rwallace

166 ms·

1531.
by rwallace 15y ago
Compared to the ways people used to settle their differences in the days when war wasn't online, I also am enthusiastic about these developments.
1532.
by rwallace 15y ago
> Are you in favor of government regulation for people researching new designs for nuclear bombs? The cases are not particularly similar. It doesn't matter that we have crippled nuclear weapons R&D with regulation. It will matter a
1533.
by rwallace 15y ago
For example, there has been a lot of talk for the last few decades about bioterrorism. In 2001, it finally happened; a bioterrorist attack occurred. It killed five people. In the meantime, natural infectious diseases kill several million pe
1534.
by rwallace 15y ago
The scare quotes are well placed. The problem with Bostrom et al. is not that they are spending money. It's not even the fact that they are wasting their time on imaginary risks. It's that, by trying to bend policy around those imaginary ri
1535.
by rwallace 15y ago
> Let this be a reminder to you all. Build the hell out of your network. Not that this is bad advice, by all means, but I think there is a more concrete lesson here: > I went so far as to convince her to quit a great gig back in Chi
1536.
by rwallace 15y ago
I've heard Mathematica praised before, but not in precisely those terms - I was under the impression it was more a DSL for mathematics. Can you give a few examples of things it can do that put it that far along the power curve relative to P
1537.
by rwallace 15y ago
I get the impression from the story that his second wife was trying to give him exactly that sort of counsel, but he didn't listen. If so, the moral of that story is, when someone you trust advises you to just chill and not shoot yourself i
1538.
by rwallace 15y ago
18-wheelers and buses are fewer in number, highly visible and driven by professionals. They're a much smaller problem in practice.
1539.
by rwallace 15y ago
Which makes it all the more important to find a way to get the Hummers and Escalades off the bloody roads.
1540.
by rwallace 15y ago
Surely you can then use it _only_ for your job, and post only work information, no personal information?
1541.
by rwallace 15y ago
Or more to the point, browsers should always wrap text that would otherwise be cut off, regardless of what erroneous instructions they get from the website. As one writer put it, "anyone who puts up with horizontal scrolling probably has ot
1542.
by rwallace 15y ago
I don't disagree that the usual implementation of wrapped code is pretty terrible (because it goes back to the start of the line, thus spectacularly breaking the indentation-based formatting - UltraEdit is the only implementation I've seen
1543.
by rwallace 15y ago
Which is a very wise policy. It's not like deleting apparently unused code that you can get back from version control if you turn out to be wrong. The cost of carrying a hundred unused columns around forever is negligible compared to the co
1544.
by rwallace 15y ago
I don't remember C# extension methods being particularly prone to incur instanceOf checks, but I could be missing something; can you expand on this?
1545.
by rwallace 15y ago
Such as? Even living below the poverty line in a poor country with soft currency (in which case you probably won't be reading HN or participating in psychology experiments) you're still likely to get through quite a bit more than that in a
1546.
by rwallace 15y ago
Sure, but you're talking about the vendor supplying the program to the customer and still maintaining the installation at the site. I was under the impression the request was by customers who have their own IT departments, for a "give us th
1547.
by rwallace 15y ago
A thousand dollars is not a life-changing sum. It's well within the range in which the utility of money is linear in the amount. (Even if it's large compared to what you have in your pocket, by the time you spend it, your life will be the s
1548.
by rwallace 15y ago
In the ancestral environment, violence was the main cause of death you could do something about and cars didn't exist. The result is evolved instincts that are wildly irrational in the modern environment. If you actually stop and think abou
1549.
by rwallace 15y ago
And that is the fundamental fallacy. Trade secrets are far, far less harmful than patents. If you keep your work a trade secret, your customers still benefit and in the worst case you have at least done no harm. Patent trolls destroy far mo
1550.
by rwallace 15y ago
I think that's a good post. I don't know Patrick so I can't comment on the specifics about him, but it makes a good general point in a powerful way.
1551.
by rwallace 15y ago
Rearranging the layout of the keys never helped me, but this did: http://specialneedscomputers.ca/index.php?l=product_detail&#... Recommended if you need an alternative to the usual high-force keyboards.
1552.
by rwallace 15y ago
What we aren't hearing about is the people who declined to use Airbnb and had their homes ransacked because a burglar spotted they were empty. The risk of having the place trashed by a guest has to be offset against the improved security fr