jbotz

43 ms·

451.
by jbotz 6y ago
Well, don't do that. It's just a circular data structure, many (or even most) languages give you enough rope to hang yourself with one of those. Nothing particularly surprising or Python-specific about it.
452.
by jbotz 6y ago
> the compiler will tell you if your LEGOs fit together, but not if you've built a knife instead of a fork. OK, let's stretch that metaphor a bit. A powerful type system like Haskell's is really a way of both restricting
453.
by jbotz 6y ago
Well, then actually on July 20th, 1969, the earth did become a planet, for at least some humans, and thus, by virtue of our capacity for taking the perspective of others, we may now all refer to it as such.
454.
by jbotz 6y ago
Yes, that's why I said "edible" bananas... those "mostly seed" ones aren't really edible, there's nothing to eat. The mutation / hybridization that resulted in seedless edible bananas must have prece
455.
by jbotz 6y ago
Well, edible bananas don't have seeds, you have to excavate and extract, prepare, and then bury (plant) culms to spread them. So yes, it was definitely deliberate, people carried banana culms around with them in order to plant them as
456.
by jbotz 6y ago
It's a good metaphor, could definitely help people understand the nature of the problem and raise awareness of its urgency. I'll be using term "social cooling" going forward, definitely.
457.
by jbotz 6y ago
> The 21st? The iPhone? Meh. Humph. I think the iPhone (actually, smartphones) is right up there with the biggest changes of the 20th century. It's what put humanity on the Internet. That may not be so obvious to someone from dev
458.
by jbotz 6y ago
We didn't come to rule the world with our intelligence... we came to rule it with fire. Fire, control over it and the ability to make it, is the one thing humans have that no other animal has. We may (or not) be more intelligent, have
459.
by jbotz 6y ago
I really don't think that's objectively true. The "relative peace" is quite relative after all, depending a lot on where you live, and at best it's less than a century old (75 years since the end of WWII). I thin
460.
by jbotz 6y ago
There is now but one choice... RISC-V, full throttle.
461.
by jbotz 6y ago
"Opening" things to facilitate the flow of information is necessary to reduce to costs of increasing complexity. It is the best tool we have to hold off the collapse of our increasingly complex society (as hypothesized by Joseph
462.
Migrating birds are mysteriously dying in New Mexico in 'frightening' numbers(lcsun-news.com)
7 points by jbotz 6y ago|0 comments
463.
by jbotz 6y ago
It's worth adding that the Apple II was really the first home computer, soon followed by others from Commodore and Radio Shack. There were other microcomputers, but they weren't aimed at a casual home market. The Apple II wa
464.
The appallingly bad neoclassical economics of climate change(tandfonline.com)
1 points by jbotz 6y ago|0 comments
465.
by jbotz 6y ago
> This theory leads to any possible existence existing, [...] This statement maybe superficially correct, but I interpret it differently. Every possible existence may exist, but not every imaginable existence. For something to exis
466.
by jbotz 6y ago
Is there any one place that would be a good first place to go to check on outages like this? It would be really cool and useful to have an "public Internet health monitoring center"... this could be a foundation that gets some fin
467.
by jbotz 6y ago
Hm, yes, I've always like that term. Maybe it's time to re-popularize it. The issues it points at are more relevant than ever, and it's really, really urgent now that more than anything else we understand that we are all, a
468.
by jbotz 6y ago
Not the same thing. PEBKAC says the operator is the bug, not that the bug only exists in the mind of the operator.
469.
by jbotz 6y ago
I don't know of an existing name, but I'll invent one right now that works: it's a "Scheinbug". "Schein-" as a prefix in German means something that appears to be one thing but isn't what it appears t
470.
No net insect abundance and diversity declines across US(nature.com)
254 points by jbotz 6y ago|128 comments
471.
by jbotz 6y ago
There always is some evaporative cooling going on. At night the cooling causes condensation, and the dry clay absorbs this moisture, then during the day sun and wind dry it out again causing evaporative cooling. How big this effect is v
472.
by jbotz 6y ago
It's an old trope in Sci Fi that alien intelligences would be so different from us that we couldn't even begin to comprehend them. Octopuses belie that idea... although we share some DNA, our last common ancestors barely had a ne
473.
by jbotz 6y ago
I have quite a bit of experience here that people may find helpful, and I'm going to share it in some detail; but since this comment is pretty long, let me give you the TL;DR first: Water good, use plenty, daily. Soap not so much, use
474.
by jbotz 6y ago
No, you have it completely backwards. This is actually a very valid use of the scientific method to test a completely scientifically valid and reasonable hypothesis that produced a negative result. It goes like this... Observation: Som
475.
by jbotz 6y ago
This paper has been on Arxiv since nearly a year ago; surprisingly it apparently didn't make HN at the time, even though it did get a bit of publicity then, including the MIT technology review[0]. Despite the sense of humor evident in
476.
by jbotz 6y ago
I've been using Roam for about 6 months. The compelling thing about it is its simplicity... it hits a sweet spot of giving you some of that "Zettelkasten magic" without you having to learn much of anything. Just go ahead an
477.
by jbotz 6y ago
This is an unqualifiedly good thing. Btrfs is today is a very solid, modern and featureful filesystem and deserving of wider adoption. People are rightfully somewhat hesitant to switch to new filesystems---it's the subsystem in which
478.
by jbotz 6y ago
Actually you can definitely trust these pieces to take the load... and then some. A piece of wood that naturally grew into a specific shape is much strong along that shape than any kind of joinery you can come up with. This fact has long
479.
by jbotz 6y ago
Size matters! I think one of the key factors here is that a civilization that produces our level (or greater) of advanced technology has to be really big, in terms of numbers of individuals... an ancient city state of 100,000 - 1,000,000 p
480.
by jbotz 6y ago
Looks pretty good, but when you call it a map it makes me think that it would make the connections between topics, i.e. show the sequence you need to follow to learn things, what are the pre-requisistes for each topic, etc. I don't se

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