goldmab
Joined 16 years ago
Karma
283
Submissions
120
Member since
Sep 22
Recent submissions
Comment · 13 years ago
Thanks. I think a lot of them agree that low-carb approaches work for weight loss and some other outcomes, since that's what the science shows. But his "insulin hypothesis" is pure pseudoscience and I'm not aware of any papers about it.
Comment · 13 years ago
It took me a little reading to figure out the agenda, but some key phrases like "obesity is a growth disorder" tipped me off. This is a Gary Taubes project. He is a writer of books in favor of low-carbohydrate diets, and he often badly misinterprets the scientific literature. He has a selection bias about which studies he thinks are worth talking about, so as to make it appear that low-carbohydrate diets are the answer to everything. No actual nutritional scientists think his "alternate hypothesis" is credible.
Comment · 13 years ago
This is a fun demo of functional programming, but Lisp isn't so special anymore. In Python:
>>> def deriv(f):
... dx = 0.0001
... def fp(x):
... return (f(x + dx) - f(x)) / dx
... return fp
...
>>> cube = lambda x: x**3
>>> deriv(cube)(2.0)
12.000600010022566Comment · 13 years ago
Anti-semitism isn't always about religion. Sometimes it's just racism.
Comment · 13 years ago
Does this bother you? I think they are just trying to eliminate management overhead by using peer evaluation to set the company's direction by consensus. This could maybe be chaotic, but I see it as a trade-off. A traditional structure is chaotic in its own way. Like, who gets promoted to upper management? The most deserving people, or lucky people?
Arbitrary decisions from an executive may or may not be better than popularity contests. I guess it depends on the executives and the culture.
Comment · 14 years ago
CRUD wrappers with a pretty GUI are actually really hard to do well. Think of all unusable and unstable CRUD apps you've used. I wouldn't drill someone on dynamic programming for that kind of job, but I would want them to be smart enough and dedicated enough to do it well. In my experience that's rare.
Comment · 14 years ago
While on a 1:1 audio call, users will see content that could spark additional topics of conversation that are relevant to Skype users and highlight unique and local brand experiences. So, you should think of Conversation Ads as a way for Skype to generate fun interactivity between your circle of friends and family and the brands you care about. Ultimately, we believe this will help make Skype a more engaging and useful place to have your conversations each and every day.
How can Skype pretend something is desirable if it goes away automatically when you pay? That's nearly the definition of undesirable.
Comment · 14 years ago
I'm a Ruby developer who never uses Rails, and I think this is a major problem. It makes it hard for me to embrace "Ruby developer" as a career path because that means I'll be typecast as a Rails dev, and I don't want to use Rails.
Comment · 14 years ago
My TV has rabbit ears. I can watch NFL games in high definition with them for free.
Comment · 14 years ago
I call bullshit. If this guy was bored because all of his software projects were exactly the same, he should have automated their creation and reused his code so that they took an extremely short amount of time to create. Anyone who can't do that is either encountering novel problems that require decisions, or just not a good enough programmer to automate and reuse.
This is the same way I feel when programmers complain about writing "just another CRUD app." CRUD apps are in fact very difficult to write because of usability concerns. If all of your "create" screens look exactly the same no matter what is being created, that means you are making no effort as a UI designer to anticipate common creation patterns. Even assuming a cookie-cutter UI, a CRUD programmer has to properly model the concepts in data, which is not trivial either.
Comment · 14 years ago
What kind of thought process and/or experimentation led you to that algorithm?
Comment · 14 years ago
Yep. I learned music theory in the course of learning to play single-note woodwind instruments. There's a lot of focus on scales and intervals.
Comment · 14 years ago
If you want to learn to play guitar, the wrong approach is to pick up a book about music theory and a chart showing where all the notes are on the fretboard.
I found music theory knowledge very helpful when learning how to play guitar. In fact, if somebody knows what intervals a minor triad and a major triad are made of, and they know what note each string of the guitar is, then they can work out how to play a lot of chords.