sethg

72 ms·

691.
by sethg 17y ago
Miss Manners has a simple protocol: a date must contain food, entertainment, and affection. In the early stages of the relationship, it's mostly entertainment and just the slightest hint of affection. As the relationship progresses, the l
692.
by sethg 17y ago
Clay Shirky had some acrid comments on this "semantic links to humans" idea five years ago: http://many.corante.com/archives/2004/08/17/xfn_relationship... One comment to that post remarked: "It seems to me that it's not just a solution l
693.
by sethg 17y ago
Not to mention "pointy-haired ex-boss".
694.
by sethg 17y ago
I don't think Clojure's "recur" or Scheme's tail-call elimination should really be called optimizations. The point of optimizations, AIUI, is that the code will still run with the optimizations off--it will just run more slowly, but might b
695.
by sethg 17y ago
If I had learned C, Lisp, and Java "in depth" when I was an undergraduate, much of the effort to learn them would have been wasted. My first programming-ish job involved documenting C++ libraries (in an era where C++ templates had just st
696.
by sethg 17y ago
The article claims that (a) television prevents war and other bad things by exposing people to role models (e.g. women with few children) and other cultures (e.g. Kobe Bryant in China); (b) as access to TV, particularly digital TV, increase
697.
by sethg 17y ago
Perhaps education makes the difference because a literate population can more effectively hold its government to account. Consider the proliferation of rabble-rousing newspapers, associated with every political stripe, during the late nine
698.
by sethg 17y ago
It's not possible to police millions of bloggers, but IIUC if some company with deep pockets enlists thousands of bloggers in a stealth "social marketing" campaign, and the ruse is discovered, the company can now be fined for deceptive trad
699.
by sethg 17y ago
Gladwell is not talking about the heritability of IQ on an individual basis; he's talking about IQ differences, or the lack thereof, between races . It's entirely possible that there is some factor of intelligence that is mostly inherited
700.
by sethg 17y ago
According to Wikipedia (I haven't bothered to check the math), a ternary currency system would maximize the likelihood that a customer would get exact change. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balanced_ternary So I think we should eliminate th
701.
by sethg 17y ago
Shame on Ms. Kaminer for using "photo-shopping" as a verb, instead of respecting the property rights of Adobe, which considers "Photoshop" to be one of its most valuable trademarks.
702.
by sethg 17y ago
If linguistic specialists can work this well for accents inside the UK, I'm sure they'll be able to tell if you're lying when you say you grew up in Somalia to Somali parents, but you're accents indicating you're from Kenya or Ethiopia. T
703.
by sethg 17y ago
That's a feature, not a bug. Keynes's whole point is that recessions are caused when too many people want to save and too few people want to consume. Putting more money into circulation puts weight on the other side of that scale.
704.
Richard Posner on "How I Became a Keynesian"(tnr.com)
12 points by sethg 17y ago|18 comments
705.
by sethg 17y ago
So those are Keynes’ prescriptions for a successful economy: low interest rates, government investment, and redistribution to the poor. And, for a time — from around the 1940s to the 1970s — that’s kind of what we did. The results were mag
706.
by sethg 17y ago
If some guy claiming to be a Russian general offers to sell you what looks like a surplus nuclear warhead, how do you know he isn't a CIA or FSB agent running a sting? How do you know that he hasn't ripped out the electronics that cont
707.
by sethg 17y ago
That's my first impression--I see a bunch of pages on the project wiki with proposed features for the language, but no documentation along the lines of "if you actually want to use this language to accomplish something useful, here's what
708.
by sethg 17y ago
Oprah Winfrey is rich, educated, and privileged, but she's not white.
709.
by sethg 17y ago
"White" has always been shorthand for "that set of ethnic groups that has almost the same level of privilege as the WASPs". The Irish, the Italians, and the Jews weren't always "white", either.
710.
by sethg 17y ago
Natalie Goldberg, in Writing Down the Bones , described how for a while, whenever she sat down to write she would just have this immense feeling of inner peace flow through her, as if she were close to enlightenment, and she thought "Well,
711.
by sethg 17y ago
You can argue that a law achieves a good end (on utilitarian grounds, for example) without arguing that it ratifies any particular Natural Rights.
712.
by sethg 17y ago
I'm uncomfortable with this essay because the author seems to be buying into the general idea that there is some bundle of Natural Property Rights that all humans are entitled to, and the job of a lawmaker is simply to align the statutes as
713.
by sethg 17y ago
I read the whole thing. It didn't redeem itself.
714.
by sethg 17y ago
From the essay: On the other hand, maybe you want to inspire and motivate people for a living. This takes a lot more skill than delivering pizzas, but it’s in much higher demand relative to the supply. Gosh, if I decided I wanted to inspi
715.
by sethg 17y ago
The phrase "fixed income" is generally used to refer to people who are living off an annuity or a pension that doesn't change from year to year, so that they would be totally screwed by inflation or a large unexpected expense. Referring to
716.
by sethg 17y ago
There is a legal fiction that a government is not merely the vector-sum of actions made by its functionaries, but that it has a corporate identity that decides and acts and persists over time. This is fiction, of course, but it's a useful
717.
by sethg 17y ago
Mobutu Sese Seko was the president of Zaire, now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Nigeria is a different country from Zaire/DRC. They don't even share a border, they have no ethnic groups in common, and their post-independenc
718.
by sethg 17y ago
I think it's a good thing that someone else can't call Amazon, pretending to be me, and convince their CSRs to brick my electronic devices.
719.
Cursive handwriting considered harmful; bring back italic(nytimes.com)
116 points by sethg 17y ago|60 comments
720.
by sethg 17y ago
Arutz Sheva, the Israeli network that does for Jewish nationalism what Fox News does for the US Republican Party, is halal.

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