pmb

10 ms·

61.
by pmb 14y ago
Right. My claim is: "Google does something evil" is news, "Microsoft does something evil" is not news.
62.
by pmb 14y ago
Microsoft's motto is "Don't be so evil that the government can successfully break you into pieces". Google's motto is "don't be evil". We expect vile bullcrap from Microsoft.
63.
by pmb 14y ago
Both are essentially aggregators of not-for-profit university lectures. Education is a weird thing. We don't know how to do it well, and we don't know how to ensure it is taking place, but every for-profit university (new online ones poss
64.
by pmb 14y ago
Hooray! For-profit universities are almost uniformly a scam.
65.
by pmb 14y ago
Social networking has consistently produced job offers for me, but I did also get one job through my undergraduate college career fair and my current academic position through ACM jobs.
66.
by pmb 14y ago
It is called a Trie or a Prefix Tree, and has been (re)invented many times.
67.
by pmb 14y ago
The main branch of the New York Public Library in Bryant Park.
68.
by pmb 14y ago
But "rational" and "fully informed" isn't enough. If I encode prices as a 3SAT problem, then your "rational" and "fully informed" person will be required to solve a (thought-to-be) too hard problem in order to do the efficient thing. There
69.
by pmb 14y ago
Yes. Hopstop is free but has ads.
70.
by pmb 14y ago
Yes. I have relatives who died due to a lack of health care. They felt sick for a long time, but only got treatment once the chronic problem became acute. Unfortunately, when a chronic undiagnosed cancer condition becomes acute, it means
71.
by pmb 14y ago
Read the citations. Some of the results are self contained, though. (eg the one from http://33bits.org/ )
72.
by pmb 14y ago
But what do journals do ? I know what they did : they were clearinghouses of current scientific knowledge. Now, in the days of the ArXiv, what do they do ? The only answer I can come up with is: help academics gain tenure and promotion
73.
by pmb 14y ago
I was intending to imply that the massive dollar flow to these administrative costs is not proportional to the value provided. The cost for your friend to fly around was not in any way proportional to the price levied on the journal purcha
74.
by pmb 14y ago
There are no editorial costs. Editors are not paid. There are no authorial costs. Authors are not paid. There are a few copy-editing costs. Copy-editors get paid a few hundred bucks per article. There are a few administrative costs.
75.
by pmb 14y ago
They can't even lie competently. Where are the organizations competent to run a nuclear power station? Because nuclear power, done right and engineered well, is the one of the safest and best sources of energy. Tepco is criminally* incom
76.
by pmb 14y ago
Two wonderful companions to this article are "Thinking Intelligence is Innate Makes You Stupid" http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2007/12/03/thinking-intellige... and (especially) Cosma Shalizi's article on the malleability and heritability
77.
by pmb 14y ago
We had all of: offer, acceptance, consideration, meeting of the minds, capacity, and legality. It sure felt like a contract to me.
78.
by pmb 14y ago
I never asked much of it - all I really cared was that it was hosting that I didn't have to think about. Two WordPress sites, some backups of important files and the occasional scp around a stupid firewall or NAT box. And now they are can
79.
by pmb 14y ago
Thanks! This looks ideal for my needs!
80.
by pmb 14y ago
On a related note: where is good for hosting two small websites? I'd like to be able to log in with SSH and get an actual Unix shell (and not have to pay too much, as the websites are neither large nor popular).
81.
by pmb 14y ago
I paid the extra $$ for lifetime (and did it back when I was a grad student and had basically zero money) because I didn't want to have to think about hosting any more. Now I have to think about hosting again. Ugh. Broken promises leave a
82.
by pmb 14y ago
It's like math. You don't believe the difference between the best and the rest until you meet the best. It is apropos that someone linked to a Terry Tao math post in this discussion, because right now, in math, Terry Tao is definitely in
83.
by pmb 14y ago
They don't. That's why they are building a third water tunnel. For backup, and so they can do repairs on the other two.
84.
by pmb 14y ago
The complexity classes that involve randomness have names like BPP, ZPP, and RP. BPP is usually the one people mean when they talk about practical problems that randomness might help solve. Although the second level of PH contains both NP
85.
by pmb 14y ago
This stuff has just been in the air the past few years - Network coding ( http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~michaelm/CS222/contentdist.pdf ) does the inverse operation to increase efficiency in Bittorrent-like distribution schemes. It is quit
86.
by pmb 14y ago
That was the first thing I noticed, too (after the J/I awfulness).
87.
by pmb 14y ago
These sorts of problems will occur in any distributed system which runs at a high rate without humans in the loop. There is no chaos monkey for the stock market, and transaction rollback is available only in the most extreme circumstances.
88.
by pmb 14y ago
Those are what its advantages were. Now its main advantages seem to be: (1) Omnipresence and (2) Easy to migrate from a static site (I missed that one in my prior comment, and it's an important one - thanks!). All the others are relative
89.
by pmb 14y ago
Cool, but seems unwise. If you are smart enough to do this to PHP, then you are hopefully smart enough to know you should probably not be writing your large system in PHP. There are many better base languages, as opposed to one which has t
90.
by pmb 14y ago
It was, however, founded by a guy who left the human genome project and took his hard-won expertise elsewhere.

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