All of sketerpot's Comments + Replies

And also computationally impossible for a space endeavor of any size until the late 90’s (citation needed here and would love to hear from someone with experience).

I looked into it and, yes, this looks basically correct with a caveat: it's computationally very expensive to get those first stages to land on their own at a convenient, precisely chosen location. We've been doing propulsive landings for decades with e.g. the Apollo moon landers and the Viking Mars probes, the latter of which had to be fully autonomous because of speed-of-light delays. Landing ... (read more)

There's also variation in the amount of children's television watched by people in the test population. The protagonist mentions seeing "less children's television than most children in our age cohort", and it's a safe bet that this was tracked as part of the data set.

Not just genetic tendencies; it was also meant to look at shared environment, like the TV shows subtly but thoroughly pushing a certain worldview, and the words from teachers saying it explicitly. From the story: they wanted "to find out how well we were doing environment-wise and heredity-wise on people's kindness and resistance to conformity-pushed cruelty".

Ah. That web site throws out too many claims to investigate fully -- who has the time? -- but if you google around for a sampling of them you'll notice that they tend to crumble under scrutiny. The sections mentioning quantum mechanics are especially blatant: they're gibberish, total incoherent misuse of terminology.

EDIT: There's a sequence of articles called Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions which is relevant here. One that applies in particular is Fake Explanations, which could be summarized as "If you are equally good at explaining any out... (read more)

Did you mean to post a link here? I'm not seeing one.

If you were to try and search the space of all possible inputs for MD5, you'd quickly(ish) find an input that collided with the Obama Werewolf input, but it'd be garbage.

Really? Last I checked, the best known preimage attack against MD5 was too slow to be practical. Finding collisions is drastically easier, though I don't know any method for doing it with arbitrary plain-text English sentences.

Not just modern sexual attitudes, but specifically the sexual attitudes you see in the Harry Potter fanfiction community. And I'm sure it was meant to be jarring. Magical Britain's culture is subtly but deeply different from that of the muggle country that shares its borders; it would be profoundly weird if there were no surprises, no culture shock.

He's the Super Hufflepuff! He's taking all the electives, which is physically impossible without a Time Turner! He was mentioned right before Harry started making thorough off-screen preparations, and then conspicuously forgotten for the rest of the chapter! Dramatic logic dictates that he's got to show up at some point, probably in some way that involves time travel.

... Unless the whole thing was a throwaway joke about how useless Cedric was in Goblet of Fire, in which case yeah, I guess it was pretty funny.

An alternate interpretation is that Voldemort was strengthening a few of the spells that Sprout cast, as well as the spell that Tonks used to win the battle, and this use of his own magic was what caused Harry's doom-sense to tingle. If that's the case, then there would be none of his magic on the troll.

Other useful dummy values are $1, $42, $1,000,000, $9999999999999.95, and "'; DROP TABLE salary; --". As someone who has written input validation code for web forms on a few occasions, I personally give you my blessing to subvert them.

I'm not entirely sure what your argument is yet, but here's a simple example utility function that might be interesting as a baseline:

def utility(universe):
    return 42

This function halts for all inputs, and assigns each input a desirability value that can be compared with others. What sort of utility function are you imagining?

It would definitely be a rationality quote if it went on to quote the part where Eric Flint decided to test his hypothesis by putting some of his books online, for free, and watching his sales numbers.

The Reddit guys really, really dislike doing schema updates at their scale. They were getting very slow, and their replication setup was not happy about being told to, say, index a new column while people are doing lots of reads and writes at the same time. So they eventually said "to hell with it; we'll just make a document database, with no schema, and handle consistency problems by not handling them. Man, do not even ask us about joins." This seems to have made them much happier than the 'better' database design they used to use, which is impo... (read more)

"Focus on the future productivity of the asset you are considering. [...] If you instead focus on the prospective price change of a contemplated purchase, you are speculating. There is nothing improper about that. I know, however, that I am unable to speculate successfully, and I am skeptical of those who claim sustained success at doing so. Half of all coin-flippers will win their first toss; none of those winners has an expectation of profit if he continues to play the game. And the fact that a given asset has appreciated in the recent past is neve

If it makes you feel better, I studied computer science but frequently feel a sense of inadequacy because it feels less hard core than "real engineering".

