Viewing profile — Hussell

"these agents" meaning the people who tried to solve the problem and failed?

Because it isn't clear: There's one bird on this mural from each of the 243 taxonomic families. That's why there are a lot of unfamiliar species: because taxonomic categories are u…

There's one bird per taxonomic family. Eagles, Hawks, and Kites are all in a single family, so there's just one: a Black-and-white Hawk-eagle, in Mexico.

Decisions are made by people in the group, not by a notional single being "the corporation". It's individual people making decisions about whether to go for short-term profit or lo…

"We" here likely refers to Tim and his current coworkers who were present to see this, not every current and future employee of Microsoft / Github. Try not to think of any organiza…

The maximum IQ score anyone can get depends on the total number of people who have taken IQ tests so far. Even if every single person alive today took an IQ test (which is absurd i…

The statisticians have a bunch of tricks to transform the formulas into more-easily computable forms, e.g. calculate both the average and the standard deviation in a single pass th…

The two species share a lot of glue genes, and the properties of their silks differ due to other genes affecting things like the ratios of glue proteins in the silk. Those other ge…

Nowhere in the paper does it say that individual spiders are varying their silk composition in response to conditions. The selective expression of proteins is a difference between …

The spiders haven't even been shown to change their silk in response to conditions. It's just two species of spiders each with their own silk recipe.

Since I happen to know these species: the spider pictured at the top of the article is an Argiope bruennichi (Wasp Spider), a European species which closely resembles A. trifasciat…

For those who haven't seen this before, the ones you should look at first are: Falsehoods about Names https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... Falsehoods abo…

Is there an easy way to display a diff which shows all the new links since the last time this was on HN? (Sept. 8th, 2020) Partial list: Falsehoods about Airline Seat Maps https://…

400 hours/minute is 24,000 minutes of video per minute, or 241,920,000 minutes of video per week. Assuming a human can review 8 hours of video per day, 5 days a week (too high, but…

Here's another subpixel font called The Flea's Knees: http://www.typophile.com/node/61920 It's 3 pixels tall (not including ascenders and descenders, which are another two pixels e…

> Real rivers go somewhere. They don't just stop in the middle of nowhere. Yeah? Have a look at the Morghab River in southern Turkmenistan. It flows from some mountains in Afghanis…

Basically: because it has a lot of characteristics in common with all the other, better preserved, asteroid craters we know of. So our hypothetical advanced civilization would have…

Eliminating syntactic (not semantic) ambiguity is indeed a noble goal, but I was kind of horrified when I first realized how it's done in Lojban. Practically every type of phrase h…

That's a problem we already deal with by having labels for the date inputs which explain the expected format. This is especially necessary in Canada, where until recently there was…

I want the content, number formats, date formats, map labels, etc. on my website to all use the same locale. Date input widgets are no exception. I can't afford to give full suppor…

Sounds like you're one of those people who use Linux.

Here's an example of a 2000s era page with a table about midway down with its own scrolling: http://www.ibacanada.com/site.jsp?siteID=ON001 Does this not work on some modern browse…

There's a minesweeper solver which works out all the probabilities of uncertain squares. http://mrgris.com/projects/minesweepr/demo/player/ The creator wrote an explanation here: h…

http://web.archive.org/web/20160625124824/http://cacm.acm.or...

I've personally seen a building with a fractional street number, in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. I've also had to deal with irregular addresses in Canada. Working on a Canada-only pr…