ljw1001

41 ms·

391.
by ljw1001 9y ago
For those who haven't seen this the early AutoDesk papers on the founding and organization are particularly interesting. AutoDesk was a kind of virtual company formed by expert programmers creating individual apps, with the idea that t
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The AutoDesk File: Detailed inside view of an early Unicorn (1994)(fourmilab.ch)
1 points by ljw1001 9y ago|1 comments
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by ljw1001 9y ago
Non-coercive population control, especially through the increase of economic and educational opportunities for women and the distribution of free, convenient contraceptives.
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by ljw1001 9y ago
Serious question: How do you get the energy (and other resources) back to earth in a way that is cost competitive with extracting them here? If it costs more money, people will use up what's here before they import the resources from M
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by ljw1001 9y ago
I agree with the edit. If you build a partial solution (in other words, a library designed to be compiled with other code) and GPL it, you're making it difficult to use, but if you're providing a finished product (whether that&#x2
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by ljw1001 9y ago
Sure, but how frequently would you know that something useful is on page 10? It doesn't seem like a very common use case to me. You can only optimize so many things at one time. Maybe this is a thing that's worth optimizing, but I
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by ljw1001 9y ago
If everyone needs to know what everyone else is doing, you have no encapsulation in your code, which is a major design flaw.
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by ljw1001 9y ago
> It's hard to track progress and estimate if your tickets are huge multi-week affairs. So what you are saying is that the standup really _is_ for project tracking. I don't disagree. In my experience that has been the main poin
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by ljw1001 9y ago
Yeah, it does seem fairly healthy, but one has to admit that Boston would be a very different place today if Microsoft and Facebook (and YC) had stayed. At this point Kendall Square really is all about the biotech (aside from the research o
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by ljw1001 10y ago
This is the sophisticated version of the 'do nothing' argument. It's not a good argument in any form. If the greenland ice mass melts billions of people who live on the edge of the sea are at risk. If rising ocean temperature
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by ljw1001 10y ago
Somehow you think this is the important part of the message?
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by ljw1001 10y ago
I understood, but I think recent evidence in the US suggests that a great many people absolutely take as objective fact what a politician claims. A similar number probably absolutely believe the opposite with little or no evidence. Net, I t
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by ljw1001 10y ago
I am told at work (I work in the cancer-medicine field but am no expert) that there are upwards of 1,000 distinct targeted cancer therapies in various stages of R&D at present. They could certainly (and likely will) make a big dent
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by ljw1001 10y ago
Not only that, but (in my experience as a Google engineer), factors relating to the location of data (distribution and disk vs ram, etc.) often greatly outway algorithmic performance. Constant factors often dominate variable factors.
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by ljw1001 10y ago
Politicians _always_ promote the success of their own policies.
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by ljw1001 10y ago
Because your house is often a source of significant equity that you would lose if you can't make the payments.
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by ljw1001 10y ago
I haven't seen much that would make me call 'deep learning' a general purpose programming paradigm. Seems more like a niche.
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Ask HN: A new paradigm in programming languages?
3 points by ljw1001 10y ago|3 comments
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by ljw1001 10y ago
Large research universities and hospitals, Pharma, and, of course, the Broad. I understand pharma not sharing but much of the hospital/broad/university data is produced with (at least some) public money.
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by ljw1001 10y ago
Combined phenotype/genotype datasets. These are (with some good reason) very difficult for anyone outside the medical-research establishment to get access to, but the net result is that it creates market barriers supporting the existin
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by ljw1001 10y ago
I would second this advice. To be a little more concrete: What aspects of your specialty are the most expensive, the most time-consuming, the most error-prone, and/or the most dangerous? Alternately, you can look at the delivery system
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by ljw1001 10y ago
Thank you for such a fun and cool project, but please do take into consideration the comments others have made about being sure it's safe: at least if you plan to make a bunch of them and sell them :)
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by ljw1001 10y ago
that's just what I was thinking
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by ljw1001 10y ago
When I was in grad school, I took a middle ground: I determined to get a B or B- (if it could be done with reasonable effort) for all the courses. This let me have extra time to put into the courses I found most interesting and I would spen
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by ljw1001 10y ago
I will add a personal anecdote from software development. On one project I had a difficult objective (to write a database that met certain criteria). I had never done database work before. For the first year, I worked with almost no supervi
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by ljw1001 10y ago
Smile is an awesome library. If you use it in Java, Tablesaw is a data-frame-like data-munging framework that works well with it. https://github.com/lwhite1/tablesaw
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Harvard Scientists Plan Geoengineering Experiments(technologyreview.com)
2 points by ljw1001 10y ago|0 comments
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by ljw1001 10y ago
Clearly this article upsets a lot of people but it ties together two important issues: One is that economics drives SV's best efforts towards the problems of the affluent. This gets extra flack because of all the (mostly hollow) talk o
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by ljw1001 10y ago
There are many things that are real and not on the radar of Trump's administration, including climate change. I'm not sure Mnuchin is doing anything but cheerleading here.
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by ljw1001 10y ago
I found it fascinating that Smalltalk was #2 as most loved language in spite of its minimal use. Many of the ideas developed for Smalltalk are now commonplace, so I'm guessing that it's the careful integration of those ideas that

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