Your sense of inadequacy is probably unjustified. I studied electrical engineering and computer science. Within both fields there's a wide range of hardcore-ness. In both fields you can find people who do incredibly difficult things, and a much larger group of people who do the bare minimum, and people everywhere in-between. I have seen some startlingly incompetent people with engineering degrees, so the lower bound here is pretty low.

So if coming from a top school makes SV employers think (correctly or incorrectly) that you're a top programmer, this could go a way towards explaining the salary thing.

This also works if coming from a top school correlates with some factor that makes SV employers think you're a top programmer. The most obvious example of such a factor is programming skill: you'd expect people at top schools to program better, on average, than people from obscure schools.

Have you heard a baby being born? A baby is all like "AAAAA! AAAAA! AAAAAAA!", except less textual and more piercing in pitch. Show me a definition of "dignified" which encompasses such shrieking, and I'll show you a definition of "dignified" which lacks mainstream recognition.

I'd say that the process of childbirth is a clear, up-front warning that it definitely won't be.

Not only does exercise become its own reward, but skipping exercise becomes its own penalty -- you feel physically crappy if you go too long without getting your fix. I see this as a good thing.

Exercising with someone is also an great way to socialize if you're a quiet person, and ill-at-ease with small talk. Pauses in conversation are natural when people are breathing heavily, there's always at least one shared topic you can talk about, and the exertion tends to make people more cheerful.

Seconded; that's the book I learned from, and would have been my runner-up recommendation. In particular, its pictures are excellent, and there are loads of them.

I don't know specific techniques to design good algorithms for problems.

I would suggest reading an introductory book on algorithms and data structures. There are a number of good ones, and none of them is strictly better than the rest, but for your case I would recommend Steve Skiena's Algorithm Design Manual, which can probably be found in your university library. It's very readable, discusses how to go about solving algorithmic problems, and has a lot of breadth.

This is some of the higher bang-for-the-buck knowledge in CS, and surprisingly relevant to the Real World.

I believe SMTP uses "HELO", actually (or "EHLO" to enable some extensions). The server then indicates that it heard the HELO command, often with a cheery remark like "Pleased to meet you! I'm a server! :-D"

This is one of the more charming aspects of the internet's plumbing.

"Verres" came from combining "Vassar" and "Herreshoff". Here's the thread you're remembering.

If we could achieve eternal life through the clever use of linguistic ambiguity, then post-structuralist continental philosophers would have defeated death long ago. What would the world be like, I wonder, if all forms of cleverness were useful? A candidate for weirdtopia, probably.

Took the survey. Cooperated because most puzzles which explicitly use the words "cooperate" and "defect" have been created in such a way as to make cooperation the better choice.

(Considering my fairly low chances of winning, a deep analysis would have had only recreational value, and there were other fun things to do.)

Look into cloud computing. It's new enough not to have made it into many curricula yet.

For a decent summary, here's a pretty well-written survey paper on cloud computing.. It's three years old now, but not outdated.

It's a good start, but I notice a lack of actual programming languages on that list. This is a very common mistake. A typical CS degree will try to make sure that you have at least basic familiarity with one language, usually Java, and will maybe touch a bit on a few others. You will gain some superpowers if you become familiar with all or most of the following:

• A decent scripting language, like Python or Ruby. The usual recommendation is Python, since it has good learning materials and an easy learning curve, and it's becoming increasingly useful for sci

As far as I can tell, a significant fraction of the people in every major don't really understand it, don't care very much, and are continually half-assing everything. The problem with just flunking these guys is that they can still be valuable to employers, and their tuition money is nice to have.

A good, lightweight rule of thumb: before making a major life decision, spend at least an hour googling around for relevant information, especially from people who've done the thing you're contemplating. Chances are, your experiences will not be so different from theirs.

Then, seriously consider at least one alternative.

Further, people outside the nerd community have a broader emotional repertoire.

I would be very interested in hearing more about this -- my set of friends has a decidedly nerdy bias. Am I missing out on some feelings?

Formally, I believe the first form can be produced by a regular grammar, but the second form can not. Check out the Chomsky hierarchy for a rundown on the power of each type of grammar.

That's an surprisingly forgiving thing to say. She lives in a place where eating legs to prevent starvation is a venerable military tradition, and a non-zero number of people end up in the Girls' Working School.

This also has the advantage of being cheap in bulk, since it has so many industrial uses. Current prices are under $400/ton.

