philh

61 ms·

511.
by philh 11y ago
If you never prosecute the small crimes, people will start committing them more often. (To be clear, it would also be a failure mode to always prosecute the small crimes.)
512.
by philh 11y ago
To pick a contrived example, I suspect that if you offered unlimited free heroin for personal use! that would make the world a worse place. More subtly, charity could make one person better off and others worse off. You could go around to
513.
by philh 11y ago
> Should I kill someone if it is the best way to decrease child mortality rates in Africa? I'd be very surprised if the EA movement has a consensus opinion on this question. > Should we all quit our jobs to solve friendly AI? I&#
514.
by philh 11y ago
One of the factors that influences human flourishing is the prevalence of malaria nearby. If you get malaria and die, your ability to improve your own circumstances falls to 0. "People now have access to bed nets which make them less l
515.
by philh 11y ago
To clarify, 0 here means the answer is no (the tune was played incorrectly) and 1 means the answer is yes.
516.
by philh 11y ago
Here are my answers - Y correct, N incorrect. 9/26 Y, 17/26 N, makes me guess I had too many N, which is already what I was expecting. Does anyone feel like marking me? (Example) - Y 1 Y * 2 Y 3 Y * 4 N
517.
by philh 11y ago
I seem to have the lowest score yet, at 17/26. I recognized most but not all of the tunes. There were many I wasn't sure about, and if I took it again I'd probably give different answers. One time I tried to tune a ukulele, u
518.
by philh 11y ago
I don't care for that explanation, because they don't have to call the original function. (E.g. an @skip('not yet implemented') test decorator.) Or they could call it multiple times. The post-decoration function doesn&#x
519.
by philh 11y ago
I don't contribute to many open-source projects. But I'd imagine Python would have a good track record, PEP8 specifies something like a 72-character limit. That said, long lines in an existing project aren't a dealbreaker, if
520.
by philh 11y ago
I'm not sure I like any of those as much as the original. When you introduce a new name, I don't know if you're going to use it anywhere else. (But having a name is good, so I'm on the fence.) When all your while conditi
521.
by philh 11y ago
It looks like this formatter isn't just for internal use, at a company that can buy each of their developers multiple 25-inch monitors. Not everyone has screen space to burn making their editors and terminals arbitrarily wide. If the m
522.
by philh 11y ago
Traditionally, multiplication takes two elements of a set and turns them into another element of that set. The dot product doesn't do that, it takes two vectors and turns them into a scalar. The cross product only exists in three dimen
523.
by philh 11y ago
I'm not sure why you think that. Do you mean that normally, in this context "space" means the memory usage of a program, which isn't particularly related to the size of the program? In which case, yeah, it's a littl
524.
by philh 11y ago
Out of interest, what if anything would you say the main result is? I don't have one in mind, which I think harms the post - there's no narrative, just a bunch of questions and answers. The three final plots are there because the
525.
by philh 11y ago
I agree - if I hadn't been writing this to fit udacity's project evaluation specs, I would probably have included fewer. (Even as it is, I guess many of them should have been smaller.) Bike usage depends noticeably on the rain, wh
526.
How London cycle hire usage varies with weather(reasonableapproximation.net)
3 points by philh 11y ago|5 comments
527.
by philh 11y ago
So does Knuth's, which embeds a case conversion table directly in the code. http://onesixtythree.com/literate/literate2.pdf The shell script is easy enough to approximately fix: tr -cs '[:alpha:]'
528.
by philh 11y ago
Also, pedantically, a plane that crashes on the 2nd August isn't going to crash again on the 3rd. We can reduce the rate of crashes by taking planes out of the sky, and one way to do that is to crash them.
529.
by philh 11y ago
There may not be a good solution currently, but I don't believe that no good solution is possible even in theory. Which makes me wonder if the VT100 paradigm is holding us back. Like, if a VT100 understood the concept of tabs natively,
530.
by philh 11y ago
I don't know if it's fair to describe this as a limitation of VT100 (and I haven't RTFA yet), but some things that AFAIK terminals don't get right yet: - Screen's scrollback buffer and my terminal's scrollback
531.
by philh 11y ago
> Assange is claiming they can talk to him any time The closest I can see to this is: > From the beginning I offered simple solutions. Come to the embassy to take my statement or promise not to send me to the United States. which does
532.
by philh 11y ago
I don't think those are quite conflicting. It sounds like Assange says he's happy for the Swedes to do it, but the Swedes are saying they can't get permission from Ecuador. OTOH we have Assange saying "this Swedish offic
533.
by philh 11y ago
It may be better for those people to call /bin/bash, and fail early and obviously for anyone who doesn't have that; than to call /bin/sh, attempt to write portably without really knowing the quirks of this variant o
534.
by philh 11y ago
> it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach th
535.
by philh 11y ago
You get to control your computer, but there are some things which it's unethical to control your computer to do. It would be unethical to prevent people from blocking ads, but that doesn't mean it's ethical for people to bloc
536.
by philh 11y ago
Unsurprisingly, that 57% is almost meaningless. It looks like they took all the betrayals they had, then matched each betrayal with a similar friendship that didn't end in betrayal, and somehow ended up with a data set that was about 5
537.
by philh 11y ago
It still points to Schneier's blog post.
538.
by philh 11y ago
The quantity means that (a) makes the world worse off and (b) makes it better off. That seems like a pretty significant difference to me. > I never said my actions were capitalistic at all. I got that impression from one of your deleted
539.
by philh 11y ago
In a ten-player game, (a) stealing one utilon from everyone else and getting 20 for yourself is one kind of selfish tradeoff; and (b) stealing one utilon from everyone else and getting 5 for yourself is another kind of selfish tradeoff; and
540.
by philh 11y ago
If everyone drives a car, people on average are better off. If everyone cheats, people on average are worse off. That's a very different tradeoff.

More ›