boxy310
Joined 11 years ago
Karma
326
Submissions
108
Member since
Jul 15
Recent submissions
Comment · 6 years ago
Yes, it's quite clever. An equivalent proof is dividing 0.999... by 9 using long division, which comes out to 0.111... which is equal to 1/9. Now use fraction notation and it simplifies to 9/9 = 1. Not quite as robust as the limit-based proofs but it's a quick answer and gets to the heart of the issue of repeating notation not capturing the whole picture.
Comment · 6 years ago
> How can the US have that little protection of their workers..?
The US has spent the last 65 years chipping away at unionization rates and other pro-employee protections. The overall rate of unionization in the US peaked in 1954 [1].
[1] http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2011/0311reuss2.html
Comment · 6 years ago
Yes - this is a major function of private equity in general. They even have investment banks and firms that specialize in "buy side" versus "sell side" of the transaction.
Comment · 7 years ago
I once had a consulting gig where the customer desperately wanted to build a Spark/Scala ML pipeline, for a dataset that was 10 MB. We spent 3 months hammering it together for a flat Python process that would've taken us 2 weeks.
Comment · 7 years ago
Neil Postman was my single most favorite find in a thrift store.
Comment · 7 years ago
Long-haul trucking would be a great use-case. Even if you need humans for local pilot guidance, you can queue them up to a "cell phone lot" and courier the last-mile drivers in between shifts of going back & forth. It would also mean drivers would be based more locally to points of loading, rather than having to be constantly on the road away from home.
Comment · 7 years ago
Cash or a bank demand account is not without their own inherent risks. A fire, robbery, or forced currency exchange could destroy the value of the physical commodity of cash, and the FDIC only insures individual account bank deposits up to a certain limit so a bank institution failure could cause losses to individual accounts.
Comment · 7 years ago
Drinking multiple _liters_ of water in a relatively short time can cause water intoxication [1] due to the drop in relative electrolyte levels. I got it once at scout camp where, unfortunately, the medic misdiagnosed me with dehydration and had me drink a gallon of water. I ended up urinating about every ten minutes for the next 24 hours, and is one of the most unpleasant experiences I've gone through.
Comment · 7 years ago
Most MLM's tout a flexible working schedule which women tend to prefer due to being saddled with a higher average proportion of the child-rearing and elder-care responsibilities.
Comment · 7 years ago
Over time the attrition rate for attention increases. As a result it becomes harder to justify further investments in usability features or content quality because you can no longer leverage the increased attention of more users in the future. This can lead towards a death spiral of lower frequency updates leading to less viewers leading to less updates.
For a venture-backed site even hitting a 20% growth rate per month would be a warning that you're not growing fast enough to justify continued investment, as was the case for a recent postmortem on Gumroad [1].
Given that this post was from 10 years ago that's definitely not the case for Hacker News, but in this climate it's gotten even more extreme if you're relying on venture backing.
Comment · 8 years ago
I think we would have to understand better how instinctive behavior ends up affecting this kind of cognitive processes, but I think it would be possible. Examples that immediately come to mind would be some cats' aversion to cucumbers due to resemblance to snakes, or superprecociality [1] in newborn animals who can walk within minutes of being born or fly on the same day they hatch.
Comment · 8 years ago
DOB and date of last checkup are highly schematizable. This specific example is very well-suited to a SQL solution dumping into an autocaller queue.
Maybe this was a terrible example, and the author didn't grasp a good example of legitimately non-schematic data points?
Comment · 8 years ago
Funny - half of my experiences talking with nonprofits were telling people with an Access database to migrate to a proper SQL database.
Comment · 8 years ago
Mid-tier Midwestern cities are quickly gentrifying with bikeshares, kombucha shops, craft breweries, and bookstore/brewpub combos. Madison, Indianapolis, & Cincinnati often get mentioned in these conversations, but I know Detroit is having a bike renaissance right now and land is _dirt cheap_ in all of these cities.
I know Indianapolis in particular has had an influx of tech companies opening large campuses, including Salesforce, Genesys, and Infosys. This has gone hand-in-hand with rises in indie music festivals and a blossoming craft brewing industry.