masterzora

If your meeting absolutely positively must happen on a known weekly no-meeting day then there's really only three cases I can see: 1. You are bad at planning 2. You are bad at communicating 3. Something really, really bad happened and people will understand breaking policy

There's a big difference between "no meetings ever" and this.

Please, examine the post to which I replied. The point is not a question of whether the facts you laid out are true. You are correct in that they don't matter so much. But consider in the context of the GP post: we have the article appearing to lay things out fairly closely to "look how much everyone believed us" versus the comment saying "well, not everyone". That is to say, the message of the article still holds just fine, but it would still be fair to carry this direction of thinking as far as "is their analysis totally on the level?" Given that this is more or less the message of the article, I was just noting how, even with this very message in front of us, we aren't necessarily heeding it as well as we could.

Sure, viewing a question with those titles doesn't imply (in the logical sense) that you are gay or hiding an affair but to some it may imply (in the looser English sense) them all the same. More importantly, if you're cis hetero you feel no reason to hide reading a question titled "Should I come out to my parents?" because you don't feel any implicit threat. If you're a 15-year-old gay kid in the deep south with fundamentalist parents who will totally freak out if they learn they have a gay child then that threat is there. Even if you can claim "no, I'm not gay, I was just reading an interesting thread" that doesn't eliminate that threat.

Now, in this particular example, that child will almost certainly be 100% decided not to tell their parents and not need to read such a question, but work with me here. It's easy to fill in with scenarios that almost certainly do occur and could be legitimately dangerous in a number of ways. I mean, hell, a physically abusive spouse noticing you reading "How should I deal with my spouse abusing me?" is NOT GOING TO END WELL. Even if you try to explain "No, I just thought it was interesting. Of course I don't think you're abusive."

I'll freely admit these cases are sufficiently rare among the general population but they are also cases worth protecting to the point where we're still far from overreacting.

Actually, this comment here is the one that makes me think. I realised when I ran across it that I and, judging by the comments in this thread, others are taking the article at face value as truth despite that same article having just told us not to do that.

> Was he new at this?

I mentioned he was a student for a reason. What do you think? This was a project for a class and even still he immediately recognised the error when he tested it.

Similar to as I mentioned in reply to a child comment, you kind of sound like someone chastising a physicist for dropping a negative somewhere in their calculations. It doesn't betray a fundamental lack of understanding such that they should be lectured to go back to first grade and learn how to do arithmetic; it just demonstrates that at some point they were acting somewhat careless in what they were doing.

And, yes, it is a bit of an embarrassing mistake. That's what makes it such a fun story!

I wouldn't say that. I've always seen it like a physicist dropping a negative: he understands and when he sees the result he immediately knows what he did wrong but a little careless thought at the time led to a silly mistake.

> I wonder if a machine learning algorithm could spot new species from flickr photos...

You have to be careful with those things. My alma mater has a tale of a student 7 or 8 years ago who built a neural net to detect lizards in photos. He fed the system a bunch of pictures to teach it what lizards look like. When it came time to test he got remarkable results: it was 100% effective in positively identifying lizards. Then he fed it a picture of empty ground and the net happily confirmed that this picture contained a lizard as well! Turns out, if all of your training data is positive the computer just learns "everything is a lizard".

Of course, real-life researchers would never dare make such a mistake but this tale always amuses me so I couldn't resist :)

> I'd say most HNers aren't inexperienced developers, and yet they seem to be taking Yegge's sophistry seriously

Bullshit. To the latter half, I mean, not the former. HN sees posts of more or less this type (the "make an essentially meaningless metaphor and see how far we can push it" type) quite often, plays with it for at most a couple weeks, and then forgets it ever happens. The "taking [it] seriously" you see here is likely to be that case again: HNers like playing around with basically any classification that anyone presents (cf. the math/corn post where even I felt compelled to throw in a quick comment) and then moving on to the next classification system someone presents. It doesn't mean they're going to now make all of their life decisions based on the classification of the week; it's just a bit of harmless fun.

Now, it's true that sometimes this does spread and gets to really silly levels but I see no reason to suspect that this is going to be in that camp rather than the "harmless fun" area.

This is definitely a per-person sort of thing. I was a maths major who took several physics courses and I tended to find that they muddied my mathematical understanding as often as they helped whereas I found algebra and number theory (my foci, admittedly) to be easy enough to understand on their own that the classes were just on this side of trivial.

As an algebraist who would be classified under "spirals" here I just think the corn looks more interesting if I leave bands of kernels in the first pass and then pick them up in the second. Definitely sounds like a more algebraist-focused reason for it, too :)

I always see people comparing pirate downloads as akin to motor vehicles while the copyright industry is the buggy whip manufacturer but has anyone parroting that actually stopped to think about how patently ridiculous the comparison is?

Technology has not rendered copyright unnecessary. Yes, it is easier to mass-infringe these days than in the past but you must remember that, not only has it been possible (and generally easy) to infringe upon copyright, but that that is the very reason why copyright exists in the first place.

Intellectual property is more than a business and it's silly to claim otherwise. To quote the US Constitution on the matter:

"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"

This is the clause that essentially says "People can copy the work of others so in order to encourage creation we will allow creators an exclusive monopoly for some time after which it will belong to the public."

The problem with copyright is not that the industry is trying to pretend that it's not easy to copy because that is really nothing new; the problem with copyright is that the idea of "limited Times" has gotten ridiculous but that is an entirely different conversation.

