sfrank2147

What does it even mean for consciousness to be an illusion? An illusion implies that someone is being fooled by consciousness, but who is the someone being fooled if there is no underlying true self?

Somewhat tangential, but the most absurd ad I've ever seen was when Dodge ran an ad during the Superbowl quoting from this speech.

Thanks for the response!

Does anyone know how Project Euler was storing the passwords?

That's not what standards are for - standards define what students should be learning and at what age, and teachers are responsible for making lesson plans to implement those standards. Every teacher has his/her own teaching style, imposing one method of teaching the standards would just piss everyone off.

And yes, teachers do share lesson plans, both online and within their schools.

I'm learning Haskell right now and it's great. I don't know how widely used it is in production, but it's introducing me to tons of ideas that are applicable in lots of other languages (e.g., how to do functional programming effectively, how to effectively use a strong type system, how to separate out functions with side effects).

That's a great tradition! From an economics perspective, I would gain way more than $2 worth of utility from discovering that someone had randomly paid for my coffee, it would really make my morning.

I wonder if the benefit would decrease if the practice became more common though. Would I start expecting my coffee to be free, and become disappointed when I had to pay for it?

A monopoly should be defined by barriers to entry, not just market share. There's nothing preventing other large companies from entering the search space, and in fact many of them have (yahoo, microsoft, etc).

There are true monopolistic firms like Comcast or Time Warner, where there are serious logistic/economic barriers preventing other firms from entering the market. This doesn't seem like one of them to me.

The one in 30 million statistic is crazy to me! That means that the surviving fish need to average 30 million children in their lifetime to sustain the current population - if they stay adults for 2 years, that's 41,000 children per day! Can someone shed light on how that's possible?

Note also that it's 1 in 30 million babies that actually hatch that survive, not just 1 in 30 million eggs.

As the paper mentions, it's also possible that people are lying to the IRS about the date of relatives' deaths. (I personally think that's the more likely interpretation, but I guess it depends on your priors).

I don't understand how a startup will help here. The problem is regulatory hurdles (good or bad): there are laws that prevent patients from buying medicine before it's been thoroughly vetted. Will this company lobby to change those laws? Or is this an Uber situation where the fact that it's a VC-funded startup means that regulations magically don't apply.

Everyone here is saying to give lots of examples: I would add to not ONLY give examples, but also make sure you explain parameters, return types, etc.

The most frustrating type of documentation for me is when there are usage examples but nothing else. Then, when I invariably want to use the library in a way that's slightly different than the provided example, there's no documentation available.

I could see this having large adverse selection effects. All the "low risk" people buy cheap insurance from Google, and the incumbent insurers are left with a pool of only high-risk customers and have to dramatically increase their rates accordingly.

Even if that works well for 99% of people, it could have seriously negative effects for some. After all, a 99% accurate ML algorithm still leaves 1% of "innocent" customers with no way of getting affordable insurance.

I don't think this is comparable to recent NSA actions. The Post Office is a government agency. It's not reasonable to expect the government not to keep track of the mail it delivers.

To phrase this the nerdiest way possible: good art is NP-Complete.

I'm a former math teacher, now a programmer. I think he leaves out a few considerations:

1) You need to be able to do basic calculations before you can do advanced proofs. I taught a lot of high school seniors, and I had a ton of students who were smart enough to handle abstract concepts, but couldn't follow along when I showed them cool proofs because they got caught up on the basic calculations (because they hadn't learned them well in middle/high school).

2) Good high school teachers DO do a lot of pattern recognition/abstract reasoning. That's the entire idea behind a discovery lesson and constructivist teaching - having students learn formulas by discovering patterns and reasoning about them.

3) Again, as he points out, American high schools do do proofs in Geometry. He thinks they're really pedantic, but there are good reasons why 2-column proofs are so tedious. For one, students seeing proofs for the first time freak out, so giving them structure helps. For another, if the students write out every single step, it's easier to identify who really knows his/her stuff and who's BSing.

The problem with average per song is that you "use up" words in every new song, so all things being equal each marginal song has progressively fewer new words.