Viewing profile — nickcano

I don't know if this qualifies as rock bottom, but here goes. As a baby, I was adopted by the mother of the man who was married to my biological mother, and at the time thought to …

Author here. At least, from my experience, they are. No Starch Press went above and beyond when working on my book, and they're currently getting hit hard by the counterfeiting iss…

The problem is, when counterfeiters become the default in the buy box, it gives them market they wouldn't otherwise have. If you go to a bootleg site, you expect bootleg books. If …

Holy shit, posted in 2009 and still no change. I see this every time I'm on LinkedIn--I hate it. Still nowhere for me to add my book (sure, publications, but it will drown under mo…

At my last job, we had servers with 64 cores, 1TB ram, and 100+ TB of storage that were taxed to their full extent by one or two people at a time. The job was essentially taking mu…

This causes a ton of compatibility problems, and it's worse that a lot of companies don't seem to care and advertise compatibility anyways. I noticed this a while ago when I wrote …

>about every strange error they get from another programming language that js would have just passed silently with a weird result Wait, do you mean to imply that "passing silently …

I mean, yeah, that's what I feel like is going on. I think it's more like when somebody says the word "January", I pick up that it's a tag in many contexts, one being time, and sta…

>I simply don't visualize it, I think of it as an abstract concept and don't try to put a picture on it. Right. When I'm asked "what happened in January", I just think back to Janu…

That's interesting, I wonder what happens if you take one of the current prototypes and hover off the ledge of a canyon... Will you drop suddenly and go splat, or will you keep alt…

>without some kind of public showdown that involves social media. Maybe many tech communities are capable, and you just don't realize it because they're not having public showdowns…

>bullet proof since it's likely that any sample used to test its effectiveness will be run by VirusTotal first. Nope. There are lots of situations where exploit kits will automatic…

The bottom line, though, is that ads DO serve malware. I work for an endpoint protection company and the most common traces we get from our customers are ones that originate from a…

>the biggest reason to think the universe isn't a computer is just how darn non-computable quantum mechanics is If an intelligence is simulating a universe, they aren't exactly goi…

How, though? Assume a particle has some Flatten() method that is called only when it interacts with another particle. Until this is called, certain data points (let's say, anything…

>I remember reading once that the limitation on speed of light could be a performance optimisation. >Things in superpositions only becoming "set" after observation... that is just …

Well that's also interesting because it brings the potential count of simulated universes from "some N bounded by the ratio of the amount information containable by a universe to t…

I love contemplating this idea, but really hate when people write about it. They always talk about "The Matrix" or being "Video Game Characters", which really muddies the water. Of…

Ideally there should be a way for the model to say "soccer is a type of sport, let's apply this question to every other sport and only say yes if soccer is the best answer", right?…

I dare you to find someone willing to, without a computer, parse such a description. JPEG is a surprisingly non-intuitive, complex format. You're right, you can be more precise tha…

They could have used PCA[1] on their feature set and let a human come up with these; they claim to use machine learning, not that this checklist was generated as a result of machin…