wnewman

12 ms·

31.
by wnewman 14y ago
There is truth in this. Certainly shipping more is good. But the situation is somewhat analogous to the perennial debate about commenting code, with "talk" playing the comment role and "ship[ped code]" playing the code role, so that your "t
32.
by wnewman 14y ago
There are subfields of programming that generate more than their share of subtle gotchas, so that one should be particularly careful even when doing many routine (aka "trivial") things. E.g., security, or multithreaded stuff. From my single
33.
by wnewman 14y ago
For most web text I heartily agree with your quote. But in some cases, e.g., a large family of pages which are to share nontrivial layout (perhaps one page documenting each function in a software library, with standardized formatting for th
34.
by wnewman 15y ago
You write "For distances over 20 miles, if you can't beat car travel for a family of 4 (about 8 cents per mile per person) you suck at your job." Like many other critics of cars, you seem to implicitly consider the value of travellers' time
35.
by wnewman 15y ago
It isn't like that because paying money to someone in exchange for merely being evaluated is an easy way to fall for a scam: the evaluator has a significant incentive to offer this deal to people who will fail. It is much more like having t
36.
by wnewman 15y ago
You write, in comparing "our" (presumably US) system to the Finns that our system is not only ineffective and inefficient, it is immoral . Are you saying that non-internationalist socialism is inherently moral while individual property rig
37.
by wnewman 15y ago
Any assignment that expects footnotes probably ought to have graders who scan the footnotes, and I find it particularly funny, in a grim and ghastly way, that no one tripped over the jests concentrated there. Bollock & Maidenhead _The
38.
by wnewman 15y ago
Your question might need to be constructed more carefully in order to cleanly disentangle spatial visualization from math ability. I have noticed that I seem to be best at math that I can somehow analogize to geometry or to tangible physics
39.
by wnewman 15y ago
It seems to me that Kurzweil is on rather strong grounds when he argues in effect that 25Mbytes is a safe conservative upper bound on the information needed to specify a human infant brain. The relevant information content of the epigenetic
40.
by wnewman 15y ago
It's actually not crazy small considering what you can expect from natural selection (strongly constrained by the bit error rate in reproduction, more weakly constrained by the total number of selection events in the population since some e
41.
by wnewman 15y ago
I thought it was unreasonable for him to choose to compare to the second law of thermo, which is lawful in a much stronger way (very precisely stated, understood in a quantitative way at microfoundations...) than the pattern in accelerating
42.
by wnewman 15y ago
There's probably more to it than that. Humans do typically play Go on 19x19 boards, but Go is still relatively hard for computers (compared to Chess) even on smaller boards like 9x9, where the branching factor is reasonably comparable to Ch
43.
by wnewman 15y ago
Very little is certain in economics. Possibly the best thing for our economic future would be unemployment in excess of 63%, high enough for the two programmers in Atlanta who currently carry in their brains the complementary halves of an a
44.
by wnewman 15y ago
I think a certain amount of "horses for courses" caution is called for here. Some skills seem much more suited to learning by doing than others. Even within a particular field of endeavor, some skills seem more suited to learning by doing t
45.
by wnewman 15y ago
The author wrote "This formula, as anyone can see, makes no sense at all. I decided that Fourier must have been speaking to aliens, because if you gave me all the time and paper in the world, I would not have been able to come up with that.
46.
by wnewman 16y ago
Noahlt wrote "Today, do any colleges even consider this?" It probably depends on the school. Perhaps in some pretty perverse ways. I'm surprised no one has mentioned the Espenshade and Radford study yet. It's quoted at e.g. http://www.tran
47.
by wnewman 16y ago
PFDS is a very good book even if you have no particular interest in functional programming. It's not the first book you should read on algorithms (hey, they didn't title it _Introduction to Algorithms_ for nothing), but I think PFDS is a ve
48.
by wnewman 16y ago
I have generally found it very helpful to spend a lot of time understanding the behavior simple concrete cases, and understanding how a general mathematical principle applies to them. The visualizable low-dimensional case of analytic geomet
49.
by wnewman 16y ago
When you write "the fuel is extremely hot and takes about a week to cool it to a normal level," perhaps what you mean is not that the fuel is literally physically hot, but that the fuel is so radioactive that it continues releasing a signif
50.
by wnewman 16y ago
If anyone does something like this, I'd suggest supporting not just http://junk.launchpad.net/~jmillikin/ but also something like http://junk.launchpad.net/~~jmillikinpersonalwebsite.com/ , embedding other domain names in URLs for your
51.
by wnewman 16y ago
You don't need to think the human species is chosen, just that it's extremely unusual. It's not superstition to notice the worldwide explosion of human population displacing many many specialized species (e.g., top predators). It's not supe
52.
by wnewman 16y ago
For some evidence that your point "it's quite possible" isn't merely some idle hypothetical, search for "Webb" and "Seager" in http://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/retrospectives.pdf The same author (Leonard) also published a paper i
53.
by wnewman 16y ago
Air and sea combat tend to place a big premium on being faster. If you can cruise strategic distances or sprint tactical distances significantly faster than your opponent, all sorts of choices open up for you. (Notably: you choose whether t