hugh

70 ms·

661.
by hugh 18y ago
Interestingly for many of us, there seems to be one scheduled for 2012 across large chunks of Northern California, Arizona and Nevada. update: Actually it's going to be an annular eclipse, not a total eclipse, which isn't quite as awesome.
662.
by hugh 18y ago
It could really use some examples of what the hell he's talking about. Wide ranging examples, too. I'm sure he could come up with one or two, but can he come up with a whole bunch, which span a reasonably wide swath of algorithm space? Show
663.
by hugh 18y ago
It is fairly likely that there was a real Trojan War. It is reasonably likely that there was some man on whom Odysseus is largely based. It is slightly likely that said man, upon returning from the Trojan War, did something along the lines
664.
by hugh 18y ago
It's possible you're being modded down for your poor spelling and grammar. I've modded you back up to 1.
665.
by hugh 18y ago
Patents vary hugely in value. The vast majority turn out to be worth almost nothing, while a few are worth billions. I'm pretty sure if you had this it would just accumulate all the worthless patents, while people and companies who owned th
666.
by hugh 18y ago
You're probably right, it's probably more about intelligence than consciousness (I haven't read it for a long time). Anyway, it's certainly not about machine translation.
667.
by hugh 18y ago
Didn't everybody want to be a games programmer when they were thirteen?
668.
by hugh 18y ago
I'd be more interested in knowing how the _really_ rich spend their time. Not the $100K+ folks -- a group which is mostly composed of plain ol' hard-working types with good jobs, but the people who are rich enough to retire but young enough
669.
by hugh 18y ago
Well, (a) You can't prove or disprove a riddle (b) The Chinese Room isn't a riddle, it's a thought experiment (c) You can't prove or disprove a thought experiment (d) You might be able to prove or disprove the point that Searle was trying t
670.
by hugh 18y ago
OK, that explains fish fish eat eat, but what about fish fish fish eat eat eat? (Now there's a sentence I never thought I'd be typing today.)
671.
by hugh 18y ago
I don't get it. I can't see any way to make "eat" anything other than a verb, and as such I can't see any way to parse it.
672.
by hugh 18y ago
For all this talk of the $15 billion valuation at which Microsoft invested in Facebook, didn't they get some extra goodies for their money? As I recall there was some kind of exclusive advertising rights as well as the stock. If I sell you
673.
by hugh 18y ago
Am I reading this correctly? I have to pay you a dollar to participate in your poll? Good luck, but I think you're dreaming if you think you'll get many people to fall for that one.
674.
by hugh 18y ago
I always assume that 12% of people deliberately give the wrong answer to stupid questions from pollsters.
675.
by hugh 18y ago
That could be difficult. It's difficult to get the CoS to pin down exactly what it is that the e-meter is supposed to be measuring ("mental energy"), so it's impossible to tell whether it's measuring it or not. Of course it's possible to sh
676.
by hugh 18y ago
Possibly, but there's a new one which Reuters managed to fall for the other day (look up "genepax").
677.
by hugh 18y ago
Any suggestions on how they could do this one? Pig corpses aren't going to cut it this time, and neither is Buster.
678.
by hugh 18y ago
The above moronic talking-point exchange is exactly why we don't want to see political debates on this site.
679.
by hugh 18y ago
Please keep in mind: the reason why politics stories are quasi-banned (or at least strongly discouraged) here is not just that they're not relevant to technology/startups/etc, but also because political debates are boring, repetitive, and h
680.
by hugh 18y ago
More to the point, in my experience the kind of people who actually do great things are not the kind of people who spend their time thinking about how mediocre, unambitious and lackluster other people are.
681.
by hugh 18y ago
It seems they were anti-communist vigilantes rather than ordinary "bandits". Anti-communist vigilantes who respect mathematics? We need more of those in our universities.
682.
by hugh 18y ago
Of course it's perfectly possible for one person to be related to a distant ancestor by two different pathways with significantly different numbers of generations. In fact, if you traced your family tree back 40ish generations you'd almost
683.
by hugh 18y ago
Please read carefully before flaming. For what it's worth, he did start with "No offense, but..." which doesn't really sound like flaming.
684.
by hugh 18y ago
A great(ish) philosopher once said that the point of having philosophers was to save regular people from the effort of having to think about philosophical questions. Likewise, the point of having physicists is to save regular people from ha
685.
by hugh 18y ago
Hmm, so why doesn't it just get deleted?
686.
by hugh 18y ago
Can anyone explain why the comment in this subthread by keating is marked as "[dead]"? What does that mean?
687.
by hugh 18y ago
Does there need to be some analogue of Feynman + Hawking etc, where theres both epic insight and just generally an outgoing ridiculous persona and also some reasonably good popular expositions of deep ideas? What ideas in CS are as intere
688.
by hugh 18y ago
So the big lesson here is that you can make $100 million a year (for at least a few years) without adding any value.
689.
by hugh 18y ago
For people who don't want to get out of bed as soon as the alarm goes off, but who also don't want to risk sleeping for another hour, a snooze button is perfectly sensible.
690.
by hugh 18y ago
What's irrational about having a snooze function?

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