mikhael

i'll admit that that's a convincing argument, but there are ways in which apparent causality can be shown to be illusory. one thought experiment i remember from school involves someone watch…

i do not believe in materialsm, but i do believe that intention and goals are emergent phenomena. nevertheless, i think that's mostly a separate issue. it is a false equivalency to say that mater…

if i understand you correctly, you seem to believe that qualia definitely affects physical reality. we don't know whether that's true or whether qualia is just a byproduct of physical realit…

fair enough that maybe i'm not in the target audience. and perhaps i'm too stuck in my own head, writing iOS apps, where i can't imagine general constraint solvers being used to solve a…

while i will go off and read a few of the linked papers, this post doesn't do a great job, in my opinion, of showing a meaningful relationship between generalized constraint solvers and one-way d…

i wonder whether other cycles would cause the same problem.

In my opinion, the front page should really, really highlight the call-back-and-show-script feature. Sending this out to family and friends, this is the piece I really want them to see.

I read GauntletWizard's point as that such devices are becoming like "brain prostheses." If the device were embedded in your skull/brain, but could be wiretapped, would it be subje…

The state actually gave a fair amount of advance notice. I was given an exact date for when the lien would go in effect, with over a month of lead time, as I recall. I'm a little too paranoid to say e…

I use a credit union, and I have been the victim of a similar problem as the author, and the credit union folded in exactly the same way. Notably, the credit union is local to a state different from t…

The site that usually shows which MIT services are down/unavailable has evidently been hacked, too: http://3down.mit.edu/

I think that (or I wonder whether) you've touched upon the difference between personal vs. public freedoms, the latter of which we impose many regulations upon. Many people would object to a sub-minim…

I find this even more confusing. #1: You preface that sentence with "But in French" so why mention English? Can /dʒ/ actually be written some other way than "dj" in French? From your post, it seems li…

Is this a deliberately confusing explanation? "... this falsehood perpetuated on the big screen in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained where the eponymous character spells his name, adding 'the D is …

I second the call of bullshit. Though I've only skimmed the paper, I don't see any concrete performance numbers. I only see this: "The group has written sev- eral million lines of code, including: cor…

I'm confused about one part of your analysis. You write that Q^k_l = Q^(k-1)_(l+1) * (1 - 1/(l+1)), but it's not obvious to me why the multipler, (1 - 1/(l+1)), is correct in general (past the second …

You would also lose easy access to file histories, correct? This is one reason why I'm a fan of SpiderOak -- the index remains encrypted, but file histories are still stored (efficiently).

That reddit comment only really clarifies one thing: that the cable provider doesn't pay the network very much . Based on the rest of the comment -- the fact that ads are really what support networks…

While I think this makes sense, I've often had the feeling that there's a keeping-up-with-the-Jones' aspect to having an iPhone, driving people to get the new models based on comparison -- "Which iPho…

Do you know whether Prof. Ng has updated the material since the first run of the class? We are still in the honeymoon phase of free, online university courses, so I think there's been relatively littl…

The obfuscation comes as a result of the patent examiners whittling down the overly broad claims made by the authors. This is a process that goes on for numerous rounds, back and forth. Personally I s…

> (past the initial, incomprehensible-unless-you're-a-patent-lawyer "Claims" section) On the contrary, the claims are meant to be understandable to any reasonably technical person (anyone "highly …

i meant it not as a way of solving the current problem so much as a way of preventing it from happening again. indeed, i haven't any great ideas about how to redirect the massive momentum that craigsl…

i wonder whether there is enough interest to build a community-supported "open-craigslist" on top of which anyone might build their own tools/services.