oxymoron

17 ms·

121.
by oxymoron 9y ago
I stand corrected, and appreciate hearing your perspective. It does have a different structural feel to it compared to works I’ve read by respected modern day historians (which isn’t that many), so I think I can see what you’re getting at.
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by oxymoron 9y ago
I think that Better Angels makes a stronger case from a qualitative point of view than it does from the quantitative point of view. Taleb and others have criticized Pinker’s statistical analysis quite convincingly, but the historical narrat
123.
by oxymoron 9y ago
It’s quite different. The bolsheviks believed that the collapse of capitalism was imminent, and that revolution would eventually sweep across the west even without their involvement. I always interpreted “We will outlive you” as the ideolog
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by oxymoron 9y ago
And I recall reading that he was quite active in making the Polish government-in-exile acquiesce to Soviet demands. A bit like Chamberlain on the question of Czechoslovakia perhaps?
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by oxymoron 9y ago
Well, you don’t, so if that’s a requirement you’ve got to do it some other way.
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by oxymoron 9y ago
I’ve frequently used the equivalent of HMAC_SHA512(long_secret,uid + ’|’ + timestamp) to generate a token on the server, which the client can retain and pass along requests, and can be verified on the server without persistence. I assume th
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by oxymoron 9y ago
It seems unlikely that you were able to overload the Google public dns server, and it also seems unlikely that you were saturating your connection. Thus you probably hit a rate limit. If you go recursive, and cache at least the TLD servers,
128.
by oxymoron 9y ago
Yep, pretty intense gerilla marketing on HN. Worked on me though... After the first article I thought "I want to read that at some point." After the second one, I added it to my wishlist. After they got Vincent Cerf to review it i
129.
by oxymoron 9y ago
I did the same thing about fifteen years ago by generating a mJPEG stream from a PHP-script. As far as I can remember, it seemed more reliable than using GIF. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_JPEG
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by oxymoron 9y ago
Thiel ousted Musk from Paypal, and even though they don't seem to be antagonostic these days, I don't see them doing each other a lot of favors.
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by oxymoron 10y ago
Tesla's system has an order of magnitude or two of more miles driven than anyone else though, so I think it's unfair to speak of a higher risk based on current data.
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by oxymoron 10y ago
I'll concede that the analysis isn't completely without merit, but having spent the last few years in ad tech, I sincerely hope that there won't be a revival. It's a race to the bottom. Publishers are struggling and are
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by oxymoron 10y ago
To jump into a really interesting discussion: I totally get what the both of you are saying, but I think that the real problem are poor abstractions. In some sense SQL is code generation since it's a declarative way of describing what
134.
by oxymoron 10y ago
I've worked primarily in Java and C++ for the past few years, but also with several dynamic languages. I sometimes miss the expressiveness of Python, but I can't say I'm ever frustrated by a strong type system nor does the co
135.
by oxymoron 10y ago
One thing often missing from the debate is this: version control is a fundamentally complex problem. In my view, it's a unfair to blame this complexity on the tools. The cockpit of an airplane is famously complex not because Boeing and
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by oxymoron 10y ago
As a European I've found that most ISP-provided residential gateways are crap, optimized mostly for convenient remote management by support staff. I used to switch them out for WRT54GL's, but these days I too prefer Ubiquiti gear.
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by oxymoron 10y ago
Can't be given in terms of elementary functions, with a finite number of terms. Seems a bit arbitrary though -- neither can exp(x) or ln(x) or sin(x), so introducing erf(x) and defining it using an integral seems more par the course th
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by oxymoron 10y ago
Probably to minimize context switching?
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by oxymoron 10y ago
Can someone explain the terms "black money" and "white money" in this context?
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by oxymoron 10y ago
So which parts of Chapter 7 and 8 - the ones that deals with the applicable neurology and psycology - do you disagree with? I presume that the chapter on inner demons felt very relatable when you read it, pierre? :) Please do elaborate on y
141.
by oxymoron 10y ago
It's a bit unfair to claim that a person can't have _anything_ interesting to say in regards to _any_ subject because you disagree with the statistical methods in one of his books, isn't it? Moreover, not all of Better Angels
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by oxymoron 10y ago
Neal Stephenson paints an entertaining picture of the events surrounding the plague and the great fire in _Quicksilver_. It includes a fictionalized version of Robert Hooke with frequent references to his contribution to the rebuilt city, a
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by oxymoron 10y ago
It's true that Germans enjoyed quite a few civil liberties at the time, and that it's constituent states has at times been very progressive in certain respects. That said, there seems to have been very little emphasis on individua
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by oxymoron 10y ago
As much as I'd like to agree with this, I can't avoid to notice that much of quantum mechanics was developed in early 20th century Germany (with some exceptions like Bohr, Fermu and de Broglie) which wasn't exactly following
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by oxymoron 10y ago
I carried a 2013 Dell XPS Developer Edition and a MacBook Air in parallell for a while this year. Note that not all of this necessarily applies to more recent versions of the XPS. * My XPS has a really awful touchpad. When I first got it, i
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by oxymoron 10y ago
I also very much agree with this. I think it might be a sign of something deeper, though. When I design a library, I keep in mind that it might be used in a variety of contexts applied in a multitude of styles. In contrast, when I author a
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by oxymoron 10y ago
Seems like SpaceX agrees with you on the difficulties with the fuel tank, with Musk calling that the single hardest part. Rather cool that they've already made progress on that though!
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by oxymoron 10y ago
Here's another one: https://github.com/facebookresearch/deepmask
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by oxymoron 10y ago
Agreed. I was a long time abuser of cut, but has moved to relying on sed instead. I find that it's generally a lot more robust if you think through your expressions. For certain cases awk will also do the job. Perl oneliners do seem co
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by oxymoron 10y ago
Stephen Pinker quotes that exact passage in _The Better Angels of our Nature_. He rebuts: > Orwell was wrong about one thing: that political euphemism was a phenomenon of his time. A century and a half before Orwell, Edmund Burke complai

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