rwallace

72 ms·

691.
by rwallace 11y ago
That's an argument for why it's reasonable to be wary of taking financial risks. It's not an argument for why it's reasonable to call the police and a psychotherapist because you saw a mouse in your apartment.
692.
by rwallace 11y ago
Okay but aren't you implicitly assuming a sane set of specifications? I've seen it claimed that the input legislation was forty thousand pages. Can't confirm that of my own knowledge, but if it's true, far from criticizi
693.
by rwallace 11y ago
Intuitively you would think so, but the world doesn't seem to work in accordance with our intuition.
694.
by rwallace 11y ago
Looking at the discussion on the site, it's pretty clear that although there wasn't proof beyond reasonable doubt of the crime of fraud, the company refused to show their work - give any details about what happened to the money or
695.
by rwallace 11y ago
These days, clang-format
696.
by rwallace 11y ago
It's funny, I hold exactly the opposite view for exactly the same reason! I regard a code formatter nowadays as an essential tool for programming productivity, the fourth most important tool after an editor, compiler and web browser. T
697.
by rwallace 11y ago
The problem is that excessive competition in a system originally designed to ensure research money was spent well, is now actually causing the money to be spent badly. Asking for concrete suggestions for improvement is perfectly fair. Here
698.
by rwallace 11y ago
That's one thing I like about the idea of producing protein-rich food by the methods described in the article: it has the potential to cut down on the perceived need to subject caged farm animals to a lifetime of torture.
699.
by rwallace 11y ago
> What I did manage though was a means of getting on to any computer anywhere in the world even if it was totally air gapped and owned by someone that did not speak English. Even better, in most cases this would take seconds from a stand
700.
by rwallace 11y ago
Five characters! Luxury. I learned to program on a system where we only had two. (Not joking: on the Commodore eight bit machines, only the first two characters of variable names were significant.)
701.
by rwallace 11y ago
If $25 is a large enough sum of money to cause serious regrets over the coming weeks, then certainly you have my sympathies, but I would suggest it's not actually an issue of what the Haskell package does or doesn't do, it's
702.
by rwallace 11y ago
I can understand that, but a discussion about a kid's first project wasn't really the best place to post such a complaint. Probably better save it for some commercial project where they actually have a budget that could be used fo
703.
by rwallace 11y ago
Actually that's a bloody brilliant idea. In an ideal world, morality or enlightened self-interest would convince everyone to behave well. The real world falls far short of that ideal, but social pressure is often a powerful tool for fi
704.
by rwallace 11y ago
Be very careful with that line of thinking. It amounts to 'he's a bad person, so we should punish him by assigning him low status, and part of that is to refuse to take his opinion seriously.' It's instinctively appealin
705.
by rwallace 11y ago
I agree that freedom is important. That's why I like LLVM: it gives me practical freedom to do research on analysis and transformation of actual code. Before, you were legally free to do this, which was a good starting point to be sure
706.
by rwallace 11y ago
Let me put it this way. I ended up making a personal rule: don't start any more side projects. I should have made that rule earlier.
707.
by rwallace 11y ago
Both sound fine in terms of career, and you say they offer about the same pay. The big thing you haven't mentioned is working conditions. Does either demand unpaid overtime? Require you to work in an open plan office? Have a long commu
708.
by rwallace 11y ago
There's a school here in Dublin where the kids were starting to get back trouble from the weight of all the books they had to lug around, so they gave them all iPads and books in digital format instead, which solved the problem; that&#
709.
by rwallace 11y ago
Be that as it may, it's worth noting Google does other things as well. You could always try to get a job there working on self-driving cars (saving lives) or solar energy (saving the world).
710.
by rwallace 11y ago
> Well, Saddam's was one of the worst regimes since the Nazis. Saddam was a villain to be sure, but as far as people actually living in Iraq were concerned, his regime was nowhere near as bad as what followed. For some reasons why,
711.
by rwallace 11y ago
That's probably because you live in a relatively wealthy country that would not be harmed so much by economic sanctions. One way to look at it is that that the economic sanctions against Iraq killed two or three orders of magnitude mor
712.
by rwallace 11y ago
> Economic sanctions are an alternative to war. And frankly one of the reasons I think they should be taken off the table entirely is because they are far too easy an alternative. At least in war, some of the victims have their faces bro
713.
by rwallace 11y ago
The word 'balance' is vague and overused, to be sure. Here's my suggestion for a kind of action: if you have to respond to aggression, make the response targeted and limited to what is necessary. For example, when Saddam Huss
714.
by rwallace 11y ago
If the author had portrayed the Imperial Japanese government as an innocent victim, I would be the first to despise the article. But he didn't. He mentioned the campaign of mass murder in China, the insane stupidity of the decision to
715.
by rwallace 11y ago
Ah, metaness! So can we assume people who assume other people are stupid, are stupid? Or is there some benefit from doing things that way that might not be apparent at first sight? One possibility that comes to mind is the substitution of p
716.
by rwallace 11y ago
What I find surprising is that the number of generations is fixed. When I first read about particle generations, my reaction was 'oh yeah, it's obviously the same particles in some higher energy state, so it should keep going up i
717.
by rwallace 11y ago
You say it's not your problem, and imply that's because it's not your fault, but how sure are you of that? When poor people can't get decent jobs, often it's not because they aren't capable of doing them. It&#x
718.
by rwallace 11y ago
That is one possible conclusion. Another possible conclusion, however, is that the world has changed in the years since last time Paul was actually doing this, and people with current experience are pointing out that his advice in this case
719.
by rwallace 11y ago
Don't typical web users these days always search instead of typing in the domain name?
720.
by rwallace 11y ago
Maybe never. The Homo Economicus model of human behavior as optimizing for expected economic return is only a first approximation. In some cases, human behavior is more accurately modeled as "Mine! My precious!"

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