veddox

19 ms·

151.
by veddox 6y ago
Interestingly, it has been argued that the Galileo affair was actually a case of him "being right for the wrong reasons". Obviously there was also a lot of politics involved, but the Vatican did have some of the best astronomers o
152.
by veddox 6y ago
> From many of these examples, a common thread is the following or a combination thereof: - Someone is seen as an outsider within a field - The data that supports or undermines claims is noisy. This I think is the core und
153.
by veddox 6y ago
That's what I meant with my reference to sampling bias.
154.
by veddox 6y ago
Having actually gone to the trouble of reading all the papers linked in the above article, here's my take: 1. The article attacks a straw man, in that it suggests that masks are supposed to be a cure-all against Covid-transmission. I h
155.
by veddox 6y ago
My take-away points (and personal comments): - CL is mostly used by hobbyists. (Not a very big surprise.) - There do seem to be several users in research computing. (As a computational biologist, I find this interesting and encouraging.) -
156.
by veddox 6y ago
Absolutely. Most of the questions effectively cannot be evaluated.
157.
by veddox 6y ago
How often do you run into packaging problems? As in, you need some software but it‘s only available for Linux via the Ubuntu repos?
158.
by veddox 6y ago
I find the two pretty orthogonal...
159.
by veddox 6y ago
> But the real issue still stands: Bio is hyper complex and it takes a long time to get used to the nomenclature and ideas. That is exactly the point, which I believe the article author either glossed over or didn't fully appreciate
160.
by veddox 6y ago
Absolutely not. You probably won't understand 10% of what you read. Better: go to your local university library, check out a good medicine/biology textbooks, and read that. Then go read the papers.
161.
by veddox 6y ago
I still mourn the loss of Bazaar, Canonical's early distributed VCS. It was much simpler to use than git, but still gave you the important functionality. It had a clean Python implementation. (Actually it was the first open-source pr
162.
by veddox 6y ago
Nothing is going to guarantee free elections, certainly not any technology. Democracy is a human, social phenomenon. While it does pose technical challenges, it stands or falls with how humans behave, not how well the technology performs.
163.
by veddox 6y ago
That is a point. On the other hand, with the electoral college system, you don‘t need to hack the entire US. A single swing-state might be enough.
164.
by veddox 6y ago
> "hate" as we understand it today had very little to do with the transition to empire Fair point. What I was thinking of was the general decline of respect for the (semi-democratic) republican system of governance. The Republi
165.
by veddox 6y ago
We have the Fifth Article of our Grundgesetz. The difference lies in how Germans and Americans understand „freedom“. Americans have an ultraliberal, individualistic definition of the concept; Germans are more ready to restrict an individual
166.
by veddox 6y ago
We have the concept of the defensive democracy („wehrhafte Demokratie“), which is basically that.
167.
by veddox 6y ago
You‘re kinda misrepresenting the article. The author/interviewee is not for unlimited speech, she just argues that it should be private organisations doing the censoring rather than the government. (Which quite frankly, I find even sca
168.
by veddox 6y ago
He knew how to capitalise on peoples‘ fears and prejudices. He gave them common enemies (the democrats, the communists, the Jews), played on their pride, and helped them when they were vulnerable. Then he indoctrinated the hell out of them.
169.
by veddox 6y ago
It is a tough line to walk. However, having seen in our own and other countries’ histories what happens when hatred is allowed to spread unchecked, we have decided that it‘s more important to slightly restrict one right (within tight bounds
170.
by veddox 6y ago
Well, the thing is, in Germany we‘ve experienced first hand what happens when hatred goes rampant - when criticism turns to ostracism, hateful words to hateful deeds, inflammatory speeches to flame-filled cities. And I‘m not just talking ab
171.
by veddox 6y ago
Started with Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Leadership", which is a 4-in-1 biography of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and LBJ. I cannot recommend it highly enough! (Here's my more detailed write-up: https://terranos
172.
by veddox 6y ago
> For the people who are busy working on something they find important, most often 'status' is not even a thing. I'd slightly modify that to say that what they were doing was more important to them than status - which isn&
173.
by veddox 6y ago
Not a bug as such, but always a lovely war story: rebuilding Unix after scragging /bin ( https://pulsar.sternwarte.uni-erlangen.de/wilms/recreation/c... )
174.
by veddox 6y ago
A BC 100 is a pet dream of mine :D Unfortunately, as a student, the price tag is still quite a bit beyond me...
175.
by veddox 6y ago
"Spektrum der Wissenschaft", the German edition of the "Scientific American", covered their expedition regularly. I imagine other pop-sci sites and magazines did too...
176.
by veddox 6y ago
> Alternately, the CL community should develop its own semi-official stdlib That's an idea I would actually like to develop further :D Not sure HN is the right place though, so I moved it to r/Common_Lisp: https://ww
177.
by veddox 6y ago
You have to remember that HN users aren't a representative subset of software developers world-wide. Part of that may be the continuing influence of PG: I both learnt Lisp and found HN because of his essays, and I suspect I'm not
178.
by veddox 6y ago
Oh, hey Vincent :D I was thinking about mentioning that list, actually. Yes, there are libraries around for most common tasks. However, there are three things I'm not satisfied with: 1) I expect common tasks to be covered by the standa
179.
by veddox 6y ago
The state of the Common Lisp library ecosystem is probably the saddest thing about the language. As the author says, the inbuilt standard library is hopelessly too small for modern requirements - even basics like string manipulation are onl
180.
Obituary for key conservationist Georgina Mace(theguardian.com)
1 points by veddox 6y ago|0 comments

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