sethg

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511.
by sethg 16y ago
I would not trust any politician who says “I have no idea what policies I should be proposing once I get elected, so I want to hear your ideas.” Such a politician is either an idiot or a liar. A politician with intelligence and integrity w
512.
by sethg 16y ago
The humor is not that a social site attracted trolls; the humor is that a major US political party used a social site to solicit help developing its political agenda . The trolls are just helping us see the violence^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfoolish
513.
by sethg 16y ago
I can’t remember the last time I bought something worth more than $100 by paying cash. If every bill with a denomination over $20 went away, or if inflation reduced the largest circulating bill to a value of twenty 2010-dollars, I wouldn’t
514.
by sethg 16y ago
You wouldn’t want to exchange a suitcase full of cocaine for a suitcase full of gold and then discover, long after the purchaser had flown away, that the coins were 90% pure gold instead of 99.99%. As long as you trust the ECB to keep infla
515.
by sethg 16y ago
Do handwriting interfaces have more traction in China, Japan, and Korea?
516.
by sethg 16y ago
The next step is testing: violating minor rules, asking for things that are not supposed to be given. They test for the resilience of the guards and are also playing to what in psychology is called the “foot in the door phenomenon”: people
517.
by sethg 16y ago
A private school can’t refuse admission to a deaf student, but if (for example) the student requires a sign-language interpreter to participate in class, the private school is under no obligation to pay for one. A public school in a simi
518.
by sethg 16y ago
We are not sponsored by any synagogue. (Trust me, the synagogues compete with the Jewish schools for donations.) “Other fundraising” is our fundraising. I don’t have a breakdown of my particular school’s budget, but a sample budget
519.
by sethg 16y ago
I call bullshit. I send my son to a private religious school ( http://www.jcdsboston.org/ ) which is not sponsored by any synagogue of millionaires. The Supreme Court declared in 1925 (Pierce v. Society of Sisters) that parents have the
520.
by sethg 16y ago
If this were an article about poor people in India hiring their own militia because they couldn’t get adequate protection from the local government-sponsored police force, would anyone be considering this a model for the US to emulate?
521.
by sethg 16y ago
The public schools are obliged to take just about every kid who shows up, including children with severe emotional, cognitive, or physical disabilities. In the US, they are also obliged to provide disabled children with education “in the l
522.
by sethg 16y ago
When a manuscript for a novel—especially a novel by an unknown writer—hits an editor’s desk, neither the author nor the editor really knows for sure whether the story is going to be a hit, a bomb, or something in between. The current publi
523.
by sethg 16y ago
That’s not sporting .
524.
by sethg 16y ago
If you believe that a benevolent God would leave puppies and kittens behind, does hiring an atheist to look after your pets bespeak a certain lack of faith in God’s plan?
525.
by sethg 16y ago
The technique for sailing into the wind, however, is much less than a thousand years old (unless it’s yet another trick that the Greeks learned and then everyone else forgot until the Middle Ages). IIRC one of the first sailors who knew th
526.
by sethg 16y ago
Sure, they could find a guide. How could they find a trustworthy guide?
527.
by sethg 16y ago
IIUC the people who sneak across the Mexican border don’t just walk across; they hire guides who know the terrain and are constantly running back and forth. A terrorist from a third country, air-dropped into Mexico, wouldn’t know who to tr
528.
by sethg 16y ago
As another article recently linked from HN pointed out, even if you can get a basic understanding of CDOs and credit default swaps in a few hours, if you went to actually invest in one of the things, the legal documents defining your act
529.
by sethg 16y ago
The cost saving argument might not be that much of a stretch, if you consider that (a) as human-vs-nature struggles go, playing at subsistence agriculture might be less arduous than trying to imitate a British lawn in the Southern Califor
530.
by sethg 16y ago
The cynical answer would be “so you can out-snob the snobs who buy all their produce at Whole Foods”, but I can come up with a less cynical answer. Assume that in the long run, rising oil prices and what-not are going to make food more expe
531.
by sethg 16y ago
You need to think like a large-company HR director. Every employee must have an appropriate rank to justify his or her salary, and a list of qualifications to justify the rank, so that nobody can say “hey, this guy across the hall is doing
532.
by sethg 16y ago
There are very large organizations that have tied themselves to IE6-dependent code (or at least, code that their IT staff assumse is IE6-dependent) on their intranets, and they are not eager to commit the resources necessary to bring everyt
533.
by sethg 17y ago
The unencrypted contents of your hard drive constitute evidence, not testimony.
534.
by sethg 17y ago
Yet, strangely, the people who want to sell me crap never let me cash in directly on my personal information. They always want to buy through some middleman that claims to be offering me some other service.
535.
by sethg 17y ago
A certain political blogger, in another context ( http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2010/04/the-fifte... ), remarked: [T]here are really two ways to break news. A Type 1 scoop is a story that if you don’t break, just won’t be brok
536.
by sethg 17y ago
Bluetooth connects devices that are close to each other , but your phone’s Bluetooth driver can’t tell the difference between a device that is touching the phone and a device that is ten feet away. So in order to establish a Bluetooth con
537.
by sethg 17y ago
Does ITA even use Lisp for its newer projects? None of the current job postings in their engineering department mention Lisp.
538.
by sethg 17y ago
...which raises the question: do these people lack the capacity for racial prejudice , or do they lack the intelligence required to determine what race a person belongs to ? The boundaries between races are, after all, determined by cultu
539.
by sethg 17y ago
Microsoft promoting one of its proprietary file formats as a “standard” when politically expedient, and then ignoring that “standard” after the moment of expedience has passed? Shocked! Shocked, I am!
540.
by sethg 17y ago
Two words: counterparty risk. If you borrow from A (or if A invests in you) and lend to B (or invest in B, or, if B is a bank, deposit money in B), then any risk that B might default translates into a risk that A will have trouble getting i

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