rhino42

8 ms·

31.
by rhino42 15y ago
I have anecdotal evidence to back up these claims: my mother is in internal medicine and my father is a surgeon. both have practiced defensive medicine and my father has complained about how common an occurrence it is on a regular basis. M
32.
by rhino42 15y ago
There's a team at UC-Berkeley which is working on compiling C++ to a combination of CPU/GPU/FPGA code right now, which might change things. I think you need a special architecture to take full advantage of it though.
33.
by rhino42 15y ago
The other issue will be the I/O bottleneck. A practical application would need to have on-chip memory to buffer data (not mentioned here, I think). Even so, the applications will be severely limited by having data with enough processing n
34.
by rhino42 15y ago
Haha, I guess I wasn't clear enough there; my bad. In my defense, I was not saying "since we achieved all these awesome things, we'll surely eventually avoid the heat death of the universe". Instead, I was claiming that right now, we're pr
35.
by rhino42 15y ago
Now that I think about it, even this viewpoint is invalid. Perhaps we simply have an insufficient understanding of the universe. In 5000 years, they might ridicule the people of their past (us) for ever thinking that the end of the univer
36.
by rhino42 15y ago
I frankly don't understand why you were downvoted. I agree with this opinion...
37.
by rhino42 15y ago
Consider selection bias: You'll only hear about the people who won. Those who bought a ticket and lost say nothing, because everyone knows that the chances of winning a lottery are dismal to say the least. So you only hear about winners!
38.
by rhino42 15y ago
This. IMHO, humanity's goal for the next hundred years is to enhance our energy and medical technologies as quickly as possible. (space takes a distant third). We are essentially in a race against time: if we are too slow, we will deplete
39.
by rhino42 15y ago
No offense, but you seem to be raging a bit there. Naturally, you have many interests. We all do. Google is trying to get the best picture of what those interests are, arguably so that they can give better than chance (or whatever they h
40.
by rhino42 15y ago
But at the moment those ads ate only email-relevant when served to your email- that's my understanding
41.
by rhino42 15y ago
But a intermediate stance, such as "you should use more than just mass media to learn your issues: consider these five websites" could be an effective message (if people actually browsed those websites / got informed)
42.
by rhino42 15y ago
You'd have to be pretty killer to pull that off, however. I know for a fact that out of college Microsoft picks up engineers from MIT for 84k, and NASA gets new greats (not necessarily from MIT) for 76k. (disclaimer- I am not from MIT, b
43.
by rhino42 15y ago
Actually it's even more helpful than that: the lightest color indicates a less than one percent chance of entering the one percent, which means that that job does "worse than chance at achieving "one percent status".
44.
by rhino42 15y ago
The data in this graph is flawed. I only see one major box categorized as "engineer", and it says that 1/4 of all engineers are architecture or surveying. Try 1/20, perhaps. 1/4 is way too large. The only engineering majors that large
45.
by rhino42 15y ago
Haha, guess I didn't account for selection bias. I just asked a risk aversion question to a group of people who are considering startups (and thus very risk-tolerant). Go figure!
46.
by rhino42 15y ago
Eh, it depends. Would you rather have an 80 percent chance to make 75k per year, or a 10 percent chance to make 1 million per year? That's what I thought. Engineering and software development are fields where you can consistently make ve
47.
by rhino42 15y ago
Actually, I really looked the colors, it adds another dimension to the data: "given that you have X job, what is the chance that you would become filthy rich". I was actually frustrated with the graph until I noticed the meaning of the c
48.
by rhino42 15y ago
Cell towers can detect the receive power of any given cell phone on their network. If you just hacked your cell phone to use high transmit strength, they would know and could kick you off their network. I can imagine that you could rig you
49.
by rhino42 15y ago
While this sounds like a good idea on the surface, it won't work. Pretty much all cellular communications nowadays uses CDMA of one flavor or another. An important property of CDMA is that any signal that I send to the tower actually cause
50.
by rhino42 15y ago
My initial reaction was "wow, good point; there's no way that the government would ever make the airlines buy completely new barcode scanners everywhere, for the simple purpose of improving security checkpoint effectiveness". But then again
51.
by rhino42 15y ago
This is a classic case of the "prisoner's dilemma". By supporting the bill, you may increase your profit (but probably not by 10x). However, you interfere with legitimate businesses, and thus cause a net loss to society. The threat is tha
52.
by rhino42 15y ago
In this case, I disagree. Posting to that location lets us easily see the comments made on that posting (instead of just the replies to the comment being linked to)
53.
by rhino42 15y ago
This. My brother goes to MIT and he is precisely life-sized. He just works very hard. Let me also comment that the difference on starting salary at MIT is not so different from that of top five schools. Coming from one of those schools
54.
by rhino42 15y ago
I initially interpreted that as "and other news aggregates like HN out there?" Oh, my silly brain... But seriously, are there any other awesome news aggregates that I should be aware of?
55.
by rhino42 15y ago
I would imagine only if you were fluent in it. I bet these cabbies have to lice And breathe this information. You need not just a pile of facts, but the bigger picture: it has to be instinctive. I am not am expert.
56.
by rhino42 15y ago
Correction: automation possess a threat to those who do not work principally with their mind. Knowledge workers won't be in danger of marginalization in the near future
57.
by rhino42 15y ago
Debatable. They clearly have enough calories , but you need more than just that to live and be healthy. I would strongly argue that omega-3's and vitamin D3 are essential nutrients that a substantial portion of the population are deficie
58.
by rhino42 15y ago
I believe that we are presently seeing the results of a system which has (by and large) begun to fail on that massive scale. The main cause of this present recession have been IMHO due to the replacement of human labor with technology. Th
59.
by rhino42 15y ago
The problem is that the "free market" approach works better when it is immediately apparent the quality of the product. The results of teaching high school aren't really apparent for 3-4 years (at the fastest). This makes it hard for a new
60.
by rhino42 15y ago
But you have to remember that the battery producers aren't especially interested in the safety of the battery (beyond a certain level)-- they care about price, capacity and re-usability.

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