hugh

89 ms·

931.
by hugh 19y ago
I know, I thought it was a silly example. Sorry, I kinda convolved my reply to your comment with my reply to the article.
932.
by hugh 19y ago
I dunno, an awful lot of people seem to be making an awful lot of money by selling bottled water, and I don't see any of them using a rebellion-based marketing strategy. I see messages ranging from "Buy our water, it's cool and refreshing a
933.
by hugh 19y ago
I'll take a few more brilliant bio-weapons researchers who do what they're told by Uncle Sam over a few more brilliant bio-weapons researchers who _don't_ do what they're told by Uncle Sam.
934.
by hugh 19y ago
If by "stereotypes are usually correct" you mean that if there is a stereotype that says "people of group G have property P" then people in group G are statistically more likely than average to have property P than the general population, t
935.
by hugh 19y ago
Can you be more specific about what you don't like about this guy's coverage of Eastern Europe?
936.
by hugh 19y ago
Well, just to get this out of the way: no, it's not in geostationary orbit, it's just a big balloon. It is, of course, not possible to be in a geostationary orbit above Texas anyway, because Texas isn't on the equator. Anyway, I'd have much
937.
by hugh 19y ago
I got 88, but I'm kinda in the business. I thought I'd get more.
938.
by hugh 19y ago
Interesting, but not really all that unlikely. At home? At work? On a train? At lunch?
939.
by hugh 19y ago
That's great, but I'm still holding out for Fortran on Flanges
940.
by hugh 19y ago
Discussions about moderation are pretty boring, but I will say that I was one of the ones who modded the original comment down, mostly because I thought that the suggestion that Hollywood is deliberately trying to "brainwash" people into ac
941.
by hugh 19y ago
Well, just to argue against my original point, the scaling of the travelling salesman problem usually applies to the time taken to figure out the optimal route, not the time taken to actually traverse it, which is O(N). If you're just looki
942.
by hugh 19y ago
Shouldn't it be O(N)? I mean, the time taken to pack and send your products will still scale linearly with the number of customers, right?
943.
by hugh 19y ago
It's not that hard to monetize: just stick ads on pages and sell them. If they had been happy with a billion-dollar valuation, they could simply do that, and everybody would have been happy, including their blissfully unzombified users. Unf
944.
by hugh 19y ago
They're not really saying they're going to "lose their shirts", those are the journalist's words. What GM actually says is that the Volt won't be profitable for the first few years, which is no surprise to anybody, and no different from wha
945.
by hugh 19y ago
Moller Aerospace is based here in Davis, and I don't see any signs of them mass-producing anything. As far as I know, he has a single prototype which may or may not hover when attached by a wire to a crane. There was a press release about s
946.
by hugh 19y ago
That's interesting. I'm a postdoc in physics, and a few months ago I was feeling bored and poor, and seriously considering switching to finance. Three months later though, and staying in academia is looking pretty attractive. I might not be
947.
by hugh 19y ago
This is a very interesting question, but unfortunately in this case the author's answer is just the standard scientist's whine: "There's not enough funding for my kind of research". Better possible answers include: a) The time isn't right f
948.
by hugh 19y ago
I'm no expert, but it seems to me that reading stock charts is just a particularly unsophisticated form of statistical arbitrage, and that it _might_ work provided that nobody else in the world is doing it. Real statistical arbitrage firms,
949.
by hugh 19y ago
Drat. I tried the same trick, and I'm down to my last $10,000.
950.
by hugh 19y ago
I have to say that as a way of getting attention for his $3000-a-month internships, Seth Godin's trollish "I know this is controversial, but..." blog post challenging the desirability of every person who's ever written a resume and every em
951.
by hugh 19y ago
Why bother wearing pants? By wearing pants you just communicate to the rest of the world that you're a B-player who needs to wear pants to be taken seriously. Look at Einstein. He always wore pants, but if he didn't, do you think they would
952.
by hugh 19y ago
Hmm. Back of the envelope calculation: In order to project something on the moon to have it visible during a full moon, you'd want the projection to be at least as bright as the sunlight hitting the full moon (about 1 kW per square metre).
953.
by hugh 19y ago
I agree. I suspect that scaling up a simulation of a neuron and expecting it to act like a brain is a bit like scaling up a simulation of an iron atom and expecting it to act like a car.
954.
by hugh 19y ago
Whoops! OK, so just to clarify, I didn't mean for my off-hand generalization about "science journalists not knowing anything about science" to extend to the author of this article in particular, who as several people have now pointed out, t
955.
by hugh 19y ago
Oops. I stand corrected. The author of this particular article obviously does know the subject very well. My apologies.
956.
by hugh 19y ago
Have you seen the homeless people in San Francisco? Do you really think that a lack of voicemail is what's holding them back from getting a job? You can give 'em a phone, a shower, a shave, a set of clean clothes, and even some lessons on i
957.
by hugh 19y ago
I've always known that science journalists don't know anything about science. I'm only now realizing that they don't know anything about journalism either. They only know how to tell one story. That's the story of the underdog scientist who
958.
by hugh 19y ago
'Captured robots would not be difficult to reverse engineer, and could easily replace suicide bombers as the weapon-of-choice. "I don't know why that has not happened already," he said.' Perhaps because Al Qaeda is rather heavy on the "scre
959.
by hugh 19y ago
I personally tend to try to apply the standard of whether it's of importance or interest to hackers in particular, rather than to human beings in general. Major news stories are, of course, of importance to everyone, but I personally would
960.
by hugh 19y ago
No, I want to see it lifted, in exchange for democratic reforms. Whether or not it was a good idea in the first place, it's in place now, so lifting it is one of the few carrots which the US can offer the Cuban regime. It seems silly to giv

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