jhbadger

13 ms·

151.
by jhbadger 5mo ago
Even in LA it's quite possible to live without a car if you live in the right neigbhorhoods like K-Town or any other centrally located one where both the Metro and buses are plentiful. LA's a huge place with varying amounts of den
152.
by jhbadger 5mo ago
While I recognize many of these, I had no idea about the IBM Academic Operating System (a version of UNIX for their RT RISC workstations distinct from the normal IBM version AIX). There are just snippets of info about this OS on Wikipedia a
153.
by jhbadger 5mo ago
There is actually a phrase "free library" commonly seen in older libraries often called a "Carnegie Free Library" because they were created as a philanthropic project by the industrialist Andrew Carnegie. They are called
154.
by jhbadger 5mo ago
Whatever happened to wire wrapping? That used to be a viable alternative.
155.
by jhbadger 5mo ago
My first gig at 18 was managing my university library's database (in dBase III; it was the 1980s) and writing the user interfaces for searching. This was a pre-SQL database for you youngins in case you have no idea what I'm talkin
156.
by jhbadger 5mo ago
The current US minimum wage is so way below market wages in most places to be meaningless, though. I'm sure McDonald's would like to hire people at $7.25/hr (or better yet have robots that they don't have to pay after
157.
by jhbadger 5mo ago
I live in the DC area and it is kind of sad that a lot of people here haven't been to the various Smithsonian museums (which are free) here, or haven't been since they were children.
158.
by jhbadger 5mo ago
The RCA-1802 was used in the COSMAC Elf computer which was described as a hobbyist project to build in a series of articles in Popular Electronics 50 years ago. The Elf may be obscure but one thing developed on it (or its successor, the COS
159.
by jhbadger 5mo ago
I think the detail of Barlow being Dick Cheney's former campaign manager was a very useful addition to the narrative though. Barlow (through his Grateful Dead connections) is generally presented as an idealistic, if a bit naive, hippie
160.
by jhbadger 5mo ago
Or just plain FoxPro. I was writing dBase programs to put myself through undergrad in the late 1980s/early 1990s and I really liked the early DOS versions of FoxPro with their extensive mouse-driven TUI -- even more elaborate than the
161.
by jhbadger 5mo ago
I also find it funny that many of the people who look down on Costco rave about Trader Joe's and find it cool -- even though, like Kirkland, Trader Joe's products are mostly de-badged brands as well.
162.
by jhbadger 5mo ago
Coke is amazingly popular around the entire world, though. You can go to China, India, South Africa, and find Coke for sale and selling well even though they have their own traditional beverages. Obviously sugar water isn't very good f
163.
by jhbadger 5mo ago
Classic Basic (line numbers, GOTO) resembles 1960s/1970s FORTRAN before it adopted structured programming. The idea when BASIC was invented in Dartmouth in the 1960s that it would be a good introduction to programming for students who
164.
by jhbadger 6mo ago
When we get complete neuronal connection maps (which we are getting close to for mice and humans will be done within a decade or two), we could in principle simulate a brain on a computer or on paper too. Unless you assert something magical
165.
by jhbadger 6mo ago
He never did such a thing. Most of his career was in evolutionary biology and his atheism was only relevant in that many of his critics were people rejecting evolution on religious grounds. And even his "God Delusion" (which was o
166.
by jhbadger 6mo ago
A "cultural X" is a totally valid position. Many Jewish atheists consider themselves "cultural Jews" and see no problem with celebrating Jewish festivals even if they don't believe in God. Being an atheist doesn&#x2
167.
by jhbadger 6mo ago
Strong disagree (I'm a computational genomicist). The "official" Human Genome Project was in a rut, doing incredibly inefficient and scientifically uninteresting chromosome walking techniques and would have taken years or eve
168.
by jhbadger 6mo ago
Definitely. Smoking used to be the default and non-smokers were viewed as being eccentric like vegetarians/vegans still are today and having a small non-smoking section was seen as something for "those people" like restaurant
169.
by jhbadger 6mo ago
Prolog is great for the cases where logic programming makes sense but you can easily create a logic engine in Lisp (or other languages - that's what kanren/minikanren which has been ported to many languages)
170.
by jhbadger 6mo ago
My copy of "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" is explicitly listed as being copyrighted by Ben H. Winters in 2009 despite the majority of the words being Austen's, though. Perhaps music has different rules compared to t
171.
by jhbadger 6mo ago
Yeah, I'm talking about the version (which is even on my US DVD) where the narrator is some black marketeer neither Martins nor Lime. "I never knew the old Vienna before the war with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm.
172.
by jhbadger 6mo ago
This is of course assuming you take AI-generated code unchanged. But you don't, in my experience. And that generates a new work fully copyrightable even if the original wasn't. Just like how the fad a decade or so ago of taking To
173.
by jhbadger 6mo ago
Yeah - listen to the narrator in the opening on the classic Orson Welles film The Third Man (1949) - he says he never cared much for Vienna before the War, preferring the scene in Constantinople instead.
174.
by jhbadger 6mo ago
Yes, they actually planned to release cross-platform applications in addition to games and actually shipped one (1985's database Cornerstone). The problem was 1985 was a bit late for cross-platform business software to be successful; t
175.
by jhbadger 6mo ago
Well, TADS is older than Inform, yes, but the whole idea of VM-based platforms for adventures originated from Infocom's Z-machine starting with Zork I in 1980 -- it's what let them basically release their games for every platform
176.
by jhbadger 6mo ago
There's also ZIL by way of ZILF https://github.com/taradinoc/zilf This is the Lisp-like language that Infocom implementers actually used back in the day.
177.
by jhbadger 6mo ago
There were also financial reasons not to, just as there were with the Ottoman Empire in Eastern Europe -- Islamic law says that no Muslim can be taxed more than a non-Muslim so non-Muslims were handy to have around because they could be tax
178.
by jhbadger 6mo ago
John McPhee is a great underrated non-fiction author, up there with the late Tracy Kidder. I particularly like McPhee's "The Curve of Binding Energy" about the physicist Theodore B. Taylor.
179.
by jhbadger 6mo ago
Or, maybe the jobs are there because people companies want to hire want to live there. We have a way of testing this now given that remote work is a thing. We can see if people would rather work remotely from a cheap house in rural Kansas a
180.
by jhbadger 6mo ago
Up to a point. Yes, it is nice to mix housing and retail and the like, and some zoning laws prevent this. But you have to look back into the 19th century before zoning laws existed and you had things like slaughterhouses opening in resident

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