smanek

89 ms·

751.
by smanek 18y ago
A PhD, even in the hard sciences, is rarely worth while monetarily. Most people driven/smart enough to successfully complete a PhD at a top school would also excel in the corporate world (or law/business/med school). Financially, it probabl
752.
by smanek 18y ago
I don't know Ruby, but the author's comments suggest that why_'s way is more brittle, longer, and slower. How is it better then?
753.
by smanek 18y ago
Well, my iMac tops out at 3GB of RAM, which makes running a VM a little tough. As an example, yesterday I was doing some work in SBCL (Lisp) that required multithreading. Due to a bug in sb-thread in the Mac implementation of SBCL I needed
754.
Ask YC: What kind of desktop to buy?
2 points by smanek 18y ago|5 comments
755.
by smanek 18y ago
Because by the time a java exception is caught, the stack has already been unwound too far (because java must do so to find the nearest exception handler). Lisp, basically, keeps track of exception handlers in a table seperate from the runt
756.
by smanek 18y ago
Even if each individual agent isn't rational it is possible that, on average, we are. Think of a room full of gas that you slowly heat. All sorts of quantum effects and chaos affect individual particles. But, on average, we can predict the
757.
by smanek 18y ago
I think that seems true. I'm not particularly good (just moderately competent), and had no trouble finding work in what is ostensibly one of the worst economies in 70 years.
758.
by smanek 18y ago
The problem for most information jobs is it's very hard to measure performance. Basically, I don't know how long a particular task should take, since every task is so different. It's very easy to notice when a guy on an assembly line is sla
759.
by smanek 18y ago
Foreign Affairs (by the Council on Foreign Relations) is great too, if you like The Economist. It goes even more in depth. And I like the NYTimes, just for their investigative journalism and op-eds (except Krugman ;-)). Exposing the warrant
760.
by smanek 18y ago
Being able to search for functions/libraries by type signatures is very, very useful.
761.
by smanek 18y ago
An 'inner join' would be nice. A few years ago I worked at a large financial consulting firm, and I was amazed at how often accountants would implement what basically amounted to an 'inner join' using nested iteration over columns in vba. T
762.
by smanek 18y ago
I'm not entirely certain how this works, but I live in a fairly residential neighborhood in a Boston suburb, and this was able to pinpoint my street address exactly. I'd love to read about how this actually works - their site is a little sp
763.
by smanek 18y ago
I guess it's a matter of definitions. The kind of linguistics Chomsky worked on were rather mathematical, for example, see the Chomsky Hierarchy ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy ) which is used extensively in Computer Scienc
764.
by smanek 18y ago
I would contend that bias has to do more with interpretation of facts, than of facts themselves (although, obviously, you can create bias through selective presentation of facts as well). Basically, it reduces to which side of the is-ought
765.
by smanek 18y ago
Logo isn't too bad. It's open source, scheme derived, and very easy to make games (beginners like immediate feedback). http://education.mit.edu/starlogo/ At 13, he may be too old for it, but Logo was one of my first languages back in elem
766.
by smanek 18y ago
I was fairly interested in the article. It was a little short on context but, from what I gathered, Horowitz et al. posit that college professors lean dramatically left and pressure their students to do so as well. Based on my experience, t
767.
by smanek 18y ago
In the real world there are transaction costs - but for most people in the example given (college students selling event tickets) they don't come anywhere near $1000.
768.
by smanek 18y ago
You didn't understand. The point was that the same person would pay $X for good A, but will only sell good A for $B, where $B >> $A.. Let's pretend that if I want a widget I am willing to pay $1 (but not $2) for it. That means I wou
769.
by smanek 18y ago
One of the things that struck me was that "People are sometimes willing to sacrifice the pleasure they get from an experience in order to project a certain image to others...People, particularly those with a high need for uniqueness, may sa
770.
by smanek 18y ago
Pretty useful. It would be nice to be able to see the top stories over any arbitrary time period as well. I imagine an interface with a draggable timeline to specify the period (something similar to what google finance uses, perhaps) could
771.
by smanek 18y ago
The article is a bit fluffy, you can find some more details at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_map_algorithm
772.
The Universal Algorithm(sciencenews.org)
4 points by smanek 18y ago|1 comments
773.
by smanek 18y ago
Reminds me a lot of the split brain phenomena ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain ). "Split-brain patients may sometimes confabulate a rational account of their behavior, if the true motivations cannot be reported since they may depe
774.
by smanek 18y ago
That's very true. I personally like clojure - and it does provide a lot of potential advantages to common lisp. I just don't think the author of this article understands them - he's just spewing bs. Hickey does make a lot of valid points ab
775.
by smanek 18y ago
But common lisp does come with vectors (make-array), hashtables (make-hash-table), and set-operators (intersection, union, pushnew, etc) that work on lists. Also, Common Lisp (CLOS, in particular) supports multimethods (defmethod), contrar
776.
by smanek 18y ago
As long as you don't carry a balance on your credit card, one of the other cards may very well have been the right choice. I personally chose an Amex card with better rewards, but higher interest, since I pay it off in full every month. You
777.
by smanek 18y ago
I honestly don't think that 'cram schools' are particularly effective. I taught for the Princeton Review for a while ($20+/hr when I was 18 sounded pretty good). In my experience, the average student would only gain about an extra 50 points
778.
by smanek 18y ago
Ignorance is fine. It's trying to force your ignorance on others (like that teacher did) that's bad. If you don't understand the issue, don't forcibly confiscate the free software and yell at people. I don't understand (many aspects of) bio
779.
by smanek 18y ago
Not by a long shot. I'd argue by that metric Labs are hundreds of orders of magnitudes better. A few of the big ones (in recent history) off the top of my head: -Norman Borlaug invented Dwarf Wheat while at a lab in Mexico. It has been esti
780.
by smanek 18y ago
Common Lisp came out of ANSI, and I'd say it doesn't look like C++ ;-)

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