Viewing profile — sfrank2147

What does it even mean for consciousness to be an illusion? An illusion implies that someone is being fooled by consciousness, but who is the someone being fooled if there is no un…

Somewhat tangential, but the most absurd ad I've ever seen was when Dodge ran an ad during the Superbowl quoting from this speech.

Thanks for the response!

Does anyone know how Project Euler was storing the passwords?

That's not what standards are for - standards define what students should be learning and at what age, and teachers are responsible for making lesson plans to implement those stand…

I'm learning Haskell right now and it's great. I don't know how widely used it is in production, but it's introducing me to tons of ideas that are applicable in lots of other langu…

That's a great tradition! From an economics perspective, I would gain way more than $2 worth of utility from discovering that someone had randomly paid for my coffee, it would real…

A monopoly should be defined by barriers to entry, not just market share. There's nothing preventing other large companies from entering the search space, and in fact many of them …

The one in 30 million statistic is crazy to me! That means that the surviving fish need to average 30 million children in their lifetime to sustain the current population - if they…

As the paper mentions, it's also possible that people are lying to the IRS about the date of relatives' deaths. (I personally think that's the more likely interpretation, but I gue…

I don't understand how a startup will help here. The problem is regulatory hurdles (good or bad): there are laws that prevent patients from buying medicine before it's been thoroug…

Everyone here is saying to give lots of examples: I would add to not ONLY give examples, but also make sure you explain parameters, return types, etc. The most frustrating type of …

I could see this having large adverse selection effects. All the "low risk" people buy cheap insurance from Google, and the incumbent insurers are left with a pool of only high-ris…

I don't think this is comparable to recent NSA actions. The Post Office is a government agency. It's not reasonable to expect the government not to keep track of the mail it delive…

To phrase this the nerdiest way possible: good art is NP-Complete.

I'm a former math teacher, now a programmer. I think he leaves out a few considerations: 1) You need to be able to do basic calculations before you can do advanced proofs. I taught…

The problem with average per song is that you "use up" words in every new song, so all things being equal each marginal song has progressively fewer new words.