zazen

31 ms·

91.
by zazen 9y ago
I think this varies massively between different situations. There are definitely good motives for sharing facts, and there are definitely bad motives for sharing facts. It is _sometimes_ a matter of arrogance and pretend intellectualism.
92.
by zazen 9y ago
It's one thing to share some interesting facts and point people to the book. No-one's going to object to that! But I think it's a bit different if someone spends an entire lunch "explaining" the contents of a book
93.
by zazen 9y ago
I guess I was seeing a big distinction between telling your friends _about_ this great book you've read, and telling the story yourself, as if you were the expert, as if you, rather than the author, had done the research and formed the
94.
by zazen 9y ago
Your friends must be better story tellers than mine! Second-hand stories tend to be pretty stale in my experience. Bad enough when people try to tell about something they heard happened to Joe, worse when they try to tell about something
95.
by zazen 9y ago
To clarify the headline: this is the earliest astrolabe _for maritime use_ _yet found_, dating to AD 1495-1502. Astrolabes in general go back to classical times. I guess the headline is getting at that distinction with the phrase "na
96.
by zazen 9y ago
I was surprised when I first saw the word "tensor" being thrown around by computer scientists to apparently mean just multi-dimensional array. But then I thought, well, "vector" is very widely used - including by mathem
97.
by zazen 9y ago
Thank you for this comment - that's a really striking way of looking at these things. Makes me wonder just how many human interactions involve being that little bit of a sociopath. E.g., "putting your best foot forward" for
98.
by zazen 10y ago
I think most people outside the tech bubble just don't see the importance of protecting privacy. In the USA, I think there isn't that much popular opposition to the NSA? Even after Snowdon? Similar in the UK. Most people just se
99.
by zazen 10y ago
This sounds plausible, and it chimes with the article's statement that the new supply is at the high end. Thanks! If people were only blocking certain kinds of development, that would explain why low-end prices stay high even while t
100.
by zazen 10y ago
I know nothing about the San Francisco housing market apart from what I've heard in discussions here on HN. The received wisdom here seemed to be that powerful NIMBY lobbies in SF were preventing needed development and causing the sky-
101.
by zazen 10y ago
Yes. I don't disagree with a single word of that. I took jknoefpler's comment as an invitation to reflect on the fact that Castro, and even H----r, are members of the same species as us, and what that might say about the human con
102.
by zazen 10y ago
>Fidel - borderline evil The point isn't to quibble about the label. It's to refrain from leaping straight to applying labels. The pleas you're seeing for a calmer and broader conversation are not attempts to exculpate Cas
103.
by zazen 10y ago
Your first link is to one of a series of articles linking Star Wars to: Lawrence of Arabia; E.T.; the Seventh Voyage of Sinbad; The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly; Empire of the Sun; and possibly others. They can't all be major influences
104.
by zazen 10y ago
Do you mean 633 Squadron, rather than the Dam Busters? The fjord attack seems like a more obvious parallel to the trench run.
105.
by zazen 10y ago
The distinction between current and habitual actions also exists in standard English, of course: "Cookie monster eats cookies" vs "Elmo is eating cookies". I'm not sure whether this is quite the same as the distinc
106.
by zazen 10y ago
This may very well be true in organizations where the sarcasm exists in an established context of mutual respect (or at least, the knowledge that you'll have to keep working with the other person). But it's very different when tot
107.
by zazen 10y ago
You chose to reply only to the final, weakest part of Tossrock's comment. Yes, you're quite right, dropping celebrity names isn't much of an argument. The rest of his comment seemed pretty bang-on to me. I'd be curiou
108.
by zazen 10y ago
Yes, they do. Sometimes they're wrong, but sometimes they're right!
109.
by zazen 10y ago
There is more-thoughtful discussion of the D-wave controversy in this thread - look for dsacco's comments.
110.
by zazen 10y ago
Not many people would literally declare "I confidently believe that airplane autopilot is a turnkey solution". But perhaps the point is that a lot of people would vaguely feel that way without exactly crystallizing it as a though
111.
by zazen 10y ago
I find this comment very puzzling. A team of experts spent months or years designing and building a ship. Are you really suggesting they just forgot about the hydrodynamic drag? If the first thing that pops into your head was actually a
112.
by zazen 10y ago
Academics in some fields have been starting independent open-access journals, sometimes with the explicit goal of replacing Elsevier journals in particular. https://gowers.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/the-elsevier
113.
by zazen 11y ago
The article says the Iraqi government has hired an Italian contractor to reinforce and maintain the dam. This presumably makes the massive-disaster scenario described in the Guardian's rather clickbaity headline somewhat less likely.
114.
by zazen 11y ago
Actually, on re-reading the piece, the author isn't claiming he thought up this argument on the spur of the moment. I got confused because of the dramatic narrative, which started with the meeting already going on before the author st
115.
by zazen 11y ago
Apparently, the first "first principle" he reached for was the one that shone immediate light on the situation. If that's true, he got amazingly lucky. Reasoning solely from established facts is wonderful when you can do it
116.
by zazen 11y ago
The idea of basic income is popular on this site and has many ardent supporters here. Whichever side of the debate you're on, please bear in mind this topic needs an extra effort of patience and civility to have a productive conversat
117.
by zazen 11y ago
Perhaps. But I think it would take a particularly far-sighted and philosophical moderator to down-vote/remove a perfectly civil post whose message he agreed with, _just_ because it was contributing to an echo-chamber effect.
118.
by zazen 11y ago
This is a very interesting question: when does a community become an echo chamber? To use the hunting example: I imagine sometimes the hunters talk about stuff to do with hunting itself; the merits of different rifles, or where to find gam
119.
Hewlett-Packard threatens the Financial Times [paywall](ft.com)
1 points by zazen 11y ago|0 comments
120.
by zazen 11y ago
The author spends most of this lengthy post congratulating himself for winning an argument against a poorly-educated call-center worker who is required to read from a script. This leaves a pretty bad taste in my mouth. Apart from anything

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