jibiki

42 ms·

361.
by jibiki 18y ago
I don't know how much you can cultivate that attitude, and how much it's just something you're born with.
362.
by jibiki 18y ago
What about Greenspan?
363.
by jibiki 18y ago
I think he's talking about the ~100 generation time-scale; i.e., Darwinian evolution rather than Lamarckian evolution. If anybody has a "desire to have a large family gene", then that gene will come to dominate the human gene pool in a few
364.
by jibiki 18y ago
I thought this would be about Bayesian vs. Frequentist, but it really isn't. The sort of statistical problems he is talking about are basically predictive: what is the distribution of variable y if we know the values of variables x_i? How
365.
by jibiki 18y ago
Madness or not, it seems to stop people from going to war in the first place.
366.
by jibiki 18y ago
The doomer theory is that modern agriculture is merely an inefficient means of turning oil into food. I don't know how much credence to give this; I'm not an expert.
367.
by jibiki 18y ago
Bingo. Once we start losing massive numbers of soldiers, launching nuclear weapons starts to seem much more justifiable. Particularly if anyone is convinced that launching first gives us an advantage in the ensuing fallout.
368.
by jibiki 18y ago
This sounds really smart, but I don't know if it is. Let's say you want to be a great basketball player. If you're short and fat, you won't be one, no matter how much you practice. Michael Jordan was an incredible natural athlete. It's
369.
by jibiki 18y ago
It's a fun read, but it drags a bit towards the end. My gut feeling is that if you enjoyed Dune, then you would probably like Atlas Shrugged.
370.
by jibiki 18y ago
Ah, thanks. M1 seems to be between 1 and 2 trillion, so credit card debt is definitely significant against that back drop.
371.
by jibiki 18y ago
My knowledge of philosophy has enabled me to write some brilliant SQL queries.
372.
by jibiki 18y ago
This site looks, a bit shady, but it does give figures: http://www.blacklistednews.com/view.asp?ID=6397 > Total U.S. credit card debt reached almost $800 billion in November 2007 In contrast, the US GDP is about $14 trillion, so credi
373.
by jibiki 18y ago
I doubt that actually happens with food. Over the course of a year, the person taking payday loans has less total money to spend on food, because he's paying interest. That's much more relevant than the extra food money he might have over
374.
by jibiki 18y ago
You said, "take issue with payday loans not him." Then you said "we don't know what his firm's policies were, if any measures were taken to prevent payday loan abuse, etc." This is exactly the opposite sentiment: that we should take issue
375.
by jibiki 18y ago
Your argument makes perfect sense for people, no sense for corporations ("it's like saying GM owes X billion dollars because of the money they're going to have to pay in retirement benefits"), and some sense for governments.
376.
by jibiki 18y ago
There's also the trick way to do it, namely the distance from (x0,y0) to the line ax+by+c=0 is |ax0+by0+c|/sqrt(a^2+b^2) This has the advantage that it generalizes to arbitrary dimensions. For example, you can do it to find the distance fr
377.
by jibiki 18y ago
Also, perhaps it should adjust for population growth.
378.
by jibiki 18y ago
I'm reading through that filing, and it's not clear to me why the guy stopped paying rent, or why Macy didn't personally contact him after that. The whole story is bizarre. If Macy wanted to do things by the book, then he should have draf
379.
by jibiki 18y ago
Usually I enjoy Ebert's writing, but I didn't really get the point of this piece. I don't see why the future he envisions is inevitable, and I don't see why it's tragic.
380.
by jibiki 18y ago
Most of what you learn (in school) is stuff you HAVE to take on faith. Are you going to empirically verify the concept of covalent bonding? Are you going to figure out Kreb's cycle from first principles? Will you deduce the results of th
381.
by jibiki 18y ago
I'd go so far as to say unix command line tools work much better than the window-based alternatives. Or at least I use them more as time goes on, and use nautilus less.
382.
by jibiki 18y ago
I had to use the computer lab for many of my comp sci courses. If the lab had had an unusable window manager, then I wouldn't have taken nearly as many comp sci classes. Undergrad CS course aren't just for CS majors.
383.
by jibiki 18y ago
There's a famous music sharing group where you can only become a member if someone vouches for you. If someone snitches, then they are thrown out of the group along with the person who vouched for them. (Or something like that.) This sort
384.
by jibiki 18y ago
Maybe what you want is not a Markov model, but a stochastic context-free grammar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_context-free_grammar
385.
by jibiki 18y ago
I've been doing this wrong for as long as I've been programming (eight or nine years.) I always just try to get stuff to compile as quickly as possible, then to run, and then handle the edge cases if they come up. Needless to say, unconsi
386.
by jibiki 18y ago
But everything's a proxy for everything. Employers don't really want educated employees, they just use the college degree as a proxy for the skills and qualities they actually want. The college degree itself doesn't certify learning or th
387.
by jibiki 18y ago
It's shocking that such a naive model produces such good results. I suspect it has to do with the languages they are translating: if they wanted to translate Japanese to German it would take more sophisticated methods.
388.
by jibiki 18y ago
Wesnoth is nothing like Settlers, but it's still a good game, especially considering the price. IIRC, ESR wrote a campaign for it.
389.
by jibiki 18y ago
I don't think you followed the double negatives there. The masses generally believe the media, and the media acknowledges the possibility of non-anthropogenic warming. If you are saying that the scientific establishment is 100% sure of AGW
390.
by jibiki 18y ago
To commiserate is to share misery, the word you are looking for is commensurate. Your comment seems somewhat tangential to the argument. Are you saying that the financial crisis was in no way caused by consumer attitudes towards real estat

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