phaedrus

80 ms·

631.
by phaedrus 16y ago
I heard a story (I don't know if it's true or not) about Fedex and Frederick Smith: supposedly at one point in the company's early history, they were going through a rough time and realized by Wednesday there wouldn't be enough money to ma
632.
by phaedrus 16y ago
Actually I sometimes come across old code I've written and think, "Wow that's really neat. I wonder who wrote this?"
633.
by phaedrus 16y ago
IIRC from an earlier article, Elon Musk actually did have a prenup, but his (ex-)wife's lawyer is filing to get it overturned.
634.
by phaedrus 16y ago
Am I the only one who can't find a link in the article that actually links to a store where you can buy it? I can't even find it with a Google search; no direct hits and the ones that look like they might lead near it on TI.com time out.
635.
by phaedrus 16y ago
Exactly! In fact the software that does that even already exists! I read a news story earlier this year about a team which was using that technique to restore old phonograph records that are too fragile to play. They even used it to succ
636.
The Bitter Truth About Sugar(singularityhub.com)
79 points by phaedrus 16y ago|86 comments
637.
by phaedrus 16y ago
I agree with your thesis but I wouldn't classify classic VB as particularly powerful either. Usually when people say a language is powerful, they seem to mean that a small number of primitives can be combined to produce a large variety of
638.
by phaedrus 16y ago
I just read this book. It was interesting but it's geared towards physical products with very large franchises like Coca-Cola beverages or IBM servers. Which is on the face of it very strange - you're targetting a book to a level at which
639.
by phaedrus 16y ago
Richard Dawkins, in (iirc) The Selfish Gene proposed that if we really wanted to increase the average lifespan of humans beyond what it is now (we're on the high side of longevity compared to even other primates) then the way to do it would
640.
by phaedrus 16y ago
If you click on the more rural western Oklahoma counties, all the movement is just between adjacent rural counties. As someone who worked hard to break out of a small town, I find that a bit depressing - no one is "escaping" and no fresh i
641.
by phaedrus 16y ago
As ridiculous as what he did is, ironically the post itself does constitute a germane HN link: 1. He describes a social engineering experiment (a kind of hacking). 2. It's partially about the interesting idea of organizing your writing so t
642.
by phaedrus 16y ago
It's not either-or. We can use oil, while still asking the question, do we need to use so much, and do we need to push so hard to get more? You don't have to stop using oil entirely tomorrow to be concerned that the returns we get from wh
643.
by phaedrus 16y ago
The Io language has a similar gotcha - when I cloned one of my prototypes that contained a List member, I was surprised to find that all the clones shared the same List! It actually makes sense - it was the reference to the list that was c
644.
by phaedrus 16y ago
This is surprisingly like the first step you'd take if you were about to start hacking the firmware on an embedded board: before you change bits, you upload a known good firmware to prove your programming process is working correctly.
645.
by phaedrus 16y ago
Wolfram Alpha came out just before I started Calc II. I credit Wolfram Alpha as the reason I was able to go through Calc II, III, IV, and Differential Equations this year. I'm able to grasp advanced math concepts, but I have trouble actual
646.
Ask HN: Good, enthusiastic intro to Scala?
3 points by phaedrus 16y ago|2 comments
647.
by phaedrus 16y ago
I've found his contributions outside of Ruby to be also valuable: he wrote a very interesting minimal webserver in the Io language. Just reading the code to it opened my eyes to a way to solve a problem in some Io code I was working on. A
648.
by phaedrus 16y ago
Is it difficult to get the paperwork and permits in order to employ people from multiple countries? I've often wondered how that works.
649.
by phaedrus 16y ago
I was calculating number of engineering job applicants divided by the number of places to work. That is, supposing there were 100 people and 10 companies, or 20 people and 2 companies, that's still the same ratio of 10 engineers employed p
650.
by phaedrus 16y ago
Hey guys, I'm the one he was criticizing, and I'm voting him back up off 0 on this comment. 1. That may have been hyperbole. A better way to phrase it would be "A state where the tech sector seems to have as little presence as a country w
651.
by phaedrus 16y ago
I share your frustration. Although I do live in the USA, not all regions of the USA are equally prosperous. Though patriotism leads people here to shut their eyes to it, the economy in the state I live in has more in common with third wor
652.
by phaedrus 16y ago
This doesn't sound plausible as a joke. If you were going to do such an obscure joke, why choose Myth? Why not say "Gotcha" or make up an obviously fake cracking group name. Number 3 is at least plausible, but anyone who could do this wou
653.
by phaedrus 16y ago
The code doesn't even have to be that old - in my indie game company, my partner and I often run into issues just moving code between my machine and his. Things like compiler versions, C++ library versioning issues, third party libraries.
654.
by phaedrus 16y ago
This is certainly interesting; lately I've been wondering something similar: what software engineering techniques might also be found in genes or brains in nature. This could be summed up as "Does the brain have subroutines?" I'm not sure
655.
by phaedrus 16y ago
@Coders can often walk through large logic problems instantly: I work in an IT shop where we write in house systems to support the business processes of nontechnical people. When we try to hammer out business requirements for systems we'l
656.
by phaedrus 16y ago
I think you're substituting some colloquial fuzzy/subjective definition of the word "information" here as "a conscious being knowing something." But in the context of the linked article, we're talking about Information in the context of In
657.
by phaedrus 17y ago
"Measured" is a misleading way to rephrase the title. The mass wasn't measured, it was predicted theoretically using computer simulation.
658.
by phaedrus 17y ago
He specifically answers the concern about negative inertial mass! He proposes that to make negative mass make sense with regard to inertia, the equation F = ma should actually have been F = |m|a.
659.
by phaedrus 17y ago
The flaw in your argument defending NPEs is that even if the physics is correct there will be countless engineering challenges to overcome between the theoretical invention and the actual working billion dollar device. I put forth that the
660.
by phaedrus 17y ago
You should write about Lagrange: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange I kept running across things named after him or invented by him in different areas (Lagrange points in orbital mechanics, the Lagrange Method in my Calc IV class, var

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