thisrod

34 ms·

301.
by thisrod 10y ago
Do you understand the arguments that the ability to send a signal faster than light allows you to send that signal backwards in time? I've never met anyone who who understood special relativity but was OK with that.
302.
by thisrod 10y ago
> He's an influential and highly connected billionaire. Which makes him totally different from the Member of Parliament for Cambridge, Master of the Mint, intellectual grandfather of the enlightenment, etc. By the way, Isaac Newton
303.
by thisrod 10y ago
> What are my options? Activism. I'd still like to think that there is a real chance of Tony Blair being convicted of mass murder and dying in jail. And of George Bush and John Howard not daring to set foot in Europe again. This wa
304.
A poor background can help your career. But rich is better(smh.com.au)
1 points by thisrod 10y ago|0 comments
305.
by thisrod 10y ago
To an outsider, this theory sounds like a really hard one to test. The hypothesis is that experiences in infancy condition adult behaviour, so someone would need to track a large cohort of people for decades. That kind of thing is rarely do
306.
by thisrod 10y ago
I never used Facebook until I ended up as secretary of a sports club. It adds a lot of value for messages such as, "Could someone who regularly drives past the bottle shop please pick up a carton of beer and drop it off next time they
307.
by thisrod 10y ago
There is a higher order issue here. DNS time stamps have been stable for decades. Why has anyone written new code to format them since the last leap second?
308.
by thisrod 10y ago
Smalltalk had a neat solution to this. You gave some arguments and a result, then it tried all the methods with the right types, and listed the ones that gave the result. Searching for '(a b c) and 'a would tell you what car is c
309.
by thisrod 10y ago
Version 2 of the transportation system is well known in outline. Undesirable elements are disappeared to remote islands, whose people don't want them there, and whose police, to the extent that there are any, aren't willing to pr
310.
by thisrod 10y ago
The developed world already has this problem: Australian unemployment benefits are on the same order as most UBI proposals. The current Australian response is the systematic rape and murder of unauthorised immigrants, which most of the cou
311.
by thisrod 10y ago
Last time I looked at C, the libraries had yet to be ported to C99. You had to choose between z = u + 2 * i * w, or zs = fft(ws); you couldn't have both. Therefore Fortran kept winning.
312.
by thisrod 10y ago
So in Australia we have things called small claims courts, which are designed to make it practical for an individual citizen to sue a billion dollar company for a few hundred dollars. And I think that Australian consumer law would take a v
313.
by thisrod 10y ago
That doesn't necessarily follow. Cars are much more important now than in the 1940s. OTOH, "motor literacy"—in the sense of knowing how cars worked and being able to keep them running—might have been a lot more common back
314.
by thisrod 10y ago
I think the rule is that, when a business charges a consumer a penalty fee of any kind, the fee must relate to actual costs that the customer's actions imposed on the business. A business could estimate the cost of bananas, but they c
315.
by thisrod 10y ago
In principle, it seems like this could be mitigated by some changes to the language. Has anyone tried this? E.g.: Strings have a dirty flag. Literal strings are initially clean, CGI variables are dirty, argv and file/socket input
316.
by thisrod 10y ago
Squared error because the uncertainties in independent, normally distributed random variables add in quadrature. I expect that this could be proved geometrically using Pythagoras's theorem, so in that sense the comments about orthogon
317.
by thisrod 10y ago
The thing that struck me was the data, not the attempts to explain it. Assume the graph is right. From the 60s to the 80s, the gender mix in male dominated degrees was equalising slowly but uniformly. Then, after 1983, computer science v
318.
by thisrod 10y ago
Picture a pair of tanks shaped like a parallel plate capacitor, a circuit shaped pipe connecting them, and a mixture of water and air filling the pipe. (The air lets the water move around without creating a vacuum.) All other things being
319.
by thisrod 10y ago
Like this? http://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/about-council/committees-mee...
320.
by thisrod 10y ago
> water does not attract other water in any way Um ... once we've cleared up all the misconceptions about electricity, we might want to move on to this other thing called gravity :-) The usual reason that people are mislead by &quot
321.
by thisrod 10y ago
I think many HNers would enjoy the Australian version of this: http://worldrogainingchamps.com.au/ A rogaine only lasts 24 hours—no one has been tempted to organise a longer one. On the other hand, the requirement to keep
322.
by thisrod 10y ago
"Speculative science" is the normal way to describe that.
323.
by thisrod 10y ago
We're talking about a bunch of gay evangelical Christian undergrads in the darkest years of the AIDS crisis at its ground zero. This was indeed how such people behaved-look up "cognitive dissonance"-but cut them some slack.
324.
Vale Leslie Nassar, engineering genius and champion shit-stirrer(crikey.com.au)
1 points by thisrod 10y ago|0 comments
325.
by thisrod 10y ago
Maybe he was an idiot, but everyone who lived in the previous 4 billion years was a worse idiot. In the land of the blind and all that.
326.
by thisrod 10y ago
Let's not get too nostalgic. The operative words there are "English man": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Restriction_Act_... Or at least someone with a good enough accent to pass for one.
327.
by thisrod 10y ago
> systems engineering, a very broad field born almost entirely from the NASA space program What's the evidence for that? The Idea Factory , a history of Bell Labs, claims that it was originally "system engineering", back
328.
by thisrod 10y ago
I'm a bit surprised that, in 2016, there is no standard way for a computer to authenticate its keyboard and monitor. Has anyone even thought about how that could be done?
329.
by thisrod 10y ago
> I'm surprised they didn't go by the UIAA standard ... for testing dynamic ropes. That's because they weren't testing dynamic ropes. All the other UIAA standards—the ones for harnesses, nuts, camming devices, stati
330.
by thisrod 10y ago
>It's worth considering why you were advised to stay in the higher class cars Because the advisors get a cut of the train fares, most likely.

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