astine

67 ms·

601.
by astine 13y ago
I once took a job as a low-level sysadmin contractor at a government office. The first task I was assigned was to create my user account on the various Unix machines I would be working with. To accomplish this task, I was given the root pas
602.
by astine 13y ago
I was sold on Wayland in terms of technology a while ago. Where Wayland is losing people is when is it going to be ready to use? Sure, you can install Wayland now, but there are no applications that target it. Yes, XWayland is meant to solv
603.
by astine 13y ago
Do you know how often an Electoral College delegate changes his vote? It's extremely rare. Most of them are bound and even the unbound ones nearly always vote as directed. Personally, I've always like the idea of the Electoral Col
604.
by astine 13y ago
George Carlin is (was) a right fool. The whole problem is that people don't have enough control over the government. Not voting only allows those who would have control over you to have more power. Even a protest vote or a third part
605.
by astine 13y ago
Think what McCarthy (the communist witch hunter, not the inventor of Lisp) I like that this is a forum where you have to specify that.
606.
by astine 13y ago
No, not really. That article would indeed be a problem, but only if it ignored either Volvo manufacturing deaths or BMW driving deaths. An article comparing total Vovlo and BMW related deaths as a measure of the make's cost to society wou
607.
by astine 13y ago
"We are pumping out liberal arts grads " You mean humanities graduates. The Liberal Arts is not about making better managers, that's what an MBA is for, the liberal arts is about exposing students to a wider variety of fields. We have way
608.
by astine 13y ago
Where are you getting that? It looks more like Pinterest than Instagram. There's less whitespace, but the old design was more complicated. It's more colorful now and there is more focus on the photos.
609.
by astine 13y ago
I agree. One of the more annoying things about people who talk too much about typography and other design topics is that they get locked into orthodoxies which are barely even opinion and certainly not even fact. The classic example is Helv
610.
by astine 13y ago
Some thoughts: "If you use your file system as a "database" you can ask it questions too with file paths" You'll be much more limited in the kind of queries you can reasonably make. You'll have to decide on them ahead of time. This might be
611.
by astine 13y ago
Well here's one good reason: If your data cannot all fit in memory at once, you cannot simply serialize and deserialize it from disk. You will have to create some kind of indexed solution involving reading and writing to files piecemeal and
612.
by astine 13y ago
Using mg misses the point of using Emacs. I use Emacs because I can customize it deeply and extend it into a near IDE and universal interface. mg is just a text editor with Emacs-like bindings which is not worth much to me. Also, the 'vi' o
613.
SQL schemas should have documentation strings(theatticlight.net)
1 points by astine 13y ago|0 comments
614.
by astine 13y ago
Better, if you do have backups, just drop your database, reconstitute a new one (using your schema definition file which you should have saved,) and load your most recent backup. I've dealt with disk file level corruption and the best way
615.
by astine 13y ago
"Why was the contest only between Romney and Obama?" This is why: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post#Effect_on_p... "Why do you have to be uber wealthy to run in a country ruled "by the people"?" Because of the logistical co
616.
by astine 13y ago
You are not wrong. The French revolutionaries did take inspiration (and occasionally direct support) from the American revolution. So did the Italian unification which named streets in Rome for George Washington. Even in England the revolut
617.
by astine 13y ago
There are 3000+ counties and county equivalents in the US, so that makes about 50 tweets per county. That could easily be output by one or two people per county. Seeing as a lot of southern cities seem clean but with one or two really brigh
618.
by astine 13y ago
I suspect that nearly everybody already has a blanket or two unless they live in Borneo or the like. It's a little like Google giving out food. A blanket is a basic necessity and aside from destitute street bums, people generally already ha
619.
by astine 14y ago
This experiment doesn't seem to be positing at all Koreans look the same but rather that all Korean beauty contestants look he same. The implication being, not that Koreans look similar to each other, but that they have similar standards
620.
by astine 14y ago
"This argument is structurally similar to the argument that God exists because God is perfect, and a necessary attribute of perfection is existence. It begs the question." No it doesn't. The hypothetical alien race remains hypothetical thro
621.
by astine 14y ago
Bukowski is talking about something different. Cleese is talking about how to get into the creative or 'open' mode, whereas Bukowski is talking about people who use their circumstances to justify their lack of performance. Cleese only sugge
622.
by astine 14y ago
"and inflation reduces the amounts of those debts." Only if inflation is at a higher rate than than the interest on the debt. Which is rarely the case. Bank loans are constructed so that the bank makes money and that couldn't happen if they
623.
by astine 14y ago
"because it prevents governments from increasing quantity in times where hoarding is occurring." As opposed to a currency which allows a government to deliberately and invisibly transfer wealth from the poorest to the richest in society? Wi
624.
by astine 14y ago
I partly agree. I've worked at various times in my career as a developer and as a sysadmin. When I've worked with Perl is has usually been in my sysadmin role and the advantage that Perl has always had in that role is that it is part of the
625.
by astine 14y ago
> I dismiss "free market" on the premise that it doesn't exist and it never existed (and furthermore: that it can never exist). As soon as you have a government and regulations you don't have a free market. That's silly, freedom is a ma
626.
by astine 14y ago
The text is just quotes from the man himself.
627.
by astine 14y ago
"(why is it urban kids?)" Because children who grow up in rural areas generally have more contact with wild animals and livestock so they develop 'healthier' attitudes towards animals at a younger age. I have a friend who grew up on a farm
628.
by astine 14y ago
That's not really a fair question. Pennies aren't worth the hassle of having to carry them around. That's like asking if I'd be willing to let the other guy have the money if he offered me effectively nothing.
629.
by astine 14y ago
In the article they mentioned later that in gift-giving cultures receiving a gift make one indebted. They are rejecting the offers, not because they are too small, but because they are too big. The people offering as much as 60% are doing s
630.
by astine 14y ago
These cultural traits are older than colonialism. Christian crusaders commented on them in the middle ages and they're the reason that Arabs have a reputation for dishonesty in the West. They're not incompatible with building a large empire

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