jowiar

60 ms·

571.
by jowiar 14y ago
Not sure the causality here, and I can't verify the citation on wikipedia, but from 1918-1928 2/3 of Choate graduates went to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Presumably by 1935 things were much the same. The number I would be much more interes
572.
by jowiar 14y ago
I'd be fine with requiring a 60% vote of the house, or votes representing 60% of the population. 40% of the senate represents less than 12% of the US population. The Senate exists for one reason only: The slaveholding governors of Carolinas
573.
by jowiar 14y ago
Any good examples? I'm having trouble thinking of something that: 1) You can benefit more from as an industrial secret than as a patented invention. 2) Society is harmed by the lack of public disclosure.
574.
by jowiar 14y ago
> In fact, you can break this law without even knowing that someone else thought of the idea first. This is the biggest flaw with the current patent system. The reality is if an invention falls into this category, it should not be paten
575.
by jowiar 14y ago
> A paid version 2 though produces a similar windfall again, rather than diminishing returns. Marginal utility. The first million is worth a lot more than the second.
576.
by jowiar 14y ago
> I heard once that the only ones who got rich in the gold rush was the ones selling pans. Too bad Apples seems to have a monopoly on the mobile-app equivalent. Not just Apple... The original pan seller's legacy isn't doing too badly, e
577.
by jowiar 14y ago
The bigger issue is that when something becomes "conventional wisdom", it ceases to be effective. The stock market in our current post-dividend era is largely a sham, in this regard. "Put your money in an index fund and forget about it" is
578.
by jowiar 14y ago
Steven Rudich's lecture slides on the topic are pretty great, and how I was first introduced to the topic: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/academic/class/15251-s04/Site/M... Not sure if the lecture itself is available anywhere.
579.
by jowiar 14y ago
This is a fundamental difference between hardware and software. You can release beta SW. You can't release beta HW.
580.
by jowiar 14y ago
> This is an area where hackers can really make an impact. One of my friends has coauthored several papers with some of the BrainGate folks. We spent a road trip a couple years ago discussing his research. One thing that jumped out is h
581.
by jowiar 14y ago
Not really for ratios. If there's a min and a max, sliders make sense. You can make a better argument for a knob if you have an unbounded range, or an effectively unbounded one (making small adjustments on a large scale). Think old iPods.
582.
by jowiar 14y ago
Beautiful, but I don't want to see this in the wild. Knobs are bad for the same reason that pie charts are bad. Perceiving one-dimensional differences is easier than rotational/angular ones.
583.
by jowiar 14y ago
See AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, et. al?
584.
by jowiar 14y ago
Yes - you need to work powers of 10 modulo the divisor as well.
585.
by jowiar 14y ago
And there are graphs going either way, either starting from most or least significant digit. (Take previous modulus, *10 mod N, + next digit mod N), or (Take previous modulus, + 10^(next digit) mod N)
586.
by jowiar 14y ago
This is not a new thought. From Rent (Jonathan Larson, 1996): --- Roger: Mark hides in his work Mark: From what? Roger: From facing your failure, facing your loneliness, facing the fact you live a lie. Yes, you live a lie. Tell you why. Yo
587.
by jowiar 15y ago
Ted Stevens had it wrong: The internet is a series of gophers! More relevantly - definitely going to come up with more stories/silly pictures for presentations in the future. It channels the memory technique of making ridiculous association
588.
by jowiar 15y ago
Other way around - I can see zero point in paper reference books. Having all my reference books sitting on my hard drive and using Spotlight works far better than actually grabbing the right book and finding the right page. E-book has far l
589.
by jowiar 15y ago
Amen. Mathematical notation is optimized for symbol manipulation using a pen and paper, not communication of information. Even to us programmers, it's a slew of one-letter variable names that very rarely seem to have the same meaning. Furth
590.
by jowiar 15y ago
Ridiculously simple solution: Drop the hundredths place entirely. Kill pennies, nickels, quarters, bring back $.5 pieces. A tenth of a dollar is enough precision for any realistic transaction in the United States.
591.
by jowiar 15y ago
English:Lion::Español:León
592.
by jowiar 15y ago
One of the biggest things stopping kids from developing a lifelong love of reading is the "let's not offend anyone" drivel they are forced to read in the lower grades. It took until about 8th grade to actually come across required-for-schoo
593.
by jowiar 15y ago
Amen. The issue is this: If you eat well, sleep right, exercise, go on dates, and your company goes kaput in 2 years, those two years aren't wasted. If you burn every waking hour on your company, and it goes kaput in two years, what do you
594.
by jowiar 15y ago
"Do not base your entire livelyhood at the mercy of anybody but yourself, and especially not a huge corporation." This seems to apply to a vast, vast majority of the population... In our little tech/entrepreneur bubble, we're the exception,
595.
by jowiar 15y ago
(1) Add job listings to submission page (2) $
596.
by jowiar 15y ago
I think what Irving was going for was less about news being worthless in the sense of the content being garbage, but rather that the distractions introduced into ones life by caring about national/world affairs of which we as individuals ha
597.
by jowiar 15y ago
John Irving nailed it in A Prayer for Owen Meany: "Newspapers are a bad habit, the reading equivalent of junk food. What happens to me is that I seize upon an issue in the news—the issue is the moral/philosophical, political/intellectual eq
598.
by jowiar 15y ago
For me, the sensory distraction of people walking back and forth behind my desk is far worse than in front of it. Even if I have headphones in - vibrations from footsteps, someone bumps my chair, etc. Damn evolution. At some point, monkeys
599.
by jowiar 15y ago
It depends largely on what your scaling issues are. If you have requests that take a long time because of waiting for replies from web service calls, database calls, and the like, it will be a huge boon to scalability. If your CPU-limited,
600.
by jowiar 15y ago
"if it were real programming code i would be angry " -> the work of "programmers" is worth plenty, but the work of designers is worth zilch. To be fair, this is also the attitude taken by Curebit.

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