jfv

6 ms·

1.
by jfv 8y ago
Do you still see ads? Yep.
2.
by jfv 8y ago
I've been asking myself this question for over 20 years: who are these people that click on ads anyway? Ads are inherently going to be the opposite of Google's values, yet Google depends on them for the vast majority of their reve
3.
by jfv 8y ago
I think it's highly probable that either the technology will be rebuilt in a way that makes abuse possible (Google being relatively open with their technology has this side effect), or that Google won't put in enough safeguards to
4.
by jfv 8y ago
This is clearly not a good-faith effort for Google to have you stop wasting time. Youtube has been around for over a decade and they're just getting to this now? I think this is clearly a minimum amount of effort to prevent backlash, a
5.
by jfv 8y ago
I don't need reservations that badly. But the difference between having to specify Mechanical Turk work and just talking to a Google appliance is pretty huge... We're talking hours vs. minutes of work.
6.
by jfv 8y ago
People that are excited by this are being way too naive here.
7.
by jfv 8y ago
I feel like this is going to make the world even flakier than it already is. If I can waste people's time without even the few minutes it normally takes to make a phone call, what's to stop a restauranteur from effectively denial-
8.
by jfv 8y ago
This is advice for Amazon employees specifically. The incentives are not for him to give advice on how to become Jeff Bezos.
9.
by jfv 8y ago
Easy for him to say. If you're at the bottom, you get little satisfaction or recognition for performing well, and are instead judged based on things like how much time you've spent in the office, how much code you've written,
10.
by jfv 8y ago
I agree. It's (usually intuitively learned) reasoning that's very similar to the logical reasoning of mathematics. I think if you were to study, say, calculus in a manner typical of a first course in college, you'd be missing
11.
by jfv 8y ago
I think if you're a programmer wondering what math will help you in your career, which is the question this article is trying to answer, this article is misleading. Most working programmers won't have to know any math beyond arith
12.
by jfv 8y ago
I think this is how we should revamp science education. Teach people how to examine the evidence and how one can fool themselves. Less inclined plane problems, more scientific reasoning.
13.
by jfv 8y ago
This book made proof based math approachable for me. There are mechanical aspects to proofs that are probably best practiced in a structured way and this book does that by also acquainting you with set theory.
14.
by jfv 8y ago
Do NOT read Rudin. He is terse and unless you are already well versed in mathematics it is simply incomprehensible. My recommendation would be Spivak’s calculus. There are a million great exercises and the book is beautifully typeset and ov
15.
by jfv 9y ago
Everyone gets into coding a different way. If she is inclined toward design, I would definitely start with HTML and go from there. As a new coder even things like learning the tree-like structure of HTML, the brutality of an errant slash or
16.
by jfv 9y ago
Maybe someone with a knowledge of nutrition and medicine can clear this up for me. As I understand it, there are two types of fiber that are lumped into the term "dietary fiber": soluble fiber and insoluble fiber. I believe that b
17.
by jfv 9y ago
Sure... have worked over the last 15 years in software startups and large companies as everything from an engineer to an adviser.
18.
by jfv 9y ago
I’d say having virtually nobody dying of overdoses, going through withdrawals or detox, or being dependent makes it not a big issue, yes.
19.
by jfv 9y ago
Drug abuse is not a big issue in SV in general. There are a few general themes: 1) Some startups have a heavy-drinking bro-y environment. 2) Weed is common outside of work (in all of SF) 3) As part of the burning man culture a lot of people
20.
by jfv 9y ago
Proprietary software vendors market their software as being more secure through FUD in general. This isn't specific to the car industry. What's sad is that this article uses exactly the same rhetorical tactics. The failures of T
21.
by jfv 9y ago
I've always found that being in a serious/stable relationship tends to slowly cut people off over time. I honestly like being single in my mid-30's because there's always a little kick in the pants to get out and sociali
22.
by jfv 9y ago
Are you a working software engineer already? If so, you might want to wait until you know what you want to study before aimlessly pursuing a degree. Also this is a pretty lazy post. More details than 'experienced dev' would be app
23.
by jfv 9y ago
To be fair, reinforcement learning can be done with neural networks and can be seen as a form of "unsupervised learning". The results aren't as spectacular (yet?) as what we've seen in unsupervised learning, but it has p
24.
by jfv 9y ago
Hmm, don't think I understand your first argument. If 72% of MIT undergraduates graduate without loan debt, this almost certainly includes all of the students (29%) coming from the top 5%. There are certainly people that are dissuaded
25.
by jfv 9y ago
MIT is known for having a good financial aid program and a large endowment (MIT's is around a third of Harvard's!) could improve that even further. I can imagine that being very impactful in the long term.
26.
by jfv 9y ago
I would build some cool side projects. Not a ton of them (like not 50 CRUD websites), but a few good ones. Things that showcase interest and ability to pick up on new things. Remember, you're taking a shortcut into a well-paying profes
27.
by jfv 9y ago
Like so many discussions that bring out the same old discussions year after year, this one is marred by 1) Oversimplification 2) Arguing over semantics The term 10x engineer is particularly bad because it implies something: that some engine
28.
by jfv 9y ago
Maybe I missed it in this story, but this anecdote about Poincare himself is apropos: "The famous French mathematician Henri Poincaré was very interested in mathematical creativity. He describes a period of hard and seemingly fruitless
29.
by jfv 9y ago
Sure, but how much time did he give them to respond? The CS people maybe need a few seconds to "load" first-order logic into memory and may have been thinking about it before he gave them time to put their hands up. He could have
30.
by jfv 10y ago
I miss that too (90's for me). Honestly I don't enjoy programming much anymore for this reason. I remember when it was normal for people to write their own data structures for their programs -- and while not "practical,"

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