justin_vanw

9 ms·

31.
by justin_vanw 9y ago
There is remarkably low value to be extracted from hn comments. Very rarely there is something wonderful! But like 99/100 comments are some combination of showing off, punching down, pushing a crackpot agenda or cryptotrolling. Why do
32.
by justin_vanw 9y ago
And we elected Richard Nixon multiple times (governor, vice president, president!). I suggest you don't get caught up in the hype. The current period is actually extremely placid compared to many in the course of our history. Just be
33.
by justin_vanw 9y ago
What political instability in the US? Please define what you mean by instability, the US has been the most stable national government since it was founded, with a big exception of the Civil War of course. Even then, compare it to the gove
34.
by justin_vanw 9y ago
Leonard Susskind said in his book that "the universe is the inside of a black hole" is the #1 theory of cranks that reach out to contact him. The stuff written to popularize physics really has almost no correlation to the real th
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by justin_vanw 9y ago
This is great! The #1 feature of this that other stock screeners (ameritrade, etrade esp.) lack is performance! Like the minimalist interface as well.
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by justin_vanw 9y ago
I can't agree, comparing two languages purely by a superficial "this one lets me write code like this out of the box" ignores everything that matters. Lets say I wanted to write a web blog server. One language has "impo
37.
by justin_vanw 9y ago
Actually for C++ you are almost perfectly wrong. It's specifically a design goal of the language to not have the builtins be 'superior' to what you can implement yourself (well the builtins are built by world class experts,
38.
by justin_vanw 9y ago
It's not that you must do side projects or else there is no possible way you are a great software developer. It's that lots of people are just as good as you are and also do side projects. Given the choice, why would you choos
39.
by justin_vanw 9y ago
I think this just shows how scientists don't understand programming. Pretty much every 'advantage' listed for Fortran over C++ could be added to C++ in an afternoon. C++ is an extensible language, you can define your own ty
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by justin_vanw 9y ago
Its possible but there is a lot of indirect evidence for dark matter, it fits observation well even if we cant prove it. When gravity calculations give an answer that conflicts with observation, sometimes the equation for gravity ends up b
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by justin_vanw 9y ago
Friction, and really any kind of 'contact' between things is just electrons repelling. Some ideas for dark matter don't interact in any way other than gravity, so your idea is pretty mainstream on that, but there's basi
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by justin_vanw 9y ago
No, this has nothing to do with dark matter. Dark matter has to be in galaxies because the reason we think it exists at all is because galaxies spin 'too fast', so there is more mass in them and therefore more gravity than can be
43.
by justin_vanw 9y ago
Agree with most of what you say. Right now China/Russia are in a position where they have very little to lose and can just sit back and watch the US embarrass itself. They can't be seen as enabling NK, but beyond that they win b
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by justin_vanw 9y ago
It's not a slippery slope argument at all.. My point is that there is some optimal amount of investment in disaster preparedness, and if you make that optimal investment, and despite that a disaster overwhelms you, you still acted rat
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by justin_vanw 9y ago
I just learned that the ND license exists. It probably shouldn't.
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by justin_vanw 9y ago
Yes, we should make sure everything is totally proof from any possible disaster, no matter how unlikely or how little economic sense it makes. For example, we should make sure cities can survive not only 500 year floods, like in Houston, b
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by justin_vanw 9y ago
There is no reason to think we will be using grossly non-directional broadcast EM waves in 50 years for communication, and certainly not in 100 years. It's far more likely we will have extremely high bandwidth over very low distance
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by justin_vanw 9y ago
Yes, so much this! This is why things like SETI (and arecibo for finding ETs) make no sense. I compare it to using a telescope in 1850 to look for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_semaphore in space. The technology
49.
by justin_vanw 9y ago
I was just using your technique of putting words in someone else's mouth, with a question mark at the end. See GP post.
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by justin_vanw 9y ago
Of course all kinds of people can land in these remedial classes if they are not prepared. Now, I ask you, which schools do a better job of preparing students for college level work, the schools white kids get to go to or the schools black
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by justin_vanw 9y ago
Deleting because apparently you can get brigaded and fired for any slightly dissenting opinion.
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by justin_vanw 9y ago
You must be very smart!
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by justin_vanw 9y ago
Yea, when faced with an impending apocalypse you should be trolling internet forums!
54.
by justin_vanw 9y ago
Nah, why even give an inch? Yes, if you properly deal with passwords, the artifact you store gives virtually no information to an attacker, but on the other hand, why give them even almost nothing?
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by justin_vanw 9y ago
I don't have too much useful advice. I don't think there are any positive outcomes for you here, so find another employer ASAP. If you had been at this job for a long time, or you were worried about vesting options or something
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by justin_vanw 9y ago
Sad, grey, big company people can't imagine that anyone could ever be any other way.
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by justin_vanw 9y ago
Restaurants may fail less often than other startups, but the potential upside is microscopic compared to other startup type businesses. Restaurants are the opposite of scalable: costs scale basically linearly with revenue, but worse comple
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by justin_vanw 9y ago
Wow, this is like a how to guide on how to not run a business. Raise a bunch of cash, go into a location that has so much wrong with it, blow literally all the cash plus $1k just setting up furniture and permits... Why wouldn't you fi
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by justin_vanw 9y ago
Yes, these inflammatory stories surface on here from time to time. Everyone jumps from 'someone was inconvenienced' to 'totalitarianism' in 1 second with 0 information. People start calling for boycotts of the US. Later
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by justin_vanw 9y ago
It's very hard (if not impossible) to avoid being biased when reading resumes. Personally I would strongly prefer that resume's I review were anonymized and all hints that might bias me were removed before any decisionmaker see&#x

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