dfranke

67 ms·

601.
by dfranke 18y ago
It always pleases me when I read articles like this one. The mere fact that the problem is being talked about with any regularity means that the pendulum is likely to start swinging back toward sanity. (By the way, I grew up in Broward Co
602.
by dfranke 18y ago
We're talking about liability insurance, not health insurance. The root problem here is tort law, not accident statistics.
603.
by dfranke 18y ago
Total Immersion really is an excellent program. It brought me from totally incompetent to competing on my high school's varsity team within the space of a couple months. I never expected to see it mentioned on news.yc. Actually, though, y
604.
by dfranke 18y ago
I gathered that much just from the title. If you trained a Bayesian filter to recognize trolling, "grownups" would probably be one of the strongest troll tokens. adequacy.org even subtitled itself "news for grownups".
605.
by dfranke 18y ago
You can only delete comments for the first two hours.
606.
MA seeks restraining order to silence Defcon presentation about subway pass exploit(news.cnet.com)
8 points by dfranke 18y ago|2 comments
607.
by dfranke 18y ago
I think the right way to handle this is an anonymous messaging system. Click a button under one of your comments that has been downmodded, and the people who downmodded it will be notified. They can then reply anonymously with an explanat
608.
by dfranke 18y ago
The term comes by analogy to "grassroots". Astroturfing is marketing that pretends to be grassroots but isn't.
609.
by dfranke 18y ago
> and even check you at the state borders. What are you talking about? I live in California, have been in and out a great number of times, and have never encountered anything of the sort. Besides, it would be unconstitutional.
610.
by dfranke 18y ago
It's a poorly-written article so I'm not certain, but model 1.2 might be getting at the same thing that I'm describing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_loop_logic#Time_loop_logic is a better description.
611.
by dfranke 18y ago
I think this is supposed to be the "fixed point seeking" theory of time travel, where the resulting timeline is one where any future impact on past events is such that it results in exactly the same future as the one which caused those chan
612.
by dfranke 18y ago
Isn't the title of these submissions legally required to be "Imminent Death Of The Net Predicted!"?
613.
by dfranke 18y ago
I didn't realize Paul Graham was an orangutan.
614.
by dfranke 18y ago
I'm talking about a monoculture of values, not of abilities or interests. "Curious and like to learn new things" is one aspect of the monoculture that I'm referring to. It's a relatively uncommon attribute.
615.
by dfranke 18y ago
I think trying to resist the monoculture is a mistake. Your stated aim for the constituency of the news.yc community is "the 10,000 best hackers and nobody else". If you achieved that aim, you'd have a monoculture. It would be a slightly
616.
by dfranke 18y ago
I think you're missing the point. He's not looking for hardware hackers. He's looking for people who know how a computer works. God job candidates should have no trouble answering that question regardless of whether they've actually ever
617.
by dfranke 18y ago
Right, which presumably means that the tale originated before the Saxons invaded Great Britain. But nonetheless the version we know is told in Old English and not any of its continental predecessors, and its earliest manuscripts are all fo
618.
by dfranke 18y ago
> Yes, he admits, the English "have created one of the great literatures of the world. Yet, have they a single myth that they can call their own?" Yes, Beowulf. There were probably many others of its kind that were lost when the Anglo-
619.
by dfranke 18y ago
> Libertarianism is probably the most "black and white" of the political ideaologies I think Marxism and radical environmentalism (Earth First, Human Extinction Project) are equally so.
620.
by dfranke 18y ago
That's a lot more descriptive of objectivism than of libertarianism, yet it seems like a rather small minority of hackers are objectivists.
621.
by dfranke 18y ago
> However, they tend to close their minds to cool ideas from other schools of thought. That they definitely do. They reject positivism as an approach to economics on the basis that you can't do repeatable experiments with entire societ
622.
by dfranke 18y ago
So do I :-). Like I said in the essay, the bloat objection to emacs is irrational. Nonetheless, though, it's a natural reaction that most people have to get over. The key to appreciating emacs is to realize that it's only incidentally a te
623.
Code Free or Die(): Why Hackers Are so Often Libertarians(dfranke.us)
56 points by dfranke 18y ago|52 comments
624.
by dfranke 18y ago
Clicking the main link takes you to the original. Clicking [scribd] takes you to scribd.
625.
by dfranke 18y ago
Someone needs to get Fermat's Last Theorem as a tattoo. "I have the most elegant proof of this, but my epidermis is too small to contain it."
626.
by dfranke 18y ago
Disgruntled Microsoft interviewers are the prime suspects.
627.
by dfranke 18y ago
Tolkien certainly isn't the only author who has ever deliberately inserted symbolism, though. He is, however, one of the few among them who isn't painful to read. There's certainly plenty of symbolism in D.H. Lawrence, but it was put ther
628.
by dfranke 18y ago
Those statistics end at 1979, but I don't doubt that you're correct. The problem here is not literacy per se: these students would have no trouble transcribing between written and spoken English. The problem is with composition and compr
629.
by dfranke 18y ago
Tolkien is a strange exception to that rule. You can get into endless debates about symbolism or about the influences that Tolkien built on, and end up enjoying his work more than you ever did before. I can't think of any other author who
630.
by dfranke 18y ago
How old are you? The baby boom generation seems mostly literate, but my generation, gen Y, is basically incapable of constructing a sentence. In my senior year high school English class I had a teacher who liked me, so she had me grade pa

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