alex-g

13 ms·

61.
by alex-g 13y ago
It depends what the joke is. The joke about the DB9 and the Veyron is that they are ridiculously cool. The joke about Teslas is that the battery runs out.
62.
by alex-g 13y ago
3) overleveraged banks with colossal principal-agent problems and insufficient transparency or supervision
63.
by alex-g 13y ago
Basic income makes it easier to work, because one no longer has to choose between working and receiving benefits. There's currently a huge divide between working zero hours for unemployment benefit, and having to work many hours to g
64.
by alex-g 13y ago
There's another side to that, which is that overfunding of the police is coupled to underfunding of other institutions; too many social issues are framed as law-enforcement problems, and tackled with a militarized version of the law en
65.
by alex-g 13y ago
My heart bleeds.
66.
by alex-g 14y ago
This is misleading. With a one-way function, we are interested in making it hard to find any preimage, not just the one you originally thought of. There are lots of functions whose range is small, but where it's easy to find a preimage (e
67.
by alex-g 14y ago
Arch has moved on to systemd these days, if that changes anything for you.
68.
by alex-g 14y ago
See here for example: http://cryptome.org/cia-decrypt.htm There was a released-but-redacted CIA memo saying, "An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an XXXXXXXX service at the same time..." From analysis of the size and shape of t
69.
by alex-g 14y ago
At what sort of age do you think people are ready for proof by contradiction? I remember being taught it explicitly at secondary school (in the UK) but we may have seen implicit uses of it earlier. I would imagine that some very young child
70.
by alex-g 14y ago
It comes down to whether the stuff is perceived as lots of little indistinguishable bits, or a few big chunks. The former category (mass or non-count nouns) includes water, grain (in the sense of a quantity of grain, not lots of kinds of gr
71.
by alex-g 14y ago
There's a story about a student (in group theory) being asked "Are G and H isomorphic?" and replying "G is isomorphic, but H isn't".
72.
by alex-g 14y ago
The combination of Latin and Comic Sans is really weird.
73.
by alex-g 14y ago
I think it was not clear, for a long time, just how divergent Perl 6 would turn out to be. If you look back (way back) at the original RFC process, most people were proposing fairly minor changes to the language; and it was billed as an opp
74.
by alex-g 14y ago
NPR is not run by the government, though it is partially supported by government grants. It's not Voice of America.
75.
by alex-g 14y ago
This blog article ( http://korystamper.wordpress.com/2012/08/07/seeing-cerise-de... ) by lexicographer Kory Stamper raises some similar issues about color names in English - how does one define "cerise" or "taupe" in the dictionary, when no
76.
by alex-g 14y ago
Many countries, including the USA, do have such programs. The American version is food stamps, paid for out of general taxation and distributed to millions of people in low-income households. It's not as all-encompassing as your suggestion,
77.
by alex-g 14y ago
It has apparently crossed several minds, because you're certainly not the first one to suggest it. But as someone who's organized more than one conference, I can say that "the best" is not nearly as easy to define as many people think. Of c
78.
by alex-g 14y ago
Oh, absolutely, I just think it's a shame.
79.
by alex-g 14y ago
This seems to me to be far more useful than user-defined literals (the conflicting feature). At least, I can think of many programs where digit separators would be nice - but for user-defined literals, I don't see them as providing much. We
80.
by alex-g 14y ago
This is a decent start: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Freeman
81.
by alex-g 14y ago
It's a necessary motto.
82.
by alex-g 14y ago
The alternative would be to wait until you weren't doing anything important, and had nothing important on the horizon - which is when your employer will be thinking of you as a dead weight. If you're a valuable employee, then you'll always
83.
by alex-g 14y ago
FWIW in ack 2.0 (currently in alpha) this behaviour will be different: it will search all text files by default.
84.
by alex-g 14y ago
You might like "To Mock a Mockingbird" by Raymond Smullyan. It's a book of logic puzzles with a focus on combinatory logic (a model of computation related to the lambda calculus). Aside from the logic/math/CS nature of the content, the prog
85.
by alex-g 14y ago
It's not a high overhead. Your string method would have to do basically the same thing as the ipaddress initialization and method call. As a benefit, with ipaddress you don't have to re-parse the string every time you want to manipulate it
86.
by alex-g 14y ago
> More conservative distributions tread very carefully. Well, yes, that's what conservative means. You're using stable distros, with older versions of Python, and it sounds from your original post like you're not interested in using new
87.
by alex-g 14y ago
This is a great point, and this isn't just about Twitter but also about many other sites and services that seem to depend on it. It looks like a lot of people have created a distributed system version of dependency hell for themselves, wher
88.
by alex-g 14y ago
Vint Cerf usually wears a three piece suit as well. It's a bit of personal branding, plus he just likes wearing them. More importantly, perhaps, the look helped him in the past when dealing with (D)ARPA, military and congressional types, et
89.
by alex-g 14y ago
Maybe not 'stylish' in the sense of glamorous high fashion, but certainly 'stylish' in the sense of having put effort into ones own personal style, and consistently dressing that way. So 'stylish' as opposed to slobbish, slovenly, careless,
90.
by alex-g 14y ago
I'm sure MPs will be happy to let us know whether they themselves have obtained a porn license.

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