pjscott

57 ms·

571.
by pjscott 8y ago
That's because it's meant to look at other legal systems -- ones very different from the ones its audience are familiar with, i.e. those.
572.
by pjscott 8y ago
The part you do in parallel is computing the function "If the DFA is in state x, and it sees the whole input string, where will it end up?" You can represent that function as a table, one entry for each state. Once you've got
573.
by pjscott 8y ago
If I'm reading this right, it's a very cute trick. If not, maybe someone will correct my summary: You can parse regular languages with a DFA -- think of a set of states and a transition function saying "if I'm in state x
574.
by pjscott 8y ago
You can sometimes find self-contained chunks of bigger software that lend themselves to that kind of style. For example, I once had to write a highly-compressed on-disk memory-mapped data structure for searching for large sets of phrases in
575.
by pjscott 8y ago
That's a good article, and relevant. Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XPErvb8m9FapXCjhA/adaptation...
576.
by pjscott 8y ago
That's an aspirational statement, not a claim to have attained perfection.
577.
by pjscott 8y ago
You've got the incentive structure backwards! GDPR actually favors companies big enough to do something like that. They have the resources to comply without it affecting them much. Complying with vague, complicated laws is something th
578.
by pjscott 8y ago
It's been around long enough to have a short name in a dead language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
579.
by pjscott 8y ago
If you judge a law on what its effects should be rather than what they will actually be when applied to imperfect people, plenty of terrible laws will look good.
580.
by pjscott 8y ago
For some reason when I read your comment I had a vision of the Reddit founders in the very early days, waking up in the middle of the night to restart the server when it had crashed. Their sanity was very nearly wrecked because they didn&#x
581.
by pjscott 8y ago
> Part of creating a business is figuring out how to do things that won't get you sued into oblivion. The harder that gets, the fewer businesses there will be. If you look at businesses that managed to exist, sure, you'll see s
582.
by pjscott 8y ago
That might have something to do with the fact that Germany has 7x higher population density.
583.
by pjscott 8y ago
Yes? No? Abort, retry, fail? I mentioned jobs making local sense. And it's true! If any single one of these jobs were to go away, things would get worse. The system would leave its local optimum, and many problems would ensue. And I wa
584.
by pjscott 8y ago
Once upon a time there was a thing to be done. Huge meetings were held, and goals were set for how much of the thing should be done per month. Metrics were set up to track how much of the thing had happened. Over a hundred people were invit
585.
by pjscott 8y ago
Wait, are we talking about salary or total compensation? The latter includes things like stock, and is often quite a bit bigger.
586.
by pjscott 9y ago
You're right in the same technically-correct sense that parsing HTML 4 is easy: it's just SGML! And as long as you don't have to support any of the crazy deviations from the spec that some people have come to rely on, that&#x
587.
by pjscott 9y ago
It's worth pointing out that libxml2 also contains an HTML parser, implementations of XPath, XPointer, various other half-forgotten things beginning with the letter X, a Relax-NG implementation, and clients for both HTTP and FTP. The a
588.
by pjscott 9y ago
I wrote a protobuf decoder once and found it to be remarkably pleasant. Getting the decoder working only took a few hours. The format was obviously designed to be straightforward -- no escaping, no backtracking, no ambiguity. I believe the
589.
by pjscott 9y ago
Unsubscribe from /r/politics. Unsubscribe from /r/worldnews. Find the handful of subreddits that are bothering you and unsubcribe from them . The discussions I read on Reddit are overall nicer than those on HN, not beca
590.
by pjscott 9y ago
It applies to atheists who suddenly stop being a tiny minority. Those who are still in a tiny persecuted minority keep their mouths shut, and those who've been in the majority for a while don't bother talking about it. (Sources: t
591.
by pjscott 9y ago
That should mostly apply to other languages. Only the pip/import parts differ, and those generally have straightforward counterparts since most package management systems these days are pretty similar.
592.
by pjscott 9y ago
I was a TA for a freshman college class that would deliberately give homework assignments on things not covered in lectures. We were told to direct the students to resources that would help them learn these things, but not teach them direct
593.
by pjscott 9y ago
To clarify, it's an accurate summary of Thiel's views as expressed in this 2009 essay: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
594.
by pjscott 9y ago
You could believe that standard Republican policy is overall better than standard Democratic policy. Trump has been pretty conventional on actual policy so far; if you ignore the words he says and focus on the actions he seems like a less i
595.
by pjscott 9y ago
That's a leap that he explicitly encourages people not to make: populations have a lot of variation, and to look at a difference in means as a categorical difference, to convert "women have a higher population mean for trait X
596.
by pjscott 9y ago
In the paper on the first-generation TPU, in section 7. They estimate that there would have been impressive gains in speed, both absolute and per-watt, if they'd had enough design time to give it more memory bandwidth: https:/&#x
597.
by pjscott 9y ago
Another reason is that, because the Merlin 1-D is small enough, they can use a vacuum variant of it as the upper stage engine rather than designing another one.
598.
by pjscott 9y ago
Elon Musk just confirmed in a press conference that the third core was lost; two of the engines that should have slowed it down failed to re-ignite and it came in too fast. I predict either success or a more interesting failure on the next
599.
by pjscott 9y ago
I know which I'd prefer, from my standpoint as a regular human now. If I'm wrong, nonexistence sounds like a much more solvable problem than universal permadeath. This is not a difficult comparison.
600.
by pjscott 9y ago
Philosophically, working until you're n years old is optimal -- for some value of n that I wouldn't think to dictate to anyone else. Maybe it's 50, and maybe it's 500. I don't know how it'll work out a few

More ›