impendia

69 ms·

691.
by impendia 12y ago
In my opinion this is overly harsh. I would revise to: If you don't understand why this needs to be done, you should read more and learn more until you do understand.
692.
by impendia 12y ago
Backing up your point, the following appeared in SF Weekly (one of the alt-weekly newspapers): http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2010/03/how_san_francisc...
693.
by impendia 12y ago
> The Ivy League - and other high-prestige schools like Stanford - are primarily useful for the connections you make and the status they convey to others. I emphatically disagree. I taught math at Stanford for three years as a postdoc, a
694.
by impendia 12y ago
I am a mathematics professor who has served on several hiring committees. In our context this would be impossible. In particular, I was asked to help hire an algebraic geometer -- algebraic geometry not being my specialty. For me to read an
695.
by impendia 12y ago
A friend of mine, working towards a Ph.D. in linguistics, told me that she witnessed a lecture where Chomsky claimed, on the basis of his theories, that no human language could possibly do X. (For some complicated, technical X.) A hand from
696.
by impendia 12y ago
p.s. Along the lines of (2), I would recommend trying to get yoga teachers to answer a short multiple choice quiz. For example: > Although both of these are important, which is the following is the biggest priority in your yoga teaching?
697.
by impendia 12y ago
I am a potential user of your site. I live (a bit reluctantly) in Columbia, SC, and my yoga studio cut back its advanced 90-minute classes and replaced most of them with hour-long, easier classes. Moreover, the head teacher mostly blew me o
698.
by impendia 13y ago
> Ever notice how families or tribes don’t require much process? Interesting, I've observed the opposite. As someone single, I've been surprised at how much process there is among many married or cohabiting couples. Lots of d
699.
by impendia 13y ago
How much yoga do you do in the morning? Is there a set amount you recommend? I often go to group yoga lessons (90 min., in the evening), but an hour and a half is a bit much for the mornings ;) Thanks!
700.
Ask HN: How do you get and stay in the "zone"?
135 points by impendia 13y ago|103 comments
701.
by impendia 13y ago
I remember creating all sorts of games back when I was a student. I dreamed big, and created at least some games which fell far short of my dreams -- but I never imagined that I would be able to find an audience for them. Nowadays, Kickstar
702.
by impendia 13y ago
> As others have pointed out, IE6 isn't dead yet. > we need to set fire to their pants. I remember going to a friend's house for dinner. He had spent all day upgrading the version of Linux on his laptop, and wrangling with a
703.
by impendia 13y ago
I remember my first visit to a Japanese toilet. I noticed all the buttons after I finished my business and stood up. Wow! What do these do? I bent over the toilet bowl and pushed a button at random...
704.
by impendia 13y ago
I think it's a little bit different. There are many natural ways of defining the expression a^b, which coincide when a and b are (say) positive integers, but there is basically only one way of defining 2 (namely, 1 + 1).
705.
by impendia 13y ago
Well of course we made it up. No one handed us any stone tablets with 0^0 on them. Mathematicians are always making definitions, and working out which of them should be kept and which should be discarded. We keep the definitions that make t
706.
by impendia 13y ago
I've been very surprised to notice this myself. But it really is true. Companies like Best Buy, Applebee's, Hilton each have over a million likes. Even much-maligned United Airlines has nearly 700,000.
707.
by impendia 13y ago
Start with the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. You and an opponent taking turns picking numbers, each time a number that has not been picked before. The winner is the first person to have picked three numbers that sum to exactly 15.
708.
by impendia 13y ago
Although the rules are complicated, I lived in Japan for awhile, and almost no one Japanese would be offended by a foreigner getting it only mostly right. This is not terribly hard. It suffices for foreigners to observe the basics. As expla
709.
by impendia 13y ago
An interesting observation. When I lived in Menlo Park, I observed that local politics (definitely including zoning regulations) were controlled by wealthy homeowners, who had a strong vested interest in the status quo. But absentee homeown
710.
by impendia 13y ago
Right now, you don't. Currently, having watched the whole Mt. Gox fiasco unfold, and having read from at least one HN poster who lost over US$100,000 worth of bitcoins, I wouldn't touch bitcoins with a 100-foot pole. I understand
711.
by impendia 13y ago
I am curious, how would it make sense for them to get acquired? Surely their liabilities exceed their assets, their brand is now worthless, and their reputation is shot. Why would anyone acquire them?
712.
by impendia 13y ago
Restrictive building codes are not a scapegoat. They are a public policy decision which directly explains why the price of housing is so high.
713.
by impendia 13y ago
> there's no impetus to pass a new law repealing a law that's already been invalidated. Well... in 2000 (!), Alabama repealed its laws against interracial marriage, which had been invalidated in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia . h
714.
by impendia 13y ago
1/(1 - x) = 1 + x + x^2 + x^3 + x^4 + ... so, 1/(1 - .0002) = 1 + .0002 + .0002^2 + ... and 1/9998 = .0001/(1 - .0002).
715.
by impendia 13y ago
An interesting point. I don't really understand it, so please allow me a question. Is there anything you would find disagreeable or unfriendly about, e.g., the following? http://www.math.sc.edu/~thornef/math142&#x2
716.
by impendia 13y ago
Could someone please explain to me -- why do people actually use this software enough to hate it? I am a math professor at a university which uses it, and so I use it to mass e-mail my students and to record grades. And for nothing else
717.
by impendia 13y ago
This is not limited to the Ivies: http://www.sa.sc.edu/leaders/ Of course, this is the same phenomenon on a larger scale. Nowhere tries to be "normal". Visit the website of any college or university: it will
718.
by impendia 13y ago
I agree that this case has received much more publicity than it deserves. But I also agree with mindcrime's point, admire the student's actions, and am grateful to live in a country where the consequences to the student are likely
719.
by impendia 13y ago
> a less pretentious Brooklyn (I live in BK now). Interesting. My main complaint about Durham was that it was very suburban; the idea of traveling between any pair of locations other than by car was wholly ridiculous. (But last time I wa
720.
by impendia 13y ago
I've lived in all of Durham, San Francisco, and Menlo Park (next town over to Palo Alto). Durham, in my mind, had a weird vibe. Despite growing up there, I think what I remember best is taking a swing dance workshop (in my mid-twenties

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