sebastos

30 ms·

241.
by sebastos 10y ago
Okay, I'm a guy, I'll show up for work on Monday completely naked. If any of my coworkers so much as glances downward I'll let that sexist swine hear about it. Should be cool, right? It's THEIR problem, after all. It&#x2
242.
by sebastos 10y ago
I don't really like "systems" for ranking and scoring people in general, but just as an exercise in systems design here, what about this for a strategy? 1. Each manager gives their people an absolute score 2. A meta-manager c
243.
by sebastos 10y ago
Seems to me you're playing hide the ball a bit here. If it's the case that society conditions men to display confidence, then aren't we left to explain why _that_ might be the case? Why doesn't society condition women to
244.
by sebastos 10y ago
+1 for the fast-talking engineer phenomenon. I think quickness of thought is a fitness that can be exercised, mostly orthogonally to deep thought. We all eventually find someone who thinks and talks faster than ourselves, but indeed we also
245.
by sebastos 10y ago
"I don't have this problem, so nobody does." Lacking support for large binary blobs is, like, THE #1 reason that an engineer might have to use an alternative.
246.
by sebastos 10y ago
If we did, who would you ask to validate that it was statistically significant?
247.
by sebastos 10y ago
I think technical people are better equipped to appreciate how important a seemingly small engineering difference can be. You have to spend a lot of hours wrestling with a complex topic before you realize how hard those innovations are to c
248.
by sebastos 10y ago
Right. Point being that expected value of drawing from a probability distribution isn't enough to explain people's preferences. We care a lot about the whole shape. So it's a little reductive to just tally up the expected tim
249.
by sebastos 10y ago
Okay. Suppose that you spend 30 minutes on your commute each day for the rest of your working life, until you're 65. That means you'll waste almost a full year's worth of waking hours driving. I've invented a teleporter
250.
by sebastos 10y ago
Okay, I've designed a new pill. 1 out of 4 people have adverse reactions to its contents and die instantly, but people who don't live long virile lives until, on average, the age of 100! Your expected gain would be nearly 5 additi
251.
by sebastos 10y ago
Yeesh. Remind me to never publish a paper that gets mentioned in a Wikipedia article and then posted to Hackernews 15 years later. I wouldn't want somebody to knock on my door and demand that I find a substitute for the term "Curs
252.
by sebastos 10y ago
Nothing personal about your comment particularly - I agree with how you're characterizing it. I was reacting to the instant jump to political thought people were making when the PoA has plenty of interesting implications in the merely
253.
by sebastos 10y ago
I'm guessing it's because you're projecting political baggage onto something that is more of just an interesting theoretical result. The Price of Anarchy's original setting was the issue of internet routing, and the &quo
254.
by sebastos 10y ago
Ding ding ding. The Price of Anarchy originally described the surprising result that internet routing seems to work despite the lack of a central planner. [1] The "central planner" is a theoretical maximum for the routing problem
255.
by sebastos 10y ago
The author is probably implying that being somewhat developed makes it easier to continue developing even faster, like an exponential. I agree though - that point is rather clumsily made, and my reading of it requires some good will. The ar
256.
by sebastos 10y ago
When you see comments like this, it's little wonder Thiel has gotten interested in Seasteading. Perhaps he thinks it's the only way to escape from this most virulent strain of stupid. If we're going to debug what's wrong
257.
by sebastos 10y ago
> The age old example is Pythagoras theorem, i got taught that at school and have never used it. Anyway, enough of my rant, i'd just like to see young people more prepared for the world, the opportunity is there and we're squan
258.
by sebastos 10y ago
Thanks for the detailed reply! Looks like a great list of refreshingly unusual thinking, and I love the Lovecraft suggestion!
259.
by sebastos 10y ago
Can you provide any links / reading related to some "other systems in G-space"? Sounds interesting.
260.
by sebastos 10y ago
I know what you mean, people can be so frivolous. Sometimes I just can't believe I'm surrounded by a bunch of lazy, time-wasting jerkoffs who fritter away their days getting haircuts and drinking coffee and reading magazines and w
261.
by sebastos 10y ago
If reading the Wikipedia page on NoSQL offered you a completely opaque and unhelpful window into how NoSQL worked, and if every tutorial and typical description of the subject seemed to assume you already understood NoSQL, then yes. It woul
262.
by sebastos 10y ago
It's not a false dichotomy, because the above poster isn't presenting a dichotomy at all. We'd all like to see human flourishing AND ecological protection. Sometimes those goals interfere with each other, and sometimes they d
263.
by sebastos 10y ago
This looks amazing. Finally an editor that will work for an ssh session, yet doesn't demand you learn a bunch of unnatural incantations that are completely contrary to all of your everyday muscle memory. And cross platform too. Win, wi
264.
by sebastos 10y ago
I think the point is that if that's true, the concept of complex numbers is being taught incorrectly. If you tell a student that this number is fake but useful, what are they to make of that? It just starts to make mathematics seem spo
265.
by sebastos 10y ago
Yes, particle physics has been stalled for some time, and suddenly a new piece of evidence is going to supply long awaited traction in creating a better explanation. In other words, it's going to crack wide open. You've never hear
266.
by sebastos 11y ago
The statement about the diameter being the interesting parameter is kind of exactly wrong. This is true for all the same reasons Tau is a better constant than Pi. For example, how does one derive the area of a circle? The most natural way i
267.
by sebastos 11y ago
Well, I feel better for going out on 91 now after only 5 numbers.
268.
by sebastos 11y ago
Great little piece. Stuff like this really makes me want to scream. How could these site designers possibly not understand how annoying login screens are? Do they not use the internet themselves? Forced login is the #1 most annoying thing y
269.
by sebastos 11y ago
Not sure I agree. Usually, mathematics is developed backwards - you have a concrete question that you want to answer, and you reason that it can be answered so long as such and such as true. The formal system is developed post-hoc to give y
270.
by sebastos 11y ago
I find this an interesting line of argument, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to eventually find out that the current model is missing a lot of important "second-order" effects that contribute to the convergence towards goo

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