lacker

268 ms·

2971.
by lacker 18y ago
I am not exaggerating. There are many library functions that would take a day to write. If you need one, and you are missing it, then you will spend a day when you could spend 10 seconds. It's that simple.
2972.
by lacker 18y ago
I think it might help to have an official statement, like, "We plan to add all these libraries, in time. You can help somehow." One issue in the Arc community is there's no clear way to contribute. A lot of this angst about lacking librarie
2973.
by lacker 18y ago
New code is extremely important, but if you're missing a key library - say, html parsing - a 10-second task can expand to take a day. That makes "exploratory programming" hard. You can have both a well-designed language and a great selectio
2974.
by lacker 19y ago
They measured "persistence" by seeing how long people would try to solve an allegedly impossible anagram - "OCHERSTE". But anyone capable of googling for [anagram solver] should be able to see there is a solution to that anagram - "troche
2975.
by lacker 19y ago
Funny to see this article surrounded by two huge Grand Theft Auto IV ads. It made me think at first that this was about anti-video-game groups ;-)
2976.
by lacker 19y ago
I don't know a good book but I can recommend an excellent blog, Marginal Revolution: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/ Not the intro-topics sort of material, but very interesting. Closer to Freakonomics style.
2977.
by lacker 19y ago
Yes, we will keep making progress in AI. There's two parts to the success of any machine learning program (like the stuff Daphne Koller is working on mentioned in the article). Your algorithm, and your data. To paraphrase Peter Norvig: "Ten
2978.
by lacker 19y ago
Yes, when the field of AI first sprang up it was focused on logical deduction. In retrospect it may seem doomed to failure, but this is partially because our notion of "what artificial intelligence means" changes over time. There's a joke a
2979.
by lacker 19y ago
I second the recommendation of skipping chapter 6 - when I read this comment I went to check where my bookmark is because I had gotten bored while re-reading, and it was near the start of chapter 6 ;-)
2980.
by lacker 19y ago
It is not "scientific" in the sense that it does not prove its claims. But it's not "pseudo-scientific" either because it doesn't pretend it's proving claims. It's more like a book of interesting ideas from a smart guy written for a general
2981.
by lacker 19y ago
Everyone's joking around in these comments, but... in my current job (working for a huge silicon valley company) I hear quite a few stories of people addicted to speed pills or similar "uppers" because they need the energy to keep up with w
2982.
by lacker 19y ago
Plenty of people get paid the big bucks to do something interesting, exciting, and fun! Consider the founders of YouTube, HotOrNot, reddit - those seem pretty fun to me.
2983.
by lacker 19y ago
It makes you wonder when a startup should begin internationalizing their product. I guess this is easier for some companies than others, though - an international version of a service like an rss aggregator is a lot easier than an internati
2984.
by lacker 19y ago
Just because people upmod more recognizable names, it doesn't mean they are pandering. For example, I will be more likely to read a comment if it was written by any user that I recognize. If I'm more likely to read a comment I'm more likely
2985.
by lacker 19y ago
Congrats! Why does Arrington call Pandora "geo-retarded"?
2986.
by lacker 19y ago
This title is misleading. In fact the text of the article contradicts the title: "About a third of the couples had a more attractive wife, a third a more attractive husband and the remaining partners showed matching looks." Regardless, the
2987.
by lacker 19y ago
Could you make the site usable by people who don't want to sign in? Pandora had a feature where you enter one song, and they tell you what they'd recommend. That intrigued me enough to sign up. That might be useful for BookLamp too.
2988.
by lacker 19y ago
I have to disagree with your advice to avoid vector and map. If you're used to python, you probably have a very list- and dict-centric method of programming, and you are probably not very familiar with explicit memory management. vector and
2989.
by lacker 19y ago
I definitely agree with finding something you <i>want</i> to build. One of my friends taught himself programming using me to bounce questions off of every now and again, and the hardest part seemed to be when he abstractly w
2990.
by lacker 19y ago
Vote weighting is possible, but maybe it's too extreme yet blunt for the problem at hand. Vote weighting would affect all articles, but really there's a specific problem of popular-but-trashy articles that you want to target. For example, y
2991.
by lacker 19y ago
I'm glad to see more math software out there. But we shouldn't think of "proofs" of some totally unusual sub-part of math. A math professor told me once, "A good proof is just an essay that can convince a skeptical mathematician." In the U.
2992.
Avoiding the Fark Effect
4 points by lacker 19y ago|3 comments
2993.
by lacker 19y ago
Two reasonable choices. 1. Cast your ids to strings and handle them as strings everywhere. 2. Just use 64 bits. If you have a pentillion of anything it won't be you fixing the problem any more.
2994.
by lacker 19y ago
Users will be able to find it, because if your blog is on a different domain, it will probably be somewhere on the first page of google results when you search for your company. I would just keep the blog somewhere like wordpress because th