deong

7 ms·

1.
by deong 4y ago
Yep. And there are the formal optimality gaps like "this algorithm provably finds a solution in polynomial time no less than twice the optimum tour length", and there are also the informal "I have no proof of anything, but th
2.
by deong 6y ago
That's not the right analogy. It means you're not allowed to sue someone else for requiring an ID check in order to let you shop there. I'm not a lawyer, but I'd be surprised if this defense was particularly robust anywa
3.
by deong 8y ago
I'm not sure it should really count as a "Lisp book", but The Art of the Metaobject Protocol" is one of my favorite technical books ever. It takes some knocks for not really containing anything about how to use CLOS. Ins
4.
by deong 8y ago
Which 20 Republican senators do you imagine are going to stop him?
5.
by deong 8y ago
Oddly enough, I assume the Google advancement structure values anything but stability. You launch products to get promoted. Maintaining them is for fools and losers. Granted, I have no inside information. That just fits the externally obser
6.
by deong 8y ago
I think you're taking him a bit too literally. In these examples, you're not looking at simplifying anything. You're not getting rid of unneeded code. You're getting rid of debugged and stable code in favor of writing so
7.
by deong 8y ago
They used to as part of their quarterly earnings reports, if I remember correctly. They stopped during the latter part of WoD when by all accounts the subscriber numbers were very low (by WoW standards).
8.
by deong 8y ago
Even local optima are often pretty good in practice. Also, it's a very good practice to iterate through the neighbors in a random order (if you're doing next descent, for steepest descent obviously it doesn't matter).
9.
by deong 8y ago
There's another issue as well. His mapping of difficulty reaching a key isn't really the whole picture. On a conventional QWERTY layout, neither the E nor the C keys are especially hard to reach, but if you had to frequently type
10.
by deong 8y ago
I have the previous xps 13 running linux now. I'd like to support them, but unfortunately, CostCo sold me the Windows version with mostly equivalent specs for like $400 cheaper than Dell had the Developer Edition at the time. I replace
11.
by deong 8y ago
I don't think he's at all concerned about the license. He's just saying most people won't and shouldn't do "real work" on a machine that could break at any point with no possibility for support.
12.
by deong 8y ago
I think if an x1 Carbon ran OS X, you'd see a massive number of people migrating from Macbooks over to it.
13.
by deong 8y ago
Sure, but all of those are different than an admin at hacker news doing an UPDATE posts SET text="I hate brown people" WHERE post_id=17560983 to make you look like a racist (or whatever they wanted to alter your comment t
14.
by deong 8y ago
It's also important to remember just how far Git was ahead of most competitors in performance. I was using monotone quite a bit around this time, and while its UI was frankly not much better than git's, it at least worked acceptab
15.
by deong 8y ago
I believe the recommendation is to use something like Signal or iMessage -- an end-to-end encrypted channel that isn't email.
16.
by deong 8y ago
Almost every email client defaults to HTML. There are going to be people using both encryption and HTML.
17.
by deong 8y ago
I haven't been on a search committee in years, but in the mid 2000s, I think 3-500 was about the norm for a mid-range state school. Not all those people were qualified, but I think you can assume you'll have somewhere on the order
18.
by deong 8y ago
Tenure track positions are not at all hard to fill. There are 500 people applying for every one of them, and probably 350-400 of those people are completely qualified to do the job. But only ten of them are desirable, and a hundred other un
19.
by deong 8y ago
As has been pointed out before, statistics like these "for every five open faculty positions, only one is filled" are incredibly misleading. The reason only one in five is filled is not because there's a shortage of qualified
20.
by deong 8y ago
$125 an hour isn't crazy. I billed that doing some consulting for a company in Memphis maybe five years ago, and that was a no negotiation involved arrangement. I'd worked there before, so they knew me. I threw a number out there
21.
by deong 8y ago
Well yeah. I don't think anyone is under the impression that Apple made a laptop that, by design, fries peripherals when it's charging.
22.
by deong 8y ago
I think it's a general Apple failure mode. They're so wrapped up in the idea of making something completely unheard of, that they overly weight novelty. Most of these "clearly bad ideas" aren't all that clear at the
23.
by deong 8y ago
First, "don't make mistakes" is a policy so idiotic in its conception that I don't think there exists a good-faith argument for advocating for it. Second, a "cover-up" is when you hide evidence of your past mis
24.
by deong 8y ago
> To attempt a sale is not a right, at least not one I am familiar with. It's called "copyright". You have the right to control distribution of your creative work. A direct and unavoidable implication of that is the right
25.
by deong 8y ago
The loss I've suffered is the loss of the right to attempt to sell your friend the file under the terms I want to set. I have the right to set those terms because I did the work of creating the artifact. You're completely allowed
26.
by deong 8y ago
And the correct lotto numbers tomorrow are free once you know them once, but that's not how prices work. And what I'm saying is that you're simply declaring by fiat that there's no loss to the studio when you copy a file
27.
by deong 8y ago
It's only ignorant to apply supply and demand to digital goods if you start from the premise that copyright shouldn't exist. 1. Copyright shouldn't exist. 2. If copyright didn't exist, anyone would be able to get any dig
28.
by deong 8y ago
It's still going because that's the way people talk. You can actually "steal" an idea, even though it's not physically possible to remove the original from the person's mind. You can steal a kiss. You can steal
29.
by deong 8y ago
This is exactly right. When I was teaching machine learning classes, the biggest hurdle I had to get a lot of students over was their history and expectation that they can implement something, fix the compiler errors, fix the runtime crashe
30.
by deong 8y ago
When I was doing my PhD, I once resorted to turning on all logging, printing about 60 pages of the resulting output, taping them to the floor of the lab, and crawling around on all fours with a printout of the source code tracing the execut

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