j-g-faustus

17 ms·

91.
by j-g-faustus 16y ago
Good points, and I agree. The Netflix prize is interesting. According to a summary post on the Netflix forum the early results were mainly by individuals... the team members began to coalesce and combine, and in the end, ent
92.
by j-g-faustus 16y ago
I may be out of tune with many others here, but I think certain constructive processes (as in creating a many-faceted proof, outlining overarching software architecture, making the storyline of a good novel/movie) are most efficient with sm
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by j-g-faustus 16y ago
I think it would work well as a guide for startups too, especially the "how it looks to you" (living inside the dent for the past x years) vs. "how it looks to a VC" (weighing your startup against the sum total of every other product and se
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by j-g-faustus 16y ago
Check his comment to a poster that asked the same thing (why would P != NP change anything): P≠NP is exactly the ‘expected’ answer! But proving that expected answer has been the central goal of the field for 40 years—not so m
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by j-g-faustus 16y ago
Daniel Defoe (of Robinson Crusoe), 1703: [my novel] is being Printed again and again, by Pyrates But the term was in use as early as 1600: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement
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by j-g-faustus 16y ago
Considering the number of people that can accomplish anything useful with HTML vs the number of people that can accomplish anything useful with C (or even XML), it's well in line with my expectations. It's fairly easy to get a simpler imple
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by j-g-faustus 16y ago
I tend to think that very few things that see widespread real-world use are "simple" by any reasonable metric. The basic idea may be simple, but by the time you have covered a reasonable fraction of real-world use cases and error conditions
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by j-g-faustus 16y ago
> I travel far FAR less often now than a few years ago. So do I. I never found flying particularly pleasant, whether economy or business class, and after a decade of frequent business flying I pick other alternatives (including staying
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by j-g-faustus 16y ago
I'd add a fourth factor: The fact that we travel more frequently. If you are flying something like once per decade flying might feel like an adventure in its own right and you may be willing to splurge a bit. But the more often you need to
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by j-g-faustus 16y ago
It's been a few years since this was relevant for me, but my primary concern would be that in order to publish actual code I would either have to spend months cleaning it up, writing documentation etc., or spend the next year fielding suppo
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by j-g-faustus 16y ago
It's mine, I had no idea it would make it to Google and HackerNews that quickly. Glad you like it :) On bigger fonts, can't you just use the browser "increase font size", Command-+ on my system? I prefer the smaller fonts to make room for m
102.
by j-g-faustus 16y ago
True enough, I think. Then the primary driver is not a vision of technology as such, it is political: If you aim to change (or rule) the world, bigger is always better (as bigger equals more power, people and money to change the world accor
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by j-g-faustus 16y ago
There is a shutoff valve at the bottom of the sea, another valve on the drilling rig at the sea surface, and a pipe connecting them. The way you close off a well is by a) closing either of the valves or b) pumping a few tons of sand and cem
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by j-g-faustus 16y ago
The entire concept of art is relatively recent (from the Renaissance on), the ancient Greeks considered a sculptor to be a craftsman just like a smith or carpenter. And the Renaissance artists had to make a living somehow, much of their ar
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by j-g-faustus 16y ago
Well, we can find or create equivalences. Someone I knew did a master thesis on the male reproductive system, he told me that males have 10-15 largely independent biological pathways to produce sperm. From nature's perspective the point is
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by j-g-faustus 16y ago
Don't think so, it was clearly marked with price list and everything. I imagine it's more along the lines of "I'll pay them all by the end of the week/month", and then they forgot about it. Or perhaps sales grabbed a bunch to hand out to po
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by j-g-faustus 16y ago
A few years back a company in Scandinavia tried to sell candy bars at workplaces by leaving a tray of candy bars and a jar for the money. They found that it worked well at low-income workplaces (90-95% honesty) but poorly at high-income wor
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Entrepreneur motivation is overrated(businessinsider.com)
3 points by j-g-faustus 16y ago|0 comments
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by j-g-faustus 16y ago
Classification. The goal is to find the simplest description that will separate two sets of data (here: the points inside the circle from the ones outside). Linear classifiers - in 2D, a straight line that separates the two groups - are pre
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by j-g-faustus 16y ago
I've always thought that [gay | labor | women's | black's | etc] rights all collapse to merely human rights, and find it curious that we see the need to carve it up in a whole bunch of special cases.
111.
by j-g-faustus 16y ago
> So are you saying that that's not actually the case, that smart people aren't disproportionately unpopular? I think they aren't. As an example, we could hypothesize that people have a few simple attributes - say IQ (math), physical sk
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by j-g-faustus 16y ago
"When I sit down to write a letter or start the first draft of an article, I simply type on the keyboard and the words appear on the screen." I suppose any sufficiently advanced technology actually is indistinguishable from magic.
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by j-g-faustus 16y ago
Doubtful. Here's Hesiod around 800 BC: "I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words... When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and r
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by j-g-faustus 16y ago
http://techcrunch.com/ Every story has a Like, a Buzz and a Retweet button.
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by j-g-faustus 16y ago
HTML is not complicated at all, that's why it became a success - pretty much anyone could learn to write a basic web page in a few weeks. Web pages became complex over the years as people wanted do things that HTML was never meant to do. Li
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by j-g-faustus 16y ago
Along the same lines, Donald Norman (usability guru, started the usability field almost single-handedly with the book "The Design of Everyday Things") recently said: "I've come to a disconcerting conclusion: design research is great when it
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by j-g-faustus 16y ago
This is what I am using for a one-person home office: 1. Gmail for everything, two accounts (private and work). I found Outlook folders more convenient than Gmail tags, but Gmail is great at being accessible from everywhere and works well e
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by j-g-faustus 17y ago
> It shows how fundamentally difficult it is to make credible business forecasts in technology. Becoming a major success is fundamentally hard and predicting the future is fundamentally hard, so it shouldn't be much of a surprise. You c
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by j-g-faustus 17y ago
And Europe has 22,000 daily flights normally, 17,000 of them were cancelled Saturday. 17k flights times average number of passengers (100?) times average ticket cost ($100?) - it adds up to a lot of lost income. And as mentioned, the airlin
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by j-g-faustus 17y ago
Sounds like you are assuming that "moral" is an exact concept. Practically speaking, there seems to be lots of cases where opinions on what is moral differ: Abortion, porn, finance... What would worry me with a machine that could tweak ever

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