sethrin

48 ms·

331.
by sethrin 9y ago
If there were something better than Unix we would replace Unix with that something and keep the name. But yes, that was the joke, and no, it was not a very good one.
332.
by sethrin 9y ago
It was a joke, actually. The quote I was referencing is, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried." I actually wrote a (short) book on the ways of the Unix shell, which hopefully q
333.
by sethrin 9y ago
Ah, what? I don't know what you've been reading, but the Statute of Anne is commonly held to be the first "copyright" law, and it covers the monopoly rights of printing press operators. Copyright in the US today still do
334.
by sethrin 9y ago
Ugh. Unix is absolutely the worst development target. It's clunky, ad-hoc, it uses some horrible ancient programming language and an even more horrible ancient scripting language. Like democracy, it's definitely the worst example
335.
by sethrin 9y ago
I suppose I wasn't clear enough. I do think that his characterization of the social role of cannabis is accurate, but the technical challenges are a bit different. Which is mostly just an opportunity to mention my personal technologica
336.
by sethrin 9y ago
What you say is accurate, but I feel like it sort of highlights the difference between cannabis and tomatoes. Cannabis is not difficult to grow; even a modest amount of care and attention can produce good sinsemilla. Tomatoes just seem to s
337.
by sethrin 9y ago
Ah, growing cannabis isn't quite like growing tomatoes. Growing tomatoes is something that a tomato plant does more or less of its own accord. Cannabis really wants to be 15 feet tall and to produce lots of little seeds. Getting it to
338.
by sethrin 9y ago
They haven't been able to guarantee an internship, but they do seem to go to a fair amount of trouble to get everyone one. The last cohort all got internships in the last round, and a couple people from previous cohorts also did as wel
339.
by sethrin 9y ago
Well, security is a pretty big concern, to be fair. The rejection of kdbus was probably political as much as anything else. However, I think that to the degree that there was any kind of consensus, it was not necessarily a rejection of the
340.
by sethrin 9y ago
It's not that no other system can do what government does, it's that there is no other system. Government is a local monopoly on violence. Getting rid of violent (coercive) government does not remove the ability of men to be viole
341.
by sethrin 9y ago
When I find myself with a tough decision, I remind myself that it's tough for a reason: either the available options are similarly good, or similarly bad, or both. Therefore, the choice between them is not likely actually all that impo
342.
by sethrin 9y ago
I reread UHH recently, and I don't find it has aged well. The humor is very dated, as is much of the commentary. I was keeping notes reading through it about what was no longer correct or relevant, but it became sort of pointless when
343.
by sethrin 9y ago
This is true. However, while jokes are not expressly against the rules, the community moderation rarely favors them. Personally, I read a lot of Slashdot, and to some degree enjoy the level of humor, political debate, and anonymous commenta
344.
by sethrin 9y ago
Is there much overlap between blueberry farming and traffic modeling?
345.
by sethrin 9y ago
Can we perhaps instead of 'punished', maybe 'brought to justice' or 'rehabilitated'? Negative consequences should be focused on making the affected persons whole, and secondarily on getting the person to the po
346.
by sethrin 9y ago
Pretty much everything programmers do is create unproven algorithms. Hopefully at least some of them are correct. A heuristic is a problem-solving approach that has a chance of failure. So say you need a pretty fast dictionary, and you can
347.
by sethrin 9y ago
fnj is also a longtime community member of Slashdot, and well regarded.
348.
by sethrin 9y ago
Well, as I've read on this, there is good news and bad news. The good news is that the best predictors of how you're going to vote are already public. Wait, maybe that's the bad news. Either way, as you say one can already do
349.
by sethrin 9y ago
I would perhaps recommend The Clockwork Universe [0] instead, which is more or less exactly an overview of the characters and intellectual influences of the time. [0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004GB1TTA/ref=dp-ki
350.
by sethrin 9y ago
I'm sure that there is some interesting technical work being done by various political participants. Tweets do not present novel technological problems; I'm not sure what the HN interest might be.
351.
by sethrin 9y ago
That may or may not be the case (I would dispute it) but the rules here expressly place political discussions as off-topic. From what I have seen, banning accounts seems to be a last resort for people who post almost exclusively political a
352.
by sethrin 9y ago
I do really like JavaScript's ability to compose objects like that, and I feel that people interested in it as a language should definitely learn how to program in that manner. However, I suspect that for most people JavaScript is a me
353.
by sethrin 9y ago
startup, n: an otherwise normal business that isn't making money. But more seriously, the term is somewhat vague and is often misapplied.
354.
by sethrin 9y ago
Does that mean that as long as you test the shit out of it, it doesn't matter how it gets done?
355.
by sethrin 9y ago
This is called "tu quoque"[0] or appeal to hypocrisy. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque
356.
by sethrin 9y ago
As an aside, if anyone has ever actually used comments, whitespace, or quoted strings in an email address, that would be be extremely interesting to hear about.
357.
by sethrin 9y ago
10000 lines might not be enough. I'm not sure that it's possible to determine whether something is a valid email address other than trying to send mail to it. If you haven't read the RFCs, they're pretty much a nightmare
358.
by sethrin 9y ago
Both definitions are commonly accepted, for certain values of 'common'. The positive definition is limited to the tech industry, of course. I don't think that there is any appropriate situation to try to correct other people&
359.
by sethrin 9y ago
You've described "maintaining a website" and dropping out of university, and those virtues have enabled you to travel the world. That suggests that this ability is independent of your skills. I honestly feel like I'm bei
360.
by sethrin 9y ago
Also: > Withdrew from top university in my country after 6 months combined with > I also am very much a generalist with no specialist skills. What employers would this be valuable for? None. Not phrased like that anyway.

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