Viewing profile — jlgray

Who among us hasn't suddenly, in the middle of some mundane task, broken down and started spewing pages of surreal, stream-of-consciousness nonsense?

This is the thing for me. If your company has a fully-stocked kitchen, quality chairs, monitors, adjustable desk, and noise cancelling headphones, it might be a comparable to a goo…

An under-represented argument for a carbon tax is the fact that it would encourage companies to innovate, both with respect to efficiency as well as using renewable energy. I predi…

I don't think the comparison to cigarette taxes is completely fair. Cigarettes are relatively inelastic w.r.t. price as they are addictive, and have no real competing product. Elec…

Science and technology are generally agnostic to their usage, and will be used to both positive and negative ends whose magnitude is proportional to the power of the underlying tec…

I had a number theory professor who said there are a number of deceptively promising avenues of attack using simpler methods than Wiles, but that end up being dead ends. He said ma…

I'm ever so slightly optimistic in this regard. As soon as we see a few GDPR-related penalties assessed, the risk-reward calculation will change drastically. According to their 201…

$50bn/year would be more revenue than fb had in 2017, though of course the majority of their 2.23bn monthly users would disappear if asked for $.01/mo. It is an interesting thought…

Looks like a summer school program at University of Waterloo: "The Quantum Cryptography School for Young Students (QCSYS) is a unique, eight-day enrichment program for students hos…

I think an important aspect not mentioned in this article is the environment in which the computer and internet wunderkind founders got their starts. You had a perfect storm of bra…

Zoning requirements and permits for operating hotels are not unreasonable. Some people rent out a spare room now and again for extra cash, and some people have multiple properties …

I always feel like the right solution would be to have a significantly shorter copyright duration, but make it extendable for a large and increasing annual fee. I don't care if Dis…

Since they're talking about small publishers having trouble keeping up with google SEO updates, is there a reasonable way to actually break up google search?

I used MiniZinc on the capacitated vehicle routing problem in a combinatorial optimization project course a couple of years ago, and really enjoyed it. The sweet spot for MiniZinc …

Some of that has a "you get what you pay for" component. My parents have a Frigidaire Flair double oven from the early 1960s. The thing is amazing, and still works perfectly. I thi…

Interesting that you bring up autonomy and the military. I wonder if this has anything to do with the US naval piloting incidents of late. Previous HN commentary suggested that the…

> What do we imagine will happen when everybody thinks of themselves as being victimised? On an individual level, self-pity, even when justified, is not very helpful, and though th…

Someone benefits, but it is not "we"

Libertarians did this in New Hampshire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_State_Project

As you said, this is slowly happening to me. I love being able to prototype systems in languages like python and matlab, but at the same time it feels like building on sand, especi…

You would think that, but I did study abroad years ago in japan, and some guys got deported for shoplifting. Another guy I knew there also had a very liberal attitude toward proper…

As T-A suggested, arXiv is a great source, especially with the frustration over the profiteering of the publishing industry, although you always have to be aware that arXiv papers …