pfedor

8 ms·

31.
by pfedor 13y ago
The problem is, if you actually choose your 4 words randomly out of the full dictionary, you won't get something like "golf kangaroo crispy halitosis" or "correct horse battery staple". It will sound closer to "capaciously endodermal remas
32.
by pfedor 13y ago
Would you mind if I ask you to elaborate? I can think of two ways to read this 1. If the USA bombs China, and China fights back, that means a global war and global wars accelerate the progress of science and technology, therefore in the lo
33.
by pfedor 13y ago
I couldn't find reliable figures for China, India, Brazil or other countries, but I'm very certain I'd rather be in the top 10% of those countries than the bottom 10% of America. You'd be right about Brazil. http://economix.blogs.nytimes
34.
by pfedor 13y ago
I like people in Wisconsin, can't really relate to people in Chengdu The people in Wisconsin will be better off if they produce something at which their comparative advantage is the highest. You'd harm them, as well yourself and the Chin
35.
by pfedor 13y ago
Yeah, they clearly don't realize that, that's why the article says, "Statistical note: This graph is logarithmic. That means doubling your income from $1,000 to $2,000 raises satisfaction by the same amount as doubling your income from $10,
36.
by pfedor 13y ago
It is worth repeating that the original paper, by Kahneman and Deaton--the one everyone likes to cite to support the opinion that happiness doesn't increase with salary above $75k--said nothing of the sort, unless you accept a very peculiar
37.
by pfedor 13y ago
I'm guessing he's referring to the fraction of underweight children, 5.1% below the poverty line and 5.7% above 4x the poverty line. Not sure whether 4x should qualify as "rich", but more importantly, being underweight is pretty low bar. F
38.
by pfedor 13y ago
Haxe did nothing you couldn't do with AS3 and Alchemy. So, have they fixed this bug in Alchemy: http://forums.adobe.com/thread/487570 It's kind of hard to use C++ when you're not allowed to make a copy of std::string. Last I looked int
39.
by pfedor 13y ago
Increasingly smaller fraction of humanity is has a problem getting water or food, from almost everyone not that long ago, through 40% of the world population in the 1980s to less than 20% nowadays. This change is due to economic growth, wh
40.
by pfedor 13y ago
Saying the market wouldn't have still gone through the industrial revolution is tantamount to saying that industrial society is not economically efficient! Isn't that rather like saying that there wouldn't have been a strictly monotonic r
41.
by pfedor 14y ago
it appears to me that almost the entire US legal and political system is driven by, and for the benefit of, corporate and big business interests "Corporate and big business interests", i.e., publicly traded companies, are responsible for
42.
by pfedor 14y ago
helped bankrupt the USSR Which alone should be reason enough to declare anyone a Saint and then give them the Nobel Peace Prize for twenty years in a row.
43.
by pfedor 14y ago
Or to put it another way, how could it have been worse? Easy. The coal mining industry could have continued existing for another thirty years, bringing huge losses each year, subsidized by the taxpayer. Like, say, in Poland, which is wh
44.
by pfedor 14y ago
Yeah artists seem to do it all the time. They also often get indignant at the merest suggestion that they might want to agree for someone to use their work for free. The difference is, of course, that writing code is joy so no wonder peopl
45.
by pfedor 14y ago
The decision to enter a PhD program only makes sense for one of the two reasons: either you think you're going to win a Nobel Prize one day, or, you don't mind spending five years in a way which doesn't advance any goal (literal quote from
46.
by pfedor 14y ago
The developed world has an exponentially higher cost of living than sub-Saharan Africa or rural India Which is irrelevant since the $2 a day figure is adjusted for purchasing power parity.
47.
by pfedor 14y ago
I was curious so I looked up the numbers on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiopulmonary_resuscitation#E... The survival rates are: CPR by a bystander: 4% Cardiocerebral Resuscitation (i.e., chest compressions only without art
48.
by pfedor 14y ago
In the USA as of 2013, everyone already has their basic needs taken care of--or at least what Bertrand Russel would consider the basic needs, of course we have redefined them since to mean things which in his time would have been considered
49.
by pfedor 14y ago
Their neighbors are slightly worse off, and 20 people have a place to live. That is what happens when only one landowner chooses "defect". If all of them do it, then 20 people times the number of lots might find a place to live, except i
50.
by pfedor 14y ago
Zoning laws seem like one example of a regulation that genuinely prevents the tragedy of the commons. If one person built a twenty story house on their property, that person would get rich and all their neighbors would be slightly worse of
51.
by pfedor 14y ago
I've never lived in a small town, but if literary accounts are to be believed, it was hell for precisely this reason.
52.
by pfedor 14y ago
The metric which would be a tad closer to ideal would be some average of u/t where u := the number of users who upvoted a given comment, t := total number of users who saw that comment. Where "saw" can mean either "the comment was already
53.
by pfedor 14y ago
It was at the O'Hare airport: http://www.aclu.org/files/assets/2011.09.21_-_doc_17_-_pl._s...
54.
by pfedor 14y ago
Let me repeat what has been said in the other Hacker News threads about the same story: This is neither the law nor the actual practice in the US. It is just something crazy that DHS once said. If they ever actually searched someone 100 m
55.
by pfedor 14y ago
Oh, I also can say and hear "fuck" all day long without blinking, because, like you, I am not American and English is not my native language. However, there are words in Polish which could make me cringe, especially when heard unexpectedly
56.
by pfedor 14y ago
Those people would be benefitting from the original pirate's crime. Generally feigning ignorance is not enough to absolve you from the responsibility in such cases. If you buy a stolen car (even not knowing that it was stolen) the police
57.
by pfedor 14y ago
The fact that you are not the original author has nothing to do with the author exerting any control, it is a question of fact. Beethoven no longer exerts any control over the Moonlight Sonata and yet it is a fact that he wrote it and not
58.
by pfedor 14y ago
There is significant debate as to whether public domain even exists except through copyright expiry. Such serious claim requires some serious citation. It is certainly not true as stated, since all original works produced by the governme
59.
by pfedor 14y ago
Is there anything to stop you from installing Linux or Windows on a macbook?
60.
by pfedor 14y ago
How did the end up about the same? Were they paying themselves the same salaries they would have been getting at Microsoft the whole time? Were they living more frugally than they would have been had they been working at Microsoft?

More ›