karmacondon

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by karmacondon 12y ago
This is actually a big deal. Obama's code wasn't very useful or complicated but that obviously wasn't the point. The point here was that a 53 year old african american man sat down and learned to write a program, any program.
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by karmacondon 12y ago
Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey. It describes the daily schedule of almost every famous creative person you can think of in a few paragraphs, from Bach to Tesla to Ayn Rand. Peering into the day to day lives of well known
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by karmacondon 12y ago
I recently realized that I was taking in a large amount of information every day but retaining very little of it. Between HN and Reddit, I would "learn" dozens of things each day and end up not getting a lot of value out of it. Wh
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by karmacondon 12y ago
So you feel that your rights include knowing which military bases intelligence information flows through? I can understand people being outraged at the idea of NSA spying and wanting specific programs to end immediately. Whether certain int
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by karmacondon 12y ago
If book-based or street view-based captchas go away, I suspect it will be because bots/spammers got better at solving them than humans But, wait. Isn't that what we want? It seems like bots and spammers have a relatively small c
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by karmacondon 12y ago
I don't have a fancy college degree, but even I can see that you might be mixing correlation and causation. College doesn't necessarily cause people to earn more money, better understand the world or communicate well. It's th
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by karmacondon 12y ago
The Internet. The Apollo Project. D-Day. The Manhattan Project. Federal Highways. The National Park System. How on earth could a small organization do any of these things? I can understand why you feel like you're living a Strange Day
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by karmacondon 12y ago
This makes no sense. Say we shut down The LAPD or the VA. What would it be replaced with? The idea of a private sector police force is a little scary, and what private business would perform the function of Veteran's Affairs? The point
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by karmacondon 12y ago
A paper about making video game characters act more like real people, trained by having people simulate interactions in a restaurant setting. http://www.media.mit.edu/cogmac/publications/orkin_aamas2009... . Not gr
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by karmacondon 12y ago
A friend and I share the same first and last name, and for a long time the first instant suggestion for our name was "[name] sex offender" (because of another person with the same first and last). My friend lobbied with google for
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by karmacondon 12y ago
And this is also true for cellphones. Siri is always listening for you to say her name, which means that anyone you talk to with an iphone is always recording. Not everyone has the same level of concern over "priacy" that you do,
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by karmacondon 12y ago
This is the plot of the movie Antitrust. The idea of spying on potential competitors using surveillance didn't make sense in the movie and doesn't make sense in real life. If this were being done on a scale large enough to stifle
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by karmacondon 12y ago
Interview questions are great tests of algorithmic thinking, which is why some companies ask them. I don't plan on interviewing for a job any time soon and I probably wouldn't want to work at a company that asks questions like thi
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by karmacondon 12y ago
I'm not sure if I agree with the ethics of selling security exploits, but it's a world I know very little about. You seem knowledgeable, is there any more information you could share about the business and culture of selling 0days
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by karmacondon 12y ago
The USPS has been tracking mail in this way for well over a hundred years. Why should we see this as a problem to be fixed now, as opposed to 100 years ago?
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by karmacondon 12y ago
Evolution doesn't have anything to do with strength or weakness, it's about fitting the current environment. Sometimes smaller organisms are more likely to survive because it's easier for them to hide from predators. Sometime
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by karmacondon 12y ago
Coincidentally we were just discussing the Chinese Room [0] on IRC. It's a philosophical debate, but the short version is No, a google search isn't conscious. It's AI, or machine learning, but it isn't self aware. [0] h
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by karmacondon 12y ago
Watson was designed to answer Jeopardy questions. If Alex Trebek had used natural language to ask it anything other than a jeopardy question it would have failed spectacularly. ie, "So where are you from?". It was definitely built
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by karmacondon 12y ago
This exposes a fundamental flaw in the internet advertising model. On some level I've known that a script like this could be easily written for a long time, but seeing this working product really made it clear. It's unlikely that
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by karmacondon 12y ago
These things have been true for all of human history and yet, Flynn Effect. People considered to be intellectual have always been outnumbered by non-intellectuals, but the numbers of both are increasing absolutely. Intelligence may be herit
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by karmacondon 12y ago
Hear hear. If you're worried about the privacy implications of Facebook, don't use it. I don't have a facebook account and I'm still alive. I talk to my friends via text or email or in person. It's possible that I&#
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by karmacondon 12y ago
There's a lot of disagreement about a lot of the examples you mentioned. Serpico was talking about the police receiving envelopes of cash, which is universally considered to be bad. The TSA, phone metadata and the rest don't seem
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by karmacondon 12y ago
I respectfully disagree. If you measure learning with homework questions from textbooks, then of course textbooks and the modern classroom will seem like the best way to learn. There are many ways to educate. Getting a person intensely inte
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by karmacondon 12y ago
The new Simpsons episodes are not awful. I don't think anyone wlll say that they prefer the new seasons over the older ones, but that doesn't mean that the new seasons are objectively bad. Whatever is said about the show, it still
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by karmacondon 12y ago
So if someone attacked you or one of your loved ones, you would say "Set the attacker free because we don't want to increase recidivism"? Perhaps the current prison system is doing more harm than good, but the rule of law req
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by karmacondon 12y ago
The point that James Comey was trying to make is that we don't want to live in a world without warrants. The prosecution in a criminal case has the burden of proof. It's difficult to prove something beyond a reasonable doubt if ke
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by karmacondon 12y ago
"The wicked man flees when no one pursues." If everyone was constantly breaking the law then there would be no known criminals who haven't been arrested. There would no John Gottis or Whitey Bulgers. As soon as the government