Viewing profile — danblick

The author presents the idea that "you may be born into a culture with social practices that you don't understand but that work for your benefit; they may work better if you don't …

I'd recommend thinking a little about the algorithms involved in efficiently assigning a nearby task to each dwarf and then planning a path for each dwarf to its destination. It ge…

John McWhorter is a well-known linguist who talks about things like comparative linguistics. He's said in the past that (colloquial) Indonesian is one of the most streamlined langu…

It seems like there's a lot in common here with the idea behind design patterns and pattern languages: giving names to "chunks" of expert knowledge in order to allow those chunks t…

It's obscure, honestly. But most cryptocurrency enthusiasts use the term to mean a blockchain (the data structure) together with a protocol for "consensus" (acceptance of a single …

Ya know, Radia Perlman has decades of experience working on networking protocols, I'm willing to bet she understands blockchain as well as anybody. The statement "I cannot distingu…

Eh. But inflation only affects nominal assets like bonds and bank account balances. Real assets like houses or stocks (to a degree) would be expected to rise along with inflation. …

Instead of arguing to go to Mars, let's get the military interested in kinetic bombardment systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment Clearly we need one because No…

I don't understand how the administration can support this change. Allowing carriers to discriminate against content providers seems like legalizing extortion. Is there an argument…

Yeah, you could argue, "Prime is sufficiently expensive and video streaming is a sufficiently large part of Prime that it's not dumping". I can see that, it's possible. I mean, if …

Hadn't heard of that before, thanks! In this case, I understood the question to be "will deep learning do a good job predicting the function of/phenotype emerging from individual S…

From my understanding, Amazon doesn't currently make money off its Amazon Instant Video service. Cheap, high quality streaming TV like this probably hurts (1) traditional TV channe…

I'm skeptical. Machine learning algorithms are only as good as the training data you can provide them. There are lots of tools in genetic analysis you can use to try to understand …

What is LIME?

You're right. If I had a game like this, I would want people to think they could make a lot of money by playing. An easy way to create that impression and to generate hype would be…

I'm kind of imagining a future waterworld scenario where Earth's ice caps have melted completely and humanity looks back at electronic cat breeding as one of the gross excesses of …

Okay. I'm not a zealot about these things, but I think the author underappreciates the nicer aspects of agile. My favorite book on agile looks at it from a mathematical / risk mana…

I used to think in terms of stories, but then I heard Tyler Cowen tell me a story about the dangers of stories, and now I don't think in terms of stories so much. (My story of pers…

Yeah, "moving the web forward" sounds a lot like building barriers to entry. On the other hand, these browsers are open source software, so I'm not sure that's a great argument.

Scheme is a wonderful and flexible language. There's a reason it was used as a teaching language and in books like SICP. I don't use it very much, but you really have to admire som…