breadbox

23 ms·

391.
by breadbox 13y ago
"I'm really crossing my fingers that preventing anthropogenic global warming is as simple as banning CFCs." The snarky response of What's the weather like on your planet? has never seemed more appropriate.
392.
by breadbox 13y ago
I accidentally hit Alt-Bkspc instead of Ctrl-Enter and lost all my state. Gah. Had I been a little farther along I probably wouldn't have been willing to start over to get back to where I was. It would be nice if the game put itself in th
393.
by breadbox 13y ago
And your pregnant friends are thinking the exact same thing about you.
394.
by breadbox 13y ago
Presumably a more accurate clock will make it much easier to detect small relativistic effects. This could be useful for e.g. measuring gravity waves. Or it may just make it possible to do various kinds of experiments on a smaller scale. An
395.
by breadbox 13y ago
It's true that people often use the 10k-rule to downplay nature, but I disagree slightly with the article's thesis. When I first discovered what programming was, I was obsessed from that moment on. It was all I wanted to do. Did I have a
396.
by breadbox 13y ago
There are two authors listed, one male and one female. Makes for a bit of confusion when the article dips into personal anecdote, doesn't it? (I'd hazard a guess that the anecdote is Grandin's, since she's "the famous one".)
397.
by breadbox 13y ago
It's arguably less ridiculous than the Mars Bigfoot story, and I seem to remember that Fox reported that one too. So I'd say probably not.
398.
by breadbox 13y ago
"one of the unsung heros of physics ... got the 2012 Nobel Prize." I can't say that I would complain about being forgotten like that.
399.
by breadbox 13y ago
Seriously, HN seems to get one or more of these comments every time someone dares to describe some personal adventure as an "experiment". The implication seems to be that if you don't have a statistically significant control group, you shou
400.
by breadbox 13y ago
To be clear, I was talking more about how it was perceived at the time, not about how it actually was. (And of course, what was kitchen-sink-worthy in 1960 would be seen as ultracompact today.) But in any case, I bow to someone with actua
401.
by breadbox 13y ago
The Babylonians got by using a place-system without zero for a long time. People relied on context to disambiguate. (It probably helped that with a base-60 system, one was six times less likely to have a zero.)
402.
by breadbox 13y ago
s/like/know/ Algol perhaps had the disadvantage of being far more popular among academics than among actual programmers. Perhaps for that reason Algol became the lingua franca of pseudocode, while C became the lingua franca of actual code.
403.
by breadbox 13y ago
It's not a matter of wanting to please someone. It's a matter of not having to deal with someone who's attempting to push the envelope of polite social interaction with a sales pitch. Even a low pressure sales pitch gets on my nerves. Not b
404.
by breadbox 13y ago
Restaurants are a slightly different situation. Once you're already in a restaurant, it's quitely unlikely that you're going to walk out without buying something. The waiter (if motivated by tips) has every reason to help you actually enjoy
405.
by breadbox 13y ago
... And then never go back to that store again.
406.
by breadbox 13y ago
The first measurement is in no way causal. It's just that the whole point of the experiment was to show that entanglement occurs even when the photons don't coexist. If you didn't make the first measurement, then there wouldn't be anything
407.
by breadbox 13y ago
But what do you think physicists do all day? Exactly what you just described. Unfortunately we pretty much have the answer, and it's kind of a resounding NO. Look up "local hidden variable theory".
408.
by breadbox 13y ago
You're only the ten millionth person to voice that desire. Sadly, the universe is not obligated to be intuitive. At this point we probably have to accept that the parts of the universe that we didn't evolve to understand are free to be as u
409.
by breadbox 13y ago
Not only that, there's evidence that it might have been the more common pronunciation at the time!
410.
by breadbox 13y ago
The parallels with "gigga" vs "jigga" (for the pronunciation of the metric prefix) are striking. I've met a couple of people recently who weren't even aware of the 2nd pronunciation, and a lot of the people who are don't realize that both p
411.
by breadbox 13y ago
Which is exactly why you don't do it in a language where it isn't.
412.
by breadbox 13y ago
Eh, not really. Think about it, when the soda is free: You drink a can in the morning, because if you're a soda drinker you're probably not a coffee drinker, so this is your morning caffeine hit. Then you'll have one at lunch, because you'r
413.
by breadbox 13y ago
To me the point was more that the higher-ups had no idea how precarious their hold on their engineers was, nor how important certain everyday things (like free drinks) become to their idea of the company they work for. Had they realized any
414.
by breadbox 13y ago
It's true, though -- under current law, you get a free pass for the majority of evidential requirements just by calling your product a "supplement". As long as they don't explicitly state that it can cure something specific (see e.g. Airbor
415.
by breadbox 13y ago
YM dietitian. A dietitian is someone with the relevant educational background, at least in the US. (The title of "nutritionist", in contrast, has no legal requirements, so they are perfectly free to call themselves nutritionists if they wan
416.
by breadbox 13y ago
Which is exactly why that passage confined itself to talking about constant motion.
417.
by breadbox 13y ago
I find myself disagreeing still. I would say that the idea that you can't measure your own motion without something else to measure against, is obvious to the casual person. (Whether that "something" is a physical object, the background rad
418.
by breadbox 13y ago
Joe Bob Briggs had a better quote, to the effect that lotteries are a tax on desperation. The people who play lotteries are often those who have run out of rational options. Seen in that light, lotteries are really a government preying on i
419.
by breadbox 13y ago
The C example is a great demonstration that typography is not an objective practice. That someone could take the original strcpy() and, with the express goal of improving its appearance, produce something so unpleasant to read ... When I
420.
by breadbox 13y ago
Yes, you have the idea. You put down just a word or two, no more. But then you add to it, and then some more, and then the next you know, you have a page full of such text. It can be hard to stop once you get into it!

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