waveman2

4 ms·

1.
by waveman2 12y ago
One other factor I would mention is the massive uncoolness of Ada. This seems to come from three directions: 1. Invented by and for a bureaucracy known for its extravagance and wastefulness. 2. Verbosity of a degree only before seen in COBO
2.
by waveman2 12y ago
To put it another way "It's the ecosystem, stupid." Apologies to Bill "It's the economy, stupid" Clinton.
3.
by waveman2 12y ago
In a number of countries you are not allowed to ask someone's race, let alone record it on your computers. In the USA it is compulsory so you can provide these stats and protect yourself against lawsuits.
4.
by waveman2 12y ago
> it is their responsibility to fix it. This seems to contain two embedded and unexamined assumptions. 1. That this is a problem. If women prefer not to go into sciency fields (other than biology) why is that inherently a problem? Do yo
5.
by waveman2 12y ago
> I would hypothesize that this is false Citation required. And if women are less interested overall in CS and/or have less ability on non-verbal tasks overall then you would expect that the RHS tail of the distribution of women wou
6.
by waveman2 12y ago
It's unavailable in the sense that you can actually buy it now. I just did. That is, in the sense that it is available . And right now the claim made is demonstrably false, if not a deliberate lie. Seriously people you need to confirm
7.
by waveman2 12y ago
> maybe older developers have a blind spot towards opportunities that have failed in the past Yes. A lot of things have to come together for something to work. Something can fail many times before succeeding. A little irrational optimism
8.
by waveman2 13y ago
Protip: the government scans and keeps the exterior of all mail that is sent. So, put the returning address on the inside of the envelope so that it is harder to work out who is sending mail to whom.
9.
by waveman2 13y ago
I think this reflects one of the fallacies that people from other languages bring to Lisp. They think that all languages are more or less immutable. If something annoys you (like funky function names) you can alias them or add whatever you
10.
by waveman2 13y ago
Two comments 1. Machine learning is moving more and more towards indirect programming i.e. you program the computer with a learning algorithm and let it work out what to do. Google reinforcement learning, or machine learning. This greatly r
11.
by waveman2 13y ago
From personal experience I suggest you never buy a children's book on your own account. There doesn't seem to be a way to tell Amazon "Hey this purchase was a one-off, don't use it for recommendations".
12.
by waveman2 13y ago
His argument seems to be "computers cannot do X yet, therefore computers will never be able to do X".
13.
by waveman2 13y ago
> they're just far more likely to make wildly incorrect mistakes than understandably incorrect ones Have you spoken to some members of the general public and asked what they think? People believe all sorts of wacky things. We are j
14.
by waveman2 13y ago
One of the criticisms of the study is just this point. A lot of the "upward mobility" is people moving to more expensive areas where they get somewhat higher pay but the cost of living is much higher. They may well be worse off, b
15.
by waveman2 13y ago
The studies seem to be confusing causation and correlation. They seem to assuming that there must be an environmental cause for the differences in people's IQs. This may seem like a stupid assumption to make, but a lot of people in the
16.
by waveman2 13y ago
> though no one really knows at this point This is half the problem. After 30 years in IT, I note the NBN has no feasibility study, no cost benefit analysis, and is running way beyond schedule. This is the sort of project you try to get
17.
by waveman2 13y ago
No I am saying that trivia is trivia. What happened is at worst micro-bullying. Actually I suspect the daughter did not want to do the course, was pressured into it by her mother and pickup on on this minor incident as an excuse to stop the
18.
by waveman2 13y ago
According to the author she did nothing about the problem at the time ie did not talk to the teacher, but is now more than happy to create drama by the track. The author's qualifications in teaching appears to be zero, and her qualific
19.
by waveman2 13y ago
Worth mentioning also that India has one of the world's oldest and richest cultures. It is hard to describe the feeling visiting some of these places, perhaps it's a bit like visiting Delphi or the Acropolis. My favorite was the R
20.
by waveman2 13y ago
> You clearly meant billions of men. Plenty of women believe this too.
21.
by waveman2 13y ago
It is a reasonable position I think. Given the progress with understanding many other things, it is reasonable to expect progress here - bearing in mind the incredible complexity of the brain. If philosophers were going to solve this proble
22.
by waveman2 13y ago
This seems like an obvious point, but when you are dealing with complex systems second-order effects often result in totally perverse outcomes. Often the result of pushing the system in one direction is an outcome in the opposite direction.
23.
by waveman2 13y ago
Google, along with Apple, will always be the company that beat him.
24.
by waveman2 13y ago
His foundation makes great play of the claim that they are evidence based and totally, totally use metrics and quantitative feedback to guide their work. So I go onto their site and look for such metrics, feedback, evidence that they have c
25.
by waveman2 13y ago
This has been common in academia since the 1970s. It is an inexpensive way to show how 'enlightened' you are.
26.
by waveman2 13y ago
From her profile http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2000892040/fred-feed-rea...
27.
by waveman2 13y ago
There are numerous more subtle forms of corruption in the US system of education 1. Grade inflation. 2. Bell curves so that a certain percentage of students must pass. 3. Student evaluations and students voting by enrolments that discourage
28.
by waveman2 13y ago
You may need to get out more https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSBC See "Money Laundering".
29.
by waveman2 13y ago
> You consider the idea of treating compression loss as an error to be patched as non-obvious, whereas to most on HN (being generally technical, even if not in this field), that's probably, a "yeah, duh, and?" suggestion. I actually imp
30.
by waveman2 14y ago
While it's true that really really good ideas are not free, you seem to be understating the importance of execution. There is a huge difference between "Let's start an online bookshop", which was an idea many people had, and Amazon.com. Or

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