts to sound impartial by pointing out [before immediately dismissing] the arguments the other way, by Peter Norvig". Don't get me wrong -- a
272.
by hugh 18y ago
Is that a new guideline, by the way? It wasn't there in the old days -- presumably it postdates the "flag" feature. In any case, I don't like that guideline much. Complaining about offtopicness is, in my opinion, the best substitute for dow
273.
by hugh 18y ago
Indeed. I'd never heard this "Wall Street vs Main Street" meme until a few days ago, and suddenly it's everywhere.
274.
by hugh 18y ago
I should write a Greasemonkey script that switches politics links to... I dunno, blog postings about wrapping bacon around things which one would not normally wrap bacon around. Greasemonkey can do that, right?
275.
by hugh 18y ago
Uncovering the pressures that drive this self-sacrifice could shed light on the evolution of altruism, Kaspari added. Well, I don't think "altruism" within an ant colony has much to do with altruism in other species. Worker ants have no w
276.
by hugh 18y ago
No, no, no, no, no. Bad upvoters! Seriously. This is a politics piece. Worse, this is a partisan politics piece. Worser, this is a partisan politics piece masquerading as a FAQ.
277.
by hugh 18y ago
The problem is that the leter-grade system doesn't give this information. "A" could mean you're a super-genius, or a plain old genius, or a reasonably good student, or a so-so student at a place with severe grade inflation. At my school (in
278.
by hugh 18y ago
Oh, I never intended to argue from Dawkins' authority. I only meant to point out an interesting theory (which I personally think might have a bunch of truth to it) and to acknowledge where I got it from.
279.
by hugh 18y ago
Of course. Fortunately, sociology seems to be one of those handwavey areas where the opinions of laymen are, on average, not much worse than those of experts. Or at least, that's my opinion, speaking as a layman.
280.
by hugh 18y ago
In "The God Delusion", Richard Dawkins puts forth an argument something along the lines that the US is the most religious of the rich countries since it, unlike most European countries, never had an official state religion. Over time, faith
281.
by hugh 18y ago
What would it mean, in this context, for a measure of risk to be "self-consistent"?
282.
by hugh 18y ago
I'm still not convinced that you can't just say that x/0 equals infinity. Certainly, there's nothing to stop you from saying that. We could quite easily define a number called Infinity (or, say, Frank) such that x/0 = Frank, the same wa
283.
by hugh 18y ago
Even by politics standards, this article is pretty bad. It's completely disingenuous. Ebert starts with "I do not like you, John McCain. My feeling has nothing to do with issues..." and then goes on to complain about some irrelevant body-la
284.
by hugh 18y ago
Wait, but the integers don't form a field anyway (not closed under division).
285.
by hugh 18y ago
Maybe. No.
286.
by hugh 18y ago
Yes, apparently it does. This leads me to propose a new mantra: forget being different, just be the same. (I'd blog about it myself, but unfortunately my own blog is devoted primarily to motorcycle stunts and zebra penises.)
287.
by hugh 18y ago
Why not? (Apart from the fact that most people tend to move their pillows around during the night...) It's not the perfect response to every crisis, but it can't hurt. If one day you can't get your money out of the bank, for whatever reason
288.
by hugh 18y ago
I thought the "Ask YC: How bad is the economy?" thread was pretty good, but I don't think we need a play-by-play update on every piece of economic news. For the next year or so I'm going to just wake up every day and assume there's some bad
289.
by hugh 18y ago
Anyone know exactly how the FDIC thing works? Supposing my bank goes under (which I sure as hell hope it won't, cuz it's Bank of America), I'm guessing it'll take some time for them to get their act together and I might not be able to acces
290.
by hugh 18y ago
I'll be more interested once they start building a possible one.
291.
by hugh 18y ago
I'm with the Magnificent Bastard on this one -- the full Windsor is overrated. http://magnificentbastard.com/posts/ask-the-mb-windsor-knot
292.
by hugh 18y ago
In what way was y2k a public policy issue? And was the "debacle" the bug itself or the over-reaction to it?
293.
by hugh 18y ago
I assume the worst consequence, from their point of view, would be humiliation. Either a humiliating failure to detonate, or a humiliating detonation that kills only them, and slowly, like that guy who tried to drive a truck bomb into Glasg
294.
by hugh 18y ago
A wearable bomb can only kill (say) few dozen people, even in a crowded area, but the same bomb detonated on a 747 could kill 400. It could also allow them to gain control of the aircraft (maybe, depending on whether they can persuade the p
295.
by hugh 18y ago
That's an interesting question, worthy of its own thread. I think the reason is this: programming is much easier to teach yourself than any of the others. And the reason is this: in programming you know when you're wrong. You can spend thre
296.
by hugh 18y ago
Things do seem more boring when you're making money for it. Does this effect have a name? I'm reminded of the first time I ever went to a casino. After an hour of exploring and putting the occasional dollar in a slot machine, I was about fi
297.
by hugh 18y ago
Now that was just silly. No Fortran elf is going to have variables with legible names "Shamrock" and "Rainbow" and "Misty_Morning_Dew". Try shmrc, rnbo, and mmd, and make sure that mmd is an integer.
298.
by hugh 18y ago
Just wear a damn balaclava. It's not like the police are going to bother to investigate a yard sign theft, even if they have access to the footage, so stealing the sign provides an opportunity to (a) put one over on a bunch of obsessive wei
299.
by hugh 18y ago
Perhaps the idea could be adapted, though. How about throwing in a motion detector so that we only draw our human watchers' attention to the motion of things which look like human-sized objects? You'd need, of course, to throw in some kind
300.
by hugh 18y ago
This is neat. Of course it would be just as easy to write a python script to generate and compile the LaTeX file instead, but this is neater in some situations.

More ›