colinb

22 ms·

211.
by colinb 8y ago
Does this account for the historical reticence of coroners to record a suicide as such because of the stigma that might be heaped upon the dead person, and their surviving relatives? In the 1970s religion was a much stronger force in nearly
212.
by colinb 8y ago
The average life expectancy page is excellent. I'm not a design person, so I have nothing useful to say about that aspect of the page, but the information it presents is mind boggling. I really want to know what happened to Algeria in
213.
by colinb 8y ago
Honesty doesn't seem to be at issue here. Empathy definitely is. And while I take your point that you'd prefer an email, and I guess a degree of privacy with your own emotions on the topic, I can imagine that many people feel othe
214.
by colinb 8y ago
Does anyone know if there's a strong link between Forrester and Donella Meadows, of Thinking in Systems? I'm reading that book after seeing it praised more than once on HN. Meadows provides lots of food for thought, and I think I
215.
by colinb 8y ago
There's a group of three such power stations near Las Vegas. I passed them on the way from LA a few months ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanpah_Solar_Power_Facility I don't know if they permit visitors.
216.
by colinb 8y ago
Now you've really piqued my interest. If you're able, please tell me more about the kind of answers you got.
217.
by colinb 9y ago
I think the obvious answer is because they could complain to the police if they were under threat. Of course, it being the obvious answer doesn't preclude it being nonsense, so feel free to tell me why I'm wrong.
218.
by colinb 9y ago
to paraphrase the immortal words [1] of Mandy Rice-Davies, well she would say that wouldn't she. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandy_Rice-Davies
219.
by colinb 9y ago
This is interesting. I set out to argue that there are plenty of nasty, boring, unfulfilling jobs done by women for low wages (something that I think is inarguably true). But I note that your examples are mostly about physically hazardous j
220.
by colinb 9y ago
Isn't the whole point of "enemy combatant" that it allows people to be held in a state not governed by national, or international law or treaty? "PoW" has actual meaning, rules, treaties etc. Or they could be treate
221.
by colinb 9y ago
Come to Dublin. Where I work, we'd love to hire more experienced people. I'd say around 15% of my colleagues are >40, with 3 or 4 > 50. I don't think it is at all unusual to get paid significantly more than €40k..
222.
by colinb 10y ago
I'm largely ignorant of Haskell, but isn't one the touted benefits of strictly typed languages (bondage and discipline typing I've heard it called) that SEGVs simply don't happen? I've built fairly complex systems w
223.
by colinb 11y ago
> In the uk politicians are paid peanuts, hence we have monkeys who make stupid descions like this Indeed. If only we paid MPs like they do in Nigeria it would all be much better. Furthermore, to call computer modelling, i.e. recording a
224.
by colinb 11y ago
I suppose it depends on your definition of 'major', but if you can name more than 20 I'd be surprised. Also, the thing that makes US airports unpleasant is not necessarily the same as the irritant in other places. Travelling
225.
by colinb 11y ago
You say "convince". I don't think that has application to many technical discussions. Often these aren't settled on merit, because they're not actually technical at all. It surprises and disappoints me that many of
226.
by colinb 11y ago
The obvious rebuttal to your first point is that Texas and California share a language. They also share quite a lot of culture. Whether a Texan is more like a Californian, than a German is like an Greek, I leave to the reader to decide. The
227.
by colinb 12y ago
isn't this what throwaway Linux VMs where invented for? Elsewhere in this thread someone mentions a conspiracy of service provider and porn [alleged] criminal. So I guess Fapuntu-64 won't work for that, but for all else, it seems
228.
by colinb 12y ago
I'll agree that the crimes committed by these individuals took a long time to come to light, but I don't see that either had any relevance to the discussion about retention of data that could be used to track their movements. Savi
229.
by colinb 13y ago
Clearly not. But those were a while back. And the people who seem to be doing the most killing of civilians these days identify themselves as muslims. Yes, I understand that most, perhaps very nearly all muslims don't want anything to
230.
by colinb 13y ago
0.5% ? Really? Can you back that up with a reference please.
231.
by colinb 13y ago
does recent historical record count, or do you need predictive results? Recent historical examples include the Industrial Moth. If you want to predict some evolution, pick an antibiotic and wait for it to become ineffective. Here's mor
232.
by colinb 13y ago
I'm a zionist, and a jew. And I think that hating zionism, and hating Israel is hating the jews. Hating the policies of an individual Israeli government is politics. I can tell the difference. Interestingly, I'm also a [naturalise
233.
by colinb 13y ago
Why would you expect the US government, or ANY government to respect the right of privacy of citizens of other countries? The first duty of government is surely to protect the interests of the country to which it belongs - note that I'
234.
by colinb 14y ago
The first project; the one that finished nearly on time, ran for three or four years. I joined half way through as a crispy graduate. It came in within a couple of weeks of schedule. It seemed very well managed for the whole of time on it.
235.
by colinb 14y ago
I think one of the problems with software engineering is that [almost] no one knows anything about it. I've been a working programmer [or software engineer if I've just met you at a party and I think you're cute] for long enough to work on
236.
by colinb 15y ago
Embedded systems are designed to squeeze the absolute maximum out of the hardware upon which they run. All this processor affinity, cache stride calculation, and avoidance of cross-core conflicts is just how business is done. The upside is
237.
by colinb 16y ago
I'm close the finishing the last major chunk of the book. Working with two colleagues for around two hours a week, its taken us nearly a year to get this far. Of course, we did every exercise, and lost a lot of time trying to work around in
238.
by colinb 16y ago
No. I've spent far more of my working life puzzling through OO in C to want to inflict it on others. But I've also become a fair to middling C programmer, and the strength I bring to that task has a much to do with knowing how to build larg
239.
by colinb 16y ago
"encouraged coding styles of modern and real OOP C++" Where do I go to learn those given that I work in an all C shop? One of the problems of learning C++ is the sheer profusion of material that's available, much of it written when the tech