ddt

> (Aside: I am intentionally sticking with U. S. customary units of pounds, miles, etc., to be consistent with much of the related literature.)

From the article, it sounds like dietary science in the US is done with imperial units. It was written by an American for a primarily American audience. Americans track their weight in pounds. Those seem like pretty good reasons to not use metric to me.

Especially with how close the precinct station is to Cal Anderson. We're talking ~3 blocks. Maybe it's a case of understaffing and/or suboptimal allocation of officers? I imagine Pike from 12th down past Broadway becomes a primary focus later at night. I imagine that's when most crime in Cal Anderson occurs. Time-of-day data would be awesome in this set.

Sounds like they're doing something closer to URVs [1] than Bitcoin.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidade_real_de_valor

My understanding is that dumbwaiters and laundry chutes fall under a fire code which boils down to "Nah, dude. Don't do that" just about everywhere. Vertical passages are great for fires, and bad for people who like not being on fire.

There are complicated ways of doing this, but the naïve way is as follows:

First you need a corpus of text that's grammatically correct

Each node in the chain is a word or piece of punctuation. Each word has a certain probability of being followed by every other word in the corpus, including itself. There are a few different ways to start the sentence. One approach is to start from the node for the punctuation mark ".", and only selecting a following node that is not a period, since sentences don't tend to start with punctuation. From there, use a random number generator to pick a following node based on your probability matrix, rinse, repeat.

If you'll notice, there's no guarantee that it will be grammatically correct. There's just some statistical likelihood that it will be.

Oh man, so many memories of giving motion sickness to my friends and parents watching me play Descent.

My big takeaway from the Chomsky quote is that it's useless to ask if computers can think because one of the fundamental properties we associate with thinking is some biological/spiritual aspect. For a computer to "think", we'd need to redefine what we mean by think. And if we have to redefine what it means to think, why bother hailing it as an accomplishment to make a computer "think". The properties are incredibly important to our understanding of the world. The fact that we have different words for "think", "compute", and "calculate" gives some insight into the value we assign to the distinction as a culture. If those differentiations didn't exist, the problem of simulating cognition wouldn't change. What would change is our perception of the problem. If thinking, calculation, and computation all share the same word, it becomes a question of degrees of "thinking" rather than substantially different processes.

I don't think Chomsky is trying to elevate certain things outside of the laws of nature. He's describing how what we choose to differentiate changes our fundamental perceptions of those things. Submarines could "swim". They could also "read", but those words have a very specific set of properties associated with them.

I guess my point was that hipster is such an ill defined word that trying to understand why a particular thing is or is not hipster is futile.

The term "hipster" has become more or less a catch-all for words such as

* pretentious

* egotistical

* artsy

* self-involved

* preachy

* irreverent

* trendy

and many many more. My favorite thing about the linguistic history of "hipster" is that it started out defined as "one who is hip", but has come to describe both the hip person and the hipness itself. Phrases like "hipster shoes" or "hipster band" come to mind.

While the name "Uncle Tom" comes from the book, the character of Uncle Tom from ~1865 onwards was portrayed almost exclusively in minstrel show retellings of the novel. Minstrel show's didn't quite... capture the anti-slavery sentiments of the book [1].

The novel's Uncle Tom was resistant to the harsher institutions of slavery, sometimes standing in vocal opposition to his masters. The minstrel show Uncle Tom was almost exclusively played by white men in black face, going for cheap laughs by exaggerating the perceived mannerisms of American blacks. Essentially, the novel was radical, progressive and extremely popular. In the process of turning it into a minstrel show, everything radical and progressive was stripped out and replaced with cheap, comfortable laughs for an audience with a concept of how black people are "supposed" to act.

And that's how people who have just read Uncle Tom's Cabin don't get why Uncle Tom is now an epithet for people perceived to be subservient, or cooperating with their oppressors.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Tom#Epithet

I haven't read any books specifically on this topic, but it's a fairly common thing in non-academic (and sometimes academic) discussions of history. There's a subreddit, http://reddit.com/r/badhistory, that spends a lot of time picking apart bad historical arguments from around the web. Just as often as not, I'd say, the issue with the history is just as much trying to apply modern morality and societal norms to a culture completely removed from the modern day as it is factual inaccuracies.

It's not exactly a rigorous explanation of the phenomenon, but it is a good set of case studies.

Also, it should be noted that using modern concepts in a historical setting is not always "wrong" or "bad history". It's pretty clear the author of this article chose to describe Grosseteste the way they did to simplify his work for a broader audience.

I love this. Do you happen to know of any good reading materials on pre-Enlightenment or even pre-printing press scientific history? It gets boring hearing that there was no academic advancement from the fall of the Roman Empire until Galileo.

Partly, it has to do with the role of the church pre-enlightenment. The modern secular university didn't exist in the 13th Century. The concept of a teaching body that granted degrees, certifications, and did research was barely off the ground with things like the University of Paris and the Thing Which Would Become Oxford University. The scientific method didn't exist as any formal process. If you wanted to spend your life thinking, you didn't have too many vocational options outside of the church.

As to his role as a "scientist, philosopher, mathematician, theologian", that's more a projection of modern concepts onto a historical figure. There wasn't nearly as much siloing of various intellectual pursuits. There were just secrets of Nature to be discovered, and people looking to discover them.

