rwallace

61 ms·

601.
by rwallace 10y ago
I do have some sympathy for the author, but it's a good idea to keep in mind that just because nobody ever told you there was a rule against getting sloppy and working outside normal business hours, doesn't mean it's a good i
602.
by rwallace 10y ago
If you don't have children, then you don't have a colony. At best, you might have a pathfinding expedition intended to prepare for a future colony, but then there's a case to be made that the money and time might be better sp
603.
by rwallace 10y ago
> "But I was just following orders" isn't an acceptable excuse in any situation. On the contrary, it's an acceptable excuse in lots of situations. The finding at Nuremberg was that there is a line beyond which it stop
604.
by rwallace 10y ago
You need to be willing to walk away from the partnership if necessary. Not that it's something you want to do, but you can't let fear of it control your actions. Or conversely, if you decide you can't do that because you don&
605.
by rwallace 11y ago
> Was it not the case that people would have assigned very low probability to Fermat's last theorem too Why do you think so? As I understand it, most mathematicians thought Fermat probably correct.
606.
by rwallace 11y ago
Epsilon. We don't have a formal proof, but most people who have looked at the proposition consider it to be almost certainly false.
607.
by rwallace 11y ago
I sympathize, but honestly, the fourth thought - that you don't want to do the data entry the client has agreed to pay you for - is a bad thought that you need to evict from your brain ASAP. You should want to do it. It's a good d
608.
by rwallace 11y ago
Seems straightforward enough to me. 1. Crap, my blog got hacked. 2. I'm a journalist not a cybersecurity expert. I need to outsource the task of keeping my blog secure. 3. Medium seems a promising candidate. 4. Actually, Medium looks p
609.
by rwallace 11y ago
Personally I like David Brin's solution from the Uplift novels. Most of the things we want to say have nothing to do with sex and apply regardless of gender, so if we aren't going to let the same words double for male and gender-n
610.
by rwallace 11y ago
Now that I think about it, there was an article a while ago by someone who hired someone to sit beside him and prompt him whenever he drifted off track, to make him get back to work. I would expect that to work, and apparently it did, very
611.
by rwallace 11y ago
Different tricks work for different people. Here's one I find works for me: given a pile of tasks sufficiently daunting that it's hard to get started, take the easiest. Not the most important, the easiest, the one that can be comp
612.
by rwallace 11y ago
Nobody is suggesting that it's either necessary or possible for the climate to never change at all, even slightly. The point being made is that climate change of too large a magnitude, occurring too quickly, is damaging, potentially
613.
by rwallace 11y ago
I agree completely. A liberal society is one in which we can work with people who hold views we disagree with, even views we find reprehensible. A society in which only one set of views is permitted to exist is a totalitarian society. We sp
614.
by rwallace 11y ago
The '$200 per year, not interesting' comments are missing the point. Politics is a game of increments. If you want a measure in place for a large amount of money a few years down the line, you typically need to get it in place for
615.
by rwallace 11y ago
The Scheme programming language. As close to the core essence of programming as an actually usable, practical programming language has ever come. LLVM. Being able to fully represent general code in a simple, well-defined, readable text-base
616.
by rwallace 11y ago
Yep! As someone who was rooting for DeepMind, I like this result, for two reasons: Lee Sedol earned it - he's behaved like a true sportsman all the way - and it gives us some interesting information (yesterday we only had a lower bound
617.
by rwallace 11y ago
The problem with 'flag and footprints' demonstrations is precisely the same as their attraction - they are, in essence (even though that was not the intent), selected to be as misleading as possible about progress in solving the r
618.
by rwallace 11y ago
Not if they end up funding the next Ford, IBM or Intel. Hence, I suppose, the point of this post.
619.
by rwallace 11y ago
First of all, according to what the experts are saying, the most dangerous idea one could possibly have is your idea of doing nothing - that guarantees the worst-case outcome. Second, one would normally expect the force required to break th
620.
by rwallace 11y ago
You (and at least one other) reacted as though I had claimed such an action would come with a guarantee nothing could go wrong. Which is, to put it bluntly, a rather stupid reaction given that: 1. I didn't make a claim. I asked a quest
621.
by rwallace 11y ago
Would it suffice to just take a stick of dynamite to one of the seized gates?
622.
by rwallace 11y ago
I don't think you and OP are necessarily contradicting each other. OP explicitly says that if you are a big company planning to get bigger by doing lots of hiring or acquisition, his advice is not addressed to you, and you should take
623.
by rwallace 11y ago
And I'll look you right back and call bullshit. I used an Amiga in the late eighties. It was a fantastic machine for its time, certainly more advanced than the contemporary 286 PCs, but Windows 95 was markedly superior (as it should ha
624.
by rwallace 11y ago
When irresponsible or predatory lending has taken place, there is blame to be allocated on both sides. That means we are not justified in simply throwing the entire burden of solving the problem onto the borrowers.
625.
by rwallace 11y ago
The 'consumerist garbage' is what's paying to build the factories that make the chips that power the exciting research stuff.
626.
by rwallace 11y ago
I think this is true at the current tech level . That is, if your product idea is a website or a phone app (as opposed to using these things to solve a problem in some other domain), it's unlikely to be worth doing. I think the next
627.
by rwallace 11y ago
This article is a great example of why a company describing itself as a family should be a red flag. It usually means they're trying to exploit vulnerabilities in human social instincts in the same way that cults do; abuse is easiest a
628.
by rwallace 11y ago
Contact the company, show them your site, explain your situation, explain that you're looking for remote work. If they offer a compromise like being in the office one or two days a week, take it. If they won't go for it at all, th
629.
by rwallace 11y ago
While I think the notion of intellectual property is a mistake, when someone offers us a half-full glass of lemonade, to respond with a complaint that the glass is half empty is extremely poor form.
630.
by rwallace 11y ago
I'm curious, what were the reasons? What was the better alternative? I've read plenty about the shortcomings of the F35, but this is the first I've heard about shortcomings of the Abrams.

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