mquander

30 ms·

241.
by mquander 13y ago
Coal power creates that kind of crisis every day, so we don't bother calling it a crisis anymore. A total of 240,000 years of life were said to be lost in Europe in 2010 with 480,000 work days a year and 22,600 "life years"
242.
by mquander 13y ago
How do you decide what sort of thing to make in order to sell well in a marketplace like this?
243.
by mquander 13y ago
I screen & interview a zillion people for my company's engineering team, so I can imagine how this looks to an employer. It looks like a normal human being who is fairly self-motivated to work on cool projects.
244.
by mquander 13y ago
That obviously matters a tremendous amount, both in terms of how much we should continue to trust the companies involved and also what countermeasures we can take.
245.
by mquander 13y ago
Do any of the representatives passing these inflated budgets have any idea what their five billion dollars is buying? I have to imagine that all of our elected officials hear about our "cybertroops" supplying "cyber-fire sup
246.
by mquander 13y ago
You don't need root to install arbitrary APKs, and I don't understand #1. How is this any different from, e.g. apt-get? It's just a mechanism for easily obtaining and updating some vetted packages.
247.
by mquander 13y ago
I did this two months ago.
248.
by mquander 14y ago
You may be interested in the results of a big voluntary annual survey here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/fp5/2012_survey_results/ It has some questions that do a reasonable job of surveying people's beliefs on transhumanisty and Yudkowsky-y st
249.
by mquander 14y ago
I hang around with a bunch of LW people both online and in real life, and I really don't think that I've ever seen anyone deploy the kind of rhetoric you're describing when arguing with someone. It sounds unreasonably dumb. On the other ha
250.
by mquander 14y ago
The sample code doesn't show up for me, but I don't agree that using foldl is some kind of weird egghead solution. You don't need to know about monoids in the abstract to write that code.
251.
by mquander 14y ago
Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days
252.
by mquander 14y ago
The parent just linked to a half-hour long TV show which does a reasonably thoughtful job at depicting the possible significance of ubiquitous recording in people's lives. Is this not the right kind of considering, or what?
253.
by mquander 14y ago
I don't agree with this change. Based on the code, it looks like there should be an enumeration of cell_types somewhere, a button should have a cell_type, and then there's a map from cell_type to construction_fn (or a polymorphic set of cl
254.
by mquander 14y ago
In particular, "distance" in software is surely a function of "distance in mental space", rather than simply the number of lexical-scope boundaries crossed, or the specific number of containing modules. Do we have some way of formalizing t
255.
by mquander 14y ago
The replacement suggestion is only bad because it's too long, and it's still better than what's there. "Torvalds interview on community, kernel development, & more" would be a way better headline. The quality of a headline has nothing
256.
by mquander 14y ago
I attended their May workshop. It was exceptional and it seems like they have improved on the format since. If you are the sort of person who is interested in such things it is probably worth your time and money. (Or you can just value i
257.
by mquander 14y ago
Do this, it will work. The price is fungible if it needs to be.
258.
by mquander 14y ago
Lots of languages use [] with colon separators for array slicing, e.g. F#, Perl, Ruby. The idea that this syntax involves "deep knowledge" is laughable. Your criticism is analogous to me looking at "int* foo = bar()" and saying, hey, we're
259.
by mquander 14y ago
Well, then we're at our point of disagreement. I value HN primarily for discovering high-quality writing and thought that I might have missed otherwise. As for discussions, there are lots of technical posts on HN in which informed experts
260.
by mquander 14y ago
Yes, I agree that there are things to talk about related to Surface and to Microsoft. But I disagree that either Marco's review (for reference: http://www.marco.org/2012/10/26/an-alternate-universe ) or the currently popular review talk a
261.
by mquander 14y ago
The root cause is not incivility, it's inanity. Why do we have threads about these not-exactly-revolutionary things sitting all over the front page? Who votes for this stuff? The Surface one up there is just some guy's blog review. It's n
262.
by mquander 14y ago
My favorite (not most enlightening but just my favorite) article to date is Yvain's Eight Short Studies on Excuses: http://lesswrong.com/lw/24o/eight_short_studies_on_excuses/
263.
by mquander 14y ago
It's true, verifiable, basically uninteresting, and unusually rude.
264.
by mquander 14y ago
I assume the answer is because all comments must begin with words, and those words seemed like a nice beginning. Maybe you should say what seemed notable about that sentence?
265.
by mquander 14y ago
If you're going to be programming long enough, saving yourself a few minutes a day by mastering your tools is a real and genuine benefit. When you intend on continuing a career in programming, you're already committed to investing time int
266.
by mquander 14y ago
Note that this question and the corresponding answers are several years old.
267.
by mquander 14y ago
Typing and thinking faster is pretty much the rationale for every single feature in a text editor, so I'd say the burden is on you to explain why you don't believe it. For typing faster, you can get around the text quickly, do autocomplete
268.
by mquander 14y ago
I don't get what's radical about the perspective. I think most people would already agree that many demographics get fucked over when it comes to having an opportunity to learn and pursue a career in what they might otherwise wish to. As
269.
by mquander 14y ago
Just to get the facts straight, the linked article had this to say: If you can't answer the majority of the questions on these four papers, and you're working or intend to work as a software developer, you should ask yourself why — most li
270.
by mquander 14y ago
If you take apart the word "message" into its actual meaning, "left some words somewhere that 1 billion people could go read sometime" then it is not particularly astounding. It's not as if it was whispered into their ears.

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