bstpierre

17 ms·

1. 151.▲
   by bstpierre 14y ago

   There was an article on HN a while back about a server removed from a DC by the feds; that's one risk. If you have the server at your home sending emails, it will be trivial for law enforcement to figure out where you are and show up at you
2. 152.▲
   by bstpierre 14y ago

   > I would still rather start at square 1 on some risc 64 bit virtual 48 bit physical word system. A friend of mine wrote a little OS (similar to vxWorks) for 64-bit MIPS in the 90s; I helped him debug a couple of problems. This was actu
3. 153.▲
   by bstpierre 14y ago

   It's the Boston Globe, hand-wavey is all they can really be expected to publish regarding hard abstract math. I thought they did a decent enough job for a newspaper.
4. 154.▲
   by bstpierre 14y ago

   Sheep like to eat stuff like grass, which does not appear to be plentiful in the areas in question. You could feed hay, but then the sheep will congregate around the area where you dump the hay instead of wandering around getting blown up.
5. 155.▲
   by bstpierre 14y ago

   I think the opposite is also true. I became able to sleep through nearly anything (nearly including, unfortunately, 4am fire alarms and, more fortunately, 4am wrong-numbers) in the dorms at college, where it was noisy nearly all the time.
6. 156.▲
   by bstpierre 14y ago

   I spent a week in Quebec City a month ago and didn't use any local currency -- just charged everything. Hotel, restaurants, gas; they all take Visa/MC. I don't expect to travel there often, so I didn't want the hassle of withdrawing too muc
7. 157.▲
   by bstpierre 14y ago

   I don't just want robocalls killed. I don't want calls from politicians, charities, pollsters or any other exempt organizations either. I don't want calls from the debt collectors trying to reach the person who used to have my number. For m
8. 158.▲
   by bstpierre 14y ago

   Robocalls aren't necessarily interactive. You can't waste their time.
9. 159.▲
   by bstpierre 14y ago

   I agree -- it's definitely not innate. My kids -- and in my somewhat limited experience, other young children -- will ask "what's that?" when you start talking about something that they don't know. It takes a few years of school to dull the
10. 160.▲
    by bstpierre 14y ago

    > I’ve seen young writers contort their prose into incomprehensibly pretentious muddles, all in a disastrous bid to sound more erudite than they are. This seems somewhat self-referential. I'm not afraid of big words, but it seems like t
11. 161.▲
    by bstpierre 14y ago

    It is usually worth the context switch, especially when (a) the project already has several tools in play and/or (b) the alternative is much sharper. A situation that calls for expect, or for sed, for example, is likely to be much more easi
12. 162.▲
    by bstpierre 14y ago

    I have had two machines from them: a netbook and a laptop. (I build my own desktop machines.) Overall they have been decent purchases, but... The netbook: wireless driver for the builtin never worked. I had to buy (and carry around) a USB
13. 163.▲
    by bstpierre 14y ago

    Most of the projects I work on require the use of several languages, and to me it's nice to be able to use the sharpest tool for each job. In a given day I might use one or more of C, C++, Python, sh (which possibly includes bits of sed/awk
14. 164.▲
    by bstpierre 14y ago

    "Cancer" is a fairly wide range of diseases. There are specific diseases that have had significant success. I don't have historical data handy, but I recall reading that Hodgkin's Lymphoma went from something like a 10% survival rate 30 yea
15. 165.▲
    by bstpierre 14y ago

    This is not the reason I can't sleep. I fall asleep just fine. I have a hard time staying asleep because of the small child who climbs into my bed in the middle of the night. Even then, it's not the extra person in the bed as much as gett
16. 166.▲
    by bstpierre 14y ago

    You sound just fine. Practice more, get rid of the "uh"s and "um"s, and you'll sound great.
17. 167.▲
    by bstpierre 14y ago

    Re filtering: I guess from my perspective, all I'd really want is a binary filter with two "folders": worth-reading and crap. I'd never look at the crap folder, but you could still say you're presenting me all of the tweets. Re social: Agai
18. 168.▲
    by bstpierre 14y ago

    Your link to TheNextWeb also makes me realized that you don't show pricing on your front page. Also, realizing that I'd have to create rules for the filters is a downer. I was hoping for some kind of machine learning that does the opposite
19. 169.▲
    by bstpierre 14y ago

    I rarely use twitter; I've made concerted efforts but I mostly find the SNR is too high. I looked at your front page but didn't find it compelling. 1. I don't want to filter noise to folders, I want to skip it entirely. 2. I could care less
20. 170.▲
    by bstpierre 14y ago

    The thing those people are missing is 10,000 hours of deliberate practice . Showing up is not enough. I'd rather work with someone who has five years of experience than someone with one year of experience repeated twenty times.
21. 171.▲
    by bstpierre 14y ago

    For writing, the rules outlined here are very helpful: [1] http://www.critters.org/c/diplomacy.ht [2] http://www.critters.org/c/whathow.ht Specifically: * Critique the story, not the writer. * Remember that it's your
22. 172.▲
    by bstpierre 14y ago

    I don't think he meant "top" meaning (necessarily) leaders of a hierarchy. I think it meant more like look to people who are performing "better" than you -- for whatever thing you want to measure.
23. 173.▲
    by bstpierre 14y ago

    You're getting the paypal charity rate, right? I thought I saw in your faq that you mentioned 2.9%, but the 501c3 rate is 2.2%: https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/donations
24. 174.▲
    by bstpierre 14y ago

    The court decision: http://www.aclu.org/files/assets/10-1406_0.pdf Patents at issue: 5,747,282; 5,837,492; 5,693,473; 5,709,999; 5,710,001; 5,753,441; 6,033,857.
25. 175.▲
    by bstpierre 14y ago

    Hi cousin! I've heard this too, but I thought it was a lower percentage. Are there any good (DNA-based?) studies to support it?
26. 176.▲
    by bstpierre 14y ago

    That's an excellent suggestion -- good way to change up a tired conversation starter. My addition to the list would be to learn/practice something that you find frustrating or just don't know well. E.g. I know C/C++/python well, but I'm a t
27. 177.▲
    by bstpierre 14y ago

    sigh A butterfly flaps its wings, xkcd puts up a comic on ratings, someone piggybacks on the comic, it makes the front page of HN, you wander by and mention criticker, a bunch of geeks pile onto the site to check it out... and it ends up
28. 178.▲
    by bstpierre 14y ago

    I've actually traced my ancestry back to Charlemagne. It's an interesting exercise. Some of my links are not very well substantiated, but the dozen or two generations from Charlemagne forward are fairly well documented, depending on how man
29. 179.▲
    by bstpierre 14y ago

    If you use example.com@mydomain.com as the email address for your login to example.com, then they're easy to remember.
30. 180.▲
    by bstpierre 14y ago

    This was my prediction [1] back around the time that SOPA died. Not that it isn't obvious or anything. All the pieces of SOPA/PIPA/whatever will turn up somewhere. They know they can't cram the whole thing through at once, so it's fairly li