Maybe a naive question, but you've got me curious: why is it the standard of care at some heart centers, rather than most or none? Is it a matter of cost, or are the benefits you mentioned not well-established, or are heart centers slow to change their standard of care? Or is it some fourth thing I didn't think of?

This is actually a really tidy example of Bayesian thinking. People send various types of emails for a variety of reasons. Of those who send penis extension pill emails, there are (vaguely speaking) three possible groups:

1. People who have invented penile embiggening pills and honestly want to sell them. (I've never confirmed anybody to be in this group, so it may be empty.)

2. Scammers trying to find a sucker by spamming out millions of emails.

3. Trolls.

If you see emails offering to "Eml4rge your m3mber!!", this is evidence for the existence of s... (read more)

An interesting bit about the economics of it:

By building it on pylons, you can almost entirely avoid the need to buy land by following alongside the mostly very straight California Interstate 5 highway, with only minor deviations when the highway makes a sharp turn.

The pylons are the single biggest cost, but by building it this way, they can avoid almost all the expense and delays that come from buying land and trying to get a right-of-way -- they can just use one that already exists. Upon hearing this, the cost estimates no longer sound too good to be true.

Such a threat can also be effective for asymmetrical violence -- no matter which way the asymmetry goes.

He just needs to get Saber to say it. Saber often tells people, in a bluntly matter-of-fact way, that they're making a mistake. Rin knows this. If Shiro said it, though, she'd think it was some kind of dominance thing and get mad.

(Maybe I'm over-analyzing this.)

Do you know what the best thing is? The best thing is when you habitually recognize the most common forms of human irrationality, and easily steer away from them. This works when you're short on will power, when you're sleepy, when you're drunk, when you're under the influence of religious experiences; whenever. It works because it doesn't require any real effort, in the moment. The effort comes when you try to train yourself to think like this, and you can do that beforehand, at your leisure.

(This isn't actually the Best Thing. The real Best Thing is prac... (read more)

There's a theorem which states that you can never truly prove that.

You'd think that more severe punishment would have a correspondingly greater deterrent effect, but that doesn't seem to be the case. What matters much more than the severity of the punishment is its likelihood. Sure, you might starve in the streets if you get caught jacking off in some high-born lady's nether-garments -- if you get caught. And, let's be honest: you're probably not going to get caught, and if you get caught, you're probably not going to be reported to your employer.

In any case, all that talk of starvation is far-off, way in the future; the ... (read more)

Unfortunately, since Reno backs off later than Vegas, a mixed Vegas/Reno network ends with the Reno machines consuming the vast majority of bandwidth.

Unless they're idle most of the time, that is. Anybody who's run a modern BitTorrent client alongside a web browser has been in this situation: the congestion control protocol used by most BitTorrent clients watches for packet delays and backs off before TCP, so it's much lower-priority than just about everything else. Even so, it can end up using the vast majority of bandwidth, because nobody else was using it.

It does sound like exactly the kind of clever hack Harry would use to get an indefinite healthy lifespan, though.

That post consisted of (fairly minor) Evangelion spoilers, encoded with rot13 for the benefit of people who haven't seen it yet.

(For completeness' sake: the language of Ente Isla is English with a bunch of letter substitution, and the language that Ledo speaks in Gargantia is a letter-substituted offshoot of German. They're similar to rot13, but much more pronounceable, since vowels map to vowels and consonants to consonants. More info here.)

Thomas Schelling proposed a useful strategy: make small threats for small infractions, and then follow through on them. This gives credibility to your larger threats, without too much inconvenience for either party.

(And, of course, try to make the whole thing as predictable as possible; never be capricious with your own authority.)

Even if altruism turns out to be a really subtle form of self-interest, what does it matter? An unwoven rainbow still has all its colors.

1% fees are way too high. Vanguard has some good funds with fees as low as 0.1%.

That number is a bit out of date; they recently cut fees for many (most?) of their funds. Now I'm only paying 0.05% on my main index fund. I'm pretty cheerful about this.

It wasn't until the 1850s that Ångström discovered that elements both emit and absorb light at characteristic wavelengths, which is what spectroscopic analysis of stars is based on, so I'm leaning toward justifiable.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but most of those look like the result of fishing around for positive results, e.g. "We can't find a significant result... unless we split people into a bunch of genotype buckets, in which case one of them gives a small enough p-value for this journal." I haven't read the studies in question so maybe I'm being unfair here, but still, it feels fishy.