sramsay

41 ms·

391.
by sramsay 13y ago
I'm sorry, but I've spent about twenty years trying to deal with digital versions of texts written before 1900, and I think that's just bullshit. This problem is still really, really fucking hard , and still really, really
392.
by sramsay 13y ago
Perhaps, but Classical Greek civilization remains startlingly intelligible to us after 2500 years. We stare up at the paintings on the caves at Lascaux having only the vaguest idea what they mean (and that's hardly the most recent exa
393.
by sramsay 13y ago
"I highly, highly, doubt a government agency like the NSA would hire someone with such sketchy credentials." Absolutely. It's boilerplate on job descriptions for Federal jobs of any consequence. You can't answer the
394.
by sramsay 13y ago
I agree. This is the weirdest part of this whole thing. Surely there are a dozen countries less inclined to want to extradite Snowden to the U.S. for the grounds stated. Why not flee to a country that is a weak (but not too weak) ally of
395.
by sramsay 13y ago
It's a joke. I would rather have a root canal than have the wait staff of a chain restaurant come around and sing me one of their obnoxious birthday ditties.
396.
by sramsay 13y ago
"The neatest outcome would be that restaurants will . . . stop singing . . . songs." IANAL, but I believe that particular practice is prohibited under the auspices of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which, while not leg
397.
by sramsay 13y ago
Except that C is all over the stack that most people work in every day, and not just way down at the level of the OS. It's astounding to me how many of the people talking about Python, Ruby, and PHP as moments of great liberation from C app
398.
by sramsay 13y ago
I know exactly what he means. Most people are surprised to learn that I study direct methods in the calculus of variations (mostly with Sobolev spaces) using bc, and then write out my results using ed.
399.
by sramsay 13y ago
And the award for best typo ever goes to: "[Lisp] had been my sweetheart for a log time."
400.
by sramsay 13y ago
I'm so tempted to get one of these. With the shell plugin, I have access to my very high-powered servers, and Chrome comes with a nice development environment. Besides that, it's cheap and light -- a perfect roadkit. The only problem I se
401.
by sramsay 13y ago
The Modern Science of Mental Health!
402.
by sramsay 13y ago
Wake me up when there's a 3rd edition of The C Programming Language .
403.
by sramsay 13y ago
What sort of cover art should we use for the book? How about a snow-capped mountain peak? You know, the kind of mountain peak where people die either for lack of oxygen, or because crevasses open randomly across the landscape. The kind of
404.
by sramsay 13y ago
I can't blame anyone for laughing at Star Wars Kid when the video first appeared, but I have to admit that my immediate reaction when I first saw it years ago was nothing but profound sadness. All teenagers have insecurities, but nothing li
405.
by sramsay 13y ago
I seriously doubt that. Most "professional philosophers" these days are doing analytical philosophy, and it's been at least 500 years since a non-crazy person has been persuaded one way or the other about God by studying logic. I suppose G
406.
by sramsay 13y ago
I take "other" to mean "Well, it's complicated." I'm most surprised to see deontology so high (nearly as high as consequentialism) under normative ethics.
407.
by sramsay 13y ago
Man, that sucks. Win a game like that, and you never have to have another idea as long as you live.
408.
by sramsay 13y ago
I more often experience the facepalm of watching an uncomplicated idea turn into a global sensation. It's 2005 (hardly the distant technological past), and someone gets the idea for a site where you can store and watch videos. This is not
409.
by sramsay 13y ago
Dude wrote in pen . We are not worthy, brothers and sisters. We are not worthy.
410.
by sramsay 13y ago
"* Ed now stops reading stdin when reaching real End Of File the first time. (Before it needed to reach EOF twice)." Once? You've gotta be kidding. In older, hardcore versions, ed would BLOW RIGHT PAST your first EOF. It would say, "So l
411.
by sramsay 13y ago
These photos are breathtaking -- the sort of thing that makes one feel small in a colossal and complex world. It is the landscape of Milton and Dante come to life, beautiful and terrifying, ferocious and serene. But, Dude. Really? Standi
412.
by sramsay 13y ago
"If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood." Someone please put this in the fortune file for all eternity. It describes my life
413.
by sramsay 13y ago
I realize it's in quotes, but very few academics hearing the phrase "academic freedom" would think of "the ability to work on anything you like." They would, rather, think of what Wikipedia aptly describes as: ". . . the belief that the fr
414.
by sramsay 13y ago
Ye Gods! Do you mean to say that this is not an implementation of x in Javascript? [1] [1] Values for x might include Linux, the XBox, the Apollo Guidance Computer, Intercal, Apache, the French language, the Haskell compiler, Hacker News,
415.
by sramsay 13y ago
"I feel that when it comes to making AI, a better definition is something along the lines of "intelligence is the ability to make good choices when faced with a decision" I love it. Mine is even more constructivist (and Wittgensteinian).
416.
by sramsay 14y ago
"when I say 'libertarian,' I mean true libertarianism . . ." Talking about "true libertarianism" is no different than talking about "true conservatism," "true feminism," "true Marxism" or anything else -- these terms are all historically fl
417.
by sramsay 14y ago
I am absolutely amazed by the reactions in this thread. I don't know if HN readers are bunch of neo-cons (I'm certainly not), but I wonder if people feel threatened by the GPL, because they are current or aspirational entrepreneurs who thi
418.
by sramsay 14y ago
". . . dividing space into a four-dimensional grid." Time Cube! These stupid idiots still don't understand it.
419.
by sramsay 14y ago
I've seen that. Isn't that marvelous? But in all honesty, I've experienced this in other areas of my life -- writing, programming, cooking, guitar playing -- and can attest to what he's saying.
420.
by sramsay 14y ago
I am so impressed by the mechanism used to hold and release the bottom piece -- it's an elegant, simple solution that fully demonstrates why I lack the talent to be a practical engineer.

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