excitom

11 ms·

61.
by excitom 6y ago
Whenever I hear people talk about the superior sound quality of vinyl my response is "Yeah, there's nothing quite like the sound of a rock being dragged over bumpy plastic!"
62.
by excitom 6y ago
My favorite pet peeve is whoever decided that in gmail nothing is ever deleted but you can move messages to the Trash folder. So instead of Select message, click Delete you have Select message, click Move, select Trash folder. Sure it'
63.
by excitom 6y ago
Such an object would function as a sail—one powered by light, rather than by wind. The natural world doesn’t produce sails; people do. What about jellyfish that move about the oceans pushed by wind?
64.
by excitom 6y ago
Interesting point: The original reason for the double deck design on the 747 was to allow the entire nose to be a cargo door. Having an upstairs lounge or first class cabin was side benefit.
65.
by excitom 6y ago
SV resident and former Austinite here: During the time I lived in Austin large developments full of McMansions sprang up. The answer to peoples' question "Who can afford all these places?" was "Californians." Also,
66.
by excitom 6y ago
I was developing casual games (Backgammon, Spades) around the time the Mersenne Twister came out and it looked new and shiny and cool so I adopted it for my random number generator. I ran 10s of millions of dice rolls and card shuffles thro
67.
by excitom 6y ago
The biggest reason is that sales tax can be applied at the state level, then a county can add a bit more, and a city a bit more still. So for a national chain it's impossible to know the final price to put on an item until the consumer
68.
by excitom 6y ago
TL;DR Hypertext links and graphics.
69.
by excitom 7y ago
Personal anecdote: Use Slack for DMs.
70.
by excitom 7y ago
Related story: Around the turn of the century I was talking to a VC friend about the dot com boom. He said "Watch out if the dentists start investing." Meaning, people with high net worth, inflated sense of knowledge, and not much
71.
by excitom 7y ago
Based on the lively discussion generated in this thread - because it's interesting.
72.
by excitom 7y ago
Still using my 2013 Air, but the touch pad is getting finicky. I really need to thump it to get a click. I don't know is this is fixable ...
73.
by excitom 7y ago
You basically proved his point. The analogy is correct but no one cares if a little guy can't buy lunch. Same problem, different scale.
74.
by excitom 7y ago
Dams represent man-made changes to the environment that often had unforeseen negative impacts. In the case of Niagra Falls, its presence isolates the Great Lakes ecosystem from the Atlantic Ocean. During many millennia a unique ecosystem de
75.
by excitom 7y ago
I work in SoMa and walk to and from the CalTrain every day. Reading this article you'd think I'd be ankle deep in poop during my walk. It's just not the problem it's made out to be, not even close. I think people who wri
76.
by excitom 8y ago
It takes a huge amount of money to build a successful hardware company and they failed because they ran short of cash. However Amazon seems to believe that their product idea and the people who conceived it have value, and that's what
77.
by excitom 8y ago
OK so let's back up and look at this from a higher level. A program that is supposed to help 10s of thousands of students ends up helping very few. Does this mean that all the rejected people are lazy, stupid, or grifters? Or is the pr
78.
by excitom 8y ago
I don't necessarily agree with your (b) but I'll concede it if you agree to a (c) the worst charter schools can fall far short of public schools on quality ... in agreement with your point (a). Just read the linked LA Times arti
79.
by excitom 8y ago
Oh, where do I start. Let's trade anecdotes. One of my children went to a charter school and my experience is the opposite of yours.
80.
by excitom 8y ago
A previous employer of mine had a Glassdoor "problem" with bad reviews. Now when people leave they are bribed with a week's pay to promise not to post anything bad, and their Glassdoor reviews now are packed with glowing pr
81.
by excitom 8y ago
I, too, studied this in the late 70s. Interesting stuff.
82.
by excitom 8y ago
It makes perfect sense, distilled down to "shift variable costs to suppliers while slowly extricating from the costly business of acquiring, storing, and shipping merchandise".
83.
by excitom 8y ago
Speaking of gobsmacked, check out this use of APL notation to formally describe the IBM System/360. https://web.archive.org/web/20060813132807/https://www.resea...
84.
by excitom 8y ago
>One problem with Vim is that you get so used to its key mappings that you’ll want to use them everywhere. If don't already know about `set -o vi` in `bash`, prepare to be delighted.
85.
by excitom 8y ago
This is exactly why I keep some small bills in my wallet. No need for the "man" to share the transaction between me and the person who provided me with good service.
86.
by excitom 8y ago
There is also the Republic of Hawaii, which existed for 4 years between the Kingdom of Hawaii and becoming part of the U.S. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_of_Hawaii
87.
by excitom 8y ago
My favorite: "dd" the "copy and convert" command, but "cc" was already taken by the C compiler.
88.
by excitom 8y ago
I understood that it originally stood for "yellow pages" because it is a directory service, but that the phone company asserted their trademark on the term.
89.
by excitom 8y ago
Example: The zombie-esque http://www.excite.com/
90.
by excitom 8y ago
I always found it interesting that the Awk paradigm is also the basis for IBM's RPG language. Two very different environments coming up with basically the same elegant solution for the same problem: 1. Run zero or more setup operations

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