time_management

14 ms·

91.
by time_management 18y ago
So who is a better bet, from an admission's office's perspective, a kid from a poor background or a kid from a very wealthy background, assuming their grades, quality of high school education, test scores, et al are identical? (I'm assuming
92.
by time_management 18y ago
Solid, but you missed the enormous influence of yield optimization, especially among the Ivy League colleges that use sophisticated models to predict yield. Colleges care intensely about yield, for two reasons. The first is that it reduces
93.
by time_management 18y ago
I don't think it applies to Hacker News, because no one "games" karma, and having a high score doesn't seem to give anyone special influence over site content. Wikipedia certainly has this problem, though. It seems to appeal to those with t
94.
by time_management 18y ago
I tend to think of "interestingness" as a fuzzy property that is at or near 1 on the obviously interesting integers {0, 1, ...} and approaches 0 as N -> infinity. But that obviously doesn't alter the fact that "interestingness" is extre
95.
by time_management 18y ago
I like the one about all positive integers being interesting better. There, at least you have to break out the fuzzy logic to debate the "proof"'s value. There is probably a tie for shortest Wikipedia non-notable page at 0 characters. Filte
96.
by time_management 18y ago
I missed the date, and honestly thought it had been written recently in response to the 2008 crisis. (Edit: never mind; the blog post was. Apologies for misunderstanding you.)
97.
by time_management 18y ago
I disagree with him strongly on a lot of political issues, but he's right on the overarching philosophical point that people in most circumstances (business bureaucracies with extensive lobbying arms being the worst offenders) want exemptio
98.
by time_management 18y ago
I think he means "irrelevant" in the same sense as that by which Paul Graham considers Microsoft "dead". The problem with the game industry (and much of the entertainment industry) is that anything with a $20 million budget is going to be d
99.
by time_management 18y ago
Since you're already familiar with Java, consider using Clojure, a Lisp that runs on the JVM and therefore has access to all the Java libraries. Java and Clojure have full interactivity, so if you need speed, you can always move the perform
100.
by time_management 18y ago
He just made it too fuckin' easy. What, two weeks between those two posts?
101.
by time_management 18y ago
I'm glad that Michael Arrington is a firm believer in fair play and egalitarianism: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/02/back-i-am/ When my time was up to leave, I asked Potts if I could stay another week. He said something about being f
102.
by time_management 18y ago
No. Standard time is (in most places) closer to solar time. The issue is that, when political time is fixed, most people naturally develop a habit of waking up around the winter sunrise, year-round. This means that 1-3 hours of light, durin
103.
by time_management 18y ago
$480m / 300m people = $1.60 per person. DST covers 2/3 of the work-year, or approximately 160 work days. So it buys us 160 hours of extra evening light. (I'm not counting weekends, because then the distinction between the hour lost of morni
104.
by time_management 18y ago
Question, because I'm certain somebody knows: is that story of 100 IQ - 60 = 180 - 140 in terms of relative intelligence true? Not really. "180 IQ" is taken to mean two different things. Precociousness is the first; a 6-year-old with the
105.
by time_management 18y ago
Just thought of "The Raft" in Snow Crash .
106.
by time_management 18y ago
I prefer small-function programming, but I think there are needed caveats. Code reuse and easy testability are obvious upsides of small-function programming but, most importantly, interactive development is easier and more fun. You can test
107.
by time_management 18y ago
Probably much higher. I'd bet that it's 50% at least. Aside from health insurance, one of the biggest hurdles to startup generation is the uncertain career effect. Being YC-funded essentially means that Paul Graham is vouching for your time
108.
by time_management 18y ago
I think the key is to avoid a certain set of developed traits that might be called "horsemen of the mediocralypse"-- learned laziness, learned helplessness, deference to authority, and discouraged distraction. I'm sure that many others that
109.
by time_management 18y ago
The worst thing about drugs is drug-related violence. Cocaine and heroin are quite bad for the body, but most of the harm they do comes from their illegal status and the crime surrounding them. Even addiction's not as terrible as it's mad
110.
by time_management 18y ago
Right, but let's consider the difference between a recession and a depression. A recession is a contraction in a healthy economy. It's normal, and probably necessary. A depression is something worse. We don't know yet if this is a recession
111.
by time_management 18y ago
I used the word "schooling" instead of "education" intentionally, as I was speaking more about institutionalized, credential-backed education. College used to open doors. Now it's essentially mandatory if you want even the right to apply fo
112.
by time_management 18y ago
What math department? I was in math grad school for a year at UW-Madison.
113.
by time_management 18y ago
This isn't really new. Academia has been in this recession for almost 3 decades. Universities are just using the recession an an excuse to ramp up the same garbage one more notch. One reason universities get away with this horseshit is that
114.
by time_management 18y ago
I like DST, but not because it saves energy. It just seems silly to sleep through the best light because the rest of the world is on a late cycle. Before DST, factories and shops had summer and winter hours. Work might start at 6:30 in the
115.
by time_management 18y ago
Python is correct. It's promoting to bignum, while the others are using floats, presumably, and passing them off as integers. I think they ought to display 1.0333147966386144e40. Your average wannabe-banker/Wharton undergrad has never heard
116.
by time_management 18y ago
But I would also argue that 4-5 levels of quality is too much, because is the grader comparing papers to other papers, or to some ideal paper that exists in his mind? I think, in general, the grades A, B, and C map to the following standa
117.
by time_management 18y ago
It's basically an honesty test, since the interviewer explicitly says not to use paper or a calculator (which would include Excel). Quants are given harder questions, and I doubt that a trader would be dinged for not knowing the correct app
118.
by time_management 18y ago
Making homework optional across the board (e.g. you can get an A if you ace the exams) is silly. It makes sense for a few courses (e.g. freshman writing, calculus sequence, intro language) which exist to train a specific mastery that can be
119.
by time_management 18y ago
Trying to do real programming in SAS is a nightmare. The language sucks. Also, it's proprietary and expensive. It's surprising that statisticians would fail to understand the importance of testing, given that a lot of the root issues in sta
120.
by time_management 18y ago
I worked at a hedge fund where one of the phone-screen brainteasers was "How many zeros are at the end of 35!?" The very not-smart people would try to use Excel for this, and get hilariously (and obviously) incorrect results due to rounding

More ›