nwhitehead

11 ms·

61.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
This is a good paper but I believe it is misinterpreting the results. There is strong evidence that people have a limited capacity for making tough decisions. This "willpower" or "bandwidth" gets used up as decisions are
62.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
An idea is to think about rendering/typesetting as a feature. For many, getting an environment set up to turn the project files into final files of whatever form is a huge barrier. It would be great to have a bunch of back-end renderin
63.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
The intersection of git and wikis is interesting, it's one of those things that sounds compelling but then the details usually end up making it hugely complicated. Worth thinking about. For general writing collaboration I would serious
64.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
Coming at it from the teaching side there is definitely a high correlation between lack of foreign accent and good teaching skills. In school I used to help assign graduate TAs into math sections. We would go through and rate all the gradua
65.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
There are three reasons why YAGNI works so well. First, people systematically underestimate uncertainty. The human brain is good at recognizing patterns and making plans but not so good at dealing with randomness and uncertainty. When talki
66.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
> But then, is any mathematical abstraction real? I guess it's all beside the point. I actually think the reality of mathematical abstractions is hugely important because of... computer programs! In a real way, programs are the embo
67.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
For each fixed length there are a finite number of programs of that length. If we use 8-bit bytes for the alphabet, there are 256^N programs of length N. The set of ALL programs is infinite (we don't limit the length of programs), but
68.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
Consider the set P of programs that take no input and generate an infinite stream of digits. Each program in P has a finite length and is written out of a finite set of symbols, so there must only be a finite number of programs of any given
69.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
My wife is addicted to this game already. Just hearing about the decisions she's making makes my skin crawl. She's a total graphical adventure game snob, so if you're one too it's worth checking out this game. The multip
70.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
You're right to look at the marginal tax rate but you're not considering all the options available. For goods like a hamburger it's easy to see why a tax on hamburgers makes people buy less hamburgers. Hamburgers cost more wi
71.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
Using logic to "prove" God exists isn't totally crazy, just mostly crazy. Gödel himself tried his hand at it [1]. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_ontological_proof
72.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
Actually thinking about it more you might want to have "Tuple" and "MutableTuple" objects. In languages that use parentheses notation for tuples you need to decide which one you want, but since you have names you can hav
73.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
I like the "unpack" idea of using a function to name the parts of the tuple, it's elegant and fits well into JavaScript. I'm a bit less sure about exposing the "pack" method outside the constructor. That makes
74.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
My guess is that this cropping is being done by video editing service companies at the request of the studios. Netflix and a studio come to a distribution agreement. Netflix tells the studio the technical requirements for the digital files
75.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
Try the free online textbook Category Theory for Computing Science by Michael Barr and Charles Wells [1]. It's a true textbook with exercises and lots of content. [1]: http://www.math.mcgill.ca/triples/Barr-Wells
76.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
This is awesome! Thoughts: after clicking, sometimes I decide I want to cancel drawing from that point. I can click on the original point to cancel, it would be nice to be able to press ESC or SPACE to cancel drawing (just noticed that Z fo
77.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
This reminds me of the strategy for getting Linux help. Just wander around near the cubicles with penguins on them and say, "It's too bad Linux doesn't support foo." You'll have energetic Linux hackers proving you w
78.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
The current best practice is that when police ask you to give up your fundamental rights you politely say no. Calmly say, "I don't consent to searches." There is literally nothing good that can come from giving up your right
79.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
If you have a good idea for a television app you can build it and publish it now on Roku. No need to wait for some revolution or anything. To get started in Roku development just takes a Roku device for testing (cheap) and free registration
80.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
This is an interesting hypothesis. It wouldn't even have to be changing percentages of ingredients, it could simply be the result of increased agricultural efficiency and yields. 100 calories worth of corn feed is quite likely to be su
81.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
You're wrong. The constitutions of New Hampshire, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Texas allow for the people to abolish the government.
82.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
This article reminds me how much fun it is to program an FPGA. It's one of those mind-expanding exercises like learning logic programming or writing a purely functional persistent data structure. "Describing hardware" is quit
83.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
I think there is something to the idea of generational mixing on Facebook causing a loss of value. A friend today posted a picture of a cat with its tail in the air where the "view" looked like Jesus. His mother then promptly comm
84.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
Another fun read is the listing of original developers of Mathematica in the Addison-Wesley "Mathematica" book and what they worked on. http://omohundro.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/wolfram88_mathe...
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by nwhitehead 13y ago
Do you have any case studies showing what the actual overhead is? I love the idea but would worry about negatively impacting the customer experience.
86.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
All the studies so far indicate sitting (or other forms of inactivity) are bad no matter how much you exercise at other times. The best natural experiment was the London bus driver study which showed huge differences in heart problems betwe
87.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
It's almost a tautology, but by paying late you keep your cash available for other uses until you pay. Cash flow can be the limiting factor for many (most?) businesses. Another way of looking at it is that by paying late you pass some risk
88.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
Think of it this way, the advertisers that can't deal with kittens with lightning out of their eyes in the pitch deck are also likely the ones that would have a bad experience advertising on reddit and interacting with the community. By bei
89.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
Wow, that graph is very surprising to me. I only update apps when I update iOS (very rarely). I find it supremely annoying to update things manually. I would worry that the population being captured is not representative of the general app
90.
by nwhitehead 13y ago
Computing SHA hashes is embarrassingly parallel, but LINPACK is NOT embarrassingly parallel. LINPACK, like many scientific applications, requires a fair amount of communication. Comparing hashes per second to LINPACK scores is really apples

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