pjscott

67 ms·

691.
by pjscott 10y ago
Refusal to do such cold calculation, though it may feel nice, is also paid for in lives. The prices are usually worse, too.
692.
by pjscott 10y ago
If you think I was making a point about what they should do, or what they have a right to do, then... I didn't make myself clear, and I apologize. I'm talking about concrete physical consequences. Who eats and who doesn't; th
693.
by pjscott 10y ago
Good explanations! As I recall this stuff is usually introduced as part of classes along the boundary between basic and higher math, so having a mini-book about it seems a bit unconventional -- but it's a really good idea. Nice straigh
694.
by pjscott 10y ago
That's nice for the local economy. Not as nice for the non-local people who would have received money but didn't. I bet some of them really could have used the cash. Whether or not this is a good thing overall depends on your prio
695.
by pjscott 10y ago
... Or someone who was understandably proud of having written a basic but serviceable filesystem on an airplane. Please at least consider the boring hypothesis.
696.
by pjscott 10y ago
Random access by code point is hardly ever quite what you want, and UTF-8 is not a bad internal encoding. http://dparrol.github.io/unicode-random-indexing.html
697.
by pjscott 10y ago
If I ran servers which processed temporarily-plaintext health care information, and I couldn't snoop on it even with effort, I'd be ashamed of my poor skill at villainy. Encryption is not all-powerful.
698.
by pjscott 10y ago
Repeatable? Sorry in advance for quibbling, but -- suppose that a star goes nova, and you weren't expecting it, but you happen to have telescopes gathering interesting data from this once-in-a-stellar-lifetime event. If you learn inter
699.
by pjscott 10y ago
It's important to be insufferably pedantic about this: they index by code point , which is almost but not quite what people expect a character to be. $ python3 >>> "위키백과"[1] '키' >>&
700.
by pjscott 10y ago
The article also said that "Thiel thinks that people shouldn’t go to college because it’s a waste of time" and then threw in a misquote of Ayn Rand for good measure. What all these things have in common is that they're false
701.
by pjscott 10y ago
Interesting. I haven't noticed movies bashing me over the head with liberal views, but I'm not conservative so I might just be oblivious to it. Do you have any examples?
702.
by pjscott 10y ago
It's of importance to anyone with a political ideology they think stands no chance of being voted in on a large scale. Again, I'm not seeing more than a superficial resemblance.
703.
by pjscott 10y ago
Those are the parts of that essay that people always quote -- which is odd, since they're just statistical observations about what the electorate will support. The real meat of the essay is what Thiel proposes we do about it: not some
704.
by pjscott 10y ago
Any post that includes the string "Hitler" is wrong.
705.
by pjscott 10y ago
(Example: remember that "10,000 hours to expertise" thing that Malcolm Gladwell was pushing a few years ago? Forget about it; the whole thing failed to replicate. And forget about Malcolm Gladwell in general, since he makes a care
706.
by pjscott 10y ago
Certainly it does -- and yes we do. Things are so bad that entire fields of science are best disregarded until a few good meta-analyses come out. Or, better yet, large randomized trials with predetermined criteria for success or failure, an
707.
by pjscott 10y ago
Makes sense. If you can make a viable product atop TensorFlow, then acqui-hiring you is probably a good bargain.
708.
by pjscott 10y ago
Yes, probably. The improvements would still be gradual, though.
709.
by pjscott 11y ago
If you can program, this is the best probability book. I think you messed up the URL, though: http://greenteapress.com/wp/think-bayes/
710.
by pjscott 11y ago
If you're right, then I'd say that it's still trivially outweighed by the Gates Foundation's efforts on disease reduction. Each billion dollars spent fighting malaria buys a whole lot of indulgences.
711.
by pjscott 11y ago
Is it just skimming? When I saw the headline of the article I decided that, rather than skimming it, I'd try just reading all the words really fast . I haven't taken a class or anything, so maybe my technique could use work, but
712.
by pjscott 11y ago
If they can get supersonic passenger planes flying over the ocean again, they won't be an obscure company anymore.
713.
by pjscott 11y ago
That's almost certainly a misattribution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_sucker_born_every_...
714.
by pjscott 11y ago
It would be interesting to look at the distribution of points for articles that get submitted multiple times -- there's obviously a lot of variability! I'd expect it to look vaguely power-law-shaped, because articles that get upvo
715.
by pjscott 11y ago
I'm not sure, and neither is the guy who's writing this book! However, he has given some thought to the matter and written a very interesting article about how such a thing might or might not work: http://www.daviddfrie
716.
by pjscott 11y ago
Alternately you can affirm the "never compromise cryptography" code of ethics, which I just made up and which is exactly what the name says.
717.
by pjscott 11y ago
This doesn't fit as well in a blurb, but a more precisely-stated version of Thiel's thesis is that, since truly competitive markets tend to drive down profit margins, you want to have some big advantage that's hard for compet
718.
by pjscott 11y ago
As the author emphasizes, that depends on the speed requirements of your software. There are places where nanoseconds matter, just as there are places where tens or hundreds of milliseconds don't.
719.
by pjscott 11y ago
True, though it's usually not worth the hassle. Most production implementations of quicksort just drop down to heapsort for the current sub-array if the stack gets too deep. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introsort
720.
by pjscott 11y ago
In case anybody was wondering, your C compiler almost certainly will not generate different assembly code for ++x and x++. (This is easy enough to test if you have a compiler handy.)

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