jfb

75 ms·

811.
Will the F-35 Ever Actually Fly?(vanityfair.com)
1 points by jfb 13y ago|0 comments
812.
by jfb 13y ago
Hyperloop doesn't terminate in Oakland, and even if it did, that says nothing about the southern terminus, which is in Sylmar. The whole Hyperloop thing is back of the napkin wank.
813.
by jfb 13y ago
I agree that there are cautionary lessons to be learned from the Detroit fiasco; but to my mind they're less about the particulars of, say, the Kilpatrick debt issue boondoggle, and more about the problem of incentives for elected offi
814.
by jfb 13y ago
Yes, but. The Federal government has many monetary tools available to it that Detroit doesn't. It's not clear to me that making the analogy between the way the Federal government and a non-soverign entity like Detroit work does an
815.
by jfb 13y ago
Detroit isn't circling the drain because of Kilpatrick, as corrupt as he was; the problem is fundamentally the cumulative effect of decades of reasonable if ultimately irresponsible decision making. I liked the freep article a lot; I w
816.
by jfb 13y ago
Apple's employee/product number would blow your mind, then.
817.
by jfb 13y ago
(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. (ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do. (iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. (iv) Never use the passiv
818.
by jfb 13y ago
Trampolines are a solution to the same problem that tail-call elimination solves; they're not transparent to the programmer.
819.
by jfb 13y ago
The world is not entirely composed of consumer web startups. There are plenty of opportunities that don't share the tradeoffs inherent in the typical HN style environment.
820.
by jfb 13y ago
SICP isn't a book about Scheme. It's a book about writing computer programs. Scheme was used because it imposes the minimum additional cognitive load. Worrying about all the warts in, e.g. Common Lisp (to say nothing about Javascr
821.
by jfb 13y ago
It's also a great San Francisco movie.
822.
by jfb 13y ago
That, and running the earthquake site [1]. I show that to everybody I know when they move to the Bay Area or Seattle. It induces compulsive refreshing. [1] http://tinyurl.com/l2w75wl
823.
by jfb 13y ago
OT: John Cazale had the most astonishing career of any actor ever. Six years, five movies, five nominees for Best Picture ( The Godfather , The Godfather Part II , The Conversation , Dog Day Afternoon , Deer Hunter ), three winners. And
824.
by jfb 13y ago
Hackman plays the same character, really. It's not in the same league as The Conversation , but it is a really fun double-feature companion.
825.
by jfb 13y ago
I would have paid $25 for this app. It is by far the best RSS reading experience I've yet encountered, and I use RSS multiple times a day. $5? Cheap at 5x the price, as far as I'm concerned.
826.
by jfb 13y ago
Say you have a set of tasks you need to do, and some of those depend on others. Now, you want to perform those tasks in order. The question then becomes: in which order ? That's the problem that tsort (1) solves. It's a way to do
827.
by jfb 13y ago
tsort is one of my favorites, mostly because it's totally pointless until you need it and then it works exactly right . I love it.
828.
by jfb 13y ago
Are you familiar with stdin/stdout/stderr on Unix and how they interact? What ssh does that I find so powerful is ensure that what you put into stdout on one side of a pipe flows out of stdin on the process that ssh starts on
829.
by jfb 13y ago
It would be an interesting project to look at people's shell usage and try to determine when they started using Unix. I have loads of Irixisms that have only recently been crowded out of my head by Darwin BSDism.
830.
by jfb 13y ago
Sure, of course. But I've used that tar|ssh combination so much that it was the first example of using the rsh-like stdout/in pairing that came to mind. As much as I bitch about Unix and POSIX and horrific shell brain damage, I st
831.
by jfb 13y ago
There are a large percentage of people who first encounter unix on single-interactive-user machines.
832.
by jfb 13y ago
The single most useful thing about ssh to me is that it connects stdout/in across the channel (this is behavior inherited from rsh). This allows for e.g.: % (cd /foo; tar cpf - .) | ssh bar $cd /baz\; tar xpf -$ Or:
833.
by jfb 13y ago
Redis and postgres are very different tools serving different problem domains. If you're able to swap one out for the other, you might want to reëvaluate your architecture.
834.
by jfb 13y ago
DC is in some ways an anomaly; US citizens deliberately disenfranchised by the Federal Government. It's not surprising that they might be extravagantly corrupt.
835.
by jfb 13y ago
The kind that are stapled to bearer bonds?
836.
by jfb 13y ago
Of course not, but as a companion piece, it's plenty fun.
837.
by jfb 13y ago
Well, sure, but that's so reductive as to be meaningless. There's a strong element of self-interest in preserving an environment that we're well adapted to, and as some of the changes threatening that environment are anthropo
838.
by jfb 13y ago
Enemy Of The State [1], the Tony Scott Joint, is a sort of follow-on, sort of homage to The Conversation , which is in my opinion the best American movie ever made. It's a worthy double bill. [1] http://www.imdb.com/
839.
by jfb 13y ago
Assumes facts not in evidence.
840.
by jfb 13y ago
Taleb's "black swan" is by definition not a repeatable -- or even predictable -- event. The metaphor loses all novel meaning if stripped of that quality.

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