jeffcoat

11 ms·

61.
by jeffcoat 16y ago
I'm interested in this, since my phone is my favorite book reader. The best app I've found so far for reading on Android is Aldiko ... and it's quite good: I'd be interested to see a comparison. The linked article is not particularly enthus
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by jeffcoat 16y ago
It's certainly possible in this case: There shouldn't be any problem with "actions strictly prior to a law being passed" -- the US Constitution frowns on _ex post facto_ punishments -- but everything described in the article is only legal u
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by jeffcoat 16y ago
It would be interesting to see numbers on just how dependent the early American colonies were on tobacco exports. That's the sort of thing that would tend to be de-emphasized in low-level history textbooks.
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by jeffcoat 16y ago
Careful, here: this is exactly what the argument would look like if you'd decided in advance what the right answer is, and you kept casting around for reasons why that's so until you find one that seems to stick.
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by jeffcoat 16y ago
As a Netflix subscriber ... sometimes I forget, for weeks at a time, that they can send me physical DVDs. Even with a limited (by comparison) selection, the streaming service is already much more useful to me than DVDs-by-mail.
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by jeffcoat 16y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity
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by jeffcoat 16y ago
I can't make sense of your thesis at all. Is King Lear The Iliad , or The Odyssey ? The Little Engine That Could ? King of Kong ?
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by jeffcoat 16y ago
If someone refers to the "standard" algorithm for factoring on quantum computers, they're talking about Shor's algorithm. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shors_algorithm (Also, remember that factoring is not (known to be) NP-complete.)
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by jeffcoat 16y ago
I've heard this story, but I can't find any evidence for "regularly". (I'm also not sure what form such evidence would take.) The highest profile case I can find is of Robert Jordan, of New London, CT, who sued for discrimination because hi
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by jeffcoat 16y ago
Sure. Do that, and you can get hired anywhere. 1, 2, 3 are by themselves exceptional-- pretty much by definition, setting a world record in anything is unusual. Having started and sold a company means you've built something worth real money
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by jeffcoat 16y ago
The first Android app I paid for was Aldiko ( http://www.aldiko.com/ ), an ebook (epub) reader -- excellent feature set, and fantastic polish. There's an ad-supported free version, too, but $1.99 is nothing for software I use every day.
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by jeffcoat 16y ago
It has its own grammar, distinct from English, its own vocabulary, and native speakers -- what more do you want from a language?
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by jeffcoat 17y ago
I've completely switched over from reading RSS feeds in Safari over the last couple of months. Safari had trouble keeping track of which articles I'd seen -- and would occasionally even corrupt its own database -- but the thing that finally
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by jeffcoat 17y ago
The _New York Times_ has an idiosyncratic style guide; they follow each letter with a period when the letters are pronounced individually. So, "I.B.M", "C.I.A.", but "NATO". (Naturally, how IBM itself spells its name is of no interest.)
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by jeffcoat 17y ago
Exactly why I consider it a Good Idea to make commits that are either style or substance, but not mix both.
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by jeffcoat 17y ago
You don't understand it perfectly well, though. You're not "racking your brain" because loops are better fits to most problems than other approaches -- it's because you're still learning. That's perfectly okay, of course. It just means it'
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by jeffcoat 17y ago
Presumably, people would bootstrap themselves into careers in pretty much the same way they do now. Of the top of my head ... 1) Working with (or interning with) someone reputable, and getting their public stamp of approval. 2) Certificatio
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by jeffcoat 17y ago
It's worse -- they have an incentive to bargain against the long-term public interest in order to win good-will with unions, which can lead to votes.
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by jeffcoat 17y ago
Searle doesn't make an argument about formally equivalent Turing machines, he makes an argument about a person using an instruction book to manipulate strange characters. It's a perfect trap for your intuition. You have an intuitive feeling
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by jeffcoat 17y ago
You've assumed your conclusion there: that the system Searle describes is able to encode information in a way similar to a human Chinese speaker.
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by jeffcoat 17y ago
I don't understand why people are willing to even accept the premise. The system as described (a book of instructions for manipulating Chinese symbols) can't usefully answer the question "what time is it?"; why should I believe it could car
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by jeffcoat 17y ago
You have excellent taste; go now and grab a copy of Borges's _Ficciones_ for more. http://books.google.com/books?id=4dPBlkL1dkIC
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by jeffcoat 17y ago
Have you discovered that if you have something that someone else wants, and they have something you want, and you swap, then you can both end up happier? Have you discovered that it's tricky to carry with you for exchange purposes every con
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by jeffcoat 17y ago
No one complains about something that they have no interest at all in -- it's not a rant about how IBM's newest z/OS mainframe has poor support for browsing websites that use Flash. Much more frustrating is something that looks like it coul
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by jeffcoat 17y ago
I'm a checklist fan. Here's the don't-break-the-build checklist I have posted on the wall beside me: 1) No ? in 'svn status' 2) Checkstyle accepts all changed files 3) 'svn update' 4) Unit tests pass 5) 'svn commit' As you say -- condescend
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by jeffcoat 17y ago
I think that's the point, yes. In software engineering, quantity has a quality all its own.
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by jeffcoat 17y ago
Great tip -- I've been using Mnemosyne daily for the last couple of months, but it's never occurred to me to use the flashcards to schedule practice sessions.
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by jeffcoat 17y ago
This looks like a job for ... Prediction Markets! As in, seriously: has such a thing already been set up?
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by jeffcoat 17y ago
What are you pointing out here? That it doesn't mention the gap at x=1.5? Okay: what did we learn from that?
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by jeffcoat 17y ago
Here's a (very naive) algorithm that doesn't count references: 1. Start at some well-known root object. Mark this object reachable. 2. For each object that is reachable 2a. For each object that this reachable object has a reference to

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