atlantic

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Everything I Needed to Know About Programming I Learned from BASIC (2008)(blog.codinghorror.com)
1 points by atlantic 12y ago|1 comments
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by atlantic 12y ago
This appears to be part of a disinformation campaign to discredit Greenwald and The Intercept, using Paypal as the sacrificial goat. The fact that Greenwald has held back documents cannot, by itself, be held against him. The documentation h
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by atlantic 12y ago
Actually, the life-after-death thing is a bit secondary in this case. The important point is that the mind can somehow keep going, at least for a short while, independently of a functioning brain and nervous system. This has major philosoph
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by atlantic 12y ago
Lack of food is rarely a problem that is found in isolation. It usually exists in a context of social and political turmoil. If first-world countries want to stop people from going hungry, a good first step might be to stop exporting arms,
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by atlantic 12y ago
No mechanism was actually discovered to explain how this reversion process took place. Which means it could just as easily have a cultural as a genetic basis within spider societies.
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by atlantic 12y ago
When you get to a point where government agencies fabricate evidence in order to incriminate people that they "know" are guilty, they are acting as judge, jury and executioner, and undermining the whole system of justice on which
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by atlantic 12y ago
I second this approach. Had a similar problem with a client in the UK two years ago. They dragged their feet for a few months, then gradually stopped answering emails and taking my phone calls altogether. I wrote a very angry email saying I
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by atlantic 12y ago
Or putting it another way, law enforcement will still be able to break into individual phones, but indiscriminate collection of data on a large scale will become that much more difficult. Which is a good thing.
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Stack Overflow introduces runnable code snippets(blog.stackoverflow.com)
9 points by atlantic 12y ago|0 comments
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by atlantic 12y ago
Who said anything about unlimited freedom? Keeping a few secrets from the state, namely the contents of your mobile phone, is a very limited and modest freedom, and one worth defending. And having that extra bit of privacy is hardly going t
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by atlantic 12y ago
Knowing Latin may not be identical to having an education. But without Latin, you simply do not have access to over a millennium of pre-Enlightenment written material, which may seriously warp your view of Western culture.
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by atlantic 12y ago
I'm puzzled. Why would I be downvoted for quoting the article? I didn't actually formulate my own opinion in this comment.
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by atlantic 12y ago
Thiel's opinion of the NSA really runs against the grain: The debate about security and civil liberties, he says, is often framed as involving a trade-off between the two things. ‘My view is that it’s quite the opposite. As a libertari
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Interview with Peter Thiel
2 points by atlantic 12y ago|2 comments
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by atlantic 12y ago
In my country Coke is used by plumbers to unblock drains and pipes. Just knowing that has always discouraged me from drinking it.
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by atlantic 12y ago
It's odd that you would see a reference to someone's eventual death as an insult. For a 70-year-old man, death looms large, whatever Wikipedia has to say on the subject.
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by atlantic 12y ago
In a general way, I would agree with you. However, my experience has been that topics such as Israel/Palestine, GM and 9/11 attract an unusual amount of attention from astroturfer types (by which I mean exceptionally opinionated p
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by atlantic 12y ago
I don't understand the downvotes either. The only way I can explain them is that there are certain categories of debate on HN which instantly attract large numbers of trolls intent on suppressing certain avenues of discussion.
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by atlantic 12y ago
My point is that, for the purposes of justice, the exact same standards should apply to government agents and private individuals in the matter of admissibility of evidence. Meaning that if they want to relax the standard for the government
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by atlantic 12y ago
Whatever it is that the FBI did, the agency should be held to exactly the same standard as a private individual interacting with a company's online presence. Have private individuals ever been prosecuted for exploiting security loophol
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by atlantic 12y ago
Disobedience of orders within a military hierarchy in wartime will certainly lead to court-martial, and in serious cases may result in a death sentence.
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by atlantic 12y ago
It's a bit glib to dismiss a long and well-researched book in a single throwaway sentence. Hsve you taken the trouble to read it? I found it extremely convincing. Arendt sat through the entire trial and examined reams of historical doc
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by atlantic 12y ago
Yes. We humans base our judgement and evaluation of people on appearances. Sex is one of the first classifications we apply. Absolutely crucial in forming an impression.
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by atlantic 12y ago
Saying "the man" or "the woman" is much more informative than saying "the person" in a title, especially in an article that is as much about character as about research.
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by atlantic 12y ago
Very often our discussions on these topics tend to dwell on the supposedly unethical behaviour of this or that corporate actor. Instead, maybe we should recognize that incentives to lobby (and sometimes, to cheat and bribe), are built into
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by atlantic 12y ago
It would be interesting to build economic models of markets that take into account the capacity of large agents to make changes to the rules that govern the functioning of the market itself (via their influence on the legislative process th
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by atlantic 12y ago
1) determine the use cases of the different applications involved (ie, what is each one used for, how does it fit into the company's workflow) 2) treat each app as a black box, understand the major data flows involved (which data sourc
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by atlantic 12y ago
>Now the question is: what will guide Agile through the “slope of enlightenment”? Ditch the Agile consultants. Let each team build its own understanding of Agile principles, and implement Agile in its own way. Once Agile stops being an o
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by atlantic 12y ago
I'm surprised no-one has suggested weather balloons.
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by atlantic 12y ago
There is an excellent podcast by Peter Adamson on the history of philosophy at www.historyofphilosophy.net. I've listened to 100+ episodes already, and have yet to feel disappointed. A good start would be to listen to all the episodes

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