trominos

17 ms·

91.
by trominos 18y ago
"Paul Graham said that most philosophers have been wasting their time. Now I'll refute the statement that all philosophers have been wasting their time. Also, speculation about neuroscience counts as philosophy as long as the people invol
92.
by trominos 18y ago
From what I get out of the blurb on the linked page, reddit's only asking a given person to donate the kind of work that he does professionally. Which would actually make this a rare instance of volunteer work where your point doesn't apply
93.
by trominos 18y ago
Dunno about that. I read the first seven (I think) chapters of Outliers, and I can only remember Gladwell using two statistically relevant pieces of information: that sports players are born close to the cutoff line for their sport, and tha
94.
by trominos 18y ago
> If you can't calculate the value of it, then it has no defined value. That's not true. The Busy Beaver function is a counterexample: it's possible to enumerate all n-rule Turing machines. Each such machine either halts after a finite
95.
by trominos 18y ago
This is not exactly on-topic, but here's a question that I still haven't gotten a good answer to: People who are excited about a potential singularity: why? Doesn't the idea of being obsolete scare you?
96.
by trominos 18y ago
Seems great. Are there any similarly gentle intros to emacs?
97.
by trominos 18y ago
We can do something about downvoting. Being gratuitously shocked and horrified at some more-or-less random kid's suicide is just obnoxious. FWIW, tdavis, I wasn't offended by your comment, except to the extent that it makes HN more reddit-l
98.
by trominos 18y ago
Watching N.YC become reddit is more painful than I thought it would be.
99.
by trominos 18y ago
No, it demonstrates that you don't need to be nice to be religious. PS: This is an ugly topic and a terrible article. Can we please get some moderation in here?
100.
by trominos 18y ago
Can you elaborate? I don't really know what you mean by "middle school cafeteria." If you're talking about obsession with status, I've got a few friends at Harvard and none of them are more concerned with status than any mildly ambitious pe
101.
by trominos 18y ago
So? Tax rates are determined (well, should be) by what works. If some double taxation is good for the nation, more power to it.
102.
by trominos 18y ago
Your engine actually seems superior to Google in some ways, which is fantastic. I've always wondered if a single person could do something technologically novel in search; you seem to have done so. I wouldn't be surprised if your engine ope
103.
by trominos 18y ago
Well, people have been cooling themselves for literally millions of years without adverse effects. Of all the performance enhancers you could buy, including legal ones, the Glove seems the least likely to screw you up long-term.
104.
by trominos 18y ago
Sweet Jesus, why is Apple the only computer company in the world that understands (and applies) the idea that, in the age of Core Duos and 2 GB RAM standard, style is the primary thing most people want in their computer?
105.
by trominos 18y ago
Did you guys see Bee Movie? Did you see the Jerry Seinfeld ads for it? Compared to the BM ads, especially, this is pretty funny. (I actually think it's decent on its own, but I've always been a big Seinfeld fan.) It doesn't do much for MS's
106.
by trominos 18y ago
So open it to the public. After the election, publicly associate each password to a vote; also make people register for passwords and keep track of the number of people who register. Then after the election ask people to check that their
107.
by trominos 18y ago
Okay. But what if everybody (or almost everybody) prefers SUVs? And I guess we need to extend the analogy a little more: what if everybody needs a car, and their parents are buying them one, and the parents choose primarily based on cost,
108.
by trominos 18y ago
Yeah, but if college's function of "preparing you for work" is taken over by vocational schools, it's not clear that there will still be a market for our current conception of college. And I'm sure that a lot of you will say that that's an
109.
by trominos 18y ago
The ugliest parts of Perl (in my admittedly not-exceptionally-well-informed opinion) are dereferencing variables and automatic list flattening. I honestly don't know what kind of crazy design process could possibly lead to the way Perl hand
110.
Is Philosophy Worthwhile?
5 points by trominos 18y ago|8 comments
111.
by trominos 18y ago
It may be possible that each universe will simulate a substantially simpler universe; it would of course be impossible to tell whether you universe has "lower resolution" from the inside, cause you'd have no frame of reference.
112.
by trominos 18y ago
In the long run, maybe. But I certainly think it's plausible that a startup could out-develop Google in a relatively unexplored area over the course of a year or two—and that's all they need, since their exit strategy is (presumably) gettin
113.
by trominos 18y ago
I thought that the entire startup culture was based on the idea that a startup could outpace a behemoth like Google or Microsoft.
114.
by trominos 18y ago
Well, we only all have to die once for it to be a big deal.
115.
by trominos 18y ago
That clip was like... the anti-humor. Why is that guy so popular?
116.
by trominos 18y ago
>Some people wind up majoring in the humanities and social sciences because they can't cut it in highly mathematical disciplines, sure. But it's also true that many of the mathematically adept are also weak in the humanities and social
117.
by trominos 18y ago
Right. It's vital that incentives are not made to feel like "awards," but are instead seen as part of the compensation structure. (I think that the "incentive pay" Joel's talking about really means "public awards, possibly with cash associa
118.
by trominos 18y ago
This article didn't talk about incentive pay , it talked about incentive superficialities. Which are of course generally degrading. IMX, incentive pay isn't the same way—provided that it's actually significant, as opposed to a largely-mean
119.
by trominos 18y ago
Collatz is completely unapproachable. Sure, anybody can understand what it's saying and run the algorithm on a couple of numbers. Very few people will be able to do anything else with it. (I think that saying that you can "understand why Co
120.
by trominos 18y ago
I can't tell if this is a joke or not, but if it's serious it's not a good idea. Working on one impossible problem is a good way to get frustrated as hell.

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