btilly

60 ms·

961.
by btilly 3y ago
It is easy to retrofit many simple stories onto science. In this case the "smart guy who figured it out" usually didn't understand the discovery in the same way that we do today. Something was figured out, but typically not i
962.
by btilly 3y ago
I have no idea about current textbooks. But certainly the physics textbook that I learned from quoted the myth. And it is easy to find examples online, like https://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Physical_and_Theoret..
963.
by btilly 3y ago
What I'm talking about is very much modern vs historical. To take a trivial example, most of us would like to draw a straight line from Darwin writing The Origin of the Species to the current acceptance of his theory of evolution. We
964.
by btilly 3y ago
Worse yet, the troll company was often created for the purpose of owning that specific group of patents. That limits the damage from a lawsuit gone wrong to just that group of patents, and not the many other patents owned by the hundreds of
965.
by btilly 3y ago
Yet another example where it is tempting to retrofit a modern understanding onto a historical debate. We're tempted to do this because when you're embedded to the modern worldview, it is hard to remember that others were once poss
966.
by btilly 3y ago
Likewise, but more like 20 years ago for me. Kept it off for many years as well. I should do that again actually. Gained some weight during COVID.
967.
by btilly 3y ago
They have done a pretty terrible job of being accurate about who is shipping to Israel. Which makes that a bad strategy. https://www.lloydslist.com/LL1147633/Houthis-target-tenth-sh...
968.
by btilly 3y ago
Sounds like an AI version of Tipler's Von Neumann probe argument. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft#De...
969.
by btilly 3y ago
The other book is, "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" https://www.amazon.com/What-Care-Other-People-Think/dp/03933... I particularly liked it for the in depth discussion of how Appendix F came t
970.
by btilly 3y ago
I would hold SQLite up against anything. Likely the second most widely deployed software ever. https://www.sqlite.org/mostdeployed.html The best tested piece of software that I know of. https://www.sqlite.org&#x2
971.
by btilly 3y ago
You might be right about the main parachute. In WW 2, only US paratroopers had reserve chutes. This was likely a British paratrooper. So no reserve chute. And yes. Climbing out of a tree while shaking from adrenaline is scary dangerous. But
972.
by btilly 3y ago
I have a story about that, from the movie producer Fred Zinneman. He was working on a movie and cast some paraplegics. One when asked said it was an accident, but didn't want to talk. Fred eventually got the story out of him. He had be
973.
by btilly 3y ago
It is indeed unintuitive in practice. One of the key factors is that a large part of the cost is opportunity cost. People tend to get all tangled up when thinking about such counterfactuals. We want to have our cake and eat it too. And if w
974.
by btilly 3y ago
Actually, reusability was an obvious idea from the start. For example the Space Shuttle and the McDonnell Douglas DC-X are examples of attempts at reusability in the USA, and other countries had their own experiments. It just became non-obv
975.
by btilly 3y ago
Even simpler. Just have a Dictionary mapping place name to ID. The slow path is "I haven't seen this name before and I need to store it, making sure that I'm not racing any other thread doing the same." You'd have a
976.
by btilly 3y ago
I indirectly know someone who fits this description. (Friend of a friend, wouldn't be able to track down.) Was part of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Chanology , got caught, went to jail. Yeah, super-illegal
977.
by btilly 3y ago
Dang it. Reading that, I want to give the book to my wife. But she does all of her reading these days on audible. And https://www.amazon.com/Cochrane-Britannias-Wolf-Donald-Thoma... shows only a paperback. (Only 3 books lef
978.
by btilly 3y ago
I have a simpler theory. The law is the way it is because of the influence of lobbyists. Those lobbyists include lobbyists for companies that do things like payroll. They would like the system to be complex to provide a regulatory moat that
979.
by btilly 3y ago
Tetlock paints a different picture of his positive findings than you do. Specifically, Tetlock's project opens with key issues of scope about what to even try to forecast. Based on his previous work in expert prediction, he concluded t
980.
by btilly 3y ago
There is a key difference between that, and what I created. The difference is that persistent data structures allow you to traverse the history of the data structure to find past versions. By contrast I only allowed you to see the current v
981.
by btilly 3y ago
It seems odd to me to call a data structure "persistent" when its purpose is to allow you to cheaply keep many similar transitory copies around until you throw them away. The specific application was using dynamic programming to b
982.
by btilly 3y ago
So if we ignore the technical merits based on which append-only data structures were chosen in general, we don't necessarily have additional technical merits for any particular time append-only was chosen. The reasons why append-only s
983.
by btilly 3y ago
Efficient in what way? Yes, a delta record would be smaller. But now you have to fetch both the new and the old, plus do computation to figure out what you have. This is trading off space and time. I'm going to go to a reasonably low l
984.
by btilly 3y ago
This has been posted several times over the years. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23701556 seems to be the only previous discussion with comments though.
985.
by btilly 3y ago
One of the advantages of this kind of architecture is that if one reader is reading the old tree while it is replaced, it just works. Databases are really good at having multiple versions of the same data structure be accessible at the same
986.
by btilly 3y ago
You are answering the wrong question. The question was NOT whether it spreads information from the articles to people who wouldn't have paid for it. The question was whether it suppresses sales of the articles to people who otherwise
987.
by btilly 3y ago
I'm sure that somewhere, someone, has data confirming or denying this. But, anecdotally, it's what I've seen to be the case.
988.
by btilly 3y ago
The "unfounded claims" were backed up by a link to Stanford on fair use and copyright. That's the opposite of being unfounded. Remember. The NY Times does not have a record of filing frivolous lawsuits. Particularly not again
989.
by btilly 3y ago
First, you missed the "and". Do CliffNotes, Wikipedia, etc. substantially impact the market for the original work? For example CliffNotes does not - people who buy the CliffNotes version typically already have the original work as
990.
by btilly 3y ago
The page mentions 4 categories of law which are pardoned. The first is https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2011-title21/html... , which covers the whole country. The next two are DC specific. And the la

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