khawkins

24 ms·

181.
by khawkins 7y ago
Unless you're literally writing for elementary school kids, speaking to an adult or even teenager as if they are that young is an insult. The lack of belief in climate change isn't a a problem of a lack of education, its a problem
182.
by khawkins 8y ago
I'm now regularly seeing search results bury political pages which seem to run counter bay area political views. I'll search the terms on Bing and DuckDuckGo and the page I'm expecting will be the first hit, but on Google it
183.
by khawkins 8y ago
This is philosophical drivel that has only the effect of making politicians seem like they care about the environment. The notions of harm or injustice with respect to the environment are all socially constructed human values we imbue them
184.
by khawkins 8y ago
Regulations from whom? The "Communist Party", a regime founded on anti-capitalist doctrine? This is where communism breaks down. The only way to make it work in an economic sense is to turn it into a soulless corporate dystopia.
185.
by khawkins 8y ago
If you understand how CART decision trees are trained, then you can see why random forests are powerful by thinking through their training process. In the first step of the decision tree training we pick the best feature split, divide the d
186.
by khawkins 8y ago
Gonna call bullshit on that claim. I've seen estimates that an acre feeds 2-20 people. Assuming 20 people, that's roughly 2000 ft^2/person, which is 10 times bigger than the 200 ft^2 size of their larger model. Not going t
187.
by khawkins 8y ago
They've been using the VC money to buy up competitors (Memberful, Kit, Subbable). We need to look more closely at business models like this, where a new technology starts gaining traction and insane amounts of money piles in to squash
188.
by khawkins 8y ago
I've seen no calls to increase the numbers of conservatives/Republicans in STEM, despite the fact that political ideology and affiliation is actually testing the way people think. For example, though the percentage of scientists w
189.
by khawkins 8y ago
Good. And I hope that Facebook abandons attempts to be the arbiters of truth and "facts". These initiatives to saddle social media public forums with automatic "fact-checking" are laying the groundwork for an Orwellian f
190.
by khawkins 8y ago
While I appreciate that the author rightly calls out the cult-like mob justice of the progressive movement as overly cruel and destructive, the final section reveals an inherently selfish motive for this piece. He appears less concerned wit
191.
by khawkins 8y ago
The Control Theory (129) section does a real disservice to the field by insinuating it is little more than the study of Kalman filters. While an important model, the core results of control theory are without a doubt stability criterions. T
192.
by khawkins 8y ago
From just looking on Google Maps/street view, it seems like they primarily converted one road into strictly bike traffic, keeping the roads parallel to it typical road traffic. I don't think it's a bad idea, but to pretend l
193.
by khawkins 8y ago
It's just as much Pelosi and Schumer playing politics. They don't want to give him any money, despite this being a fairly small request, because they know that if he can't deliver on his central campaign promise it will tear
194.
by khawkins 8y ago
The National Border Patrol Council, a labor union with over 18,000 members and represents the US Border Patrol, fully endorses congress funding the border wall [1]. It's the solution that the people who are actually there, on the groun
195.
by khawkins 8y ago
"Citing an unnamed official." This headline is misleading. It suggests that Trump administration officials are publicly reporting this, when the question of who is saying this cannot be confirmed.
196.
by khawkins 8y ago
Occam's razor is a heuristic used in the investigative process, not a principle. While it's fair to point out that a theory makes everything more complicated and thus might make it less likely to be sound, it's not fair to pu
197.
by khawkins 8y ago
Well put. Block chain certainly has applications but they're almost entirely a design choice. The reality of block chains is that they'll always be complicated enough that there will always be a man in the middle. Mt. Gox demons
198.
by khawkins 8y ago
If another professor wrote the exams for a class they didn't sit in, you'd have the students screaming in unison, "this wasn't discussed in class!" Not exactly disagreeing with the idea, but students have been norm
199.
by khawkins 8y ago
The integrity of a hard science like physics is rarely compromised by political persuasions. I have little idea how his positions on the bomb would have affected his ability to produce unbiased scientific results. The conclusions of those p
200.
by khawkins 8y ago
It is a colossal misstep for the MIT Media Lab to move into social activism, and that is what this award is doing. If you'd like to be perceived as scientists, you lose your credibility to do impartial investigation of social trends.
201.
by khawkins 8y ago
I think your language is overly combative, but I appreciate you bringing to my attention this Mozilla initiative. It's clear from that article and this report [1] that Mozilla is supporting the building of web tools to suppress speech
202.
by khawkins 8y ago
>I can't wait for science-illiterate politicians to take this ('Look at what YCombinator is saying!') and say we should defund science. This is an extremely hyperbolic thing to say. While I don't think that in this e
203.
by khawkins 8y ago
1/2 m = 50.00 cm, 1/2 ft = 6 in 1/3 m = 33.33 cm, 1/3 ft = 4 in 1/4 m = 25.00 cm, 1/4 ft = 3 in 1/6 m = 16.67 cm, 1/6 ft = 2 in This is why imperial makes more sense to me than metric. If we had
204.
by khawkins 8y ago
"More and more academic scientific research is the author taking previous research, adding a spin to it, and claiming it's...new" This describes the vast majority of academic publications both today and a few decades ago. It
205.
by khawkins 8y ago
Honestly, I think that the boost provided by money is probably quite small. At a certain level, poverty is going to detract from a young person's ability to succeed, but money very rarely begets success. What I think is far more likel
206.
by khawkins 8y ago
Stapling bills together has been modus operandi for congress for decades. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but it's certainly not unique.
207.
by khawkins 8y ago
It would be more "fair" to let people make their own decisions and not assume adding a comment is adding an endorsement.
208.
by khawkins 8y ago
Actually higher degree of freedom arms with 6-7 DOF have simpler kinematics and are easier to program, in general. This is especially the case if you're using sensing and a lightly unstructured task. An end effector pose has 6 DOF (3
209.
by khawkins 8y ago
"Bezos wouldn't do this unless he saw a benefit for the business or his hand was being forced somehow." I don't like this type of knee-jerk suspicion towards people running corporations. Don't forget that they have
210.
by khawkins 8y ago
Having a patchwork of moving schedules across society, from schools to businesses to recreational activities is far worse than the inconvenience of simply changing your clocks twice a year.

More ›