thisrod

38 ms·

421.
by thisrod 12y ago
After reading the relevant chapter of Cialdini's Influence , my take is that it's easy for cult leaders to brainwash people because they've read it too. And, of course, because they're evil, greedy bastards. Presumabl
422.
by thisrod 12y ago
In France, back in the day, the King was served entire meals at once, which would sit there cooling off while spectators gawked from the gallery. It was one thing if you could afford to eat great cuisine, but if you could afford to let it
423.
by thisrod 12y ago
I'm surprised that Pinker doesn't mention the book whose title and authors change with each edition, but which keeps the words style, lessons, clarity and grace on its cover. His book sounds exactly like it. Turner and Thomas, t
424.
by thisrod 12y ago
The (dense) vector and matrix functions have lived in Lapack and BLAS for 40 years, longer than there has been a libc. Every serious language has a standard interface for them, and the issues discussed in the article haven't caused pr
425.
by thisrod 12y ago
I agree with that in principle. The problem is that you have to do those sports a lot in order to stay fit, and people start companies, write books and do other things that leave them with too little time for it. Climbing over a lifetime
426.
by thisrod 12y ago
Paul Graham's essays discuss how the most exciting work in many media was done by the generation that invented them. For example, the most interesting paintings were done centuries ago, when oil paint was new. Bach is like that. Whe
427.
by thisrod 13y ago
Do you know of any controlled experiments to test the safety claims for automatic traction control? People used to say similar things about ABS. Then the experiments were done, it turned out to be pointless or possibly dangerous, and peop
428.
by thisrod 13y ago
Right at the start, Kay pointed out that the innovation to get from Alto to Macintosh took more work than inventing the Alto. I don't think he was ignoring that. His point might be that someone was bound to do the innovation, but it
429.
by thisrod 13y ago
This looks dodgy to me. The purple and red lines on the graph don't end up parallel, so the active set algorithm appears to have time complexity O(n) in Julia, but O(n^2) or O(n^3) in Python. Can that be explained?
430.
by thisrod 13y ago
Did you ever read Calculus Made Easy ? If you just want to understand enough calculus to know why a thrown ball follows a parabola, that really isn't hard. The typical university course aims higher than that - it's trying to in
431.
by thisrod 13y ago
Another theme of The Idea Factory is relevant to this discussion. The Bell System was the hardest thing people tried to build in the 20th century, and it couldn't have been done without valve amplifiers, transistors, information the
432.
by thisrod 13y ago
I've also dreamed of linking Smalltalk images against Plan 9 namespaces. Do you know if anyone has seriously worked on it?
433.
by thisrod 13y ago
There's an obvious reason for Einstein to have gotten stuck: the subject of his later research, a quantum theory of gravity, really was too hard. The problem remains open today.
434.
by thisrod 13y ago
The technology on that list can be traced back to two scientific breakthroughs. The germ theory, from the 1860s, led to vaccines, antibiotics and surgery. Quantum mechanics, from the 1920s, led to the transistor and the laser. The list o
435.
by thisrod 13y ago
Not only did Plan 9 have named pipes, it lacked any other sort. Pipes were implemented as a synthetic filesystem. http://man.cat-v.org/plan_9_2nd_ed/3/pipe
436.
by thisrod 13y ago
A generation ago, paper had the kind of resolution that screens do now, and all the problems mentioned in this thread came up when books were printed. This made them problems for Donald Knuth. He tackled them with his usual genius, and th
437.
by thisrod 13y ago
I grok a different subtext: It's a journalist's job to know where the skeletons are buried, and where the escorts keep their address books. Journalists also have ready access to dictionaries, with which to clarify the meanings of
438.
by thisrod 13y ago
Clerical error, maintained for a day, with Amnesty International and the Brazilian ambassador screaming blue murder? Yeah, right.
439.
by thisrod 13y ago
At this point, who cares what words Mr. Obama uses to describe his actions? He has done things that demand his sacking; after that, he can tell it to the judge.
440.
by thisrod 13y ago
My first thought was to agree, but my second thought was to wonder how much worse this makes things. The mobile network already locates you well enough for the spooks to find out who you're meeting. I live in Melbourne; half our mobil
441.
by thisrod 13y ago
There's a very stable C compiler out there: Ken Thompson's 1990s rewrite of Dennis Ritchie's 1970s original. Unfortunately it wouldn't solve OpenBSD's problem, being too stable to have caught up with C99 and C++.
442.
by thisrod 13y ago
US signals intelligence is also described as "absolutely critical" to Australia's diplomatic campaign to win a seat on the United Nations Security Council. "Without intelligence support, overwhelmingly provided by US ca
443.
by thisrod 13y ago
Now a year later, China decides it doesn't want to export to us anymore and bans exports of Steel to the US You mean they might do what Australia did to Japan in 1938, and the US copied in 1940? If it comes to that, we'll all have bigger
444.
by thisrod 13y ago
The headline is a bit silly. People tried to help the cops stop a thief, but stuffed up and inconvenienced bystanders. Those people happened to work for ISPs. So what? The real problem is the second order one: Australian cops are so bad
445.
by thisrod 13y ago
The card doesn't matter: if the bank can afford to mass produce it, the cost to duplicate it will be small change in a $45 million heist.
446.
by thisrod 13y ago
Einstein was lucky as well as smart. He was a curious kid while the cracks in the foundations that Newton laid were growing too wide to ignore; he graduated just as the whole structure collapsed. The things he and his contemporaries built
447.
by thisrod 13y ago
I'm intrigued that anyone would teach OOP using a language other than Smalltalk. As well as giving you the bits you need to build objects, it puts them together in a dispatch system and class library, fully thought out and tastefully desig
448.
by thisrod 13y ago
There are many hypotheses about this; history only happens once, so it's hard to test them. Here are a couple of the more interesting ideas. Jared Diamond: Eurasia runs east-west and has a large temperate zone. This supports enough biodiv
449.
by thisrod 13y ago
I agree: fanatics of magic woo are indistinguishable from sufficiently advanced fanatics of technological woo.
450.
by thisrod 13y ago
So we're talking about a very general problem. When I noticed that a system of equations including x=y can have a different least-squares solution when you change it to 2x=2y, I was quite surprised.

More ›