Viewing profile — ddt

> (Aside: I am intentionally sticking with U. S. customary units of pounds, miles, etc., to be consistent with much of the related literature.) From the article, it sounds like die…

Especially with how close the precinct station is to Cal Anderson. We're talking ~3 blocks. Maybe it's a case of understaffing and/or suboptimal allocation of officers? I imagine P…

Sounds like they're doing something closer to URVs [1] than Bitcoin. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidade_real_de_valor

My understanding is that dumbwaiters and laundry chutes fall under a fire code which boils down to "Nah, dude. Don't do that" just about everywhere. Vertical passages are great for…

There are complicated ways of doing this, but the naïve way is as follows: First you need a corpus of text that's grammatically correct Each node in the chain is a word or piece of…

Oh man, so many memories of giving motion sickness to my friends and parents watching me play Descent.

My big takeaway from the Chomsky quote is that it's useless to ask if computers can think because one of the fundamental properties we associate with thinking is some biological/sp…

I guess my point was that hipster is such an ill defined word that trying to understand why a particular thing is or is not hipster is futile.

The term "hipster" has become more or less a catch-all for words such as * pretentious * egotistical * artsy * self-involved * preachy * irreverent * trendy and many many more. My …

While the name "Uncle Tom" comes from the book, the character of Uncle Tom from ~1865 onwards was portrayed almost exclusively in minstrel show retellings of the novel. Minstrel sh…

I haven't read any books specifically on this topic, but it's a fairly common thing in non-academic (and sometimes academic) discussions of history. There's a subreddit, http://red…

I love this. Do you happen to know of any good reading materials on pre-Enlightenment or even pre-printing press scientific history? It gets boring hearing that there was no academ…

Partly, it has to do with the role of the church pre-enlightenment. The modern secular university didn't exist in the 13th Century. The concept of a teaching body that granted degr…

I think the second reason you listed to be much more compelling than the first. It could be argued that the space race was about ensuring that the US had missile superiority over t…

This and Twitch Plays Pokemon have taught me a lot more about group efficiency than The Mythical Man Month

@moron4hire: It's a good point. But there are side effects of reducing residential property. What happens to the city's economy when everyone's commute is doubled because housing i…

I think she's taking the position that there's inherent value in providing affordable residential property in New York which exceeds the value in extracting maximum tax revenue fro…

I think this is where the argument for short term whole-residence rentals breaks down. In the beginning, Airbnb was for homeowners and renters to provide a spare bedroom to travele…

The "graph moving in the right direction" doesn't have to be impressive in absolute terms. If I can prove that I have 100 paying, engaged customers this week, 50 last week, 25 the …

I can't possibly recommend Rdio enough. The design is simple and intuitive. State transfers nicely between devices. Even little things are pleasantly surprising. If I have my lapto…

It tells the sender if you screenshot. It's not enough to prevent it from happening, but it adds a pretty big social incentive not to do so.

I don't doubt that they're smart and nice. I'd be shocked if they didn't want to do right by their customers. It seems like they have a pretty good track record of being good to th…

I think anyone who doesn't provide programmatic access to their analytics app is going to fall by the way-side so quickly there wouldn't be much demand for them to be integrated in…