gintas

This reminds me of an incident on Friday night: I noticed an unusually bright planet in the sky, and checked it out with Google Night Sky on my Android phone. When I zoomed in, the software showed the disc of Jupiter overlapping with Uranus. I sure was amazed!

I checked now, and the planet conjunction list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conjunction_%28astronomy_and_as... indicates that this conjunction has happened several times recently, but won't be happening for a while now.

The cloud can (and will) get cluttered too...

Actually, come to think about it, SLRs aren't that cheap either...

You did guess wrong - it seems to be 'head reference' actually. As the article explains, the original links were conceptualized with two anchors, the 'head' and the 'tail', and 'href' is the reference to the head of the link.

Pieces of information from the same source are not independent with regard to reliability. To establish reliability of the source, one should take a sample of facts and verify. If you can find misinformation even without investigation, it indicates high probability that other information from the same source is incorrect.

That one caught me too, even with zero knowledge about CUDA/OpenCL, I actually googled OpenCL to find out the fact of the matter.

Well, for one, knowing an attack strategy makes it easier to defend against. Moreover, if the strategy is fair, it levels the playing field; if the strategy is unfair, making it public increases the chance that the legal system will be adjusted to plug the holes.

The claim is actually that "all games will become social", and I doubt very much that this will happen. I have an inkling that Solitaire and Minesweeper are going to stay around for a while.

Moreover, historically new ideas with a high potential tend to expand their influence very rapidly in the beginning and take a large share, but the legacy tools still remain (sometimes still unparalleled in specific niches): hence the telephone in the age of the internet, or mail order books in the age of Amazon (see http://www.publishers.org/main/IndustryStats/indStats_02.htm ), bicycles in the age of the automobile, etc.

Why relive, when you can 'live' new experiences?

I did my Masters thesis informational ontology. Here's the thing: Shannon's information theory is a mathematical formalism, and is not enough to define information. Furthermore, information can only be defined within bounds of a model, and there are typically many ways and many abstraction levels available to describe a phenomenon, so the question of objectivity of information is still open.

If to assert objectivity you try to pick the lowest possible layer of abstraction at the quantum mechanics level, you lose the whole layer of semantic information, i.e. information about something, which is actually the primary concept of information, and "information" simply becomes a name for a set of mathematical formulas, and as such it may not be treated as a substance.

Mediocrity is a worthwhile tactic if you're not optimizing for money or status, but, say, happiness. Ambition can cause a lot of pain, particularly in feelings that you have not lived up to your potential (I've seen plenty of that happening).

YC readers are understandably strongly biased against such values of take-it-easy life. I don't subscribe to such values either, but they can not be straightforwardly discounted as inferior just like that. I would argue that understanding your limitations is just as important as developing your abilities.

"Fooled By Randomness" is an interesting read and its central claim, namely that humans tend to see patterns where there aren't any, is correct and scientifically proved by psychology. However, the book seems to go way too far by occupying a strongly skeptic position and therefore refuting itself.

Bioinformatics is cool, but it's basically less sexy than you might think. There are various directions to work on, but the kind of work is essentially statistics and pattern matching. If you want to figure out what genes do or how proteins fold in general, go read a textbook. Spending a year on a single gene processing gigabytes of dirty data may not be as sexy as you might think. Or it might be if that's your cup of tea, but as I said, in the end, it's mostly statistics.

"Why should economics be a social science, because it's about stuff?" Yeah, right. For example, and I build "stuff" (from something like "bit substance", I take it?) for a living...

Economics is not related much to physics. On the contrary, it's pretty much metaphysics as its quant is money, which is socially constructed.

It is fallacious to assume that economic growth will lead to growth in energy use. Quality, not only quantity generates value. In other words, if a baker keeps baking better-tasting bread, and a piano maker keeps making better-sounding pianos, the economy will grow. Improving quality does not necessarily need extra energy.

Piano & pencil.

I used to write summaries for all study materials as I was reading. It helps get a better broad view, I think, and it also encourages writing down any related thoughts that come to your head.

I have found that it is best to summarize in a question-answer format, much like a FAQ. Having questions separated from the answers is useful later when revising and the questions are more open-ended than a straight summary.

There's a website that a friend and I set up to store exactly such question lists (with answers): http://www.problemata.com . It's rough, but already usable.

The questions you mentioned are scientific rather than philosophical. I'd say the discerning feature of most philosophical questions is that no empirical evidence can give a conclusive answer to them. So, no, exposure to science will give you some prejudice (in both a good and bad way) at the beginning of a philosophical argument, but after that, you will mostly be relying on logic.

Got a Bachelor's in Computer Science and a Master's in Philosophy here.

If you're seriously into philosophy, do have in mind that casual evening readings will probably not match a year or two of intense study. On the one hand, I think one has to live for a while in academia to get a decent understanding of philosophy. It took me about a year of full-time study for philosophy to really "click". On the other hand, shallow study will not be enough to get somewhat sick of the subject and start avoiding it, which I jokingly consider to be one of the best things about my philosophy education.

Full time study is a fairly big investment in terms of time though, and keep in mind that you will probably want to get back to hacking afterwards.

Piano (classical/jazz). A little djembe too.

I, for one, do claim to understand the quote by Bloom. I think he means that openness understood as "going with the flow" is in fact not openness at all because it obscures alternatives. This is actually a theme recurring throughout the literature, nothing really special.

I do not mean to defend the poor prose of some professors, there is indeed plenty of that, however, in many cases it is simply not an option to use everyday terms because of their ambiguousness.

Finally, the charge of obscurantism and particularly its "explanation" by social factors is just nasty! It's no better than calling your readers too stupid to understand you. In fact, I would argue that while both factors are at work, the latter is much more so. But hey, I'm biased.

Vilnius University