wtmcc's comments

The compression is basic run-length encoding, leveraging the Perl repetition operator (x), and the property of the Perl print/say functions that they concat items passed in a list before writing to STDOUT.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-length_encoding

https://perldoc.perl.org/perlop.html#Multiplicative-Operator...

https://perldoc.perl.org/functions/say.html

https://perldoc.perl.org/functions/print.html

Probably the best citation is a remarkable, rigorous paper by Chetty et al (2014) that uses individual IRS returns [1].

To quote those authors: “We find that children entering the labor market today have the same chances of moving up in the income distribution (relative to their parents) as children born in the 1970s. However, because inequality has risen, the consequences of the ‘birth lottery’ – the parents to whom a child is born – are larger today than in the past.”

[1] http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/mobility_trends.pdf

Internet service is a much higher margin business than television. I don’t see why Big Cable should want to stay in it, at this rate.

81% of the money TWC takes in video subscription fees they spend on video programming from Viacom, EPSN, HBO, etc. [1]

3% of the money TWC takes in broadband subscription fees they spend on high-speed data. [2]

These figures do not include infrastructure investments ($3.2 billion in 2013). [3]

[1] (4,782m+772m)/6,825m = .81. (http://ir.timewarnercable.com/files/doc_financials/Annual%20...) [2] 175m/5,822m = .03. (Ibid) [3] 3,198m. (Ibid)

The portrait of the college grad painted in the article is consistent with what I’ve seen as an undergrad at Harvard in econ and CS circles.

> [College students want money, structure, and sex appeal.]

But I’ll add another motivation to the laundry list, that draws smart grads to selective/prestigious programs (including Harvard, Goldman, Google, and even YC): Smart grads want to be surrounded by other smart grads, because they want to build peer relationships with future co-founders and business partners.

This article considers hedge funds in the aggregate, which seems to me to be a fallacy. It doesn’t consider variation within a category which we can usefully select against.

“Money in hedge funds is a bad investment” seems similar to saying “going to college is a bad investment,” when the value of a college degree is highly dependent on institution and major. CS at Stanford may be a fabulous investment, while Folklore/Mythology at U of Phoenix may not be.

I assume “ACCESS GRANTED” is preferred over your root prompt because it is more legible to the vast majority of viewers.

In fact, I suspect one noble goal in ItsAUnixSystem-style sequences is making sure everybody watching understands what’s going on: The access was granted, dummy.

Of course sometimes that’s gonna conflict with realism.

> The only real restriction is that fast lanes can’t be offered exclusively to a company also owned by the cable or phone company.

This fast lane already exists, and it exists for the cable company itself.

E.g. Comcast’s digital television (including Netflix-rivaling “Xfinity” on-demand service) is delivered over bandwidth that is dedicated/statically allocated to serving their entertainment package.

Worse still, Comcast’s data also has a dedicated backhaul. Live TV is collected from satellite feeds at a local “headend” facility, and on-demand content is likely cached close to the user à la Netflix Open Connect.

You can get a passport the same day in the US. Most but not all State Dept. “passport agencies” [1] require proof of international travel in the next 2 weeks.

I know, because I had one made in Atlanta, the day before a trip to Europe.

[1] http://travel.state.gov/content/passports/english/passports/...

Original link to English translation http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/debatten/mathias-doepf...

Original link to German source http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/medien/mathias-doepfne...

No, because “blurriness” (low local contrast) may indicate something besides a particular depth.

Consider, for instance, a head-on photograph of a print of a shallow-focused photo. The region that print embodies will have plenty of variation in contrast, but exist at a single depth. Also, consider that blurring increases in both in front of and behind the center of focus; how could we tell which depth the blurring indicated?

Something similar to what you suggest is, however, done in software autofocus, which can take repeated samples at different focal distances to clear things up. Maybe that’s something to think about, e.g. for a static subject. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autofocus#Contrast_detection

Great way of thinking of it. Adults may have different brains for learning languages than kids, but I’d argue the problem adults have is more that they have more "ships to burn" (and are more hesitant with the torch).

Well said. To take things one step further, I’d suggest the main failure may be the claim that we desire to learn languages in the first place, when we’re not willing to integrate a language into the things in our lives that motivate us.

With the exception of Japanese (with Anime‎ etc.) I can’t think of a single door that a foreign language opens, which we can truly expect the representative American high school student to be interested in.

The traditional American Spanish classroom is probably at least 80% English, and students are in it perhaps 5 hours a week. = 1 hr/week total

Compare this with the experience of a Spanish native speaker dropped into first grade in America, and not knowing a word of English. They have school for 6 hours a day, every weekday. = 30 hr/week total

These are not comparable, even by volume.

When you account for the burden of code-switching among languages, and the disconnection from what interests them of what little Spanish the Americans hear, it’s even more obvious why we Americans don’t end up learning Spanish, and Hispanic immigrants who go to school in the US speak English with fluency and ease, even when they first encounter it only late in life.

Yes. As I mention above, I find motivation to be extraordinarily important in learning languages of all kinds. Diving in implies you start with some task you’re already motivated by.

A crucial, well understood advantage with PLs is that they are well documented (both officially and on Stack Overflow), making minor successes with little previous exposure more likely, which can provide constant reinforcement.

In fact, natural languages are far better documented than people believe. Armed with a few electronic unabridged dictionaries, translation corpora, and conjugation tools, you can make text chatting with a native speaker motivating in the same way as diving into a new programming language, even without having ever composed a sentence before.

I’d echo your intuitions about learning, drawing on my experience learning a second language (German) to fluency in my late teens, and comparing them to my half-hearted, dead-ended attempts with a few others (Chinese, French, Ancient Greek) afterward.

To me, it seems the most important factor in learning a language is exposure (à la Gladwell’s 10k hours, and 1 hr in classroom counts far, far less than 1 hr of watching a trashy soap opera). Related and also important is motivation.

Excelling at the classroom model might provide a foundational excitement or make talking with natives less humiliating or help with grammatical minutiae (in German, irregular verb stems and modifier declension, which just take more hours to get intuitively), but has nothing directly to do with how fluent you end up.

I’d guess this test serves more to reinforce an already prevalent, toxic fatalism about learning languages (in particular as adults) than to teach us about our selves.

Instagram/Twitter/Github: Informal market which favors the needy, and somewhat the connected.

Phone service: random UID as you suggest, users put aliases in address book. Works great. Plays no favorites, unless you want 555-555-5555.

Internet DNS: restrictions on valid names (to certain TLDs) which are gradually lifted as our name needs increase. Expiration, which favors the needy. Cash market, which favors the rich and needy.

Email: Similar to DNS, but mandatory attachment to domains broadens set of available names. No expiration policy at high demand domains (i.e. gmail).

I’m very interested to see how the mainstream press covers something I understand well. Gives me a input → output pair to train my model of the press’s lens on the world. It’s also interesting to see how the public reacts to such a thing.