ckuehne

“Some people become depressed at the scale of the universe, because it makes them feel insignificant. Other people are relieved to feel insignificant, which is even worse. But, in any case, those are mistakes. Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow. Or a herd of cows. The universe is not there to overwhelm us; it is our home, and our resource. The bigger the better.” David Deutsch

There is no "nation from which the items were taken".

This conclusion does not follow from the article.

> We're already inundated with mediocre programmers, many of whom have CS degrees, which is precisely why the industry looks at job experience more than credentials

How does looking at job experience help to distinguish good from bad developers?

"The assumption is that people can acquire knowledge as if it’s a substance they can pour into their minds. I call it the Water in a Cup method"

In German-speaking countries, there has been a name for it since 1647: Nuernberger Trichter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Funnel

I think your statement "Once you have plasma breakeven you have a self-sustaining heater basically" is false. According to Wikipedia [1] - if I interpret it correctly - the fusion energy gain factor from plasma must be 5 (!) to have a self-sustaining heater:

"Most fusion reactions release at least some of their energy in a form that cannot be captured within the plasma, so a system at Q = 1 will cool without external heating. With typical fuels, self-heating in fusion reactors is not expected to match the external sources until at least Q = 5"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy_gain_factor

No, there is only "knowing that communist central planning always ends up in shortages".

See here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19970544 for an example that illustrates the point nicely.

"and make the latter catastrophically worse" Wrong: https://ourworldindata.org/global-economic-inequality#global...

You're in for a 'treat' https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(14)...

Of course it is. That is why, had the pilot survived, he/she would have faced criminal charges.

So, how much percent in pension payments for teachers would the German taxpayer save if the state required, say, one year less teacher education?

I like this quote from the "Where We Have Failed" paper: "We are very uncritical of systems created by the large Internet vendors to that solve application-specific problems, which have been written, until recently, by development teams with little background in DBMSs. As such, they have tended to reinvent the wheel. I am especially amused by Google’s adoption and then rejection of MapReduce and eventual consistency."

This sounds a lot like the "We do everything with XML now"-phase that the Java world has gone through.

Note also that the blueberry test group (WBB) had a higher score in the practice test already (cf. Table 1). In other words: they were probably better before the consumption of the blueberry juice and stayed better afterwards.

Note that the chart in the linked comic begins in the middle of the last ice age. It ends one or two degree celsius above the mean temperature of the previous 500 years (or so). The big hockey stick at the end is a prediction! At the point in the chart at about 16000 BCE it states that the short warming or cooling spikes have probably been smoothed out (after all, those ancient temperatures are only available by proxy).

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What do you mean by 'allowed'? Why should it not be allowed?

If licensing was required for computer-related goods and services we would likely neither have Linux today nor a cheap plastic router to run it on.

Export is not the metric you are looking for. Germany exports lots of solar and wind engery during storms or on hot summer days because it cannot use it. The prices for this energy are low, even negative.

How is Fizzbuzz a trick question?

"What’s going on here? Why is Postgres wasting its time, continuing to search even though it’s already found the data we’re looking for?"

Because Postgres has not already found what we are looking for. The query is

  select *
  from users
  where name = 'Capitain Nemo'
  order by id asc
  limit 1;

Only after Postgres has found all users with the name 'Capitain Nemo' it can sort them by their 'id' attribute and limit the result set to the first one in the sorted relation.

Otherwise very nice post though.

I think you are confusing things.

The problem is not to compute S=10^(3 * 10^10). In fact, we have already computed it. The problem that you originally discussed was waiting (at most) S steps until we can be sure that the finite state-machine either stops or runs forever. I assumed 10^9 steps per second. Thus, the waiting time would be approx. 10^10^9 years.

Wikipedia has a nice discussion on the topic with a quote by Marvin Minsky [1]:

"Minsky warns us, however, that machines such as computers with e.g., a million small parts, each with two states, will have at least 2^1,000,000 possible states: 'This is a 1 followed by about three hundred thousand zeroes ... Even if such a machine were to operate at the frequencies of cosmic rays, the aeons of galactic evolution would be as nothing compared to the time of a journey through such a cycle'"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem#Common_pitfall...

It is not "relatively easy" to solve. It is exponentially hard. For example, 16 GB RAM means you have about 10^(3*10^10) possible states. That is a 1 followed by 30 million zeroes.

So I guess I'll pick you up in about 10^10^9 years and you tell me how it goes. That is of course assuming that your program does not load new functions from your hard disk at some point which would add more state to you program thus stretching the waiting time even longer.

Those who cannot differentiate between life expectancy at birth and life expectancy at adulthood are doomed to draw misleading cartoons.

But this is exactly the point. How do you know that it is a correlation? To establish a correlation you would also have to look at all the founders who did not succeed. As far as I am aware, Jessica has not done this.

Maybe a quote by David Deutsch will ease the pain:

"Some people get depressed when they find out how huge the universe is. They feel tiny and insignificant and think that nothing matters in this world.

That makes no more sense than getting depressed when you find out that cows are bigger than you. What is the big deal about bigness? A cow is much bigger than you, but it is a ridiculous animal and you are a valuable person. You know it’s a cow. It doesn’t know anything. it just stands there eating grass (grass!) and mooing. And if it were bigger, that would only make it more ridiculous."

> In Africa, they even have a song about it

They also have a song about it in Germany. It's called "Whatsapper": http://youtu.be/Rxb2A4uASqc

Well, I was going to add "EDIT: Or are you just being sarcastic?". Twice. But I didn't. After all, it's Hacker News.