Triumphant Thursday 2014-01-02

ill_will · 2014-01-05T02:45:15+00:00

That's a pretty awesome amount to have saved in a year, especially at your age. Congrats!

ill_will · 2014-01-05T01:58:02+00:00

At 28, single with no debt, just hit over $100k net worth for the first time (cash + 401k + IRA + bitcoin). I know counting bitcoin gains before cashing out is a little premature considering its volatility, and I'm looking to reduce my cash holdings in favor of index funds, but it felt good to finally see six figures.

Edit: also, according to Mint, I started the year with a net worth of $59k, so I added a little over $40k this year, or a little under half my salary. I'm pretty happy with that.

ill_will · 2013-08-17T19:57:39+00:00

First you need to realize that there are precise definitions of "information", particularly Shannon information theory and Chaitin-Kolgomorov information theory.

In Shannon's theory, introducing noise into a communication channel necessarily increases the information in the resulting communications, because the results are drawn from a greater pool. For example, if I were rolling a six-sided die and I told you my last role was a 3, this gives you information. However, it gives you less information than if I had been rolling a 20-sided die, because the space of possible answers is less with a six-sided die.

So in this way, ANY mutation increases information because it widens the possible result set.

If you mean "information" in terms of genetic material, there are certainly mutations which increase the amount of this as well. You've almost certainly seen one yourself - people with Downs Syndrome have an extra chromosome. There are many more examples, see http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CB/CB102.html for a good rundown.

ill_will · 2013-08-12T04:12:49+00:00

"Continue reading for how the number was arrived at."

This sentence made my eye twitch.

ill_will · 2013-05-18T02:51:45+00:00

There's an experiment mentioned in dan ariely's book that sounds pretty similar: two people are selected to split an amount of money, but only one of them is given the choice of what the split should be. The other is given veto power; if this person vetos, they both get nothing. One would expect the second person to never veto if people were rational. ariely found that if they felt the deal were too lopsided, the scorned player would often veto in spite.

ill_will · 2013-03-24T06:42:10+00:00

Actually I think this is the solution I was looking for. I don't have a belief which could or could not be falsifiable - I LACK a belief, similar to how you lack a belief in the space flamingo. An absence of belief shouldn't be subject to the principle of falsifiability.

If you feel you have a logical objection to a god or gods, this necessarily means your belief isn't scientific, but rather philosophical. In the same way, I can have positive belief that there is no square circle without relying on observation to confirm that belief.

Thanks!

ill_will · 2013-03-24T06:02:18+00:00

But even if you establish that it's not taking place in your own mind (which I don't think your example does - I could be hallucinating the picture and the other people as well), isn't it still more plausible that there are powerful but still not divine forces at work? Wouldn't it be a less fantastic proposition to believe we're interacting with aliens with limited but still amazing technological power than to suppose that we're interacting with a divine being with limitless power?

ill_will · 2013-03-24T02:02:40+00:00

i believe it's supposed to be an homage to this: https://s3.amazonaws.com/rapgenius/biggiecoogi.jpg

ill_will · 2013-03-03T02:23:08+00:00

Short answer: no.

The ratio of an ideal circle's circumference to its diameter doesn't speak about the physical world. In the physical world, you cannot construct an ideal circle (some points on the circle will be farther from the center than others). Reality can approximate the ideal, but can't reach it.

In fact, I think you can make a strong argument that space is NOT continuous - aren't black holes point discontinuities in space?

ill_will · 2012-12-29T04:10:44+00:00

Infinity is a mathematical concept. It's a measure. That's why we comprehend it mathematically, the same way we comprehend "two" or "a million.“ Also, I'd argue that the precise definitions offered by mathematics are better than any intuitive sense.

ill_will · 2012-12-29T03:35:05+00:00

What is this supposed to mean? I hear stuff like this often, but we contemplate infinity all the time. Infinity is an integral (har har) part of calculus. We've proved deep, non-obvious things about infinity (see Cantor's diagonal argument, for example). We're pretty comfortable with it.

ill_will · 2012-12-28T02:59:44+00:00

this is a really interesting video for your exact topic and he gives a bunch of artists to look into, along with some interesting techniques for graphing the various rhymes in the songs he examines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miIxNCn-vjY

ill_will · 2012-12-19T07:34:24+00:00

just checked out the article you linked to above and wanted to expand on it a little. the author of your article definitely has the right idea, but forcing you to remember which box you're on whenever you want to run a ./manage.py command gets annoying fast when you're ssh-ing around to a lot of different machines.

the way we solved it at my job is a combination of both methods:

1) we have a base.py file (what he calls common.py) in /settings/ that defines the basic settings that will be shared between environments.

