bendykstra

It was through the angry backlash to a tweet that I discovered Stephen Fry. About eight years ago, Stephen couldn't get a Windows laptop to connect to wifi. His Twitter outburst and the reaction of Windows fans became grist for the tech blogs, which is how I noticed it. I wonder if Stephen is romanticising the early years of Twitter or if those angry reactions have just become more common. (Either way, I don't blame him for leaving.)

Do you mean that it does not exist or that it cannot exist? I've heard this exact phrase before, "reverse racism is a myth," and it seems like an example of a thought-terminating cliché.

I think you can ignore the effect of shadows from cars. If you look at satellite images of highways, the percentage of the road covered by cars is actually quite small (<5%, by length, I would estimate.) The reduced efficiency due to not orienting the panels at the optimum angle will be much greater.

https://www.civicsolar.com/resource/effect-array-tilt-angle-...

The US drone fleet was not more secure at that time. In 2008, recordings of drone feeds were discovered on the laptops of Shi’ite militants. Four years later, less than half the drone fleet had been upgraded to use encrypted video.

http://www.wired.com/2012/10/hack-proof-drone/

When a new rule is introduced, the early panels can be easily solved by trial and error. However, it's a mistake to continue until you can articulate the rule. That means experimenting with a panel even if you accidentally get the correct answer on the first try.

Edit: I'm reminded of this game from the New York Times from October: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/03/upshot/a-quick...

If the pot is split at an random point between 0 and 1, then on average, 75% will go to one player and 25% to the other player. (It doesn't matter which player is which or how many points the players began the round with.) The equilibrium is a state in which the average pairing between two players is unequal in this 75/25 ratio.

Some countries have less inequality, but also have less average wealth. People do not migrate to those poorer countries seeking to be richer than their neighbors. Instead, people tend to migrate to areas of higher wealth, even though it means they will have less relative wealth. It's clear that absolute wealth is more important to people than the zero-sum game of relative wealth.

> I like to say if your income is consistently growing at ~10% every year, when the economy is growing at 2-3%, you're likely making someone worse off.

That is like saying, "The average age of the country is growing at 0.1% per year while my age is growing at 4% per year, therefore I must be making someone else younger." Income usually increases over the course of a career, but in the end, people retire or die and stop contributing to the average.

In the strange economy that this simulation proposes, every economic interaction is a zero-sum game. Some or all of the participants' money is placed in a pot and then randomly redistributed. This economy looks a lot like a poker tournament! As the game assumes that each economic interaction produces a winner and a loser, it is no surprise that simulation sorts the population into winners and losers.

You get to choose the license that works best for you.

http://savannah.gnu.org/maintenance/DualLicensing/

Another fun article from the same author from 1984, "VALUE OF [Desktop] WINDOWING IS QUESTIONED."

http://www.nytimes.com/1984/12/25/science/value-of-windowing...

They are very simple, imaginary machines. They only have one general purpose register, a single non-addressable register to which you can copy or swap the value in the main register and four I/O registers for communicating with adjacent machines. To get anything complex done, you need to use multiple machines and much of the puzzling is spent figuring out how to divide the responsibilities.

Just as during WWII, during WWI, the British had a very sophisticated interception and decryption program[1]. Its capabilities were also kept secret for long after the war and the Germans remained largely ignorant of how thoroughly their codes had been broken. I think if the work during WWI had been revealed earlier, the Germans would have been more careful and would have avoided repeating some of the mistakes of WWI. It was shown to be a wise policy after WWI, so I'm not surprised that they continued it after WWII, especially with the start of the Cold War.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_40

GM has good reason to make risky decisions, since the taxpayers will likely be asked to support the company a second time if it runs into trouble. As a taxpayer, I would like them to be as safe and stagnant as possible, but I have no say in the matter. This is the moral hazard created by the bailout.

I don't like her analogy in which she compares solar panels to smokestacks. As she points out, smokestacks were not a complete solution to air pollution because they merely moved the problem somewhere else. Solar panels are in no way comparable in that respect. The analogy only works if you consider energy production to be itself a problem.

> a threat which cost millions of dollars

It was the reaction to the threat which cost millions of dollars. We should be careful to distinguish between the costs of terrorism and the costs of our reaction to it.

I learned the importance of trichromacy when a friend and I came across a patch of wild strawberries. I'm partially red-green colorblind and for every strawberry I found, my friend found ten. They were almost invisible to me. It's neat to see that the fourth cone's response curve peaks right between the red and green cones' curves in tetrachromats. I bet they are amazing at finding berries.

