psykotic

31 ms·

211.
by psykotic 14y ago
> And the second reason is that you can try to direct your money more to the people than government by staying and eating in small family establishments rather than pricy hotels that are almost always are controlled by the government. W
212.
by psykotic 14y ago
Yes, the reasoning for his situation is totally legit.
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by psykotic 14y ago
Dickens wrote many great sentences by my reckoning, but that one has always annoyed me. It is a workaday piece of prose that long overstays its welcome, finally admitting its own irrelevance to this or any other book. That punch line wittic
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by psykotic 14y ago
When comparing two otherwise identical teams, the distributed one is probably the less effective. That's not the situation most companies are facing. A company looking to hire me that was competitive on most other fronts and stood out by le
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by psykotic 14y ago
Those opening sentences have a particular kind of urgency. By contrast, the equally memorable openings of Lolita and Moby Dick could never be called urgent, but they do instantly establish an unusual first-person narrator. What they all sha
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by psykotic 14y ago
> However, he paints the picture that porn has been with our society forever and that its effects are known and tolerable. I would argue that its widespread availability is an extremely novel phenomena and that its effects are unknown a
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by psykotic 14y ago
I accept your point while submitting that everyone in this thread, yourself included, fails this stringent test: > They were responding to a specific claim of the GGP, that porn is harmless. Speaking of strawmen, it was Jacob who used t
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by psykotic 14y ago
Good for you--I mean that. My addictive superstimulus is learning new things with no practical relevance my work, like orbital mechanics or calendrical calculations. When I catch myself going on extended binges, I try to extricate myself by
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by psykotic 14y ago
> We have normalized porn very recently and it is just a piece of modernist faith that it is harmless Do you abstain from television, computers, rock and roll, role playing, comic books and video games by this same line of FUD? Mass med
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by psykotic 14y ago
Apropos: http://www.theonion.com/video/china-celebrates-its-status-as...
221.
by psykotic 14y ago
I'll take your word for it. In that case, the notes can't very well be said to take you to the graduate level. There's no point in skating over arguably the most beautiful and interconnected area of mathematics (by which I mean complex anal
222.
by psykotic 14y ago
This looks great based on my quick perusal. I'd be very surprised if the notes could teach these subjects to anyone who didn't have significant prior exposure. The notes seem better suited for reviewing and contextualizing material you alre
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by psykotic 14y ago
> Unlimited vacation, hardware budgets, a results-only work environment, optional meetings. No company bullshit. Aside: I've become convinced unlimited vacation policies are a bad idea at scale. Everywhere I've seen them applied, they l
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by psykotic 14y ago
A lot of the time, the nature of the data and its lifetime makes specialized allocators easy to use. Not infrequently they can actually be more convenient than malloc/free when you have a bunch of allocations (think nodes in a parse tree) w
225.
by psykotic 14y ago
It's also hard to think of anything less new school than freaking Autotools. There's a good kind of old school (C, UNIX, Audrey Hepburn) but Autotools isn't it.
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by psykotic 14y ago
Fair point. I was using "controlled" as a shorthand for the usual qualities (double blind, randomized, sufficiently many test subjects, etc) you'd associate with good experimental design.
227.
by psykotic 14y ago
I got that from your original post. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any studies with that experimental setup, hence my earlier question to you.
228.
by psykotic 14y ago
That's not a controlled study, plus the effect claimed is much weaker than what I was addressing. I can believe that placebo provides some pain relief--I was addressing the claim that they provided identical levels of relief. All the studie
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by psykotic 14y ago
> inject someone in pain with morphine. do it repeatedly over time. once, without telling them, inject them with saline instead. their brain will respond as if it was morphine and continue to block the pain. I must admit I have a very h
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by psykotic 14y ago
I bought a Nexus 7 as my first Android device a few weeks ago, primarily for reading. Overall, I've been pretty happy with it as a long-time iPhone and iPad user. I'll say this: It's surprising how bad Android's momentum-free scrolling feel
231.
by psykotic 14y ago
That looks like a great initiative! My biggest concern is how individual employees are supposed to enforce this kind of agreement if the patent owner reneges. A random programmer is not going to have the financial means or a strong enough i
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by psykotic 14y ago
Because a dilemma often faced by programmers is that their employers want to patent their ideas for defensive reasons. It's a situation in which you as an employee might have leverage, so your stance isn't mere armchair ideology.
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by psykotic 14y ago
This is why, as an employee, you shouldn't buy a company's line on defensive patenting. Heartfelt as it may be, if the company's financials ever go sufficiently south, none of that will count for anything, least of all in the event of outri
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by psykotic 14y ago
Greg Egan's Planck Dive short story is worth a read: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/PLANCK/Complete/Pla...
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by psykotic 14y ago
> AES is based on factoring. And you say _he_ doesn't understand cryptography?
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by psykotic 14y ago
> In all the years of doing this, I've had an official try to shake me down maybe 5 times. Corruption in most of these countries is a negotiation game that is conducted implicitly. That's why playing dumb is so effective--if you don't k
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by psykotic 14y ago
Yeah, playing dumb has always worked for me when I was on my own, even when I was at fault. With my wife in the car, we've paid heavily discounted "spot fines" a few times when caught speeding, fitting the pattern of small-scale corruption
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by psykotic 14y ago
Obligatory reference: Fremen windtraps from the Dune novels.
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by psykotic 14y ago
> It inevitably evokes a picture of a poor sod writing a book on "20th century warfare" in 1912. No kidding. The back of the book has a prominent blurb about Autotools. That's about as retrogressive as it gets.
240.
by psykotic 14y ago
For people who have issues with this, I'd suggest asking your manager or whoever is in charge whether X days of vacation per year would be acceptable. And then track your own vacation days and treat them like you would at any other company.

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