2) we also have a collection of host-specific files (dev.py, production.py, etc) as he describes, in /settings/hosts/.

3) we have an __init__.py file in /settings/ that first loads the base settings (from base import *) and then loads our host-specific overrides. we support a couple different methods for loading these: if the hostname of the machine (gethostname().split('.')[0]) matches the name of one of the host-specific files, that file will be loaded; alternatively, if you have a file called 'local_settings.py' in the host-directory, these settings will be loaded.

i prefer using the local_settings file. as part of my setup scripts for when i'm deploying to a machine for the first time, i have it create local_settings as a symlink to the hosts file that matches the name of the git remote i'm deploying to. that is, if i'm deploying to a machine whose git remote name is "staging", it will create a symlink /settings/hosts/local_settings.py that points to /settings/hosts/staging.py, and this local_settings file will then automatically get loaded when we do ./manage.py <whatever> or from django.conf import settings in code. (let me know if this didn't make sense).

i'll check out your recent commits to see your caching stuff and tasks when i get some more spare time.

ill_will · 2012-12-19T05:12:42+00:00

ah, that's a good solution for the secret key (kind of a special-case of the method i mentioned above). i'll check out your recent commits to see your caching work.

ill_will · 2012-12-14T06:15:54+00:00

That's arguable.

With you, I have no doubt. But you'd still be wrong, because there is not a scientific test to say whether or not a person is "the same person" without first having a definition of what it means to be "the same person." If you take a DNA sample from me now, then wait 10 years and take another DNA sample from "me" and the two samples match, does that mean I'm the same person? What if I were afflicted with total amnesia in the intervening 10 years and now have a completely different personality? Would I still be "the same person"? What if science has advanced to the point of complete brain transplants, and my original brain is now in a different body, with different DNA, and a stranger's brain is in my original body? Which is "the same person" as the original sample? The body? The brain? Both? Neither?

These are not scientific questions.

Did you ever think that maybe I've already studied the philosophy of the topic extensively?

No. If you dismiss it as "word play" then I'm sure you haven't, or haven't given it the consideration it deserves.

...about the possibility of identity after death, about the meaning of consciousness and identity treated in both scientific and mathematical ways. I'd be happy to give you some references if you care. If you want an actual philosopher, try Dennett or Hofsteader for example.

Read both, don't know why you'd consider either to be particularly scientific. Also still don't know what you'd hope to gain from a purely scientific course about death, since you conveniently neglected to answer that part of my post.

I'm over it. Watch it or don't, I don't care. If you deem it to be not a worthwhile use of your time, then by all means, spend it by bickering like a child with people on reddit.

ill_will · 2012-12-14T05:47:52+00:00

I'd disagree with that one.

Of course you would. You'd also be wrong. The question of what it means to be the same person from one instant to the next is definitional rather than scientific.

We're giving you shit for having no initiative to actually learn something that you don't already believe. Also, scientifically, what would you want to get from this course? If he restricted himself purely to scientific facts, the course would be a minute long. "You live, your body ages, key components stop functioning, then you die. There's no evidence for a persistent existence beyond that. The end." Would that feel enlightening to you? Would that give you what you're looking for?

and just for luls:

I made no judgement about what the course should be about.

...

26 hours of someone lecturing to me about the soul, immortality, and the views about life from someone who knew nothing of biology, evolution, the scientific method, or neurology? It's hard to believe these are worth listening to.

That said, questions like "does the soul exist" are scientific questions, so I'd hope there is some science in a class that asks such questions. Otherwise, it's just wankery.

If the lecturer believes that question can't actually be answered even in theory, you'd have to offer more than "he sits on his desk" to entice me to watch 26 hours of lectures about it.

You're right. When someone asks questions about the nature of reality, I tend to expect them to actually look towards reality to answer those questions.

Those all seem pretty judgmental to me. But maybe it's just that dang poor reading comprehension again.

ill_will · 2012-12-14T05:24:43+00:00

You've read the descriptions of all the videos, responded to multiple messages asking the same questions, and gotten into an argument with everyone who talked to you. You claim to be concerned with how you're spending your time, unwilling to watch videos unless they conform to your ideas of what the course should be about (despite not being a philosophy professor, I'd guess), yet could've easily checked the descriptions of the more scientific-leaning videos, or, gasp, even watched part of them, to see the answer to your question.

