rflrob

59 ms·

571.
by rflrob 16y ago
> For all RMS knows, this advice could be alexey's way of manipulating him into working against what he values. Some of the advice that I remember most from the original post was about things that are tangential, at best, to FLOSS. Ref
572.
by rflrob 16y ago
> Sending humans sounds cool but we shouldn't go until it's as safe as commercial aviation then we can do it frequently. That's almost asking for it never to happen at all. Air travel has a safety rate of 1 fatality per 2 billion passen
573.
Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies(michaeleisen.org)
711 points by rflrob 16y ago|140 comments
574.
by rflrob 16y ago
> In sciences, the real problem is things like the biology PhD whose training ends up being "working in this lab on this piece of equipment with this species for these tasks", or so I have heard from the other articles on this topic. I'
575.
by rflrob 16y ago
In science, as well as in other fields of human endeavor, there are two kinds of geniuses: the “ordinary” and the “magicians.” An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There
576.
by rflrob 16y ago
I can't agree more. If you want to go broad, get a masters (or two or three!), but a PhD is if you want to push the boundaries of what we know. I can't help but be reminded of this visual explanation of a PhD: http://matt.might.net/arti
577.
by rflrob 16y ago
As things stand now, we don't have a perfect understanding of how the Earth's core works. Even if we did, though, the amount of energy that would be required to start up a magnetic field on another planet would be, well, astronomical. Kee
578.
by rflrob 16y ago
I would say that 3 classes is few enough that it should be fairly resistant to data mining. Figure 2b and 2c aren't as obvious to me that there are 3 classes, but 2a and 2d are pretty clear. "All science is either physics or stamp collect
579.
What is a PhD Really Worth?(nature.com)
14 points by rflrob 16y ago|3 comments
580.
by rflrob 16y ago
For whatever reason, yours must have much better resolution than mine if you can track favorite parking spots. The map I'm getting has, at best, a quarter mile resolution or so, which means that in the moderately urbanized area where I spe
581.
by rflrob 16y ago
> Spend $15 for a CD or spend the same for three months access to an enormous catalog of music? I'm picky about my music, so I don't buy new CDs that often, but when I do, it's usually for an artist I really like. When I have the oppor
582.
by rflrob 16y ago
> The state police responded by saying they would provide the information only in return for a payment of $544,680. Anyone know what Michigan's Freedom of Information laws are like? Half a million seems ridiculously high for a FoIA-type
583.
by rflrob 16y ago
The author seems to be assuming that all iPad owners have or will soon have a smartphone. I don't know that this is the case: my mom got my grandmother an iPad, but there's no way she needs a smartphone for anything.
584.
by rflrob 16y ago
Aren't most works-for-hire for by US Government employees immediately released into the public domain? In that case, then, how and why is it that the National Arboretum is a "copyrighted place"? Also, does anyone know a good primer on cop
585.
by rflrob 16y ago
> the came (in the book) because they had the MicroSoft business plan: destroy any competition. (do unto others before they do unto you) And why would anyone logically do unto anyone first? If you're not worried about people stealing y
586.
by rflrob 16y ago
Yeah, but why use landing pages at all? I never understood why some sites have a page whose sole purpose is to make you click something again. The only worse thing is a landing page with some sort of flash intro that, only if I'm very, v
587.
by rflrob 16y ago
> It's more about selling you the keyboard (a suitable keyboard for SSH clients doesn't come standard with touchscreen devices) than about selling you the client. If that's the case, why not mention it a bit more in the post? I agree t
588.
by rflrob 16y ago
Why not be aware of the "rules" (rather than ignoring them), but break them when you need to? By and large, they seem like good advice, as long as you take them with a grain of salt?
589.
by rflrob 16y ago
I'm not even sure there's value to having the score appear after any period of time, though very little disincentive to have it appear after voting. Since HN is, on the whole, a time-wasting avenue for me, I rarely look at things older tha
590.
by rflrob 16y ago
> I find that going into a thread an hour or two old and seeing comments with 50-100 points is a major disincentive to commenting, even if I have something to say. That comment or couple of comments and their resulting threads are going
591.
by rflrob 16y ago
"In Lustig’s view, sugar should be thought of, like cigarettes and alcohol, as something that’s killing us." I don't smoke, but I do drink alcohol in moderated amounts, and I'd disagree that alcohol is "killing us" [1], and feel that even
592.
by rflrob 16y ago
Unfortunately, this article doesn't seem to offer any insights into what factors made the game so successful, or even really present much new information that couldn't be found in one of the many other links on HN over the last several mont
593.
by rflrob 16y ago
I suspect that touching the screen would, at all but one depth plane, break the illusion. The brain is eerily good at fooling itself, until it receives contradictory information.
594.
by rflrob 16y ago
I would be okay if there were some way to tell roughly how many points a post was getting, even if it wasn't precise. For example, some sort of color coding that moved to warmer colors on a roughly logarithmic scale.
595.
by rflrob 16y ago
http://www.fanfiction.net/u/2269863/Less_Wrong The PDF is even nicely typeset in, if not the Official Harry Potter font, a close facsimile.
596.
by rflrob 16y ago
"But critics of net neutrality rules argue that free-market competition would prevent such abuses" Is consumer internet really a free market? To my knowledge, most of the Bay Area only has a choice between Comcast and AT&T. If you o
597.
by rflrob 16y ago
Physical science probably won't be much better if you don't like math. Remember, "The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics". Heck, be a humanities major and learn to code, it's not like computers only work for people w
598.
by rflrob 16y ago
Seems to me this has a bug on Len<3 strings. This isn't a convention I've seen before, but I don't think anyone would shorten "in" to "i0n" or "I" to "I0I".
599.
Waiting for the Motivation Fairy(nature.com)
3 points by rflrob 16y ago|0 comments
600.
by rflrob 16y ago
>There's also that whole mood message thing which just dumbfounds me. My friends and I have come up with a pretty good use for the mood message: with a custom chatstyle I hacked together, if you set your mood message to a hex color, the

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