smanek

59 ms·

571.
by smanek 17y ago
woah, I've been using Emacs for years and never heard of Elpa. I always managed my .emacs by hand ... ELPA may be worth looking into though. Anyone have any first hand experience?
572.
by smanek 17y ago
Not necessarily ... If you're 'over-qualified' for a particular job, then you're either going to be promoted or switch jobs very quickly. In either case, the company still has to spend a lot of time and money training your replacement.
573.
by smanek 17y ago
In my experience, the downside of BDB is simply the license. There is no way for me to use it in my program (and distribute my program) without opening up my source. I can't simply 'query' a BDB server - by using BDB at all I have to link t
574.
by smanek 17y ago
Dividing numbers with exponents is simple - you just subtract. A^B / A^C = A^(B-C) This is an obvious result of the rules of arithmetic. To use a concrete example: A^3/A^2 = A because A^3 is A x A x A divided by A^2 is A x A, then the two A
575.
by smanek 17y ago
I've heard the idea bandied about that we should just drop the ambiguous names (w.r.t., the whole long/short scale thing) and start using scientific notation. It is much more obvious that 10^12/10^6 = 10^6
576.
by smanek 17y ago
If you like that you might also be interested in Benford's Law which points out some really unexpected Digit distributions in a lot of data sets. Smeed's law is one my favorites. It accurately predicts the traffic fatality rate as a functio
577.
by smanek 17y ago
The link doesn't seem to be working but (if you're talking about what I think you're talking about) that isn't Joel's idea. It's Apps Hungarian notation which was invented in the 70s at PARC. Although, IMHO, it's just a poor attempt to comp
578.
by smanek 17y ago
I don't think there are a fixed number of winners in advance ... My expected return may go down if the person in front of my wins (I have to split with more people, so each winner gets less) - but my chances of winning don't change.
579.
by smanek 17y ago
This essay seems particularly relevant (and contradictory): http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/09/stratified-by-c.html
580.
by smanek 17y ago
That just isn't true. As an obvious counter example, asymmetric encryption (gpg,et. al) is very slow. Which means that if I need to encrypt a lot of data at rest it sometimes makes sense to use a symmetric cipher. Security (even just the su
581.
by smanek 17y ago
Considering that Newspapers lose money on each sale, it sounds good. For example, a $1 newspaper costs the paper $1.50 to print and distribute. In theory, they are supposed to make back that 50 cent loss (plus cover all their other operatin
582.
by smanek 17y ago
I would definitely agree. The 'gmail' part didn't strike me as out of place so much as the 'zackster' part. I believe Zackattack's name is 'Zachary Burt', which would make 'zackster' an informal (and, in my opinion, somewhat frat-ty) nickna
583.
by smanek 17y ago
If so, I misinterpreted it. My impression was that: 1) Zackattack doubts that the labor market is good for LAMP hackers, and puts out feelers suggesting that he is looking for work in the field ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=614130 )
584.
by smanek 17y ago
For what it is worth, if you are actively looking for work a more professional email address would be better. Ideally, it should be something like 'zburt@mydomain.com' (or zach.burt, zach, etc) where mydomain.com hosts your resume, professi
585.
by smanek 17y ago
I think people are just having trouble reconciling some conflicting data they are getting. I know: 1) Wolfram is a very smart man - probably smarter than you or I (depending on the value of 'you'). This is backed up by numerous bona fides s
586.
by smanek 17y ago
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=609997 The salient point is that even if I'm happy to subsidize that sort of lifestyle, I don't think the government should make the decision for me (especially not at the point of a gun).
587.
by smanek 17y ago
You don't understand. I am all for charity (I give a fair amount myself). Any of us could fall on hard times. But I am against being forced to give money to these sorts of causes. What if I, personally, feel like there is somebody else wh
588.
by smanek 17y ago
Did you read the article? "Just around the corner from Norway’s central bank, for instance, Paul Bruum takes a needle full of amphetamines and jabs it into his muscular arm. His scabs and sores betray many years as a heroin addict. He says
589.
by smanek 17y ago
Ideally yes - but we can't (ethically) do that ;-)
590.
by smanek 17y ago
That isn't fair - there is selection bias. You have to compare people who were accepted to college and choose not to go to those who choose to go. Then, subtract the opportunity cost of the money the college goers paid (i.e., cost * expecte
591.
by smanek 17y ago
I think the problem is that the semantic web is fundamentally very similar to the sort of 'logical ai' (Prolog, Cyc, etc) that is often blamed for the AI winter. Eliezer made a fairly convincing argument that a lot of this is the result of
592.
by smanek 17y ago
I think 'deceleration' is more ambiguous. I tend to think of derivatives taken with respect to time in terms of high school physics. Let x = postion x' = velocity x'' = acceleration x''' = jerk (and, incidentally, the 4th through 6th deriva
593.
by smanek 17y ago
Not all of them. I've read Ultimate Imperative, Ultimate GOTO, and Ultimate Opcode (along with Sussman's SICP, which covers some similar ground). To the best of my recollection, I haven't seen these on HN before. Have they been posted befor
594.
The Original Lambda Papers (Guy Steele and Gerald Sussman)(library.readscheme.org)
21 points by smanek 17y ago|3 comments
595.
by smanek 17y ago
So, it would violate SR under certain conditions (just as SR/QM violate newtonian mechanics under certain conditions?). Boy, we really need a unified field theory to work out the kinks in physics ... I guess this could be a chance for Strin
596.
by smanek 17y ago
How would that avoid violating Special Relativity (and giving rise to all sorts of nasty paradoxes)? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity#Causality_an...
597.
by smanek 17y ago
How is the Nash equilibrium for stock prices infinity when inflation is greater than the interest rate on bonds? I can see that being the case when the universe of goods consists solely of stocks and bonds (i.e., no other products are avail
598.
by smanek 17y ago
No. Don't use a big word that you don't understand when a simple one will do.
599.
by smanek 18y ago
Lisp is not, by any reasonable stretch of the imagination, fast. The key is that most applications aren't CPU bound anymore. If speed is that important, use foreign function calls (or, better yet, Haskell). And I say this as a long time CL
600.
by smanek 18y ago
? Maybe I'm being a bit dim, but I have no idea what that means. Care to expand?

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