It is tough to pull a coherent thesis from this piece but it seems to be close to "be aware of the costs involved because, although specialised hardware can be useful in many situations, it is not a magic wand you can wave." The way it opens he seems to imply that he is used to people excusing slow/inefficient ideas by handwaving that doing it in hardware will be fast without doing any real critical evaluation on what gains hardware can actually bring. The fact that some systems can see real gains from specialised hardware does not serve as a counterargument if this is in fact his thesis.

Honestly, it gives the impression that some of the commenters are from the internet. As sad as it is, you can kind of expect shit like that from completely disinterested parties who just want to be assholes.

http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/theorist.html is a great starting point. That page is written and maintained by a Dutch Nobel Prize winner who believes that it should be perfectly possible to learn physics from the internet if you know what you're looking for. If you go down the page he also includes references to print texts but the idea is for the web links to be sufficient.

Take the elevator :)

1. Why does every thread about FizzBuzz-esque problems always drive people to prove that they can solve the problem that is by definition minimum-competency.

2. The first is far more quickly solved by definition of the additive inverse, anyway.

Even days or weeks is insufficient. If I buy tickets to an event four months from now it is usually incredibly easy to arrange an affordable flight, for example. Or if two mutually exclusive events I am interested in have tickets go on sale at the same time right now I can pick one and purchase a ticket. If they are sold out I can pick the other event instead. With this system if I enter the auction for only one and do not win then I am screwed for the second one as well. If I enter both auctions I run the risk of purchasing both tickets.

I can imagine some other, more subtle planning issues that arise as well. Not that the system couldn't work but I think it would make for a terrible standard model.

As a sort of side-note you talk about helping the artist extract some of the money they are leaving on the table. I don't it's fair to assume that they are leaving the money there because they can't figure out "hey, if people are successfully scalping then I could make more money by charging more!" They have to look beyond a single transaction and keep in mind lower income fans that they still want to please, for example. Such fans would inevitably lose the auction for any show that sells out but some of them actually get to attend the show with the current structure.

One can be intrinsically motivated and still need a steady income.

The recording feature seems like a neat way to differentiate this from alarms, but I think I'm getting the wrong idea from your second paragraph.

I've got an alarm on my phone already. The tone is the same as my ringtone. The slide required to shut it off is identical to the slide required to answer. If it weren't for the record feature, would this really be adding anything? If not, why not emphasise the record as the primary feature?

Not everybody with whom you disagree is a puppet.

The ethical approach is subversion of the law less often than the internet appears to think.

0. There are known cases of peoples' passwords (including my own) not on the list.

I make a regular habit of clicking through a large number of Kickstarter projects and back a fair number and that number doesn't surprise me at all. I suggest you also look through a few sometime. A lot of projects on Kickstarter are, quite frankly bad. They are trying to build something nobody wants or their projections or idea are unrealistic. They provide little to no information about the project. Their reward tiers are unattractive or poorly built. Their creators lack credibility and have nothing to back them up. They are obvious scams. They have ridiculously short or ridiculously long funding periods. They do no promotion outside of Kickstarter. The creators provide no updates and don't communicate with backers.

The projects you see are the ones that overcome all or most of these potential issues and I'd suspect that the numbers for those are much, much better. But I'm honestly surprised that only 56% fail given what I've seen.

Not that your conclusion is wrong by any means but given that Shakespeare is well known for skillfully breaking and rewriting rules he's not really a good example to persuade prescriptivists.

Spivak pronouns do indeed come with drawbacks (as do all proposed solutions for gender-neutral language) but I put forth that said drawbacks are minimal. The pronoun set is intuitive to English-speakers and I've found that brief explanation, if any, has been required no more than once per person before they can easily grok my usages.

I agree that from a perspective of getting more people to use them the drawbacks are greater but from the perspective of understanding the drawbacks are essentially non-existent.

I personally think it just sounds awkward. Spivak pronouns can pick up all of the benefits of a singular "they" without the drawbacks, though.

Bourbon, you say? Now you've caught my interest. Any particular beauties in that collection?

Yes, yes they are. I don't even see all of the resumes submitted to my company since they are filtered through the recruiters and our HR guy but the ones I do see still need a fizzbuzz test more often than not.

Granted, it is not a thing you should give everyone. I can usually tell when I look at a resume that such a thing is likely to be pretty pointless (It points me to a github account I can look at instead? Why bother? The resume is clearly written by someone who knows what they're talking about and isn't stuffing everything they've ever done onto a page in a game of buzzword bingo? Probably safe.) so I don't give fizzbuzz tests to everyone but sometimes you have to be sure.

If the songs are in the cloud that middle ground doesn't work.

> Soo... does that mean other platforms also expire when they can't be bothered to support a game? For example, a playstation version?

What? Are you being intentionally ridiculous. They license songs. I don't know the terms of these specific licenses but the way they work in general is that they can license the game for a specific use and/or term. I'm not a lawyer so I don't know specific legal terms off the top of my head but there's a different license for the PlayStation version of the game where they are giving the user a copy of the song to have and to hold and one where they would stream, which I assume the iOS version is actually doing. Again, not a lawyer so I don't know the specifics but you will often see something like a TV show having broadcast rights to use a song in their show but they (especially for older shows) may have failed to procure the appropriate rights to use the song on the DVD version.

Now, I don't know too much about the Rock Band app so I'm sure someone more knowledgeable about it is likely to come through and correct me but it sounds like the songs are streamed for the iPhone. This wouldn't be as crazy as it sounds since phones still have relatively limited space and applications with smaller footprints are thus easier to manage.