ArbitraryLimits

Aren't more than a fifth of PhD holders in the U.S. foreign born? The story of immigrants returning home is a lot different from a story of native-born Americans abandoning their country.

Bill Walsh might have said it also, but this football coach was probably first:

"Bull Cyclone once said to Tommy Atkins, a player who became a career Marine, 'Tommy, there are two kinds of young men—those you have to kick in the pants to get their potential and those you have to pat on the back. If you, as a leader, make a mistake, you've done a great injustice. So be very careful and decide as accurately as you can whether to kick or to pat.'"

See http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1...

You don't measure the wave function, you measure the state of the underlying system (qubits or whatever).

When a measurement is made, the wave function, which gives the probability of finding the system in any particular state, "collapses" so all the probability mass is on the state you just measured.

If you keep measuring the system quickly (relative to the time it would take to change significantly) you actually stop if from evolving the way it would have if you'd left it alone, as if you dropped a ball and kept staring at it and it dangled in the air instead of falling.

So how exactly does the government design that?

I saw the same thing in Italy when I lived there in the 90s - any kind of real estate was much more expensive than it seemed like anyone would be able to afford.

Never did figure it out - in the US, the public policy issue with homeownership is making mortgages easier or harder to get. If they're easy, then prices go up but more people own something. If they're hard, then prices go down (because no one bids them up) but fewer people own. I can't figure out a policy that leads to high prices and low rates of ownership.

Papayas from Hawaii are irradiated before they get to the US mainland. It doesn't mean they become radioactive.

I've always been a fan of die_you_gravy_sucking_pig_dog() from the FreeBSD source.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/~checkout~/src/sbin/sh...

Richard P. Feynman

“Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.”

You're right, I meant to write PowerPC.

ARM chips outsell x86 chips by at least a factor of two, and I'm pretty sure more than that. For each Intel desktop/laptop there are twenty ARM chips in microwaves, cars and airplanes.

In the beginning it had a lot to do with toolchain support, these days I think it's a combination of force of habit and the fact that you can fry an egg on an x86 floating point unit.

> In my eight years of surgical training, I had seen only one patient with an ulcer so severe that the stomach’s acid had eroded a hole in the intestine.

vs

> patients arrived almost nightly with the condition

It sounds to me like the limiting factor in innovation was a sufficient supply of patients FOR ONE SURGEON to practice on, in which case working in an underserved area is an advantage.

It seems like C++'s lack of an ABI would bite you way before any issues with libc++. (Or is there one now? I'm getting old.)

There probably won't be any more scientific breakthroughs that mess with people's conception of their place in the world the way relativity and quantum mechanics did. That's not the same thing as no more breakthroughs.

My university's physics department did the same thing with SETI@home. The SETI@home guys were smart enough to make their program run as a screen-saver that displayed Fourier Transforms so people thought it made the lab look more sciency and left it on.

Hacker News and the Harvard Business Review aren't really the same "we."

All bureaucracies seek to perpetuate their own existence; most also accomplish something worthwhile along the way. The TSA only does the perpetuation.

GE has essentially been a mix of holding company and leveraged buyout firm for a long time now. I think of GE as a stock trader who takes really, really long positions in an industry as a whole by acquiring a subsidiary in the industry rather than buying the corresponding index fund.

I'm a little confused as to who exactly "us" refers to in your post, could you clarify please? "We" as generic consumers, "we" as developers, other?

It's either New York-ese or investment banker-ese (hard to distinguish between the two sometimes). They also nounify "spend" for some reason.

The first and only time I used Solaris, I tried to run our application and got the error "System out of colors" or some such. Swore then and there never to use it again if I could help it.

I guess I'm in the minority here, but I fail to see how online courses are anything innovative - they seem to me like the logical extension of those 1000 student intro classes from 1000 to 1,000,000. I've done an entire master's degree program online and I feel like the quality of instruction was pretty much unchanged.

I'm sure you're right. In my defense, I didn't write "sigh" the first hundred times I pointed out that error on the Internet.

It's not a subtle error, and it's not peripheral to the argument either.

The entire middle third of the comment is the standard engineer's fallacy that because the laws of physics are absolute and not relative, people's values should be also, and all conflict could be avoided if people were just rational. The main evidence offered is this aside about "science" "proving" the non-existence of god, so its fallaciousness is highly relevant. (There's also the fun of pointing out a fallacious and therefore irrational arugment in support of being rational, I'll admit it.)

Every college student in a technical major who has to take a humanities class for general ed goes through this phase, it's understandable. But it's just as important to grow up and leave it. Values are not rational, but that doesn't mean you get to ignore them.

> Have you ever tried to port a package that is using autotools to a platform that is not based on GNU/Linux?

I think you mean Unix, not GNU/Linux. Porting from one flavor of Unix to another is the raison d'etre of autoconf. It's really quite valuable when you're the one in charge of babysitting 20-year-old AIX or HPUX boxes.

It's not even meaningful to talk about using the autotools on a non-Unix platform, since autoconf emits shell scripts. It sounds like you've run into problems with automake on a non-Unix platform generating Makefiles with shell code in it?

> It is not valid if your premises (e.g. all species on Earth were created by a divine intelligent designer) have been proven false.

Sigh...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

Compare the addresses at http://www.realsimple.com/home-organizing/decorating/eye-cat... and http://mandydouglass.blogspot.com/2010/10/addressing-envelop... . Those are two representative images I picked from the first google hits for "house number" and "handwritten address" respectively - all the others were comparable. Are you seriously going to claim that the house number is harder to recognize than the handwriting?

I do have an idea (literally, even) that there are additional problems having to do with extracting the house number images themselves from full-motion video, but that's an image registration problem and not an object recognition problem.

Virtually all house numbers are either painted from a stencil or composed of mass-produced shapes on a background of uniform color, whereas addresses on envelopes are handwritten by doctors, six-year-olds and people with Parkinson's disease. I'm not convinced it's a harder problem.

Please tell me whether the term "deep learning" has any meaning at all, and if so, what is it? It sounds like a buzzword to me, like "data scientist."

> "We are seeing better than human-level performance in some visual tasks," in particular, for the problem of extracting house numbers in photos taken by Google's Street View cars

Can someone explain to me how this is news, given that the handwritten addresses on snail mail envelopes in the US have been OCR'd by neural networks for more than twenty years now?

These people seem to have been chosen because of(and their advice ordered by) their physical attractiveness rather than their actual entrepreneurial success.

Edit: OK, I kind of take it back. I started paying attention at #4 and stopped at #10.

It seems to me that the whole point of having elected leaders instead of making every choice a referendum is to modulate the will of the people, instead of following it blindly.