mhartl

79 ms·

721.
by mhartl 14y ago
"pi is a lie" and "pi is wrong" are incredibly disingenuous slogans. For the former, you just need to know your meme: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=the+cake+is+a... For the latter, you need to know that it comes from Bo
722.
A new section of The Tau Manifesto: Getting to the bottom of pi(tauday.com)
62 points by mhartl 14y ago|39 comments
723.
by mhartl 14y ago
Dammit, I thought I copyedited this comment pretty thoroughly, but a stupid typo still slipped through: s/Not that/Note that/
724.
by mhartl 14y ago
Was Einstein the victim of oppression? How about Feynman? If "No", how does that jibe with your definition? If "Yes", is being a victim of oppression necessarily that big a deal? (Both Einstein and Feynman seemed to do OK for themselves.) (
725.
by mhartl 14y ago
You're arguing with ESR, not with me. My role in this is to explain ESR's position and to defend its correctness assuming his premises are true . My role is not to defend his premises, which in fact I am unqualified to do.
726.
by mhartl 14y ago
You're arguing with ESR, not with me. ESR implies that there was another alternative. My role in this is to explain ESR's position and to defend its correctness assuming his premises are true . My role is not to defend his premises, whic
727.
by mhartl 14y ago
Nothing you have written contradicts what I wrote. "Partisan" doesn't mean "wrong". It simply means that those who insist on certain "basic human rights" mostly fall into the same party (metaphorically, if not literally—"tribe" might be mor
728.
by mhartl 14y ago
English law punished homosexuality with chemical castration, but (according to ESR) Turing could easily have avoided this fate. Was Turing thus a "victim" of "oppression"? We're quibbling about words. Your notions of "victim" and "oppressio
729.
by mhartl 14y ago
The premise of your comment is one of the main points disputed in ESR's essay, namely, the claim that Turing's death was related to his oppression as a homosexual. It's as if, despite Einstein not dying in the Holocaust, for political pur
730.
by mhartl 14y ago
Who would you have decide which rights are "basic human rights"? I'm guessing it's people like you, i.e., progressives. If that's not partisan, I don't know what is. I also fear you've misunderstood ESR. See http://news.ycombinator.com/ite
731.
by mhartl 14y ago
My comment at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4158468 addresses some of your concerns.
732.
by mhartl 14y ago
It's evident from some of the comments that many HN readers have misunderstood ESR's points about Alan Turing. What ESR is saying is that "a homosexual who committed suicide because of anti-gay oppression" has become a key part of the Turin
733.
by mhartl 14y ago
Hard work, she says, has been the key to Google's success, as well as her own. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessary_and_sufficient_condi...
734.
by mhartl 14y ago
I can't imagine any tech company worth working for that wouldn't consider Haskell to be a big plus on a resume.
735.
by mhartl 14y ago
Craigslist is one of the greatest blown opportunities in the history of business.
736.
by mhartl 14y ago
Indeed, that was my guess. I'm confident anarchism is not a good solution to any problem, but I fear you may yet get your wish. I doubt you'll like the result. (I'm sure I won't.)
737.
by mhartl 14y ago
I learned something really useful from this: I didn't know about MailChimp's RSS-to-email service. Good tip!
738.
by mhartl 14y ago
I'm genuinely curious. Could you email me the word? My address is in my profile. I promise not to share it.
739.
by mhartl 14y ago
People differ greatly in their appetite for social interactions vs. solitude. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in ou
740.
by mhartl 14y ago
Or, if you use AWS as your only platform, accept that shit will happen from time to time. Unless your application is a matter of life and death, or unless billions of dollars are at stake, a little downtime now and then probably isn't that
741.
by mhartl 14y ago
For future reference: http://status.heroku.com/
742.
by mhartl 14y ago
I'm confident he's serious, and I feel much the same way. I use cperciva's Hacker News Daily ( http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/ ) to help avoid spending too much time at Hacker News and to make sure I don't miss any big stories.
743.
by mhartl 14y ago
What you mean is that heavily formatted books don't look good on Kindles. There's no general mapping from publication-quality documents (as supported by PDF) to crippled formats like ePub and Mobi. The problem is the device—or, rather, your
744.
by mhartl 14y ago
This is a limitation of the device, not the format. Why do people expect to be able to read heavily formatted books on every device they own? For books made up mostly of natural language text, this might be a reasonable expectation, but tec
745.
by mhartl 14y ago
Yes, the relevant change is in the Gemfile for each example project. Running $ bundle update rails $ bundle install should bring you up to speed.
746.
by mhartl 14y ago
Thanks for the heads-up. I've updated the Rails Tutorial book accordingly.
747.
by mhartl 14y ago
Glad to hear it. When people ask me about ePub/Mobi, I tell them that both formats are broken and that if I ever produce them it'll only be as a stupid marketing gimmick. What we really need is a format that works across different devices.
748.
by mhartl 14y ago
What's your method for making the ePub version of your books? I'm considering writing a custom program for my own stuff, but I'd love to be able to use something off the shelf.
749.
by mhartl 14y ago
Indeed. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4077125
750.
by mhartl 14y ago
To understand how hackers see piracy, I suggest reading Eric Raymond's open letter to Chris Dodd: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4155 Money quote: We engineers do have an actual problem with Hollywood and the music industry, but it’s

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