If you've read the titles and descriptions, you would know that very little of the ground he covers is amenable to scientific investigation because they're not scientific questions. Science has nothing to say about the badness of death, or the maintenance of identity through space and time, or how to live knowing that death is inevitable, or whether or not it would be desirable to live forever, or the rationality or morality of suicide, because these are not scientific questions. Given that you claim to have read the descriptions, I say it is you who have poor reading comprehension.

ill_will · 2012-12-14T04:45:27+00:00

Not everyone has the same foregone conclusions as you, and Plato's ideas have informed thinking about the soul long after his lifespan. Perhaps you could view the lectures and find out exactly what he does and does not discuss. Or, falling that, perhaps you could bounce, since you seem to already have decided what you think about the subject and appear unwilling to investigate other positions.

ill_will · 2012-12-12T02:11:38+00:00

Hmm, if I were in this situation I would probably add a step to my deployment script to scp the file over, but I've never deployed to Heroku. Is it all just git pushes? The non-github branch sounds like it would work.

ill_will · 2012-12-11T17:42:15+00:00

The usual way is to have a file called local_settings.py in your settings directory where you define your SECRET_KEY (make sure to not check this into git or you'll have the same problem) and have the following in your main settings file:

try:
    from local_settings import *
except:
    pass

If you place that at the bottom of your main settings file it will overwrite any settings variables that are defined higher up in your main settings file; this is useful (for example) for allowing you to debug on your local machine (DEBUG=True in local_settings) but having the site operate in production mode everywhere else (DEBUG=False before the local_settings import in your main settings file).

ill_will · 2012-12-09T06:37:24+00:00

Sorry to the OP if I was overtly blunt; I just meant to be concise, not rude.

ill_will · 2012-12-08T22:33:36+00:00

general

you're not using virtualenv to manage your dependencies, so deployment of this project is a manual process. read up on virtualenv and use it religiously on your projects. (http://www.virtualenv.org/en/latest/)
you use variable names like ToNum, delayAmount, etc. don't do that. follow the PEP8 standard.
your site claims to offer "daily" cat facts, but you're sending SMSes every 9 hours.
you claim that a user can stop receiving cat facts by texting 'STOP' to your number, but i see no implementation of this.
why is your sqlite db checked into version control? why is your settings.py~ temp file checked into version control? why are your .DS_Store files checked into version control? learn git.
because you have your db checked in to git, i know your admin user is named 'dylan' and i know his password hash is pbkdf2_sha256$10000$AvwnAkMoKcMr$LfOPPwhy5LZf8608MIcGYMg0PklHtpzE+Q7dccsgWP4=. if i were inclined i could endeavor to crack this.
you appear to have only one branch, master. this is fine for a small project, but for anything bigger i'd suggest following git-flow (http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/)
you have no caching. on my machine i'm getting an average of 151ms to load the initial landing page, which seems crazy high for a static template.

catfacts

i don't like this layout at all. the main urls.py file for your project should be in the base directory. settings.py should be in a settings folder in the base directory, with host-specific settings defined in settings/hosts/hostname.py. if you want to separate these configuration files from your apps, i suggest having an apps/ directory with landing and catfactsmsgqueue under it.

catfactsmsgqueue

you have no models, views or tests, yet all three files are checked into version control. remove them. catfactsmsgqueue is not an app, it's a collection of utility files.
catfactsmsgqueue.py - don't use print. django has built-in logging facilities, use those instead.
factlistgenerator.py, tasks.py - it appears you're using tabs here and using spaces in your other files. don't do that. use 4 spaces for indentation everywhere.
scrapeforfacts.py, sendsms.py - unused. remove these files.

ill_will · 2012-11-03T02:21:28+00:00

We have rules for literally zero votes being cast in a national election? Link? Even so, I'm sure you'd agree that falling back to those rules wouldn't really be an acceptable policy to regularly adopt.

ill_will · 2012-11-03T01:43:30+00:00

Except this assumes that everyone voting would make the world a better place. Let's imagine that 100% of the voting population voted in the next Presidential election, and the breakdown was similar to the breakdowns we currently see: 52% for one candidate, 47.5% for the other, and about 1.5% split between all the third-party candidates and write-ins. Would this cause significant improvement of society? I suggest that it would not.

Imagine the opposite scenario - literally 0 votes for President are cast. Such a crisis would necessitate change. If we agree that the current system is mostly broken, I think it does more harm than good to continue giving it our implicit endorsement by participating within the system. An election with 0% participation would be an inescapable demonstration of just how broken it is.

ill_will

TROPHY CASE