xelxebar

77 ms·

1. 841.▲
   by xelxebar 9y ago

   This is a good point. If we're posing Occam's Razor-like arguments against models for having "too many free parameters", then we should probably really be comparing something more precise, like the models' Kolmogoro
2. 842.▲
   by xelxebar 9y ago

   Well, if you're familiar with sums, then the "shortcut" isn't all that much faster; it's mostly a function of how quickly you can grok the salient points: The fly travels 3/2 times the speed of a train, so ever
3. 843.▲
   by xelxebar 9y ago

   Not to mention that "gluon" is the name of a particle (strong force carrier). There seems to be a trend recently to ride science hype by choosing a sciency-sounding name. :/
4. 844.▲
   by xelxebar 9y ago

   Well, I can see the point of leaving a trail that shows you aren't fraudulently claiming the file is zero bytes. Otherwise, it's just your word.
5. 845.▲
   by xelxebar 9y ago

   There is a lot of historical arcana baked into the command line and bash, but I've found it worth learning like any other language. Anyway, just for future reference you can use bash's `help` command to get documentation about bui
6. 846.▲
   by xelxebar 9y ago

   Thanks for the encouragement! For those at all interested, some of the existing tools/libs in this arena are * shelly [1], * turtle [2], and * hell [3]. I currently don't have much Haskell experience, but I do kee
7. 847.▲
   by xelxebar 9y ago

   I know you're joking, but I would really like to have the Haskell type system in my shell with suitably-typed versions of the standard utilities: sed, awk, grep, etc. I tried asking #haskell on freenode about "using ghci as a shel
8. 848.▲
   by xelxebar 9y ago

   At what point should one switch from an interpreted to a compiled language? There probably aren't any hard and fast answers. Take Dracut [1], for example. It's a successful utility completely written as a collection of bash script
9. 849.▲
   by xelxebar 9y ago

   I don't know much about the curator, but nacl is apparently on the same domain: http://safecurves.cr.yp.to/
10. 850.▲
    by xelxebar 9y ago

    I've hand-written a couple elf binaries just for kicks. The wikipedia page on ELF has a list of current conventions on the 7th byte in the elf header (e_ident[EI_OSABI] in the spec) [1]: 0x00 System V 0x01 HP-UX 0x02 NetB
11. 851.▲
    by xelxebar 9y ago

    This is an analogy that I've run across in my own thinking, too. I feel like it's an example of Fundamental Attribution Bias or something. Instead of thinking of people as static personalities with properties like smart vs. dumb o
12. 852.▲
    by xelxebar 9y ago

    Baye's Theorem doesn't have a term for "burden of proof". If we want to claim that UBI will swing any way in particular, then we gotta pony up the evidence, regardless of the specifics. Instead of volleying opinions back
13. 853.▲
    by xelxebar 9y ago

    Wait. Isn't the point that we're trying to gather empirical data on what happens. Without this data "strong belief" one way or another seems a bit irresponsible to me.
14. 854.▲
    by xelxebar 9y ago

    Wow. It didn't take long to go from punctuation to philosophy.
15. 855.▲
    by xelxebar 9y ago

    Just thinking out loud here, but isn't part of the point is that they are not keyboard characters. If they're on the keyboard, then they will pop up in ordinary text, similar to the | (pipe) character and friends.
16. 856.▲
    by xelxebar 9y ago

    Just curious, but what about non-vertebrates? I'd have expected there to be an official number/hash that identifies genes like the InChI Key for chemistry or something. IIRC, that key in particular is just a SHA-256 of a long huma
17. 857.▲
    by xelxebar 9y ago

    > Empirically, programs written in memory-safe languages produce multiple orders of magnitude fewer memory-related bugs than C and C++ codebases do. This kind of emperically-driven motivation is great! Would you mind pointing me to some
18. 858.▲
    by xelxebar 9y ago

    I'm always confused by the "safe language" evangelism. Reducing cognitive load is a Good Thing TM; I get that. But aren't we just trusting the Rust compiler and JVM to not have subtle bugs that introduce memory managemen
19. 859.▲
    by xelxebar 9y ago

    FWIW, the page (slowly) loads a few pictures and no content with JavaScript disabled. I just immediately close pages that do this.
20. 860.▲
    by xelxebar 9y ago

    Actually, people are already working on getting to Alpha Centauri within a reasonable timescale and without exhausting the world's GDP [1] ! [1] https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/Initiative/3
21. 861.▲
    by xelxebar 9y ago

    Yeah. Every now and again you'll also come across some 50-year old looking mechanical rice vending machine, selling 5, 10 and 15 kg bags of rice.
22. 862.▲
    by xelxebar 9y ago

    Thanks for asking! I don't have any precise requests, but I would like to be able to pretty much hook up an oscilliscope or logic analyzer anywhere and in principle be able to understand what's going on. I'm looking to get in
23. 863.▲
    by xelxebar 9y ago

    Now I want a Faraday cage closet.
24. 864.▲
    by xelxebar 9y ago

    At least with gpg2 exported private keys are encrypted by default. In fact, $ gpg2 --export-private-keys won't even ask you for a password because of this.
25. 865.▲
    by xelxebar 9y ago

    I was confused too, so looked up the prices. The pen plotter seems to be in the neighborhood of $225 USD [1] while the AxiDraw is $475 USD [2]. [1] https://www.amazon.com/pen-plotter/s?ie=UTF8&page=1&rh=i%3Aa...
26. 866.▲
    by xelxebar 9y ago

    Just throwing this out there, but do you trust yourself to be capable of protecting your best interests? The prisoner's dilemma is a pretty clear example where people "looking out for their own" ends up causing everyone to sh
27. 867.▲
    by xelxebar 9y ago

    Well, making good policy is an extremely different skill than sharpshooting. I think the crux of your point could be sharpened to a question, "In addition to policy-making experience and skills, how much gun firing experience does one
28. 868.▲
    by xelxebar 9y ago

    Somewhat off topic, but what about open hardware platforms that are really friendly to hacking around on the hardware? Is this just a thing of dreams?
29. 869.▲
    Ask HN: Can ghci realistically replace bash?

    4 points by xelxebar 9y ago|4 comments
30. 870.▲
    by xelxebar 9y ago

    > So I'm pretty happy to excuse [selfishness] until I see arguments with more facts than 'I think' or implicit 'selfishness is bad it sounds unfriendly'. This is a really good point. To remove the moral overtones