sakai

26 ms·

211.
by sakai 15y ago
As a "businessperson" that does some light coding on the side for fun (mostly scientific programming), I really appreciate the author's argument. Unfortunately, it's difficult to find organizations that know how to make the most use out of
212.
by sakai 15y ago
"Sweden" ... "The mistake those in the thread disagreeing with me are making is to assume that just b/c governments are less often observed to blatantly harass their own citizens, they are more civilized than the small time crooks whose lac
213.
by sakai 15y ago
And this is why there's so much dark fiber (but hooray!).
214.
by sakai 15y ago
The article does call them gains, but if it's truly only the capital paid out this is a good point. More likely, these numbers are abysmal because of the poor performance of equities over the selected period (1998-2010) and consequently the
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by sakai 15y ago
Indeed it's not at all unreasonable that the largest firm would be < 1% of the market. In fact it's fairly logical, given that: A) hedge funds are pursuing strategies where the individual investment opportunities are often fairly small
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by sakai 15y ago
It's worth pointing out that the FT's 84% figure is NOT correct, though that actually further reinforces the point that fund managers are fleecing their investors. While the funds collectively realized $449bn in investment gains and paid ou
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by sakai 15y ago
This is great. It would be nice if there was a "project description" field however in addition to the names: [ http://code.nasa.gov/projects/ ]. The projects are fairly esoteric and span a broad range of fields: * Conflict Prevention Bands
218.
by sakai 15y ago
This is incredibly disgusting behavior. I have so much respect for the founders of PayPal, but current management is destroying their company and, sadly, their reputations.
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by sakai 15y ago
I don' think that example proves your point: perhaps he loved problem solving / was an excellent problem solver and pursued CompSci for that reason, only to drop it because he disliked the formalism required by programming (or math, for exa
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by sakai 15y ago
It is worth noting, however, that Mountain Pass primarily produces "light" rare earths, while the mines in southern China will remain the predominant source of several "heavy" rare earth metals for several years to come (e.g., dysprosium).
221.
by sakai 15y ago
Well said.
222.
by sakai 15y ago
This article consists of speculation, factual misstatements, and some jingoistic China-bashing. Terrible journalism: "Many rare earths are also geochemically rare". No, they're actually as common as many industrial metals, including copper.
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Millions of docs (200+GB) allegedly lifted from Stratfor(wired.com)
2 points by sakai 15y ago|0 comments
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by sakai 15y ago
That's somewhat true. Prices rose tremendously across all rare earth metals, and they fallen back notably for some light metals.[1][2] That said, they remain high for heavy rare earth elements (HREEs), where China still dominates production
225.
by sakai 15y ago
Thank you for this -- an accessible presentation of the most important facts and numbers on a contemporary, quickly moving issue. We could use more of this from journalistic outlets as well (albeit without the editorializing). And the 'What
226.
by sakai 15y ago
Does anyone know how the revenue sharing (and other terms) work for the Pokki store? I'm all for prizes and contests as a means of incentivizing creativity and innovation, but the lack of clarity on the above point (and thus what you both "
227.
by sakai 15y ago
Interesting, though picking on that one sentence sort of misses the point -- via long-term political appointments, supermajority requirements, constitutional reforms, and a host of other measures, Fidesz has critically wounded the ability o
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Big and clever - Why large firms are often more inventive than small ones(economist.com)
3 points by sakai 15y ago|0 comments
229.
by sakai 15y ago
While nonetheless a total fiasco, it's worth observing that the recent Netflix debacle is a rare example of a major failure that stems from being too strategic and conscious of long-term trends (hyperopic vs. myopic).
230.
by sakai 15y ago
I haven't read the paper in full yet (nor am I a machine learning expert), but it seems to be training it against a precompiled dataset, not using human views: "To learn the feature weight vector which best discriminates an im- age from a l
231.
by sakai 15y ago
Very cool. Figure 7 is particularly instructive as to the power of this approach. It would also be interesting to see a comparison of images where the features are less pronounced, e.g., matching landscape images. One can imagine uniform we