aaronem

108 ms·

841.
by aaronem 13y ago
> The meaning of life is to never die. This seems like a difficult philosophy to live with. You will someday die; does your life thus have no meaning? Everyone ever born will eventually die; does human life as a whole thus have no meanin
842.
by aaronem 13y ago
The Christian in you is a good and honorable person; the Hacker News commenter in you knows that such behavior is never rewarded here unless it happens to line up with the HN zeitgeist, which has little patience with any sort of received wi
843.
by aaronem 13y ago
That's one year's salary for an extremely well-paid developer.
844.
by aaronem 13y ago
Thanks -- but you might want to wait a little while; someone opened a Github issue pointing out that the API offers better weather info than I'm using, and also linking a weather icon font I didn't know existed, so I'm mid-re
845.
by aaronem 13y ago
You may or may not have seen it already, but in case you haven't, I'll link here the "How to NSA-proof your email" howto [1] someone just posted in the "Gmail was down" thread. Regardless of how you feel about
846.
by aaronem 13y ago
Do; I spent half a day wrestling with courier and lost, and it took me less than an hour to get dovecot up and doing what I wanted.
847.
by aaronem 13y ago
I mentioned the other day that I'd been thinking of writing a HOWTO for setting up a VPS as a mail server. Now I don't have to; your link is quite close to what I'd have written -- same VPS host, same SMTP and IMAP servers, v
848.
by aaronem 13y ago
I didn't find postfix all that hard to set up. Courier, on the other hand, is a disaster area, which is why my mail server runs dovecot instead; the latter took little effort to configure, and works quite nicely across several devices.
849.
by aaronem 13y ago
I picked up a copy last night. Thus far, it's mainly challenging my patience and my tolerance for lousy writing styles -- it wanders all over the place. I haven't read any of Schlosser's other books; is he always like this?
850.
by aaronem 13y ago
I'm just an armchair historiographer, but it seems to me that more or less all innovation is "by the rich for the rich only" -- at first. Pharmaceutical research, in its modern form, is a very young field; give it fifty yea
851.
by aaronem 13y ago
Sure! There are a couple of issues I want to close on it first, though, so it may be a little while; on the other hand, once I've done that, it'll be a lot niftier than it is right now, and a bit more reliable besides.
852.
by aaronem 13y ago
I cackled! Thank you for pointing that out. Alas, I must confess that I have written Visual Basic (VBscript) code in Emacs. A while back I was screwing around with a project which attempted to generate, via the Windows speech synthesis AP
853.
by aaronem 13y ago
Ritchie's riposte seems apropos here: "If you want [Vim], you know where to find it."
854.
by aaronem 13y ago
You could automate this with a function hung off the after-load-functions hook. Here's something off the top of my head: (defun foo-compile-if-newer (path) "A function suitable for hanging off `after-load-functions&#
855.
by aaronem 13y ago
I'm guessing it was a belated attempt to stifle the inevitable social justice flame war.
856.
by aaronem 13y ago
> Until people start to feel unsafe or targeted The implicit threat, made explicit once again -- it amazes me how blatant some people are in HN comments on this subject!
857.
by aaronem 13y ago
"Survive" and "innovate" aren't the same thing; if pharmaceutical corporations did what you suggest here they should, we'd just be hearing about how evil it is that they don't develop new drugs any more be
858.
by aaronem 13y ago
> My dentist recently told me about 2 drugs which are essentially the same. The drug made by the foreign company costs Rs. 200 (approx $4). On the other hand the India generic version costs Rs. 30 (approx 50cents). Well, sure. All the ha
859.
by aaronem 13y ago
Certainly the situation today isn't similar to World War II. But that's not the only sort of situation in which covert intelligence is of value; how better, after all, to know what overt action to take?
860.
by aaronem 13y ago
> I think you have a very, very optimistic view of humanity. Indeed, very much so! Having once lost my faith in progressivism, I found myself no longer wedded to the peculiar species of pessimism, regarding humanity and human affairs, wh
861.
by aaronem 13y ago
In 1983, Gospodin Colonel Stanislav Petrov saved the world. Somehow I don't see the value of a system which would've made it impossible for him to do so.
862.
by aaronem 13y ago
Hardly overkill, when you consider these weapons were designed for use against squadrons of nuclear-armed Soviet bombers, and the abysmal performance of fighters and interceptors against bomber squadrons during World War II.
863.
by aaronem 13y ago
I don't wonder. It's simply that, while certainly no one is perfect, almost everyone is better than almost anyone imagines that anyone could possibly be.
864.
by aaronem 13y ago
"If you make something idiot proof, someone will just make a better idiot."
865.
by aaronem 13y ago
> Which is worse? A government unable to take secretive (hostile) action against other states (or it's own citizens), or one in which we have mass surveillance, secret (kangaroo courts), torture, and secret executions of people not
866.
by aaronem 13y ago
You can actually just put (server-start) at the end of your init file, and it'll behave more or less as you intend; if you've got a lot of stuff hanging off after-init-hook, you might do well to hang server-start off it a
867.
by aaronem 13y ago
…I'd forgotten all about it, but yeah, you definitely do have a point.
868.
by aaronem 13y ago
Awesome! Mind if I grab a copy of this image, to use with whatever attribution you like, on the repo README? I don't use nyan-mode myself, and it'd be nice to have the screenshot to show people who find the repository.
869.
by aaronem 13y ago
Emacs offers goto-line on M-g g or M-g M-g, which admittedly is not the handiest of key sequences; I've been thinking about rebinding that to be more useful, but I don't use it often enough to really need to. Line numbers are also
870.
by aaronem 13y ago
Seconding the recommendation for the Railwaycat fork, which is excellent. I just wonder about how quickly it'll be integrated into the 24.4 codebase, once that version drops; I'm really looking forward to file change notification

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