There is a subreddit dedicated to such photos. Many of the top submissions are quite good.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AccidentalRenaissance/top/?sort=top...

> Rupert Scofield, who runs FINCA, one of the largest and most prominent microlenders, said randomized controlled trials work well in medicine but don’t make sense in evaluating development aid. He said that for years, his response to claims like Duflo’s was to say he didn’t need data when he could see the effect firsthand.

It sounds like he is suffering cognitive dissonance. He believes in RCTs and he believes in microlending. To resolve the conflict, he rationalizes first that RCTs "don't make sense" in the microlending world. Next he decides that researchers themselves aren't credible as good researchers would not reach a "false" conclusion.

Another way to put that is that it would encourage saving and investing. In the long term, that's better than encouraging spending, since the money would go towards growing the economy. (Assuming it isn't invested in beanie babies and lottery tickets.)

I don't think that is an accurate characterization. A time use study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston[1] found that the time a male worker spends at the workplace decreased from 51 hours in 1965 to 40 hours in 2003. The average male in 2003 spent most of that extra time on leisure activities. That's only one study, of course, but it squares with what I have consistently heard. Another study, which I can't find right now unfortunately, looked at leisure time enjoyed at the workplace. That would be a contradictory concept in 1965, but today, many people spend an hour per day or more reading, playing games or visiting social media sites.

[1] http://www.bostonfed.org/economic/wp/wp2006/wp0602.pdf

> The director or executive officer may amend or terminate the plan in specified circumstances.

Under this system, would it be possible to contract with two brokers, telling one to sell shares and the other to buy the same amount? If so, should you learn useful information later, you could terminate one plan, putting the information to use immediately.

I found one quote in an op-ed in the Yale Herald regarding the controversy especially surprising and revealing.

> They [Erika and Nicholas Christakis] have failed to acknowledge the hurt and pain that such a large part of our community feel. They have again and again shown that they are committed to an ideal of free speech, not to the Silliman community.

It is simply incredible to see anyone criticized for having a strong commitment to the freedom of speech. It's all the more amazing that it happened in a newspaper and on a college campus. The paragraph (as well as the rest of the piece) also seems to acknowledge that the demands of the protesters are at odds with the rest of the community's right to free expression. At a minimum, it acknowledges that the Christakises' position is one of principle, while failing to respect that fact.

The newspaper is offline now, but the op-ed was located at http://yaleherald.com/op-eds/hurt-at-home/. It's still available in Google's cache.

This reminds me of a popular German graduation prank. Three goats are set loose in a school building. However, before the goats are released, the students paint the numbers 1, 2 and 3 on them to facilitate an orderly recapture procedure.

Another interpretation, since these are voluntarily reported on a CV, is that the people citing OS X and Haskell are more likely to be trying to differentiate themselves. They want to be seen to "Think Different." In the likes column, they add a prestigious and difficult language or an OS associated with an exclusive brand. In the dislikes, they put items that are seen as mainstream.

One interesting consequence of this is that the further west that you look within a timezone, the less sleep people tend to get.

> Examination of ATUS activity logs shows that workers experiencing earlier sunset also go to bed earlier and that this correlation between sunset and bedtime persists even if the worker goes to bed well after dark. Coordinated work start times translate this earlier bedtime into longer sleep.

Time Use and Productivity: The Wage Returns to Sleep, Matthew Gibson and Jeffrey Shrader

One feature that I really wanted when I used Pandora was the ability to create groups of stations that stay out of each other's musical territory. Add a bias against songs that are a better fit on other stations in the group and a bias towards songs that fit best on the current station.

I'm having trouble imagining any sufficiently specific and unambiguous format for writing requirements that does not look like programming. Even something like SQL, which only needs to describe database queries, is still the domain of the programmer.

Also, East and West Berlin, still distinguishable by the streetlamps which have not been replaced since reunification.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2013/apr/21/astro...

> I also find it interesting how relatively little attention is given to the advantage of tactile buttons

If I remember correctly, while in programming mode, almost all TI-BASIC keywords could be input by pressing a menu button followed by a number. You could be very efficient once you learned the combinations. By the time I started high school, I had learned the menus well enough that I was writing games in class while concealing the calculator under the desk. (Of course, as I found out later, my teachers weren't fooled for a second.)