sethg

83 ms·

901.
by sethg 18y ago
Is employee A working late nights because he or she is working hard, or to fix bugs introduced by careless coding the previous afternoon, or because for every hour physically at the office, 45 minutes is spent reading HN? It's hard for the
902.
by sethg 18y ago
It's in Spolsky's interests to hire people who "could" manage multiple projects if given that responsibility I'm not sure that's true. I've never been a project manager, but I have had a job where I would sit idle for weeks at a time be
903.
by sethg 18y ago
I have this mental list of "things I would love to see and am too lazy to actually implement right now and maybe someone else will come up with the same idea and spare me the work". And now I can cross another item off of that list.
904.
by sethg 18y ago
While I agree with the principle "never attribute to malice that which can be explained by ignorance", I think a discussion of how a certain action caused damage , and how to remedy that damage, can be easily sidetracked by a discussion of
905.
by sethg 18y ago
From my own limited experience, ancient documents tended to be very elliptical; when everything had to be copied out by hand the reader was expected to do a little more work to understand what documents meant. So this tablet may have been
906.
by sethg 18y ago
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a long article on Pythagoras that doesn't mention the whole rutti-tutti-irrationality issue. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pythagoras/ They do say that we don't have anything written by Pyth
907.
A 3700-year-old proof that the diagonal of a unit square has length √2(math.ubc.ca)
54 points by sethg 18y ago|23 comments
908.
by sethg 18y ago
I am suddenly reminded of how, after a few months studying in an Israeli religious school, I switched my note-taking from English to Hebrew--not because I was terribly fluent in Hebrew, but because the books I was studying (canonical Jewish
909.
by sethg 18y ago
I should also note that being a native speaker of the English language does not automatically make one able to write coherent technical documentation in English. Unfortunately.
910.
by sethg 18y ago
Can anyone tell me any programming language which doesn't use english keywords!?! APL?
911.
by sethg 18y ago
I once attended what must have been the minimal possible Orthodox Jewish wedding; bride, groom, ten men including a rabbi, a ring, a cup of wine, and a prayer shawl that four men held aloft to make a chuppah . No dinner, no DJ, no videogr
912.
by sethg 18y ago
MIT Press has about as much to do with the MIT undergraduate curriculum as the MIT Real Estate Office, so I don't think citing their new-books list proves anything.
913.
by sethg 18y ago
I'm wondering if pressure on MIT to develop demonstrable practical skills in underclassmen has increased since (classic) 6.001 was introduced. I mean, if you're smart enough to get into MIT in the first place and you learn Scheme as a
914.
by sethg 18y ago
All aboard LambdaTrak!
915.
by sethg 18y ago
...more mundanely, countries with lots of gold available to mine could manipulate the rest of the world's economies by strategically deciding when to grant or restrict mining concessions. It would be an interesting mathematical exercise to
916.
by sethg 18y ago
IIUC one downside of the European monetary integration is that if, say, the German economy is doing fine while Italy is in recession, then Italy cannot simply loosen up its currency to boost demand while Germany keeps its currency tight. I
917.
How the US government bailed out the railroads…and made a profit(washingtonmonthly.com)
13 points by sethg 18y ago|4 comments
918.
by sethg 18y ago
It's not uncommon for a middle-class family to buy a multi-family house, live in one unit, and rent out the others.
919.
by sethg 18y ago
If you conspire with your doctor or your lawyer to commit a crime , then your discussions in furtherance of that conspiracy are not privileged.
920.
by sethg 18y ago
We need to define a new milestone before "ramen profitable". Perhaps we can call it "beer profitable", as in, you can't actually live off your profits but you can buy the occasional beer with them.
921.
by sethg 18y ago
Mark-Jason Dominus proposed a different gimmick, long before LOLcats were invented: http://perl.plover.com/yak/presentation/samples/slide024.htm...
922.
by sethg 18y ago
It seems to me that validation would be especially helpful when you're composing one Web page out of a bunch of smaller components; if, say, each component is in its own <div> and your validator confirms that it's a proper <div&
923.
by sethg 18y ago
Nobody went into debt for college. You either saved money in advance or worked your way through. The Federal government has been loaning money directly to college students since 1958 and has been guaranteeing bank-originated student loans
924.
by sethg 18y ago
Compared with some of the things American financiers were believing during the height of the bubble, elves and trolls seem downright rational.
925.
by sethg 18y ago
I wish more classes used "portfolio assessment" to rate their students... http://www.unm.edu/~devalenz/handouts/portfolio.html ...but given how labor-intensive it is to grade a portfolio, I can't blame teachers for shying away from the te
926.
by sethg 18y ago
Well colleges use a combination of factors--grades, class rank, standardized-test scores, extracurricular activities, football talent--to decide who they are going to admit, and the practical difference between a first-tier and second-tier
927.
by sethg 18y ago
What if the teacher feels that ten homework assignments can cover more breadth than two or three tests, and therefore can give a more accurate picture of the student's abilities? Would you also redefine those homework assignments as "tests
928.
by sethg 18y ago
There's no sense in prescribing a change to "our grading system" without even referring to the content of the class that's being graded, based on the assumption that all the work a teacher gives out to students can be classified as "homewor
929.
by sethg 18y ago
I am astounded that in response to proposals to add closures to Java, many Java programmers protested that Java didn't need no stinkin' closures.
930.
by sethg 18y ago
Do I also have a moral obligation to click on the ads, in case the ad purchaser is being paid by the click instead of by the audience size? If I watch a TV show with commercials, do I have a moral right to go to the bathroom during the comm

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