jordanb

119 ms·

1471.
by jordanb 17y ago
U6 isn't the "real unemployment rate," it's just the loosest definition of "unemployment" that the BLS calculates. It's much higher than U3 because the definition is so much more broad. It is also, of course, much higher than U3 in good tim
1472.
by jordanb 17y ago
Yeah, and they mostly have no serious understanding of the technology. At least the typical sportscaster maybe played the sport in High School. He has some distant connection to the sport beyond being that of a spectator with a camera in fr
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by jordanb 17y ago
Putting "Windshield Wipers" on the probes to another planet isn't exactly like going down to Auto Zone and picking up a few strips of black silicone. Wipers would have to survive the extremes of space and the surface of Mars. They would nee
1474.
by jordanb 17y ago
TAOCP is a very thorough "text book" for people who really are interested in the subject matter. It's not really Knuth's goal to break new ground with it, but to compile the most interesting things he's found into a single work. It's hardly
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by jordanb 17y ago
I have a friend who manages a hospital IT department. He said that problem is that American private hospitals already are highly computerized, it's just that the computer systems are focused entirely billing and not at all on medical record
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by jordanb 17y ago
It's interesting to consider why the myth that porn drives innovation has such legs. It strikes me as something of a modern-day fairy tell for the information industry, where the moral is that people who restrict (even patently offensive) s
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by jordanb 17y ago
So then the Police entered the building ostensibly to break up an illegal party, and then decided to confiscate the computers while they were there? That sounds like a fishing expedition to me. I don't know what the law is in Sweden, but in
1478.
by jordanb 17y ago
That excerpt reads to me as written by a frustrated programmer who was given a dataset that was poorly designed and lacks sufficient documentation. I've been in that situation before, as has anyone who's had to work with real-world data. Th
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by jordanb 17y ago
Misspelling that word so badly does. I'm sorry. Eigenvalues are very fundamental to the types of math social scientists have to do. They are a core concept of linear algebra, which itself is all over modern statistics. Imagine if you get
1480.
by jordanb 17y ago
You're right. :x It was a while since I looked at the original question. It would be interesting to hear what he's actually trying to do. Looking closely at the question, he wants all open tags, but not ones that are self-closing. My guess
1481.
by jordanb 17y ago
Interesting. Do you have evidence for this? I looked around the internet and couldn't find any. I actually didn't use that analogy blindly. I have experience in construction. I have never been in a situation where it would be easier to mash
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by jordanb 17y ago
He narrowed his problem domain to the one suited to parsers when he said he had a structured document. He did that when he said "HTML." Regular expressions are a tool for extracting (semi)-structured patterns from unstructured text. For ins
1483.
by jordanb 17y ago
While I agree that using regexes for one-off jobs is not the kind of thing that would summon Cthulhu. I think it's still the wrong thing to do and you would still be better off using a parser. I think, to sum up this whole drama, we have on
1484.
by jordanb 17y ago
It's worth observing that your CD example may be rational given that CDs are more liquid than train tickets. Train tickets are generally non-transferable so, absent a black market, they are not liquid at all. Buying a six month ticket is ma
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by jordanb 17y ago
Raymond's point about people at the top not needing to to self-promote is something I've heard described many times before. I would call it trite, actually, but my googling is failing me so I can't find examples to back that up. One very el
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by jordanb 17y ago
They would never use Linux for Avionics, because it would be far too expensive to get such a large and complex system certified for that kind of work. Commercial planes use linux for non-critical functions like the in-flight entertainment.
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by jordanb 17y ago
"Two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth" is just a "rule ... economists made up" too. And a totally arbitrary (albeit seductively simple) one at that. The NBER look at when the economy actually starts slowing down, not when some ar
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by jordanb 17y ago
Yes. The recession began in late 2007. Unemployment didn't start spiking until mid-2008. What happens is that companies are not anxious to start laying off employees when the economy goes south, for a variety of reasons. So they start sprea
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by jordanb 17y ago
Probably these guys: http://www.atlassian.com/
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by jordanb 17y ago
BNSF rails are used for mass transit in Chicago. They're also used for Amtrak routes. BNSF has historically been the freight railroad most friendly to passenger rail. Unlike Union Pacific and CSX, they aren't antagonistic to Amtrak, and mak
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by jordanb 17y ago
The implications of this article are depressing. While I usually keep a tiny violin handy for when I run across writers bemoaning the death of journalism, the bleakness of an Internet full of crappy howto videos busted out for $20 a pop has
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by jordanb 17y ago
It's interesting that Joel purports to treat his programmer staff as professionals, yet has the same unreasonable tradesman-focused expectations that the cube farm managers have about education in Computer Science. A graduating structural