Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46670652

Points: 1

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46260461

Points: 4

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35859049

Points: 4

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Of course, it is true that his books are unavailable on Amazon and Amazon-owned sites. I wish I knew what caused this, or how to find out.

I know people who, when considering faculty job offers from universities, use "are libraries open to the public" as a proxy for other valuable properties of the university. It seems like a pretty good heuristic to me.

I've been asked for ID exactly once on a university campus---I needed security to let me into my office building in the middle of the night because I'd forgotten my wallet in there, and they needed to record my name for some record. The officer didn't seem interested in _checking_ the ID so much as copying down the name.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33063991

Points: 1

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32102834

Points: 5

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The problem, of course, it that the timing doesn't make sense at all. You say this happened in the early 50's. That can't be the early 1850's, since Bader wasn't born yet. But by the 1950s, Feynman was already long gone from high school. Indeed, he'd already devised path integrals, and so he certainly knew about the principle of least action!

Perhaps you meant 30's?

A reasonable survey to send around might be "how often do you use the FreeBSD docs?" "How often do you notice errors in section 1? Section 2? Section 3?" That's not what this is. It's "here's a specific error, and I'm gonna run a /poll/ to figure out what the priority on fixing it is".

Even ignoring the "that's why we hired /you/" component---this must be a singularly ineffective way to gain reliable information. Very few people are going to reply (because each of the ~100 questions is rather technical!). The responses are therefore going to be self-selected to... I don't know, whoever has the time and will to waste on this.

In any case, here's the follow-up with the winners: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=42

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30532686

Points: 3

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Really, this is a transparent attempt to bring that topic into unrelated threads. Let the namecheap-bashing stay in the namecheap-bashing threads.

I mean, we don't live in a representative democracy. Not in the sense you're describing.

(Assuming you, like me, live in the U.S.) Civil servants are not elected, are not directly accountable to elected officials, and are certainly not drawn from a representative cross section of the public. You may feel like they represent you, but that is (to be frank) little more than an expression of your own place in society. Civil servants form a discrete and powerful class, with their own interests, unions, and lobbying groups. Ignoring this is, optimistically, naive.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30295073

Points: 1

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Surely this is several typos? Longitude, which marks east-west, must span 360 degrees (-180 to 180, perhaps? although 0 to 360 is just as reasonable). Latitude, marking north-south, spans only 180 degrees, and therefore is presumably -90 to 90 (so that 0 is the equator).

The article really has a strong vibe of "algorithms are faulty, we need humans in the loop to make sure they're behaving well!", with a hidden assumption of "humans are less faulty than algorithms". That's an empirical assertion to be determined on a domain-by-domain basis. It's certainly true that having a human in the loop leads to worse outcomes in chess (unless the human has enough modesty to just not do anything). The same is increasingly true of other domains as well.

Perhaps someday, incorrect, largely content-free FUD articles about how algorithms suck will themselves be written entirely by algorithms.

This is pushing way too many of my buttons, so I'll just close by pointing out (on the other side of the apps/humans scale) that a substantial fraction of the time, when I check the weather on NWS, it says something like "Today's high: 56; current temperature: 58". I certainly hope that a human in the loop would fix that problem.