thisrod

105 ms·

481.
by thisrod 15y ago
I find the contrast with alpinism very interesting. Instead of an enemy trying to kill you, it's a combination of nature and your own ambition. Ambition is an essential part of it, because mountains are harmless if you stay away from them
482.
by thisrod 15y ago
> that's a terribly limited API. Plan 9's users consider that a feature. Standing boast: "GNU's compiler manual is bigger than our whole system!" > I don't know enough about plan9 to suggest how, for example, notifications for devi
483.
by thisrod 15y ago
Surely these chefs have heard of Noma. Key points being that it's arguably the best restaurant on Earth, unarguably the trendiest, and that it doesn't provide utensils. I wonder to what extent they're copying it? Their arguments for eatin
484.
by thisrod 15y ago
I understand that changed when the UN was formed. Its member states aren't permitted to start wars, period.
485.
by thisrod 15y ago
No. Santorum screwed up by defaming 10 percent of the people on Earth, who replied in kind. Dan Savage just got them organised.
486.
by thisrod 15y ago
This is a neat story. I'm a bit too eager to believe it. If I knew some neurology, I'd surely think of reasons to be sceptical. What are they? Apart from the obvious one, that no one has repeated the experiment yet.
487.
by thisrod 15y ago
> I don't understand why the flight computers don't perform more aggresive smoothing on the signals from the sensors In this case, you can solve the hard AI problem, and you're just getting started. Witness Air France.
488.
by thisrod 15y ago
> Is there good way of knowing how you'll respond in a crisis? Practice. Get safe but uncomfortable, cause some chaos, and deal with it. Then think about what you did, and why, and what you'll do next time. Or hire an outdoor first a
489.
by thisrod 15y ago
That was done in the 80's: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine . Richard Feynman had to help the designers with the hard bits. Users recall them fondly. In the end, clusters became too cheap for custom hardware like this to
490.
by thisrod 15y ago
That's the straight reading. Enigma , the biography that brought Turing widespread attention, follows a gay narrative: "we make modernity," and "the Nazis change, but they don't go away." And now, after we made this bit of the modern narr
491.
by thisrod 15y ago
One could argue that those photons are massive, because they are partly excitations of the water, which increase its mass. Others could argue otherwise. This leads to rather wanky debates over the precise meaning of "mass".
492.
by thisrod 15y ago
> Given that Oppenheimer was Jewish himself Good point.
493.
by thisrod 15y ago
after 1946 ... late 1940s ... immediate postwar period. These sources contradict your claim, and suggest that both America and Australia were disgracefully antisemitic when Oppenheimer wrote his letter.
494.
by thisrod 15y ago
Do you have any evidence for that? Later, the Occam's Razor talk mentions that Popper applied again in 1945, with the same result. I assume the allied public changed its mind very rapidly when the war ended, and it learnt about the exterm
495.
by thisrod 15y ago
Note that Feynman was Jewish. I don't know if that mattered in America in 1945, but it certainly did in Australia. See http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s632081.htm : "What too are we to make of the cavalier disregard of an
496.
by thisrod 15y ago
Good for them. Epileptic seizures aren't usually life-threatening.
497.
by thisrod 15y ago
It would be interesting - but a lot of work - to add "time to modify" and "time to debug" metrics. Each task would come with a modification, and an error to make in implementing the original task. You'd recruit undergraduates, who hadn't u
498.
by thisrod 15y ago
The footnote was interesting. Instead of (lambda (x) (* x x)), Smalltalk writes [:x | x*x]. Apparently Church's original lambda notation was very close to that. This helps more than you'd think. For example, (if condition (lambda
499.
by thisrod 15y ago
I thought Australia had already agreed to follow America's mistakes on copyright and patents, ten years ago, under the pretence of free trade. Has anything changed?
500.
by thisrod 15y ago
There's an important difference between HIV and smallpox. To eradicate smallpox, it suffices to vaccinate all the humans. But to eradicate HIV, you have to vaccinate all the apes. This family of viruses has already jumped species twice,
501.
by thisrod 15y ago
Also see Smalltalk, for contrast. Lisp's uniform syntax lets the interpreter rewrite parts of programs; Smalltalk's uniform semantics let programs rewrite parts of the interpreter. PG's discussion of objects overlooks that. OMeta looks li
502.
by thisrod 15y ago
The most effective schools do similar things, and call it "outdoor education". It's expensive, and I doubt there's much evidence about the long-term effects on the students. I'd guess they don't take it far enough to be useful. When peopl
503.
by thisrod 15y ago
"In olden days, an 'em' was the width of an 'M', but this is no longer true; ems are simply arbitrary units that come with a font" - the TeXbook, p60
504.
by thisrod 15y ago
Wow. No one has mentioned the gospel according to Golub: http://www.amazon.com/Computations-Hopkins-Studies-Mathemati... This is the "how we wrote Lapack" book.
505.
by thisrod 15y ago
I use checklists, and they work. Scientists and engineers have a technique for complicated mathematics, which might work for editing sendmail.cf. Do it twice, and compare your answers. This works best when the "you" is plural, but repeati
506.
Four Corners posts its archives(abc.net.au)
1 points by thisrod 15y ago|0 comments
507.
by thisrod 15y ago
I see a different problem: the scope of Unicode has crept outside the scope of its designers' expertise. Next you know, we'll have a code point for the symbol "arctanh". (Moreover, sin through arccosh will be contiguous, erf will be place
508.
by thisrod 15y ago
Do you consider being John McCarthy or Dennis Ritchie to be a problem? I doubt that they do.
509.
by thisrod 15y ago
I only know of one experiment on this: < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park >. It concluded that morphine addiction in ordinary rats is not just influenced by their environment, but pretty much determined by it. I'd be interes
510.
by thisrod 15y ago
Scientists say "code" because "machine code" is a bit of a mouthful. They say "machine" because their computers used to be people, and an interrupt meant running excitedly into Sir George Everest's tent. If entrepreneurs had invented the

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