I think the second reason you listed to be much more compelling than the first. It could be argued that the space race was about ensuring that the US had missile superiority over the USSR, but I'd wager a significant number of the aeronautical engineers and astronauts involved were much more interested in going to the moon because it was there.

This and Twitch Plays Pokemon have taught me a lot more about group efficiency than The Mythical Man Month

@moron4hire: It's a good point. But there are side effects of reducing residential property. What happens to the city's economy when everyone's commute is doubled because housing in the city is becoming prohibitively expensive as supply shrinks? Without zoning laws, how do you attract people to move to your city when there's no guarantee their apartment building will still be an apartment building once the lease is up?

To answer the question, I think it's the city government's job to balance the interests of people and businesses that reside in the city. In a perfect world, every side effect and externality would be neatly quantifiable, and municipal leadership would be fair and evenhanded. For now, we have to trust that the feedback loop of election will produce pretty good solutions to problems. I can't think of a better way to approach things in the current system.

I think she's taking the position that there's inherent value in providing affordable residential property in New York which exceeds the value in extracting maximum tax revenue from every square inch of the city. At the very least, I find that to be a defensible position.

I think this is where the argument for short term whole-residence rentals breaks down.

In the beginning, Airbnb was for homeowners and renters to provide a spare bedroom to travelers. In that case, they're facilitating a private transaction between two individuals to exchange money for a place to crash. By the residents staying at the home for the duration of the guest's stay, it's hard to call that a sublet, and there's a very strong argument to be made that it's just a communications platform to link either side of a marketplace.

But the case of whole-home rentals gets murkier. I don't see how letting someone stay in your home while you're living somewhere else is anything but a sublet. And if it is a sublet, why should it not have to conform to the established rules for sublets?

I find it disappointing that the Airbnb team hasn't done much in the way of explaining this point. When they do address the legality of Airbnb, they almost always refer to the first case. It's understandable, as it's a much more easily defensible position. I'd be interested to hear someone from Airbnb directly address the possibility of their service being used to turn residential spaces into commercial spaces (in the form of hotels).

The "graph moving in the right direction" doesn't have to be impressive in absolute terms. If I can prove that I have 100 paying, engaged customers this week, 50 last week, 25 the week before, etc. I've proved that the idea resonates with a market, and its growing. Note that this is still early stage. You have to be able to prove some indication of longterm value though.

I can't possibly recommend Rdio enough. The design is simple and intuitive. State transfers nicely between devices.

Even little things are pleasantly surprising. If I have my laptop hooked up to speakers at a party playing through Rdio, I can change the song from my phone.

The only thing it doesn't have that I'd like is Grooveshark-esque queue building. Every music player could just lift Grooveshark's queueing system wholesale and everyone would be much happier.

It tells the sender if you screenshot. It's not enough to prevent it from happening, but it adds a pretty big social incentive not to do so.

I don't doubt that they're smart and nice. I'd be shocked if they didn't want to do right by their customers. It seems like they have a pretty good track record of being good to their sellers and buyers. My friends who sell on Etsy have nothing but good things to say about them, and the few times I've bought from them the experience was surprisingly smooth for a user-run marketplace.

But Etsy's at a point where they're driving people's income that they depend on. The process for remediation and reconciliation shouldn't be unclear until they shut down your site.

I'd also like to see Etsy take on less of a shoot first and ask questions later approach. Especially when something is as grey-area as this. If he's using a factory, he clearly isn't pushing enough product to justify having a factory.

I think anyone who doesn't provide programmatic access to their analytics app is going to fall by the way-side so quickly there wouldn't be much demand for them to be integrated into Segment.io. I'd be interested to see an example of an analytics service that doesn't offer API access.

I use Zapier to send me text message digests of certain kinds of tweets. For something so easy to use, it's incredibly powerful.

My team of four got into YC with not a college degree between us. Two of us had most recently gone to community college, one of us dropped out of the University of Washington, and one of our teammates had just done six months at USC. Granted, USC is a "good school," but if you have a strong team that can demonstrably work well together, you have a good shot of getting into YC. In our case, we'd been on a very competitive high school robotics team for four years and had done other tech projects together.

The moment Zynga decided they were going to make their money as a me-too game studio, they sealed their fate. You can get people in the Skinner Box for awhile, and get them to peck you millions upon millions of dollars, but eventually your brand is tarnished to the point where not even your most active users will vouch for you. And now they're going through the process of retiring executives and the standard hallmarks of a company desperately trying to make something broken work.

It's mostly just the master-bath, too. The house I'm currently renting has a master bath and walk-in closet that a person could comfortably live in, while the other bathrooms barely have enough room to stand in.

Every time I've talked to them they describe themselves as Torontonians.

I think BufferBox in the most recent YC batch is a perfect example of this. They're making an Amazon Locker that works with everything, Amazon or no. They launched in Toronto, and already pretty much own the market with Canada Post addresses, a partnership with Walmart Canada, and integration with the local public transportation.

I can't seem to find a link. It wasn't very large. Maybe 8 feet by 20. But it was just enough to make it feel like the way things used to be.